Lets Talk Bitcoin - Episode 30 Participants Adam B.

Levine (ABL) - Host Stewart (ST) - Master of Ceremonies Mark Hochstein (MH) - Panel Moderator Trevor Timm (TT) - Panelist Jonathan Mohan (JM) - Panelist Stephanie Murphy (SM) - Panelist Alan Safahi (AS) - Panelist Michael Terpin (MT) - Panelist ABL: Hi folks, Adam B Levine here. Were back from New York with talks, panels and exclusive interviews to share with you over the next few weeks. One of the most educational panels for me personally was the Bitcoin and Freedom of Speech panel, moderated by a friend of the show: Mark Hochstein. Panelists include: Trevor Timm from the Freedom of the Press Foundation, Jonathan Mohan of BitcoinNYC, Stephanie Murphy of Lets Talk Bitcoin, Alan Safahi of ZipZap and Michael Terpin of Bitangels. Our release schedule for the next few weeks might be a little more crouded than normal, so stay tuned for episode 30 to be released so time before Friday. If you have comments, questions or topics for the show please visit letstalkbitcoin.com/reddit to be directed to our new listener interaction subreddit. Weve had a lot of activity here so far and I am excited to hear what you have to say. If you enjoy the content from the conference thatll be releasing over the next few weeks, please donate bitcoins or litecoins at letstalkbitcoin.com. This trip was out of pocket and your support allows us to cover future conferences in the same fashion. We have three or four more scheduled before the end of the year. Also thanks to Mediabistro for putting on such a great event with Inside Bitcoin. Ill hand the panel of to Stewart at this point, hes the events master of ceremonies. Enjoy the show. ST: This panel is a powerhouse panel. Were really thrilled that all of these personalities were assembled and one of the reasons theyre here is because Mark Hochstein, who is the Executive Editor with American Banker was kind enough to help me invite everybody and to initiate a lot of these contacts. So uh, Mark really helped me with this event from the beginning and I really appreciate it so I want to give him a big round of applause as he is going to introduce the panelists. *Applause* MH: Thanks Stewart. Its very fitting that, this event is organized by MediaBistro. Years ago I, you know, in the late nineties, I went to a media-mixer cocktail party for journalists and people like that, that was organized by MediaBistro. And I met the publisher of High Time. And I told him that I worked at a Banking Publication. And he said: Well, you should an article for me about how to launder money. I was on the mortgage beat at the time, so I demerit but I uh. I asked him what the office environment was like at your magazine. He said: Its pretty much what you expect. So on a serious note, one of the things that gets overlooked I think, when people talk about bitcoin in the mainstream media, is the positive aspects of its neutrality. You know, there are people who say its used to launder money, its used to buy drugs, potential for it to be used by terrorists and what not. But there is a flip side to that and I am just briefly going to read a quote here. This is from Bitcoin Magazine, which is out in the exhibition area, theyre selling these. This is from when Wordpress started accepting bitcoins. They said, this is how Wordpress explained it. They said, why they accepted bitcoins to sell their add-ons: Paypal alone blocks access from over 60 countries, many credit card companies have similar restrictions, some are blocked for political reasons. Whatever the reason is, we dont think an individual blogger from Haiti, Ethiopia or Kenia should have diminished

access to the blogger sphere because of payment issues they cant control. Our goal is to enable people, not block them. And then this was additional commentary from the article and it regards anonymity. Many bloggers that operate in restricted regimes do so using pseudonyms for their own protection. Traditional payment methods like credit cards and Paypal are unusable for those bloggers because they expose the payers physical identity. And I think that it is a really fitting introduction to a discussion about this aspect of bitcoin. So I am going to ask each of the panelists to briefly introduce yourselves and explain what you do and how that ties in to the subject of bitcoin and free speech. Well start to my left, Trevor. TT: Hi everybody, my name is Trevor Timm and Im the Executive Director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. I also work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the EFF, which is a digital civil liberties foundation in San Francisco. And Im here to talk about both jobs of mine because they both deal directly and indirectly with Wikileaks and bitcoin and free expression. EFF was one of the first organizations to take bitcoin, back in 2010. They subsequently decided to stop taking it and then recently, in the last month or so, we started taking it again. And Im gonna probably get into the reasons why, weve received a lot of criticism but there is actually very good reasons, mostly to actually protect bitcoin and make sure the markets stayed as sound as they were. For the Freedom of the Press Foundation we started six or eight months ago. Our goal is to facilitate and crowd-fund donations to a variety of transparency journalism organizations. The most notable being Wikileaks. Wikileaks is probably, as many of you know, cut of by Visa, Mastercard and Paypal, back in the end of 2010. They started to publish classified, state department cables. The same cables the New York Times and other newspapers were publishing. But because of pressure, unofficial pressure from a couple of congressmen, all of these payment processors decided to cut off Wikileaks. Even though they had broken