Does Bitcoin matter? Does Bitcoin care? What do you think about it? The President of the United States believes that Bitcoin indeed matters. He labeled it a potential threat to the national security of the United States of America. I don't think that Bitcoin cares about what the President of the United States thinks about Bitcoin, which is kind of the point; for 1000s of years, the way that we designed the money was such that what people thought about that particular kind of money influenced the money, and the behavior of that money and the rules under which that money would be able to exist. What will be the next step? The next step is that Bitcoin will still not care. Bitcoin will still do its own thing, the network that will enable anyone to transfer value in an unfettered manner and without any possibility of nation states stopping it or organizations interfering. The European Union, for example, is the latest to delude themselves that they will be able to stop Bitcoin. The European Parliament voted a few weeks ago a resolution that will be implemented in all the member states that will impose reporting requirements on Bitcoin exchanges that are stricter than not those imposed on any bank. A bank is required to report on the source and the destination of a transaction when it is larger than the equivalent of $10,000 or 10,000. Euro. The rule that is now going to be imposed in Europe is for this reporting to apply at any amount being transferred; it is frankly, ridiculous, and it is not going to achieve whatever supposed desired effect the legislators felt they would need to act in order to achieve because Bitcoin doesn't care. You should care about what the nation states are doing, and I am looking forward to understanding that you are caring, but you should also care for yourself and be fine with the fact and recognize your ability to let go of the feelings that you have towards Bitcoin, because Bitcoin doesn't care. #finance #bitcoin #money

What is going to take to move Bitcoin and Blockchain and crypto from 10s of millions, maybe 100 million to billions of people adopting it and using it daily. I'm here back in Dubai, where I will be speaking at conferences, talking about the various crypto technologies that are certainly very important. However, often, the teams that are analyzing how to improve these technologies, neglect other fundamental barriers to adoption. So many wonderful technology solutions require dozens of difficult steps until you can do something, while others have a promise of providing you with great financial returns. However, they require a commitment and the ability to manage the risk that not a lot of people have. Finally, even though we speak English, and many of the people follow us as well, the vast majority of the people on the planet do not. It is crucially important to overcome these barriers if we want to scale crypto solutions to billions of people. For the past few months, I have been working with a talented and passionate team that is building exactly that: CheetaX is focusing on India's 1.3 billion people, which is a huge market opportunity. Their current solutions for savings provide abysmal returns, and the population is ready to adopt something new. It has one of the largest Internet populations in the world, and smartphone distribution is huge: an estimated 800 million people have smartphones. Now CheetahX wants to provide a very simple solution with easy onboarding, and the one-click decision for a bridge towards what we call DeFi Yield Opportunities, really simplifying what can be done. Not everyone in India speaks English or Hindi, and as a matter of fact, hundreds of millions of people speak neither of those two languages, but their local language. CheetahX plans to release its application in seven languages to provide a necessary gateway to crypto adoption to these hundreds of millions of people, and the time is now because the infrastructure is here. The people are ready. We need to provide them with smart solutions. And we need to enable them to learn so that they can adopt crypto and its advantages. CheetahX is already providing the waitlist for signing up in their application, and they also have a native token that will be used as a reward token in their learning platform, and so many other ways. On cheetahx.com people can already start understanding how they are aiming to approach this incredibly rich and promising market. Will India be only the first step? Will CheetahX go on to conquer Southeast Asia or Africa or other important markets? Well, we will see but the billions of people who haven't been using Blockchain and crypto solutions until now certainly have a new player that they can leverage If they want to make their first steps in this exciting world. #india #crypto #startup

