In this thought-provoking session, our expert speakers will explore the critical importance of decentralization in promoting individual autonomy and protecting liberty in an increasingly centralized world.

Transcript

foreign [Music] all right I got the glasses so how’s everybody doing today yeah seems like people are enjoying the um a Timothy King great to see you Miguel people are enjoying them networking in the lounge there’s also some booths uh I was just hanging out with the name base Booth you know the sponsors that have Booth some have live people there was Alex and Aaron just there and it was a few of us chatting name-based stuff so

01:04
definitely if you also have time to go to the booth support the sponsors also I know a lot of you want to talk to some of these companies anyways it’s a really good chance to uh to do that um again this is our third handy con you know we’re always improving so the Boost is a newer experiment but hopefully you enjoy those as well as the lounge I know there’s so much content so much things to do so we are streaming live in Austin Texas Brian buckles there is got his laptop up on the podium at the co-working space I’m blinking on the

01:41
name now same one as names Khan it’s a factory Capital Factory I believe if somebody wants to correct me yes Capital Factory so they just did some testing I was just doing some testing with them this is going to be an experiment fingers crossed fingers crossed this goes smoothly but Brian is sharing live in Austin Noel is there Steve Webb is there in person yeah Mr TX we were just talking to Noel uh he is there they think what’s happening is there’s an audience there right now and they’re they’re doing a little bit

02:17
of prep talk to them before they plug us in what we just did the we just did the a little bit of audio and video testing so it should work fingers crossed but um we are waiting for them but just obviously there’s so much to talk about so while we wait for them Brian or Noel if you hear me just turn it on when you’re ready we’ve gotten a lot of applications and forms and positive feedback about the rings that Johanna and I talked about at the beginning there’s people from all around the world filling out the form

02:51
open to uh to to to to to to experimenting with what we’re calling it experimenting I know it’s uh you’re not sure exactly what you’re getting yourself into we don’t want to make people get into it we’re there okay yes yes hey Noel dot ta TX everybody’s asking for you sure the the Rings link is handiconda XYZ rings but uh okay but all right everybody’s excited to see no I don’t think I needed them can you hear me oh yeah yeah I can hear you now sorry I was like ignoring you I

03:31
I see people looks my name in the chat though yeah I’m always excited uh there’s a little echo on my side but I’ll let you take it from here you’re gonna share your screen yeah we are live all right well um before I share my screen um I just want to thank you Mike and uh and Company for organizing this and for your passion and hard work it does not go unnoticed this is the third year of handycon and there are so many similarities to where we are with handshake uh with uh Bitcoin uh back in 2012 2013. I see so many

04:15
parallels and it’s just really exciting times to see all of us uh come together but it’s a great to be here this evening and for those online uh night morning and afternoon we have community members uh tuning in from dozens of countries around the world all brought together by this incredible protocol called handshake we come from diverse backgrounds and have various views but what attracted many of us is this idea of self-ownership that uh big Tech and corporations and government shouldn’t control every

04:57
aspect of Our Lives that we should have self sovereignty and the physical world as well as online and that is what our next talk is going to be about basically about preserving for preserving Liberty uh with uh decentralized Technologies and Liberty is for everyone and handshake is for everyone and our speaker Brian buckles that’s going to be coming up it’s a long time domain investor since the mid 90s anyways and also a former economics professor so I’m gonna share my screen and Brian can I can come up here and

05:40
take it away support all right yeah and you can just hold on so it doesn’t okay all right so they don’t see me they just see the screen is it they should see you as a speaker all right well I hope everybody can hear me um I’m Brian buckles and I got into domain name investing back in 1996 uh I established a company called nameshop.

06:29
com and that was I still have a few domains from back then but uh I’ve been teaching economics basically uh for the past few years around the DFW metroplex um so the talk I’m going to give today is about why decentralization is important for preserving Liberty so first I wanted to show you this picture this was at the last namescon conference and you can see there’s no in the center and that’s me with the crazy shirt and that’s pay from Taiwan um I’ve learned a lot from these guys Noel thank you for everything you’ve taught

07:10
me about handshake he was my first exposure to handshake I guess more than a year ago and he always answers my questions when I have some stupid question to ask but uh here’s another picture from the last names con conference and I really like this picture a lot because there’s me standing with very brilliant people way smarter than me you’ve got Chango you’ve got the three of the four handshake creators Joseph poon JJ Andrew Lee and then Chad folkening’s there at Noel so this this is a picture I I

