The video illustrates the innovative capabilities and profound societal impacts of bitcoin, highlighting how it transcends a simple electronic currency transfer. It introduces bitcoin as a groundbreaking technology that sidesteps traditional financial intermediaries, thus potentially revolutionizing monetary exchanges. Through the eyes of financial experts and real-world demonstrations, bitcoin's infrastructure and its implications as a decentralized currency are explored.

Often compared to digital gold, bitcoin's unique features such as its decentralized network and blockchain technology are explained. Unlike conventional financial systems that rely on central authorities or digital payment networks, bitcoin represents both a currency and a payment network, enabling borderless, anonymous transactions. The narrative further explores the origins of bitcoin via the enigmatic figure Satoshi Nakamoto and the concept of mining as it relates to network security and the generation of new bitcoins.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. pseudonym ['suːdənɪm] - (noun) - A fictitious name used by someone, particularly a writer, to conceal their identity. - Synonyms: (alias, pen name, nom de plume)

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, an author using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto posted a nine page document.

2. decentralized [diːˈsɛntrəˌlaɪzd] - (adjective) - The distribution of power or functions from a central authority to smaller units such as local branches or systems. - Synonyms: (distributed, dispersed, autonomous)

It's both a currency and a payment network, and we've never had one thing that's both of those at the same time. This decentralized nature of the bitcoin platform is one of the things that make it so unique and world changing.

3. blockchain [ˈblɒktʃeɪn] - (noun) - A secure, distributed ledger which records transactions across multiple computers so that the records cannot be changed retroactively. - Synonyms: (distributed ledger, chain of blocks, digital ledger)

This public ledger, known as the blockchain, is perhaps what could make bitcoin a financial game-changer.

4. remittance [rɪˈmɪtəns] - (noun) - Money sent, typically to family or friends, as payment or a gift. - Synonyms: (payment, transfer, sending)

Currently, almost all of our daily transactions involve a third party, a bank, credit card company, or remittance provider.

5. encryption [ɪnˈkrɪpʃən] - (noun) - The process of converting information or data into a code to prevent unauthorized access. - Synonyms: (coding, ciphering, enciphering)

Bitcoin is what is known as a cryptocurrency, meaning that it's a digital currency in which encryption is used to regulate the creation of new units and verify the transfer of funds

6. cryptocurrency [ˈkrɪptəˌkɜːrənsi] - (noun) - A digital or virtual currency that uses cryptography for security. - Synonyms: (digital currency, virtual money, electronic money)

Bitcoin is what is known as a cryptocurrency, meaning that it's a digital currency in which encryption is used to regulate the creation of new units and verify the transfer of funds.

7. anonymously [əˈnɒnɪməsli] - (adverb) - Acting or done by someone whose identity is not known or disclosed. - Synonyms: (secretly, namelessly, incognito)

And if you're careful about how you use bitcoin, you can do these teleportations anonymously.

8. intermediary [ˌɪntəˈmɪdiəri] - (noun) - An intermediate agent or agency; a mediator. - Synonyms: (mediator, go-between, arbitrator)

And when it comes to financial transactions, you hit the send button and you have an intermediary, the bank, that is moving money from one account to another.

9. consensus [kənˈsensəs] - (noun) - General agreement or a majority of opinion within a group. - Synonyms: (accord, agreement, harmony)

People thought that it was impossible. All the mathematicians and computer scientists thought that it was impossible possible to have consensus on a distributed ledger like this.

10. open source ['əʊpən sɔːrs] - (adjective) - Referring to software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance. - Synonyms: (publicly accessible, free source, transparent)

The bitcoin protocol is open source, meaning that the programming code is freely available to add to and redistribute.

Magic Money - The Bitcoin Revolution | Crypto Explained

So here I have two devices, and I will transfer $1 from this device to this device, instantaneously enter the amount, and send. I'm seeing the transaction now. And there it is. What you've just witnessed is what looks like a standard financial transaction. Money was transferred electronically from one account to another. But while it appears like an ordinary bank transfer, it may perhaps be the most revolutionary technology you're likely to see in your lifetime. This technology is called bitcoin. Money makes possible the exchange of many different goods and services among many different. Wherever we go, we see money being used as a medium of exchange. Money is at the core of our existence.

