 So we are very happy to welcome Andreas Antonopoulos to Norway, and we're very proud to have you here at Norway Bitcoin and Blockchain Association A short introduction to our guest Andreas Antonopoulos is a very well-known and respected person in the global Bitcoin and Blockchain community He is an engaged guru Entrepreneur teacher and speaker who travels the world around to spread the knowledge about Bitcoin and Blockchain technologies Welcome to Norway Andreas. Thank you so much So we have got some questions from our members, but also from our friends in Sweden from the Swedish Bitcoin Association So the first question is How can we better spread the knowledge about Bitcoin and Blockchain technology Technology around the young people like 15 to 25 years old Well, I think young people naturally are attracted to the idea of Technologies that operate on the internet that share the characteristics of the internet that are open innovative fast cheap and secure and I think in the long run When young people are exposed to banking as business as usual, they will find it Bizarre and that is slow and yeah controlled and expensive I don't really think you need to promote the concepts to young people although when it comes to Understanding where Bitcoin has value in Scandinavian countries, right? I think Some of the arguments that work in other countries don't really work here In most countries governments are corrupt Governments tend to concentrate power the banking system is not particularly consumer friendly in some cases It's downright criminal. Yeah And those are not problems you really have in Scandinavian countries. So not that's much yes, if you if you start with a premise that The government's government is benevolent Then some of the traditional approaches to explaining Bitcoin to people I don't think are very useful instead I think really talking about The powerful nature of bitcoins flexibility and programmability as a source of innovation, right? The possibility of Taking some of the same kind of flexibility and transparency that you appreciate in Scandinavian countries the egalitarian ethos the transparent operation of government and using this technology pushing it into other countries right and Making it available internationally So the idea is not let's fix Norway's banking or let's fix Norway's government but it's more doesn't the whole world deserve the same level of government and Banking as Norway has for example, I think that's a much better way to explain why Bitcoin can do this In countries where you don't necessarily have those capabilities, right? right and The globality that you can transfer money globally We had example here that young people here can use Vips very easily but it's only in turn in the country well vips is great If you're great if you're 15 years old. Yeah older if you have a bank account Yeah, and if you have a credit card and you don't have any transactions abroad, right? And if you only want to use it inside the country, then it's great Imagine if you could do vips only was available to anyone of any age any nationality in any country Without a bank account or a credit card. Well, that's Bitcoin. That's right there. So, yeah, it's great Let's give it to the rest of the world. Yeah, absolutely. Yes Next question is One of the first reactions that we get from people especially Technicians and programmers when we are introducing them to Bitcoin is this will never scale We can we can impossible store all transactions in one database How can we explain it easily for them how this actually is working? Mm-hmm. Well, they're correct Yeah We can ever scale and in fact if you look at early iterations of the internet, right the routing infrastructure then couldn't scale either and So over time what you saw is the proliferation of additional layers in the network Now one of the nice things about especially payments, which is the aspect of this technology that we need to scale the most is That you can create Systems where you batch payments where you group them together and you only communicate the difference in large batches of data We already have examples of that technology in Lightning Network, right? Tumble bit moonbeam and certain other second-layer technologies that are being implemented in Bitcoin as well as Raiden in Ethereum and other platforms like that They allow you to actually take the payments network to the scale of Millions or even billions of payments per second So far exceeding any level we have in any financial network today exceeding visa and master cost by orders of magnitude By orders of magnitude so you can really bring forward this vision of Micro-payments, but the trick is doing that without putting trust in any central party, right? Being able to communicate between two parties without them trusting each other And without Centralizing the network by giving too much power to any one party we can preserve those characteristics So the real question about Bitcoin is not whether you can scale payments But how do you scale trust? So that you can scale payments because one easy way to scale payments is to not scale the trust system, right? Right and centralize just have one central The easy answer is the wrong answer the harder question is how do you scale Bitcoin law? Preserving the trust model exactly as it is, right? And there are answers to