# TOKEN2049 - 10 Years In - The State of Decentralization - Alex Mashinsky (Celsius Network)

- Channel: [TOKEN2049](https://streameth.org/token2049)
- Date: 2019-10-09
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-rENIosCGGMU
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rENIosCGGMU

## Transcript

all right hello Hong Kong I guess the break didn't give us a break let's see can you put up my presentation here we go all right so last year I think there were what like 1500 people here right who attended last year no one it's all fresh blood okay one person okay so how many are familiar with Celsius heard of Celsius before all right so I can get off the stage all right it sounds like most of you know what we're talking about so I am famous for three things one is six children at home that's the most important thing I did seven startups before Celsius and now I'm considered one of the bank's biggest enemies you know if you want to read more about it there's a Forbes article that just came out this morning saying that I'm the guide the banks should be worried about so the reason they my context is relevant is because they actually deployed voice of IP here in Hong Kong in 1995 back when it was still a British colony who was here in 1995 well one guy all right so I work with new TNT and new world you know this company's new TNT in your world the headphone companies competing with Hong Kong Telecom and we brought in a voice that replaced $3 a minute with what was then $0.50 a minute and now zero right so we took something that was a giant monopoly Hong Kong Telecom was a giant monopoly and reduced it down to nothing right basically we all use void for free today so the same thing is gonna happen with muy muy Piz money over IP and money over IP is here to basically get rid of the banks and replace them with the servers that actually act in our best interest anyone here from works for bank security there's one guy in the back curve but the point is 20 years from now banks are gonna have to come up with a different business model this idea that I can take somebody's money for free and not pay them anything for it and then lend it to your neighbor make 24% because I'm charging them on their credit card 24 25% I'm not paying anything for the money keep 90 percent of the value to myself the bank it's just a crazy idea I know we all do giving our money for free to banks every day but that's gonna be replaced so taxonomy of crypto right digital assets US dollars digital assets well underneath that we have all of these different types of digital assets that are being born right stable coins and if T's you familiar with that you know anyone here knows what NF t stand for one guy two non fungible tokens most assets in my view in the future are gonna be non fungible two tokens meaning the unique assets they're not like just like every theory of every eath is the same here it's exactly the opposite of that so we're still experimenting right we're still trying to figure out what's happening but I want to share with you my kind of analysis of what happened in the last ten years since the Bitcoin was created and if you you have to think about it in the context of a four-man relay race anyone here did a relay race in high school or in college oh we have a few guys okay great so the analogy will be really easy to understand so Satoshi invents this beautiful thing called the Bitcoin and hands off who did the hand of the baton to who's the first guys to kind of grab it and say yeah we love this thing well you have a clue right there and I think it's right it was a bunch of anarchists right about a million anarchists who basically said we hate the current system we're gonna create something completely different and they grab the baton they try to run with it but they can't finish the race there's just not enough Erica ston the planet to deliver this as a killer app so they had to pass the baton who did they pass the baton to libertarians right 3 million libertarian show up they grab the baton they try to run finish the race they can't finish the race either 4 million people using any technology is a complete disaster ok no tech in the world can survive on 4 million users so they pass the baton to someone else who do you think is the next guy to grab the baton speculators very good you get a free Celsius wallet so the speculators look at these two guys and say it's not about blowing up the world it's not about saving the world right the libertarians want to save the world with this thing it's about making money and they take Bitcoin from about 600 all the way to 20000 right we overshoot to the top 20 million speculators from all over the world jump in on this who did they try to hand off the baton to anyone anyone who's seen this presentation before you can do a clue on that on the internet just google form in a relay race you'll see what the last guy is right so the last guy was supposed to be the institution's all these guys that usually are the first guys in on the next big thing suddenly we're the last guy in there were the the guy was like saying oh my gosh this is the best performing asset class in a decade in a generation we missed the whole thing how do we get in on the next big thing and the speculators were like here is a baton man at 20,000 well the institution said I'm not touching this thing they dropped the baton right prices are down 80% because regulatory scalability right and security issues all those things haven't been solved it's not that they care about the price the issue was more about them coming in and during the same period of time right if you look at what happens to subscribers versus what's happening to price action there's complete disconnect between price action and subs