The Bitcoin Gospel | VPRO documentary (2015)

so we're standing here at my living room in a Tokyo Japan and I'm going to show everybody just how amazing Bitcoin is by sending a hundred euros worth of Bitcoin as of today's value through my TV onto the camera onto the TV in the Netherlands and anybody with their Bitcoin wallet ready that scans what they're going to see on the screen in a moment we'll be able to claim the 100 euros worth of bitcoins and there's nothing that anybody can do to stop it or to freeze your account or block it or control it in any way so on the TV here we have a Bitcoin address that I've just generated and I have my phone here I'm going to scan the QR code for the Bitcoin address on the TV now I have it I'm going to send a 100 euros worth of bitcoins that address so we'll hit send and anybody can monitor on blockchain on info the balance of this address there it is 100 euros worth of bitcoins just arrived at this address so total received 100 euros final balance 100 euros just like that so on this next screen you're about to see anybody with their Bitcoin wallet that scans the private key that corresponds with that address we'll be able to claim that money just by scanning the code that you're about to see on your television so if you want to take a look here it comes 100 euros ready for anyone to claim all you have to do is scan this one right here and it's a hundred euros worth of bitcoins as of today by the time you scan it it might be worth even more so there it is for anyone ready to claim with their Bitcoin wallet okay Holland now you've just seen the power of Bitcoin I sent a hundred euros worth of Bitcoin from here in Tokyo directly to you guys through this camera through the network through the TV right into your home if I had tried to do that send you the money with a traditional bank it would have taken several days and probably cost 30 euros I just did it right now with Bitcoin instantly basically for free and didn't have to ask anybody for permission I didn't need a bank I didn't need a government I didn't need anybody I just needed myself and you and our smartphones to do it that's the power of Bitcoin this is back light welcome to a world in which we can be our own bank we take it for granted that money creation is controlled by governments and banks but there's a community of people who don't see this as a given and to get quite worked up about it Wall Street is fraud America is fried the world is fraud banks are fraud central banks are fraud live in an era of fraud it's all based on fraud and they get a percentage of the fraud that's the business model to suggest that there is any moral or ethical aspect to anything that's going on now is to be completely naive about the fact that we live in an era dominated by financial terrorists terrorists terrorists she hotties of banking they're here to kill you and themselves they believe in an ideology not the Koran but Adam Smith that they completely miss read and interpret as something to justify their blowing themselves up Jerry yellows and terrorists Marriott jaggies and terrorists the Central Bank of Japan is a terrorist these are the real terrorists those received this community is switching to what they think is a better monetary system a system in which banks are no longer needed because payment could be made directly from one person to another the system of that one of the two parties is always the slave and that is the architecture of money we live in that is the architecture of money we use a nice civilization an architecture of money where you have no control an architecture of money where every interaction is mediated by a third party a third party that has absolute control over that money Bitcoin is fundamentally different because in Bitcoin you don't owe anyone anything and no one owes you anything it is not a system based on that it is a system based on ownership and no one can censor it no one can seize it no one can freeze it and what they will tell you is that they're worried they're very worried the worried that criminals will use Bitcoin but the truth is that they're far more terrified that all of the rest of us will thank you Bitcoin the cryptocurrency that was mostly known as a convenient tool for criminals has suddenly become an important topic at conferences on financial innovation all over the world proponents speak passionately of a digital miracle that can save the world from financial ruin the Bitcoin story starts off like a gospel revelation it's November the 2nd 2008 just six weeks after the Lehman Brothers collapse and all over the world there are panicked debates about how to save the banks then on a little visited web forum for cryptographers a document appears in which a completely new monetary system is proposed the visionary author calls himself Satoshi Nakamoto first time I heard about it I was at lunch with a buddy in Texas and he said man there's just crazy new money and so he talked about it over lunch and then I went home and I said man I want to I want to see if I can buy some at first I wanted to buy some I'm emailed friend of mine I think I I probably saw the white paper it's a web form or something you know I just said this is some electronic currency thing and this was publicly available you know this was posted I think December you know 2008 or something and these were the darkest days of the financial crisis so that to me suggests a very clever mind that saw an opportunity the perfect opportunity to introduce a new radical technology and new radical approach to money in finance at just the right moment when people would be very open to making this big shift its required to adopt a new currency I'm pretty pretty sure if Satoshi is a human being although I'd really love to go find out they with some advanced AI but 99.99% chance who the human being what's exciting for me is like a global economy right now we say we have a global economy but I can't take a dollar and give