Stafford Masie’s electrifying keynote at the BNC#6 conference in Hermanus delved deep into the transformative power of Bitcoin and the impending AI revolution. With bold insights, Masie challenged conventional notions of money and work, urging listeners to grasp the significance of these paradigms in the digital age. Masie’s compelling narrative intertwined the rise of Bitcoin as a disruptive force in global finance, especially resonating with Gen Z’s disillusionment with traditional banking systems. He painted a vivid picture of a future where Bitcoin, AI, and generational shifts converge to usher in an era of unprecedented opportunity and financial empowerment, leaving his audience inspired and reimagining their path to prosperity.
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Summary of Stafford Masie’s keynote address at BNC#6 in Hermanus
Stafford Masie’s keynote speech at the BNC#6 conference in Hermanus was a captivating exploration of Bitcoin’s profound impact on the future of finance and society at large. Masie began by highlighting Bitcoin’s meteoric rise in value, from its early days to its current status as an undervalued asset class with immense potential. He emphasized that despite widespread interest, many still struggle to grasp Bitcoin’s true essence and utility.
Masie then delved into the generational divide, pointing out how younger generations like Gen Z are disillusioned with traditional banking systems and seek alternatives like Bitcoin. He emphasized that Bitcoin isn’t just a speculative investment but a revolutionary store of value and medium of exchange. Masie also touched on the intersection of Bitcoin with AI, noting how both technologies are reshaping the job market and economic landscape.
One of the key takeaways from Masie’s speech was the concept of financial empowerment through Bitcoin. He urged listeners to rethink traditional notions of work and savings, advocating for a future where individuals could achieve financial freedom through prudent investment in Bitcoin. Masie’s vision painted a picture of a new golden age where technology, abundance, and financial liberation converge, offering hope and inspiration to all who seek a brighter financial future.
Read the full transcript of Stafford Masie’s keynote address at BNC#6 in Hermanus ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
00:07 They normally when I’m on stage at BizNews, I’m a little bit more event I have big slider, but they said this is working guys. I guess if I move this way, yeah, okay. Great. Just working. There’s a lot that I want to articulate because so much has happened since the last time I spoke at BizNews. I think the first time I mentioned Bitcoin at BizNews, I think the price was $16,700, right? Then I spoke again at BizNews and the price was 23, $24,000. What’s the price this morning?
00:37 It was actually this morning, it went to 74,000. Let’s get that right. Right, so in terms of everyone that has been on a BizNews stage and the history of BizNews hosting this event, nobody else has spoken about an asset class that has outperformed the asset class that I usually speak about when I get up on stage. And that’s Bitcoin. I am surprised that there are people in a banking keynote versus in this Bitcoin keynote. Right?
01:02 And it’s because there’s so many of us that are still captivated by the way kind of fiat works and we’re still confused. What shocked me was when I listened to some of the keynotes yesterday and some of the interviews yesterday, I mean, one was this Magnus here. Magnus, though he’s not here. He should be here. Because one of the things that Magnus said was he doesn’t get it. Someone asked me about Bitcoin. He says, I don’t understand it. I’ve read the 11 page Satoshi Nakamoto. He couldn’t even say Satoshi Nakamoto properly. I was like, and that’s the problem that we have right now. He said this new asset is here.
01:31 And very few people truly comprehend what it is. And the reason is people aren’t willing to do the work. There’s a slide that I always used to pick up, I always used to pick up, put up is, everyone wants to know should they, they should buy it or whether they should sell it. The line is very long at that little counter. But the counter that has the understand Bitcoin has almost no one at it. The objective here today is that you’re gonna learn about Bitcoin. This is the number one thing I’m gonna tell you and I’m gonna tell Charles and I’m gonna tell everyone is, is go out and understand this thing better.
01:59 It is the most underrated, undervalued asset class in the world today, even at $74,000. I’m not here to give you investment advice, but everyone that has bought Bitcoin since I started to buy Bitcoin, you’re all up. So I’m okay with that. But this is not investment advice, official investment advice. The point here is, is this thing is not understood. This thing is not understood as an asset class from a speculative perspective. It’s not understood as a medium of exchange. It’s not understood as an SOV, a store of value.