no crime and were protected by the first amendment like the New York Times was. And so we set up our organization to both help other journalism organizations if this ever happened to them, and also to take donations to Wikileaks. A big way that Wikileaks was able to sustain itself, during this two year period where they couldnt take donations, was through bitcoin. And we also decided to take bitcoin just after our launch and we can get into that later in the panel but Ill pass along. JM: Hello, I am Jonathan Mohan and I founded BitcoinNYC. In the past five months weve grown to be the largest and most active bitcoin-related community in the world. My perspective here is kind of on the ground of what it is,means to adopt bitcoin. As it relates to free speech I am trying to proselytize bitcoin as much as possible so I kind of bring that angle to the discussion. SM: Hi, my name is Stephanie Murphy and I am a radio and podcast host. You may know me from the podcast called Lets Talk Bitcoin. Its a twice weekly show, all about bitcoin and crypto currencies, which I host with Adam B. Levine, who is over here and Andreas Antonopoulos. You know, obviously I am really interested in bitcoin. I got interested in it back in 2011 so I guess I was fairly early in on the curve and the way I heard about bitcoin initially was from another radio show, that I am also a host off, which is called Free Talk Live. And thats a nationally syndicated talk radio show with an individual liberty vent. And I am someone who has, for a very long time had, a really strong interest in human freedom of all different kinds, it extends to a lot of different areas of interests of mine. And so Ive been following things like Wikileaks and anything that has to do with bitcoin, freedom of speech and potentially sort of the organizations that may, you know this talk may be really relevant to you so, I guess Im coming at it from more of a journalism angle. And I also have an interest in bitcoin charities. So, you know, these two things sort of dovetail to me. I work with a bitcoin based charity called Free Aid. We do outreach and education about health and safety, and we also provide first-aid at some sort of rural camping events. And so Ive been really interested in how bitcoins can benefit charitable and non-profit organizations. So Ill be talking a little bit about that too.

AS: Thank you. Hi, this is Alan Safahi. I am founder and CEO of ZipZap. ZipZap is a global cash payment network so we obviously deal with a lot of anonymity issues and KYC and AML issues. But Im here on the panel today because of my background. I immigrated here from Iran in 1977, before the revolution. So Ive lived under oppressive regimes before. And Ive gone back to Iran for visits and Ive lived under that oppressive regime after the revolution. So freedom of speech is a very important and dear concept to me. I fight for it. I teach my kids to fight for it and not be bullied. So I believe freedom to spend your money is part of your rights. Similar to freedom of speech is freedom of expression. So if you like what somebody says on their blog and you want to donate money to them, youre expressing your support of that freedom of speech so its important for us to fight for that. And I am fighting from inside the regime for the past 18 years. I have been involved with prepaid Visa and Mastercard products. A company that my son is now running, since I launched ZipZap. So I have decided to join the fight from within and I am a freedom fighter so I look forward to your couple. MT: Hi, my name is Michael Terpin. Im a serial entrepreneur in the media industry. I disrupted business models a few times. I started the first national PR firm based on new media and internet back in the early 1990s. I then started the first internet-based press release distribution company. It was originally called Internet Wire in 1994, funded by Sequoia Capital. We changed the name when we started working with NASDAQ to Market Wire and we sold it in 2006. Its now the third largest news wire in the world for company news and press distribution. And Im currently CEO of Social Radio, which is one of the oldest social media marketing firms in the country and also it has a PR devision. I got involved in bitcoin in two ways. I was working with clients for a decade in the virtual currency space, which unlike digital currency virtual currency is kinda just like a currency and it operates inside a video game. Second Life and we worked with a number of companies such as Entropia Universe, in which you can actually take money out of the video game and spend it. That was sort of the predecessor to a lot of the freedom of currency issues that are coming up now. When I first went to the bitcoin conference in San Jose, which was actually two months ago I was struck by the fact that it was in the same small room as the first Internet World, also run by Alan Meckler who owns MediaBistro. About the same size and they had these old 10 by 10 tables in 1994 for these little start-up companies called Yahoo and Lycos, and here you had Coinbase and you know. I just got this idea that this was sort of the biggest thing weve seen since social media 10 years ago and the internet 20 years ago and that I needed to be there. I then met David Johnston at the cocktail party and we had a conversation that there needed to be an angel group, because there was a gap between the crowdfunding of some of these new start-ups. And when they finally just started minting money and growing at 15 percent a week and would get 5 million dollar checks from Union Square and some of these other top VCs. David said Why dont we start one? and so we did. We co-founded a group called BitAngels. We are actually going to be having a meeting at lunch. We grew from