In June 2019, I began a series of 3 free talks on Bitcoin, Cryptoassets and Blockchain. The objective of these talks was to engage with my local community on these topics, I hoped to widen the understandings of those interested enough to attend.
Having been banned by Facebook for advertising the event! I decided to do it old school by simply posting up flyers on local notice boards etc. I had 30+ people, all newbees, at my first talk. I was happy with this size crowd.
I set out below my material in case anyone would like to use it and do the same.
I started the talk, like I always do, with this great clip about the internet from 1994 ‘Today Show’. This is a great reminder that things we take for granted now were not so long ago strange and new…
Overall the talk was based heavily on the wonderful book The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous.
I found explaining Bitcoin in the context of the revolution of money to be very helpful. It allows the audience the opportunity to come to their own conclusion that peer-to-peer electronic cash in the next logical step in the evolution of money. I explained the history of money using these slides.
I used a number of youtube clips to explain Bretton-Woods.
- Bretton Woods 1944 Conference News Footage
- Explainer by the Center for Strategic & International Studies
- How it failed by Prof. Mehrling, Institute for New Economic Thinking
- President Nixon Announcing the end of the Gold Standard in 1971
The next segment set the scene by considering Cash transactions and how they important they are for privacy and freedom (I lent heavily here on the work done by The CoinCenter).
To explain Bitcoin for the first time I enlisted the help of Peter Van Valkenburgh of CoinCenter and his explanation to the US Congress on this very topic.
I used a recent clip of Barry Silbert talking about crypto and his Drop Gold add.
I then brought things back to the financial/economic world of June 2019 and spoke about the credit bubble and play a recent clip where the PIMCO CIO and CEO are interviewed by Bloomberg TV.
Thanks for your attention hope you found this interesting/helpful.
