The topic I want to talk about today is how we measure success.
How we measure success in this space, I think, says a lot about what our individual goals are.
But it also says a lot about how our industry, our ecosystem, our environment is changing over time.
I ask people this question quite often.
I ask, "How would you measure success in this space?"
Whether we're talking about Bitcoin or open public blockchains and other cryptocurrencies in general...
What does it mean to be successful?
When do we know that we are 'winning' or have 'won' this battle?
When do we know that this technology has arrived?
The answer I get really says a lot about the person I'm talking with.
It's a highly personal answer.
The silly answer is "when the price goes to the moon!" [Laughter]
That's not a very good measure of success.
It's not a good measure of success because that's not what we should be aiming for.
But then again, that's why a lot of people get involved in this space.
A lot of people get involved at first because they anticipate, or have heard,
that this is a fantastic get-rich-quick scheme.
Then they discover over the next harrowing weeks -- or sometimes just days -- that it can also be...
a fantastic get-poor-quick scheme. [Laughter]
As they branch out into obscure altcoins they've never heard of, trade based on panic,
trying to cut their losses, and blow all of their investment away...
If you got into this space to get rich, you may succeed, but you probably won't.
That's not a very good motivation.
Fortunately, if you have a strong local community, what happens when the price goes shooting up
across the cryptocurrency space is that a lot of new people start showing up to the meetups
with a little sparkle in their eye.
Yeah, you can tell! They're "very excited about this technology."
No, they're not. They've very excited about the possibility of making some money.
As soon as the price turns (which happens on average just after it climbs to the high point),
most of them disappear.
I've watched these ebb and flows since 2012.
I remember the first meetup I went to; only one other person showed up.
That other person was Adam B. Levine, the founder of the 'Let's Talk Bitcoin' podcast,
which we've now hosted for 386 episodes since 2013.
It's the longest running podcast in the space.
I met him over steak at the Napa Valley meetup of the "local Napa Valley Bitcoin community,"
...which was just Adam and me. [Laughter]
I wasn't even in Napa, I was just travelling there.
It was a very sad meetup.
Fast-forward to about a year later, and that same meetup had fifty people showing up on a weekly basis.
Then about a year after that, there's only five people.
If you follow these trends, you'll notice that our space ebbs and flows like the price,
which attracts a lot of new people.
The trick with community is to get people who may join for all the wrong reasons, and help educate them
about the technology, mostly by conveying why you yourself are interested in this technology.
If you got into this space in late 2017 to get rich and invest money between October and December,
and you're still here, clearly you're not here for the money.
You've weathered the storm.
We're on the other side of that mountain now; things are looking pretty grim comparatively.
If you're still here, that means you have another motivation.
That's great, because now you can start talking to the people around you, in your community,
about why you are still interested in this technology and what you think it will do.
For me, the important characteristics of open public blockchains have nothing to do with money.
They have a lot to do with decentralising trust; creating open environments that are borderless,
global, and can create opportunities for people to engage in commerce without restrictions.
To me, it's about changing the architecture of one of the fundamental technologies we have in society,
which is money.
Possibly a few more related to that, [such as] smart contracts, law, and justice systems.
That is what drives me with this technology.
I have this crazy idea that this technology can change the world, that we can see a world
where access to this technology changes people's lives -- especially in places where there is very little access...
to financial services, to fair and open systems, the ability to record the truth, to transact without trust,
to kick out intermediaries from every commercial transaction, to get rid of organised criminals...
who happen to have a banking license and are robbing people blind.
Of course, this is not as much of a problem in Ireland, but it certainly is a problem
in the vast majority of the world.
To me, those things are important.
I measure success a bit differently.
When I ask people, "how do you measure success with this technology,"
I think the most common answer I receive is "mainstream adoption."
As in, 'if most of the people around me are using this technology.'
'If I can use it to buy something from the local shop, then I think this is now succeeding.'
That's their measure of success and it's a very common measure of success that a lot of people talk about.