the two of us to now 200 angels. We funded one deal and we are getting ready to announce three more, that are in the process of closing. I am also on the board of the new House School of Journalism at Syracuse University, which is one of the premier journalism schools in the world and we are very focused on our first amendment rights. At first when I was asked about this panel I was thinking: Well, currency and freedom of speech arent exactly the same thing and then of course I rebrowsed the decision of Citizens United which basically says they are. ST: Which actually brings us the first question I want to throw out to the panel: Are financial transactions free speech? Trevor. TT: Well, I would argue they are, no matter your feelings and Citizens United and Ill just give the prime example which Ive been working on for 6 months, which I just mentioned which is Wikileaks. You know, Wikileaks was able to publish these classified documents in the public interest, just like newspapers do all the time. You know, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wallstreet Journal. If you open these papers up on any day, you are bound to find classified information on its

front pages. But because the United States government could not go to court to censor Wikileaks officially. There was a decision back in the seventies about the Pentagon papers. The New York Times published a top secret study about Vietnam and it went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said that effectively that the government cannot censor newspapers. They can only potentially punish them afterwards, which has never happened. People arguably said that that is protected by the first amendment as well. So if the government decided to go to court to stop Wikileaks, they probably wouldve been laughed at by a judge. There has been a long history in this country that no prior restraints or censorship orders are allowed. And so they went a different route. They decided that because of the way the internet works, where all these intermediaries really hold an extraordinary amount of power over what you publish online, that they would target these intermediaries unofficially. So senator Joe Liebermann and Congressman Peter King approached these companies privately and also publically asked them to stop servicing Wikileaks. ST: So Trevor, this was an extralegal pressure. This was not even through the legislated process. TT: Right, if it was through the legislated process it wouldve been struck down immediately. If it was in front of a judge, they wouldve been laughed at in court but instead they decided to do it with a wink and a nod. And so Visa, Mastercard and Paypal amounted for 95 percent of all the donations Wikileaks could take. And so naturally they were pretty much shut off from any form of funding. At this point they were incurring huge costs giving that the U.S started an investigation into them, despite being protected by the first amendment. They were getting DDoS attacked and their website was going down. They had a huge amount of server costs because obviously everyone in the world was going to their website to read this news. We felt that this was a real injustice. You know, the U.S government couldnt censor them legally but they could strangle them financially and hope that eventually they would just bled out essentially and couldnt continue. That actually largely worked you know, Wikileaks was kinda thrown offline for a while, their staff was greatly reduced and so eventually we decided to start the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which on our board consists of Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon papers leaker, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras who are, and if youve been paying attention to the NSA stories and Edward Snowden, they were the journalists that leaked those stories. The actor and activist John Cusack is also on our board and J.P Barlow, also a founder of EFF. Our goal was to take donations to Wikileaks so that this unjust act wouldnt go unpunished essentially. But also to make sure that we could be there if this ever happened again. Obviously, in the next few years there is going to be many websites that have a digital-only publication model and that many might be like Wikileaks, who take anonymous submissions from whistleblowers. And if the government decided that this attack was used again, that we would be there to step in and say: Ok, well take donations. You can donate to us and we can provide a certain level of anonymity. This is kind of where bitcoin comes in. Luckily Wikileaks had been able to take bitcoin donations for these two years, and it kept them afloat at least so that they could survive atleast with barebones costs. So naturally when we started our website, we got all sorts of complaints that we werent taking bitcoin. The amount of comments we got about bitcoins versus all the other comments combined were probably about equal. People just really wanted to use this service to donate to something that they felt that they should be able to do anonymously. And so right after we started we pretty much heard these calls and decided to start taking bitcoin donations as well. Just to give people another way to donate to a group that, again its not illegal to donate to, but it may look politically bad on their part, or they might be worried that they may end up on a governments watch list or part of some investigation. That may be frivolous but again they just dont want their name attached to it. In that sense its been very successful and could have huge implications for free speech on the road. ST: There is one question Trevor. Can you share how you get the money, whether it comes in from bitcoin or dollars, from the foundation to Wikileaks?

