Inaugural event

A transcript* of the speech given by Claire Cummings (founder) at our inaugural event.

Well, thank you for coming along today.

My name is Claire Cummings. I’m the founder of the Centre for Digital Assets and Democracy, or as we shorten it, to CDAD. Jennifer, whom you’ve already met, is our Head of Strategy, and has been working on this with me since the very beginning.

So, what’s the point of having a Centre for Digital Assets and Democracy if we don’t actually think about what they are?

We have digital assets and democracy on the one hand. On the other we have physical assets and totalitarian states. We have dictatorships. We have proscribed terrorist organizations which are in stark contrast to nation states and democracies.

But let me tell you a story which is really about two sides of this same financial coin.

It dates back to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. There was a lady in Afghanistan who realised that, because she was female, educated, and had worked independently, had worked and earned and saved, she was at great risk when what democracy there was in Afghanistan, left the country. She knew she had to get out and she knew she had to take with her the savings that she had earned.

But she had to travel swiftly, and she had to travel light. She could not take any bulk. So with one small handbag, this lady, with her family, got on a ‘plane. They got off the ‘plane in a western democratic society where picked up her ‘phone, turned it back on and down loaded her bitcoin. She was able to do that because of the freedoms she had before the US left Afghanistan. At that time, she was free to be able to earn. She was free to be able to keep her own savings. And she was also free to be able to keep safe her own information.

Now somebody once told me that if you want to pick a seed phrase or some seed wordings for your wallet, you can’t really do any better than to find a few verses of a poem or a book that means something to you.

And I like to imagine that in the same way that lady may well have taken something from the Koran with her as her seed phrase, I may take something from the Bible. Other people here may take something from the Bhagavad Gita or the Torah.

And doesn’t that show us really that digital assets are worldwide? They cross boundaries, they cross continents, they cross genders, they cross religions. And what they enable is a basic form of democratic principle.

On this, I would like to touch on the some political of the Enlightenment. I’m slightly nervous about doing that because we have amongst us an award-winning essayist who’s written about blockchain and democracy for a prize in the name of that early Enlightenment philosopher, John Locke. The author, Francesca, is 15, like my 16 year old daughter who gave the first talk, the yare very much the future. … I would suggest that maybe our two daughters are stealing the stage from us and it’s soon time their generation to take over.

So, what do these philosophers say? In brief, they talk about freedom.
Jennifer has already talked about the freedom to transact. I would make it clear that when we talk about the freedom to transact, we’re not talking about the tax man knowing how much money you have, or the tax man knowing how often you’re paid. It’s that once that money is yours, it’s yours and it’s privately yours.

It’s freedom to transact and freedom to transact in privacy. It’s freedom for your to own financial data, which is nobody else’s. And if you follow the thinking of the philosophers of the Enlightenment, you will see that these freedoms, these individual economic freedoms, lead in turn to the flourishing of businesses.

They lead to the flourishing of, and the safety of, families, of societies, of communities. And all of that leads to a flourishing of democracy.

What could be more precious? What could be more cherished? What, in the light of the invasion of Ukraine and the stories that I hear on a daily basis of atrocities, and I hear those from the two refugees I have living with me, what could be more important than our democracy?

What could be more important than being able to live in a democratically elected state and know that you are safe? In the essential ways but also to know that what you earn you keep, and it remains private, it remains yours.

Now the opposite to this, I would suggest, is centralisation. This is when power is put in the hands of too few people. It’s when financial as well as political power is in the hands of too people, when everything is centralised, and we, who are the masters of those we elect (the servants of the people) we are put in a position of no longer actually being the ones to whom the elected answer because they have information over us and can and use it to stifle us.

We then lose democracy by over-regulation. Something demonstrated by the flourishing of the Western economies contrasted with those behind the Iron Curtain after the end of the Second World War. We in the west had the freedom to create our own prosperities and care for our own people.
And that was my warm up to the two talks which are coming next: decentralization in the context of digital assets and democracy and then how the next generation of entrepreneurs can be powered by digital assets.

Claire Cummings, founder [email protected]
Jennifer Ewing, strategy [email protected]

*some edits have been made for ease of reading