02:28 It is not even understood from an energy perspective. And let me say something that’s quite controversial. And if you do the work, you’ll get to where I’m at with this. And here’s one single point. What Bitcoin is doing for the fiat world as a store of value is minuscule compared to what it will do for energy and the energy sector in the world over the next four to five years. It’s going to be extraordinary what Bitcoin mining will do to the energy sector. When you apply a Bitcoin mine,
02:58 to an energy producer, it’s incredible how it stabilizes a grid. It’s incredible how it takes the economics of that entity and takes it to the complete next level. It’s incredible how it allows IPP, Independent Power Producers, to connect onto a grid and actually makes that entire, for lack of a better term, that equation, that monetization algorithm that makes that entire partnership make sense, make even more sense.
03:26 From an actuarial science, when you take a Bitcoin mine and you connect it between an IPP and a major grid producer, and you are on those transmission lines, it’s incredible because when the wind is blowing and this grid is full and the IPP has all this energy and nowhere to store it, that’s when Bitcoin will grab it and eat it. When nobody’s using it, that’s when Bitcoin will grab it and eat it. Then Bitcoin can be throttled in that way. What it’s doing on the energy side is what I want you to go away and investigate even more.
03:54 It is extraordinary. I’m involved in a project right now and I can’t disclose what it is, but it could be potentially the largest Bitcoin mine in the Southern Hemisphere. And what we’re doing is we’re attaching it to a grid that’s fairly unstable. And the problem with this grid is its transmission lines. And the problem that it has is it’s got axis supply of alternative energy, but it doesn’t know what to do with it. And that’s the problem, that in the world today, I think more than a third of all the energy that we produce in the world goes away.
04:23 That was a shocking statistic that I learned over the last year. Almost 30 to 35% of all the energy that we produce, that we harness, we can’t utilize. That’s the Bitcoin story even further. This thing is not understood. So now I’m going to articulate some things. I’m going to go through fiat currencies. I’m going to talk in your languages. So let’s go through it. So if I had to explain a token and I wrote this down, it has 27 trillion in supply. It has an unlimited cap.
04:54 1% of the holders own 30% of it. The issuer is 34 trillion in debt. The issuer has printed 25% of the supply of this token in the last six months. And it’s inflation associated with that of control. If I told you to buy in that core, so would you buy that token? All right, that’s the US dollar. That’s what the US dollar is today. The global metrics for me that scare the living daylights out of me.
05:22 is that more than 20% of US dollars was printed in the last 12 to 18 months. More than 60% of US dollar in circulation today was printed from 2020 until now. That is not sustainable. That’s a money printing machine, right? And I think that the pivotal question that everyone will be asking moving forward is what is money? If you’re to ask me what is the number one question that everyone should have in their minds, I think it’s two questions.
05:50 What is money? And the second one is what is work? Those are the two questions facing humanity today. Bitcoin addresses the one and Bitcoin only addresses the one. Charles is going to get up on stage today and he’s going to perhaps represent the other coins. But I want to say there is only one. There is no second best. There’s only one Bitcoin. Yes, you can go play with the others. It’s OK. Ethereum is OK. But Ethereum is solving for something very different from what Bitcoin is solving.
06:19 very very different, right? This store of value, what it does with power, the proof of work, et cetera. When you get this truly in your head, then you’ll see how different this thing is from anything else. So the one question is, what is money? And people are starting to wake up to the fact that we need to answer this question. It’s fascinating when I speak to school kids or I go to universities and I talk about crypto. Kids all want to now understand why are things so broken? Because what we’ve done to Gen Zs has completely disintermediated them.
