This is so good, with an amusing start as Snowden talks about Daddy Bitcoin . Who’s your daddy bitcoin ?

I absolutely love how Snowden phrases his sentences. Some interesting lines captured :

1. We are winning ladies and gentlemen, but we haven’t won, so we have to make sure we don’t get cocky

2. they fight us, then they get us to love them (on political representation)

3. Cast a vote, but don’t join a cult. They are not your tribe

4. there's a passage from a book that I think for this crowd really resonates it says - For in every country of the world, I believe, the avarice and injustice of princes and sovereign states, abusing the confidence of their subjects, have by degrees diminished the real quantity of metal, which had been originally contained in their coins. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations written in the year 1776 (https://www.adamsmithworks.org/documents/chapter-iv-of-the-origin-and-use-of-money)

5. you are made to pass through ‘gates of permission’ that are owned and controlled by others that do not answer frankly to anybody (on terms and conditions that you click yes)

6. whether we're talking about core governments or whether we're talking about corporations we're talking about the same thing. We're talking about the systemization of technologies that are designed to order our lives

7. Bitcoin transactions are permanent, they are public and they can be tracked and they can be linked. Enormous proportion of them are fully doxed but just not publicly doxed.

8. That metadata patterned out,  is your pattern of life (dang!)

9. Metadata is like a private investigator following you all the time

10. Suddenly they can have every life of every person every day at every moment on a live feed being interpreted at machine speed and then you start feeding those inferences into a decision-making process (on advancement on machine learning and its interpolation to Bitcoin’s metadata)

11. larger and larger parts of this transaction mesh of this network gets identified - the space for everyone else to have any kind of private interaction diminishes

12. The United States is the only advanced democracy on the planet that I am aware of that does not have a basic privacy law. We have the Fourth Amendment that only binds the federal government that doesn't do diddly-squat to protect you against corporations and the government.

13. We have passed the inflection point and we are accelerating down the slope and we're reaching the point where all of us are about to have to make very serious decisions about how we spend the rest of our lives to try to make the world better for our children and for those who come after us

14. Elections do have consequences. They do matter, but sometimes it feels like they're less meaningful than they should be

15. Do you really believe that the two front runners are what you know the collective will of this country would choose as the two best Americans ?  When you were a child and in school they're like oh president's the best person - does it feel like that ? I don't think so

16. right now we're doing it for the likes,  we're trying to get approval,  we're trying to get acceptance,  we are being driven to compete for attention and for acceptance

17. we need to start,  instead of competing, we need to start cooperating,  working together to find our way out of this hole

18. The internet is broken because institutions are competing against the individual while the individual is competing against other individuals. We need to shatter that design

19. Competition is everywhere but it's only against the powerless

20. By all means, cast your vote. But don’t join a cult. There’s a lot of work to be done.

https://youtu.be/f3NBhSXtE5g


"Cast your vote but don't join a cult. They are not your tribe."

I love this


I think about that Adam Smith quote often. He figured out how governments around the world looted their subjects savings. When I read it, I remember thinking...Bitcoin fixes this.


Onward 🫡

Onward 🫡


Thanks for the Snowden synopsis.

Thanks for the Snowden synopsis.