Why Living on Crypto Matters | Joël Valenzuela | ETHDam 2023

foreign [Music] so the final keynote of this this uh of this morning is going to be from someone called Joel I think Joel is here is Joel not here yeah you're here you have a laptop are you just gonna speak it out all right I appreciate that well without further Ado we have Joel talking about living unbanked and you can take a mic here or you can use um the one over there yeah I'll take that enjoy well hello everyone these are the last survivors of the Apocalypse known as lunch so I won't uh bother you too much in keeping away from your much needed nourishment but because you are here you're going to be test subjects so first of all raise your hand if you've ever used cryptocurrency before okay that's almost everyone as it should be now who has ever actually bought or paid for a good or service that you would normally use fiat currency for how many have actually bought something or paid for something with crypto here no not in this case not in this case okay so about half now how many people spend cryptocurrency on again regular goods and services that you would otherwise use your card for on a monthly basis at least once a month okay still pretty strong how about every single week one and a half we're getting fractional here so and we realize cryptocurrency has been out and exists for 14 years now right it's not necessarily early in the game but at the same time I understand because this is kind of the way I live my life and it can be a little difficult so just the quick my story right so for about the last 20 or so years I've known that fiat currency was a scam I've kind of known that inflation can destroy your savings government control all the good stuff that we know and from an early age I was sort of trying to figure out how to not live with my whole life savings and the money I use in a bad system and so in the early days like around 2010 or so I was trying to get one of euro-pacific capitals gold back debit card so I could spend and live on gold and all this stuff which you know it's not something a lot of people can realistically use then about 2012 I heard about cryptocurrency and this thing called the free state project right around the same time which the freeze project is a move to get a bunch of people to move to one geographic location namely New Hampshire again rep in the shirt right here in order to all focus on advancing human freedom in kind of a it's kind of like a freedom hackathon as it were and so on my way moving out there oh I stopped in Chicago and a friend of mine we shared a pizza and he I paid for and he paid me for his piece in Bitcoin which I didn't know yet was the stuff of Legend as it became isn't isn't Pizza day coming up pretty soon here yeah Monday so very appropriate and so for the next couple of years I use cryptocurrency wherever I could I tried to get paid in Bitcoin I try to use it but it wasn't until the end of 2015 that I decided I was never going to be paid in Fiat again I just decided I've been playing around with this too much I'm going to just stop playing I'm gonna start actually doing and so I since then I have not earned fiat currency it's been a long almost eight years now right and the next year around the middle of 2016 is when I close my bank account and so that was my life for a while few months after that I had problems with Bitcoin because the block size the blocks filled up payments were taking a long time to go through uh things were getting expensive like my two dollar coffee was now three dollars etc etc and so I had to switch and so since then my daily money for the most part about 80 or more is Dash but I used a wide variety of cryptocurrencies anything people will use and so that's kind of my story of during this whole period of time now why does it matter that people actually try to do something like this well um you can't really have freedom without Financial Freedom and I know there's there's a lot of theoretical things about what freedoms matter most what about freedom of speech what about freedom to defend yourself things like that the most realistic way someone can shut you up if you're saying something they don't agree with is to take away your ability to bank if you can be debanked it's it think about if you tomorrow were unable to use your bank card at all or a bank account or a payment app think about how would you get around how would you use public transportation how would you buy groceries what would you eat how would you make money how would you do anything be basically rendered homeless almost instantly and that is a massive amount of power that's in the hands of a very few institutions known as Banks and they are at the mercy of one entity depending on Country you're in the government and so we have only the amount of Freedom that our rulers allow us to have because we are on the banking system and it's kind of interesting because there's so many people involved in cryptocurrency but there's so few people using and as an experiment right so about two days ago I went to there's an Indonesian takeout place in town here that takes Bitcoin and of course I went out of my way and actually had a second dinner you know not complaining it was good food but just to go out of my way to patronize this place because they take Bitcoin and you know thankfully for me I guess they use a static address and have for a while so I was able to look up their entire transaction history because I know here at Ethan we're all about privacy right so I was able to look up their entire history of all the payments they