that. It's an engineering problem and I think as we've reached a point where there's some pressure on the scale of Bitcoin It's created this explosion in a bit of innovation Which is leading us to not just one solution, but many many many layers of solutions that can all be expressed over time Right, right So doesn't we have if we are using lightning network? Isn't that a Way of centralizing that we must have some the payment channel. Isn't that a centralizing technology or how? Well, not necessarily. I Can run a hub you can run a hub everyone in Bitcoin can run a hub. There's no Inherently centralizing part to the architecture now granted because In order to use lightning network, you have to commit funds and those funds generate fees It can have a centralizing effect But here's the thing we're not making a choice between lightning network and doing everything on chain That's not right, right? We're making a choice between doing things in a trustless off-chain payment channel like like network Yes, we're doing things in a trusted off-chain database that belongs to a company like coinbase or some other provider Yeah Those are the choices and already more than 80% of the coin transactions are happening off-chain in the private databases of service providers So we actually achieve less centralization by moving to a trustless system like that Right, okay The interest for blockchain technology has figuratively exploded at last 12 months Especially outside the financial sector. So we see IBM. We see SAP Microsoft are now promoting and marketing their solutions rather aggressively mm-hmm What are your thoughts about the hyper ledger and the ethereum enterprise alliance? I mean, I think Overall, this is good because what it's doing is it's training a lot of developers in the concepts and eventually they discover The real open and public blockchains that are going to have a huge impact in the world About a month ago. I was in Singapore and I met this person who told me I've been working in the blockchain space for a year and I just discovered Bitcoin and now I'm very excited And it blew my mind even though I had predicted this would happen Yeah, I hadn't seen an example of it yet This person had gone to a seminar organized by a bank that spent an hour teaching them about blockchain Without using the word Bitcoin. Yeah, which just shows, you know, kind of the soulless Search for profit can cover any sense of rationality or ethics whatsoever So that's like going to in the early 19th century Seminar about new possibilities for vehicles and Doing an hour seminar on tires and not mentioning automobiles, right? And selling that to horse manufacturers or horse breeders. It's it's insane, but at the same time That's what's happening. There's a there is a very big effort to create all of this marketing hype Yes, yeah, the truth is that while blockchain technology is If implemented correctly a very interesting technology, it has some narrow applications You do not need a trusted immutable neutral censorship resistant platform for everything, right? The capabilities that it offers come with disadvantages Transparency is not always an advantage. So which is why for example, I don't think there's a very good use case for health care especially not private health information and It doesn't scale as well as a replicated relational database There's a tendency to try to apply blockchain to everything where a Replicated relational database would work and that's unnecessary But it's generating enormous hype at the moment an enormous investment You know what all of this investment most of it's gonna fail That's the truth in any startup in the end The market is going to select the things that really work and discard the things that don't All of these big companies. They're trying to find a way to inject innovation into their product line Yeah, and Generates more revenue from their enterprise clients. That's fine. I find most of it boring. It's not Bad, it's not good. It's just simply boring the really interesting applications applications that are so truly destructive and So truly outside of the norm of what we do today with the internet That's if you try to present them to an investor or a regulator or a government agency Yeah, they're horrified. Yeah, so that's a good test if what you're trying to do horrifies investors Yeah, that's probably just about disruptive enough to be a meaningful application And if they're smiles all around in a conservative board of investors guess what it's not disruptive I'm interested in the really disruptive applications and most of what's coming out of the blockchain space Isn't but that's okay. Yeah If you look at what happened for example in the internet up to the year 2000 we saw a lot of failed ideas and a lot of grand vision absolutely and 95% of that got wiped out at the end of the bubble but the internet persisted and Many of those ideas came back better at a better time and became hugely successful and in the end society was transformed I Think all of that's great. It doesn't really change what Bitcoin is going to do. It doesn't change what Ethereum is going to do Ironically, I think things like the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance are these alliances of convenience that we saw in the early days of Bitcoin A lot of companies were interested in Bitcoin But then