Snowden Bitcoin2024 Speech: Bitcoin's Privacy Challenges in the AI ​​Era

This article is Snowden's video link speech at Bitcoin2024, compiled by 0xjs@黄金财经

Hello everyone, it's great to be with you. You guys are such a great group.

First of all, it's great to be with you. Not long ago, I spoke at the Bitcoin Conference in Amsterdam, and we talked about very different topics. It's amazing that in just nine months, we have seen such a big change. The topic last time was that the rules of the game are unfair, but we can't leave. In fact, we feel that this game is so good that we can't leave. We put up with these injustices because we have no other choice.

What's amazing is that we are starting to create our own choices. Nine months ago the central topic was Gary Gensler, Gary Gensler, Gary Gensler. Everyone was paying attention to what he said, and I had to remind everyone that Gary Gensler is not Daddy Bitcoin. It's easier to make that point now because it turns out that Gary Gensler is not Daddy Bitcoin. Ladies and gentlemen, we are winning, but we haven't won yet, so we have to make sure we don't get caught.

Unfortunately, this is also the end of the happy part of this speech, but I think there are so many people who will talk about happy things this year that you don't need me to say that. I noticed that this year we have more political representation, which is a beautiful and significant thing. We have reached a stage where initially they ignored us, then they fought us, but now they are trying to make us love them.

I want to make this point briefly because I don't want to spend my entire speech talking about politics, voting is necessary, but don't join a faction. They are not our representatives, they are not your personalities. They have their own interests, values, and pursuits. Try to get what you need from them, but don't give yourself to them, even if you have to vote for them.

Instead, I want to approach this conversation from a different angle. I want you to reflect on where we are, how we got here, and where we are going.

There is a quote from the book that I think is very resonant for this group. “I believe that in every country of the world the avarice and injustice of princes and sovereigns, abusing the trust of their subjects, has gradually diminished the actual quantity of the metal originally contained in their coin.” From Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, which he wrote in 1776.

We don’t play the metal game anymore, but if you look around you see it everywhere, affecting us, holding us in bondage. You see it in the internet, too.

What’s wrong with the internet? The problem is not the internet, but the world, as they become more and more one. A system has been built, not just through administration but through the concentration of resources and the intermediation of generations, that is inherently unfair.

I mean, look at the economy. Resources are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. Even the human voice. The winner-take-all model is evident, whether you’re talking about broadcast media, traditional media, newspapers, or social media. Minority opinions increasingly rely on the tolerance of censors to survive on the margins of the platforms.

You see truck drivers in Canada being de-banked, you see students in Colombia being fired for expressing their opinions. We don't have to agree with them, but they should have the right to debate, to persuade, to dissent, to protest. That's the engine of our progress, the existence of dissent. If we accept that the system we inherited is for the best and should not be changed or challenged, then we are saying that this moment in history is the best, and it's not. We know it's not.

Despite the many privileges and technological blessings we enjoy, life is still hard. But all the good things you enjoy are the result of someone's labor, effort, and ingenuity, who gave their time of life to us, to the human community. and the systems built around us are designed to extract as much of that as possible and return it to those who rule.

None of the issues I've raised are technical. They're all very broad and relevant to the average audience, but what I want to remind you of tonight is that I'm worried that's about to change. Our lives are increasingly mediated by screens, by slabs of glass. You are watching this talk, either live or by registering to watch it on your smartphone or laptop. No one goes to a counter to buy a ticket anymore, that’s not how the modern world works.

But in order to set up your computer, turn it on, log in, set up your account, take out your smartphone, charge it, turn it on, connect to a Wi-Fi access point, you have to click “Agree to continue.” You have to agree to someone else’s terms of service. You are forced to go through someone else’s permission gate, which is owned and controlled by someone else, who is accountable to no one. You look at Facebook, you look at Google, and you see how they abuse the trust of every person in every country. The EU tried to control them, but they were completely bypassed.

There was a General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that was supposed to fix all of this, but it didn’t work. They said, “If you break the rules, we’ll fine you 4% of your global revenue.” But the systematization of these technologies hasn’t happened, and it’s been many years. Whether we're talking about corporations or governments, we're talking about the same thing: systematized technology designed to manage our lives for the benefit of the institutions that are trying to organize us.

In some cases, we need that management. We need to be able to collaborate, to be able to work together, we need to be able to work together, right? But we need to agree to that at some level, and we should need to agree to that. It's not "tap OK to continue or decline and use my phone my way," it's "tap OK to continue or you can't use your iPhone, you can't use your Android phone." Whether it's made by Samsung, whether it's made by Google, whether it's made by Apple, you either play by their rules or you can't play at all. That should change.

We'll talk about this later, we've made a lot of progress in the context of money, which is why all of a sudden we're seeing politicians take a lot of interest in these audiences. They understand that a new center of power is emerging. But there's still a vulnerability for all of us, including all of the celebrities who are going to speak here, and that's AI.