07:47
really like a lot maybe I’ll get it autographed one day so I really like the handshake Community because these people are smart I remember watching the handycon conference three years ago the first one I guess it would be two years ago and there was this guy on there and he had his voice like synthesized you know and I I went and I showed my wife I was like look at this this is really cool these people are cool and it just drew me in and then I started asking no questions and uh it’s just a very interesting project and the the most

08:25
important thing I want to leave you with tonight is that handshake is the only blockchain that decentralizes the internet’s root Zone and there’s other naming projects out there but handshake was created in good faith to work with the icann tlds all they have to do is come in and claim their TLD and they can upgrade it to the blockchain for their for their customers it was created in good faith and uh if you if you’re interested in what actually is the root Zone and why the handshake project actually is the real

09:02
internet root Zone that we all know about and and use every day there’s a link there on this slide if you go to skyinclude.com root Zone there’s a very good discussion between Mike and Chango on why this is the real root zone so this is the naming project of all projects and the the important thing about handshake is that we’re trying to protect free speech for everybody the protocols are neutral so we can live with that as long as we we have the protocols everyone can live by that another advantage of handshake is there

09:38
are some cyber security implications in I.T there whenever there’s a hack usually they end up saying it’s always the DNS and that problem is eliminated when you put it on the blockchain so um handshakes a lot like Bitcoin um as Noel mentioned um Satoshi Nakamoto the first application of the blockchain was Bitcoin the second application was decentralized DNS and that’s what handshake is attempting to do handshake like Bitcoin is also proof of work it’s secured by proof of work mining the property rights are

10:18
irrevocable and interestingly uh one of the creators of handshake was also the creators of the Bitcoin lightning Network that would be Joseph poon so for example um verisign they they run the uh registry for.com all they have to do is come in and claim.com on the blockchain it’s reserved for them take 20 minutes and it’s theirs and then they can offer their customers uh an upgrade they can upgrade their.

10:52
com domain to the blockchain and for verisign and the other registrars that would be another Revenue stream for them so today I kind of started with the conclusion now I’m going to go through the details about decentralization why decentralize I’m going to talk a little bit about the U.

11:12
S Constitution and how that was an attempt to decentralize government and then I’ll give some examples of how through history the government has grown Way Beyond where it started and now the power is actually more centralized and the checks and balances are not there like they’re supposed to be and that’s leading to government censorship that we’re reading about in the news almost every day now I’ll talk a little bit about that and then some final conclusions about why we’re doing this we’re doing this to preserve Liberty for

11:42
the Next Generation so why decentralize um every in everyday language people say Nobody’s Perfect to air is human we say these things all the time so it’s kind of common sense that there’s some flaw in humans uh the Christian church and the uh the judeo-christian anthropology the creationist anthropology teaches that man’s made in the image of God and that humans have fallen and they’re radically corrupt to the Core but even if you don’t believe that you can look at history there’s plenty of

12:20
examples through history we have thousands of years of history that reveal what human nature is for example the Soviet Union that was just in the last century um that was about as centralized as you could possibly get with the government and look how repressive and totalitarian they were one of the uh dissidents in the Soviet Union was Alexander solshenitsen and there’s a quote from him the line separating good and evil passes right through every human heart uh he spent a lot of time in the gulag because he didn’t drink the Kool-Aid and

12:59
he was speaking out against the centralized government of the Soviet Union there’s a couple other interesting quotes here from Lord Acton power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely uh you might have heard that before and then there’s another quote about President Lincoln that was uh made by Robert Ingersoll he said if you wish to know what a man really is give him power this is the Supreme test so there’s all kinds of examples through history of people are falling and when they get in power

13:34
like Hugo Chavez for example they just don’t leave and they start to centralize things and consolidate their power the idea of a benevolent dictator is a fiction that’s a fiction that’s not reality so the founding fathers when they set up our government they knew this and they put in a lot of checks and balances those are the separation of powers that’s the checks and balances between the three branches the legislative executive judicial and they also uh check the power vertically that’s called federalism they

14:10
wanted to limit the power to the federal government to protect the rights of states and individuals and they couldn’t even get the Constitution ratified until the Bill of Rights was added the first 10 amendments some states are like we’re like we don’t want to sign on to this because we just left Europe to get away from this uh centralized system we don’t want it here either so they made them add on the Bill of Rights with the first 10 amendments and today in theory at least the states are supposed to be Laboratories of democracy

14:43
where different states could try different things and we can figure out what works and then maybe other states want to adopt those instead of this one size all uh blanket prescription of policy that may work and it may not work so the Bill of Rights the First Amendment which I’m sure we all have seen before it kind of lists in order the freedoms that are the most important in order first is Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or preventing the free exercise thereof that’s the First Freedom