they started shying away from the reputation of Bitcoin things like the Silk Road and things like that Cost people to start worrying about associating their brand with Bitcoin Well, it's ironic to think that Ethereum is a platform for running unstoppable code And eventually someone's going to write the actual marketplace like Silk Road In Ethereum code, right? So then it will not only be providing the funds as Bitcoin was for Silk Road It'll actually be running the market on the platform at that point You're going to see the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance Start distancing themselves from Ethereum and they're gonna say well, we're not so interested in Ethereum But the technology behind the theorem smart contracts. Have you heard that before? So it's gonna be the same story all over again in fact If that happens, that means Ethereum is doing something interesting If it's too comfortable for an Enterprise Alliance Then it's not doing anything disruptive Business as usual we already have. Yeah. Yeah These platforms are all about changing business as usual. At least that's my opinion. Exactly. It is. Yes Talking about the theorem then Ethereum is planning to switch over to a proof-of-stake algorithm Can a proof-of-stake actually be as safe as proof-of-work? No idea There's only one way to find out. Yeah, and that's for someone to do it at scale So I'm glad Ethereum is doing it because it's going to allow us as an ecosystem You know, I I've never taken a maximalist position in this space. I See this as a big ecosystem full of experimentation Bitcoin has its role it provides the role of robust man money sound money long-term story value and It's almost a gateway to a lot of the other things that happen. It's also a Test for what happens at the $20 billion scale. Yeah The good thing about the theorem right now is that it's not at the $20 billion scale And actually that allows it to have more room for experimentation Because of that, I think it's a great test bed to test this proof-of-stake System there may be room for only one proof-of-work algorithm in the world proof of work is expensive what it gives you is immutability of a Certain quality its immutability that is backed by energy and that's a very expensive way to do immutability There's a very good argument to be made that you can run proof-of-stake systems that are anchored Into bitcoins chain to sort of inherit some of that expensive immutability without having to do it themselves And I think we might have an opportunity to see that not the Casper is planning on doing that But it might be an interesting option for the future as well Casper is very interesting It's a very well-designed system and I think it will allow us to test proof-of-stake at a much greater scale It won't be without problems proof-of-work has problems and at each scale We uncover new problems because greater scale means greater level of attack and also Greater challenge and so proof-of-stake will have to start Small and then gradually build up in value the rights security is not Something that is simply an on or off. You can't say something is is or is not secure It's not a true false statement. It's either one. It's it's not either or it's a quantitative issue So the question is how secure and the answer for proof-of-work is 21 billion, right? That's how secure work is why because we have 21 billion dollars parked in a proof-of-work system Yeah, and it has not yet been brought down So how secure is proof-of-stake right now? It's about as secure as there are some proof-of-stake systems running. They're in the millions, right? Right if Ethereum does it we may be able to make a statement like proof-of-stake is $4 billion $5 billion secure As big as the market cap right Cryptocurrency because that much money is kept protected by it, right? And so that will allow us to quantitatively assess the security of proof-of-stake and as both of these systems escalate We can keep proving them at higher and higher levels and they will be more and more challenged at each level I hope to see more consensus algorithms. There's no reason to only have one no and I think part of this Experimentation is that each choice that is made that's different Sends that system down a different path where it can differentiate but also create unique applications I think proof-of-stake is much better suited to Ethereum's style of governance as well as to it's much more experimental and Much more rapidly changing more flexible nature, which is what you need for highly programmable smart contracts Doesn't make it very suitable for robust sound money But Bitcoin already does that there's no need to repeat it right and so, you know, this is How I see it is each system is beginning to fit more closely into an environmental niche That it can dominate right, right Great Moving on to patents Craig Steven Wright and his associates associates has much more than 70 patent applications for Bitcoin Blockstream has announced Defensive patent strategy and now we had ASIC boost patents from from Bitmain And of course the most famous of them all maybe is the Accenture Editable blockchain patent. Mm-hmm. What is your opinion about patents in in the whole Bitcoin blockchain and ecosystem Well about three years ago. I started actively talking about the risk that patents have in the space and They can