it to you in the Netherlands and then you know what to do with it right you would have to go and change it to your native currency and when you kind of eliminate that step and I can just send you one form of payment and you can send me a product in a matter of seconds that starts to change things from a from a global perspective so the first wire that I sent was a for $25,000 and this was in early 2011 and bitcoins were somewhere around $1 all the way along I was buying Bitcoin and any time I meant turn some dollars for my other company I put it into Bitcoin and at this point the vast majority of a my net worth I've been keeping a Bitcoin for a while now I'm glad you didn't get the parking pay the car is actually like the perfect color for Bitcoin it's like the Bitcoin Orange so we wanted to order some like Bitcoin decals and put like Bitcoin logos around the car and then drive around Tokyo to hope help advertise a Bitcoin but still never got around to doing that maybe someday Roger fear is the CEO of memory dealers com selling secondhand computer equipment but for a couple of years now he's been known as the Bitcoin Jesus in 2011 he bought $25,000 worth of bitcoins which now have a market value of 6 million dollars and somebody closed my uh I usually leave the trunk or the hood open a little bit so that I can reconnect the battery but I don't know how it got closed between now and the last time I was here so we'll have to uh some people think of Bitcoin as sort of an early adopter thing like okay I'm already too late or so isn't that a problem for Bitcoin so thinking that that it's too late to get involved in Bitcoin is like thinking it's too late to get involved with the internet or too late to get involved with using a cell phone like it's not too late to get involved in Bitcoin Bitcoin is going to make your life easier in so many ways and and the price of Bitcoin - it's not too late for that either bitcoins like two hundred and seventy dollars a Bitcoin right now if Bitcoin becomes really popular all over the world bitcoins are going to have to be worth at least tens of thousands of dollars a Bitcoin if not hundreds of thousands of dollars per Pig per Bitcoin so thinking it's too late to get involved with with Bitcoin is like thinking it's too late to get involved with with using the Internet of course not like it's ubiquitous in our lives and bitcoins going to become ubiquitous in our lives as well perfect money should be have a limited supply that's one of the most important things needs have a limited supply it needs to be easily recognizable it needs to be durable it needs to be transportable Bitcoin has all those things better than any other form of money the world has ever seen and that's why when I noticed Bitcoin for the first time I realized that it's so incredibly useful as money that people are going to start using it more and more Roger lives and works in Tokyo he's outsourcing all the work for his own company so he can spend all his time promoting Bitcoin so it's a pretty exciting time for Bitcoin right now with all the stuff going on in in Greek I mean bitcoins up about ten dollars since yesterday just since all the news on the Greek referendum vote and just every day bitcoins so exciting so on you can see you know lots of trading and everything just in the last 24 hours there I paid to put up a billboard in the heart of Silicon Valley right next to one of the busiest expressways that just said we accept Bitcoin memory dealers calm and then listed some of the parts that we sell then after that I started paying for national radio ads in the United States - Ron more than a hundred radio stations across the United States and paid for that for a couple of years okay wave a popular consumer website in Japan will accept bitcoins from now on at a press conference Roger fear helps them spread the word well today one Bitcoin is Salman goes on in Nairobi Canseco challenging in atrocity nam kyuman in token insane man in naka de valera is it a Bitcoin Warneke Nina Rajasthan car seats may we stated a key muscle there was a sad day he out of the coal cause it's me imani new I call you Quattro an Aikido no Nathalie Sanwa what assured in Hangul mind occur a Nihonjin naka Rod Carew a to touch the copper-colored smashed it could hit economist Inka animal Sukhoi hello can anyone say toma de monaco a career on disc a domo an Opie Tokui Valdes knee and OTC ryomou ha karana Qatari toka Ito sugoku Tommy sigatoka Qatari a she's a super open an associate REI toes who could open any other a to G only also sunny quit their ego saga if I arrow to go to destiny so you my Marino at Cohn oh my no Connie you are how you cut or chop to re master like at all Imam are anyone engine erection no koto EEMA size Chikara imam are a bit corner Ichiban call you go to mathura crowd it's a kite Shinhwa each one e economy learning a bit coins I forgot mantra in Makarova could've asked you oh good hideout hi IRA so go build an eye on there so yeah prinster - Tamar - show demo kya Sinan boon Bitcoin wantonness a cartoon in Kannada yeah c'mon in Nara no Colossians Artemis George are you giving bit please away I'm giving you every Pope every single person here 1000 yen worth of bitcoins which is like $8 in something cents that's a refreshment my dog okay I've given away thousands of whole bitcoins to just various people on Facebook that would post their Bitcoin address and this is back when bitcoins were a couple of dollars each so I'm sure those people are pretty happy at this point how could this digital coin invented by this Satoshi Nakamoto become hundreds of times more valuable than the dollar and why do enthusiasts like Roger fear want the world to switch to bitcoins to understand this we need to look at how new bitcoins are created a complex process called mining promotional videos make it look as if everyone can just mine bitcoins millions of people all over the world earn real crypto money daily it's quite simple