15:19
religion freedom of religious expression the second freedom is freedom of speech or of the press and then the right to peaceably assemble and then a right to petition the government for a redress of grievances then I I’m going to skip through this a little bit I want to highlight the Fourth Amendment now because this is certainly another amendment that is in play today with what’s going on this says the right of the people to be secure in their persons houses papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures

15:53
shall not be violated unless they have a warrant what’s a warrant they have to have probable cause supported by an oath of somebody and they have to particularly describe the place to be searched and the person or things to be seized so when you think about like a warrantless wiretap or something or you know you type something in Google and then the police show up at your door that’s illegal that type of uh that’s not a warrant because they have they can’t just do a blanket search on keywords and then come and get you so that that’s

16:29
the Fourth Amendment that’s that would be unconstitutional do something like that but we know what’s happening then also in the Bill of Rights the ninth and tenth amendments say that basically that anything that we haven’t specifically delegated or relegated to the federal government or to the states belongs to the people so it’s not by default the government can do whatever they want it’s they can only do these things we listed everything else belongs to the states or to the people so they couldn’t even ratify the

17:01
Constitution until this was added on and then and then they got it ratified so something happened since then uh we have a different government today the the government has grown over time how did that happen well they need money they need money and so that came in 1913 with the 16th Amendment which is the amendment that allowed them to Levy the income tax so it says the Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes from whatever Source derived without apportionment among the several States

17:38
so this is basically the food for the Beast that after this the government started growing a lot because they had the money to do a lot more expansion and then you come on to 1971 where the gold standard is fully eliminated it was partially eliminated during the 20th century at different times but then in 1971 it’s fully eliminated and now we have fully fiat currency and they can debase the currency at will which creates inflation as we see today and inflation is another hidden tax so the government’s growing

18:18
and what we’ve seen is basically the rise of a federal administrative state in in slaying uh some people call it the Deep State or the swamp uh but they’re getting at this idea of a federal administrative state and we know that in the executive branch there are there are the favorite three-letter agencies the FBI the CIA the NSA there’s also the Department of Education which was created as recently as 1979 originally the department of educa the education function was a local function for communities and parents and now we

18:58
see things coming out of the centralized Capital where they’re saying you have to do this you have to do this and that’s a one-size-all prescription that’s not in keeping with the idea of federalism over time these agencies and many others they’re not accountable anymore they’ve grown unaccountable to the president or to Congress they just kind of do what they want they have the money and no one really challenges them there are other departments that are deliberately unaccountable for example

19:31
the office of special counsel you’re not going to find that in the Constitution uh it’s supposed to be the Congress that checks the president but now we have this roving prosecutor that can harass anybody they want and force them to run up huge legal bills while they’re trying to run the country and then the Federal Reserve System which was created in 1913 that’s also supposed to be politically independent so their accountability uh is all is also questionable so are these people really public

20:04
servants I put servants in quotes they’re unionized and their incentive is to maximize their budget and maximize their retirement income they can retire after 20 years working for the government and then they can go and do something else like work as a lobbyist or a contractor or something and then they got two incomes they got the government pension and then they got the second uh income so I don’t consider that to be a servant uh it’s more like a trough Okay so what we have now with this federal administrative state

20:39
is basically centralized power the and the checks and balances are not there like they’re supposed to be and there’s a some examples I can give you here JFK uh he said uh when he became president he wanted to shatter the CIA into a million a thousand pieces and then uh the French government calls JFK and says hey why is the CIA doing these operations in our country we’re an ally and JFK told the French President I don’t have control of the CIA that’s a fact this is not a conspiracy theory it’s it’s a fact of history

21:20
I could give a whole hour-long talk on that but we’ll just keep moving so the Patriot Act we know was established um after 9 11. they could have certain uh abilities to search electronically to try to find terrorists right well Snowden revealed that they’re listening to everybody U.S citizens or not it doesn’t matter they’re picking it all up they’re supposed to be masking U.

21:50
S citizens but in a minute I’ll tell you how that’s not working either at one point the NSA director Hayden was called to testify before Congress and he said no we don’t we don’t uh listen to American citizens and it was just flat out lie and there’s no accountability there was no accountability they just go back to their agency keep doing what they’re doing nobody they don’t respect the Congress the the public opinion the public approval of the Congress is in single digits they don’t care what they what they

22:24
testify to because there’s no consequence another example um the National Security advisor rice Susan Rice was prolifically unmasking U.S citizens you’re not supposed to do that uh if you’re doing this catch-all Dragnet operation American citizens are supposed to be masked but apparently uh they were prolifically unmasking U.

