How crypto could allow more people to be their own boss | Laura Shin | TEDxSanFrancisco

I started my journalism career at three great companies Newsweek The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times the problem was within two years and nine months I quit all three jobs I have a theory about why I'm not used to people telling me what to do I grew up in a household without any rules my parents did not impose a single rule on me or my sister while we were growing up that meant that some mornings I might eat a popsicle for breakfast it meant that I watched about as much TV as you would imagine an eight-year-old would watch if there were no limitations placed on her and there was a TV right in her bedroom I also apparently asked for an album called get lucky buy a band named loverboy because I owned that when I was five I think growing up this way is a big reason that my sister and I both became our own bosses she's a successful co-founder and CEO and I'm an independent journalist with two podcasts and recently announced a book deal [Music] earlier in my career when I struggled as a freelancer I often felt bad about the fact that I couldn't just stick it out in these jobs I didn't like but eventually I realized that actually the self-employed lifestyle is much more similar to how humans have existed throughout history we would just do what we needed to do when we needed to do it as my friend the venture capitalist built I has said on my podcast we lived in a flexible work fabric that meant maybe we would go fishing in the morning maybe we go berry picking in the afternoon and it's only recently that we've become cogs in the wheels of these larger corporations as a journalist I report write and record my podcasts on my own time and then I pay myself directly from the revenues of my business I don't contribute to this larger entity that then pays me a salary and gives the profits over to owners and shareholders in my world I am the worker and owner and the shareholder I'm a small corporation a corporation of me while this setup isn't incredibly common nowadays I think it's gonna become a lot more prevalent over in the next few decades it's a trend that could perhaps take down some of the biggest businesses we know today it could also remake the way many of us earn our money and the reason for this shift begins with of all things Bitcoin Bitcoin you might be thinking yeah Bitcoin cryptocurrency magic internet money what some people call criminal money it's that crazy digital asset that was born about ten years ago Bitcoin I started covering Bitcoin in the spring of 2015 when Forbes asked me to head up its fin check50 list with another reporter she and I divided the list in in categories and I took digital currencies at that point I still down the crypto rabbit hole as they say for me earning about Bitcoin was like traveling to a foreign country oh wow let's take a peek down that Street oh what's around that corner oh my gosh look at that amazing view but this whole journey was taking place in my own head after a while I realized I could not stop turning over in my mind this multifaceted intellectual gem iock found at that time I was covering a personal finance and career you know how to earn money how to earn more money how to negotiate a learn how to retire at 25 I also wrote about freelancing because I was a freelancer and at first I thought personal finance and career were really different from Bitcoin the first two topics really didn't change very much and Bitcoin was constantly changing to the point where I struggle to keep up but eventually I realized that the two are a lot more similar than I originally thought before I explain why I just want to say that what I'm about to tell you is gonna seem kinda out there so I want you to think of my talk today as a visit to you from the future it's sort of like this photo of magazine clipping I saw making the rounds on Twitter earlier this year it's from 1999 and in it sci-fi author David Gerald was asked to give his description of the future of computing when you read it now it is a spot-on description of an iPhone don't a Siri he even ends it by saying we should dub this device a pain in the ass because it was going to destroy all of our privacy well I don't know if I can be quite as prescient as David Gerald what I can tell you is what I am seeing from reporting on the front lines of this technology it's what I like to call my front row seat to the world's most suspenseful movie the one that's gonna last decades my first takeaway for you from my visit to you from the future is that developers are using a technology behind Bitcoin to create a parallel financial system Bitcoin was the first time that we had truly unique digital assets previously if I sent you something on the internet I was always sending you a copy so if I sent you a word doc or a text message or a photo I always had a copy of that word doc that text message that photo now I could send you a Bitcoin and everybody in the world could be certain that I no longer had it and that you had it with these digitally native assets with these internet native assets you could now create an Internet of money you might be thinking well I already moved my money digitally I log on to my bank website onto PayPal onto venmo but no that's all just a digital veneer on this legacy banking system that grew up out of physical and paper money when I pay you via my bank account I basically you know send that message and my bank will debit my account on its ledger then it will credit your account on its ledger those two banks then have to come together and reconcile those accounts and that process can take days that's why bank transfers take days often with dick coin there's one ledger and it's in the cloud and instead of tens of thousands of employees at these banks managing all these Ledger's it's just a piece of software with Bitcoin through my podcast Unchained I interview developers who are building what they call the world of decentralized finance this consists of a number of protocols for financial functions our current internet consists of many protocols for communication for instance HTTP hypertext Transfer Protocol is how we can all read each other's web pages SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is how we can all read each other's email messages developers are now creating protocols for financial functions such as derivatives money markets debt credit exchange and more that means some day instead of putting your money into a money market account at a big bank with all its many employees and branches around the world you might instead put your money into a money market account created by a smart contract a piece of software created by a few developers and posted online in