 All right, welcome to my presentation, Competing with Free. As Daniel just said, I'm Gigi. Most people probably know me as their Gigi on Twitter. And as Daniel also said, I work on Bitcoin full-time, couple of different projects, I've written a book. And yeah, I was inclined to give this talk another title, to be honest. I was inclined to call it, Competing with Freedom. And the reason for that is because I believe that Bitcoin equals freedom. That's a very short answer to that. But just because Bitcoin equals freedom, it doesn't mean that it's free. Like the time where you were able to purchase a Bitcoin for free has long gone. And free doesn't necessarily mean gratis. Like we see this all over in the Bitcoin space, there are a couple of different projects. For example, Samurai, Wasabi, Mynote, RISC. All of those projects are based on free and open source software, but to use them, you will have to pay a little bit of money to make full use of these software products. And of course, there is Bitcoin as well, which falls into the same category. So I will be talking about free software for a little bit and move Bitcoin to the side. So free software, what is it? And how can you best think about it? If people talk about free software, they mostly use other names. Like they will talk about Fluss or free and Libre open source software, or they will talk about open source, or they will simply talk about Libre software. I will stick to the free software definition by the Free Software Foundation spearheaded by Richard Stallman. And Richard Stallman defines four essential freedoms. That apply to free software. So you need to have the freedom to run the software for any purpose. You need to have the freedom to study the software. You need to have the freedom to redistribute the software to help your friends. And you need to have the freedom to modify the software as you fit to help yourself, help others and also distribute the modified versions. So if we look at Bitcoin, it fulfills all these criteria. You can run it for any purpose. You can study it. You can redistribute it. You can modify it. But since this is Bitcoin, modifying it is kind of complicated. So I'll just leave it at that. It would fill a whole other 20 or two hour, 20 minute or two hour talk to talk about it. So what's interesting to point out is that only for two of those four freedoms, the source code is required. So there's a small difference between free software and open source software. So to study it and to modify it, you obviously need the source code. So there could be open source software that is not free, but Bitcoin is free software in the free software sense. And most people talk about it as open source software. So what's important to point out is that Bitcoin would not exist without open source software existing before it. And I'm quoting Joseph Jax here, who is the CEO of OSS Capital, a company focused on funding open source software. And I want to look at the freedoms that Bitcoin enables now. So if we zoom back to Bitcoin and the freedoms that Bitcoin enables, first of all, it enables the freedom to transact. Second of all, it enables the freedom to save. And third of all, it enables the freedom to remain private. I think those three are extremely important. But they're more, there's the freedom to choose. Like there are many software options and many also options. You can just choose what kind of network features to use, for example. Freedom to use it as you see fit. You can use it also for non-monetary purposes. Open timestamps would be an example for that. Freedom to join and leave the network at will. That's very important in general for nodes, but for miners in particular, freedom to inspect. It's an open letter. It's an open system. Everyone can inspect it and the freedom to innovate. And those freedoms, you can do good and bet with it. Like you could also, if we talk about the freedom to inspect, for example, we could rename that to the freedom to surveil. And if we talk about the freedom to innovate, we could also entitle that the freedom to launch shitcoins and ICOs. But for now, let's just stick with the terminology inspect and innovate. And of course, a lot of people have talked about these freedoms already. So when we talk about freedoms, we might, the freedom to transact, we might say that Bitcoin is censorship resistant. When we talk about the freedom to save, we might say that Bitcoin is unconfiscatable or immune to inflation. When we talk about the freedom to remain private, people talk about how Bitcoin is anonymous or pseudonymous to be more precise. When we talk about the freedom to choose, we say it's open. When we talk about the freedom to use, we say it's neutral. The freedom to join and leave the network, we call it borderless. Freedom to inspect, we call it public. Freedom to innovate, we call it permissionless. And of course, I'm alluding here also to Andreas Antonopoulos, who often talks about the five pillars of open blockchains. And I think it's just interesting to point out that the five pillars that he mentions, open, borderless, neutral, censorship resistant and public. In my opinion, all rest on the four essential freedoms of free software. So those five pillars wouldn't exist without the four freedoms. But I'm here to talk about how to compete with free. And I will focus on one of those freedoms, which is the freedom to innovate, which is the permissionless nature of Bitcoin. All right, so the freedom to innovate. Let's start with probably the most famous example. So there was this company, BitPay. I mean, it still exists, but the short story is that there came along this guy, Nicolas Sturrier, and BitPay posted something on Twitter that Nicolas disagreed with. And he replied that this is lies. My