 How do you see the role of debt changing in a society with the advent of cryptocurrencies? That's a really interesting question, Kenny. When you first get involved in this space, you may not initially notice, but bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies like it... are not debt instruments. When you hold bitcoin, nobody owes bitcoin to anyone. It is an asset. Most other systems we have that we use for money are actually debt instruments. They are created through credit. When you hold a dollar, somebody owes somebody for that dollar, and somebody holds a debt. That means it is a very different system than traditional currencies. The other big difference is that in traditional currencies, lending is done by what is called... fractional reserve banking, meaning that banks can effectively create money out of nothing, by lending $9 for every $1 they have in deposits. That mechanism allows them to expand the availability of credit in the economy, essentially to inflate the economy... by producing more credit. If that credit is properly invested, it is great, it might increase productivity, create returns, and that's fine. If it's not properly invested, it creates bubbles and inflation... in the underlying currency, and that's not fine. How does that change with cryptocurrencies? We don't know yet, but one thing we do know is that... you can't do fractional reserve banking with cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. You can't give out bitcoin that doesn't exist, or that you don't hold. You can't give out more than already exists, so you can't issue a debt in bitcoin, not directly at least. However, one of the interesting phenomena that has occurred is the emergence of all of these other blockchains. While some of them are differentiating in terms of capabilities and features, and creating technology innovation, many, perhaps, are not doing much else other than creating another pool of currency that they're injecting into the system. In a way, that's inflating the supply of money, and that's one of the ways that you effectively get credit. We see this particularly in the case of so-called airdrops, where you have a fork. A good example would be the recent bitcoin gold, but there might be many others. This fork isn't so much aiming to differentiate on features. I don't want to disparage bitcoin gold, but that's not the point. The point is that when a fork like that occurs, it creates a new supply of money. For every bitcoin you held before, now you have the original bitcoin plus some new currency that's been created out of that fork. If the price of bitcoin doesn't drop, and the price of the new coin is greater than zero, then the sum of them is greater than you had before, so they've effectively increased the supply of currency. One way we might see the expansion of credit is through the so-called airdrop forks. Not necessarily a good thing, because that also creates inflation. It doesn't create inflation in bitcoin, which continues to be constrained, but it does create inflation in those airdropped currencies. The corner asks, why is the Japanese government pushing adoption in bitcoin, and legalizing it in such positive ways, and the Chinese government made ICOs and exchanges illegal? I'll make one assumption, and this is a very difficult question to answer. I don't want to go into this, because I have very little insight into the thinking of the Japanese and Chinese governments, for obvious reasons. I don't live there. I haven't visited Japan for a long time, and I haven't been to Mainland China at all. Actually, I've been to Hong Kong a few times. To claim to know what they're thinking would be hubristic. One of the big differences between what's happening in Japan and China is the following. China has this very big issue of growth and development, which is underlined by this enormous amount of debt, and a very, very big real estate construction and manufacturing. I don't know if I should call it a bubble, but certainly a lot of people are worried that there might be a very big overinvestment and malinvestment, capital misallocation, and a lot of these massive projects that are pumped by government funds, by printing currency. Underneath this, you can imagine there's a great deal of fear about inflation. If you think there is a lot of debt and a lot of malinvestment, then obviously, as the government prints more and more money, this is going to lead to inflation, maybe not right away, but eventually. When you have growth rates of 6%, 8%, 10% a year, the possibility of inflation suddenly getting out of control is very, very high. As a result, if you're a Chinese investor, if you're someone who has money in China, and you have this fear of inflation, what do you do? One thing you can do is get your money out of the Chinese yuan and try to invest it outside of the markets that you feel are bubbly and outside of the currency that you might feel may be inflated. That leads to the capital flight. Capital flight is a big problem for the Chinese government. This capital flight, which is happening quite a lot and has been happening, found that one of its avenues found Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. One of the reasons we saw all of these billions of dollars flowing into cryptocurrencies was because Chinese people were trying to get their money out of the country. I don't think it could coincidence that the Chinese government made ICOs, exchanges, and trading to fiat illegal, or at least shut them down. They didn't make them illegal, they just passed some policy rules. It's not like they wrote a law. A lot of this happens at a regulator state agency policy basis. They blocked those because of the capital flight. It's not a coincidence that this happened right when the five-year National Congress of the ruling Communist Party was happening. The leader was laying out the latest five-year plan, a plan that, among other things, had a lot of comments about money, investment, currency, national imperatives, and things like that. Meanwhile, what's happening in Japan is they have the opposite problem. They're not worried about inflation. In fact, the biggest problem they have is they're on the tail end of a 20-year deflationary spiral that has continued to affect their currency. They have a problem with demand and underinvestment. They have a problem with the fact that their economy is not overheated. It's frozen, and it's been frozen for 25 years in this deflationary trap with near-negative interest rates and an inability to really stimulate the economy. For them, something bubbly, a bit ICO-related, a surge of investment, people spending their money instead of hoarding it, spending the money even if they're spending it to move into cryptos. Obviously, you can see the incentives are adopted, so that's one of the reasons why you might be seeing a difference in policy. I'm trying to not make strict pronouncements here, because I'm not sure. I hope that was useful. Next question is really interesting. It comes from Pierre, money supply and deflation. Pierre asks, restricted money supply in Bitcoin is virtuous to create trust in the system and avoid inflation. Most economists, however, advocate for a flexible money supply so that it matches economic conditions and need for credit. If the current fiat system enables inflates endless bubbles through cheap credit, doesn't Bitcoin have the exact opposite problem? Two problems come to mind. One, future prices are unpredictable and do not match productivity, and two, too much deflation might discourage investment. In summary, if Bitcoin is its own central bank, how do you know that its monetary policy deeply embedded in the system was a good one in the first place? Any advice on good readings about this issue? I think this is part of a broader issue, and that broader issue is this assumption that there will be one money, and that one money is the mandatory money that everyone has to use. You see, central bankers have to get it right, because they're forcing everyone to use their system, and if they get it wrong, they force everyone to get it wrong with them. Bitcoin may not be the right monetary policy, but it's an opt-in voluntary system. If you don't like its monetary policy, don't use it. In fact, in a world where that choice exists, where all of the choices exist, where you could pick monetary policy by picking the currency you want to use on a day-to-day basis, where you can't be locked into a system, where you can't be taken hostage, where you always have an exit, is a world in which there is no wrong monetary system, because there is no permanent monetary system, there is no unchangeable monetary system. Bitcoin's monetary system is unchangeable within Bitcoin, but you don't have to stay with it. You can leave if you don't think it's right. The problem with the monetary policy of nations is that not only do they change the whim of bureaucrats, but you can't leave. It's easy to look at that and say, we wouldn't want Bitcoin to replace all central banks with a deflationary monetary system that is imposed on everyone. Guess what? I don't want Bitcoin to replace all central banks with a monetary system that is imposed on anyone. That's not what it's about. It's about choice. Once you have choice, then your choice of monetary system is the right one for you, because you chose it. If nobody else chooses it, that's their problem.