Through the Eyes of a Cypherpunk Legend: Hyperbitcoinization = HyperAmericanization

Yes, yes. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.

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Let's talk about hyperbitcoinization and hyper-Americanization, a very interesting topic. It goes into some really interesting places, and I think you're going to be a little surprised where this ends up.

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Let's start here. I don't know why I have a big X on there, but there we go. This is the kind of thing I would normally end a presentation with, but it's really very important. It brings us to our point.

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We believe that the good, the useful, and the beautiful grow in us.

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This is a really important point because it makes us primaries, not secondaries. It makes us sources, not derivatives. That's a really important concept I'd like you to hold in mind, because if the good grows in us, we're the source.

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I'm kind of a scientific guy, and I like to use scientific analogies all the time. One of them is that all things physical in the universe that we know of seek a least energy principle. Everything tries to use the minimal amount of energy. This is true at the subatomic level, and it's true in human affairs, where people are trying to be careful. Don't make a mistake. Don't go too far. Stay where you're safe.

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But there is an issue with that. The physical world goes to entropy, which is where it wears down and wears out. But life doesn't. Life is actually recognized by its ability to transcend entropy, to take things that are worn out and put them back together into something highly organized and important.

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Think of a fruit tree, an apple tree. It takes in water from the soil, it takes in minerals from the soil, it takes in sunlight, it takes some gases from the air, and organizes it all and turns it into fruit. This is a transcendence, a reversal of entropy, of everything wearing out. This is going in the opposite direction. And everything alive does that.

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There's one kind of exception, and that is us. Humans can do this willfully, when we want to or not. We can't run as fast as a deer, but we can build machines that take us much faster, much farther. We can't fly like a bird, but we have machines that we can create, that we did create on purpose, with energy and effort, that take us almost immeasurably farther and faster.

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Humans can do this willfully, but only if we break that least energy state, only if we care about something. If there's something we really want, something that's in the proper sense of the term sacred to us, something that matters to us, then we can create. I don't know how far we can go. And we do it willfully. That's completely unique in nature.

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But this choice to break the least energy state, to care about something and build something you want, this really is faith. What's the Bible line about faith? It's the substance of things hoped for, of things not seen. This is where it begins, because we decide to create something that matters, something we have passion for.

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This is what drove America. This is what drove Bitcoin. It's the same base.

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This is one of the first acts of faith that you see all over the North American colonies. This is an indentured servitude contract. Indentured servitude was not slavery. I'm sure there were some bad cases, but there are bad cases now. Everywhere we look, there's a bad case in something, because humans aren't fully developed. We've got problems that we still need to fix.

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But this was how poor boys and poor girls, by the way, there were a lot of young women who came, easily a million people, came from England to America this way. And why this way? Because how is a poor boy living in Devonshire going to get to America? He can't do this. So a bunch of business guys put together this arrangement where you went and worked for three years, and then you came out of your employment contract.

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Think of the faith it took for these people. Think of the conviction they had to have to do this. That's very important. And think also that their families were probably not overall pleased with them.

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This is another very important one. This is a little town in Massachusetts, three years before Jefferson and his declaration. These guys say, essentially, that they have the right to judge kings. It says, "The ruled have a right to refuse new laws, and to judge for themselves when rulers are transgressing." You think it took a little bit of determination and courage to say this in 1773?

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But these people were convinced, and became convinced, that they were the primaries, that they had a right to build what they wanted and to live as they wanted. They were convinced that they understood it and they could judge kings. That's a big deal.

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Here it is for Bitcoiners. This is Diffie and Hellman, for those of you who know the Diffie-Hellman key exchange, which is fundamental to Bitcoin and several other things. These are young men who had a passion for something, who went out to do something that had never been done before: to use math to separate secret keys. Very, very important. But look at the faces. These are people who believe in something.

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This is where Bitcoin came from. This is the Financial Cryptography conference in 1997. This was after we had the cypherpunks. People understood what cryptography really meant to us, how it made a terra nova, a new world for us. People began to understand this and said, we need money. We have to have money.

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This is a conference that was held on some little island in the Caribbean. Probably most people wouldn't know it. Probably almost no one has been there. These guys weren't going there because they wanted to find venture capital to start something. They were there because they knew this thing was important. They didn't know how to do it, but they wanted to do it, and they were going to spend their time and energy because they believed in this.

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This is a community on the coast of Africa. Why are they there building in this spot? Because they believe in something. They found something they can believe in and put their passion into, that they cared about. And I promise you, their families think they're a little crazy. There is lots of social pressure, or social impositions, that go along with all these things. But these people are doing it because they believe in something. They believe they're the primaries.

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When America was young, it had no myth. There was no "we're the great America." People had to prove it. They had to prove that living their way was better than living in subjection to the king.

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This idea of a myth, and every nation seems to have its own, they're special because of this, they're special because of that, is actually a problem, especially regarding this, because it kind of subsumes you. Take one of the myths from the 19th century, manifest destiny: we really need to go across and take over the continent. Once you find your identity in that, you move a little bit into being a derivative rather than a primary.

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So America had to prove it, and they had a lot to prove. I'll just give you a couple little things here. I won't read all of these. The second one is the one that made me laugh. This is Lord Sandwich of the Admiralty: "Who are the Americans, a race of convicts that should be thanked for anything we allow them short of hanging?" Wow.

