Speech transcript below.

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(crowd cheering)

(crowd cheering)

- Hey gang.

(crowd cheering)

So I'm not in a prison cell anymore.

(crowd cheering)

Yep, I'm standing on this stage right here in front of you.

On this exact day, May 29th,

exactly one decade ago,

I was standing in a courtroom in front of a judge.

On that day, that judge gave me two life sentences,

plus 40 years, without parole.

I was just 31 years old.

If she and all the others behind my prosecution had their way,

I would have grown old and eventually died,

still in prison.

Instead, I'm here, with you.

(crowd cheering)

Just a few months ago,

I was trapped behind those prison walls

and didn't know if I would ever get out.

And now I'm free.

(crowd cheering)

I'm free and it's because of you.

You made this moment possible.

Can you feel that?

Let that sink in.

You, you, you, you, you, you did this.

Thank you.

(crowd cheering)

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

And you're not alone.

You are part of something much bigger.

This is bigger than Bitcoin.

This is bigger than crypto.

Freeing me took many, many people from all walks of life,

coming together and saying, "This is not right."

It took many people just like you saying,

we care about freedom and keeping somebody like Ross

in a cage until he dies is a threat to freedom itself.

(crowd cheering)

It took President Trump recognizing

that an injustice had been done

and that so many of you demanded

that I be freed.

I am so, so thankful that we elected him

and that he is who he is.

(crowd cheering)

Nope.

He's a man who does what he says he'll do.

He said he would free me and he did, period.

He's a man of integrity.

So a few years ago when I was still in prison,

trapped and desperate,

I spoke to you at this conference

through the prison phone.

By show of hands,

how many of you have heard the speech I gave

at Bitcoin 2021?

Okay, probably about 20% of you.

In that speech,

I wanted you to understand what it means

to lose your freedom.

I wished I had known before I created Silk Road,

before I risked my freedom.

So those lessons that I had to learn the hard way,

I wanted to give to you.

I lost even more of my freedom because of that speech.

The prison threw me in the hole over it for a while

and when they let me out, they put me under heavy surveillance

for years, all the way up to the point

that President Trump pardoned me.

But you know what, I'm glad I did it.

I am.

(crowd cheering)

Connecting with you that day felt so, so good

because it was like a small part of me had broken

beyond the prison walls and escaped only for a little while.

So today is the mirror image of that day.

Today, I want you to understand what it means

to win your freedom.

Winning your freedom.

Winning your freedom feels as amazing

as losing it feels awful.

And I want you to understand that.

I want you to understand that because

when it comes to freedom, we're not there yet.

There is still more freedom to be won.

Yeah, there's still more work to be done.

And I'm talking about freedom beyond what anyone,

anywhere has ever had.

It's going to be incredible.

And it's going to be worth fighting for.

I wish you could know what it felt like

to take those first steps out of that prison

and into freedom.

I truly wish you could be overwhelmed

by such a huge wave of freedom all at once.

In that moment, feeling that, I knew

all the years of effort, all the pain,

all the struggle, it was worth it.

And here's my point, freedom is worth the struggle.

Now if you can believe it, I actually got used to being in prison.

For so many years, it just became normal.

In order to keep my head and stay strong, I had to accept what had happened to me and

where I was.

I couldn't fight it every moment of every day.

But there's a danger in that, the danger of complacency.

I found that we can lose the desire for freedom.

We can get used to our chains.

We can forget that they're even there.

David Bailey put it in perspective for me when we were talking about me coming to speak

at this conference.

He said, Ross, you took Bitcoin from zero to one and while you were in prison, we, the

community, all of you, we took it from one to ten.

But we still need to go from ten to a hundred.

He's right.

I mean, look at the last 14 years and what a wild ride it's been.

When I launched Silk Road, buying a whole Bitcoin would set you back less than a dollar.

I could change.

You imagine that?

Another worth over a hundred thousand dollars each.

Back then, there was just one exchange you could buy them on, unless you wanted to scour

message boards or go to local meetups.

Now it seems like every app I download has a built-in wallet with one-click buying options.

