Original source: Edward Snowden Keynote Speech Bitcoin 2024
Compiled by: Golden Finance
Hello everyone, it's great to be here with you all. You guys are such an awesome group.
First of all, it's great to be here with you all. Not long ago, I was speaking at the Bitcoin Conference in Amsterdam and we talked about very different topics. It's amazing how much we've seen in just nine months. Last time the topic was that the rules of the game are so corrupt and unfair, but we can't leave. We put up with them because we have no other choice.
What’s amazing is that we’re starting to create our own choices. The central topic nine months ago was Gary Gensler, Gary Gensler, Gary Gensler. Everyone was paying attention to what he said, and I had to remind everyone that Gary Gensler is not Daddy Bitcoin. It’s easier to make that point now because it turns out that Bitcoin is Daddy Gensler. Ladies and gentlemen, we are winning, but we haven’t won yet, so we have to make sure we don’t get cocky.
Unfortunately, that's also the end of the enjoyable part of this talk, but I think there are a lot of people who will be talking about enjoyable things this year, so you don't need me to say that. I noticed that this year we have more political representation, which is a wonderful and remarkable thing. We have reached a stage where initially they ignored us, then they fought against us, but now they are trying to make us fall in love with them.
I want to make this point briefly because I don't want to spend the entire speech talking about politics, voting is necessary, but don't join a faction. They are not our representatives, not your personalities. They have their own interests, values and pursuits. Try to get what you need from them, but don't give yourself to them, even if you have to vote for them.
Instead, I want to approach this conversation from a different perspective. I want you to reflect on where we are, how we got here, and where we are going.
There is a quote in the book that I think is very resonant for this group: "I believe that in every country of the world, the avarice and injustice of princes and sovereigns, by abusing the trust of their subjects, have gradually diminished the actual quantity of the metal originally contained in their coin." It's from Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, which he wrote in 1776.
We don't play metal games anymore, but if you look around you can see this problem everywhere, affecting us, holding us back. You can see it on the Internet as well.
What's wrong with the Internet? The problem is not the Internet, but the world, as they become more and more one. A system has been built, not just through administration but through the concentration of resources and the intermediation of generations, that is inherently unfair.
I mean, look at the economy. Resources are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. Even the human voice is like that. The winner-take-all model is evident, whether you're talking about broadcast media, traditional media, newspapers, or social media. Minority opinions increasingly rely on the leniency of censors to survive on the margins of the platforms.
You see truck drivers in Canada being de-banked, you see students in Colombia being fired for expressing their opinions. We don't have to agree with them, but they should have the right to debate, persuade, dissent, and protest. That's what drives our progress, that dissent exists. If we accept that the system we inherited is best and should not be changed or challenged, then we are saying that this moment in history is best, and it is not. We know it is not.
Despite the many privileges and technological blessings we enjoy, life is still hard. But all the good things you enjoy are the result of someone's labor, effort, and ingenuity, who gave their time of life to us, to the human community. The systems built around us are designed to extract as much of that work as possible and return it to those who rule.
None of the issues I mentioned are technical. They are all very broad and relevant to the average audience, but what I want to remind you of tonight is that I worry that this is about to change. Our lives are increasingly mediated by screens, slabs of glass. You are watching this talk, either live or registered on your smartphone or laptop. No one goes to a counter to buy a ticket anymore. That's not how the modern world works.
But in order to set up your computer, turn on your computer, log in, set up your account, take out your smartphone, charge it, turn it on, connect to a Wi-Fi access point, you have to click "Agree to Continue." You have to agree to someone else's terms of service. You are forced to go through someone else's permission gates, which are owned and controlled by someone else, who is not accountable to anyone. You look at Facebook, you look at Google, and you see how they abuse the trust of every person in every country. The EU tried to control them, but they were completely bypassed.
There was a General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that was supposed to address all of these issues, but it didn't work. They said, "If you break the rules, we'll fine you 4% of global revenue." But the systematization of these technologies hasn't happened, and it hasn't happened for many years. Whether we're talking about companies or governments, we're talking about the same thing: systematization of technologies designed to manage our lives for the benefit of the institutions that are trying to organize us.
We need that kind of management in some cases. We need to be able to collaborate, to be able to work together, we need to be able to work together, right? But we need to agree to that at some level, we should need to agree to that. It's not "tap agree to continue or decline and use the phone my way," it's "tap agree to continue or you can't use your iPhone, you can't use your Android phone." Whether it's made by Samsung, whether it's made by Google, whether it's made by Apple, you either play by their rules or you can't play at all. That should change.
We'll talk about that later, but we've made a lot of progress in the context of money, which is why all of a sudden we're seeing a lot of interest from politicians in these audiences. They understand that a new power center is emerging. But there's still a vulnerability for all of us, including all of the celebrities who are going to speak here, and that's AI.
