Robert F Kennedy Jr Keynote - Bitcoin 2023

[Applause] hello bitcoiners um there's a lot of people who are not in this room for whom Bitcoin may seem an issue that's too trivial for a presidential campaign David Bailey had a party that we were at last night asked me how I I sold on bitcoin and I told them that it happened to me in an instant when I saw the truckers what happened at the trucker strike in Ottawa and a few months before that I had gone to Italy and I'd given a public speech a large large crowd in Italy about the dangers of digital currency and particularly programmable currency that could be used by governments to to enforced to punish bad behavior income accommodation with surveillance systems and facial recognition systems that the government wouldn't know when you were doing something wrong and could change your credit card and this is what's happening in China so the only purchase groceries within maybe a five minute walk of your home and I said that hypothetically and I think six weeks after I made that speech I saw that very thing happen to the truckers in in Ottawa as most of you know that trucker strike was a peaceful demonstration of people who were demanding rights that are sacred and are taken for granted for every American the right to be free of government mandates the right for free assembly right for free speech uh the right to petition our government all of those things that we take for granted and nonetheless and it was a peaceful demonstration unless the Canadian government fiercely repressed the truckers protest government officials declared a state of emergency a surprise Free Speech perhaps most alarmingly they froze the bank accounts of hundreds of protesters and their supporters which they identified using surveillance and data monitoring Technologies some of these lawful and peaceful protesters none of these awful and peaceful protesters had violated any law they had not been charged and they certainly had not been convicted it but suddenly they found that they could not access their money their bank accounts to pay their mortgages or to feed their families when I witnessed this cataclysm is this devastating use of government repression I realized for the first time how free money is as important to Freedom as free expression and [Applause] a government that has the power this is our citizens when they're disobedient will inevitably turn our entire country into Serfs um it is the ambition of every totalitarian regime to exercise complete control over every aspect of Our Lives we live at a time now that technology has dangerously expanded the capacity for governments and corporations to control Our Lives distant impersonal multinationals and authoritarian technologies have usurped the Realms of human activity that were once private or held by a community they monitor our every movement our Communications our every transaction and the Technologies they use to monitor us can also be used to control us led by the United States liberal democracies across the globe suddenly pivoted during the pandemic and use that crisis as an excuse to trample a central constitutional rights and freedoms governments suspended the rights to free assembling the freedom of worship property rights trial by jury and they censored free speech in the name of combating misinformation and disinformation we lost our freedom to travel the mandates caused us even sovereignty of our own bodies some might say well those were just temporary restrictions and temporary suspensions of our rights but the Constitution has no pandemic exception and and by the way the framers the Constitution knew all about pandemics there was a malaria epidemic that decimated the armies of Virginia during the Revolutionary War and a smallpox epidemic that froze the armies of New England at the very time when Benedict Arnold had led the capture of the city of Montreal and because smallpox had decimated the at that Force we were not able to hold Montreal otherwise candidates that hey would be part of the United States and the framers knew that at the time not only that but after the end between the end of the Revolutionary War and the ratification nine years later of the Bill of Rights there were epidemics in almost every city in our country smallpox epidemics cholera epidemics yellow fever epidemics that killed tens of thousands of people and yet the framers did not put an epidemic exception in the Constitution they wrote the Constitution not for Yeezy times but for Hard Times and and during the Civil War when we lost 659 000 troops killed in battle on both sides it's the equivalent of 7.2 million today much a much worse loss and happened in covid and our country was being torn apart and came this close to being ripped apart and when Abraham Lincoln did the right thing and tried to suspend habeas corpus to prevent Confederate infiltrators from inciting riots in the northern cities he was told by the Supreme Court you can't do it it's in the Constitution it doesn't matter how bad the crisis is you cannot suspend the Constitution and yet we saw this very very dangerous president that we now have we as American citizens are now facing in our country it happened during covid where the government established a new president which is that if it has a good enough excuse the government can now take away all of our freedoms and guess what there is always a good excuse whether it's to stop a new disease the next pandemic to protect us from misinformation to prevent domestic terrorism to stop hate speech to prosecute a war or to fight climate change but all of these reasons can easily turn into pretext control over the public starts perhaps as a means but it always becomes an end is part of the unstayed and seductive ideology of totalitarianism that Utopia will come through exercising perfect control over Society and that works well as long as the good guys are in control or your guys are in control Bitcoin is a bulwark against precisely this kind of government and corporate expansion and intrusion in fact it has been used [Applause] it has been used to bypass oppressive government controls over the monetary systems as in Canada and Myanmar as president I will make sure that your right to hold and use Bitcoin is inviolable first I will defend the right of self-custody of Bitcoin and other