trust in you is broken. I will make you obsolete. One of the most iconic and famous tweets in the Bitcoin universe. And he launched BDC Paysera and he did it. Like he made them obsolete BitPays, pretty much obsolete now. And BDC Paysera is one of the most important projects in space. Another example, as Has mentioned in the talk before mine, we have CASA and they have or had the CASA node. And a bunch of people came along, pretty much unrelated like Stadikus and Rootsol and Selco and Taylor. And I've open norms in there as well. He worked on all pretty much all these projects, I think. So there are many motivated, sometimes anonymous or pseudonymous Bitcoiners that have certain missions. And I have a quote here by Taylor, who's said that his goal is to build the most cost-effective solution for running a full node by integrating the best open source projects. And that's Taylor Haspa of my node. And he launched my node. And it's in my opinion a great project which does exactly that and it does it for free. So I think CASA's hand was kind of forced. They were not able to compete with free and all these projects are very dearly loved in the space and many people use it and all of those are open source. But there's a kind of happy ending to this story. So CASA decided to open source the software of their node product as well. And if you like to run the CASA node now, you can slap the software on their Raspberry Pi if you're feeling inclined to do so. That's kind of a happy ending in that story. There are more examples of the permissionless nature of Bitcoin. There are people building messaging services on top of the Lightning Network, for example. So what you see here is what's that built by use the Jagger. And people can use the Lightning Network to embed messages directly in this payment rate pretty much. So you have to pay a couple of militatorships to communicate with each other. It's still very early days, but it already works and it's quite fun to play around with it. Another example in the same domain would be Jaggernaut by John Contrell. A very innovative and great Bitcoiner. He builds a lot of cool things and that's one of the things he built. And as you can see, it's very easy to request and receive and send payments in this app because it's just a messaging app built upon the payments app pretty much. So all of that is integrated already and works. All right, so you can see that Bitcoin pretty much equals permissionless innovation. Everything we see in the Bitcoin space is permissionlessly innovated. Bitcoin itself falls in that category. Like Satoshi didn't have to ask for permission to launch it. He simply went ahead and did it. Yeah, he just put in the work, did it for free, released it to the world for free and everyone can do with it what they want pretty much. So people are building and they're building for free. So why is that the case? Especially if you're an economist, you might ask yourself, why is that? And you can ask yourself this question in other domains as well. Why are people working on Newsletch Linux, for example? Why are people working on open source software in general? Why are people contributing to Wikipedia, for example? There are a lot of people that pretty much do this as a full-time job without any compensation. And last but not least, why are people working on Bitcoin? Which is the question I'm trying to answer here. And of course, if you're a little bit like me, you're in it for the technology. So what kind of technology is it? I'm, of course, talking about NGU, number go app technology, as Saifidin has pointed out. So eloquently, it's the most important underlying technology that powers Bitcoin. But more seriously, I believe that there are two main motivations, like two motivation categories why people are working on Bitcoin. First of all, we have intrinsic motivation. So you might really be fascinated by the technology if you come from a cryptographic or technological background. You might be pulled into Bitcoin because it's just one of the most interesting projects on the internet right now to be working on. You might come from an ideological side. Bitcoin is a very opinionated software. The ideology is embedded in the core protocol itself. So if you align with Bitcoin's ideology, you might start working on Bitcoin because of your ideology. And I have a quote here from Adam Beck that encapsulates this intrinsic motivation and he says that ask not what Bitcoin can do for you, but what you can do for Bitcoin. And I think a lot of people are asking themselves exactly that question and just start to work on Bitcoin just because it's interesting or just because they think it's the right thing to do from an ideological perspective. And second of all, there is the extrinsic motivation to work on Bitcoin. So you might fall down the Bitcoin rabbit hole because someone paid you in Bitcoin or you bought some Bitcoin, you made a little bit of money with it, something like that. But there's also the wealth aspect which I separate from the money because I think a lot of people have this extrinsic motivation to build up multi-generational wealth now to kind of understand that if you fix the money, you fix the world and you can actually build up wealth over the long run. And I'm quoting Marty Bent here who is saying all the time that you have to fix the money to fix the world pretty much. And I have another quote here by Ches Hillother who says that Bitcoin is simply an opt-in open source software with the historical reliable property of making its use as wealthy. And as we can see historically, this is true. And there are reasons to believe that this will be true in the future as well but we will see about that. So with intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation