 Hi. I'm just wondering, let's say that 5% of people of the total population get out of their comfort zone and they move to, for example, crypto. Okay. And I just wonder when do you think that this gentrification will come that, you know, this mainstream, let's say, user-friendliness of crypto community will come. Then you say, okay, this is gentrified. I'm going out of here because it's to user-friendly for me. Well, it's already happening, right? It's already happening. And at the moment is primarily the things that people call blockchain, enterprise blockchain, blockchain proof of concept, blockchain alliance, blockchain projects. We're using blockchain to do blockchain, blockchain, blockchain, blockchain. And yes, this week is consensus week in New York, blockchain week in New York. I must have forgotten to go there. I came here instead. And they're going to say that word a lot. Yes, gentrification is already happening. The attempt to wrap all of this in a sanitized corporate environment, but the brilliant thing about it is that that doesn't take away the core principles and values anymore. They've built their own little neighborhood. And it's boring. And they're doing their own little thing. And the consultants are making fantastic money, right? The funny thing is, and I predicted this in 2013, I suggested that what's going to happen is they're going to start blockchain projects. They're going to take these blockchain projects, and they're going to have funding. And for this funding, they're going to train software developers to work on blockchain. And how are they going to train software developers to work on blockchain? They might buy my book. They might go and do some courses online. They'll start learning from the existing code base. They're going to copy some of the existing code. They're going to learn cryptography fundamentals. They're going to learn about elliptic curves. They're going to learn about private public keys. They're going to learn about hash algorithms. They're going to learn about consensus algorithms. They're going to learn about proof of work. And one day, one of these developers is going to discover Bitcoin. And people thought that was funny, right? I mean, come on. How can they possibly do that? So I went to this conference in Singapore, and me and Vitalik Buterin were there, both doing a presentation for the Singapore Meetup. And this kid, this young kid, maybe he was in his 20s, not even mid-20s, came up to me and said, Mr. Antonopoulos, I've been watching your videos. I've been in the blockchain space for a year and a half. And a couple of months ago, I discovered Bitcoin. What? How? How can you be in the blockchain space for a year and a half and discover Bitcoin in the last two months? He said, well, I went to this Bank of America conference presentation. And there was a consultant who was talking about this new technology called blockchain. And they talked about blockchain, they talked about hyperledger, and they talked about ripple, and they talked about distributed ledger technology, and they talked about federated ledgers, and they talked about proof of authority, and proof of stake, and all of that, all of that. They didn't say Bitcoin once, it wasn't on the slides. And so then I got hired and I got involved in this project, and I started working with hyperledger. And I started reading. But every time I would search for one of the things that I was interested in, it would send me into these weird open-source communities on GitHub, and I'd find things about other things that I'd never heard of. And then I started noticing that Bitcoin came up a lot. I was like, what's the relationship between blockchain and Bitcoin? Does Bitcoin use blockchain too? And this entire time I'm sitting there and I'm really, uh-huh. And then what happened? Really, uh-huh? And I'm like inside, I'm screaming, but I'm listening to this guy. And then I discovered your videos, and I started watching them, and now I'm really excited about Bitcoin, so I came here to learn about Bitcoin. And I'm like, oh, this is it. Because the beauty of that is Bank of America paid to train this guy. And now he's working for us. And they keep doing that. Because if you get trained on the corporate dime, on the boring corporate stuff, and then one day, can you imagine you've been doing all of this stuff with hyperledger and distributed ledger technology, etc., and you've been paid and trained and trained and trained. And one day you come across Bitcoin, and it blows your mind. Because it blew my mind and it blew your mind. We're all here because we had that epiphany. We had that same experience that, oh, wow, this is very different. It's exciting. It's weird. And then you get involved and you start reading and you go down the rabbit hole. So we're going to keep seeing that happening. And I think that's one of the most exciting parts of this space. Hi, Andreas. After a lot of investment and extensive research in the blockchain space, it is clear that private blockchain is not having any advantage over existing databases. But still I see a lot of major tech giants working on their private blockchains and offering as a service or in other ways, but also investing a lot of money in development, as well as in marketing of private blockchain. Is there anything I am missing which private blockchain offers over database, as these tech giants have great talent, but still investing a lot in private blockchain? Yeah, I mean, there is one important consideration, which is the hype factor. Private blockchains, the word blockchain itself comes with so much hype, and people automatically make assumptions, often incorrect assumptions, about the characteristics and capabilities of something just because it has the word blockchain in it. So people assume, oh, well, if it's a blockchain, then it must be immutable, not the case. If it's a blockchain, then you must have decentralized control, not the case. If it's a blockchain, then it's censorship resistant, or it's neutral, or it's able to track truth, or no one can cheat the rules. None of these things are true. These are not characteristics of a blockchain. They are characteristics of some consensus algorithms on some blockchains. And they're really the aspect of a blockchain that is formed by a decentralized consensus algorithm. So people use the word blockchain in order to imply all of these other characteristics, whether they're true or not, because they can raise a ton of money. And because the consultants who sell this junk to big private businesses, they don't