06:48 Think about Gen Zs today, right? They’re completely disintermediated from an economic perspective. They can’t afford the houses. They can’t afford the things that we could afford when we were their age. Because we, 2021, what did we do? We’re hyper concentrated through stimulus and COVID packages, et cetera. We stimulated the 55-year-old and above range of human beings. You guys got all that money. Everyone else didn’t. Companies that stopped by, Bracks, et cetera, et cetera. But we’ve had an enormous concentration
07:18 hyper concentration of wealth in the world. So Gen Z’s are completely disintermediated. So for them to participate in an economy, they can’t really get there. That’s the number one issue. Number two issue with Gen Z’s is they hyper digitize. Number three is they believe more in their theory than they believe in the real. Gen Z’s don’t want a nice sneak on their foot. They want a nice sneak in the metaverse because they can create financial instrumentation associated with that. Gen Z’s went through the 2008 financial crisis.
07:47 They know banks lie. They know banks don’t tell the truth. They saw what happened to their parents during the financial crisis. They can still completely recall that. So this notion of a bank with a big vault in your head subconsciously that was imprinted on you when you was a kid, Gen Zs don’t believe that. They don’t believe in the current financial structure. And they’re investigating very, very deeply into it. The last thing about Gen Zs is it’s the most privacy-violated group of human beings that we’ve ever seen in the history.
08:17 of humanity. Their entire lives live in social media containers and they have no right over it. Their birthdays, the first day they were born, the first time they walked, the first holiday that they went on, the first aeroplane ride, their first graduations, all of that content you and I put up into social media containers and we just clicked the EULA, yes, yes, yes, we installed the app. What we didn’t realize is we were rendering the entire lives that we have into an external container that they have no right over. These are the people that are driving these coins.
08:47 These are the people building these metaverses, these tokens, these NFTs, these Ethereum platform, these layer two things. It’s not built by people my age. It’s built by people in their early 20s. If you take a look at where all the VC money is going, it’s going towards them. So we’re seeing a generational shift, but this generation is also asking, what is work? Because Fiat is broken work, right?
09:13 We work, work, work, work, work. We get super indebted. We pay off our debt and we sort of live the last two years of our lives like we should have lived our entire lives and our kids are going to that same cycle. And kids are just in front, they don’t want that. So the question about what is work, that’s the AI story. I don’t have time today, but the two questions is what is money? And that’s what we’re addressing today. The other one is what is work? And that’s the AI story. What’s very funny for me in the world today is that in the United States, everyone’s asking what’s this Bitcoin thing? What’s its utility?
09:43 What’s fascinating to me is how many people in the Western world today don’t get Bitcoin. Yet everyone outside of the United States gets its utility. If you live in Venezuela and Argentina, if you live in South Africa, if you live in Egypt, just in the last three weeks. Right? The Egyptian dollar versus Bitcoin. Did you see that? The God candle in one day. If you live in Turkey, you know Bitcoin. So Bitcoin is understood fascinatingly.
10:12 outside of the G4. And you know what’s conversely so, is how few of us outside of the G4 understand what’s happening with artificial intelligence inside of the G4. That’s the conundrum that I see happening. They don’t understand Bitcoin and we don’t understand AI and what AI is gonna do to the job market. But the two have come at exactly the same time. In a world where we’re gonna have
10:39 Ultra abundance you as people that have done your MBAs and your iconic economic minds You don’t understand how to compute abundance in your actuarial science work where everything’s abundant and labor and Intelligence is disseminated when the labor and intelligence separates from each other. We don’t know how that economy works and That’s where we live today What is happening is intelligence is separating from human consciousness and that’s the dilemma that we’re gonna have to face
11:06 And what does work look like? The granite is that that’s very interesting, but that’s going to lead to abundance. And that abundance is being matched by what? The first true scarcity we’ve ever seen in humanity. It’s such a beautiful thing. We’ve got this hyperabundance through AI. And then conversely, so we’ve got this, this true authentic scarcity algorithm protocol thing that’s meeting it at the same time. AI and Bitcoin were made for each other. What’s the biggest challenge of AI?
11:37 Biggest challenge of AI is repudiation. Is it authentic? Is it real? Is this the real thing? We all know that this is gonna be our biggest challenge of AI, but guess what? What is the biggest truth network in the world? What’s the biggest truth computer in the entire world? It’s Bookway. It’s the largest crypto computer in the entire world. It can exchange value without any third party having to verify.