and Bitcoin is able to bridge the gap between these two and it does so in a very intricate and interesting way and has pointed that out in the previous talk as well. That Bitcoin has this kind of circular nature. So you fall down the rabbit hole, whatever your entry point might be and you might be interested in the technology with it will shape your ideology over time. You kind of have to align with Bitcoin's ideology. Otherwise you're gonna have a bad time and you might get wealth in the process. You will be able to make a little bit of money at least and you might earn money in Bitcoin and so the cycle repeats. So who is working on Bitcoin? First of all, let's see who's working for open source software in general. There's some research on that. I'm quoting a paper here by Bruce Perence. The paper is called The Emerging Economic Parading of Open Source Software and he identified a couple of different groups who are working on open source mainly. So first of all, they're volunteers. Second of all, they're companies with single open source program as their main product. Then we have companies for whom open source software enables sales of hardware. So I'll come to that a bit later with service businesses, governments and academics and scientific researchers. But we're here to talk about Bitcoin. So I'm asking who works for Bitcoin? All right, let's go through this list. In Bitcoin, we obviously have quite a bit like many, many volunteers. We have a whole army of people working on Bitcoin. We also have companies with a single open source program as the main product. I mentioned some in the very beginning like somewhere where I was savvy, my node and so on. Companies for whom open source software enables sales of hardware. Obviously, there are hardware wallet manufacturers, Coincide comes to mind and there's a lot of mining hardware and stuff like that. Service businesses, we have a lot of that. Governments, not yet, at least not publicly, but they will come in time. I'm quite sure about that. And we have a lot of academics and scientific researchers working on Bitcoin as well. So one more thing about volunteers, love sponsorships and open source in general, but in Bitcoin in particular, of course. And it's quite interesting to see this ecosystem develop more. And I will present two slides from the Bitmax research report that was published very recently in March, 2020 called Who Funds Bitcoin Development? So Bitcoin Core Developers and Lightning Developers are funded by a couple of different companies. There are not too many developers yet that are funded by that, like it's below 100, but you can see that this list of companies is growing and a lot of companies realize that they kind of have to fund Bitcoin Core Development and open source development in general. I want to point out that there are a couple of developers also sponsored by private donors, which I think is quite important. And the second slide I want to show is the top Bitcoin Core contributors by number of commits. I just want to point out that most developers are funded from independent resources. So I think that's important to point out as well. All right, so I have a couple of minutes left and I'm going to try to tell you what Bitcoin actually is. So I'm sure this is quite impossible, but I'll try anyway. So first of all, I want to tell you what Bitcoin isn't. So Bitcoin is not a company. I'm sorry to say that has, I know it's a very great framework to look at Bitcoin as a company, but as has also pointed out, it's kind of an anti-company and I can only repeat that. So it has no DO, no fixed structure, no fixed employees, no fixed infrastructure. It's just a letter and rules. And most importantly, I think the most important aspect of Bitcoin is that it can't go bankrupt. So that's what differentiates it from all other companies and most other organizations. But even though Bitcoin is not a company, it pays people, which is quite an important thing. And it also has somewhat of a share price, like the price of Bitcoin goes up and down in value. And as has pointed out as well, it's partially based on utility. So I think that's interesting to point out that it has some characteristics of a company. So what is Bitcoin? To keep things short, it's an organism. That's what it is. That's a direct quote by Raoul Paul. And he, I agree with the statement very, very much. So I think that the best way to think about Bitcoin is as a digital organism. And Ralph Merkel said it very eloquently that Bitcoin is the first form of a digital organism, like a new form of life. And it lives and breathes on the internet and it pays people to keep it alive. And yeah, I think it's just obviously true if you study Bitcoin long enough that it has this organic behavior it behaves like an organism. So how to compete? How to compete with free and how to compete in this weird space that is the Bitcoin space. I have a single word answer for this question and I hope everyone will take it too hard. And the single word answer is you have to live in symbiosis with this Bitcoin organism. So you have to build up synergies. You have to find a way to work with Bitcoin and not against it. And I have another quote here by Jesse Lawler who said that historically it has always been more economically rational to help Bitcoin than to fight against Bitcoin. And I think that's profoundly true and I think it will be continued. It will continue to be true in the future. So I hope that individuals and also companies will find a way to live in symbiosis with Bitcoin and this will be better for all. All right, that's it from my side. So thank you, if there are any questions feel free to reach out to me on Twitter. I'm there GG pretty much everywhere and yeah, you can find me on the internet.