significantly slow down innovation, especially in the commercial side. Yeah they don't affect Bitcoin because Bitcoin is open source and You can't stop open-source software from implementing patents There there's no one to sue for patent infringement in an open source, right? And so I don't think that's really an issue for the software itself But it can be a very challenging issue for the companies that work in the right point space, right? In in some of the round tables I've participated that had several members of the industry Discussing patent strategy the general attitude was patents are necessary for commercial use as A defensive thing, but we should as an industry work hard to avoid them being abused as an offensive strategy Meaning that companies do need to patent their own innovation to make sure that nobody else can grab it and then Exclude them from the thing they invented right especially in the US We have a big problem because the patent law was changed Really in favor of very large well-funded corporations, right? So that patents are no longer based on first to invent But they're based on first the patent meaning that even if you invented it before if you didn't patent it You lose and you can be excluded from using your own invention This creates an incentive for very well-funded Organizations to take out patents even on things they didn't invent right and it's in sense patent trolling The kind of thing that block stream has done with the defensive patent Policy, I think is very positive for the industry. They're not the only ones in fact I think some of the others have made similar inventors pledges or Defensive patent pledges Pledges are not perfect They do not survive the bankruptcy of an organization one of the risks in this space is that when a company that has a lot of Patents goes bankrupt and those patents are sold They're bought by commercial patent exploitation Yeah trolls who then use it to attack the rest of the industry with extortion And that can be very costly So yeah, I mean this is a this is a challenge in the industry. It won't stop. It will stop the Innovation among commercial companies It won't stop the innovation in the open-source community. And of course, that's one of the advantages of Open-source. Yeah, is that it's not encumbered by this. It's sad patents originally were designed as a means to protect inventors They've been perverted over decades and decades and now they are simply a form of corporate welfare Yeah, just like many other forms of corporate welfare They are yeah, I heard a number we had a patent discussion on the us loob blockchain day the other day and I Heard that 90% of all patents are actually not used. They are just had Stored as a as a security if someone else should it should infringe of your on your No, then you can use your yeah, the primary the primary Sorry the primary used Mechanism or policy for these is mutually assured destruction. Yeah, which is if you sue me I'll sue you back with a hundred more. Yeah, it takes a lot of energy and capital away from actual developing and actual Good stuff Okay, moving on to more society in government questions What is your opinion about separation between government and economics in general and what part can Blockchain play in a perfect economical social order So I think in in most In most of the developed world it is firmly understood that there are very very good reasons why Church and state should be separate. Yeah But that's a new invention right in here. Yeah for a very long period of history church and state were not separate and that had very bad outcomes for everybody and part of the reason was that Religion is a very powerful form of control and governments and religion conspire to Oppress people. Yeah, if you combine them, they become too powerful. Well exact same thing applies to money I think in 25 years time from now, we're going to begin to see a growing recognition among some countries Pioneering countries if you like that there should be separation of money and state in exactly the same way for Exactly the same reasons Power corrupts Absolutely power corrupts absolutely exact and the two most powerful forms of power are money and belief Yeah, if you combine the two It's very very dangerous. It's a little Yeah money and state should be separate and in almost all societies where Power of money is in exclusively the domain of the state Then the state very quickly loses respect For its citizens. In fact when money is derived from For example the exploitation of resources Like oil with the exception of Norway I'm not sure how long that's going to last Right if you look at the history any government that has the ability to generate money outside of taxation and therefore is decoupled from the needs the productivity the the Welfare and labor of its citizens, especially the middle class very quickly They become irrelevant to the political discussion and the democratic institutions collapse and you get autocracy We see that throughout the Middle East where resource extraction economies diamonds cobalt Antimony oil, etc. Lead to dictatorships and civil wars It's great that Norway isn't there But it hasn't been that long since Norway came into sudden wealth without the need to tax its citizens And I don't think that story ends well We'll see how it goes. Maybe this is going to be the golden