Every day we transact with one another. Currently, almost all of our daily transactions involve a third party, a bank, credit card company, or remittance provider. And ultimately, it's these institutions that carry out the transaction on our behalf. This is until the invention of bitcoin. Bitcoin is truly one of the most important inventions ever in the history of humankind. That's how big of an impact it's going to have on our lives. And it sounds really difficult and complicated and hard to understand hearing about it. If you had only heard about email, it would sound difficult and complicated and hard to use. Bitcoin is literally easier to use than email. So what exactly is bitcoin? Well, for starters, bitcoin isn't actually a coin. Bitcoin is a new form of money, a currency that lives solely on the Internet, one that some have even called magic Internet money.

I think part of the confusion is that bitcoin is actually two different things. It's both a currency and a payment network, and we've never had one thing that's both of those at the same time. So the dollar is a currency, but it's not a payment network. PayPal and Visa are payment networks, but they're not currencies. Bitcoin is both of those things at the same time, but it has this other property, and that other property is that it can instantly be teleported anywhere in the world just like that, almost for free. And there's nothing that anybody can do to block these teleportations. There's nothing anybody can do to intercept these teleportations. And if you're careful about how you use bitcoin, you can do these teleportations anonymously. So with bitcoin, with a push of a button, you can pay anyone anywhere in the world or receive payment from anyone anywhere in the world.

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, an author using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto posted a nine-page document onto an online forum. The document, titled a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, would soon become the building block for what is today the first fully working concept of decentralized money. These are the daily candles of bitcoin, just in the backdrop. But I want to talk about these trend lines. You've seen them on other presentations even earlier today. I started out working at Bear Stearns back in 2007. So about a year and a half or so before the financial crisis really started to hit. And after Bear Stearns, I joined JP Morgan, where I became a VP. And that was my last job. All of these jobs were either midtown or downtown Manhattan. Tone Vays is a Wall Street veteran. A former VP at JP Morgan, he now spends his time studying and educating audiences about bitcoin.

Bitcoin is generally difficult to explain. You want to try and break it down as simple as you can. So the simplest way is basically, it's like a message. It's a digital message that you're passing. And normally we're all used to computers. We're all sending emails, we're all sending pictures. But you're always sending a copy. Anytime you hit the send button in a computer, you always retain a copy, you always retain the original. And when it comes to financial transactions, you hit the send button and you have an intermediary, the bank, that is moving money from one account to another. And this is the problem that bitcoin solved. It was able to take something digital, and when you hit the send button, you're not actually sending a copy, you're actually sending a digital object.

At its core, bitcoin is basically a new monetary system. However, bitcoin is unlike any other system we've seen in the past because it isn't centralized in one place. This decentralized nature of the bitcoin platform is one of the things that make it so unique and world-changing. We're all familiar with PayPal or Visa or bank of whatever. All of these traditional services that we're used to control, who's allowed to have an account, who can send money from who, from what country's users can send money to other countries, users with bitcoin, there is no entity that's controlling any of that. There's just this software protocol that anyone can write software to interact with, and then anyone can install that software on their phone or on their computer.

And once they have the software installed, they can now interact with anyone else anywhere in the entire world that's also using the bitcoin software. This software that runs the bitcoin protocol is commonly called a wallet, a digital purse which stores and allows the holder to move bitcoins from one wallet to another. The bitcoin protocol is open source, meaning that the programming code is freely available to add to and redistribute. In this way, similar to anyone being able to add a new website to the World Wide Web, programmers are able to add new products to the bitcoin network.

We have Jason, for whom this is very late evening, because he is in Australia, and we're about to do Jason's first bitcoin transaction over Skype as our medium, so everyone can see how quick and easy it is. On my end, I will hit send, and Jason is going to hit request. So when he hits request, a QR code should have displayed in the middle of your screen, and he's going to put it up to the camera of Skype so I can scan it with the camera in my cell phone. All right, I see the QR code. My phone is trying to scan it, and there it is. I scanned it. So I feel kind of generous. Let's send Jason $5. So I have just sent Jason $5 in bitcoin, and let me know when it's registering on your end that you have $5 worth of bitcoin. And there it is. Okay, so that took about ten to 15 seconds.

Bitcoin enables users to send and receive money instantly without the involvement of a third party. This digital breakthrough allows the user to effectively become their own bank. This is a complex idea to handle, but the possibilities of this new bankless currency are enormous. With the exception of actually handing physical cash to you, generally, we have to rely on third parties for lots of different payments, be it credit cards or wire transfers internationally, or even sort of keeping cash under your bed, storing large amounts of cash. We use banks, and what bitcoin does is allow us to do all of those things without any third parties. So in that sense, we can be our own bank, we can be our own payment system. We can be our own international wire system. We can be our own remittance system. We can do all of these things without relying on any other third parties. That's what bitcoin allows us to do.