TT: Sure. Again, its not illegal to donate to Wikileaks. There is actually a variety of methods that people have been able to do so. In the past 2 years its just much harder. Everybody uses a credit card, everybody uses Paypal and it takes 30 seconds but you can still bank wire money to Wikileaks. You can send them a check. You can use a service that not everybody knows about but it still exists, called Fladder (19:03), and of course bitcoin. This financial blockade wasnt a legal restriction preventing people from actually doing it. It was just making it much harder, so we wanted to bring the ease back into donating to Wikileaks. Given that how many people wanted to but just either couldnt figure it out or it made them extra nervous. *Advertisement 1* More than 300,000 users, and counting, trust blockchain.info. Its a bitcoin wallet service and a wealth of bitcoin information, and its completely free to use. With a blockchain.info wallet youll get the convenience of a web wallet and the security of a desktop client. Blockchain.info is also a block explorer. You can use it to see bitcoin transactions in real-time, check the balance of any bitcoin address and view many handy bitcoin charts all for free. See what they have to offer today at blockchain.info. *Advertisement 2* Hi, this is Jason King, founder of Seans Outpost and youre listening to Lets Talk Bitcoin. Seans Outpost is a homeless outreach in Pensacola, Florida and we are proudly powered by bitcoin. Today, over 13,000 meals have been fed to the homeless in our area. All purchased with bitcoin, and through the generosity of the crypto currency community. Read more about us at seansoutpost.com. Food, shelter, bitcoin.everybody. Seansoutpost.com. ST: Stephanie, for organizations that are outside the political mainstream, how important is it when they are taking donations to offer the option of anonymity? SM: I think its incredibly important if they are going to succeed. The example that just came to mind ,when you were talking Trevor, was there is an organization called antiwar.com. They basically have a website that gives editorial news and views from an anti-war perspective for about 17 years. They recently got interested in bitcoin. Theyve been around for a while. Theyve been accepting donations and they have a pool of donors. Recently, just a couple of months ago, they found out that their management, their leadership, had been being surveilled by the FBI for a couple of years. The FBI had been failing to respond to voyeur requests for information about that. A couple of their big donors heard about that and got really spooked. They didnt want to donate because they didnt want their names attached to supporting an organization like antiwar.com. You wouldnt think that would be so controversial but apparently it is. So yeah, its absolutely important to have the option for anonymity, because some people do want to donate but they dont want their name attached to it. Actually, funny enough youd be surprised. Ive met a lot of people in the bitcoin space and I like to ask them how did they get interested in bitcoin at first. There have been a lot of people who have told me that the reason they got into bitcoin was because they wanted to donate to Wikileaks and they couldnt do it through the legacy banking system, or through their credit card. They didnt want that to be public information. They were almost scared to say: Well, I want to give bitcoin to Wikileaks.. I think there is a large pool of people out there who would donate to certain organizations if they could do so anonymously and be assured of that. Trevor, like you were saying, there is this climate of fear now because the government can extralegally strangle somebody financially. The system that we have has built in so much financial control over potentially anybody, that it is really important to have that option to donate anonymously. Mark, when you said: Is financial action speech, or are our financial transactions speech.. Its funny because the word speech connotes free speech , like the right to free speech that is enshrined in the constitution. I

have a slightly different perspective on that. I dont think it really matters what is in the constitution, because freedom of expression is a human right. So even if financial transactions are speech then it shouldnt matter what the constitution says. We all know that they dont follow it anyway. Trevor, as you said, the whole pressure on Wikileaks was completely extralegal. We are almost at a point now where it doesnt really matter, or it matters less and less every day, that we have a first amendment. Maybe we ought to start looking at speech and expression in many different forms, including financial transactions, as sort of a human right. JM: When we are speaking about organizations that are outside the political mainstream. I think one example that is not talked about so much because of how outside of the mainstream it is Defense Distributed. This is the organization that wants to take 3D printed blueprints of guns and distribute them to the masses to give the right to bare arms to anyone who has a 3D printer. If you are talking about people who dont want their names on a registry. They have virtually no donations in fiat just because I would fear to give them money. If you look at where they receive their funding from, they have had over $50,000 in donations through bitcoin. Cody Wilson, who is the gentleman who runs this, would say that he would go the events such as this and he would speak. Hed get maybe a couple of dollars handed to him in person and then he would go home the next day, and see thousands of dollars in bitcoins given to his organization to help him run it. Really, it is a clear cut example of something that is almost entirely funded through bitcoin just because of the toxic financial system with people who are fearing for being put on the list for something as politically explosive as the right to bear arms. ST: Or literally explosive in this case. Were kind of getting to the real edge of what a lot of people would be comfortable with. If financial transactions are speech does that mean if someone actually does wire money to a terrorist organization. Is that an act of speech? Does anyone want to tackle that? MT: Even the traditional definition of freedom