exception scan the Navy has done that before but in general I think the the combination of state power and Power of the money is a very dangerous combination Bitcoin technology specifically not blockchain, but Bitcoin the use of blockchain and currency I think Creates enough separation and empowers citizens themselves to control their choice of currency And to control their ownership of money. I think that is a powerful counterbalance to The untethered control over money by governments. We're seeing that already in Venezuela We're seeing that already in a number of situations where The state has made an extreme mess of their currency and the people are using Bitcoin defensively What I think that's a great idea. Yeah They are talking about Fed coins or in Norway should be nor coins. Mm-hmm What is your idea about countries creating their own cryptocurrency that they have control of? Well, if they have control of it It's not to decentralize cryptocurrency. No, it's a centralized database And that means two things one it delivers none of the benefits of liberty that are delivered by a cryptocurrency It removes self-determination and empowerment of the individual It removes censorship resistance. It removes neutrality. It removes the global nature and it's no longer open So all of the advantages of an open public blockchain are gone. Yeah But what it also does is it adds in security? Blockchains are not inherently secure. There's nothing magical about the blockchain that makes it secure It's not the blockchain that makes things secure. It's the decentralization that makes things secure. We cannot secure Systems and we cannot secure keys and when I say we know one On this planet knows how to secure information Perfectly as a result the only way we have found and the reason things like the Bitcoin blockchain are secure as a whole is By spreading the control so thin that there's no one place you can attack to gain any level of control You have to attack Everywhere it's the same thing as if if I wanted to rob every Norwegian of their cash Mm-hmm I have to go out and hit all of them over the head and take their wallet Right. Yeah, if they all put it in the vault now All I have to do is make a hole in one vault and I get everybody's money. Yeah, right if you create a Fed coin then That one blockchain allows you to hack an entire country's monetary supply Yeah, that is a terrible idea. It's even worse than if you can find a country that can secure that system That would be a miracle because we haven't had one yet Right, right The NSA can't secure their computer systems North Korea can't secure its computer systems even the most autocratic authoritarian places where Every crime is the death penalty Can't secure systems right and so the only thing we know that can secure systems is to remove Concentration of control every one of these Fed coins. We're talking about is concentrated control if they do it Mm-hmm. It will be hacked. Yeah, why is it not hacked today? Because in most Situations the actual production of money is much more decentralized than people realize Yes, the interest rate is controlled centrally. Mm-hmm the printing is done at several different printing places Which is then distributed by hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of armored trucks on Secret routes that constantly change to thousands and thousands of banks where it's introduced into the system Right, you're talking about replacing all of that with a controlled computer system with Maybe just a few sets of keys, right if the government can control it Then anyone who can steal those keys can control it too, exactly if the government can't control it and it's decentralized Then what is the point of making it? We already have one of those. It's called Bitcoin, right, right? So it would actually be much worse than we already have today absolutely much worse It's much more dangerous than what we have today And I think that's unfortunately a lesson that will only be learned the hard way It doesn't actually remove any of the other problems, which is That inevitably the government is going to manipulate the money supply And they're going to create inflation in order to erase the debt because the biggest debt holder in every country is the government itself Right, and as long as governments with debt holders and not savers They will take from savers to pay for their debts and the best way to do that Without taxes without voting without anything else is inflation. Yeah It's the best form of theft the government has ever invented. Exactly. Yeah, I'm very easy just print more money. Yes So another question in this area is what can the general population do To secure themselves from a possible economical collapse that is predicted by some people in the near future Well, that's a hard question, I mean you know The the funny thing is that these two things are connected if everybody can secure themselves from an economic collapse an economic collapse doesn't happen An economic collapse by definition is something Not everyone can protect themselves from that's why it's a collapse. That's why it's correct so so it's kind of a circular question, which is You know one of the things that that these Kurt occurrences offer is simply an alternative and it's because it's an alternative that is based on different fundamentals It's based on