just download the special software connect to the web and wait for your profits to roll in for mining you don't need any special knowledge you can mine at home at work or to cafe anywhere there's access to the Internet in fact lots of people have already received a good income from mining it's interesting just to get us to get you out of the bed in the morning no it doesn't I get it it doesn't get you out of the bed in the morning no it doesn't I get it marshal Leung was one of the world's first Bitcoin miners now he's the CEO of final hash a company that professionally mines bitcoins okay well that's fine we can we can talk about it more in Chicago that's fine so back in the early days you know I get phone calls from my buddies oh hey man I lost 10,000 bitcoins because my computer blew up right back then one Bitcoin was less than a penny right so nobody cared they lost $10 I don't care right now 10,000 bitcoins that's you know five million dollars that's a big deal right so now it's interesting to see how the industry has changed there wasn't YouTube videos and all these nice things to show you how to mine so it took me about three weeks to hook up computer up to figure out how to do this mining and you know back in the good days that you could take a laptop like this and you could mine maybe a hundred or two hundred coins in a day when summer time in Houston came my wife was like this AC has been on for 24 hours it's really hot what were you doing up there I said oh you know I'm just running some computers and she walks up there and you know you see 50 graphics cards all running at the same time and it's very hot she's like okay you got a you got to get out of here you got to figure something else out cuz it is too hot hey what's up nerd you have some fans cheering here aka barnacle YZ I'm here with Marshall long from hath final hash now we're out here and I would say what's going to be the largest Bitcoin mine in North America and it's realistically an actual mining operation like you can pretty much attribute everything that's going on here to like a real gold mining operation it's like you have heavy equipment you have cost you fuel cost yeah and you have recovery everything that you then go and sell and turn into real money that's right okay how many of these machines are in here you got a scores s5 everyday actually this is mostly a scores literally the loudest place ever it's like he in a wing cooling in here is so efficient and if you put your hand back here behind the units where they're drawing here it's freezing cold it is nice ice cold air coming in here you put your hand in the front down the center is burning burning hi profitable a Bitcoin as the reward for solving complex mathematical puzzles and Bitcoin miners let their computers work day and night to complete these tasks all the Bitcoin users in the world are connected and together they constitute a network that processes and checks all Bitcoin transactions in a public ledger called the blockchain and Satoshi Nakamoto designed it in such a way that users can create a free and anonymous Bitcoin account number a so called wallet satoshis invention eliminates the need for a central bank because all the users together are the bank but early Bitcoin users had no idea how big Bitcoin and the blockchain would become I think sometime in spring of 2010 I could be wrong on the exact dates but basically someone put out a request saying hey I'd like to buy something with Bitcoin will anyone buy me a pizza and I believe someone here in England bought the the person in Florida a pizza for ten thousand or something bitcoins and maybe worth you know a very large sum of money today and and that was the first Bitcoin commercial transaction garrick Heilmann an economist at the London School of Economics was one of the first scholars to study Bitcoin and the blockchain as a serious monetary system as a scholar at you should label it was something totally new to you it looked very different to me I mean as soon as I heard the word decentralized and the fact there was a network powering this currency rather than a central issuer that immediately captured my interest is something quite different based on what little I knew about alternative currencies at that time what it meant for people who are libertarians in particular is that the government couldn't come in and shut down a server and in Bitcoin it would have to shut down the entire internet or turn off the electricity grid - to stop Bitcoin and so that was really attractive - to people who are worried about these types of things many of the early Bitcoin enthusiasts were libertarians who saw Bitcoin as the ultimate remedy for state intervention this was also what attracted Roger Vere to Bitcoin in his early 20s he was a candidate for the Libertarian Party in California but during his campaign he was sentenced to ten months in prison for trafficking illegal fireworks according to him this was a political case brought by people who opposed his ideas I have a two Bitcoin related Gea's I have the Bitcoin org and I have the blockchain that info Bitcoin blockchain logo anything was a political case there's no doubt in my mind whatsoever and in fact even at one of the pre-trial conference things with the ATF agents my attorney in the US attorney might renew saying hey these are store-bought firecrackers we sold on eBay we can pay a fine and do some community service and you down with this there's no reason to destroy my life over it and send me to prison to make me a felon and the US Attorney at that point was kind of nodding his head like that sounds reasonable the ATF agent literally pounded his hand on the table and shed it but you didn't hear the things that he said which I think summed up very clearly they weren't mad about anything that I had done they're not about the things that I had said because the ideas that I'm trying to spread are subversive to the state I did ten months in federal prison