Before bitcoin, all these companies like PayPal and Visa and bank of America, and, you know, any business, they had a ledger that kept track of all their account balances. So PayPal has a ledger that keeps track of exactly who has how much money in each PayPal account. And that ledger is stored on PayPal servers in PayPal's data center somewhere. And before the invention of bitcoin, people thought that it was impossible. All the mathematicians and computer scientists thought that it was impossible possible to have consensus on a distributed ledger like this. But what bitcoin did is it came along and figured out how to keep track of this ledger that keeps track of who has what bitcoins. But instead of that ledger being on one data center, it's on everybody's computer across the entire planet that's running the bitcoin network, including my laptop right here. I have a full copy of the entire bitcoin ledger.

This public ledger, known as the blockchain, is perhaps what could make bitcoin a financial game changer. Bitcoin is what is known as a cryptocurrency, meaning that it's a digital currency in which encryption is used to regulate the creation of new units and verify the transfer of funds. New bitcoins come into existence through a process called mining. A miner is a person or entity who runs a very powerful computer. In an effort to solve a complex mathematical puzzle known as a block. Miners around the world compete to solve or close a block and are rewarded with newly generated bitcoins if they're successful. All transactions that travel through the bitcoin network are pieces of this complex mathematical puzzle. So when a miner solves a puzzle, they're actually verifying the integrity of each and every transaction.

Welcome. This is one giant abandoned recycling plant. We've got incinerators over there, those two big silos. Right around this wall, we have a megawatt worth of solar panels. It's a lot. That's about as much as what we consume. So we're going to be able to offset our electrical costs completely. This is a work in progress. But a bitcoin mine is a group of computers that contribute its processing power to facilitate bitcoin transfers and the security of the network. Yeah, it is one big supercomputer. And all of these individual computers are kind of throwing guesses at this mathematical problem, and it's a very difficult problem. It takes lots and lots of computers to guess it.

Once that guess is correct, that is sent to all the rest of the computers, and with that answer, they record all the transactions that have been done up to that point. It's a very secure system for facilitating transfers, incurring transfers, and making sure that no kind of shady work has been done, because there's some methods in financial transactions where you can double spend. And this whole blockchain thing is one great method of make sure that doesn't happen. Let's say if Alice wants to send Bob an email, what will happen under the hood is that along the path of the email across the network, her email gets copied in many places of the network, and eventually the final copy will be relayed to Debop. That's how email works.

That's how digital transfers work, and that's how it should work for the majority of digital transfers. That's well and good. However, in the case of money, that would be disastrous. If that were to be the way that money was transferred digitally. You don't want copies of the same dollar bill to exist on the network. That would ruin the scarcity premise of money. And so this was the problem that Satoshi ni Nakamoto tackled with the creation of bitcoin. And so what happens with bitcoin? The bitcoins blockchain is that when Alice wants to send one bitcoin to Bob, she creates a transaction and that transaction gets copied across the entire network. However, this is different than, say, a single email, because that transaction has embedded in it instructions to the rest of the network that says, from here on out, control over this bitcoin is now conferred to Bob. And the rest of the network honors that.

One time I realized that, wow, bitcoin is really difficult for people to understand, as I spent the whole evening explaining bitcoin to a friend of mine. And then I got home that night and she posted on my Facebook page and she goes, yeah, I was thinking more about bitcoins and you were explaining bitcoin mining. And does that mean that bitcoins are originally underground? I realize that bitcoin is a difficult concept for people to understand and especially bitcoin mining as well, because bitcoins are not originally underground. For new users, bitcoin can be a difficult concept to understand. Bitcoins aren't physical and they certainly aren't underground. However, there are some interesting similarities between bitcoin and a precious metal that is found underground. Gold.

Gold has been money and a store of value for thousands of years. Today, gold is mined all over the world. The amount of gold that can be extracted from the ground decreases over the life of a mine until eventually the miner's exhausted of all of its gold. Bitcoins are also mined in a similar fashion. The bitcoin algorithm is programmed so that the reward for mining new bitcoins is halved every four years until the year 2140, when all bitcoins will have been deemed to have been mined. Perhaps the mysterious creator behind bitcoin was trying to mimic the attributes of gold, almost as if to create a digital gold coin which could be divided and then sent instantly around the world.

I try to explain it in some really simple way, like miners, bitcoin mining miners, they receive the reward just because they maintain security of bitcoin. Mathematically, it means that you need to solve quite difficult problems. Is it just guessing process? You have to make millions and millions, millions of guesses. And if you are right and you are able to close all these transactions inside of one block, you are successful and you receive 12.5 bitcoins as miner. Originally, this reward was 50 bitcoins every four years. This reward for miners is two times less. So reward will be decreasing over the time.