of speech has the historic limits on it like you dont have the freedom of speech to yell fire! in a crowded theater if there isnt a fire. I think that its interesting with Citizens United the Supreme Court case that basically said, for those of you who arent familiar with it in 2010, that independent organizations could take unlimited donations on behalf of a candidate or cause because otherwise they would be restrained in their free speech. That really opened up the door for a lot of other interpretations of what the corollary between free speech and free right of spending. There has to be a corollary drawn of type of currency or type of barter. The US doesnt recognize bitcoins as a currency, most places dont. Can you donate fine art? Can you donate rare coins? Can you donate something else? Or can you spend then? With regards to Citizens United, theres a new case that is coming before the Supreme Court from a gentleman in Alabama who wants to be able to donate unlimited amounts directly to the candidate. ST: Not through a super pack, but directly? MT: Directly yeah. And that was settled in 1967. He said: Well, that was before Citizens United so everything has changed now.. There is a very good chance that that will be overturned, which means that these $50,000 plate dinners could become $500,000 plate dinners. Anybody who sort of wants to influence elections at any level itll be even easier, even though in the States they tried to put campaign limits on. Its been proven that there is a much bigger diversity of candidates. When you have unlimited rights to spend you basically get rid of diversity. These are all related rights even though there are limits on it just like there would be limits within currency. Like doing illegal activities within currency. The question is: How do you temper the freedom of speech with the freedom of a government to be able to stop crimes and things like that?. You certainly, in most non totalitarian states, cant go 100 percent. You can stop all crime if you basically frisk everybody in the morning, in the evening and follow them all day long. Thats a 100 percent compliance. Zero

compliance is when we arent even looking when you are killing someone in front of us. Obviously the medium is what a society decides is in between. ST: Alan, on that spectrum that Michael just laid out of 100 percent compliance and zero percent compliance, coming from a country that had a true authoritarian regime, whats your sense of where the US is on that scale? AS: The country was built on separation of church and state. We should also add separation of bank and state. *applause* AS: I dont know where in the constitution it says that the government is there to protect me from myself. For example, there are so many examples that Trevor talked about, Wikileaks is one example. What happened with Snowden is another example. Even outside of this, look at online gambling. I talked to the General Manager of one of the largest casinos. They push hard, they lobby to get gambling made illegal because they want it to catch up. They were losing market share to people from the UK and other places. I am worried about letting the government go so far at trying to control where we spend our money and the strangle they have on the financial services. Where do you stop after that? I would say ironically in Iran, they have more freedom of expression. You cant talk about the government, you cant say bad things about the mullahs but you can actually spend your money wherever you want. They cant track it the way they do it here. You could argue that they have more freedom of expression in Iran than they do here. Im not advocating to change the regime here or anything like that, heaven forbid. What I really would like us to do is to not jump so quickly when something happens like 9/11. All of the sudden the immediate reaction is Oh, lets create a Patriot Act. How many of you guys really feel safer because of the Patriot Act? I ask people in the government , I ask people in the banking and in the law enforcement. It has created so much work for them, theyre not spending their time really going after crooks and criminals. The same thing is happening at the airport. They spend so much time searching you when you go through the line, that theyre not really spending time looking for a terrorist before he becomes a terrorist. Thats what they should be doing. Look at Israel, they have really good examples of that where in a 5 mile radius before you reach the airport they are interviewing you, before you even get close to the airport. They are probably interviewing you before you are even leaving your home, they know what you are about to do. I want to step back and talk about one more thing. Looking at these embargos and sanctions, none of them work. People are really resilient, they are very innovative and they find ways around it. When they are spending their ways around the sanctions they are not creating new products, they are not helping each other. If you take Iran for example, of the 60,000,000 population half of them is less than 30 years old. A lot of people, very highly educated, a lot of value culturally put on education, a lot of good developers there and they are involved in bitcoins. They are buying them but they are doing it in innovative ways that I wont mention here. I would say, if you remove the sanctions, remove these barriers, and let people interact with each other. Make global trades happen freely, without friction and without costs. It shouldnt cost me 42 dollars to spend money to an African country. The poorer the country by the way, the more expensive it is to send money there. Thats criminal, to me that is criminal. Let people transact with each other and what happen is you have billions of people that are now in risk getting money. They are selling their stuff online. They are getting paid in bitcoin, very little costs. And those people will become your customers in the future. As they make more money they are going to want the same luxuries we have here. It goes upstream, it helps all of us. So yeah, Im against government interference with financial services. ST: The last sounded a bit like a blanket statement. Shouldnt there be some limits, as in MSP. Youve got to do KYC, youve got to do AML. Dont those things serve a purpose?

