Through the Eyes of a Cypherpunk Legend: Hyperbitcoinization = HyperAmericanization | Bitcoin 2026

Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. Um, let's talk about hyper Bitcoinization, hyperamericanization. Very interesting topic and it goes into some really interesting places. I think you're going to be a little surprised where this ends up. Uh, let's start with here. Uh, I don't know why I have a big X on there, but there we go. Um, this is the kind of thing I would end a presentation with normally, but it's really a very important. It brings us to our point. We believe that the good, the useful, and the beautiful grow in us. 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 then we're the source. Correct? So let's take a look at this. Okay, I'm kind of a scientific guy and I like to use these scientific analogies all the time. One of them is that all things physical in the universe that we know of um seek a least energy principle. Everything tries to use the minimal amount of energy. This is true at the subatomic level. It's true in human affairs where people are trying to be careful. Don't make a mistake. Don't go too far. Uh stay where you're safe. Um but there is an issue with that. Now what I like to explain is, and I'll make this brief, all of the world, the physical world goes to entropy, which is it wears down. It wears out. But life doesn't. Life is actually recognized by its ability to transcend entropy, to take things that are worn out and to put them back together into something highly organized and important. Think of a 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 in 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. 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, with effort that take us almost immeasurably farther and faster. 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, we really want to do. something that's in in in in the proper sense of the term sacred to us, something that matters to us. When we do that, we can create I don't know how far we can go and we do it willfully that's completely unique in nature. Okay? But this choice to break the least energy state and to care about something and build something you want, this really is faith. I mean, 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, something that matters, something that we have passion for. This is what drove America. This is what drove Bitcoin. It's the same base. Now, let's take a look at this just a little bit. 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 and something because humans aren't fully developed. We've got problems that we still need to fix. But this was how poor boys and poor girls. By the way, there were a lot of a lot of young women who came um easily a million people came from from England to America this way. And why this way? Because how's a poor boy living in Devonshire going to get to America? He doesn't he can't do this. So, a bunch of business guys put together this arrangement where you went and you worked for three years and then you became out of your employment contract. 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 and think also that, you know, their families were probably not overall pleased with them. Um, this is another very important one. This is a little town in Massachusetts and this is three years before Jefferson and his declaration. And these guys say essentially that they have the right to judge kings. Says the rule 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, but these people were convinced and became convinced that they were the primaries that they had a right to build what they want and to live as they want and that they were convinced that they understood it and they could judge kings. That's a big deal. Here it is for Bitcoiners. This is Diffy and Helman. For those of you who know a Diffy Helman key exchange, which is fundamental to Bitcoin and several other things, these are young men who had a passion for something that that 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 face. Look at the faces. These are people who believe in something. This is where Bitcoin came from. This is a financial cryptography conference 1997. This was after we had the cipher punks. People understood what cryptography really meant to us. How it made a teranova. It made a new world for us. And people begin to understand this and they what we need money. We got to have money. And this is a conference that was held on some little island in the Caribbean. Probably most people wouldn't know it. And I probably almost no one has been there. These guys weren't going there because they wanted to to find, you know, uh, venture capital to start something. They were there because they knew this thing was important and 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. This is a community on the coast of Africa. People who found out and why are they there building in this spot? is they believe in something. They found something that they can believe in and put their passion into that they cared about. And I promise you that their families think they're a little crazy. There's lots of social pressure, 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. Okay? 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 is better than living in subjection to the king. You know, this idea of a myth and every nation seems to have their own. They're the they're special because of this or special because of that. The myth is actually a problem especially regarding this because it kind of subsumes you. Let's take the one of the myths from from the 19th century, you know, manifest destiny. We really need to go across and take over the continent. Once you find your identity in that, you kind of move a little bit into a derivative rather than a primary. So, America had to prove it. And they had a lot to prove. Um, I I'll just give you a couple little things here. I won't read all of these. The second one is the one that I that made me laugh. This is Lord Sandwich of the Admiral T. You know, who are the Americans? A race of convicts that should be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging. Wow. Um but we had the same thing in Bitcoin. Um we had in 1996 the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace written by JP Barlo. Uh if you haven't read it, please find it somewhere. I mean, it was really inspiring at the time. And of course, Wired came out and Wired supposed to be the, you know, electronics sort of thing. Like, they 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. Um, and then all the things that 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, you know, last one, Bitcoin refuses to die already. Well, you 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. All right, let's just talk about some some parallels. uh Bitcoin Bitcoiners and the early Americans had the same idea of freedom and they took it from the same guy John Lockach um you know that we should 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 you know political science professor then maybe not. Um, here's some more parallels. Uh, we have Thomas Payne 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? Okay. And then we have Timothy C. May on the right hand side. who was one of the founders of Cippher Punk 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 with there's JP Barlo in his declaration. I want to tell you what it was really exciting at the time still is. We have Sam Adams talking about an asylum for liberty and then we have Satoshi talking 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. 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. Now, I won't go through this, but 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. You know, there are going to be inconveniences, difficulties in our realm. I'm a massive Bitcoin advocate, but it doesn't solve every single problem. And there's 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. The people who, you know, try to slam you, oh, something could go wrong. Something goes wrong in their system every day, thousands and thousands of times. This is kind of a um an emotionally driven attack uh with something called the Nirvana fallacy. doesn't matter. But it our decentralized way is better, but it's not magic and it's not perfect. We still have to do things. We still have to bring decency and honesty into it and work well with each other to cooperate because fundamentally the better humans cooperate the better they live and the worse humans cooperate the worse they end up living. Um, I'll just talk about this saying that 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 that they had in those days. But they were starting to set the terms of the debate. And so are we. I mean, two years ago, presidential candidate came here because we mattered. Wow. Now, I'm going to have 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, that grow everything, that build everything, that repair everything. That segment of life, that's what matters. And we want ones and twos. We don't want the big super duper famous guy saying Bitcoin is it, everybody come. We want, you know what I want? I want the people who come into the Bitcoin meetup and say, "Wait, wait, what did you say? Is that right?" Yeah. We've processed over a billion transactions. It works. Whoa. That's what I want. These are the people want. That's building with with solidity. That's building for real. Now, let's finish this up. This is Thomas Jefferson. The issue today is the same. It's always been through history. Whether man shall be allowed to govern himself, to be a primary, to govern himself, or to be ruled by a small elite, a secondary. Uh, and actually he had a conversation about this with to withh John Adams. And Adams said, "Let's be specific. The revolution wasn't the war. The revolution began in 1760 when the hearts and the minds of people like the people from that little town in Massachusetts said, "We're primaries. We judge kings. We're the primaries, not the secondaries." This is the founding American idea. That's the core of it. That's the kernel of it. And Bitcoin coded us as primaries. Okay, look at the these these uh symbols here. On the left is us. That's Bitcoin. You want to be on the Bitcoin network? You're a node. You're you're an entity. You're there. The one on the right, that's hierarchy. That's governance hierarchies, corporate hierarchies, um institutional hierarchies. We have the primaries up on top and the secondaries going down. That's just the way it is. And Bitcoin made us by code primary entities. That's what we are in Bitcoin 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. What makes us the sources makes us the primaries. And it is a fundamental difference. Look, all of this has worked. Look at how 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. 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. Every year this community comes together to celebrate, to debate, to build what comes next. And every year the stage gets bigger. Sound money center stage. So where do you go to celebrate the next chapter in Bitcoin history? You come home. Nashville, July 2027.