 I think we should open up the discussion for questions from the floor. I have a question. What is your views in general of not regulating the design, which is security, which is utility, but heavily regulating online exchanges? So the gaze between fiat world and cryptocurrency world, so the crazy artificial crypto sandbox and then trying to see that. The rules are based on this exactly smooth. I think it's very hard to regulate online anything because it's not located anywhere. It's located in the cloud. So just settling the issue of jurisdiction is very difficult. Now, I do expect that there will be online platforms that voluntarily opt into regulation. Coinbase has brought up before a very good example of this. And they're clearly pursuing a clientele of a certain type who are willing to pay more for a degree of government protection. But I think you're also going to have wildcat exchanges that are deliberately beyond the reach of governments. And they probably have a place to play in the markets. And I think for governments to try to chase them down in a certain jurisdiction over them is never going to work just because of the technology that's involved. And for Europe, maybe I can answer. I think they are not that much under control at the moment because there was a big effort to have them under the European regulation for anti-money laundering, which is really a minimum of requirement that you can put on an entity which is dealing with money value. And as long as tokens qualify as financial instruments, you're required to obtain an MTF license to operate in some kind of an exchange in Europe. And to be honest, this not only applies to Coinbase, there are many other outfits used to be operated out of Japan or Hong Kong, actually considering to relocate to certain European jurisdictions to get under the European regulation. I wouldn't be surprised to see that happening. Yeah, Binance, for instance, is considering to relocate to Malta at the moment. But you also see people going to Bermuda and, say, Shells and places like this. And then it's up to the customer to decide that the market will direct capital wherever the appetite for regulation really meets the market equilibrium, I would think. So my question would be primary to David, but also to the regulators. So you made it very clear that some of the tokens are clearly not a security and they have some value and you should actually be able to use them without being regulated by a securities regulator. But others clearly are probably security if you apply the Howie test or like you take the German approach. And my question would be if some of them are in fact securities, would Ethereum not be in exchange in the first place? In exchange? Yeah, like in line with the exchange act. Yeah, I think it certainly could be construed as such. The two big problems with Ethereum from a regular point of view is it has no organized leadership, first of all. So if you wanted to regulate them, who would you call? How would you go about doing that? And the decentralization of all these things is such that I don't think you really have the ability to regulate them. And the other question about them is simply where they're located. Because one could argue that Ethereum is based in Switzerland, that it's based in Russia, in Canada, or really it's based everywhere. So I think that even in principle if it looks like an exchange, it's not the kind of exchange you're used to seeing. And we've seen this from the earliest days of Bitcoin when they've tried to seize Bitcoins from drug dealers. That you have a hard time applying existing law from an enforcement point of view to a technology that requires private keys where there's decentralized authority. And I'm not sure the government should even waste their time trying because this stuff is pretty cleverly designed to be beyond the reach of the regulator. That's kind of the whole point, the whole cypherpunk movement that spawned these ideas was trying to make it unregulable. And I think they've, to an impressive degree, have been successful in this. Yes, the crypto token and the, yes, it's really true, of course, that it's difficult for the regulators to say who are you going to regulate if he even does have any address. And so that makes things really challenging. And the only thing where you can start is what you mentioned are the exchanges where you can start to try to regulate this gate from the traditional financial sphere to the crypto token sphere. So this is something, yes, difficult. But on the other hand, we have to, and the other challenge in this is that everything is so globally. And when you would like to make a really effective regulation, then that should be ideally worldwide. And this is really something which you can say is a challenge. There are a lot of committees discussing the whole topic about Bitcoin, which, when I say personally, last year was for me a little bit a surprise that this Bitcoin exchange rates were rose during the year, because when the year 2017 started, everyone was talking only about blockchain and Bitcoin seemed to be a quite old-fashioned thing. And then there was such a rise in the exchange rate that, yes, everyone started to rethink everything. And so even our colleagues in the Financial Stability Department started to think about that. And as well, all the international committees like Financial Stability Board, they thought, okay, we have to monitor that properly and to see what is going to happen and whether these things are really able to influence the financial stability of the whole world. So this is really something I haven't expected. But the FSB actually concluded that there is not an issue of financial stability. But nevertheless, it's now on their agenda. And there was something last year the same time. I think we wouldn't have expected that. So things are really very quickly. I think you also have to keep in mind that these blockchains create lots of new regulatory opportunities. And we saw, I think, the day before yesterday, Jerome Powell, the Fed Chairman, said that Bitcoin was great for money laundering. Now what he didn't add was that we all get to see the blockchain. So if you're out there laundering money, it's delivered right into the mailbox of the Fed and anyone else who wants to see who are the money launderers. And a week ago they indicted those 12 Russians for hacking the US elections and they said they paid for this with Bitcoin. Well, we now can trace the wallets of the Russian intelligence service and see who else are they dealing with and so forth. And I think that, you know, really regulators have an opportunity here maybe to catch many more bad people doing many more things than they ever were able to in the old financial system. And the right attitude is not hopelessness but creativity. But I think we need regulatory agencies with somewhat different mandates