The creator of bitcoin, whoever he is, was a really, really, really smart guy. And he obviously liked math a lot. And he sat down and did some calculations and thought to himself, if everybody in the entire world were to start using bitcoin, how many bitcoins would we need in order for that to be able to accommodate everybody using bitcoin for this? And each bitcoin can be divided down to 100,000,000th of a bitcoin. And if everybody in the entire world were to start using bitcoin as their money, the smallest unit of a bitcoin, which is called a satoshi, it's 100,000,000th of a bitcoin, would still be worth less than one us penny if the entire world were to start using bitcoin.

So who is this Satoshi Nakamoto? Two years after publishing the white paper for the peer-to-peer electronic cash system, this mysterious figure vanished, never to be heard from again. The only clues to his or her identity can be found in the white paper. Some speculate he or she is of British origin due to the writings containing some British slang. Others believe that rather than being one person, Satoshi was a group of hackers working in concert to create a new monetary system that would decentralize money as we know it.

I think he was a clever guy. He was not a normal geek. He had good knowledge of decentralized technology or decentralization. He had good knowledge find explorer system and he was quite good coder. But the code of bitcoin is not definitely the best one. So it's definitely possible to write better code. There is also conspiracy theory. If bitcoin code was written by one guy or many different guys, hard to say. Anyway, I especially appreciate, appreciate that it's first fully working concept of decentralized money.

It's very interesting, like who Satoshi is. There's lots of speculation, especially among like, the very early people in bitcoin. But what difference does it make whether we know who created bitcoin? I don't know that it makes any difference. There's lots of stuff that we use that we don't know who created it, and yet it gives us a lot of advantages in our day-to-day activities. I have no idea who Satoshi is. We know very little about Satoshi, and so he could be at an event. He could be someone we know, he could be someone I've spoken to. He could be a friend of mine, for all I know. I don't know who it is. I don't know if we'll ever know. But it's a fun game. Am I Satoshi? I don't think I'll answer that one.

Regardless of the true identity of Satoshi, what he or she has invented could have profound effects on how our world evolves into the future. Because bitcoin enables the user to act as their own bank, in essence, it frees the user from the traditional gatekeepers to their wealth. We all use keys in our daily lives. Keys allow us to access and control our valued possessions. They also protect our valuables from being stolen. Take your car as an example. Holding the keys to your car allows you access to it whenever you wish.

But suppose you've had a few too many to drink and your loyal friend confiscates your keys from you. The car may still be yours, but now you no longer control it and must hail a ride home. The same can be said of our finances. Although you may have the debit card and password to your bank account, the funds aren't directly in your possession. Every time you make a withdrawal or transfer from your bank account, the bank is actually acting on your behalf and moving the funds for you.

This is where bitcoin is fundamentally different. Bitcoin enables an individual to hold the private keys of their own wealth. So with pretty much every asset that we have out there, we don't directly hold the dominion or control over that asset. For example, the Royal bank of Scotland, they had 700,000 accounts. ATM's just went down for the weekend. Nobody could access the ATM's, couldn't get money out. You have a credit card or a debit cardinal and it gets turned off because of suspected fraud. Or you did a charge in an unusual location. Well, guess what? The credit card company holds those private keys. They get to make the choice, not you.

Bitcoin is very, very different. In this regard, it is built on public-private key encryption. And what that means is that you send bitcoins to the public key. Then, in order to send the bitcoins, you have to be able to sign with the private key where the bitcoins currently reside. And that literally is a number. That private key is a number bitcoin. Nobody gets to turn it off. If you have the private key, you get to access it and use it with your bitcoin wallets. There's associated with what are called private key keys, and these are literally what they sound like. They're private keys that can open and unlock access to your funds.

But let's be clear. If you lose any of your private keys, you lose access to your funds. Simple as that. So we just bought some bitcoins out of a local bitcoin ATM. And so what actually comes out is what we call a cold wallet. It's a little piece of paper with two squares on it, or two things that look like Roche ink blotch tests, and a bunch of alphanumerics underneath each. Now, the top is the public key, which is what people would use to send bitcoins to this address. And the bottom one is the private key, which is what you would use to scan in order to retrieve bitcoins from this address.