a mathematical monetary supply that doesn't change and is not easily inflated or it's not inflated at all in the case of Bitcoin If because it's a system that cannot easily be co-opted It will operate with different characteristics than traditional currencies Which means that it acts as a safe haven very much like gold silver precious metals and and some countries currencies but You know if everybody tried to buy Bitcoin To protect themselves from an economic collapse Then Bitcoin would fail too Because of scaling capacity problems. It was too early. Yeah. Oh, yeah, there there is no There is no too early in these kinds of things. So I You know, I mean, I hope we don't have a catastrophic Collapse, but I do expect that we will have another global recession Probably worse than the one we had in 2008 probably within the next few years Right hard to tell of course with these things and without timing. It's a useless prediction because the prediction itself tells you nothing Of course, we will Business always goes in cycles that will eventually be a recession I think it's gonna be more sharp and more broad than the previous one Primarily because none of the problems that happened during the previous one were fixed. They were just covered up, right? and You know now the world has a lot more debt So a lot less room to maneuver if bad things happen in the economy So I think yes Bitcoin can offer a safe haven But it's very narrow it can only offer a safe haven for a very very small percentage of the population who are literate Numerate internet connected technologically sophisticated aware of these systems and have enough disposable cash to invest At least a small enough in into it and do it with the right timing, you know, that's not gonna save Anyone really or anything it's gonna create a bit of economic inequality because those who have Investments in Bitcoin are going to get an enormous bonus in that case and those who don't Are not gonna be able to to get involved because it's gonna be too late, right? You know, I do not recommend that people use Bitcoin as their primary investment but I do believe that at This time in in history based on the economic conditions we have today People should try to diversify Diversify Geographically, you know, don't have all of your things tied to one national economy, right or one industrial sector, right? Just I can't companies do it today, right? There's I know a lot of workers who Get their salary from a company and have all of their Retirement invested in that company shares And all in the currency of their country, I mean, that's a very dangerous combination. Yeah, so diversify geographically Diversify currencies don't have a single asset class have stocks have bonds have precious metals have real estate have You know, all of the things is this is standard economic it is Practice and I'm not a financial advisor. So I don't know what I'm talking about all all I have to say is that Bitcoin represents an asset class. It's a novel asset class. It is very volatile But it has an element of counter correlation, which means that when everything is going in one direction It tends to go in the opposite direction, which is a useful characteristic for a diversified portfolio If you know how to blend it in the right proportion, which is usually quite small But it's worth practicing and learning about this technology Because it might have an impact in in your ability to weather a storm rights What are the most Immediate centralized services that can be decentralized with the help of blockchain and Do you know of any such projects going on at the moment, which is not a cryptocurrency space? I Think the two biggest ones right now are the international wire transfer system, which is mostly swift. Yeah So making wire transfers across borders That's an area which is expensive slow full of errors and More importantly full of geopolitics. Yeah, yes And so it's a major lever of control that certain governments use to bully other governments And so whether you can send a payment internationally or receive a payment internationally Depends very much on what your government is doing and how well their relationships with other governments are right And that's not a good basis for international commerce That can be disrupted and I think that's already being disrupted simply by the very Existence of something like Bitcoin People see the writing on the wall in the beginning to realize that this level of control that has existed so far Is it is going to be short-lived? The second one is the international remittance market again dominated by one or two major players like Western Union and money Graham and companies that transmit 550 560 billion dollars a year and Yeah, and make a hundred and seventy five billion dollars in fees which is preposterous obscene and Ends up costing the poorest people on this planet a lot of money. Right now When we talk about Bitcoin and helping The other six billion, you know the people who are underbanked, right across the board some people see Bitcoin as it is today and go ah with the current fees you can't possibly do that because No one's gonna be able to live on Bitcoin, etc. I think that's a misunderstanding of the argument which is At current scale You can't have everybody living off Bitcoin for day-to-day transactions across the world And in fact if