we're still in a hockey stick we just overshot to the top and now we had to rebound so really we are again we we're migrating from a pyramid a system in which all the value flows to the top to the top of the 1% to the people you know the your boss's boss or his boss are the guys making all the money today in the United States I'm GUP I went to public companies the average CEO of a public company makes between 300 and 600 times their average employee salary okay thirty years ago when I came to the United States they were making six to eight times so it's up a hundred times just how much more the CEO makes and all the value is extracted and easier kept by management or is delivered to the shareholders JPMorgan 2018 131 million dollars in revenues 31 billion 131 billion in revenues 31 billion in profit all that profit instead of giving in to the depositors they're giving in to their shareholders as dividends that's what we here to replace okay so and we are part of a giant wave a tsunami right you're familiar with open source kind of eating the world will guess what decentralization is eating everything and what you're seeing is the same thing you've seen in networks right anyone here used to play with Excel 25 networks right here yeah the guys without hair so that got eaten up by frame really got eaten up by ATM everybody thought ATM was a killer app right that's gonna be the technology they're gonna dominate the world and then tcp/ip came from in from nowhere and collapsed all the networks into that well guess what there's one more step here okay the quantum computer network that is about to run the block chains all over the world is gonna be a thousand times bigger than any network that runs today and it's gonna collapse all those networks on top of it how do I know I'm the guy that in 1994 ran around the world and tell everybody hey voice is just an application you don't understand the Internet is gonna be so big voice is just gonna be an application on the internet people after me they look at me Allah said just like you guys are laughing at me about this big fishy you know what are you talking about Alex nothing can be bigger than the Internet that's exactly what all the phone companies told me 25 years ago nothing could be bigger than our TDM network we have these mainframe computers that we build we're paying like 1015 million dollars a pop to Nortel in and Ericsson and all these guys for the behemoth right well today a ten thousand dollar pc switch does the same job as one of those mainframes so what we're struggling with in the cryptocurrency and in this decentralization movement is finding the killer app we have all these experiments we have all these things going on but no one has hit the bullet bullseye we have over 2000 projects not a thing a single project that is scale anyone here disagrees with me anyone here thinks there's a project that actually hit scale when Netscape came out in 1995 in six weeks that a hundred million downloads and the entire Internet was basically 150 million people using it so that is that is scale so I put it together for you in a real simple formula so you can remember this right East End's for what what do you guys think it stands for e stands for enough all right I should just leave the stage energy now this is a Bitcoin conference so he stands for Wow people are really tired I flew here for 22 hours so none of you should be tired all right East End's for a theorem if you want your theorem to be valuable what are the components what are the things are gonna make you theorem very valuable what can M stand for it it's not money and it's not mass this is not a such as a physics conference it's a crypto mass adoption very good so what do you need for mass adoption in membership it's all about people joining and the number of people were joining as you can see from this conference is just not enough you want to get to mass adoption you need hundreds of millions of people to join this and all of us shuffling coins with each other is not a killer app I'm sorry to disappoint the converted by talking to the converted here but still so and together with that you need also credit credit is what makes economies move if you one the Bitcoin of the etherium networks to have viability you need tremendous amount of credit in those systems we had three waves of adoption infrastructure middleware and apps I'm a big believer that dabs are the killer apps it's not the fat protocol okay fat protocol is like the fat it's not it's gonna be not over until the fat lady sings the fat protocol is not gonna deliver anything I wrote the void protocol you can look it up okay I made $0 on that three and a half billion people use it all over the planet so what what you do need is you need to figure out how you get this fishy to eat all the other asset classes how are you gonna get this adoption these are all the different monetary elements it can come in to basically buy coins if any of these people start buying coins you're done right if Blackrock decides to put 1% of their assets into Bitcoin that is more than the entire market cap of Bitcoin today that's gonna drive the price 10x right that's just not happening and you have to figure out why it's not happening anyone know who the guy in the middle is Satoshi very good here we go we have one guy who knows so Satoshi showed us the way but now we have other block chains that are basically doing a better job at scale at at transparency it and all the other stuff so bragging rights Celsius was voted top 10 blockchain by every publication you can think of from MSN to Forbes to everybody else right so it's considered one of the best applications for the blockchain revolution so the main question is are you gonna work from 9 to 7 