There are dozens of new cryptocurrencies and blockchains, each one fascinating in its own

right.

And thousands more I'll never have time to learn about.

There's DeFi and Web3 and now there's AI to help me navigate it all.

It's nuts.

I effectively went into a time capsule in 2013 and now I'm coming out like Rip Van Winkle.

I mean, just a few months ago, when I walked out of prison, I'd never seen a drone.

I had never experienced AI, I still haven't, sorry, VR, the headsets, yeah, haven't done

that yet, I had never chatted with AI, it's all hitting me at once, freedom, the new technology,

the fact that I have a future again, it's a lot, it's a lot, I mean, I was in prison and

now I get to live through this incredible time with all of you.

What a blessing, what a miracle, what a gift.

So when it comes to new tech, I feel like I'm way behind the curve.

But I'm starting to suspect that maybe we're all feeling that way, at least a little bit.

I mean, everything's moving so fast right now and it's kind of thrilling to imagine

where it's all going, but that question remains, how do we take the next leap?

How do we go from 10 to 100?

Because of the speed, because of the chaos, it's more important than ever to stay true

to our principles, it's easy to lose sight of principle when everything's happening

all at once and there's a thousand things pulling your attention in every direction.

Principles should be simple and few and today I'd like to mention three, freedom, decentralization,

unity, remember, yeah, you got it.

So remember those three, freedom, decentralization, unity.

Let me take you back to before I created Silk Road back in 2010.

I wanted to have some magic mushrooms on hand to sell through the site.

So it wouldn't be totally empty when I launched it.

But I didn't want to get them from a friend of a friend or whatever because I didn't want

to get caught.

Well, that turned out.

So instead I rented a cabin outside of town where I could grow my own.

But when I showed up at the cabin, I found that there were seven wasp nests tucked in

all the corners of the front porch with one big one hanging right over the front door.

There were wasps everywhere, they were swarming in the air and crawling all over the nests.

The cabin was totally uninhabitable and the wasp infestation needed to be taken care of.

But I didn't want to collect exterminator or involve my landlord for obvious reasons.

So I was on my own.

But I remembered a trick that my father had shown me when I was a kid for removing wasps.

What he did was he got a towel, spread it out in his hands, and he got as close as he

could to the wasp nest.

And then at the last moment he darted out, wrapped it up and cinched the towel closed.

The wasps couldn't sting them through the towel and they couldn't get out.

So incredibly it worked.

So there I was on the wasp infested porch.

My heart was pounding as I prepared to do what I'd seen my dad do.

like many things I've done in my life I wouldn't try this one at home. So I

selected the nest that was furthest from the others because I didn't know if the

other nests would come to their aid and sting me. I spread out the towel, got as

close as I could, ready to flee if I had to, but when I wrapped up the nest nothing

happened. It was as if the other wasps didn't even notice so I was able to go

around the porch and carefully remove each was nest one by one until there

were no more wasps, not even the big nests over the front door. So why did I

tell you this story? Let's look at what made the wasps strong and what made them

weak and remember freedom, decentralization, unity. The wasps were

strong because they were free. Each was could act independently and it was

impossible to keep track of so many individual wasps. A sting could come from

any direction. Freedom is our strength as well. In prison my every move was

monitored and controlled. I was constantly dominated by the system I

was trapped in. I had no freedom and that made me weak. But with freedom we have

choices and with choices we become unpredictable, just like the wasps.

Choice is the essence of freedom. Any one of us could create the next piece of

liberating technology that empowers the people of the world and compared to the

constraints I lived under in prison. There's very little standing in our way.

Bitcoin doesn't work without freedom. Bitcoin's power comes from the fact that

any one of us can mine if we choose to. Any one of us can generate addresses if

we choose to. Any one of us can send bitcoins to anyone else. We are all on

equal footing with Bitcoin. With Bitcoin we are all free.

