Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales: "You Can’t Ban Blockchain. It’s Math!"

What is bitcoin? Who Satoshi who? It's a romantic story. The blockchain as a technology is not something that needs regulation.

Hey guys, this is Katherine Ross from Cointelegraph. We're here in Berlin with Jimmy Wales. Hi Jimmy, it is a pleasure to meet you. So first of all, how's it going on blogshall?

Great. Yeah, I just came off stage. I came and I spoke about Wikipedia a little bit and about decentralized systems, about how I see the current landscape of crypto. But mainly I talked about my new project, we he Tribune, which is all about bringing high quality neutral journalism to the world.

So you've mentioned, I have to ask, I'm sorry, you've mentioned that crypto is a bubble and you've actually expressed this kind of point of view in different interviews. So do you really think it's a bubble industry or there is something that we can take?

Well, I'm old now and I was in the Internet world during the dot com bubble. And so when I say something's a bubble it doesn't mean that I think there's nothing of value there. It means there's a lot of noise and there's a lot of investment money flowing in. A lot of things are being invested in that don't actually make sense. A lot of projects are going to fail. But we additionally have a lot of scams, a lot of, you know, theft, a lot of crazy things are happening. And so I just ask people to be careful.

Well, that's fair. So are you a crypto investor yourself?

No, I'm not. I have had some crypto here and there, but I'm not an investor at all. So that's the other thing to know about me. I have my own projects and beyond that I don't really invest.

You've mentioned on stage that Vicky tribune the project. So you may accept or will be accepting cryptocurrency as payment, but if you ever decide to launch a project, blockchain based project, what kind of project would that be? Would it be charity journalism? So what would this project be about?

Well, I'm not planning to do anything sort of directly in the blockchain space. I am very intrigued by the idea and a lot of people have pitched me on ideas in the journalism space. I just don't see a lot that makes a lot of sense. And so I'll continue to reflect and think. Some of the people I've talked to pitch me some idea and then I start to poke some holes in it and say this is the Problem. They say, yeah, but with your name, you could raise so much money. And I'm like, yeah, I don't need that at this stage in my career. I'm not just trying to get money from people from something I don't personally believe in. So until I figure it out, not going to be doing anything.

I get it. So there is an opportunity. But the project has to be of value.

It has to resonate. It has to be something that's meaningful to me.

I'm sure you've heard about the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Of course.

So the issue of privacy is really a topical here. Do you think any cryptocurrency or the blockchain technology can somehow help with this issue?

I don't know. I suspect not. I think that the issue is much broader and that a lot of the ideas in this area kind of fail to understand the real risk points and solve problems that people don't actually have. I think that the biggest thing that's happening is that consumers are beginning to wake up to the idea that sharing all of your data has consequences that you might not have thought about. So there are good consequences. So one of the good consequences is advertising is more relevant, and I think consumers appreciate that. I mean, I like the fact that I get ads for things that actually I'm interested in. There's nothing wrong with that. Like boats, for example. Yes, exactly. So I get ads for boats because I like boats and I'm interested in boats and I might buy a boat and so on, and it's a perfectly sensible thing. On the other hand, if political actors are using this to create disruption and hatred and basically sowing divisions in society for political gain, that's super problematic. And it's something that I think people should be concerned about. I'm also concerned about, you know, the incredible pressure that's been put on the industry of journalism for quite some time. That's been a big problem. You know, the number of excellent journalists who are out of a job simply because the world has shifted in a way that's not good for journalism is a problem. And I think we need to work ways through that, find new ways of supporting journalism.

Speaking of journalism, have you heard about the social media ban on cryptocurrency advertising and Google ban?

Yeah, a little bit. A little bit, yeah.

So basically it means that our post online, we have like Cointograph, we have Facebook groups and Twitter groups, and we cannot simply post anything about it. So that kind of violates the First Amendment right in a way. And we Were trying to do something about. Do you think it's fair? Is it a fair when we can find ourselves that we cannot speak what we would like to speak about, we would like to inform, but we cannot do this due to this ban.

So it's really complicated. So the first thing I'll say is it certainly doesn't violate the First Amendment. The First Amendment is a restriction on Congress. And so private platforms are not bound by the First Amendment in terms of the fairness. I mean, I think the issue right now is that there have been quite clearly scams put forward that are not just, just technical violations of some securities rules, but actual scams where people have had their money taken. And that's a huge problem. And so for platforms like Facebook and Google, they have to be sensitive to that. Now have they reacted? Have they overreacted? Possibly. It's a very complicated thing and certainly it's something that I think needs to be seriously looked at by, by all the relevant parties, relevant players. But you know, if, if people are advertising securities for sale that are in violation of securities laws, that's a real problem. And I don't blame the, I don't blame these people for saying we don't want any part of that.

So yeah, I guess the industry saw a crypto, the so called crypto craze in 2017. Did something happen with the Wikipedia search in terms of the crypto results or any activities, did it increase?