and I was scared of the US government the moment I was allowed to leave the u.s. I left and I haven't lived there ever since and they have what's called an exit act so at the time you announced your United States citizen they tax you on your entire net worth that capital gains tax rates and you have to pay them that money otherwise they'll probably either send you to jail or at the very least not ever let you back in the country ever again if you think about it it's not all that different than you slaves from the past having to buy their freedom from the plantation owners money creation by the state is sort of connected to state aggression for you right in my line of thinking is if you are I create counterfeit euros or print euros or dollars or yen we would go to jail for counterfeiting because it's destructive to the economy by counterfeiting dollars it's stealing everybody else in the economy that has money when governments do the exact same thing it has the exact same negative effects the only difference is they call it fancy names like quantitative easing or economic stimulus but it is destructive for the exact same reasons my hobby growing up and in high school and since has been studying economics and the more you study economics the more you realize that all these government interventions in the economy prevent the world from becoming as wealthy and prosperous as it otherwise would become and suddenly now we have this tool that separates money from state like everybody today thinks that separating church and state of course they should be separated but a couple hundred years ago it was you know heresy just hit that church the state should be separated and today it sounds maybe a little bit crazy to say that money and state should be separate but I think in another decade or two people are going to think Oh what the heck were we thinking letting governments be in charge of money that cost so many problems in so many misallocation of resources around the world of course bitcoin is is better okay these feathers pick why is the government's and banks monopoly on money creation seen as undesirable in his white paper Satoshi Nakamoto didn't express his opinion on this but it does seem that he wanted bitcoins to appreciate rather than depreciate unlike money he programmed Bitcoin in such a way that there's a maximum of 21 million bitcoins to be mined bitcoins weren't meant to resemble money but gold in November 2013 this dream became reality when one bitcoin was worth an ounce of gold the Bitcoin code itself has never been hacked but in 2014 the customer data of Mount GOx an online exchange office was stolen by hackers causing the Bitcoin exchange rate to plummet at the Financial Times in London journalist Isabella Kaminski has been critically following the Bitcoin exchange rate and community since the very beginning I've always been a geek about finance and I've always been a geek about how the system works so like the really boring nuts and bolts the plumbing of the system and I think in 2008 it was the first time we all really fought actually not only is the system as it as we know it possibly crumbling there might be opportunities for new systems to come up as a result of it exactly why I guess I start writing about it again around here 2012 and then we had the first little rally and then this is also clasp this is very reminiscent to the classic bubble I know each other so you see this is the this is the famous bubble chart which has take off first Elif bear traps as the first little micro you know mini dump and you go to the new total bubble then it crashes and is a bit of like a return people think maybe it's going to come back and then it crashes again and then it it gets back to a more realistic trajectory and you'll see that that really is very reminiscent to what we've seen here what everyone is really wondering is will we see a consolidation of this price or will it recover somewhat or will it go completely to zero and we're really what do you think I think what's best for Bitcoin is actually if it just stays stable so everybody agrees volatility is currently the the biggest enemy of Bitcoin so she's dreamed what would that be the paper doesn't really say what his big dream was he just wanted an efficient mechanism that was cheap but in terms of what I think people have projected his vision as being is this world where we are we are are all our own Banke we don't have to depend on any intermediary and thanks are gone in the current economy because of the way our system is structured if I decide to hold my dollars I'm usually holding them in an institution that is using them as a means of capital raising and they will be lending them out so my money even though I'm saving that saving is going into an investment somewhere else being done by a bank etc and it's helping to grow the economy so my saving doesn't disadvantage the economy but in Bitcoin there isn't that that opportunity so hoard of Bitcoin as a hoarded it Bitcoin it's totally idle it has no interest it has no yield it is simply sitting there doing nothing and yet the person who holds on to it thinks they have a right to future income flow as if they have been invested in when the line was flat people like massively boring or mined bitcoins and they are now like multi-millionaire billionaires they're the new 1% they're the 1% of the Bitcoin economy which again goes against the whole democratization side of the argument because really you're not democratizing the economy you're just transferring the power from the existing elite to a new elite the fact that a few early Bitcoin miners and investors are now multimillionaires is reminiscent of the current banking system in which bankers are accused of personal enrichment so I got this degree in international development and as I was with my dog on his Hill and I was like yeah what could I do go try and work and so me I say East Africa I could go and explore economies there and see