AS: Yeah I think there are limits. Obviously nobody wants to see human trafficking, illegal stuff or terrorism activities. Nobody wants to see that. But I think we need to take careful steps. My company ZipZap, Im here personally and not representing the company, I can tell you we do full KYC. We have to do it because at the beginning when we launched there were so many people who wanted to use our system because it was cash. We had to do some KYC but we do it in a different way. Your privacy is not sold out to third parties, you are protected. So there are some benefits to a KYC we provide for cash versus what maybe credit card companies provide. They really dont have the same level of protection. One of my employees was slightly overweight and bought a book online from Amazon. Within days she started getting offers for diet pills and diet programs. I mean, thats an invasion of privacy. As long as you know when you buy through ZipZap with a full KYC on you, that information is never shared with third parties. It may give you a little bit of more protection, more comfort zone. Nothing is as good as cash. Here is another problem. You go to the store right now, to any grocery store, and buy a $500 AmEx giftcard or a Visa giftcard and never have to show your ID or give them your name and address or anything. And you can go buy hundreds of them and put them in a suitcase and take it across the border, anywhere you want. But if you go through our system, you have to provide your name and information. Unfortunately as I said I am inside the system but I am hoping to educate the banks and educate the government to change that. One of the things, I dont know if anybody heard about this new announcement last night, the digital asset transfer I thought of the data. ST: Thats the new self regulatory organization. AS: Anybody saw that? So Im proud to be a founding member of that. There is 15 of us and we invited everybody to join. Basically it is a self regulated organization that we are forming so that we can regulate ourselves so that the government doesnt come and tell us to regulate. Its been a successful model for a lot of other industries and we hope to apply it to emergent payments. If you guys lookup hashtag data and join us because we want to really be self regulated. We want to do the right things. We can never get rid of fraud and those people who do illegal stuff. We can just push them somewhere else. Make it difficult enough so they go somewhere else. I tell you guys, the vision for bitcoin is going to be set in organizations like this and conferences like this. I was involved in the web when we first started in the 1990s, when it became commercialized. I can tell you if Jeff Bezos and (Gavin) Andresen and others thought about the web, the way it was in those days, where it was all porn and gambling. We would have never had an internet. They had a different vision. They saw where we are going and they brought us along with them. And I think we need to do the same thing as leaders and trailblazers in this industry. We need a vision. Where do we want bitcoin to go? There is so much good that can come from bitcoin. Billions of people around the world can have better economics and better health because they are making money. They can become consumers. They can benefit from all the things we have here. Thats where we should be taking this thing, rather than stomping our feet on the ground and saying we have to have anonymity. So there is a balance there. Thats the balance I guess we are debating at this conference. JM: You know, when you mention invasions of privacy it reminds me of what The Freedom of the Press released last month. It talks about journalists. Last month you guys released your whitepaper that spoke on all the things you could do to protect yourself from the most onerous of agencies: the NSA . Could you talk a little bit about that because I just thought that as it relates to journalism that its a fascinating discussion. TT: Im sure most of you have seen the news in the last month of the NSA and how they have been tracking the phone call records of pretty much every American, whether you have Horizon or AT&T or Sprint or whatever cell phone service. And often times when you are communicating overseas with anybody they are also scooping up those communications without a warrant as well. So we wrote a whitepaper about encryption and how it can work if use it properly. Unfortunately it is still

very hard to use from a just an ordinary user perspective and it takes to time set up. Sometimes it is clunky and there is quirks to it. If you can figure it out it provides a sense of privacy that few services do and so we try to write our guide. You can go see it at pressfreedomfoundation.org. We wrote it in the respect that we want. Whistleblowers and journalists are able to use it to communicate with their sources but it basically can be used by anybody. We try to write it in as matter of fact language as possible so you dont have to be a computer expert to understand it. Itll definitely take you a good hour to get through and set up but hopefully it can provide some way for ordinary people to start communicating more privately in this age where it seems not only the US government but governments from around the world are increasing their surveillance capabilities when it comes to the internet. JM: I would like to mention I am really good on action steps. So if anyone would like to know more about that, myself and Jonathan Warren, who is sitting back in the corner, who is the creator of BitMessage, if you guys have heard of it before. Well be doing workshops on it for journalists. So if you are a blogger or if you are a traditional journalist please come see me. We are not going to charge for them. We just need a space. If you wish to volunteer, please do. We want to just start teaching journalists how to use what the Freedom of the Press Foundation has made. Source protection is integral to a functioning society. We invite all of you to come and learn how to actually use these things in your daily life. ST: An interesting thing about BitMessage is that its using the bitcoin technology but its for a non financial use. JM: Right, right. The thing about BitMessage and when it comes to alternative currencies is what makes bitcoin so cool is that it solves the problem of how to have a third party arbitrator, when there is zero trust in a system. That can be applied to a lot of things that arent money. In BitMessage you are seeing a solution where that is resolved with communication. Its not money, its communication