Ned Scott First Steem Saturday, Johannesburg 29 Oct 2016 [Transcript- Part 1]

Transcript - I will use these **** for words I couldn't hear or make out and ( ) for words I wasn't sure about. Feel free to edit any mistakes you find in the comments as english isn't my first language. Thankfully Ned's talks are pretty clear and easy to hear.

Wow, Steem Saturday, I can barely believe I'm here, you know, 8 months ago when we were designing Steem and Steemit we were just thinking of the technology but what's truly the most amazing part of this whole journey has been seeing people come together and to have a manifest here in Johannesburg, South Africa, which is a beautiful place - I could not have imagined a better place and with such an amazing and talented group of people, it's truly very special to me, so thank you, Robert, Gavin, Jaco, Naomi, everyone who's had a hand in putting this together. It's really extraordinary, so thank you.

So yeah, it was about 8 months ago that Dan Larimer and I decided to start this so now I'm CEO of Steemit.com, this social network based on a block-chain, based on this public database of information and of cryptocurrency and of people who just wanna participate in interacting with one another. And, ehm, the way it kinda came together, we looked at, ehm, we looked at a lot of the aspects of our lives, you know coming into this.. it didn't seem quite right. So we look at banking and you know the banking sector which has all sorts of challenges. From transparency to lack of transparency and the fraud that occurs and things like that. We look at social networks and the way that social networks interact with us. Sometimes they are not completely transparent, lately we have been hearing about censorship and manipulation of content and things like that, and its kind of, its not the perfect scenario for us.. the people, and what we really want is a paradigm in which data is transparent, in which the utilities that we use online are working for us and not taking from us. So if we look at social media today, what they really have is this sort of Walled Garden and think about all the people in the room, think about all the hours that we give to these social networks. We spend our time, our energy and our creativity looking at these social networks and distributing content and what these companies are doing is they are taking all this information along with our private data, and putting it behind a Walled Garden to leverage profits for their shareholders. And, we can flip that model is what we realized with block-chain, we can flip it so that the data is public, so that our time, energy, attention and creativity is rewarded. Ehm, another aspect of these social networks is, you know, despite spending so much time on them, they don't really incorporate the other aspects of our lives that are really important to us, like Finance and Marketplaces and things like that. There is this sort of (dichotomy?) between, you know, our digital lives, we today have digital banking in a lot of places, but we don't have that in our phones necessarily and we certainly don't have that in our social media apps.

So we look at banking, and you know banking is this very cut and dry sort of institution, and for hundreds of years its been about, you know, go down the street to this big sort of (brick?), ****** institution, put your money in, trust these people who you don't really know and then they say the money will be there for you when you come back to get it. But what's happening behind that (vale?) is these bankers, and the people running these companies are taking big risks with our value and our money, and not always to our benefit. Just in the U.S recently there was a huge case of fraud where this bank Wells Fargo was actually opening accounts, second accounts for their costumers. Then racking up fee after fee on these second accounts without notifying their costumers whatsoever and then sending them the bill, but actually not even telling them that they owed money, they would just then - siphoning money out of their first account. Really malicious sort of fraud, and this bank Wells Fargo was fined by the U.S government to the tune of a $190 million, but no one was fired, there was no (hubbub?) about it, ehm, you know if you really think about that event, its a huge, huge social issue, it's wildly corrupt. You know last night I was at dinner with a group of 15 really extraordinary people who are here in this room and were telling me their experiences with Steem, with government here in South Africa and things like that, and we started talking about the way governments work and things like that. There is a lot of maybe some stories like this that occur down here as well so hopefully you guys can relate to that.

So as we looked at these problems, we realized that we were facing an unique moment in time - its often these unique moments in time where there is a convergence of new technologies and demand for something better that produces something that completely transforms the landscape. Actually looking back in time one of the last times I saw this happen was in 2009 with the technology called Bitcoin. Bitcoin you know was really, a sort of, its a digital money but what's unique about it is, people kinda look around and they all sort of see the same problem. And it turned out there were about three-teens of people working on a sort of bitcoin solution, maybe more actually, because people were looking and seeing the problem of "how can we get control of our money again?" and at the same time there were these new technologies like hashcash and digicash, that were attempts at creating this new solution but no one had figured how to decentralize and distribute the technology in a way that would be robust, but at this moment in time in 2009 there were several people working on it. There was one person, Satoshi Nakamoto, who ended up creating this Bitcoin. How many people in the room know what Bitcoin is?

Part 2 after I take a small typing break. :P

Ned Scott First Steem Saturday, Johannesburg 29 Oct 2016 [Transcript- Part 2]