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But we had the same thing in Bitcoin. In 1996, we had the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, written by John Perry Barlow. If you haven't read it, please find it somewhere. It was really inspiring at the time. And of course, Wired came out, and Wired is supposed to be the electronics sort of thing, and deemed it hogwash immediately. But it was a big deal at the time. It was on tens of thousands of websites, and there weren't that many websites in 1996.

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And then all the things people have said about Bitcoin. I kind of like the last two. "Bitcoin is driven by high school dropouts." Not exactly. I'd say it's more like college dropouts, but close enough. And then, of course, the last one: "Bitcoin refuses to die already." Well, there were plenty of people who thought that about America too, and wanted it to just die already, because it was very inconvenient to the existing ruling orders.

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Let's talk about some parallels. Bitcoiners and the early Americans had the same idea of freedom, and they took it from the same guy, John Locke. Essentially, what he's saying is we should be left alone to do whatever we want, so long as we don't hurt anybody. It's kind of the same thing we tell children. And it's kind of the same thing that pretty much everybody believes, unless you're a political science professor, then maybe not.

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Some more parallels. We have Thomas Paine saying, "We have it in our power to begin the world over again." Well, this is what we found out once we had cryptography. We can fence off part of the world, a virtual part, but a very real part, and we can create the world over again. Oh my God, what do we want to build? How do we want this to be?

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And then we have Timothy C. May, who is one of the founders of cypherpunk, saying the same thing: that this is going to be a very different realm, and it's going to change. We have Thomas Jefferson in his declaration, and there is John Perry Barlow in his declaration. I want to tell you, it was really exciting at the time. Still is.

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We have Sam Adams talking about an asylum for liberty, and then we have Satoshi talking about a new territory for freedom. It's the same stuff. It's the same stuff a couple hundred years apart. Same fundamental questions, same fundamental answers.

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As soon as the Americans could do it, they started making their own money. As soon as we were able to do it, we started making our own money, and other stuff too.

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Money really does create a comprehensible world. Once money is solid, the world cleans up in a lot of ways. Now, it's never going to clean up all the way. There are going to be inconveniences and difficulties in our realm. I'm a massive Bitcoin advocate, but it doesn't solve every single problem. There are still going to be problems because we're still humans and we're not completely developed yet, and we have a lot of stuff left to work out. So we have to remember to expect problems. That's okay.

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The people who try to slam you say, "Oh, something could go wrong." Something goes wrong in their system every day, thousands and thousands of times. It's an emotionally driven attack with something called the nirvana fallacy. It doesn't matter. Our decentralized way is better, but it's not magic, and it's not perfect.

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We still have to do things. We still have to bring decency and honesty into it, and work well with each other to cooperate. Fundamentally, the better humans cooperate, the better they live, and the worse humans cooperate, the worse they end up living.

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Astonishingly, we are setting the terms of the debate. If you had looked at the Enlightenment as it began, you would never know it from all the scholarly journals and all the things they had in those days. But they were starting to set the terms of the debate. And so are we. Two years ago, a presidential candidate came here because we mattered. Wow.

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I'll go through this pretty quickly, but I love this analogy of the iceberg. The noisy part, of course, is the TV channels and social media and the permanent state of outrage everybody seems to be in. The part that matters, though, is the big part. This is the people who deliver everything, grow everything, build everything, repair everything. That segment of life is what matters.

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And we want ones and twos. We don't want the big super-duper famous guy saying, "Bitcoin is it. Everybody come." You know what I want? I want the people who come into the Bitcoin meetup and say, "Wait, what did you say? Is that right?" Yeah, we've processed over a billion transactions. "Whoa." That's what I want. These are the people I want. That's building with solidity. That's building for real.

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This is Thomas Jefferson: "The issue today is the same as it has always been throughout history: whether man shall be allowed to govern himself," to be a primary, "or to be ruled by a small elite," a secondary.

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And actually, he had a conversation about this with John Adams. Adams said, let's be specific. The revolution wasn't the war. The revolution began in 1760, in the hearts and minds of people, like the people from that little town in Massachusetts who said, "We're primaries. We judge kings. We're the primaries, not the secondaries."

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This is the founding American idea. That's the core of it. That's the kernel of it. And Bitcoin coded us as primaries.

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Look at these symbols here. On the left is us. That's Bitcoin. You want to be on the Bitcoin network? You're a node. You're an entity. You're there. The one on the right, that's hierarchy. That's governance hierarchies, corporate hierarchies, institutional hierarchies. We have the primaries up on top, and the secondaries going down.

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That's just the way it is. Bitcoin has made us, by code, primary entities. That's what we are in Bitcoin.

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Now, we build, and all of us have built. We build not from the stuff we have, but from what we are. That's what matters. We build out of ourselves. That is what makes us the sources, makes us the primaries. And it is a fundamental difference.

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Look, all of this has worked. Look at all the dozens of ways America has led the world forward. It's not because we're fundamentally better than everyone else. We are everyone else. But what mattered was that more people here thought of themselves as primaries rather than secondaries.

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This is the core of it. This is what made America. This is what made Bitcoin. Thank you so much, everybody. Thank you so much.