what's happening like at rallies things and I was like why don't I just try and break into the financial sector in London that would actually be really really fascinating that'd be really amazing and then once I had that thought I couldn't I mean I just became obsessed with this idea bread scott is the author of the book hacking the future of money about reforming the financial sector to immerse himself in the system he criticized he worked for two years as a broker in the city of London we're now in the city we just passed the border tracking huh his dragons mark the boundaries of the City of London it's the financial district cut off of my hair I bought my first suit interestingly enough I had two interviews with Lehman Brothers literally weeks before they went bust and I remember being up and the 35th floor or something and the guy was like I know everything's fine everything's fine here yeah don't believe the stories heshes you've seen the press about us and then they went and if you created an entire society it was reliant in Bitcoin yeah you'd have massive problems with inequality but it's it's very important in that if it's forms a kind of counter power to the existing bank payment system so while I can critique Bitcoin as much as you want you know I'm always aware that's you know the glistening Bank system is highly flawed and I lacked the fact that this exists as an alternative what's happening right now and a lot of the banking scene is moved towards it's called a cashless society but if you think what that actually means it means every single payment that you undertake has to go via a commercial bank now that means every single transaction you you ever do will be monitored and recorded in a database somewhere it means you'll always be giving fees to various you know credit card companies and so on so there's there's potential achievements of surveillance there's all sorts of problems that come with a cashless society in that world something like Bitcoin which is an electronic version of cash or electronic full of I guess an electronic equivalent to cash becomes quite important so st. Paul's Cathedral which is a we're the Occupy movement set up camp London without their for long term they tried to occupy the London Stock Exchange but weren't able to get in the show st. Paul's instead you think of Bitcoin and the whole movement being as a sort of better form of Occupy it's a different full of occupy you know it's a maybe it's a follow-on from the Occupy movement in some ways Bitcoin as a form of protest against the current banking system is propagated in the Netherlands by three Bitcoin enthusiasts who have created an app called bit Casa and who are now trying to convince all retailers in arnhem to accept bitcoins a zucchini mensis break over bitcoin magnatag's Anniston see some strength of phone over control and not be humble and apart my judgment they talk emanates from woods hydric systemic like a mocha a second at this talk bainer bananita slovenly hundred events will endure chimeric fact that started via sound of alternate for night only daughter implying club people infuse the olive health market and not vanity liners individual markers buddy - saucers override that by debunk a mood Elena totally bonkers letter like added neat marker this yeah that's being super safe I was in year the plot home phone Arnhem the dissipated syndrome from the start we have here at motor Cartier and yeah you see that the Bitcoin except on the [ __ ] for spry admirers manam and syndrome have an enormous wrote over white bitcoin except don't graze on the arrows on a vehicle looked at every nano done from a key item at hood yeah you can open after friday's we stayed in cannot vein museum before wheels and bowler house that office kill in the tourists legs I've been going to rest the special items I'd gone that yeah here each have opposite from a home network and weekend and I looked at canal and lay my bitcoins come cannot save I was the fellow lonely storm at the battalion lonely enough over me general inclement agrees he a Dogma to Matt Bitcoin yeah I got my ugly I love all dead all dead yeah aglet evil meows the single map layer that is off a thermo VG e tennis circuit of GDP not my heart of the pin pushes meridian elope - Matt foam and ashes the bunker the name dynamic wound difficult for Ollis single moody penultimate Mooji of coke in with bundle scope and on distorting with all the da-da-da-dum of ameica opt out that cos want to feel go and we also the name of characters bitcoins yeah I got fear baitcaster same caterpillars out loud yeah and vanish out who the [ __ ] is leading to only bitcoins to how and silicone it on creative energy cultural as bitcoins as it act that via click home slot you started act at UK like acting the Gothic leg for young skin or cardigan and snowball Jolla the study me award and ibn Affan or knockout Loki and um Cameroon father Dhaka common father that incidentally I don't yeah I just feel really big concerns I'll be all multiply going to be part of magma sale and most for skillful Julie met dr. Phil Mia interview cars we meet Expo chaps super which was New York the Nets out of a Salt Lake necessity of it's all fake beside the ease of use the Arnim students have also noticed a less pleasant quality to bitcoins the fluctuating exchange rate compared to other currencies which could make a beer a couple of cents cheaper or more expensive between ordering and serving so Bitcoin in my mind effing ition is not money the key to something being money in my opinion is that it's a widely used unit of account meaning that goods and services are priced in it so when you go to the coffee shop you see something priced in Bitcoin that's not true there are coffee shops where there are prices in Bitcoin but that price is changing constantly based on the currency it's linked to so the pound for example here in England lost 20% of its value recently but the price of coffee didn't change