 In the latest Let's Talk Bitcoin episode, you had a great discussion about distributed identifiers. Oh, yeah. Thank you. And it made me really curious because the guest was working for Microsoft. Daniel Bruckner, yeah. Yeah. And I'm just curious your perspective on the future of this kind of paradigm of these tech titans working on open source solutions, so to speak, amidst this world of zero sum games. Yeah. And that's a great point. You know, Microsoft of today is not the Microsoft I grew up with. And it's difficult to explain to people today how terrifying Microsoft was in the 1980s. The stranglehold they had on technology, and when the internet was first growing up and they started putting out some of the first browsers and controlled the DCP IP and started building networks and things like that, Microsoft had a terrifying monopoly on computing. You could not avoid their operating systems. You could not avoid their office productivity suites. You could not avoid any of that. And for many of us, it was the idea that, oh, my God, we have to crack this monopoly of Microsoft. It gives me hope because Facebook is next. No one survives forever, right? And even these titans of technology that seem unassailable, they collapse. And they don't collapse because someone succeeded in breaking them up. They collapse because they failed to adapt to a world in which they're not the center of attention. That's what happened with Microsoft. They weren't able to understand that the internet was going to turn everything inside out, and they were the inside company, and we were building an inside out world. And so they failed to adapt. And now they're adapting faster than anybody else. And now Microsoft is the open-source company that supports Linux. And if you told me 20 years ago that I would say that sentence on stage, I would be laughing that, no, not then, but they're the last people I could imagine. And they have a vibrant open-source ecosystem, and they're also doing interesting things about privacy. And I'm not a huge fan of large corporations like that solving our problems, but if they build open-source solutions that are well-structured that we can use everywhere, then it doesn't matter who built it. And I think that's the key part of the creative commons, is that sometimes you have to think about the idea separate from the person who built it, and if the idea itself is pure and it doesn't have any hidden hooks that give them an advantage or hidden agendas that cause things to centralize around them, like many things do, then you can say, oh, this is worth using. So some of the things that Daniel was talking about on the show were about technologies that are truly open-source. Why do you think that bankers and governments and evil people who love hierarchy and control and censor, why would they show interest in centralized technologies? I mean, are they really that naive or showing? They're not showing interest in decentralized technologies. They want to take this and adopt it so they can mold it to their own model because they think it will give them efficiency or the appearance of innovation. Here's the thing. I think it's important to understand the motivations behind people who are so interested in centralization of all forms, whether that's centralization of technology or centralization of governance, like against democracy, or even just kind of the default status thinking, which is that government does good, and we need it, and it must happen that way, otherwise chaos. You've got to realize that a lot of this thinking comes from fear. It comes from an inability to imagine a world in which there isn't someone there making sure everybody behaves. It comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature that assumes that other people are out to get you. That kind of thinking also attracts people who are psychologically damaged because they rise in the ranks because they project their own internal fears and nastiness onto other people. The world keeps validating that. I'm cheating because I know if I didn't, other people would cheat, too. It's like, no, that's not how the world works. The vast majority of people are good. I read this beautiful tweet today, which was really interesting. Last week, in one day, one million people took Uber and Lyft, and two million people stayed in Airbnb in that one day. That means one million people got into the car of a complete stranger, and two million people slept in the house of a stranger and had a stranger sleep in their house. And why does that work? And the answer is not Uber or Airbnb. It's not. If your driver is a serial killer, what are you going to do? Stop! I'm going to give you two stars! Put the knife down! One star! Stop stabbing me! Right? What are you going to do? It's not enough. You come back to your home and someone's trashed it. Right? Okay, so there's some insurance, but you don't do it on the assumption that if it gets trashed, the insurance will cover it. You do it on the fundamental human assumption that we all share, which is good and true, that most people are good. Most people behave well. Most people will not trash your house, they'll respect your car, and you can drive with them without them stabbing you. That's humanity. We have to have that assumption. Centralization, among other things, operates on the exact opposite assumption, that most people are bad. Unless you keep them in track, unless you keep them in check, unless someone controls their behavior, their day-to-day lives, etc., they will devolve into animalistic monsters who will go around killing and murdering and raping people. That's not true. These centralized organizations are trying to protect the world. They won't implicitly understand things. They won't consciously think, well, if you start giving people wallets without KYC, then dot, dot, dot, dot, zombies in the street murdering each other. That's kind of the thinking. It's just on a much more abstract basis. It's fear, and we have to overcome that. The way we overcome that is by demonstrating that it's incorrect, by building decentralized systems that work better. We cannot stop centralizers from trying to centralize. Centralizers are going to be centralizing people. We need to build better, right? So build the decentralized systems, and people will find that they offer a better choice, a better future, a more human experience. And that's how we move forward. I think that's one of the elements we need to be careful of. We need to be careful not to give too much of our fault to those who fear what we're trying to do or those who want to stop what we're trying to do. We should focus on what we're doing, right? Or as this fantastic Chinese saying goes, those who say it cannot be done should please stop interrupting those doing it. Thank you. When you say centralization, well, when we put centralization as a bad thing, not necessarily a bad thing, but I think that centralization is like a natural aspect of the humans. Actually, of everything in nature, yes, they would find a way of not needing to spend much time thinking on things. So they centralize, someone takes decisions for them. But what I think that we are sort of building, it's not a problem with centralization, is we being able to opt in and out easily of to whom we give them the power to decide for us. So I think that centralization is not something that will disappear. It's something natural in us because it's a more efficient way of solving things. Absolutely. But what we're building here are tools to opt in and out easily of to whom we're giving such power to representatives. So would you agree with this concept? Well, I mean, the problem isn't centralization itself. The problem is what centralization does to the organizations and the people in it, which is that centralized architectures that concentrate power create all of the incentives for corruption. They corrupt organizations, so those organizations lose perspective of what their goals are and who they serve. And they corrupt people who become so focused on power. Now, not all centralization operates like that. It operates like that on the greatest scales. And it doesn't always immediately go to that over time. It builds that. But over time, that's the natural order of things. Cryptocurrencies are going to get centralized, right? I think we should all be aware of the fact that as more and more people join these cryptocurrencies and they go more mainstream, they're going to get centralized because people are going to tweak them to make them more efficient to their needs or adopt the ones that are more efficient and more centralized. And they're going to forget why we tried to keep them decentralized. And then we're going to have to build new solutions. As long as we have easy tools to build, to opt out. To opt out. Centralization won't be the problem. I mean, I think what we are trying to do is building these tools. Yeah. Opt out is a really important part of life. And if you can opt out of any system, then it doesn't concern you. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter of removing a president. It's building a riot. Among all of us. That's beneficial. But the way it would be, I changed my vote from you to you easily. And now what you say is not relevant because the votes being given to King spontaneously. So the power is not something that you earn. It's not something that you have. It's something that you are given. So I think that what blockchain can bring somehow and the easiness of having some sort of ideas and ways of representing what we are supporting is one of the big tools of blockchain. The tools for opting out to even things that in the actual life and our actual situations, we can decide to move on to another. Either because there's not a chance, or because of the lost or forbidden, or the risk of taking this road, doing the riot, is getting killed. So as long as we build these tools. I think the other thing we see is that historically, when something goes wrong in an environment, the only way people can exit is by physically removing them from that position. Which is why you have refugees and the mass exodus of people from situations they can't fix through any means that they see as hopeless. So they actually leave. And one of the things I like about these virtual tools is the idea of being able to exit without leaving where you are. So being able to exit in every way, economically, politically, socially, technologically, exit from traditional systems while staying exactly where you are. And that virtual exit is enormously powerful. I think we're beginning to see that.