“The Cult of Done Manifesto” by Bre Pettis and Kyo Stark states that there are three stages of being: not knowing, action, completion. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.There is no editing stage.Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.Once you’re done you can throw it away.Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.Destruction is a variant of done.If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.Done is the engine of more. Bre Pettis wrote, together with Kio Stark, “The Cult of Done Manifesto” in 2009. He then went on to found MakerBot, and I'm sure he is doing exciting things today. At the time, when I read “The Cult of Done Manifesto”, it very strongly resonated with me; if you follow the context, you can still hear echoes in so many things that I keep often repeating in many of the subjects that I talked about. How important it is to test things out, how important it is to try new things, how natural it is to make mistakes. I am sure that there are dozens of more concepts that are smartly buried, and can take seeds from within this manifesto. I recently had the chance to remember it because I am working with a very smart and passionate startup that is now coming out of their “stealth mode”. When you’re in this stage, no one knows what you're doing, and you are not ready to confront the crude reality of the world. But you must come out of your comfort zone, and face reality to receive both good and bad reception. Maybe you’re sharing your documentation, and people are trying passionately to poke holes in them, which is perfectly fine. If people just say “Oh, wow, this document is great. It is so inspiring, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it”, what could you learn? How could you improve? It’s better to hear this criticism and try to improve your idea and mentality: How much do you believe in what you are doing on one hand and on the other? How smartly Can you listen and incorporate what actually of the criticism makes sense? How can you distinguish between what you can safely discard and what instead matters to you? Of course, rather than discarding, you have answers that you are able to rapidly develop or memorize as needed and provide the answer to that criticism without trying to deflect it and acknowledging it, but also letting the other person understand that you actually thought about what they are saying. Make mistakes, because now is the time. Look at Elon Musk, for example: he has 17 million followers, yet he still makes plenty of mistakes. Don't treat your social media with gloved hands, instead just post stuff that you can always delete. Just reach out. Just make it done. #procrastination #motivation #doing

Russia's attack against Ukraine is the largest conflict in Europe since World War Two. There are countries that believe to be far enough to be able to ignore it, or to take a balanced stance without taking sides: they are wrong. In today's globally interconnected world, these conflicts have repercussions, the geopolitics of war in the 21st century leaves no one untouched. Over the next weeks and months, missile attacks will continue, bombarding and destroying Ukrainian cities. The determination of the population will be crucial. If Russia is able to eliminate the democratically elected Ukrainian government, they will install a new one who will be friendly to Russia. But even if they were to declare victory with this government in place, that will not mean that they will have conquered Ukraine as a country. Putin's decision has fundamentally undermined his own rule, and has inflicted lasting damage to the political, economic future of Russia. The consequences are far reaching. China is saying cynically: “Well, if we cannot trade in dollars, because unfortunately Russia is under sanctions, maybe we can trade in Chinese currency. By the way, we just introduced the digital Yuan. Wouldn't this be a convenient way of modernizing our economic ties?” India imports almost all of its weapons from Russia. And as the United States strengthened its ties with Pakistan in its fight against Afghanistan and the Taliban, India, the largest democracy on the planet, decided that cozying up to the Russian dictator was a good choice. During the Ukraine-Russia conflict they are pretending that they can afford not to take sides. That democracy and the democratically elected government is not worth supporting and defending, even with just a declaration of principle. Over the course of the next few weeks, we will see a lot more people dying. And we will see conflict going on. The people of Ukraine and the country of Ukraine will come out of it winning and that the aggression that they are suffering currently will cease. #ukraine #russia #ukrainewar

I am recording this episode of “The Context” on the day that Russia invaded Ukraine. I don't know what will happen in the next few days, but it’s guaranteed that there will be a lot of confusion, and our ability to make sense of the world will also depend on the kind of tools that we use to interpret the information that we receive. We receive information from a wide variety of sources to a degree that hasn't happened before. We have television, YouTube, and other video content online. We have journalistic sources, as well as crowdsourced intelligence information that is coming from people on the ground. Most of us are not equipped with the tools that enable the correct aggregation and synthesis of these pieces of information. In the past, we would rely on professional journalists to complete this task. Over the past 10 years or so, many people have started to look at the work of journalists as not only chronicling what is happening objectively, but giving a slant by expressing their point of view, or the point of view of their editorial board. There are many reasons, but this is a paradox; drinking from the firehose of information is beyond our human individual capacity, and we don't trust the interpretation and aggregation of the news by professionals. Understanding that we are individually biased, and that our various sources are also unavoidably biased, should not reduce us to a paralyzed position of cynicism. Instead, it can be substituted by a more proactive stance with the help of innovative tools, like Improve the News. Developed by MIT professor and researcher Max Tegmark and his group, Improve the News allows you to explore different points of view, and understand their merit, being exposed to them in a controlled fashion. Even if you end up confirming that you keep disagreeing with the alternative points of view, you can incorporate your knowledge of them in your worldview, to improve your future decisions. #news #fakenews #information

