 In a recent talk, you said in the current situation that a hard fork would lead to a chain split. And you went on to say that you consider this type of chain split as a political failure. I would not consider the chain splitting a political failure if there's a significant division of ideology and opinion on an issue. In the example of Ethereum, I would even consider this to be a positive thing and can even be factored as being part of the governance mechanism itself. That's certainly the case in Ethereum, yes. You don't think that's the case in Bitcoin? I don't think that's the case in Bitcoin. I think there is a fundamental difference in the governance models of the two systems. Ethereum, because of its larger attack surface, because it needs to be much more flexible, has to go through a lot more iterations. Some of them are fairly radical, especially now in the early stages, which means there will be more hard forks. Bitcoin is far more conservative in its development model. It already has enough adoption that we don't want to break things for backwards compatibility. I also think that there is a significant risk when you break into multiple coins and have these divergences, that it creates confusion in terms of adoption for software engineers and developers. If you're writing contracts, is that classic or Ethereum? At the moment, that's going to be a fairly easy answer, as long as they keep in parallel in sync, but they're diverging fast. It's a bit like evolution. At some point, the horse and the donkey diverge fast enough that they can no longer interbreed. What you get if you try to is a mule. That's basically what happens with the divergences of technologies. They drift apart until they're no longer compatible. Then you have two sets of knowledge and two sets of developers. I think we should try to avoid that in Bitcoin, unless it's absolutely critical that a hard fork happens. I would argue the market has already said it's not absolutely critical that a hard fork happens yet. I suppose some people have a greater importance in that. I think maybe some people can even come to the point where they can say, if Core keeps its current roadmap that is split actually becomes inevitable, wouldn't it be better to do this sooner as opposed to later? I think the market pressure to do it now isn't there. I think the market has already chosen to follow the Core roadmap for as long as the Core roadmap makes sense. That's a fairly short lease to be on. When we say Core, what do we mean? I'd like to be explicit about that because a lot of people say Core and it's turned into a big boogeyman. Core repository and the people who have control over that. Bitcoin Core is 95% of the development of Bitcoin. It's 95% of the developers of Bitcoin. It's people who have dedicated their lives very often at no pay to do this for years and years and years. I don't subscribe to conspiracy theories. Three years ago you were wondering about how we're going to fund developments. Now we have a very well-funded team of core developers and a very robust team of core developers. They're doing work that the market is accepting. We don't know what happens next. I'm interested to see. I think it would be politically dangerous to attempt to force a hard fork at this stage, but we'll see how it plays out. I fortunately don't have to make that decision. I think time will inform our theories very well. Right, exactly. And in hindsight then we can see whether those theories were correct. I can tell you that I often have to revise my theories. The first week after the Ethereum hard fork, I was like, oh, this seems to have gone very, very well. This is going to put pressure on core, and then four weeks later it's not going so well anymore. Now it can be used as an argument for why core was right to do a more conservative approach. Some other people might say it's an argument for why we should. Yes, exactly. And that's the thing. I mean, this is a system where there's a lot of open debates, and people can make choices. And the consensus mechanism on Bitcoin makes sure that when you make those choices, you have to commit your money to that choice. And that makes it very difficult for people to be frivolous. People are not going to simply be voting just for a protest vote. In this case, you're talking about the miners. No, not just the miners. The five constituencies of the consensus mechanism. Miners, developers, merchant services, exchange services, and wallet designers. They all have to agree on what the core protocol is. If you have a network of miners who mine without transactions because the exchange is merchants and wallet stayed on the other chain, they're mining non-Bitcoin. One fortunate aspect of this mechanism is that investors at least don't have to make that choice. At least not immediately. The advances of the mechanism. Investors don't have to make that choice. If there is a hard fork in any cryptocurrency, that means you now have money on both sides. So you can just relax and watch the fireworks, and then choose a good time to sell one of them. Thank you.