The Impact of Technology on Humanity

He is a science historian.

I've read 100,000 pages of history.

And I think the story of history is humanity's condition

was improved when we got clean water, clean food, clean air,

electricity, clean power, when we got petroleum,

when we got cars, when we got nuclear energy,

when we got antibiotics.

If you look at the plight of humanity for thousands

of years, people are dying at age 30.

There's a 40% infant mortality rate because the food's dirty,

the water's dirty, and they've got no hope.

And when they were dying of dirty water and dirty food,

they didn't know they were dying of dirty water and dirty food.

We bled George Washington to death.

Every rich person in the Middle Ages

died of gout because they drank red wine,

because they couldn't drink water,

because it was contaminated.

And so all of these companies, if you

look at the mortality rate of a corporation is 99%,

the average life expectancy of a company is 10 to 15 years.

And you can say, well, we'll just take it for granted.

Companies should only last 10 years.

Just like 40% of your kids, maybe they

should just die before the age of five,

because that's just the way God willed it.

Or maybe we should just die at age 31,

which is the life expectancy in Elizabethan England.

But the point is, they didn't die

because they were genetically predisposed to die.

They died because they had dirty food, dirty water,

dirty energy.

They worked themselves to death.

And the best thing that ever happened to humanity

was the passage of technology.

So Satoshi put his finger on one observation.

The observation is the money is corrupt and dirty

and is defective.

And you want me to show you how it's defective?

I tell you a thousand stories of people being

murdered for their money.

Every single story of Jews fleeing from authoritarianism,

every story in Germany of the Protestants, the Catholics

murdering each other, everybody that came to America,

they came because they're fleeing for property rights.

The entire history of the human race

is littered with tragedy because people never

had proper economic energy.

A type 1 diabetic can't store organic energy.

They will eat themselves to death.

Fat is the way you store organic energy.

Somehow, over the course of hundreds of millions of years,

mammals figured out how to store organic energy,

and they had fat cells.

We, as humans, have not had the ability

to store economic energy properly.

We tried with gold.

It never quite worked.

I could give you 100 examples of it not quite working.

I can give you 1,000 examples of hyperinflation

dating back to 500 BC of money not quite working.

For the first time in human history,

we have invented a technology that

allows a human to tightly bind economic energy to their person

or for a corporation to tightly bind economic energy

to the corporation.

What it means is you don't have to suffer

an early painful economic death.

And you can tell me, oh, that doesn't matter.

But I would point to everyone in Africa.

I would point to all of the misery in Cuba and North

Korea and Venezuela.

I would point to the misery in the aftermath

of hyperinflationary incidents that

took place in Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Russia.

I could go on forever.

There are literally 100,000 pages.

Read the story of civilization by Will Durant,

and you will find 1,000 examples of currency collapse

and economic misery.

And this person, Satoshi, offered us this gift.

The gift is you get to own your own money,

and no one can take it away from you.

You get to keep it.

You get to keep your life force.

And what do I think will happen?

I think that companies' life expectancy on the Bitcoin

standard goes from 10 years to 30 years to 40 years

to 100 years.

And I think living longer is a good thing.

And I think families' life expectancy

is dramatically increased.

I could do the simple math for you, the half-life of money in gold is 30 years.

Gold debases at 2% a year. 30, 35 years.

The half-life of money in Bitcoin is forever.

0% inflation makes your money last forever.

So, I think that some people will not appreciate it, and they won't get it. That's okay.

You don't have to buy it. Lots of people won't buy it.

By the way, I do think that if you ask how many Americans own InterCare, they just tipped the election in favor of Trump.

I think they care. I think the crypto lobby is the number one political force today.

So, I do think there's a lot of people that do agree with me. They do get it.

There are $800 billion to $1 trillion of real money that has been invested in the network.

You can trace it if you like, but that doesn't mean it's for everybody.

Everyone didn't install electricity in Florida. Sorry, air conditioning.

That's new. All sorts of technologies don't get embraced for 30 years, and this won't.

But I would say clean money is just as important as antibiotics.

It's just as important as fat. It's just as important as clean electricity.

So, that's my answer to you. It's technology. It makes the world a better place.

I think that for a billion human beings that are destined to economic misery, for them it's the matter of life or death.

You're not one of them. We'll stipulate. Lots of Americans aren't one.

But drop yourself in Nigeria where it's illegal to own the dollar, where the Naira is going to zero,

and then try to give some money to a person you want to help in Nigeria or capitalize a company in Nigeria.

Tell me how you're going to do it, because generally the answer is, well, we just don't.

Everybody stays poor, every company fails, and all the economies collapse.

That's the same answer as a type 1 diabetic. We just don't. We just die.

I think insulin to a type 1 diabetic is Bitcoin to an African. It's a useful thing.

Thank you.

Thank you. Michael Saylor.