but its a really powerful tool to discuss with somebody and have not only the conversations hidden but the meta data, that the government decides that they need no legal standing in order to get from you, it hides that as well. So its a very interesting solution to that problem, how to communicate with privacy. ST: I want to open up to questions from the audience in just a minute. Theres one more thing I want to follow with Trevor. The Manning verdict is coming out today. You mentioned earlier its not illegal to donate to Wikileaks. If it is decided that he aided the enemy in this case, will that change? Will it become the fact of illegal? Is there a risk of that? TT: I certainly dont think so. I mean, if Manning aided the enemy that means the New York Times aided the enemy as well as Wikileaks. Back when Wikileaks started publishing all this information they were sharing it with newspapers around the globe, including the most distinguished newspaper in this country. They have also had partnerships along the ways with the Washington Post, McClatchy, The Guardian, all sorts of respected papers. The thing is that this aiding the enemy charge is very scary when it comes to Bradley Manning. The government is essentially arguing that even though Bradley Manning never had the intent to aid the enemy it was always his intention to inform the public. The fact that they cant prove that this information ever harmed the US, even though both of those are true and the prosecution admits it. They are saying that just because information was posted on the internet and Al-Qaida potentially has an internet connection that he is therefore guilty of a capital crime. That has huge implications for whether or not you believe Bradley Manning is a whistleblower, whether somebody is giving hundreds of thousands of documents or just talking to a reporter or posting something on Facebook or Twitter. These are the types of issues that are going to crop up again and again. I think both Jonathan and Stephanie mentioned how intermediaries matter even more every day and that it seems that the first

amendment matters less and less. This is true because a lot of times the government doesnt have censorship power but companies have extraordinary power. The law professor Jeffrey Rosen talks about how the Chief Decision Makers at Google and Facebook are actually more powerful than any Justice of the Supreme Court because they alone have the power to decide what gets posted on their sites that everybody uses and what doesnt. The same can be said for these financial intermediaries. That really goes to the heart of why bitcoin is so important. What happened to Wikileaks has happened to other organizations. There are countless examples of erotic books that have been cut off from Paypal. Just recently it was reported that VPN providers were starting to get cut off by Mastercard and Visa. The government even tried to codify this technique. Im sure a lot of you remember the Stop Online Piracy Act in 2011, where this act was supposed to stop people from downloading illegal movies and music but wouldve censored broad swaths of the internet. The way they were going to do that was by cutting off financial intermediaries. People that took advertising and Mastercard, Visa and Paypal. This is an issue that will keep growing. Hopefully bitcoin can act as kind of a backstop against that. ST: I think it is time to take questions from the audience. Ive got a microphone so just raise your hand and I will come around and bring you the microphone. Does anybody have a question? Yep, here we go. Lets try to get this over here, maybe you can help me hand it? Audience member: Hi, Im Jacob Elisoff. Im really just an interested citizen. I have a question especially about what Michael was saying about how there have to be some limits. So for example if freedom of speech, with all its history of protection and there was this issue that you shouldnt have the right to stand up in a crowded theater and yell Fire. Im sure there are a lot of people in this room, Im going out on a limb, who think that freedom of expression and freedom of financial transactions is broadly a good thing. I would love to hear some examples of specific things that you think that could be forms of expression that could be enabled by bitcoin, that should not be, and what mechanisms, what techniques could be used to prevent that. Because otherwise it would really soil the name of the technology. TT: I just want to jump in really quick and I will let everyone else respond. Because it is the second time for this analogy that it is illegal to yell Fire in a crowded theater. I just want to say how terrible that analogy is. It was written back in 1917 and it was in one of the worst cases, first amendment wise, in Supreme Court history. Basically they gave someone a ten year jail sentence for writing mild anti-war literature that basically said Stand up for your rights and oppose to World War 1. The analogy which is, just as you cant yell Fire in a crowded theater, you cant create pamphlets that criticize the government. This case was overturned over 40 years ago and another case that dealt with true incitement of violence, which is still legal. You just have to prove certain steps, whether it is going to be imminent and whether you are directly inciting it. There is all sorts of protection built into the law that protect citizens from this type of direct incitement of speech but not necessarily yelling Fire in a crowded theater. That has never actually been decided by any sort of court. But of course there are ways that spending money can be illegal for example material support of terrorism. The Supreme Court upheld the decision just a couple of years ago, talking about how those types of transactions are illegal. If anyone else wants to jump . MT: The slippery slope works both ways. Even though there are things that anonymous use of bitcoins have in the past enabled, like SilkRoad. The internet itself has enabled things and as you have mentioned cash. Cash has been used for the vast majority of illegal transactions and yet we dont go and put scanning devices on every dollar bill, which we could if we decided that it was a priority. Recall all currency in the United states, put on transmitter chips and somewhat around the cost of the Afghanistan War we could have that. Its all about the slippery slope going in both directions. Is it most important to make we have a 100 percent prosecution rate of anything that the country decides that should be illegal? Or is it more important that we have a 100 percent freedom?

