 Our first question today comes from Topi, government-sanctioned Bitcoin addresses and censorship resistance. The full story is from a link to the US Treasury and one of their press releases, where under a government order... the US Department of Treasury announced it would put two Bitcoin addresses under sanctions... because the people using those addresses were recognized as Iranian ransomware hackers. These hackers used international US-based crypto exchanges to launder money back to Iran through the legacy banking system. The order states that all property and interest in property of the designated persons, so that they are in possession of control, are blocked, and US persons generally are prohibited from dealing with them. This order prohibits entities from sending and receiving funds to these two specific Bitcoin addresses. What does this mean? Does this mean that miners would have to drop these transactions leading to the addresses from mined blocks? Does it mean that this is a censorship attack vector against Bitcoin's censorship-resistant feature set? If these sanctions become a trend, wouldn't it be possible for anyone to try to enforce social compliance... without having a majority of the hash rate? What does this mean for Bitcoin's censorship-resistant? That is an excellent question, Topi. First of all, let's understand the magnitude of this tremendous blacklist that the US Treasury has created. They have blacklisted not one, but two Bitcoin addresses out of a total address space of two to the 160-bit address space. They have blocked two out of 1.461501635 times 10 to the power of 48. That is 10 with 48 zeros. I am not that good at math. I had to pull out my calculator in order to figure that one out. I think that leaves a few addresses not on the blacklist by my calculation of 1.46 times 10 to the power of 48 with 48 zeros... after it minus two, which is still plenty of addresses. Considering the fact that your average wallet or laptop computer can probably generate about a million addresses per second, that would mean that, oh, that has been 15 million addresses just since I started saying that sentence... that I could generate in order to have new places to receive funds. This entire concept is ludicrous. It represents a fundamental misunderstanding, or does it? In some way, what it is, is the US Treasury trying to apply its authority on this novel medium. They are going to start small, and this is clearly going to escalate. This game of whack-a-mole cannot be won by technical means, but it can be won by political means. The political means are to apply pressure to entities that dare to include or not enforce the block or blacklist that are regulated entities. This demonstrates that when you have an environment where you have a decentralized currency where no one is in control, and around the perimeter of this, you have a number of centralized regulated entities like the exchanges, then this is going to create a significant conundrum, because those centralized regulated entities now have to conform, comply, and really adapt to this absurd, ridiculous regulatory scheme where they have to blacklist these two addresses. There are two, soon there will be 200,000, and soon there will be 200 million, and the addresses will be updated every 10 seconds, which means having a live feed to the blacklist and maintaining compliance. It is a ridiculous scheme. It fails completely to achieve any of the goals if you really believe that the goals are to reduce the use of money or financing for terrorist activity. If, on the other hand, you might have this crazy conspiratorial idea that the purpose of these regulations is not to prevent terrorist financing, because they obviously fail at that goal, but instead to further expand the power control and authority of various national governments over the life of its citizens, and to create a completely captured financial industry that is a surveillance mechanism of control that pervades the life of every person, thereby completely destroying democratic institutions, balances, and things like that, then you would be right. So, what does this do? It furthers that goal. It furthers the goal of strengthening the surveillance system. It furthers the goal of strengthening financial controls, not for the purposes of actually controlling money, because we all know how sanctioned countries like these are funded through banks. But it serves the role of basically extending authoritarian control over citizens. It is going to be completely and effective, practically speaking, in Bitcoin, and it is going to mostly affect the legitimate, legal, regulated entities that operate on the fringes of Bitcoin, the exchanges, the merchant services, etc. For private individuals, for the miners who are anonymous, obscure, and decentralized, it doesn't create any situation. What it does in fact demonstrate is why it is important to maintain the anonymity of miners, and why it is important to maintain the decentralization of the system. So, that is the latest on censorship-resistant in the Bitcoin space. Things are going to get very, very weird over the next few years, as various entities around the world try to grapple with this thing that doesn't fit any of their preconceived notions, regulatory schemes, or environments. And as John says on the chatroom, they banned a number. Well, in Australia, the law of Australia supersedes the laws of mathematics. So, why not ban a number? Just because it is pointless? Hey, exercise of power is for the pursuit of power itself. The means are the goal.