digital assets you should be able to own your own private Keys the same as you own the keys to your car or on your wallet [Applause] your wallet whether it's in your pocket or in your or in your computer is your own I don't think the government has the right to demand access to your Bitcoin key or indeed any of your passwords to say otherwise is secede essential territory to the surveillance state second I will I will uphold the right to run a node at home [Applause] kyc requirements should be applied at the level of Banks and exchanges not at the level of nodes otherwise otherwise it would be become impossible to run the software the whole point of Bitcoin is that it's decentralized anyone can run a note and it's important not only for Bitcoin but for a democracy to be decentralized third I will defend use neutral industry neutral regulation of energy President Biden's President Biden's 30 percent tax on energy for Bitcoin miners requires an invasive surveillance apparatus to monitor what is happening in individual computers it's as a terrible president in which everything that you do that requires electricity must now be monitored by the government that's why I also support people's rights to refuse smart meters in their homes fourth fourth I will make sure that the United States Remains the global of of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies major established companies like PayPal Fidelity and block are investing heavily in Bitcoin related software development some of the best engineers and coders in the tech industry work in this field and we want to keep them here in America I will reverse the government's growing hostility toward this industry and keep Innovation at home that leads to my fifth point events like the FDX Calamity prove that some kind of regulation of the crypto industry is needed my Administration will consult with knowledgeable people like yourselves to establish sensible jurisdiction and governance for starters we must recognize that Bitcoin is not a security and should [Music] and should not be regulated as such Bitcoin is in a class by itself it's why decentralization I'm told now that there are forty thousand nodes prevents a lot of the insider trading manipulation and pump and dump schemes that plague other cryptocurrencies six I will carefully consider whether individuals like Ross Albrecht were prosecuted I will consider whether they were prosecuted for actual crimes or as a means to crack down on crypto if they had been unjustly made an example I will consider pardoning them and I will act very quickly to do so before I conclude I'd like to say something about the environmental criticism at Bitcoin it may be unpopular to say here but even though those criticisms are exaggerated if they have some degree of validity it's exaggerated because Bitcoin miners chase the cheapest energy they have to do that for economic reasons and Bitcoin mining tends to go with the energy is the least expensive drawing a lot of idle base load as well as excess Peak generation of Renewable Power but I think Bitcoin miners can still do a lot better and I encourage you in this industry to expand your use of pro-environmental energy techniques such as capturing weights methane and using waste heat which I know many of you are experimenting with we environmentalists we environmentalists will continue to pressure you to improve however whether or not the criticism is valid I want to make one thing plain the environmental argument should not be used as a smoke screen for an agenda of suppressing Bitcoin and let me repeat that energy you should not be used as a pre-tax Furniture of suppressing Bitcoin totalitarians hate anything that they can't control and they will use any pre-tax necessary to control it I am aware of an eerie Parable to the covet years when Public Health became a pre-tax to obliterate our basic rights and freedoms the covid public health emergency is gone now and we must not now replace it with some new set of rationales the further the decades-long erosion of our freedoms finally I'd like to clarify a couple of things I am not an investor and I'm not here to give investment advice or to promote Bitcoin over other cryptocurrencies or other currencies that's the job of the free market not the president of the United States my interest my interest is one I am an Ardent Defender and a lifelong defender of civil liberties and Bitcoin is both an exercise and a guarantee of those freedoms two Bitcoin is a major generator of the kind of innovation our country now needs three Bitcoin embodies two of my highest ideals transparency and Trust Americans have come to distrust the government including the way that it has manipulated our money supply to benefit the very rich and to prosecute endless Wars Bitcoin is a neutral currency beyond the ability of government or indeed any authority to manipulate in our current system nearly all of our transactions are transparent all right they're transparent to government and corporations but their machinations and activities are not transparent to us they are opaque the public Ledger of Bitcoin makes every transaction transparent to everyone it might therefore be a harbinger of a future in which the government is transparent to the people and that would be democracy Now I'm I'm proud to make an historic announcement but first if you can please pull out your cell phones our campaign will be the first presidential campaign in history to accept Bitcoin donations through [Applause] through the lightning Network and today we move one step closer to the Future today we show the world the power and the durability and the flexibility of Bitcoin I want to click Loop by saying this almost everyone in this room is aware of the link between Bitcoin and democracy and freedom and that's why almost everybody I had met that I'd meet who is involved in Bitcoin is passionate about it it's they're not passionate because it's an interesting currency they're passionate because of the deep representation of a deep need that we have or Liberty and democracy and the promise that this innovation has to guarantee those virtues oh and we we are now living in this age of turn ketotalitarianism with this emerging technology which can Empower totalitarian regimes and our job is to try to build and fortify Democratic institutions