Now, it's very important to note that that private key is something that you really shouldn't be showing around everywhere, because whoever scans this first, we'll be able to take the bitcoins off this address. Also, if you were to happen to lose this piece of paper, then you've actually essentially lost your bitcoins because nobody else has a copy of this private key. Right now, there actually is some bitcoins on this address. So if you're seeing this for the first time, you may be able to scan this off yourself and take the bitcoins for yourself.

So here is a Satori coin. There is a value of 0.001 bitcoin inside. In today's exchange rate, that would mean about $0.45. So it's very minimal amount. But it is true bitcoin inside. Now, how to redeem the value out of this token? One would have to peel off the hologram sticker in the back. Here we go. And then a QR code would be exposed. And this QR code is the private key information, which is essentially like a password. And with this private key, and only with this private key, one can redeem. You can import that value to your bitcoin wallet. Anything else physical has a very strong sense of authority or authenticity, and to make the barrier to entry to bitcoin as low as possible.

I think everyone working on their project felt it was really important that someone could have a part of bitcoin that they can hold in their hands that's portable and doesn't cost very much to get started. It's kind of a low commitment object. Because bitcoin is built on public-private key encryption, the entire workflow for sending payments, particularly online, is fundamentally different from that of credit cards. Credit cards were never built to be used on the Internet in the first place. When the credit cards were made, there was no Internet.

So a pull system is that you've given the authorization to the merchant or the credit card issuer to pull from your bank account whenever it is that they feel that they have the right to do so. With a credit card, whenever you want to initiate a transaction, you are effectively giving the keys to the merchant, and you give your keys to every merchant you deal with. So every time you make a transaction, for example, online or so, you're taking a risk because you're entrusting the merchant with this very personal information, which they could then take to initiate transactions as well if they wanted to.

Whereas bitcoin, it's a completely different model where the control is more weighted towards the consumer. The consumer then pushes their funds to you. And then if you're doing an Internet service, you could broadcast a bitcoin address, and anyone in the world could send bitcoin to you. If you were a band, a musical band, and you're performing on a concert, and your concert was being broadcast around the world, if you put up on the stage a sign that had a bitcoin address, well, you could be funded by anyone who was watching that broadcast anytime they watched it from that point onward.

My name is Sanshiro Fujimoto, and I play the saxophone and other instruments. I compose and perform and make CDs, and I make my living by being a musician. Today is a small live show without no admission fee. And if you appreciate my music, then you can tip me by tipping. You don't know how much might get zero. Or if your performance is great, you might get more than you think. So that makes me play better. Direct interaction is more about the art itself.

And if you tip someone in the street, you don't tip big money. You tip like $0.10 quarters and small money. But to send the small money on the Internet costs more than what you supposed to tip. So bitcoin is a much better way to tip someone on the Internet. Bitcoin payments are a push system, meaning that the funds are pushed from sender to receiver. This makes for a faster and cheaper system than traditional pull systems like credit card transactions. This, in turn, also means that bitcoin transactions are final and cannot be reversed.

Credit cards actually have about a six-month settlement time. Even though the transaction looks like it went through. The person can then call back and say, this was a fraudulent transaction, and then the credit card will take that money away from the merchant. In some cases. In some cases, the credit card will eat the cost, and that's a chargeback. Now we pay for this. This is the 3% fee. Merchants usually pay this fee, 3% in order to accept credit cards. So bitcoin transactions don't have chargebacks. I think of it as a good thing. As much as people like to say how great it is to dispute things, it very, very rarely happens.

Almost never. Do you order something from a legitimate company and you were not satisfied, and then the company did not solve your problem. Most of the time this situation happens is when your credit card is actually stolen, and your credit card can always be stolen. Everyone's credit card is all over the Internet. It's just luck or bad luck if your credit card happens to be used in a fraudulent transaction. We have some businesses accepting bitcoin, mostly restaurants, for example. We have some restaurants here set up in Acapulco.

For merchants, when they accept bitcoin, is for them to have another option, an innovation option, and for them, they have. They have a lot of advantages. We don't charge what the credit card fees charge every time they slide the card. Three, four, five, even 10%, depending on the credit card. We don't charge anything. We don't have a minimum fee. You can pay ten pesos, 50 pesos. We don't have a minimum. With bitcoin payments, lowering the cost of doing business and eliminating the possibility of fraudulent transactions, companies ranging from mom and pop stores to multinational corporations have started to embrace this new way to transfer value.