The vision of that is about walking into your local store [for a] breakfast sandwich
and you don't have to ask, "Do you take bitcoin / ether / litecoin / monero?"
They obviously do. That's the vision of how most people think about [success].
Alongside Visa, Mastercard, cash, euros, dollars.
You could pay in your local shop with one of these "weird" cryptocurrencies and,
most importantly, it would no longer be "weird."
You would no longer be the weirdo who keeps asking, "Do you take bitcoin?" [Laughter] Been there, done that!
If you ask a few follow-up questions,
another measure of success is if the system maintains its fundamental principles,
that it leads to societal change, that people use it to free themselves from an inflexible banking system,
that we are able to "bank the un-banked" or "de-bank all of us," as you've probably heard me say.
That this system allows us to introduce more fairness into commerce, giving less power
to corporations and more power to individuals.
These are more idealistic goals for success.
If you stop for a moment and think about it, you realise those two goals are fundamentally at odds.
If the measure of success is mainstream adoption, then maintaining the principles that made us interested
in this technology doesn't actually happen.
"Mainstream adoption" means adoption by people who don't care about these principles,
the vast majority of people around you.
How many people in here care about privacy enough to sacrifice some convenience on a daily basis?
[Audience raises hands] How many of the people you know use the same password on every website?
How many people here would never share their private information on Facebook?
How many people around you do you know, who think Facebook is the internet and haven't left that space?
... And vote based on what they see there?
The problem is that "mainstream adoption" dilutes principles.
The mainstream doesn't share your principles, it doesn't share your motivations.
You're not the mainstream, you're the weirdos who are into Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.
That's okay.
This isn't a mainstream thing and it's important that we recognise that when we have some principles
that we really care about, we can still effect change in the world even while those principles are being diluted.
I want to talk about what success looks like from my perspective, having seen a couple
of disruptive technologies in the past that emerged and then got absorbed into mainstream use.
I think it's important to see that the measure of success isn't necessarily what you think it is.
It is not as obvious as it might seem.
Let me start by asking a question: how many of you here use the Linux operating system?
[Audience raises hands] Alright. For those of you who didn't raise your hands...
all of you actually use the Linux operating system every single day!
It is used in your phones, vacuum cleaners, cars, elevators, and every single web server you touch.
It is in the little robots you bought for your kids. It is in your lawnmower.
It is in every Android phone. It is even in Windows now.
But that's not how it started.
The Linux operating system was started in 1991, by a Finnish student by the name of Linus Torvalds,
who had a crazy idea.
At the time, he was too poor to afford a license for one of the commercial Unix-like operating systems
that were made by companies like IBM, AT&T, and Sun Microsystems, which sold to other power corporations
for thousands of dollars in licensing fees per year.
That's how [the business of] operating systems worked at the time.
But this Finnish student had an idea.
He thought, 'What if I write my own [operating system]?'
At this point, you have to realise how ridiculous that idea was, on so many levels.
The Unix operating system that AT&T created in the 1960s under Bell Labs, then built up
by these giant corporations, is the operating system that run the space program, the mainframes of all the banks.
This is serious, heavy-duty, commercial operating system software.
Yet this 18-year-old says, "Let me write my own."
Most of the people around him treated him exactly as you would your cousin who suddenly says,
"I'm going to build my own rocket and colonise Mars on my own!"
Everyone says, "Yeah? Okay..."
And yet he did [it anyway].
Three or four years later, I downloaded an alpha pre-beta version of that operating system
from his university file server, from his home directory, onto two hundred floppy disks,
and installed it on my own personal computer.
It barely worked but I was elated.
I, as a student, had a Unix operating system on a personal computer that I could control.
The same thing that they had at the university and just as powerful.
He had [organised] a group of programmers and built it.
At the time, if you asked people what the point was of an operating system that was
completely open, free for anyone to use and innovate on, for building systems as small...
as embedded microcontrollers [or as large as] the biggest supercomputers on the planet?