it was still 99 p that's what it means to be a unit of account and bitcoin is not that the price adjusts based on its exchange rate continuously do you see the Bitcoin as a form of money or as a digital gold so I see gold as money and I see Bitcoin as having all the same properties of gold with one property that actually couple properties are even better so gold is kind of hard to divide Bitcoin divides down to eight decimal points instantly super easily Gold is really really difficult to transport if I want to transport gold from here to Moscow it'll cost a bunch of money to do that and it's dangerous you have to have armed guards and who knows what with Bitcoin I can simba coin from here to Moscow or to the Holland instantly just like that basically for free I don't have to pay for a bunch of armed guards it just happens almost like magic if you ever ask somebody why they think Gold's valuable I can already tell you though it feels like weird stories around ads like a precious metal isn't it it it's pretty while we think it has all its intrinsic value this intrinsic value of gold has been largely constructed in people's here it's often by a shield like association with power association with religious figures and Bitcoin and has potential for similar types of construction you could create this the sense of this almost like a commodity like token that has no immediate sort of value to it but can be imbued with value as more people start to mind they become harder and harder to find so it's kind of been at I correlated to like an arms race right the guy with the biggest gun wins at this point so this is the newest place we've started working on here this is a place in the mountains in China it's cool and it doesn't rain that much so we can cool it very efficiently how much do you pay for that electricity on a daily basis um I'll lend all of my minds together we're probably paying about $100,000 maybe a little bit more a day yeah I'm paying 100,000 is per month I'm sorry okay but Bitcoin in general all myself and all my colleagues combined it's about a million dollars a day in power in power consumption and you guys generate what worth of coins we're generating of course it depends on the price right but price right so we'll just say for 250 now we'll just put the price at $250 for easy numbers you're finding roughly around 25 bitcoins every 10 minutes so you just take that and times it by an hour so you're finding around 150 bitcoins an hour take that times 24 and you do that times 250 do some packet of so we're making about 900 thousand dollars per day so a lot of people ask how is that possible and that the reality is a lot of the Chinese guys they are mining at a negative profit one of my friends in Beijing I met him last month I met him up again and I asked him last time I checked man your power was pretty expensive why are you still mining and his only words were I can't stop so what do you mean you can't stop you're losing money it's like well I can't I have all these you know pieces of equipment and I just can't stop it's gold fever right that's right and it's interesting because a lot of the a lot of my colleagues don't see it as a business subconsciously right get addicted to it and kind of get crazy about it how's your neck and although every woman they got talent um doing the diva just one medallion that you [ __ ] far seen a or Saint hello mrs. 100-yard huh sambhar bubby did yeah a guy Oh sunshine hydro the gong-gong have a shortage hearts out raikou no sent over to Roger Langille guru Tai Kwan a front on the Heil IP oh yeah let's wait awhile I'm the cerulean guys you can call that Joshua I'm gonna sue seed of Eve our young boy I shall walk agenda see Paris and put out a deluge yet we look hungry GC a collage of your signature han dong-su palace oh gee so what was supposed to be a very democratic system has ended up concentrating it exactly the same way that we have seen the bank's concentrate their business so now you have most of the miners are based in China or most of the miners are huge server farms that you know the average person can't be a miner anymore in Bitcoin it's far the the the barriers to entry are now really really quite expensive that you have to invest in at least you know you thousands of dollars of equipment if you want to be a miner and a lot of people who got into the first year Bitcoin actually had mental breakdowns it was so beautiful it was like you're seeing you know some of the most remarkable art ever for the first time one of the qualities that I don't like about the community is that it's extremely absolutist it's very politically led and it assumes that it's political ideology is the correct one and it kind of Frost's its pursue ideology on everybody else so say you know I don't want political ideology when I'm paying for my coffee I just want a payment network that works and that allows me to benefit from smooth transaction lots of paper money so this is a receipt and this is my public address and private key you got it covered for us so we cannot film it that's right over the past two years new members are increasingly joining the Bitcoin community not for ideological reasons but for practical ones in Kiev there are some protests happening so people start using social media to share their QR code within a matter of days they automatically had fifteen thousand dollars in their wallets from sympathizers to the protest that money was transferred from around the world say incredibly powerful example because today I spent seven years in Nicaragua and today I still cannot use PayPal to transfer money to my friends in Nicaragua whether or not Bitcoin will be worth millions isn't the main question for many computer scientists investors and hackers to them Satoshi nakamoto's real invention is the blockchain technology a global open ledger which can be used to share much more than just money you may think that bitcoin is just another way to pay for a cup of