I'm not one of those people who goes on the internet and yells, "AI safety, AI safety, robots are going to kill us, you need to worry about this." I actually want them to just dump all of these models on the internet and make them available to all of us. OpenAI is not open, it's a very closed model company that wants to profit at your expense. They want to train on your data, but they want to benefit themselves, and they don't want you to have access to these models. They don't want you to be able to download the model, extract the model, get a model that you can run at home, put on your phone, and do whatever you want with it. They want you to have to go back to their well, pay the fee, and only have access to this all through their means, even if you do have the ability to run these models at home on hardware.
The good news is that getting this stuff into the hands of the public, running this stuff at home is becoming increasingly easy. I’m not just saying this in vain; I’ve been using these models at home for the past year. You can do this, too. Whether we’re talking about diffusion models that generate images, like you think of web interfaces like Midjourney, you can do it at home, it’s completely free, as long as you have the hardware to run it. Whether we’re talking about large language models. Facebook, the company that I’ve been criticizing since the beginning of this talk, is actually doing some good things in this space. Not because they love you guys, or they love us, or they love me, or anyone else, but because they’re afraid that their competitors, like OpenAI, will build a structure to prevent monopolies from forming and tax evasion. Facebook doesn’t want to put themselves in that position, so they’re saying, “Okay, we’re going to build the tools and give them to everyone else so that monopolies don’t form and can’t be used against us.” It’s more self-interest than altruism, but I still appreciate it. I’m not a fan of Mark Zuckerberg, but he’s doing great things in this regard. I hope he keeps it up. I know it won’t last forever, but in this situation, I welcome the help we can get.
But why am I talking about this at a Bitcoin conference? The reason is that Bitcoin transactions are not private. Every one of you here knows this because it’s 2024, not 2013 when we were saying, “Oh, Bitcoin is completely anonymous and is criminal money.” The only thing Bitcoin is not today is criminal money. It’s secure hard money that happens to be very useful. That’s why all the investors are investing in it, all the developers are building it, and all the people are fans of it, promoting it and attending this event.
But if we accept that our transactions are not private, they are always public, we're increasingly seeing what's happening in AI and all this data collection and data brokering and analysis. Our lives are being observed. We're being studied more deeply than at any time in human history, and the tools for deriving conclusions and inferences and patterns are more powerful than anything that's ever been invented.
What keeps me up at night in the context of AI is that they see the growing demand, interest, and traction in Bitcoin. They are developing tools, systems, and methods to start combating it. Saying “we’ve watched long enough,” is like “a lion prowls an antelope away from the herd,” but not just individual cryptocurrency users, we’re talking about the system as a whole.
How does this happen? How are they going to do it? What are they going to do? The sad truth is they won't tell us. If we look at the NSA, we look at the CIA, we look at the Department of Justice, we look at the DEA, we look at the Treasury, we look at all of these agencies; they say there are missions, they say what they're going to do, they say what they can't do, what they're not allowed to do, but we see what they actually do. We know about mass surveillance because I exposed it. We know about the massive collection of data on everybody. We know they're trying to fight all the encryption companies and tech companies that are against them.
So in that context, what I think about, and what I hope you take back to your companies and reflect on, is that all the wonderful things that you're doing, all the things that you bring to the table, all the things that you're exciting your users to, all the users that sign up for your services, that use your apps, all the transactions that are being conducted in the name of freedom and free commerce, they have more resources than all of us put together. But we have the benefit of technology, we have the benefit of distributed computing, we have the benefit of distributed ledgers, and we have to think about how to make it more powerful. It's not enough to just win the hearts and minds of the public. We need to make it difficult for them to stop us. We need to make it difficult for them to simply pull up the phone records and see who was at this meeting and start looking at what they're building, what they're doing, who they're communicating with, what they're transacting.
That's why there's a lot of debate in the community about privacy, and I get it. It's hard because people say, "Oh, privacy is hard." That makes sense, but we have to go further. We have to go further to make the system more robust. We need to do this together. No one company is going to find a solution that's going to work. You can't just simply add zero-knowledge proofs and be done with it. You can't just add a mixnet and be done with it. You need to combine multiple strategies. That's what the future is for me right now, making sure that our systems work so tightly together that there's not one bottleneck.
This is really about user empowerment. Bitcoin is already a better system than the old system, a better system than fiat, but to make sure it lasts, to make sure it's there when we need it most and they can't take it away, we need to make sure it's hard to hack. We do that by combining a lot of great ideas from a lot of great people in this room.
So I know I've covered a lot, and I know this might be a little depressing, but let me end on a positive note. It's you who matter most. You're the ones who are here to build these things. You're the ones who are here to advocate for these things. You're the ones who are here to make these things happen.
It’s been an honor to be in this fight with you, and thank you for your time.
