Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for inviting me to speak here.
My name is Brad Mills and I’m one of the founding members of the Bitcoin Coalition of Canada, which is an upstart multipartisan group working to educate policy-makers, journalists and everyday Canadians about the importance of Bitcoin. I am also an active angel investor and adviser in 28 Bitcoin start-ups, some of which are based here in Canada. These companies are working to help balance the scales of socio-economic justice for billions of people around the world who have been excluded from the traditional financial system. The Bitcoin companies I work with are positively impacting the environment, local economies and grid infrastructure.
My activities are primarily around financial literacy and financial inclusion for underbanked people living below the poverty line in countries across Africa and Latin America, but also for the millions of underbanked Canadians. Combatting poverty through Bitcoin education is personal to me. I grew up in an economic depression in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, during the 1990s, when we had one of the highest unemployment rates in Canada.
My parents divorced when I was young, and when we were not on EI or welfare, we were living paycheque to paycheque. I lived in 19 different homes growing up, including government housing, and I know all too well the stress of having an empty bank account and seeing an overdraft charge put you into the negative.
I’ll never forget what it felt like when my dad lost our home to the bank as the interest rates rose. I was part of the underserved and underbanked in Canada.
That said, I was lucky enough to be born in a country like Canada with a social safety net. My quality of life wasn’t that bad. Money was just a thing we didn’t have.
I escaped poverty through entrepreneurship. I bootstrapped a social gaming company that grew to a million players in 2009. For the first time in my life I had some extra money in the bank. I still lacked financial literacy, and it was during the global financial crisis, when most investments seemed unsafe, so I started learning about investing and the history of money.
I began buying gold because of its store of value properties. Soon after, I discovered Bitcoin. I understood that it was a decentralized digital gold, with no centralized issuer or company behind it and with an absolute limited supply, because only 21 million coins will ever exist.
I started saving in Bitcoin for the same reasons I bought gold, but I learned soon after that Bitcoin was much more than that.
Bitcoin is a once-in-a-species invention. It is the first time we’ve been able to create digital scarcity. Bitcoin is a fair and equitable base layer of money. It’s open-source and auditable by anyone who wants to run the software. It doesn’t matter if you’re a kid in Nigeria, a fisherman in Cape Breton or a billionaire from New York—everyone is on the same footing on the Bitcoin network.
Most Bitcoiners describe Bitcoin as a savings technology. It makes saving and transferring money available and accessible to anyone, anywhere.
Eleven years after I first discovered Bitcoin, it’s good to see that Canadians are among the fastest to adopt it. The Bank of Canada recently released a report that found that 13% of Canadians owned Bitcoin in 2021. It’s worth noting that more Canadian women own Bitcoin today than Canadian men did in 2017.
This is where it’s also important to recognize the difference between Bitcoin and everything else going on in the crypto space. As someone who worked on the financial committee of a large crypto fund, I have a unique perspective on stablecoins, DeFi and the broader crypto space. As an analyst doing due diligence on hundreds of blockchain projects in Web3, DeFi and NFTs, I had a front-row seat to the making of the bubble.
Unlike Bitcoin, these things are mostly just unregistered securities, often unethically launched and fraudulently pumped on unregulated crypto exchanges, leaving retail buyers holding the bag when the bubble collapses. These tokens typically have no real product-market fit, and barely anyone uses them outside of the speculators.
Last year, I started sounding the alarm, warning about the coming collapse of platforms like Celsius, Terra Luna and the UST stablecoin, as well as the FTX exchange, at least six to 12 months before they blew up. I’m proud to have directly helped save people from losing tens of millions of dollars in these Web3 crypto and DeFi schemes that exploded.
Millions of Canadians have exposure to Bitcoin. It should not be a partisan issue. This is why I’m very heartened to see members of Parliament coming together from both sides of the aisle to have these elevated conversations about cryptocurrency, blockchain technology, CBDCs and stablecoins.
I can help provide a rational framework for thinking about how Bitcoin should be treated differently from crypto and how we should embrace Bitcoin to increase the financial literacy of Canadians and promote financial inclusion through Bitcoin education.
Thank you once again for having me. I look forward to answering any questions.