the future instead of trading a derivative that was created by an investment bank you may instead trade one that was created using a protocol this sector that I've just described is really different from this world that we already know of the too-big-to-fail banks however I talked to these young developers many of them fresh out of school grad school some of them dropouts like you know the first wave of tech entrepreneurs often they have little to no financial background but they are creating this parallel financial system that can bypass the traditional banking system what I've just described to you is actually so new that much of it is either only just launched or is just about to launch so the sector is tiny but disruption is coming my second takeaway for you is that in addition to this open financial system I've just described we will likely see the emergence of a new business model you're all really already familiar with the path that many startups take to becoming public companies in the future I think of many more services will come to us via leaderless user owned peer-to-peer networks similar to Bitcoin let me take a step back Bitcoin is actually two different things there's Bitcoin with a lowercase P which is what I've been discussing so far which is the digital currency the cryptocurrency Bitcoin with an uppercase B is the network that's what enables you to send 1 million dollars with a Bitcoin from here to China in 10 minutes for little to no money especially comparison to International Bank wire transfer fees this is revolutionary this system of the payment network and the digital currency was the first time that such things were created using software without a company to keep it all going if there was no company behind Bitcoin then who helped see her to success it was the users and workers of the system itself they were the ones who helped grow it to a market capitalization of more than a hundred billion dollars which is more valuable than Goldman Sachs if there was no CEO and business behind them then how were they motivated to do so they were incentivized by the design of the software itself it was programmed to every 10 minutes release new bitcoins to anyone who contributed to the security of the network many people focus on how these miners win new Bitcoin but you can also think of that as a payment to this leaderless IT department that's helping to ensure the security of the network so much though that the Bitcoin blockchain has never been hacked in the future I think many more services will come to us via these leaderless user owned peer-to-peer networks with a crypto asset at the center that's incentivizing behaviour on that network that is how now today a cryptocurrency miner can look at the cost of their mining equipment the cost of their electricity they can project how many of those coins they're expected to earn over time and look at the price of that coin and determine whether or not it will be profitable for them to mine it or not similarly users might look at that network and say ok this services may be cheaper than using one offered by a middleman and also I could be this user owner I can use this token but also if more people join the value of my tokens may rise the total crypto asset market capitalization is just over two hundred billion dollars in some ways it's a small number meaning I think someday it could be much bigger and in other ways it's a big number in the sense that I think much of what's out there today probably won't survive and will go to zero but it's not that different from the early days of the internet where people were excited about pets calm Webvan and cosmo and yet out of that same hype cycle we also got Google and Amazon my third takeaway for you from my visit from the future is that along with these shifts we could very well see many more people working for themselves this is where my previous beats of personal finance and career intersect with crypto when you take this open financial system this parallel financial system that I described with this new decentralized business model I think we will see many more Orkut markets open up that are not open today we will also see many new channels for us to transact financially if you're like me 20 years ago maybe you woke up and you checked one email address and now at least I wake up I check multiple email addresses Twitter telegram signal I messages whatsapp limp LinkedIn Facebook and similarly in the future I think many people will check on multiple financial transactions that occurred overnight not just in the market of their country stock exchanges but in global markets that run 24/7 365 I think we will see many of us being able to monetize assets that we currently have that we can't earn money from now whether it's unused airline miles whether it's the time and attention you give to an ad whether it's spare disk storage you have or idle compute cycles on your laptop while you sleep where you're born could have less of an impact on how much you could earn over time theoretically a teenage girl in Bangladesh with access to the Internet should be able to plug into these user owned networks and earn just as easily as a mid man in Silicon Valley creators will be April to offer their wares online whether it's a digital photo a digital artwork an mp3 and ebook an article and embed a smart contract inside that will ensure that they get paid every time it's consumed in short many more people will become the worker the owner and the shareholder the one thing I cannot tell you in my visit from the future is whether or not we really will see these leaderless user owned peer-to-peer networks compete with or even displace these too big to fail banks and these tech giants after all many of these big companies are looking to use this technology to cement their dominance and frankly regulation will play a role in how this all shakes out however if this vision I've painted comes to pass then I believe many more of you will be quitting your jobs and when that happens you won't have to make this big speech with all these elaborate excuses about how the reason you quit was because your childhood [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 46,131

Rating: 4.8845072 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Business, Bitcoin, Journalism, Money

Id: w-Ew7PW4LCo

Length: 16min 18sec (978 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 23 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/peter_u1]

She is talking about BCH. But why is she not mentioning ones bitcoin cash.

[u/horsebadlydrawn]

WOW big respect to Laura! I didn't realize she was such a huge advocate of crypto-entrepreneurship. Love how she demonstrated how being self-employed benefits her and how crypto enabled this model.