I'm not one of those people who goes on the internet and yells, "AI safety, AI safety, robots are going to kill us, you need to worry about this." I actually want them to just dump all of these models on the internet and make them available to all of us. OpenAI is not open, it's a very closed model company that wants to profit at your expense. They want to train on your data, but they want to benefit themselves, and they don't want you to have access to these models. They don't want you to be able to download the models, extract the models, get the models that you can run at home, put on your phone, and do whatever you want with it. They want you to have to go back to their well, pay the fees, and only have access to this through their means, even if you do have the ability to run these models at home on the hardware.

The good news is that getting this stuff into the hands of the public, it's getting easier and easier to run these things at home. I'm not just saying this; I've been using these models at home for the past year. You can do this, too. Whether we're talking about diffusion models that generate images, like you think of web interfaces like Midjourney, which you can do at home, it's completely free, as long as you have the hardware to run it. Whether we're talking about large language models. Facebook, the company that I've been criticizing since the beginning of this talk, is actually doing some good things in this space. Not because they love you guys, or they love us, or they love me, or anyone else, but because they're afraid that their competitors, like OpenAI, will build a structure to prevent monopolies from forming and evading taxes. Facebook doesn't want to put themselves in that position, so they said, "Okay, we'll build the tools and give them to everyone else so that monopolies don't form and can't be used against us." This is more about self-interest than altruism, but I still appreciate it. I'm not a fan of Mark Zuckerberg, but he's doing great things in this area. I hope he continues. I know this won't last forever, but in this case, I welcome any help we can get.

But Why am I talking about this at a Bitcoin conference? The reason is that Bitcoin transactions are not private. Every one of you here knows this because this is 2024, not 2013 when we were saying, "Oh, Bitcoin is completely anonymous and it's criminal money." The only thing Bitcoin is not today is criminal money. It's secure hard currency that happens to be very useful. That's why all the investors are investing in it, all the developers are building it, all the people are fans of it, promoting it and attending events.

But if we accept that our transactions are not private, that they are always public, we're going to see more and more of what's happening in AI and all this data collection and data brokering and analysis. Our lives are being watched. We are being studied more deeply than at any time in human history, and the tools for deriving conclusions, inferences, and patterns are more powerful than anything ever invented.

What keeps me up at night in the context of AI is that they see the growing demand, interest, and appeal of Bitcoin. They are developing tools, systems, and methods to start combating it. Saying “we’ve watched long enough,” is like “a lion prowls an antelope away from the herd,” but it’s not just individual cryptocurrency users, we’re talking about the entire system.

How does this happen? What are they going to do? What are they going to do? The sad truth is they won't tell us. If we look at the NSA, we look at the CIA, we look at the DOJ, we look at the DEA, we look at the Treasury, we look at all of these agencies; they say there are missions, they say what they're going to do, they say what they can't do, what they're not allowed to do, but we see what they actually do. We know about mass surveillance because I exposed it. We know about the massive collection of data on everybody. We know that they're trying to fight all the encryption companies and tech companies that oppose them.

So in that context, what I think about, and what I hope you take back to your companies and reflect on, is that all the wonderful things that you're doing, all the things that you bring to the table, all the things that you're exciting your users to, all the users that sign up for your services, that use your apps, all the transactions that are being conducted in the name of freedom and free commerce, they have more resources than all of us put together. But we have the benefit of technology, we have the benefit of distributed computing, we have the benefit of distributed ledgers, and we have to think about how to make it more powerful. It's not enough to just win the hearts and minds of the public. We need to make it difficult for them to stop us. we need to make it difficult for them to simply pull up the phone records and see who was at this meeting and start paying attention to what they're building, what they're doing, who they're communicating with, what they're transacting.

That's why there's a lot of debate in the community about privacy, and I get it. It's hard because people say, "Oh, privacy is hard." That makes sense, but we have to go further. We have to go further to make the system more robust. We need to do this together. No one company is going to find a solution that's going to work. You can't just simply add zero-knowledge proofs and be done with it. You can't just add a mixnet and be done with it. You need to combine multiple strategies. That's what the future is for me right now, making sure our systems work so tightly together that there's not one bottleneck.

It's really about user empowerment. Bitcoin is already a better system than the old system, a better system than fiat, but in order to make sure it lasts, to make sure it's still there when we need it most and they can't take it away, we need to make sure it's hard to hack. And we do that by combining a lot of great ideas from a lot of great people in this room.

So I know I've covered a lot, and I know this might be a little depressing, but let me end on a positive note. The most important thing is you. You are the ones who build these things here. You are the ones who defend these things here. You are the ones who make these things happen here.

It is an honor to join you in this fight, and thank you for your time.