12:04 That’s incredible. We’ve never had that. So I’m gonna go through some more. Yes, yes, so Bitcoin’s performance since we last spoke. Right now, today, I just put some things down. But it was very interesting, I was gonna put Larry Fink up. Larry Fink’s become like the biggest Bitcoin advocate, which is astonishing to me, because just the first BNC when I got up, Larry Fink, I had a slide of him up and what did he say? The biggest fraud and the biggest scam ever. Right, that’s what Larry Fink from BlackRock said. Today, BlackRock’s iBit ETF.
12:34 We look at the performance, right? Let’s go through it. It’s not bigger than silver. It’s coming for gold. In eight weeks, the Bitcoin spot ETF asset total is half of gold’s spot ETF in eight weeks. This is astonishing, right? This amount of inflows, and people still find like, what’s the utility to this thing? What Larry Fink will tell you is, it’s a flight to safety, which is astonishing.
13:02 Okay. It’s the largest we’ve ever seen of inflows and ETFs in the history of ETFs. We’ve never seen anything like this, which is astonishing. It’s not going to stop. People are like, when is this going to stop? It’s not because guess what? These ETF flows right now. I was doing some research last night. These are ETF flows on the basis of people being asked. So someone will call the brokerage house and say, can you please put in? Then they will do it. It’s not proactive selling yet. Black rock fidelity, et cetera.
13:31 They don’t doing proactive selling at the moment. Yes, there are some road shows going on, but their trading desks are not proactively selling yet. And look at the inflows that we see. Something is going on. And someone always says, oh, this is so small relative to fear. This is so small. Yes, but it’s an apex predator. It’s coming, it’s coming for gold. It’s coming for property. No, it’s coming for bonds. It’s coming for art. A friend of mine sold all his artwork and he’s going into Bitcoin. A guy looked at the artwork.
14:00 category in the world. It’s 18 trillion dollars. That’s how big art is in the world. Bitcoin’s coming at that. Can I just, I’m going to read this and then I’m going to give over this one single thing. It’s a tweet that someone did last night and I just, I thought it’s just an incredible tweet and I’ll read it because it sums up everything. Let go of the fear of a million dollar Bitcoin. It’s happening. But it doesn’t mean the world will fall apart. It will merely be a chance for value from assets that leak value into one that doesn’t.
14:30 We want that doesn’t. What’s so scary about that? In fact, the world is going to improve along the way. A new golden age is in front of us. Think about our current reality. We tell people to work for 45 years nonstop, store as much value as they can in the SNMP 500, and they’ll hopefully have enough to retire one day. What an absolutely depressing prospect. 45 years filling out spreadsheets just to end up playing bingo in a nursing home.
14:57 Meanwhile your children are too busy to visit you because they’re following the exact same path you did. No wonder most people don’t even bother saving or planning for the future. No wonder people have lost hope. Bitcoin is the new new deal. Work hard in your 20s when you’re full of energy and ambition save as much as you can in Bitcoin and watch your purchasing power grow rapidly year over year. If you stay diligent you can be financially free in your 30s as your Bitcoin stack grows your purchasing power for f***
15:25 faster for your expenses, you can afford to start a family, you can gradually increase your living standards. Life gets noticeably better over time. That’s the hope that humanity’s first truly sound money provides. And it’s here just in time for the next tech revolution, when the cost supports multiple tech breakthroughs that will lead to massively decreased costs of production. Everything is getting better and cheaper for Bitcoin holders. But that will only accelerate with the coming breakthrough in AI. People are terrified of change, programmers are freaking out as AI starts to do…
15:54 what they can do better. There’s no denying it, professional button push pushers are an endangered species. But the people of the future won’t believe how much time we spend toiling away on computers when we could have been enjoying time with our families or spending time in nature instead. Just as we can’t believe how it used to be normal to employ children in sweatshops just in the near 1900. If you push buttons for a living, your best move is to adopt the bitcoin standard as soon as possible.
16:22 and save profits in BTC while you still can. You may find that it gives you freedom, you didn’t even realize it was possible. In the future you feared you will end up being far more beautiful than the present.”
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