received so two days ago there's my payment uh the one before that October of last year before that September and before that two years prior this address has been receiving Bitcoin payments for eight years a total of 21 payments during those eight years this is clearly a hardcore person here in town right and this kind of underscores just how little this is being used and I understand why because we are at the VC stage we're at the stage where there's a lot of money going to a lot of projects a lot of hackathons a lot of really awesome things being built and I mean that's fantastic it's a great seed stage however I believe we need to start acting like we're past that stage even though we're not because what we do informs what's being built and so there's a lot of theory that goes out there a lot of people say oh this can work that way that can work this way scaling this uh you know privacy that a lot of theory it's easy to be theoretical if you never use it and once you use it then there goes the the Illusions I've had people for example the specific case of Bitcoin um a lot of people thought like oh well why didn't you start using Bitcoin cash right away it didn't exist for a whole year that my life was impacted by this some people had the luxury of paying once a month for something and saying ah two dollar fee for Bitcoin that's terrible like it's but they still they didn't have their life disrupted to the level that I was that I had to switch a whole year before people even thought oh we needed something different and so what we build is informed by our realities and I mean I can't tell you how many days go on Twitter see poor Justin there just like losing his mind talking like this is not right this needs a change and then people don't get it because they have a lot of money to build certain solutions to build certain things to basically live their lives on assumptions that they haven't actually battle tested and so we're at we're at a spot that's very unique in human history right this wasn't possible 10 15 20 years ago we have the actual opportunity to have complete economic sovereignty and beyond for anyone in the world anyone can live permissionlessly that creates a giant opportunity for True censorship resistance people can't be censored very effectively if their money can't be censored we're sitting on this giant opportunity there's tons of money but the money is going to dry up and whatever happens whatever we have left to show for all the money that's been pumped into the space after it's all gone that's what we have to work with what if we build a castle on Sand what if we're building something on all kinds of different second third layer networks this and now with no privacy with no actual usability with a bunch of censorship vectors and then oops it doesn't work as intended but we ran out of money to kind of work on that now we have to go back in the trenches now we have to go underground Etc we have a giant opportunity that we could absolutely miss out on right now so that would be kind of my message to you today keeping it short here use it or lose it right if you're a developer use it try to make payments try to Mint nfts try to use them to token gate your whatever things anything you're kind of doing don't just do it in a sandbox environment try to do it in real life go out and spend cryptocurrency go to this Indonesian place kadiri is the name by the way go to this place spend a coin there and more importantly just think about how little you know you you really find out how little you know in that action which wallet are you going to use do you even know if they do lightning or on chain how is it going to work how is are you gonna have to wait for the person to be there to take it et cetera et cetera oh there's confirmations oh they give me a 10 discount but the fee was more than the 10 discount oh okay you learn a lot of things really quick so if you're Building Products Building Services you need to know what it ends up as and constantly refer back and forth to those points this is the opportunity of a lifetime for the human race to take a giant step towards freedom and I'm kind of worried that some of us might or many of us might be blowing it don't blow it start trying to live on crypto today yes question yeah so the question yes so the question was instead of just using direct cryptocurrencies what if you use stable coins instead and then use them to fund traditional Finance rails like Visa Mastercard Etc and do it through that there's a lot of nuance to maybe what the answer is but we got to think again when you start thinking about things like that you have to go back to what we're trying to achieve to begin with first off you want not your keys not your crypto you want something that you can control that someone can't just take from you which of course is being highlighted with the whole Ledger thing these days but that's different subject so you want something you can't that can't be rugged right so if you hold all your money in a stable coin yes like kind of you can't be rugged unless it's a unless it's say usdc which will censor your payments you know which will actually will not let you send to certain addresses programmatically right so stable coins are a little mushy in that way in that depends on the stable coin right there's a lot more risk of that and then of course the big thing about Fiat I mean I understand speculative risk and all this kind of stuff number go up number go down number go every which way however Fiat number go down if I may say so if you had number go down and more importantly