Losing so much of my freedom really helped me understand what it is and why

it's so important. There were times when I had lost so much freedom I couldn't

even choose what positioned to hold my body in because I was cuffed and shackled

so tightly. Those moments I understood that freedom is not a binary switch that

is either off or on. Being outside of prisons walls does not automatically

mean you are free and being within them doesn't mean you're not because even in

those moments I had choices. I could choose to resist or I could choose to

accept. I could have a peaceful attitude or a belligerent attitude. I could let the

people taking my freedom get to me or I could find joy deep down inside or they

couldn't touch it. In those moments, in those moments finding joy in just being

alive. That was my victory. That was how I kept the torch of freedom burning.

Next. The wasps were strong because they were decentralized. Seven nests were

harder to handle than just one. Had they all been in one big nest I would have

simply removed that nest without worrying about the other wasps coming

to sting me. Decentralization is our strength as well. We can argue all day

about how things can be more decentralized and those are good arguments to have but

as a principle, decentralization is the goal that we strive for. Bitcoin's

strength is in decentralization. Bitcoin lives on the Internet which is

itself decentralized. Anyone can run the Bitcoin protocol and connect online.

There are people from every corner of the globe. People will never meet,

validating and mining the blocks that make up the blockchain. There are scores

of wallets and exchanges spread out all over the world and because Bitcoin is

decentralized this way, nothing can stop it. Nothing. It's true. And if that wasn't

enough, there are countless forks and blockchains all riffing off of Satoshi's

original design and this too is a form of decentralization. So long as we are

free to choose we want as many of these experiments going on as possible. The

strong will survive and the system as the whole will become more robust and able

to adapt. With decentralization there is no single point of failure. That's a

lesson I learned the hard way, but despite their strengths, despite being free and

The wasps were weak, because they lacked unity.

And one of those was free to come sting me, but none of them did.

They were decentralized, so they had the opportunity, but none of them took it.

Had a single wasp dared to come sting me when I reached for that first nest.

I would have fled.

Those things really hurt, but they didn't.

Thank God you are not wasps, and I was put in prison for life.

I was isolated and weak.

I was stripped of everything, had nothing to give anyone.

But you didn't abandon me, you didn't forget me, you wrote me letters, you raised money

for my defense.

When I was silenced, you spoke up against the slander and the smears.

And in the end, when I didn't know if I would ever get out from behind those thick iron bars,

you even got President Trump to see that Bitcoin is the future.

Yeah, you did that.

You got him to see that decentralization and freedom are our future.

You said Ross is one of us.

You stayed united.

You said we want Ross out here with us.

You said free Ross.

You did this.

There were days when I thought I would die in that awful cage, but somehow that spark

of an idea that was Bitcoin back in the early days, that idea I risked and lost my freedom

for grew into a movement, a movement so powerful that more than a decade later, it came back

around and freed me.

It's just incredible.

Now, in prison, sadly, the prisoners tend to divide themselves into factions.

Resources are scarce, and isolated individuals can be preyed upon, so groups tend to dominate,

and there are conflicts between the groups, unity among the prisoners is lost.

It's a very difficult environment to navigate, and I didn't understand it at first, but

the guards, the wardens, the prison administration, they actually like it that way.

They like and encourage the division.

Now, why would that be?

I heard the saying divide and conquer, right?

Well, there's a corollary to it which says divide and rule.

Prisoners have already been conquered, so it's the job of the prison to rule them, and

it's easier to rule when your subjects are fighting each other than when they're fighting

you.

The only times I saw the wardens show respect to the prisoners was when we were united.

When we all wrote letters with a unified message, they showed up and listened.

When we all went on hunger strike together, they showed up and listened.

Outside, we stopped being treated like objects, and started being treated like men, like

equals.

Unified, we were able to stand together and demand the respect that we deserve.

So, how does this apply to us?

We can argue all day, but please never see each other as enemies.

Those that oppose decentralization and freedom love it when we're divided.

I promise you, so stay united.

So long as we can agree that we deserve freedom and that decentralization is how we secure

it, then we can be united.

We can have each other's backs, just like you had mine.

Freedom, decentralization, unity, stay true to these principles and the future is ours.

Thank you.

[Music]