They would say that success would be if all of the corporations used it; success would be...
if we put all of those other operating system companies out of business.
Success would be if nobody paid for an operating system like that again.
On those measures, ironically, Linux succeeded in all of those things!
AT&T no longer makes operating systems, IBM no longer makes operating systems,
even Microsoft really no longer makes working operating systems...
[Laughter] And now they support Linux, their greatest foe.
Linux now runs everything from the smallest Raspberry Pi computer that you can buy for $30
and use to run your sprinkler system in your garden, all the way to every single one
of the world's top 100 supercomputers.
They all run Linux. Linux is everywhere.
And yet, if for a moment you thought that mainstream adoption meant that your mom or uncle uses Linux
(and knows they're using Linux)... In that measure, it failed.
Nobody knows they're using it. It is not branded.
[Practically] nobody uses it on their desktop, apart from a few weirdos: me and others in the audience.
Who uses Linux on their desktop? [Audience raises hands] Okay. Yeah.
You can see the correlation, right? That's how they get you. It is a gateway drug.
You start with Linux on the desktop and eventually you're in an amphitheatre full of cryptocurrency weirdos.
[Laughter] It's a slippery slope.
The measure of success is not mainstream adoption.
It's not mainstream adoption in the way that you think it is, where everybody knows this is part of their life.
It is a much more subtle measure of success.
What Linux did is gave everyone the choice to run an operating system that's extremely powerful,
the freedom to run it without even knowing that they're running it because it's in their thermostat.
But it also meant that anyone can build a thermostat and start a company that builds thermostats
while using an extremely powerful, multi-threaded, robust operating system that has
millions of different drivers for different pieces of hardware.
Eventually, every piece of hardware on the planet can be used with this operating system.
It is open and everybody is innovating around it.
It breaks the monopoly of the big companies and gives that freedom of choice to everyone,
to the point where they no longer know they're using it.
I'll go a bit further back and talk about what it means to measure the success of the internet.
Most of the people in this room are too young to remember a time before the internet.
I was there; I not only remember it but I grew up in a country where we didn't have computers in my school.
I bought my own computer at 10.5 years old.
Well, my mum bought me my own computer [when I was] 10.5 years old (thank you, Mum).
I started getting on the internet surreptitiously through an account that legally speaking I didn't own,
because it was a local university account and [at the time] I was 14 years old.
Details aside, statute of limitations and all that...
I got on the internet and it opened this whole world for me.
I suddenly realised that if you got computers to 'talk' to each other and they could collaborate
using open protocols, this incredible flow of information could start happening.
I started telling everyone around me that the internet will change our lives, and nobody believed me.
If you had asked me then what the measure of success was for the internet, I would say,
"Everybody uses it."
Not just that, but we break the back of monopoly publishers like the New York Times, the London Times,
the Murdoch empire of broadcasting, the flow of information from governments to citizens,
and despotic dictatorial regimes that censor their residents.
To give access to information for people who had never had it before.
Maybe one day, a farmer in Kenya with a mobile device would be able to read an encyclopedia [article]
written by a German student about their own president.
I could imagine all of these scenarios.
What if we changed the measure of success and said that success would be that we had
this very powerful, decentralised network that gave us all access to information?
By that measure, the internet has failed.
A couple billion people only know the internet as a closed, curated garden called Facebook
that gives them carefully filtered information, managed by AI algorithms, to reinforce their existing beliefs
and tweak their dopamine receptors so they will buy more plastic shit. [Laughter]
That's clearly not the cyberpunk vision of the future that we had hoped for.
At the same time, the internet is highly centralised around a few very important choke points,
on to which an entire surveillance infrastructure has been imposed.
All of that information is sucked up, processed in vast amounts, and becomes an panopticon.
It sounds like a dystopian nightmare.
By that measure of success, the internet has failed. It has failed to deliver freedom.
What is it delivering?
It's delivering a new set of media moguls to replace the old set, without changing the architecture.