Fiat number go down in a way that where it goes down goes to fund all kinds of horrible atrocities around the world so I try to stay away from that personally as much as possible that's more of a personal choice but then also the ability to transact um privately meaning number one without kyc without revealing your identity obviously that is virtually impossible for a regular person to view completely but you can do that for a lot of your transactions you know your everyday coffee does not need to be attached to your identity for example and so in those cases yes you could potentially but it depends on the actual service right if it's a custodial kyc type car like let's say a coinbase card or whatever or bit pay they still have those right um where you have to just keep your funds in a balance on their custodial platform and then whenever you swipe you're escaping the one thing which is the inflation right the inflation of the currency devaluation of the dollar or the Euro whatever but that's it I think we can do a lot better than that I think that there are some Services right um I'd have to brush up on my list of depending on where in the world you are there's one that's really great in the US called Spritz Finance which lets you pay literally every single Bill and has a prepaid card that you can use for everything it is kyc you do have to give your identity but you never have to give control over your money you just pay whenever you want so even if the service rugs you for example uh you still have all your money so and they do accept stable coins so if you don't want to deal with custodial risk you can kind of do that I'd probably diversify stable coins across a few platforms but yeah that's a that's a better if that's an interim solution interim solution is a lot better than no solution going making one crypto payment a week is a lot better than none a year thank you one more question one more question hi thank you um maybe not really a question but more a point of discussion um I think I would kind of liken this to the movement towards zero waste um if you've heard the statement we don't need a few people doing zero ways perfectly but a lot of people doing zero waste imperfectly and I would see that also for what you mentioned as well this is not to disparage or to bring down the value of what you do like I really admire that on a very principled level but I do think there is something to be said about for example um insisting on transacting with my friend let's say I like we've gone out to dinner and and he paid and I want to transfer him money and I do this via usdc on um polygon or something and in this case like I cut out instead of doing this via the bank like via a bank transfer or doing this via Paypal where I would also pay you know zero fees arguably less than a couple of you know like point zero zero cents that I would pay on polygon to do it I'm also cutting out the middleman I'm also preventing the centralization point of currency transfer and you're right there is still inherent risk in the usdc versus that point of if I were to do it on using Bitcoin for example or like a truly um decentralized asset um but you know it's I don't think this kind of I don't think this diverges from the take that you had just now but yeah absolutely I would kind of clarify that what I do doesn't make sense like I think it does like like it does in the sense that we need someone that Pioneers that spirit that says like you can do it yeah as a as the great Ken bozak once said we're the beta testers of money it sucks and so that's kind of what I'm what I do is I force myself into an uncomfortable position so I can find my way out of it right is in how am I going to pay for things if I don't have a bank account I don't know until I'm in that I don't need to know until I'm at in that position and then I learn and that knowledge not only informs developers like I talked to a lot of wallet providers ecosystem providers I beta test a whole lot of products in the crypto space for spending and because I have that first-hand experience of what works and what doesn't but also I kind of I can tell I would say everyone and I'm relatively confident I could tell everyone in this room how to make one regular payment in crypto no almost no matter where in the world they are and that's because I've kind of gone through the learning process of doing this so as far as like the zero waste analogy that's absolutely correct the problem was we have everyone doing all waste right almost everyone again this is a great crowd here there's a lot of people that use crypto here but this almost everyone does almost nothing regularly in crypto as far as a payment and when you have people that do everything they have enough knowledge to then be able to say hey what's hey you said you don't pay this I can figure out how how you can actually do that and then oh great and then everyone starts to do just a little bit but you kind of need that that comprehensive goal that comprehensive picture because it's like it's it's always like kind of you know pyramid shape right there's always a few insane people like me at the very top or the very bottom you're you're kind of a perspective and then each person with like less lifetime flexibility less time to learn Etc is always up but if the most radical people are the people that like oh yeah every once in a while I buy a plane ticket so I can post about it on Twitter and stuff if that's the top if that's the top what's the rest of the pyramid looking like no good so to answer your point yeah thank you all right be good [Applause]