TRANSKRYPCJA VIDEO
Free Cities Foundation
David Parkinson: A Trojan Horse to Freedom
Opis wygenerowany przez Skrybot
Join David Parkinson, founder of Musket, as he delves into the potential of Bitcoin as a tool for financial freedom and resistance against oppressive control. In this enlightening discussion, David explores the challenges and solutions for merchant adoption of Bitcoin, highlighting the need for simpler ways to accept this innovative form of currency.
Using a blend of serious discussion and lighthearted memes, David takes us on a journey from the laying of the transatlantic sea cable in 1866 to the present day, painting a vivid picture of Bitcoin's role in the evolution of commerce and telecommunications.
As we navigate the digital age, trust in traditional systems is waning, and the power of governments to restrict our freedoms is growing. David offers a compelling argument for Bitcoin as a beacon of resistance against such control, drawing parallels between society's current state and the dystopian world of The Matrix.
In a world where distractions often overshadow the quest for true freedom, David calls for a societal shift in perspective. He challenges us to rethink our relationship with the government and media, advocating for the power of Bitcoin as a weapon for freedom.
This presentation also uncovers the purpose behind Musket. Named symbolically after the tool that sparked historical revolutions, Musket aims to challenge central banks' control and restrictions, empowering individuals to maintain their freedom and human rights to transact and trade.
Join us for this thought-provoking discussion and discover how Bitcoin and Musket are paving the way for a future where financial freedom is within everyone's reach.
Transkrypcja wygenerowana przez Skrybot
Okay. Hello, everyone. Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to this. So, you're with me for 10 minutes. I was doing the slides for this presentation, and the team said, look, it's a little bit dry. It's a bit serious and boring. So, I've just done 20 slides of memes just for fun. So, it's quite a serious topic, but hopefully it's lightened a little bit. So, go with me on it. So, my name is David Parkinson. I'm the founder of Musket, and we're going to cover today. . . what we do at Musket, what the business is, and why. And I think that will hopefully resonate with quite a lot of you here. So handcrafted slide.
We've spared no expense on production value here, as you can tell. So what is Musket? So we founded Musket 18 months ago. We've been in market for the last year. And the deep set belief, the thing that drives us is that Bitcoin is money. And. . . We believe that Bitcoin is not just a store of value, it's also a medium of exchange. And there's an enormous debate raging about that right now. But for us, Bitcoin embodies freedom at the personal level and every other sort of financial freedom level. So it's money in the narrowest and broadest sense of the word. But to achieve that, we actually need greater adoption. Now, lots of people understand what Bitcoin is. A quick show of hands. Has everyone.
. . heard of bitcoin before you know what i'm talking about no there's a few people don't know about it okay um so you know to really accelerate this journey merchant adoption of bitcoin and the ability to spend it needs to accelerate and that's what we've tried to do now there was a few things that we ran into along the journey the first piece that we built was the ability to accept bitcoin in a self-custodial way in a way that is borderless unstoppable governments, any other entity cannot interject and stop the transaction. That's very much the ethos of Bitcoin. But there was also all kinds of friction in adopting Bitcoin. So every merchant quite often needed an additional device. They need to align regulatory reporting and tax and accounting.
And it's just quite difficult. Sometimes we would speak to an owner of a restaurant who hadn't trained his staff and he had a single device. So, you know, when people come to pay for things in Bitcoin because they're exercising their right to do so and their support for his alignment with the vision. It was a bad experience because there was no device, the staff weren't trained, and it was quite clunky. So we've sought to cut through all of that. The good slides come in a minute. So actually, where we started from was this quote from Carl Sagan felt quite pertinent because if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first start by inventing the universe. Well, our apple pie. . .
is merchant adoption and the use of Bitcoin in everyday life. But to get there, we had to first become the best payments business on the planet. Now, that's the journey that we're on. We have, I think we've got a world first that I'll show you in a moment. But our vision is to unite commerce, both from in-store experience and online experience, and to make it as frictionless and seamless as possible.
Now, we need to reinforce that positive impact of a bitcoin transaction but doing so requires a single stack so our capability now extends into payments for card present merchants any physical retail brick and mortar store payments across online so we have an online checkout that we can compete with major global providers there and we have an epos capability so you can order your till management you can you can execute your till management and inventory stock checking everything you need to do So if there are any business owners here, we'd love to talk to you. You can run your business from your yacht or your seastead whilst we're taking care of all the software and the payments in the background for you. And of course, Bitcoin comes as standard in the self-custodial way.
