 Loic asks about Ethereum 2.0. Andreas, have you looked into Ethereum 2.0? Many people are trashing it on social media of course, especially on fact that there will need to be a second chain. Is that so? What do you think of it? Could you explain what the upgrade consists of? Is there going to be a need to transition to a new blockchain? What about all the projects that were developed on the first one? This is a great question. I have been following Ethereum 2.0, of course, but not in a great degree of depth. Among other reasons, because there have been a lot of changes, the latest roadmap, which is now more or less clarified, was presented at DevCon in Osaka just recently, just a couple of weeks ago. I haven't looked into the details as such yet. However, what I can tell you from what I've read about it is that Ethereum 2.0, which is a simultaneous transition to a sharded architecture, and sharding is a process by which you have effectively multiple chains or shards as they're called, which store different parts of the Ethereum underlying blockchain so that not all clients have to validate all contracts. Effectively, it's a way of replicating the Ethereum blockchain in different shards, similar to database sharding, in such a way that if you need to validate a small contract, you ask the participants of that particular shard that it's stored on. If you're doing validation, you're validating one shard, not the entirety of the blockchain. This is a scaling solution for Ethereum. That's how it is being proposed. Separately from that, of course, is the transition to a proof of stake system, and that's also part of Ethereum 2.0. The idea being here that several major changes that are needed in Ethereum, rather than doing these as a series of hard works, they are going to be done as a completely new started chain. However, this chain starts with the entire state of Ethereum 1.0, the current Ethereum chain, encoded as its starting point. Let me explain that a bit. One of the big differences between Ethereum and Bitcoin is the way accounts and code is stored. In Bitcoin, you have UTXO or Coin Output Points, Unspent Transaction Outputs, as you may have heard them called. In Ethereum, you have an account-based system where you track the balance of accounts rather than specific coins moving around or specific amounts moving around. You track balances of accounts, so it's an account-based system. Now, this has certain disadvantages in terms of the auditability and the potential for problems in the soundness of money. It's one of the trade-offs that Ethereum makes. That's my personal opinion that it has some disadvantages vis-à-vis UTXO in terms of how easy it is to audit the balance of accounts. However, it has some advantages in other ways because it allows a degree of flexibility, including the ability to capture the current state, the balance of all of the accounts and code-based of all of the contracts, as a snapshot. That means that in the transition to Ethereum 2.0, a point-in-time snapshot is made of the Ethereum 1.0. After that, Ethereum 2.0 is initialized with that snapshot so that effectively all of the balances, contracts, and everything else that existed in Ethereum 1.0 now exist from the beginning in Ethereum 2.0, but without any of the history of how you got there. Rather than having the entire history of the chain, which, among other things, has a bunch of junk because of denial of service attacks and repeated hard forks that needed to clean up various problems with accounting and gas accounting and storage accounting and the denial of service attacks that occurred. All of that junk is gone because it's not relevant to the final state. Instead, what you get is just one of the balances at this moment in time, one of the contracts at this moment in time, and then move forward from there. Ethereum 2.0 is a completely new chain. In fact, it's a set of shards that start clean with a snapshot of the state from Ethereum 1.0. All of the existing contracts, accounts, balances, private keys that you have continue to work in Ethereum 2.0. The interesting question is what happens to Ethereum 1.0? Of course, there is a possibility that that chain will continue to be mined. There are some issues there because there is a difficulty bomb and things like that may need to be diffused, but also there is always the possibility that there will be people who object to the transition to Ethereum 2.0 and decide to fork the code and continue Ethereum 1.0 in some fashion, just like Ethereum Classic happens during the Dow. So you may have Ethereum Classic, Ethereum 1, and Ethereum 2 after this happens. I'm not sure what exactly is the plan for handling that particular occurrence, but one of the things we now know about blockchains is that you can neither prevent someone from forking into a new chain nor can you prevent someone from continuing an old chain even if you've decided that it is obsolete. So in both of those cases, when there is any kind of disagreement in the blockchain space, it is very likely that both perspectives or points of view or implementations continue independently after a fork and so it's never A or B due to forks. It's always now A and B. In the case of Ethereum, most of the hard forks have had very, very high levels of consensus and as a result, nobody has tried to continue a legacy chain and not adopt a fork with one glaring exception of course being Ethereum Classic, ETC, and the Dow fork. So Ethereum 2.0, a series of shards coordinated among each other using a beacon chain as I believe it's called. These shards are different chains and they start from a new genesis effectively and that genesis of Ethereum 2.0 however captures the state of the existing Ethereum one chain as a snapshot in time to continue all of the existing state and allow people to continue running all of the contracts and accounts they have, but it is a new chain. Now as to the fact that many people are trashing it on social media, I don't think there is any opinion, action or piece of software that isn't being trashed simultaneously from every different perspective and that's more a reflection of social media than it is of any specific idea. Mihail asks, is Ethereum the next Bitcoin? No, I don't think so and the reason I don't think so is because I think that Ethereum specializes in a completely different application domain and different use cases. I don't think Ethereum does what Bitcoin does and I don't think it can or wants to really because that would severely constrain its development speed and flexibility. It would have to become much more conservative in order to serve the application role that Bitcoin serves. I don't think Bitcoin could do what Ethereum does for the same reason. Bitcoin would have to be much more flexible, much less conservative, much much more faster in its development cycle, which would undermine its fundamental role as a very robust, very secure system that can defend against collusion between nation-states and broad-based attacks. So for all of those reasons, I think Bitcoin and Ethereum occupy parallel, separate, slightly overlapping niches where the center of the use case of each niche is distinct enough that they do not really compete head-to-head. I think that applies with many crypto currencies. The ones that are successful and get first mover advantage solidify their position in an application niche. If they try to compete too closely with something that already exists and not differentiate enough, then the first mover advantage is almost insurmountable and they can't succeed. If they differentiate a lot in order to move further away from the first mover, then they no longer occupy the same application space and they can specialize in a different niche and perhaps succeed in being the first mover in that niche. So I think there are a couple of niches that are emerging, smart contracts, robust sound, very secure money, privacy, very strong privacy systems, resource allocation and sharing systems, perhaps such as storage, memory, CPU, and things like that. But we'll see. It's very early to tell and these things don't always go the way the designers had hoped for. People tend to use technology for their own uses and find uses of the technology that the designer did not anticipate. The market decides ultimately what the niches are, which applications are perfect for the time and the audience when they are launched and which systems gain enough first mover advantage to firmly establish themselves. Once the market gets into that configuration, I think the only thing that allows it to shake up is there's either a fundamental change in the way the market operates, like for example when we went from five big photography manufacturers that made cameras to suddenly every phone having a camera and that shook up the photography business enough to reorder the leaders in that business and someone went out of business. That kind of first mover advantage and that kind of solidified market doesn't get shaken up unless you change the parameters of the market dramatically through the introduction of some radical new technology that's very disruptive. That may happen. Until that happens, unless one of these systems fails for its own reasons through internal division or a very, very fundamental and long-lasting bug that takes the system down, I think a lot of the first movers in this space enjoy such an advantage that they're almost impossible to unseat. Ethereum is not the next Bitcoin. Ethereum is the next Ethereum and Bitcoin is the next Bitcoin. I recently did a video about that if you're interested in watching it.