I didn't want to switch out Murdoch for Zuckerberg.
That doesn't really solve the problem.
The problem is: changing the architecture of access to information.
If you look at that, you might think that the internet has failed.
But it hasn't, because it is not just [made of] Facebook.
The internet is also mesh networks, relay networks, the dark web, peer-to-peer networks,
and Bitcoin!
The internet is also wireless communications sent into North Korea, WikiLeaks, whistleblowers,
citizen journalists and bloggers who challenge governments by revealing information that
[those in power] don't want revealed.
We get to choose which internet we use.
A lot of the people in this room are choosing to use the other internet; the free, decentralised, and open internet.
If you look at the big picture, you might say that we failed.
If you look more closely, you'll notice that there's an engine of freedom and choice there.
It is still capable of birthing these incredible innovations that are unexpected, radically disruptive,
and unstoppable like Bitcoin.
It's still able to do that.
So is the internet free, open, decentralised, or is it not?
It's both.
It depends which part you're talking about.
It has achieved all of its goals, even while a big chunk of the population didn't adopt
those principles and simply replaced the old moguls with new moguls in order to get heavily filtered bullshit
delivered to them, like a drip feed, through the television.
Nothing changed for some. Everything changed for some.
People ask me if I think that big corporations or governments are going to...
start their own cryptocurrencies, and if they could beat open public blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum
by replacing them with closed private blockchains.
That's basically the same question about how you measure success.
What does it mean to go mainstream?
What does it mean to "beat" the open public blockchains at this game?
Let's say that Facebook releases their own coin: FaceCoin.
That sounds terrible. [Laughter] Anyway, they release their own.
You look at it and ask the five basic questions: Is it open? Is it neutral? Is it borderless?
Is it decentralised? Is it censorship-resistant?
The answer is no, no, no, no, and no!
It is closed, bordered / controlled by jurisdiction, not neutral, absolutely centralised, and censored
because it must be.
Therefore, it fulfills none of the criteria of an open public blockchain that we care about.
It doesn't fulfill any of the principles that we care about.
Maybe the Irish government, through the central bank, releases ÉireCoin.
Is it open, borderless, neutral, censorship-resistant, or decentralised? No, no, no, no, and no!
It is what we call a central bank digital currency, which is: new suit, same shit!
[Laughter] How do you deal with these phenomena?
If you see mainstream adoption as a measure of success, which one do you think will be more popular?
The free, open, neutral, borderless, decentralised Bitcoin or other open public blockchain?
There are a few criminals, some weird QR codes, a lot of the people wear ponytails
and tattoos for some reason.
If you make a transaction [incorrectly], there's no customer service to call.
No I'm sorry -- this is a free, decentralised future. Your keys, your coins, no customer service.
Nothing is reversible. With great freedom comes great responsibility.
Isn't that what you wanted? No, that's not what we wanted.
What we wanted was FaceCoin, where every time you do a hundred transactions, you get a little purple star.
If you collect five purple stars, you get a free Frappuccino at Starbucks! [Applause]
All I have to do is sell my soul and all of my privacy, fund war criminals around the world
(somehow, indirectly), and make Zuckerberg the king of the universe.
That didn't seem the like the original cypherpunk plan.
If the measure of success is "going mainstream," realise that a whole bunch of the mainstream
is far more interested in using the loyalty reward points of ÉireCoin, FaceCoin, or some other crap coin...
that is centralised and controlled.
They will not follow your principles.
That means, in many cases, the local chippy won't take your bitcoin even while they do take
FaceCoin, AppleCoin, or whatever other corporate concoctions are created.
We don't beat PayPal or Visa, we don't change the banking system, by doing what they do,
becoming them but only "weirder."
We have to realise that in countries like Ireland where the banking system and payment networks
[mostly] work, the need for a decentralised currency like this isn't quite there yet.
You don't need bitcoin.
Ask a Venezuelan if they bitcoin; they need it.
Someone from Argentina, Brazil, Ukraine, Greece, Cyprus... they need it.
