- Set aside 2 hours, find someplace where you can actually concentrate on this talk, and prepare to learn about the future of money. Watching this is like getting an exceptional lecture on the future of the Internet in 1992. The difference being, whereas email threatened the incumbency of the fax machine, and whereas the web challenged the incumbency of the major media and retail businesses who most exploited those systems, blockchains will threaten the incumbency of institutions until now solely the province of governments, in particular at this time, money.
This short presentation and lengthy Q&A with a Canadian Senate panel is easily the most cogent, most articulate, best-informed, and least frothy explanation of the paradigm-changing power of blockchains in general and Bitcoin in particular. The Q&A and Andreas's answers are exceptionally enlightening.
There are a couple of folks on the panel who clearly have some sort of interest in preserving and defending the financial status quo of banking incumbents at the expense of... really, whatever - starving kids in Africa, for example. One such fellow, as he gets a clear view of the power of blockchains, exclaims more or less that there's no way that the banks are going to just let this happen. For many in power, moldy concepts like freedom of speech and association are so easily swept aside.
Better yet is how clearly impotent they are in light of the rest of the content of the discussion and how effortlessly Andreas sweeps their concerns aside in light of the need to both serve a greater good and to not be the reason that their nation slips behind.
Insightful YouTube comment by Rip Rowan
Andreas Antonopolous' intelligence and eloquence is single handedly doing more for the Bitcoin community than the rest of the Bitcoin network combined, including the Bitcoin foundation itself.
I second that. I've just finished it and it's one of the most informative videos on the subject I've watched, including a few documentaries that are now out.