Have you ever looked into the socks drawer of a horse? It's full of socks in ones, twos and threes, completely useless. Did you laugh? Didn't you? Well, that is the point. Either of those outcomes is fine. I want to be a comedian. Do I want to be a comedian? My father was an actor, and he kind of made sure that I wouldn't actually go on the path of performing as an actor. But as a public speaker, I can feel that at least to some degree I would enjoy it, and maybe would be good at it. Telling a story, hearing the feedback from the audience, being able to read how they react, who are attuned to your speaking, who is maybe even riveted. And then, when I deliver a keynote, after I'm done opening the Q&A, I actually understand that people have been provoked into thinking, into asking themselves questions. These are indicators that possibly I could attempt to act as well. Even seasoned professionals, comedians you admire, need the experience of developing the jokes, testing them and improving them until they work. And of course, during the process, they feel silly, they feel bad, they feel the hurt of the audience not laughing at the joke that doesn't work. So this is the same iterative process that I talk about so often, where you want to go somewhere, and you want to know what is needed in order to get there, but not exactly how it is going to play out. And as long as you are able to measure the outcome of a given step, you are able to improve, to try variants, until you achieve what you want. The opportunity of going out on a limb, of getting your hands dirty, of making mistakes, of understanding how and when these things can work is part of the effort that makes the result valuable. The effort that distinguishes those who actually invest in the process, and those who do not. Knowing that we have put in the effort that we have made, the mistakes and that we have achieved our goal of making people laugh. Watch the video until the end to hear my favorite joke. #comedy #jokes #experiment

We want to excel, to succeed, we want to continue to adapt to the changing conditions around us. But, statistically speaking, we are average. How can we overcome the contradiction? If you feel that you are smarter than the average in a particular group, you are probably wrong. This common condition is called superiority bias, and it is not one of the worst. We are all multi-dimensional people. There are so many ways that you can be seen and recognized objectively to be above average; you just have to realize that, on average, you are average. So how can you excel as an individual? You also have to realize that it is impossible to excel all around, across so many different parameters, so you have to pick the battles that you can win. Organizations have the same problem constantly, both internally and externally. Observers will want to be able to conclude that the organization is improving and is beating its competition, but if you look over a certain period in a particular industry, you’ll see that it will have an average rating, and the likelihood that a particular organization in that group is average is statistically very high. You also have to consider that organizations tend to become more and more risk-averse, especially if they have been successful and achieved a certain position in their industry. How can an organization avoid being seen as tending towards mediocrity? It is an effort in maintaining and improving company culture, it is an effort in allowing people to improve themselves by letting them learn, making them eager to learn. It is an effort in setting bars of objectives higher, constantly restructuring the organization as needed to make sure that it can achieve the harder objectives. Being able to understand the origins of mediocrity whether in an organization or ourselves, is the first step to be able to recognize how we can improve and to what extent we can improve, understanding also the limits of this ability, and understanding how we can reach a life worth living and an organization that is generative, that contributes to a society, that makes this world a better place to be in and to thrive. #excellent #mediocre #choice