are you gonna party from 7 to 9 no even that is not funny all right i-i'll buy everybody drinks after how about that is that is that is that gonna wake you up so that's what we do we basically take we allow people to borrow dollars at 9% we have a wallet you deposit coins in the wallet and you can get a dollar loan against it which I'll charge 9% for the same loan everybody else charges 15 20 25 percent and we take this 9 percent and we give 7 percent of it back to the community back to the depositors what a new idea giving the depositors stuff back instead of your shareholders why would you do that people counting us Alex but why are you giving so much to the depositor why can't you just like give them 3 percent you want to you want to disrupt the banks you better do something more than just do a little bit better so these are the coins we support this is what we pay right now you can just deposit coins in the wallet and get this kind of return and I put this slide here to really illustrate to you so the background this stuff is all the banks it used to be in the United States in 1990 these are big banks these were all banks that had at least a hundred billion in assets we're down to five they all march together and look what happened to the interest rate during that period this is the interest rate they pay you so the banks are stealing from us every day banks are not your friends I say bad things about banks every day this is our wallet you can download it right now just do a search for Celsius network we have 65,000 downloads we launched in June we didn't I see you in March we raise 50 million dollars since June 2018 we did 1 billion in loans do you know any other crypto application they did a billion dollars like this that's how much demand there is out there 79% of our users deposit with us 4 or 5 times we have extremely high stickiness right these are all hard lers 93% of the time of these days we positive deposits Bitcoin lost half of its value during that period we did not have almost a single day where we had more withdrawals and deposits that is the true community that is the the Hudler community if you want to take a picture you can download just scan it with your phone you can get the wallet and here is their who what is the blockchain when I say blockchain what comes into your mind what's the image that comes to your mind anyone chain a chicken what else any anything what comes to your mind what it's actually a tank the blockchain is only good for one thing if you think boxing is gonna kill cancer and it's gonna kill the banks and it's gonna replace all this other stuff my answer to you is no it's the slowest most expensive database ever created in humans history so it's only good for one or two things and we have to figure out what those are does anyone know who this guy is Satoshi know who is cut-stone era anyone met Scotstoun era hey we have one guy actually marry me exists so I love going to conferences and these kids you know they're 25 or 30 they get up and they say Satoshi invented the blockchain oh no Satoshi did not invent the blockchain the first blockchain was created in 1970 ok 1991 Scot created the milk couch Merkle tree and Satoshi this is a last page from Satoshi's white paper Satoshi four-times says hey you know this is the giant who on whose shoulders I'm standing that's a quote from somebody else if you know so Scott did not choose to join the theorem project or the Bitcoin project or any one of the five thousand startups that are in the blockchain space he's only supporting one projects which is Celsius and the reason is not because I'm so good-looking the reason is because he believes that we are actually gonna change we have the chance just like we did with VoIP to take something that used to cost $3 a minute and make it free we have a chance to take that 31 billion dollars that's it now that's $5 per person on the planet that's just what JP Morgan makes every year we can take that and give it back to the people and that's not hard now I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore what about you guys yes anyone here is mad they steal from you every day you work your asses off you go home and your bank steals from your pocket every day and you do nothing about it I told you I'm gonna say about things about banks so we need to cross the chasm right so Toshi was thinking he created Bitcoin then we got a theorem right now we're about to fall through this chasm we're not we cannot get through it so the question is what's gonna save us it's gonna be a security token I don't think so a lot of people think it is I'm telling you it's not going to be that is it gonna be non fungible tokens maybe right but I think the next big thing right now that we can all rely on is the stable coin so part of the people if you're serious about this you better do something about it not just sit there and come to conferences and get free swag okay and that's about bringing each one of you needs to bring ten people into this industry people that don't have any knowledge they're afraid of keys they don't understand what the crypto thing is that understand why you're in it and so on this is how our system works if you think if you think you understand this come talk to me I'll hire you in a minute three things to remember vojta Moy equals mc-squared power to the people download our app or seven percent or more and this is our secret to our success we only have 17 employees but most of them are women that is the secret you want to do a revolution and you don't have half of the population in it with you you're not gonna be successful thank you very much this is how you contact us and come talk to me and I would love to make this happen help me make it happen [Applause] you