This is Harvard Medical School, and this is Harvard Shield. I visit here. It's 1997 to 1998. Nine bokura ima faksokatimaski no more ima Facebook toka snsugu sashinde passport tomorrow mira night so Sarah Crazy Toka Sakura Okanadisione Sonomira Donor Nokatukini Castle Tukan the Yunoga Makakua Koksai had a aritai tomo to Yukoto de Kiriba neon deokikande Ariba Shikai shoni pitoko in to sit. The first large publicly traded company to accept bitcoin is overstock, and they now ship goods to over 200 countries. Last I checked, Amazon only ships to about 50 60 countries. So they're seeding entire markets with entire populations in the billions, not even fighting for that market share.

Additionally, if Amazon accepted bitcoin, there would be no fraud, there would be no chargebacks, so it would lower their costs. It would greatly increase Amazon's profit margins to accept bitcoin. Bitcoin allows merchants to accept payments for their products and services seamlessly. And although it's becoming a great tool for merchants to offer their products to previously untapped markets, it's the people in these developing countries who will benefit the most.

Bitcoin is the easiest, safest, fastest, best option for people that don't have bank accounts or that don't have IDs, or they don't have anything but a smartphone. And there's lots and lots of people in the world. That's the position that they're in. And bitcoin is this fantastic solution and opportunity for them to participate in the world's economy without having to deal with banks and having to jump through all these. They just simply install an app and now they're part of the world's economy. Something like 33% of the credit card transactions coming out of Africa are fraudulent.

So nobody wants to take business from Africa. It's just too risky. With bitcoin, you know, the funds are good. So as a merchant, yeah, pay with bitcoin, I'll sell anything you want, you know, that's legal to Africa. Then they're able to start having property rights, and property rights are really what's going to help lift them up out of poverty. So bitcoin does get into this niche of the underserved people in the banking industry. So a lot of third world countries, they may not have access to bank accounts, they might not even have IDs to open a bank account.

But if they have cell phones and if they have access to the Internet, they can now have the equivalent of a bank in their cell phone. According to the latest World Bank figures, there are approximately 2 billion unbanked people throughout the developing world. The adoption and use of bitcoin in these countries could transform this human rights issue and allow the unbanked population of the world to participate in the global economy. For the first time in the entire history of the world. Anyone can now send or receive any amount of money with anyone else, anywhere, instantly, basically for free. And it's impossible for anyone, including governments, to stop them from doing that.

And as much as I love gold, gold can't do that. Think about that. Anybody in this room, you can now send and receive any amount of money with anyone, anywhere in the world right now, and there's nothing that anybody can do to stop that. That was not possible before the invention of bitcoin. And that is a fundamentally world-changing technology for every single human being on the planet. WikiLeaks was able to find funding through bitcoin, and this was in the midst of a financial blockade that WikiLeaks was facing at the time. The US had ordered the Visa. I think it was Mastercard as well.

Bank of America, to blockade any donations to WikiLeaks. Say what you will about WikiLeaks, not necessarily that they condone everything that they do, but I do think it is very important for freedom in the world for people to have. Have an uncensorable ability to donate money to whatever political causes that they want to. And so I thought that that was extremely powerful for WikiLeaks to be able to defy the US in that sense. Because bitcoin puts the private keys of wealth in the hands of the user. It can be used to support activist causes, but bitcoin can also be used for a night out on the town.

My name is Ken Shishido. I am co-organizer for Tokyo Bitcoin Meetup Group. We have this special event tonight having burlesque dancers receiving bitcoin tips. The reason why I do this is that sometimes we want to make our meetup interesting instead of, you know, talking about really, really technical stuff or political stuff. So this is one of the events we want to make it really fun and see what can be done. Using bitcoin currently, if you're living in most countries, buying things is not a problem. You have credit cards, you can still use cash. And to me, that is not the true use of bitcoin.

The true use of bitcoin is to give you financial privacy, which I find extremely important. During the global financial crisis, as cracks in the financial system spread, institutions once thought to be invincible, were shown to be vulnerable. As we now know, governments around the world were forced to bail out financial institutions. A bailout is when government takes taxpayer money and gives it to an irresponsible financial institution to bail out their mistakes.

A bail-in is different in that laws are written which permit financial institutions to take funds directly from customer accounts to shore up their losses. Such a thing occurred in Cyprus in 2013 when I started learning about bitcoin back in 2013, especially during the Cyprus event when banks were shut down and money was confiscated from people. I remember telling my coworkers, some of the PhDs, the quants, this is really bad. This is actually going to probably start happening in many other Western countries. And they were all laughing at me, saying, no, it's just Cyprus, it'll never happen here. And that's when I knew someone must have come up with a way to get around this problem.