Yeah, I'm sure I haven't actually looked at that data. But I mean, what we see at Wikipedia is that the search query, the search volumes for everything does tend to follow the news cycle. And so things that suddenly become very interesting because they're in the news all the time, we'll see a lot more searches at Wikipedia. Because you know, Wikipedia, you know, if you simply read in the mainstream media about bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, it's going to be very rare to get any kind of an in depth explanation of how it works and what it is. And Wikipedia is actually a pretty good place to go for that kind of broad background information to say what is Bitcoin? Like you know, who Satoshi who? Like what is that all about? You know, and you know that even the story of who is Satoshi, right? Is it's a romantic story. It's gotten a lot of huge amount of press. It's very intriguing. And so a lot of people. The article on Satoshi Nakamoto, which will be a good summary of that whole story and what is known will have been Read by, I'm sure millions of people by now.

Okay, so you're yourself. We will be seeing you a lot at crypto conferences. What do you think?

Don't know. Maybe if they invite me, you know, I mean, one of the things that is interesting that I feel like I bring to the table is I'm neither an irrational critic nor a compromised booster who's just trying to talk my own portfolio or something like that. I'm quite, you know, Wikipedia reflects my personality, which is I'm just very fact based and I'm interested in the world. And so I think I bring some observations from experience and history of living through the dot com bubble, the dot com crash, to say, look, I see a lot of parallels here and there's some interesting things to think about and I'm super interested in the technology.

So yeah, speaking about regulations a bit, I have to ask, I'm sorry, you have a PhD in finance, if I'm not mistaken.

I did all the coursework for PhD, but I never finished the dissertation.

Was it on purpose or you just got bored?

I just couldn't take it anymore.

Okay, I can understand. So there are a lot of talks about how to regulate or not to regulate the cryptocurrency. So do you see a cryptocurrency as a commodity or utility? So this is what we've been talking a lot about. How do you see it?

Well, I mean, I think there are many, many different aspects. So there's blockchain as a technology and so blockchain as a technology is not something that needs regulation or that it even. It's sort of like you'll occasionally hear a politician saying, oh, we need to ban cryptography. And it's like, well, that's stupid and crazy and you're never going to do it. It's math. You can't ban math. You can't ban blockchain. It's math. So that's that. At the same time, we see a lot of things going on that it's very difficult to say they're anything other than just scams. People making off with millions of dollars of other people's money with no accountability. And that deserves law enforcement investigation. We see a lot of the hacks and Bitcoin or other coins being stolen because somebody hacked a server and got the keys. That's what the police are for, right? Ideally. And actually I feel like there's been far too little response. You know, if you walked into Citibank and walked out with $56 million worth of gold, not Your money? Yeah. Not yours. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but you went in and you. Somebody else, you picked the lock and you stole the actual gold out the back in a truck. There would be an army of FBI agents investigating this. And I feel like a lot of the cryptocurrency thefts have gone kind of like the police are just like, well, we don't know what to do. So they do very little not to criticize them, but it's just a fact that we're not seeing the right kind of law enforcement response. People don't think of that as regulation, but of course it's against the law to steal things, and so it is regulation. And I also think that for the consumers and for the brand image of the whole cryptocurrency space, there is a feeling that it's very sports speculative. I might invest $100 and make 10,000 or I might just get my money stolen. And that's not a good start for a revolution. And the way that we transact. And so I think that we should welcome the rule of law. I would even say the rule of law is the first step, never mind regulation. And of course, we run the risk, as we always do in technology, that legislatures who have almost no understanding of what's going on will pass regulations that don't make any sense. And we've had that in the Internet space forever. We have it, in my opinion now with gdpr, which I think is bonkers, and it's an attempt to solve a problem, but it's not going to solve the problem, and it just adds burdens.

It's an action to do something, but it's not.

Yeah, exactly. And what I've said about. Actually, I'm not the person who originally said this, but I've seen people saying, you know, if you were going to design a regulation that is intended to entrench Facebook and Google in their privileged positions, you could hardly do better than GDPR because it's really burdensome for startups and it's not much burden for them. I mean, it is burden for them, but small price to pay to maintain a monopoly. So anyway, I think those are the kinds of things that we should be worried about.

And governments themselves, do you think they should embrace cryptocurrencies and. Or blockchain technology? Can they benefit from.

Depends. Right. I would say there are a lot of interesting potential applications. I think that right now one of the things that's going on is that a lot of vendors are hawking products that don't work, that are vaporware and governments can just like any other buyer be duped. And so they need to be very cautious and very careful. I think particularly when you're dealing with taxpayer money there is a very good reason to be extremely cautious about new technologies, not to reject it entirely. But you know, the first person who comes by and sells you, you know, we're going to put, you know, all of your health records on the blockchain. Really? What does that mean exactly? Right? How exactly is that going to help? What does that entail? Because you could pay millions for consultants to come and something that doesn't actually work, that doesn't mean that we won't necessarily move in that direction. But I want to see governments moving very cautiously in this space.

Okay. So this is it from me. Thank you very much for coming. It was a great pleasure.

Lovely. Thank you.

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Sam.