you're looking at people who live on two dollars a day, that's preposterous Yeah, but for a person who lives on two dollars a day They are that means they're getting 60 dollars of income A month 60 dollars of income a month is very close to the average remittance Sent from immigrants abroad now think about what a difference it makes If you save that person 9 or 10 percent And even with a high cost of a bitcoin transaction You can do that cost effectively and competitively with the western union That's the worst-case scenario and think about all the people who are living on more than two dollars a day But not that much more who can greatly benefit from this, right? So we can already impact the world's poor not by having them use bitcoin on a daily basis But simply having them use bitcoin for one application And that's remittances. All right, and that's not even considering if we use Lightning network as the remittance channel, which could then significantly reduce the fees, right, right um Some of the final questions now More about The bitcoin community and ecosystem. What can we do to be to get a more open and including community Where alternative ideas can be discussed in a more scientific and academic manner than we have today. We have more Shitstorm today so to say in in the discussions with different forums, but How can we help that? How can we do it better? Well, honestly, um, I don't think we can and I don't know that we necessarily want to meaning that Drama is a symptom It's a symptom of a system where There is no ability for anyone to impose their decision on anybody else because In the absence of broad agreement the system simply maintains the status quo It's a system that has a very high threshold for agreement 90 or more For reaching consensus in such a system all of the debates will become loud Will become messy and will become angry Um Democracy is messy If you want clean if you want calm if you want scientific precision Dictatorship is how you get it right the trains will run on time. The messages will be clean There will be very little debate very little dissent. Everybody will have simple answers to complex problems And the problem with that of course is that you sacrifice freedom, right This system is not designed to be clean And it's not designed to be efficient. In fact, it sacrifices efficiency at a protocol level for liberty and we've got to understand that it also sacrifices Decorum and clean debates And all of the other nice things that happen when when you can elect one person to make the decision And instead what you have is this very messy process Which is very organic And very free-flowing because it involves a lot of exchange of opinion All of that noise though is irrelevant Watch what's happened over the last three years all of this noise Bitcoin still works For about a dollar you can send an international payment that is completely uncensorable And near instantaneous Will be confirmed Within 10 minutes cleared completely and be irreversible After it was already uncensorable anywhere in the world to anyone without even showing a lick of id That system still works beautifully despite the fact that there are Some multi multi millionaires who want to change it Some other multi millionaires who don't want to change it with enormous budgets and shouting and campaigns and sock puppets and Right the fact that these people can't change it despite of how powerful they appear big mining consortia Large groups of developers all of them unable to impose their opinion And it still works That is the essence of the system all of this noise nothing changes until We need to change and we have sufficient agreement among everybody And guess what if we don't change a thing Bitcoin still works exactly as it is so I don't want to see a system where we can get together In a consortium or a governance committee or elect representatives or have a meeting We can't have a meeting There's six million people involved in bitcoin The only meeting that happens Is every ten minutes A block is propagated and every node on the network validates it according to the consensus rules That is our governance model. All of the rest is just noise surrounding it We don't need another governance model that one works fine. The reason it works is because it resists Attacks and coercion in an adversarial environment. We're not even in a very adversarial environment anymore yet But we will get into an adversarial environment and we're going to have some very big adversaries If we can't handle a bit of drama on reddit Imagine what happens when entire governments Are attacking this system which they will As some of them have started to do We need to be able to resist that And resisting that will be very noisy and very dramatic And hopefully in the end Bitcoin will continue to work exactly as it does today It's going to be very difficult to replicate that across the board But it's one of the reasons why In the scaling debate for example, there are easy answers and those easy answers Are answers that requires to sacrifice The very things that allow us to resist a takeover That allows us to resist Co-option and corruption of the principles of the system Right With that I would like to conclude and say Thank you very much for coming to Norway. Thank you. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much Thank you