So just to put that in picture a little bit more, the in-store capability, card present machine and a physical terminal. I'm sure everyone has interacted with one of those at some point in their lives. The online gateway. Again, integrated with Bitcoin and then Bitcoin itself. So the solution is fully integrated. It's simple to use. It's self-custodial. And as far as we know, now I'm happy to be wrong on this. As far as we know, it's the first time that a single integrated device allows people to pay for goods and services with Visa, MasterCard, Amex, Google Pay, Apple Pay and Bitcoin. So, you know, I'm adjusting. But the concept there is that Bitcoin is actually the answer here. Bitcoin is the innovation, not us, really.
But the hard part is getting Bitcoin adopted. And Bitcoin, in our view, is a Trojan horse for freedom. It is the thing that allows us to push back on totalitarian states'control and maintain that degree of human experience to interact and transact with one another. And really, that journey started, in my mind, again, I'm happy to be wrong and debate this, but the moment that the very first transatlantic sea cable was laid between Europe and North America, around about the year 1866, it took that messaging time from two weeks down to two minutes, and that's an enormous leap. And you can see this depicted in this painting here. These are the sort of Silicon Valley tech bros of the 19th century. But they were waiting for that message to come through.
And that really set us on a path to where we are today. Money, if we believe that Bitcoin is money, it's the top of a telecommunications protocol. It's the very pinnacle of the tree. However, governments can intercept, can take steps to actually control our ability to make payments online. and to transact and they can curtail our freedoms. And that's why Bitcoin being completely insensible and unstoppable helps us to cut through that and to push back. So the why of Musket, why are we here? First of all, I think that the world doesn't really need another payments business. Not really. The world probably needs more people with backbone and people like everyone in this room and that is presented to actually say, enough's enough.
We think there's a better way of governing ourselves and running our lives. So I was inspired by a quote from Dominic Frisby, who wrote the first ever book on Bitcoin in 2014. The book, this is a separate book called The Life After the State. And the quote goes, take the time to consider what the right answer is. Accept that it will never happen in your lifetime, but advocate for it anyway, because it's the right thing to do. And I think, you know, for us, that really keeps us honest and means that we don't sway from our values and our main objective of making sure that Bitcoin is. . . accepted and to do that we have to invent the universe.
And why? And all of this really is because I think there's a significant decline in trust. You know, I for one feel that the final dragnet is coming down. With that move towards everything being digitized and digital, governments have got more power than they ever had and more ability to de-platform us, restrict our freedoms, challenge our privacies. And when a central bank digital currency comes in, which is absolutely inevitable. It's not going to be difficult for them to just turn off our transactions at the sort of blink of an eye. And here's the first meme of the day, by the way. I don't know, maybe you can keep count on how many there are.
But, you know, we've seen in the UK in the last few weeks, people have been put in prison for pushing views, not even particularly dangerous views, but pushing views and thoughts on some riots and disturbances.
civil disturbances on Facebook and Twitter and they've been jailed for that and their lives have been irreparably changed as a result and I think the big challenge that we actually face here is that and this is the sort of metaphorical Plato's cave not everyone sees the problem and I'd say we're probably amongst friends in this room everyone does seem to understand that government necessarily doesn't act in our best interests all the time but that's not true of the majority of the population and you know i don't really have any empirical evidence to back up any of this talk or the rest of it so just take it as my opinion um and challenge me on it and tell me i'm completely wrong on all of this but go with it for for the final sort of five minutes um if you can't see the problem does it therefore even exist um well i think when someone thinks that government is acting in their best interests this is the image that comes to mind when i uh when i hear them and you know A lot of people quite often say that government is the only thing that stops us from being exploited and you know the most terrifying thing is when someone says I'm from the government and I'm here to help because quite often again you'll find your freedoms are impinged in some way and that really sort of hit home for me during Covid you know I feel like governments took took the steps that they felt necessary but in many cases overreached absolute and really enjoyed this absolute power so I think they've got a taste and they just need a burning platform to do it again or something similar.
And I think, again, central bank digital currencies and payments is one of those enormous risks that we face. So we need to push back. And I think the one thing that really hit home for me during COVID was just how in sync governments and the media are and what that then does to the population and society. And I think once you see it. . . is the Wizard of Oz meme. Once you see it, you know, the man behind the curtain, who is it that's controlling our lives? Who is it that is pulling the strings and making us make certain decisions? It's quite frightening and you can see through it and it's just obvious propaganda and narratives and control over millions of people.