Neither of one is going to happen. Its up to the voting electorate to basically say: Where do we sort of want to draw the line? and then you regulate around that line. AS: What was your question? What type of activities you can use bitcoin for thats illegal that should be stopped? Is that your question? First of all I think the idea of getting rid of the currency all together and changing it to bitcoin is a good idea. This is digitalized. It could be tracked. It could be monitored in a way to avoid those kind of illegal activities. Im not advocating that but if thats what the government wants to do, thats a better way to do it. You can buy a lot of illegal stuff with cash. You can buy a lot of illegal stuff with bitcoin. You can buy, as I mentioned, with AmEx prepaid cards. Is that really the way for us to fight crime? I know its popular in the movies to say follow the money but is that the only way for law enforcement to catch the crooks? As I mentioned earlier it is better to step back and look at crime before it happens. Im not talking about that movie, Minority Report, but Im talking about you can see other signs of potential terrorism activities, other signs of the things that law enforcement should be focused on rather than just the financial angle. ST: Proper detective work instead of collecting it all in other words. AS: By the way, bitcoin is not just about currency. Im going to have a speech later this afternoon that talks about opportunities in bitcoin. There are so many other cool features built into the platform that you can utilize for ID verification, for escrow services and for a ton of other stuff. Just besides the currency aspect any one of those ideas are revolutionary. Bitcoin is here to stay. There is a lot of potential behind it. Millions of dollar investments are coming into it. I think we should find a way to use the good features of bitcoin and not focus so much on the negative things people do because they do that with cash anyway. Youre not going to change peoples behavior just because you change the method of currency. ST: Just to be clear, Alan said escrow services, not escort services. *laughter in the audience* MT: You know, there was a saying in the early days of the internet that the internet views censorship as damage and routes around it. I think at least on a technological perspective bitcoin is the same way. However that didnt stop the government from coming in with PRISM and still looking at everyones email. Same thing here. Governments can still go, depending on how hard they want to try, and shut down anything. In the early part of the last century they confiscated all the gold and made it illegal to own and then put it in Fort Knox. A lot of people forget that. In Thailand, just yesterday, they basically made it illegal to buy, sell or even transfer person to person bitcoins but thats also an area that Ryan from Trade, wholl be on the next panel, probably will talk about this a little bit more. We were chatting before the session. Thats one of the most oppressive places in the world in terms of micro transactions being illegal. When you have a number of places that just basically the bank is the government, those are the ones who are going to be the most restrictive. The least restrictive are places like Kenia, where M-Pesa is flourishing. ST: We are almost out of time. Stephanie, you look like you wanted to pipe in with a comment. SM: Just really quick, I think to your question its really important to draw a distinction between identifying what the actual crime is and potential other things that might be related to it, like a financial transaction. To me a crime is something that has a victim, that harms somebody. So for instance if somebody buys drugs with cash or if somebody buys drugs on the SilkRoad with bitcoins or whatever. I dont see the crime that has been committed because I dont see a victim. Of course if its possession or personal use or whatever. Now if it is human trafficking, yeah that has a victim and that would be the crime. The act of trafficking a human being and using them for whatever nefarious

purposes. Not the moving money around in order to accomplish that. I think we have to focus on what the actual crime is and doesnt have a victim. AS: The war on drugs is another example of the government not getting it right. The war on drugs is a war on poor people and minorities. That is what the outcome of war on drugs is. The PRISM thing that you mentioned is interesting because we are spying on everybody in the world just to catch a small percentage that are doing illegal activities. The logic is very mind blowing. Imagine if you had to go through a body search every time you went grocery shopping because of shoplifters. You cant live like that. Thats not the lifestyle. I didnt leave Iran to come here in order to be body searched when I go grocery shopping and to have my email spied on. I think we need to draw those boundaries and not let the government go so far. I agree that we should try to find the people that get harmed by this and try to help them and avoid the crime. The way to do this is not to spy on every human being on the planet. JM: And the philosopher in me wants to say: Compared to what?. When we are looking at dollar denominated crime just look at what the SilkRoad has done. Even in the worst case scenario of buying drugs for personal consumption. We are seeing over 50 million dollars in retail drugs sales in the SilkRoad in over 2 years and show me 1 case of violence that has happened. Now take dollar transactions. Show me 50 million dollars in retail drugs transactions that occurred in dollars and I guarantee you there are significantly more violence that has occurred than zero. I am not advocating crime being used with bitcoin. I am saying that everything is relative to what its replacing. If you look at the used cases for bitcoin, even in criminal acts, youre seeing significantly less violence in its use than it is with the current system that exists with the dollar. ST: I am afraid that we are going to wrap it up but this has been an awesome powerhouse. Id love to continue this discussion. Thanks everyone! ABL: Thanks for listening to this portion of our special Lets Talk Bitcoin conference coverage. Big thanks to MediaBistro for putting on a wonderful event at Inside Bitcoins. Stay tuned for more to come over the course of August. If you have any questions or comments for me directly you can email adam@letstalkbitcoin.com. If you have questions, comments or topic suggestions directed at the show broadly please visit letstalkbitcoin.com/reddit. Thanks for listening.