Return to Sound Money Principles at STS

I recently had the pleasure of presenting at the Sovereign Tech Summit (STS) in Santa Monica. This was an opportunity to pull back from markets and return to our guiding principle: "Sound Money is THE Challenge & Opportunity of our Lifetime." Here are the key conclusions:

1. Popular narratives around money, monetary policy, and the financial system are filled with lies and misconceptions.

2. Money is a tool or technology, created by the market to facilitate trade and investment.

3. Various items have been used as money, each with different degrees of scarcity, portability, fungibility, and divisibility.

4. Many powerful innovations in money (such as coinage, the telegraph, and the internet) have contributed to centralization.

5. Centralization makes inflation inevitable.

6. Inflation is the biggest challenge in the world, causing inequality, overconsumption, war, and eventually monetary regime change.

7. Crypto is inevitable due to three major trends:

   1. Monetary regime change likely within a 10-20 year time horizon.

   2. Digitization makes digital money likely, with Bitcoin being the first digital money.

   3. Demographic power over money, finance, culture, politics, etc., is shifting from Baby Boomers, who generally dislike Bitcoin, to Millennials, who are more favorable towards it.

8. Bitcoin and the crypto ecosystem significantly enhances sovereignty and freedom, with numerous practical use-cases despite its shortcomings:

   1. Bitcoin miners harnessing stranded energy to create power availability.

   2. Banking the unbanked and building communities in underdeveloped areas.

   3. Protecting against hyperinflation.

   4. Avoiding asset confiscation during war.

   5. Providing greater access to USDs outside of the US through stablecoins, which are more useful because they are truly global.