And, you know, I find it somewhat depressing because then you end up seeing that, actually, we aren't really that free. You know, we're given the illusion of freedom and we're given the illusion of free choice, but we are led to the proverbial abattoir. Whether you vote left or right, red or blue, doesn't seem to matter anymore. We are just cattle in the eyes of the government and the media. And I think for many, the big challenge is that ignorance is bliss. This is, for those that don't recognize this, this is a still from the film The Matrix, where one of the characters has been battling the sort of enemy for years, and he's just grown tired.
So actually what he wants to do is be plugged back into The Matrix, and he, it's not a spoiler, don't worry, but he wants to enjoy the pretend taste of the steak, of the experiences that he's having. He knows they're not real. but it's more comforting to him. And I think that's kind of where we are today. You know, you try and engage people about the ideas of freedom and maybe how government isn't acting in the best interests. And perhaps there's a different way. Maybe you could live on a seastead. Maybe you could grow some sort of community farm and actually have a better existence.
Well, then you get sort of the non-player character response of, you know, did you watch the game last night? And, you know, that really brings us full circle back to. . . the Roman times. This is the famous quote from Juvenal. Actually, what we're seeing is mass control through distraction and sustenance. So people are just craving to be fed and entertained. And we saw that just last week. I'm not making any advocation at all for, sorry, I'm not advocating for having MLA in any way at all, in either for or against. I'm just observing what happened. He's taken a very anti-government stance and is or certainly is reducing the size of government. And last week he banned the tax authority, closed it down.
But what we saw was enormous protests. I mean, hundreds of people protesting in the streets about the closure of the tax authority. And if you step back from that, you're thinking, hang on, are you just begging for more government and more taxation? It doesn't doesn't make sense from the way I see it. But then you also take a different lens on that and you actually realize. No, they're just scared. These people have never addressed or thought what their lives could be like if they were truly free or if there was another way. They've been gaslit from an early age.
They've spent their life working towards a goal that means that they can feed their family and they can watch football in the evening or whatever it is they do for entertainment. That has been shaken at the core now. So what are they going to do? What does their lives look like? And they're terrified. So I think I sort of understood that response. So I think the message, I guess, for us collectively here this weekend is this is a hard journey to freedom. You know, we have to stick the course and fight a lot of different fights and different areas. And I think if we don't, what happened in Argentina and what happened during COVID will happen again.
And the antibodies, the protectors of the system, they've detected a foreign body, the people advocating for freedom, and they want to close it down. So the media acts on the behalf of the government to implement policy and change people's minds and control them. People then end up policing the society themselves. So we have to win hearts and minds here. You know, the antibodies are going to be hard to overcome. And if we don't win that hearts and minds battle, then it will be a small fringe minority of people who have a degree of freedom. So, you know, is it time for change? I won't go sort of full Thomas Jefferson on you, but I think these are. . . fantastic words from the Declaration of Independence.
And I would argue that it is the right of the people and it's the right time now to abolish and institute new government or certainly change the way that we think of our relationship between society and government. And for us, we're trying to do the best that we can. We know this is a battle. We can't advocate for sort of full-on actual battles with government. We're a few sort of gunships and armories short. But Bitcoin, I think, is our weapon. Bitcoin is a Trojan horse to freedom, at least as a minimum, allows us to push back on those controls and restrictions from central banks and the ability to maintain our, not just our freedom, but our human rights to transact and trade with each other.
We shouldn't be told how much steak we can eat, how far we can drive, how to spend our money. That should be a free choice that we should have. So where we've ended up then, I said we're going to invent the universe and get to the apple pie. Well, sort of, you know, it's just a name, right? Musket. To us, Bitcoin is gunpowder. You know, we think Bitcoin has the ability on its own to really damage and challenge the role of governments and money. However, if you put it in the hands of the average man or woman, in the way that gunpowder was during the American Revolution, the French. . .
the French Civil War, the English Civil War, then actually, I know this is incredibly cliched, but we have the ability to, through our individual ability to push back, to say enough is enough. You've pushed us too far and you can't do exactly what you want anymore because we have toolkits that we can deploy against you. So that's where Musket came from. That's the origin of the name. And thank you for entertaining my talk for the last 10 minutes. .
S K R Y B O T
Skrybot. 2023, Transkrypcje video z YouTube
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