Hello Miami, welcome Jack. We have 12,000 bitcoiners here, you're incredible, and I think there's 20,000 out there listening, so we're happy to see this phenomenon grow. I wanted to start with the big question that probably most people are asking: why are you on stage with a human rights activist? What does Bitcoin have anything to do with human rights? Isn't it just about investment?
Not for me. For me, Bitcoin changes absolutely everything. What I'm drawn to the most about it is the ethos, what it represents, how the conditions that created it are so rare and so special and so precious. I don't think there's anything more important in my lifetime to work on, and I don't think there's anything more enabling for people around the world.
We often hear in our community this kind of mantra that Bitcoin is for everybody, that it's non-discriminatory, that it's really kind of open for many people around the world who are walled off from whether it's transactions, saving, connecting with the world. What is your perspective on this idea that Bitcoin is for everybody?
That's what I'm focused on making sure that I help with. Whatever I can do, whatever my companies can do to make it accessible to everyone is how I'm going to spend the rest of my life. If I were not at Square or Twitter, I'd be working on Bitcoin. If it needed more help than Square and Twitter, I would leave them for Bitcoin. But I believe both companies have a role to play, and anything that we can do as companies to help also find the right intersection between a corporate narrative and a community open narrative is for the best.
The theme for today is banking the unbanked. As you all know, there's billions of people around the world who are either completely unbanked or underbanked. Yet the mobile phone is growing at a remarkable pace. Even in countries like Ethiopia and Sudan, you now have 20-25% of the population with a mobile phone, and in the next 5 years that's going to pass 50%. So we're now in a position where the increase of technology is going to allow more people to come online. And with Bitcoin, it doesn't matter what passport you have or what nationality you are, what ethnicity you are, what you believe in, you can connect to this network. So when we think about banking the unbanked, what's your vision for what is most important for helping onboard people into this new system?
Well, we don't need the banks anymore. There's so much work to do around accessibility, there's so much work to do around education so that people can own the idea themselves. And I want to thank you by the way, I appreciate you so much for all the work you do to take away a bunch of the myths that people have in their head and give a strong case for why Bitcoin can be used by everyone. But we don't need the financial institutions that we have today. We have one that is thriving, that is sound, that is owned by the community, that is driven by the community, that has this incredible and amazing consensus that always manages to do the right thing over time. It's noble and it's so rare and so unique. So anything that we can do to build it and to protect it, we're down to do.
You recently personally launched a new fund with Jay-Z where you guys dedicated 500 Bitcoin to help the Bitcoin ecosystem in Africa and India. Can you talk a little bit more about the vision for that fund and what you all hope to do over the coming years?
Yeah, I spent November of 2019 roaming around the continent of Africa. I went to Nigeria, I went to Ethiopia, Ghana, and I saw that the number one problem that entrepreneurs were working on there—and I only met the entrepreneurs, I didn't meet anyone in the government or the media—they're all working on payments, and the most interesting of them were working on Bitcoin. And when I saw the reports of Nigeria considering banning Bitcoin, when I saw the reports of India considering banning Bitcoin, it's a reminder that we could use a lot more help developing around the world. Finding developers on the continent of Africa, enabling them to do their work without having to think about taking another job is important. So talking to Jay about it, Jay loves Bitcoin. He goes very deep on what he loves. He believes in it, and he also believes in this idea of making sure that if we're going to create a money for the world, it has to be developed around the world, and anywhere there are gaps we should try to fill. So right now we're trying to find the right board for it. It's going to be a completely separate entity. I have no control or say or direction over it. Once we find that board, they'll hire a lead and they'll start making grants denominated in Bitcoin.
So Jay might have 99 problems but being his own bank won't be one. Let's speak a little more about that. Nigeria is a country of more than 200 million people. They have a 15% inflation rate. They are in many ways closed off from the outside world in terms of fintech payments. How has traveling the world and going to different countries kind of opened your eyes to the global impact of Bitcoin, where maybe people in Wall Street, Silicon Valley, in London may not be seeing? What are they missing when they say there's no social value to Bitcoin? What do you think they're missing?
I mean, they're missing everything. They're not getting out of New York. They're not getting out of the country. They're not talking to people. Go to Nigeria for one day and see the struggle that people have to put up with with their government and with their money. And go to Ghana that has a bunch of transplants from all over the continent and you witness the same thing every single day. Go to India and you see the same. My advice is they should try living on the Sudanese pound for like six months and then come back and tell us that Bitcoin is not useful. And I think they'll get a little reality check there.
So today we've got maybe estimates vary, but anywhere from like 150 to 200 million people have used Bitcoin in some way, right? So we're at like maybe 2%, 2.5% of the world population. I believe we're going to a billion people by 2025, certainly by the end of the decade. And when you have so many more people on-ramping into the system, we're probably going to have a situation where fees on the main chain of Bitcoin are going to get pretty high in fiat terms. So can you talk about for people who like in Nigeria and other places who are going to need micropayments, who are going to want to send $5, $10, can you talk a little bit about your commitment at Square to Lightning, how you kind of understood that Bitcoin will scale in layers perhaps instead of just on the main chain, and why you're so committed to Lightning in a time where we're going to get a lot more users?
Well, exactly. That's why I'm committed to Lightning, because this is going to be used by more and more people. And my belief in Bitcoin, it's an amazing asset, but my belief is the internet needs a native currency. We need to be able to transact with this every single day, and everyone around the world needs to transact with it every day. So the only reason Square got into Bitcoin is to that end. It's not just to be an exchange, and that's why we don't deal with any other currencies or coins, because we're so focused on making Bitcoin the native currency for the internet.