People who live under despotic governments and dictatorships, people who are fighting revolutions,
people who are dealing with currency controls and corrupt banks, people who can't trade internationally.
People who do not have sufficient documentation to open a bank account, people trying to transmit money
to their relatives across borders in conflict areas... they need it.
They need something that is free, open, borderless, and censorship-resistant.
They need that for smart contracts, privacy, and currency itself.
You can buy a fish and chips with the euro.
You don't need to use bitcoin to do that.
If mainstream adoption means adapting by diluting the principles, then we lose the game.
That is not a measure of success, that is a measure of failure.
The measure of success to me is keeping the principles -- remaining free, open, decentralised, neutral,
and censorship-resistant -- while becoming available to as many people who need it around the world.
That's my measure of success.
That measure of success is very different from what we often see in our industry.
As you may have noticed, over the last couple of years, a lot of new money and suits...
have shown up in the cryptocurrency space.
They may talk the talk, but they don't want to change the architecture of the financial system.
They don't want to break the monopolies, crush the cartels, break open access to financial systems,
or give economic inclusion to as many people as possible.
They simply want to replace the old layer of the top 1% with themselves.
They think, 'The architecture is fine if I'm on top.'
They do not share your measure of success, perhaps.
What I'm reaching at: we have to understand that there will be closed, centralised systems.
Those systems will appear faster and cheaper.
Another (very pernicious) measure of success you commonly see in our space is market capitalisation.
How many people have heard or seen that term in relation to bitcoin, ether, or other cryptocurrencies?
[Audience raises hands] How many people have heard of the Dominance Index?
The Dominance Index is a percentage of the total market capitalisation of cryptocurrencies owned by bitcoin.
Here's why this is not a good metric.
Here's why we shouldn't look at that metric for any of the cryptocurrencies.
Market capitalisation tells you which is the "richest" cryptocurrency.
I can guarantee you that there will be cryptocurrencies "richer," "bigger," more broadly accepted than bitcoin.
It is very easy to do that, all you have to do is sacrifice the principles.
You can make something that is cheap, fast, centralised, controlled, and censored.
Then you can pump money into it and make it "mainsteam."
FaceCoin will be "bigger" than bitcoin. FedCoin will be "bigger" than bitcoin.
Hell, Ripple may be "bigger" than bitcoin sometime soon. [Laughter]
What do the banks have that we don't?
Ultimately this is about changing the architecture of finance, at least to me.
What do the banks have that we don't?
Money!
What's the worst way to measure success in our industry?
Who has the biggest amount of money.
Well, we've already lost that game [to the banks], they have all of it.
They print it from nothing and control the creation process.
Their entire industry is rent-seeking. Of course they have money.
What they don't have is creativity, innovation, morality, sustainability,
and a plan for how to get the fuck out of quantitative easing. [Laughter]
They don't have any of those things, but they have plenty of money.
If you wanted to really screw with a nascent, disruptive industry, what better way to drive everyone [crazy]
than to persuade them that the measure of success is the fuel of the status-quo?
"We will measure this new, disruptive industry by the metric that we [succeed at] already: money!"
Being the "biggest" cryptocurrency is worthless, if you must sacrifice being the free cryptocurrency.
If you sacrifice liberty, decentralisation, and neutrality to become the "biggest,"
all you've done is recreated the status-quo but replaced the people at the top.
To me, that is a measure of failure.
We are not going to be the "biggest."
What I hope...
Especially because of how difficult it is to change this system -- which is a great feature,
because everyone is trying to change it right now -- and remove these pesky freedom principles.
What I hope isn't that we are the biggest, but the most free, inclusive, open system of commerce on the planet.
If that means we're not going to be the "biggest," I will take that!
If you want to win, if you care about the principles, if you're still here after the price drops,
and you really want to see this technology succeed,
the most important thing you have to [do] is to have a clear perspective on what the measure of success is.
The measure of success is liberty. Thank you! [Applause]
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