care. I mean, they're going to get funded whether or not the project succeeds. A lot of these are what they call proof of concept, prototype, MVP-type projects, and so far, they've been failing in very large numbers. Because developing on a blockchain is complicated, it requires new knowledge and skills, new tooling, and understanding. And if you're going to spend all of that effort, you need to get something in return. Now, if all you're doing is taking a software clone of Ethereum and you're running it as a private network without mining, proof of authority, with a few nodes on Amazon, AWS, in the cloud, etc., that's not secure. Not only is it not secure, it's not decentralized, and therefore it's not immutable, it's not neutral, it's not censorship-resistant, it's not any of those things. But it still is hard to do development on that platform, it still requires the new tooling, it still has edge cases that are often unpredictable, like the possibility of forks or mining attacks, as well as problems with propagation of transaction, and nodes going out of sync, and having to keep upgrading to maintain the software and the consensus rules, all of which means that you've just exposed yourself to a whole boatload of new, untested experimental technology to get nothing in return, other than a slow, inefficient, decentralized database. Now, there will be applications where private blockchains are relevant. These are applications where the current status quo is a tremendously centralized organization, such as a clearinghouse function. And in those cases, you have a bunch of banks that don't trust each other, or a bunch of financial institutions or parties that don't trust each other, and they will want to implement a type of federated closed blockchain. The problem is that in projects like that, if they try to build their own, then it turns into a standards war. It turns into a design by committee where every one of the competing parties within this coalition, with this framework, tries to insert their own intellectual property. You have the committee designing technical standards on the front end, while the lawyers are securing patents on that technology in order to get an edge on the back end. You have people trying to introduce their own little pet projects and technical changes in the protocol in order to get some kind of competitive advantage or edge over their competitors. Effectively, the same problem you originally had, which is the reason the parties are choosing to use something like this, is because they don't trust each other ends up sabotaging all of the development effort. One of the interesting things about open public blockchains is that the development is not driven by corporate interests within a committee, federation, or closed industry. Instead, it is driven by either a very large number of volunteers who are developing with different motivations. In fact, many of those motivations are neutral towards the interests of various corporations that are involved in the development. Even if there are corporate-sponsored developers, they come from so many different industries and represent such a broad range of interests and possible applications, that they are not directly trying to influence the protocol, usually, and can't influence the protocol to give an advantage to one party. It is actually very difficult, even in the case where what you want to do is a narrow federated closed system, which is slightly better than a completely centralized single-party, say, clearinghouse or trusted third-party. Even in those cases where there is a use case, the dynamics of trying to do this as a committee development or design project essentially undermine the project itself. We have seen banks try to do these projects again and again. I have worked on projects like this. I have worked in financial services on large projects where you had coalitions of banks trying to create the next open standard for payments, the next open standard for cross-country or international wire transfer, the next standard for credit cards or chips on credit cards, etc. These standards move very slowly. They either go towards a least common denominator or least functionality model, or they go in the opposite direction of everything in the kitchen sink, where they end up crammed with so many features and capabilities because everybody wants their little pet project to be included, and they fail. We saw this in the telecom wars in the 80s and 90s when they were trying to compete with the internet with close models of development. We saw this with the development of standards for email that failed because internet email was better and simpler. We saw this with standards for directory services and identities that failed because the enterprise models were way too complicated and developed by competitors jockeying for position. We saw this in the development of protocols like ISDN, the Integrated Services Data Network, which was supposed to be a competitor to internet broadband. We saw this in the development of video conferencing. We saw this in the development of messaging and chat messaging. In all of these cases, when the industry players tried to get together and create a common set of standards or protocols, they failed. Open source development, open blockchains, public development, collaborative development with a set of neutral principles outside of the purview of the corporate interests that drive these committee developments are more effective. Private blockchains are inefficient. They don't offer many of the benefits of decentralization. The cost to implement them is too high. The chances of these competitors coming together and creating a truly neutral open standard that serves the needs of the industry rather than jockeying for position are pretty slim. Let them keep trying. Eventually, what we are going to see as we saw with the era of the open internet is that companies that said, we can't be on the open internet, it is too wild, it is too insecure, it is outside our control, eventually saw that, in fact, those were benefits. Being neutral, being outside of the control of any organization, having standards that are designed for a broad variety of applications, rather than a specific niche, all of these things made it so that companies could get more value by participating on the open internet than trying to build their own competitor. I think the same thing is going to happen with private blockchains. The intranet of money is a very narrow use case without very good benefits that it is actually very hard to achieve.