When a depositor deposits dollars or euros into the bank, title to the dollars or euros transfers to the bank and those depositors become unsecured creditors, the bank. If the banks screw up, for whatever reason, there's now been legislation passed in many of the countries where they can be bailed in, meaning that their deposits can be turned into shares of the bank. Jeff Berwick is an entrepreneur, financial commentator and podcast host. Having founded Stockhouse.com, Canada's largest financial news website. Geoff's analysis, writings and videos have been viewed by millions of people around the world.

It's difficult to say exactly what's going to happen in the future, but it's definitely going to keep happening. I said after Cyprus is going to happen in Greece, and then they shut down the banks in Greece for months. And of interest to people who live in Europe is on January 1 of this year, they passed a European bank bail in legislation. That should be a huge wake-up call to people that they're doing that. So in Cyprus, they didn't actually pass it before. So in Cyprus, they closed the banks.

Then they came up with some legislation and said the banks could just take their customer's money to keep afloat. So they didn't even have that legislation, and they did that in Cyprus. Now they already have it in place, so they know what's coming. I see bitcoin as a way to protect and hide your assets. And we're not saying this is bad, I'm not saying that only criminals hide their assets. No, people that have worked hard and they've paid taxes and they've done everything. And like what happened in Greece and Cyprus, where money in bank accounts was just confiscated.

So if the next time the banking system gets in trouble, it could be users accounts that are rated to help fund the banking system. We're talking people with significant money, 100,000, 200,000. But it's legal money. They've worked hard for it. Some economists believe that the global financial crisis of the last decade was just a precursor to a much larger calamity. If this is the case, how will governments react in response to the next failure of our financial system.

Unlike the current banking system, bitcoin allows individuals to hold the private keys to their wealth. However, this also comes with the added responsibility of securing the bitcoins. With bitcoin, you're in 100% complete control of your own money. But that also means you're 100% responsible for what happens to your own money. So it's your job to make sure that you keep your bitcoin safe.

People are used to things like credit cards and bank accounts and PayPal. And if your credit card gets stolen, you just call the credit card company and they cancel it, and that's the end of it. If your bitcoins get stolen, there's nobody that you can call to for ask for help. But the other side of the coin, there is. There's nobody that you have to call to ask for permission to use your bitcoins however you want. So it cuts both ways.

Mount Gox, the Tokyo-based bitcoin exchange, has filed for bankruptcy protection. The announcement comes days after the exchange announced that as much as $450 million of the virtual currency had gone missing. CEO Mark Capelles apologized and bowed deeply on Japanese television. It remains unclear if the missing bitcoins were stolen, voided by technological flaws, or both. So actually, this is the old Mount Gox building.

Mount Gox was the biggest bitcoin exchange that ever existed. I think at some point they were doing over $100 million a day worth of volume, and they collapsed in quite a spectacular fashion. In 2014, I think the size of the losses amounted to over $450 million. They claim to have lost 850,000 bitcoins, of which 200,000 were found afterwards in some old wallet. People were putting money in and essentially giving them their bitcoins, giving them the control of their private keys. And the irony is that exact centralization risk is what bitcoin is supposed to free us from.

And Mount Gox just took all of the decentralized nature of bitcoin and put it into one company with a lot of people's money, and then on top of that, put the control of that company's finances under one person who has the keys of the kingdom. So we've probably seen over the last two or three years, I would, by my count, probably somewhere between half a dozen to upwards of ten different major hacks of companies that are involved in bitcoin. And one thing you have to understand is that bitcoin is fundamentally different from securing an asset that's held within the regular financial space with bitcoin, if you ever get access to the private key to a son's wallet, you can initiate a transaction outside of the infrastructure of that company without their knowledge.

That's unlike any. Anything that exists currently in the financial space, where if you want to take money out of that target, you have to have infiltrated their infrastructure. I think it's part of the mentality where people are trained not to trust themselves with their own money. And so everybody puts their money in the bank for safekeeping. And so that sort of mentality where you put your money in some pooled company whose sole purpose is to safeguard, that is a really hard stigma to break, to change.

And I think this is the thing that's the most challenging about bitcoin, is that it challenges people to question that stigma. It challenges people to take control of your own money and value and to safeguard it yourself. As we know at this time, bitcoin is quite secure. If you have more than half of bitcoin network power, you can take control of the bitcoin network. But technically, this is really hard. When we consider the current bitcoin power, it's almost impossible.

So from this point of view, bitcoin is much more secure than the biggest and most secure portals of some biggest banks in the world. The problem is that many people do not trust bitcoin just because there were a lot of news about hacking some bitcoin portals and some exchange services and so on. The problem is that, like all services based on bitcoins, is not a bitcoin, you know, itself. So you cannot associate, you cannot associate the security of bitcoin-based services with bitcoin itself.