and definitely different skill sets. But in the end, this is a big opportunity. And, you know, I think there's some chance that government becomes even more powerful if they can harness this stuff and, you know, use the information that's there. In many ways, I think Powell is out there setting a trap. You know, when the Fed says, oh, this is great for money laundering, all the money launderers are going to say, okay, come on, you know. There's also a slightly scary part that might come with that kind of new type of transparency, which could easily be misused by certain regimes. Yeah, I don't think we should feel sorry for the regulators at all. I think their job is going to change, but it may become much more powerful with these kinds of tools. That's rather surprising. I would have one more, like, I think you were very optimistic about the blockchain, but I think nobody talked about the disadvantages, which is currently, if you have an open blockchain, then at right now, the biggest standard for currency is Bitcoin, which is very energy consuming at the moment. There might be better standards, but you're locked into a system which might be very inefficient. On the other hand, you could say, well, the blockchain is not possible to change. There's a big advantage, but it could also be a big disadvantage for certain business models. So, actually, it might not be applicable for certain types of deals. And I wonder whether that would not be a big threat to having it over a concept. Or if you think about, if you can attack the blockchain, if you have a public blockchain, if it's a currency, I would rather trust the German central bank and say, you know, there's a standard. If someone wants to attack it, they have to go to this central counterparty to do it. If it's decentralized, well, they just, you know, hide and try to get 51% or even less might be sufficient to do it. Yeah, these are issues that we talk about in my course. I think, you know, the scalability of the technology people now appreciate is a bigger problem than we first thought. But I wouldn't get totally sucked in by this energy argument because most of the Bitcoin mines are like at the Arctic Circle using renewable power. They're not displacing people who, you know, would otherwise wish to use the same energy. And I think in the end, the free market for energy can regulate this quite well. If they're really going to burn this much energy, the price will go up and miners will withdraw capacity, you know, up to the point where marginal cost equals marginal benefit. I think the risk of computer-based attacks against the system, I also see this as overblown because if you really had a supercomputer that was that fast, the incentives to be an honest player and just win the blocks and mine honestly are much higher than the incentives to crash the system unless you're a state actor. You know, and you could see Putin or, you know, the dictators in Korea and so forth doing this really for sabotage purposes, not to make money, but just to undermine the adversary's strength. And it's going to be interesting how this plays out, but I think the cryptography can be strengthened much faster than computer processors can gain power and it's unlikely that the Russians can develop a computer in secret that's 20 times faster than anything available in the West. But it's pretty clear the wars of the future can be fought online and the cyber command is the one the government is going to have to invest in most heavily and crypto is but one small part of a much bigger future where artificial intelligence and, you know, the fastest machines with the biggest storage will belong to the most powerful nations and, you know, we shouldn't pretend that anything else is the case and we should be trying to have the best computer science students and, you know, have our kids learning, you know, this is a lot at stake here. And also we do see so many different approaches around novel consensus mechanisms that go way beyond possibly energy. Yeah, it's a hot research area. Exactly, exactly. And I would say from my personal experience the last 12 months so in 95% of the cases the consensus mechanism underlying those projects haven't been proof of work consensus mechanisms which are possibly an issue from an energy perspective. So to this end... Yeah, we graduated our first doctoral student this year with a proof of stake dissertation. It's the first blockchain finance PhD in the world we believe and we're very proud of this. I expect next year there's probably going to be 20. You know, that this is going to attract a lot of the young talent in financial economics because it's a well-specified and important problem. And, you know, I think that proof of work when Nakamoto put it out there just never imagined how quickly a thing would grow and start pushing the constraints and, you know, scale up as quickly as it has and these are now very important questions. My very short question to Mr. Weiss. You mentioned two-pillar approach to deciding whether it's a security token or utility token, tradeability and rights attached to the token. So if we take the pure utility token from the rights perspective, absolutely, 100% utility token, does free tradeability on online exchange make it more look like a security token or not? Well, it really depends on what that particular token looks like. As I said, the legal reasoning behind that or the buffing reasoning behind it is you need to have the three elements. Tradeability, which is what you're talking about right now. Negotiability and of course the rights. So yeah, that could be a point that leads into a certain direction but it's not conclusive on its own. But does it, I think in essence the question was, as far as I understand the question, does the security definition under MIFID require a cash flow-based component like we just discussed from an economic perspective? Well, it lists bonds and shares as examples for instance and those things come with dividends and then cash flow management, right? A couple of days ago Coinbase said it was thinking of listing the BAT, the basic attention token that is associated with the Brave browser. And I immediately thought, is this made BAT a security? And you just get the right to use the browser and block advertising. So I don't know how different regulators would answer that but it certainly would make it tradable and negotiable and that's kind of part of the design of the thing. But I'm sure you guys will have an opportunity to take a swing at that one and there's going to be many more coming your way. Yeah, thanks very much again to the panelists. I think that was a fantastic opportunity for all of us to at least touch certain topics and try to take different angles on very interesting and pressing issues that come with DLT or blockchain technology in a broader sense. And yeah, thanks again to the panel.