22:49
S citizens and so this is a problem because the checks and balances are not there there’s no decentralization another example is the FBI now this is in the news um either their either they’re incompetent or they’re deliberately spreading disinformation because the Russia collusion they they fabricated the Russia collusion thing to the fisa court they entrapped uh the National Security advisor on the second day of his of his term and then we have 50 plus former Intel officials meddling in the election signing on that the hunter laptop is

23:27
Russia propaganda or Russia meddling or whatever that’s all been proven not to be true you know why are intellifi Intel officials jumping into the news cycle a week before a presidential election that I’ve never seen that before until until last time so something’s not right and now we have the Twitter files um coming out since Elon Musk has bought Twitter and kind of the lead reporter on this is Mike taibi so you can go to his Twitter handle and see a lot of this there since uh these journalists have

24:05
gone into Twitter and have uh looked through the files and they’re revealing what’s going on at Twitter and it’s we’re finding unconstitutional and illegal government censorship all over the place for example here’s a few of the things from the Twitter files the Congress created uh this National Endowment for democracy which funded another organization in the UK called the global disinformation index which targeted conservative and libertarian sites as untrustworthy it’s always a third party

24:37
the Congress they get all the money and then they fund some third party and say you do it you know and then they look the other way and then another example the the state department this is a big one the state department has this division called the global engagement Center that has a 74 billion dollar budget and they were funding this third party organization called the digital forensic research lab that was creating lists of people that Twitter was supposed to Blacklist one of the lists was 40 000 names and it included U.S citizens and U.S

25:11
groups so either they’re very sloppy or trying to sneak some stuff in there with the foreign people they want to Blacklist uh to silence some U.S people so this this Global engagement Center this was established under Obama in 2016. but it continued under Pompeo which is what I can’t you know I can’t figure that out uh and apparently they have they’re funding 39 secret subcontractors only one of which well the one we know about is dfr lab there’s 39 more and This Global engagement Center is working with

25:46
all the other three letter agencies uh to figure out who they want to Blacklist on Twitter this is Twitter we also have proof that the FBI paid Twitter over 3.4 million dollars for taxpayer money and interestingly the former FBI general counsel James Baker was hired to be the Twitter Deputy general counsel this is this guy was involved with the Russia collusion investigation at the FBI working with these struck and paid people who have been in the news they’re the ones that try to uh entrap the National Security advisor Michael

26:23
Flynn but Twitter hired the former FBI general counsel to be their legal lead and this guy uh Elon Musk fired him but you know what’s going on why would Twitter hire this guy that’s very strange and then the Twitter files also have uncovered that the the F that Twitter had a slack Channel just for the purpose of onboarding massive numbers of former FBI employees they were hiring so many people from the FBI to work to Twitter they had their own slack Channel to onboard them faster and there’s one more point that I didn’t have time to

27:01
put on here after we finalized the slides this was in the news again last night that the FTC has sent over a dozen uh demands to Twitter demanding an explanation of why things Baker was fired he was their plant you know why did you fire our our buddy and and then they also want to know the names of the journalists who were working on the Twitter Fox including montaibi and many others who were working on this project there’s been 17 iterations of the Twitter files the federal government wants the names of the journalists they’re trying to

27:39
intimidate the Press this is just Twitter this is just the tip of the iceberg my question to you is what’s happening at all the rest of the big tech companies that we can’t you know Elon Musk can’t buy them all what’s happening at these places Facebook Google YouTube Apple LinkedIn Microsoft ATT DirecTV DirecTV which just which just censored Newsmax and specifically what’s happening at the certificate authorities and I can we may never know the answers to these questions but you can only imagine if

28:16
that stuff was going on at one company that essentially big Tech has become an extension of the federal government that’s that’s what appears to be what’s happening um so handshake can help solve this problem because we can return some level of decentralization through the blockchain we’re essentially trying to upgrade the internet when the Legacy internet was created it was created as a decentralized network that would survive a nuclear attack well now we need that decentralization to work for the people we the people

28:53
with the blockchain tech stack it can help maybe it can save another generation maybe they’ll have a freedom of speech for one more generation until they figure that out but we have to try and the proof of work technology is better than proof of stake in achieving decentralization if decentralization is the priority then proof of work is the way to go um uh Satoshi Nakamoto his priorities for blockchain the first application was Bitcoin is hard money the second application is to decentralize DNS so we’re right we’re on the right Trail