The collapse of the Mount Gox bitcoin exchange in 2014 caused much confusion and skepticism about the security of bitcoin. However, years after the collapse of the once-largest bitcoin exchange, bitcoin is now on the radar of many institutions within the financial industry. The big question, the conversation you'd hear, is that the question was whether blockchain technology would impact the financial industry. And now if you go to the trade shows and you listen to the media, the question is not whether, the question is how blockchain technology will impact and transform the financial industry.

It's now a foregone conclusion that blockchain technology will impact the financial industry in a major way. So that's where we are now, but we weren't always there. If you look just three years ago, two years ago, the attitude was that bitcoin was almost a laughable concept, and it was a non-sustainable system, and it couldn't be applied in the financial space. In Japan, the voucher currency law has passed in the house, and hopefully, it will pass in the upper house as well in the very near future. That means actually government recognizes the existence of virtual currency and trying to actually set some regulations and trying to actually support the business.

This bitcoin, why, it looks great. You know, it's a nice piece of collection, better than a yen or a penny. Some of the areas where bitcoin has been most popular so far are China, which has quite a high level of capital, controls other countries like China, Argentina, and Iran. This is where bitcoin is really caught on to a lot of people because you just simply, it's not easy to transfer money in or out of the country without going through regulatory problems or having to know someone in the government and things like that. So definitely that is a huge boost to bitcoin.

The advantages of bitcoin continue to increase its popularity around the world, sometimes in the most unlikely of places. My name is David Hyatt, and I operate the Phoenix Rising Cafe in Nimbin. This is where our bitcoin machine is located, right next to the traditional ATM machine. So the customers have a choice of using either. I saw that the current banking system was rather restrictive, and the independence of people running their own banking systems really appealed to me. And the fact also that it was digital and we're living in a digital age, I just knew that it was something that would have to get traction over time.

Bitcoin is definitely the largest innovation in monetary science since Isaac Newton's gold standard. Going to completely revolutionize how all of our assets are held. So it's going to disrupt law, going to disrupt accounting, going to disrupt our finance industry, and going to disrupt so much. It will also rapidly decentralize the capital. No longer will millions of people accumulate all of their capital into one big pile that then gets allocated by a senior vice president of Merrill Lynch or Bank of America. It'll be millions of people that you have to go and entice out of their capital, go fight a war in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Once you decentralize all of those private keys, it becomes much more difficult to get people to pay for a lot of these goods and services that they otherwise wouldn't necessarily pay for. I'll just scan it. And now I have your bitcoin address in my wallet right here. And I'll go ahead and enter $1 and we'll hit send. Mind sending the transaction sent? And if you. There you go. You heard the noise before bitcoin. I was basically retired. I was just hanging out, enjoying my life, practicing jiu-jitsu every day. And it was really fun, but wasn't really going to make the world that much of a better place if at all.

And then I discovered bitcoin, and I looked around the world and I saw these wars being fought and central banks debasing the currency and basically preventing the world from being as good of a place as it potentially could be. And I saw bitcoin, and I saw this as a tool to strip away all of their power to do that. Most people aren't interested in paying to kill people they've never met in other countries. Most people are willing to pay for roads and schools and hospitals. So if the government says we need money for roads and schools and hospitals, I think people will probably give them a good chunk of that.

If governments say, we need more money to go kill people in other countries that you've never been to in your entire life, and you're probably never going to go to in your entire life, people are going to say, no, I don't want to pay for that. But if you're using bank accounts and dollars and euros, governments can seize all the money out of your bank account at any time. They can print as many new dollars or euros as they want to pay for these things at any time. If the world's using bitcoin, it takes away those tools from government, and I think that makes the world a much, much better place.

For the first time in history, bitcoin now provides the entire world with a completely decentralized payment system. One where each individual holds the ownership and control of their own financial wealth. One where all users can transfer value and interact freely amongst each other instantly. What could the future of our world look like with such a revolutionary tool? The possibilities could be truly magical. Bitcoin is magic Internet money. Bitcoin allows you to send and receive money with anyone, anywhere in the world. Just like magic, there's.

I'm at a loss for words because it's that exciting. And that world changes. With bitcoin, you can pull out your iPod or your iPhone or your tablet or whatever, install an app, and in less than 30 seconds, you have the ability to send and receive money with anyone, anywhere in the world, basically for free. And you can be ten years old and do that, or you can be 100 years old and do that. You can be that in any country. That's magic.

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