coffee but it's not Bitcoin is just the denomination used to pay the toll to put stuff on this school baletta now if you think about it time stamp recordings of deaths births property transactions votes this is the entire fabric of our civilization which makes the blockchain one of the most profound human innovations of our time because having a massive global ledger as a public utility can completely reorganize the way that we run our societies fundamentally blockchain is a database sort of mechanism and it's a standard it's a protocol and one of the problems we have in an increasingly globalized system is that everyone is operating their systems on their own local standards and getting people to do everything in a uniform way that benefits all of us like you know bringing in the metric system that is really really hard blockchain offers an opportunity to start this new exciting technological you know industry from a standard that is globalized and potentially uniform so I see the potential that way the decentralized blockchain makes it possible to share data publicly without a single party controlling the system in the blockchain all participants in the network are equal maybe inventor Satoshi Nakamoto so Bitcoin is just the first experiment with this form of digital democracy I think blockchain technologies really authentically fascinating like I think it's anybody who ignores it and in rats Adolphe is probably making a mistake I think it's definitely not going to get it it's not going to get smaller but to this day the true identity of the architect behind this revolutionary technology remains a mystery you know we can't ask the toshi questions which is really frustrating right but it's also again part of I think the magic of Bitcoin is that you know we can all kind of imagine this technology you know for you know as we see it rather than just as Satoshi did so it could be used in this way even if Satoshi didn't intend it to intend it to be this widely worldwide distributed thing I think I think Satoshi probably did but you know it still could be that and we can we can make it that Satoshi around here somewhere in Tokyo yeah I think I see him right there oh that's a question I get a lot actually um a lot of people have asked me who Satoshi is since I got in so early um I think I've got a pretty good idea but I like to keep that one close to my chest so why um because I'm not a hundred percent certain and the reality is it doesn't really matter right it doesn't matter who Satoshi is because now it's kind of grown beyond like a pet project right but I mean Satoshi how much how many coins I think these got about 500,000 locked up with his blockchain technology inventor Satoshi Nakamoto has completely relinquished his control of Bitcoin but he does own one twentieth of all bitcoins himself so if one day Bitcoin does become widely accepted as a currency he will be one of the richest people on earth people might find that scary a new currency or system based on an inventor who owns already well one twentieth of all the currency invented yeah isn't that a problem Satoshi invented one of the most important inventions in the entire history of humankind that's going to improve the lives of everybody on the planet for the better if he had half of all the bitcoins he would still deserve it who do you think Satoshi is I think it's probably a band of people who decided that a nom de plume was the best way to go precisely because if it did take off there would be too many consequences for a individual one person or even a group of people and from my perspective you never make a move of this sort without a myth you need a sort of foundation myth every good sort of system of power has a foundation myth and it's always best if there if the leader is either anonymous or aloof or in some way distant from the public because you have to create a sort of mythology around him and because Satoshi nobody knows he is some University if we knew who he was it would almost it would almost ruin the whole thing for everybody I think why don't you disappear anything ah he undermined the ability of every single government on the entire planet to control the money supply and that's how every single government in the world is controlling their citizens and their economies today and he just basically you know knocked their feet right out from under them with the invention of Bitcoin and I'm sure that's going to make a lot of people who want to control other people by force I'm really really upset so yeah I think it's really really smart for him to have a disappeared and for me it probably would have been smarter for me to keep quiet - but bitcoins too exciting for me to just stay quiet about I think a lot of people are under estimating the way in which Bitcoin and the blockchain are going to change the power structures in society in general I'm and I grew up in the US and uh I see all these people like yeah nuke everybody in the Middle East and kill them all and then they have the former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on 60 minutes one of the most popular news shows in the US and they asked her they said like there's reports that more than half a million Iraqi children have died as a direct result of US sanctions and she looks back at her with a straight face and she goes it was a really tough decision but I think that it was worth it worth murdering half a million kids because of what the government did and I apologized for crying but it just disgusts me from my core when I see government people murdering people around the world it's not just theoretical these were real people with real lives and it's real people and bitcoin has the power to undermine everything they're doing to people around the world and I'm sorry for shouting but it just disgusts me what these people in government - and they do it through central banking and through the control of the money supply and Bitcoin takes that away from them you

