Interview│Thierry Baudet - Forum voor Democratie│ETHDam III - 2025

Hi, my name is Cherry Bodde. I'm a politician uh in the Netherlands, the leader of Forum for Democracy, the largest party in terms of members. And my key message today is that we shouldn't be thinking merely about the technological intricacies of crypto. We should be thinking and focusing on how we achieve mass adoption of cryptography, crypto technology and blockchain for ordinary people for day-to-day users because that is what's lacking. The privacy argument is fantastic, but a lot of people simply do not care enough about privacy to go through all the difficult steps of downloading applications and writing down their private keys.

We really need to bridge the technological innovations of crypto to ordinary people's day-to-day uses. That's my message. Why do you believe that crypto is democracy's antidote? Crypto technology and blockchain in general is the antidote to an ever increasingly centralized government. And the kind of control that we see in modern times through finance, but also through regulations and rules and and privacy intrusions and lack of freedom of speech.

They can be countered through networks that are decentralized where people are not living under somebody else's control. But the blockchain technology is preventing central control from happening. And that is why I think mass adoption of crypto and blockchain in general is so important because then it can really become an ecosystem. You said that a state is like a cockroach obsessed with control. What moment made you feel that most clearly?

Well, during uh COVID and lockdown period, uh we were told that this was the new normal. The new normal was that we're not going to be shaking hands anymore, that we would have vaccine mandates and curfews and we couldn't sit next to each other in restaurants and so on and so forth. I I really felt that during those two years, states across the world on the basis of crony uh flawed quasi scientific ideas about a virus were showing their true face. And I think we should all remember that. We shouldn't forget it.

We shouldn't say it was a bad dream or something that happened long ago. It it it showed a reality that is still present today. you worry about the casino culture of meme coins. Yeah. How do we bring up back?

Well, I think the uh the quick rise and fall of coins and meme coins and NFTTS has given crypto a bad name. It's given crypto the name of being a a sort of casino marketplace where you can quickly gamble and you can become very very rich or or lose all your money. And that was not what the original vision of Satoshi was about. That was not what crypto was about. It's about creating a means of storing and exchanging value and information with each other in a nonentralized manner.

That that's what it's about. And and we should go back to that original vision. If you think that crypto is the revolution, what will you think is the first victory in this revolution? Well, the first victory is that we got Ross Olrich that and that's that's amazing. That's that's a fantastic success.

And now we should make sure that Roger Ver does not go to prison that the Department of Justice drops the case against him and uh crypto community should make itself heard regarding that. [Music]