Meeting Elizabeth and team, how can you say that this is a currency for everyone in the world when you are the king of censorship? Bitcoin is about decentralization and you have no right to be here today speaking about this.
We're working on that too. We're working on that too. We'll get to that. I get it. We'll get to that. I promise.
Thank you. We can talk about it. We can talk about it. Well, why don't we just go right to that. I was going to talk about it later. We hear a lot about censorship. Maybe we'll let this settle down for a second. All right. No, we'll hit on that briefly. It's obviously very important. We'll talk about it. Can social media be more like Bitcoin? Bitcoin is censorship resistant, nobody controls it. What is your thought on that? What is your thought on this? It's a thorny problem.
Yes, I do believe it can. I know there's a number of you out there who disagree with a lot of actions that Twitter has taken. I know there's a lot of you out there who disagree with our policies and the way we've evolved them. I appreciate that. I recognize it. I also recognize the fact that there is an incentive and a corporate incentive and a business incentive that is different than what might be needed for global communication, for public conversation. And my goal in my life in this moment is to remove as much as I can the corporateness of our companies and find better intersections with the open source community. Certainly Bitcoin has taught me that with Square, and we're doing everything in our power to do that. And we're trying to do the same thing with Twitter by creating a new platform, a new open source standard called Blue Sky. We're just starting it, and it will have none of the restrictions that you see on Twitter. Inspired entirely by Bitcoin, we want to do the same thing for social media. And again, I know you're not going to believe me. I know you're saying liar. I'm going to prove it to you, and then we can have another conversation later.
Yeah, well look, when we look at something like Lightning, it's not just a payments network. It can also be like a censorship-resistant social media platform. There's folks out there building stuff like Sphinx, which I highly recommend you pursue. Sphinx is amazing. Sphinx is really cool. Basically what you can do is you can follow your favorite creators, maybe like your favorite podcast, maybe you're following what Marty and Matt are doing or something like that, and you can go into a tribe on Sphinx and you can just stream them censorship-resistant private money on Lightning and nobody can stop you. And that's happening, that's inevitable, it's coming. So this vision of streaming money to the people that you care about in a way that the government cannot stop, I know that that's what Laura wants, and that's what you all want where you're upset with Twitter. Well guess what, it's coming and nobody can stop it. So I think that's a pretty interesting segue into maybe getting back to the idea of Lightning, what it is, and why you at Square and especially Square Crypto have focused so heavily on it, as opposed to like you could have done a lot of other things, right? Like why the focus on Lightning?
Again, it goes back to the current. Square Crypto and Steve and team and Matt have been focused on making sure that any wallet can easily turn on Lightning and make it accessible to everyone. So the more people we have considering using Bitcoin for payments, for tips, for streaming money, the stronger this ecosystem is and the more we achieve our goal.
Yeah, I mean look, we're really building out like a parallel economy here that again is not controlled by governments or corporations. And I just wanted to show you like how this works and then maybe Jack and I can reflect on this a little bit. Our friend Jack Mallers has created a company called Strike with a lot of help from a lot of other people, amazing Bitcoin company. And he started a campaign recently to help Bitcoin development. So I'm on the Strike page right here. All right, and I'm going to go ahead and donate you know $2 worth of Bitcoin to Strike. Okay, so I'm going to copy that Lightning invoice. I'm going to go to my Moon wallet created by an awesome team in Argentina, and I'm going to send that Bitcoin right now. And it is going to go, and it's gone. That's a bearer asset that has just moved instantly around the world, and I didn't ask permission from anybody. So again, when we get back to this like conflict about how are we going to build a social media, how are we going to communicate with each other without censorship and surveillance, it's through Bitcoin. So I mean I just want to underline, you know, that's why I think Jack is kind of so persistent in this, because it must be such a freaking struggle to watch the entire world criticize everything you do. And I think that's fair, we should do that and hold you to a high standard.
Definitely do it. We should definitely do it. And I appreciate it.
But it's not like some magic fairy dust. This is real. Lightning is real, and I just sent a bearer asset around the world and nobody could stop me. I didn't have to ask any permission. I didn't have to prove my identification. This is an actual revolution. This is the revolution. So when we talk about Bitcoin and Lightning, if we're going to build it the right way, it's got to be non-custodial. Now, minutes before you walked on stage, you announced something pretty big that you guys are going to do at Square. Do you want to talk about your vision for like non-custodial Bitcoin use?
Yeah, I mean we're considering building a non-custodial hardware wallet. And the thing we want to do is make it completely in the open. So from all of our software to all of our hardware design would be open source. It'd be on GitHub. We want to build it in collaboration with the community. So we started a thread today just asking some questions about our design principles. We don't want to compete with the hardware wallets out there. We just want to take it to the next level and get to 100 more million people who have non-custodial solutions. And we're likely to do it sometime very soon, but we wanted to make sure that we're thinking about this in the correct way and we're reaching out to the right folks in the community to build it.
Yeah, I mean I think that non-custodial use of Bitcoin is so important. And Satoshi, the creator of Bitcoin, knew this. Just a little tidbit for the audience here: Satoshi chose his or her birthday as April 5th. April 5th was the day that the United States government basically banned private ownership of gold in 1933. So when Satoshi was designing Bitcoin, he or she was thinking about how the US government centralized and confiscated gold away from the people and how they could make a system that could prevent that. They chose the year of their birthday as 1973, which was when gold was made available for the American people again. So I think we need to think about this very carefully. Non-custodial use of Bitcoin is built into Satoshi's vision for the project. So it's really exciting to see Square support this. I think a lot of the custodians in the space won't be very happy, but as you said today in your thread, as inspired by Isaiah, not your keys, not your cheese.