Channel: vpro documentary

Views: 523,987

Rating: 4.7922163 out of 5

Keywords: Roger Ver, Roger Ver bitcoin, bitcoin evangelist Tokyo, Izabella Kaminska, Marshall Long, Final Hash, bitcoin mines USA, Max Keiser, block chain, Brad Scott, bitcoin documentary, what is bitcoin, bitcoin explanation, bitcoin mining, Economy, Backlight Economy, Economy documentary, documentary, vpro documentary, vpro documentaries, vpro backlight, Free documentary, subtitled documentary, documentary subtitles, docu

Id: 8zKuoqZLyKg

Length: 48min 53sec (2933 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 01 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/evoorhees]

Roger, you've been an inspiration to many of us. Thank you for all you have done, and for your authenticity. We are just getting started.

[u/sreaka]

Fuck yeah, I like that passion.

[u/YRuafraid]

My respect for him just went up, and I agree with him on the Iraqi sanctions of the 90s that did so much damage to that country and its people. If you wonder why the Middle East hates us, you need to look at the past far before 9/11

[u/Ragnarly]

Bitcoin's killer app - stopping killing by the State.

[u/bruce_fenton]

Roger is a great human being, I'm really happy to know him and I'm happy both that his speeches helped get me interested in Bitcoin and that Bitcoin has helped me make great new friends like him.

[u/Bitcoinopoly]

I'm crying right now just watching. Felt this exact same way my entire life and there never was a tool that would allow me to do anything about the situation. Now the tool is here and I have real hope that it will succeed in its ultimate goal: becoming the worldwide backbone for all of finance.

[u/transdimensionalsnug]

I really like Roger's passion and I admire his idealism, but it is not realistic to say that bitcion will stop war. He even demonstrates evidence of this through his use of bitcoin to promote vigilantism. Whenever he is hacked or extorted, he uses bitcoin to place a bounty. Imagine if Anonymous could hire an army to physically attack a target anywhere in the world. We are not far from that future if cryptocurrencies become adopted on a global scale. So bitcoin won't stop war, it will only change who starts it and how it is funded(sustained). People will still suffer.

[u/Hakuna_Potato]

Powerful message. The whole documentary is definitely worth a watch.

[u/creative-om]

Roger Ver is a humanist and it shows. He also has my respect.