After corporations and our democracies, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) promise to scale even further our ability to organize. The goal is to achieve our goals in a transparent and accountable manner, and in a flat partecipative structure that doesn't depend on the infallibility of anyone at the top. The concept of DAO was born a few years ago on top of the Ethereum Blockchain, when its developers wanted to make a new way to invest in projects available to everyone, where the investors would not only passively make their funds available, but through a voting mechanism could decide which were the projects that deserved to receive the funds. The experiment wasn’t a success because the code on which it was based was defective due to many bugs, but it was an important initial test. A DAO is not only for financing projects. There are many other use cases that can benefit from this kind of new organization; traditionally, we would tend to delegate the decision making to a single individual or a very small group of individuals, and one would think that this type of structure is necessary or maybe even optimal. It would appear very efficient on the surface, and that may be so in the short term. However, the danger is very clear: hierarchical organizations can efficiently make fatal decisions. One of the challenges of DAOs is to make sure that human attention and participation is sustained; it is hard work, which requires a lot of effort. You could think of a DAO powered by humans as a Proof of Work consensus algorithm, because it requires a lot of energy and a lot of thinking brains are needed in order to form the decisions of the DAOs. But how about a DAO powered by machines? One that is composed of software and hardware to an increasing degree, where the decisions are not made by humans, but are made by machines. This can also be very interesting in many different ways.

Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and now Web3. Will we ever stop? Probably not, but Web3 is going to represent an important evolution of what we can do on the internet. When the internet was born, it was for academic researchers, for technologists, specialists. With the introduction of the World Wide Web and the Mosaic browser, it has become possible for non specialists to roam the digital superhighway. The first websites were simply the display of information that you would read, and then there would be a hyperlink leading to another page or server somewhere when you clicked on it. This kind of static connection of web pages and web sites together was already a huge improvement in the area of information retrieval. Then, at the turn of the millennium, the concept of web 2.0 was born, which was the understanding that web pages and websites could and should display information much more dynamically, based on what the users also provided, text, photos, videos even. This information, that was enriching the websites, could be correlated displayed to others and others could react to them. This is what is now part of the daily life of many of us in this series of web services: social networks, video streaming sites, ecommerce platforms. Web 2.0 led to a concentration of power towards technology giants. The dream of Web3 has a better balance. The distributed and decentralized control of the information on unstoppable services, and platforms for the empowerment and emancipation of billions of people is going to take time to fully develop, maybe 10 years. But we are already seeing the glimpses of Web3 in Blockchain technologies, like the NFTs that are laying the grounds of solutions that will persist and will be important through the Metaverse. The most important component of Web3 is the challenge of a digital identity that is reliable, but is also flexible. Our digital identity must have multiple facets; if I need to be identified with my traditional passport, so be it. But if I want to be pseudonymous on some new platform that gathers one of my passions then I should be able to do so. Finally, I should also have the right to be anonymous. This flexible identity system doesn't exist yet, and it is going to be a cornerstone of Web3 applications. What other aspects of Web3 intrigue you? I’ll make sure to cover them on future episodes of The Context.

We are building the global financial and economic infrastructure for the 21st century, the Bitcoin Network. You hear a lot of superficial arguments of how Bitcoin is wasteful and must be stopped, but these arguments are misplaced. When you think about money, you think of a unit of account, a medium of exchange, and a store of value, which was used over the course of the history of human civilization. Today the most advanced form of money is represented by Blockchain-based networks, in particular Bitcoin, and it is important to understand why they have their particular features, and if they are fit to replace traditional forms of money. In the past for thousands of years, we have had gold backed money, and that too was Proof of Work. This is what is the greatest accusation against Bitcoin of how wasteful it is, but think about it: in order to have gold backed money, you had to discover, develop and control goldmines, and then extract the gold, refine it, transport it, and store it. This was and is still a pretty sizable effort, and that is why when you were able to show the physical gold, either in your vaults or in the form of coins, everyone admired you, the king, and trusted your money. Modern forms of traditional money are Proof of Work as well: the petrodollar shows the ability of the United States to protect oil trade, and impose the monopoly use of the USD on it; fiat currencies derive their value from the cumulative effort of the people working in the economies accepting them. We have an abundance of energy, and Bitcoin computers are not going to fry the world; they are going to bootstrap the world into discovering new opportunities and new ways to build a civilization. You must understand the details of this, at least to such a degree that you do not fall prey to the superficial analysis that is directed against it from the point of view of the incumbent interests. The reason why you must understand it is because it is unstoppable, not only from the point of view of cyber attacks, but also from the point of view of governments not being able to make it illegal to own or to transfer. Bitcoin is going to be part of our future and it has been for the past 10 years. Hopefully, you will stop blaming it for being wasteful.