at the same rate as that totalitarian instruments are being expanded in their power things like AI which really are going to threaten democracy at its base we need to not be chipping away at our Democratic institutions we need to be fortifying the ones that exist and building new ones and the biggest most important one on the horizon is Bitcoin because it can't be manipulated all of you I know are here again not because you love a currency but because you love our country you love democracy you love freedom and in that sense your support of Bitcoin puts you in the same category as the framers the Constitution that gave us that bill of right that created these Democratic institutions and you are the current manifestation of that impulse so thank you all very much for everything you do and thank you for being part of this movement start welcome back to bitcoin 2023 on the Bitcoin magazine live stage brought to you by Marathon we just heard one of the most amazing talks I've ever heard about Bitcoin at an event in my entire life and I've been doing this for many years and before I go to our panelists who are returning I just got to thank Justin Trudeau one more time he called me and my friends a terrorist uh a little over a year ago and it really hurt me and when I heard that it made it all worth it because that was the orange pill for what we just heard and had Justin Trudeau not been the greatest Bitcoin evangelist the world has ever seen we wouldn't be here right now listening to this and I you know one day if it does happen what we saw there and he promises to bring in your right to hold Bitcoin uh self-custody run a node um Justin Trudeau is going to go down in history as probably the biggest idiot that ever ran a country but the good news is he lives in Canada and he can apply for maid so he won't really have to live with it for too much uh but I want to turn to our panelists uh because I'm a little bit speechless here um Jesse please uh get us started yeah um I think that first of all it was an incredible speech where uh RFK did Junior did a great job of framing this in terms of what Bitcoin means for the world and for Humanity and fundamentally this is free speech and free money and he equated those these two things as being on the same level in terms of their importance for human freedom and then he enumerated all the ways in which recent history has shown us how government is looking for an excuse to take away that freedom and impinge on that and we saw that with covid uh and and he made it quite a wise uh historical parallel to how um the founders the framers of the Constitution were aware of how pandemics play out and how you know that prevented Canada from being part of the U.S and they still made an emphasis that no no uh situational um context could impinge upon the the Liberties that were enumerated in the Constitution so you know I think there was a wide perspective and wisdom in how RFK Jr is recognizing that Bitcoin represents the the next St next wave of what the the founders of the United States were trying to ensconce in our founding documents the freedoms of individuals for free speech and free money and that Bitcoin is the next wave of the American Endeavor and uh Matt even seeing Tech that he's leveraging for the operation was that a surprise to you or a very pleasant surprise seeing how the campaign is going to manage these donations uh I mean it's it's definitely pretty cool to see a uh U.S presidential candidate except Bitcoin for donations um Bitcoin is uniquely well suited for donations um it's one of a I think one of the key core use cases that we'll see kind of unfold throughout the world and I would say like you know a U.S presidential candidate usually does not have any kind of trouble raising donations to the traditional Financial system but where Bitcoin really shines is Raising donations in situations where you might be cut off from banking you might be cut off from the paypals of the world right those traditional Financial rails that do get censored and Dylan what what spoke to you in that talk yeah I mean it was just really powerful speech to see a presidential candidate that you know one that if you look at you know traditional polls or you know Legacy websites doesn't have them anywhere close to the running but if you look at kind of these uh more offshore betting sites the ones where you know the market speaks true he's he's second in the race for the Democratic primaries and you know the the first in the race is is quite literally a vegetable so so it is exciting I mean freedom rings true Bitcoin is freedom money and so uh you know I think he's he's really gunning for it anybody that's Pro Freedom um is is on the Democratic side is is in rfk's Camp now what what we almost saw there was a love letter to bitcoin uh was that something you expected Matt did you did you think he'd get right into points that uh only folks like you hit consistently I mean he's not a my understanding is he's not a it hasn't been a bitcoiner for very long so I'm not sure who he's talking to what he's reading uh what he's watching uh but I'd like to know because uh he seemed to hit all the key points of what makes Bitcoin special what makes Bitcoin unique um why Freedom Tech is important and how how policy makers should consider these things in terms of the best future for our country well um we're gonna have a few more of these political talks that one was incredible up next we have the great ordinal debate on the Nakamoto stage please stay tuned for Pete Rizzo and a few others going over what should be a pretty contentious event so changing speeds a little bit see on the main stage

Channel: Bitcoin Magazine

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Keywords: Bitcoin, Bitcoin 2023, Bitcoin 2023 Conference, Bitcoin Magazine, Bitcoin Miami, B23 Miami, Bitcoin Magazine Live, BM LIVE, Crypto news, cryptocurrency news, bitcoin news, btc news, crypto news today, bitcoin news today, Bitcoin Price 2023, Marathon, Marathon Digital Holdings, Brink, Michael Saylor, MicroStrategy, Credit and Lending, bitcoin magazine live, Samson Mow, Indonesia, Bitcoin Mining, Ridwan Kamil, bitcoin, RFK, Robert F Kennedy Jr, President, Biden, Trump, Democracy

Id: fz7FPl065II

Length: 25min 32sec (1532 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2023