29:34
uh if Satoshi says this is the way to go then we’re on the right Trail so why handshake well big Tech they’ve they’ve captured the Legacy internet the big tech companies there’s very little diversity of thought if you if you look like 99 of all big Tech employees donate to one political party that’s not diversity of thought and they’re all located in pretty much in one city uh at one state in one city so that just doesn’t uh foment diversity of of thought and debate and intellectual

30:08
development um essentially big Tech has become an extension of the federal administrative State and now the federal government wants to know you know why did you fight why did you fire James Baker at Twitter my question is why did they hire him in the first place but that was before Elon Musk came in Elon Musk can’t buy all these companies obviously um so it’s up to the people to decide do you want to live in a free country because we’re essentially living in a surveillance state um Gandhi Mahatma Gandhi said when the

30:42
people lead the leaders will follow I like that quote a lot um so we we’re going to have to do our part if we want to have a place that’s that’s free for the next generation for our kids uh handshake’s the only blockchain that tries to accomplish this tries to decentralize the existing uh I can root Zone uh it decentralizes that and it expands it even more and it’s all neutral we want everyone to have free speech we want everyone to enjoy the blessings of liberty that are possible so today it’s conservatives

31:18
that are getting censored uh who’s tomorrow who’s it going to be tomorrow we’ve seen what can happen in Germany we don’t know which group’s going to be next but you have to fight for freedom and fight for liberty it doesn’t just rain down from the sky Patrick Henry said Give me liberty or give me death during the time of the American Revolution uh we’re not we’re not trying to overthrow the government or overthrow the I can internet the I can teal these we come in good faith to work with them

31:49
to improve things and I like this last quote because I like the handshake community and how everyone’s pulling together with a common objective here this quote is from the Declaration of Independence and for the support of this declaration with a firm Reliance on the protection of Divine Providence we mutually pledge to each other Our lives our fortunes and our sacred honor so when you think about the founding fathers a lot of these guys were very wealthy they didn’t have to take a risk they didn’t have to take on the king’s

32:24
Army the most powerful army in the world they could have just taken their money and retired and been perfectly happy and content but they didn’t thank goodness they didn’t um there was a higher calling and it was about honor and Duty and they lived up to the challenge and we have to live up to the challenge too so that the Next Generation can have free speech and I think handshake is a big part of that and that’s why I’m all in with this project and thank you for listening to me I look forward to listening to all the

33:02
other conferences all the other presentations all right thank you Brian uh Noel can you hear us there or how do you want to do this yes yeah we can hear you you can take over I mean you’re probably going to continue your event there or people watching the art live of is this streaming there uh like the next session yeah yes we have the TVs up and screaming screening in the session we’re going to switch over to another device now because Marcus Andrews uh is going to be participating in the next panel from here oh yeah yeah

33:42
that’s great yeah we have a lot of weight here so I’m gonna go ahead and disconnect from this and then Marcus will get up here and uh join the next session sure all right all right I’ll see you all later yeah thank you so we’re gonna move to the next session um you know we’re experimenting here with the in-person and online but I think that went pretty smoothly I know I’ve been reading the comments I know there’s some some people have different perspectives about I you know you can interpret that how you like and

34:16
um yeah I’m tired you know it’s 8 A.M for me I’ve been up since three so um but we’re moving forward you can take that as you like I know some people think that’s uh you know I’m not going to give my opinion I think we can all make our own opinions from that speech and some people seem to agree and some people seem to not agree and I think we just leave it at that um let’s move to the next session which I think is gonna be more about the domain domaining space um which is an interesting one and I

34:45
know a lot of people here from the traditional web space so thank you all for being here thank you Brian for sharing your perspectives and knowledge and Noel for helping make that happen so let’s um I think we’ll move the next session right and there’s our amazing team behind the scenes helping you here um yes okay Stephanie thank you so I think we’re gonna cut this room move to the next room in a second and then we’re gonna connect in another person from that event live Marcus Andrews with

35:13
another group of panelists about the domain name game which is going to be some fun insights I know um pulsing will be there edad Chad some OG domain investors uh which will be some fascinating conversations some Raul uh would be really good one so should be popping any minute now and I’ll just do a dance you know you guys are I feel more comfortable with my glasses you know and I miss fistful you know I missed fistful too I think he’s around I don’t think FBI got him somebody’s saying FBI got him I don’t I don’t think they got

35:50
him but uh is this still alive um but yeah I mean there are there are a lot of people in you know crypto space that are uh a little bit more on the uh independent instead of the group and uh but I don’t want to get political today look at this I don’t want to be a political but you can all make your uh your own opinions but they’re of course in a crypto space a lot of people about individuality over uh over the uh group kind of think system and uh I can’t tell if we’re live or not still you know we’re switching over to the

36:30
other session [Music]