 You know, my youngest brother is a professor in law. He teaches his students to read the word of the law and write the word of the law, but judge according to the spirit of the law. Yes. Now, when we look at these new technologies, like these three letters, ethereum, smart contract, etc., suddenly we stand in a dilemma, I think, where you have to decide who is actually judging the spirit of a piece of code. Uh-huh. So if you look at that, from that perspective, my question goes in the direction of that. Is that maybe national, maybe regional, maybe global, um, people's framework necessarily preemptively even? And if so, how urgent is that? As a system that overrides the consensus algorithm, no, not only is it not necessary, it is odious. It is contrary to the very concept we're trying to build. We already have plenty of institutions that allow you the flexibility to try to see if your problem will be adjudicated based on the spirit of law in front of an impartial judge or a jury of your peers. We already have all of that. Everything we have is all of that. And your friend's students will leave law school believing in the spirit of law and be gradually ground down through the system of prosecution and courts until eventually they don't believe in anything other than winning the case. That's usually what happens. But the reason we have a consensus algorithm is because we're trying to build an alternative system where the outcome is known based on the formulation of the contract and it is completely neutral and impartial. Will that always work? Hell no, it won't. Sometimes it will backfire badly and we will have a disaster. That's what I mean. But then the question is, how can law create a safety net? The worst case you can have if you have a system where the smart contract has failed is that every participant in the smart contract finds anyone they can specifically identify, identify jurisdictionally, geographically, individually, and sue them in whichever court they choose or find themselves at the time. And then you have to deal with this morass. I'm not suggesting that's a good outcome. I'm suggesting it's an inevitable outcome that if you have disputes that arise in the system and you don't have a means of resolving them other than the consensus mechanism, people will start firing lawsuits at each other. So there's this really interesting framework called the New York Convention on Arbitration, which is an international treaty that allows you in 156 countries to claim independent legal arbitration through a private system of law that you can pre-define, pre-define the duration, the discovery, who the judges are going to be, how it's going to be adjudicated. Perhaps we should be building systems that say, if there is a failure in this consensus system, our disputes will be we agree to waive our rights over the New York Convention to local courts and instead subject ourselves to arbitration under a crown jury selected by smart contract 0xABCDEF to provide the final solution. Maybe you do that. I don't know if it's a good solution. I know it's better than trying to defend yourself in a hundred local courts. What if it's not in consensus algorithm but in the use or rather abuse of the system, like for example the Dow, Coops, as I call it, but I can imagine what's wrong. So the trick is distinguishing between what is use and what is abuse of the system and in a system that has no spirit of law but only has rule of consensus, there is no such thing as a distinction between use and abuse of the system. If you can use the system, it is use of the system. If the consensus algorithm allowed it, it is use. The distinction you're putting, which is a normative judgment of the spirit, doesn't apply. It simply doesn't. So, quite honestly, I think the Dow is a great lesson in that. And the lesson wasn't should we fork or should we not fork. The lesson is don't put $150 million in an untested contract, you idiots. But that's a lesson that is self-correcting, right? People got hurt by that and they're going to learn and we're going to get better. We have to realize that what we're building here, these systems, they're defining characteristic is caveat emptor. They are free market systems. They are free collaborative voluntary participation systems. Caveat emptor, buyer, beware. That is not a warning. That is a fact. And so you take it as it is. And if you don't like it, you can use the other systems. We have plenty of them. But we're not going to change this one and make it into one of the others. In fact, we're going to fiercely resist that change. Two weeks ago, I was at the University of Amsterdam. Professor David Yermak was here. You know him? No, I don't. No, you. Oh, okay. Very good. I thought maybe you... Maybe I've met him somewhere. It was a seminar for the Rebo Bank, big bank here in the Netherlands. And he was quite clear about accountants and banking. Your jobs will be gone in five years, he said. What is your opinion about people dealing with contracts? Now we have smart contracts on the blockchain, not speaking about the Bitcoin regarding accountants, lawyers. I wouldn't say the jobs are gone. I say the jobs are radically transformed. And so what does that mean? That means that if you don't embrace this new technology, or worse, you fight this new technology, then you will find yourself in a smaller and smaller and smaller niche of a business that is less and less important or relevant to the rest of the world. But when you introduce smart contracts, how many people here have heard or understand what a smart contract is? Great. A smart contract is neither smart nor is it a contract. It is a program and it's relatively dumb. So welcome to the new exciting world of dumb programs. It wasn't a very good marketing term. So we try it with smart contracts instead. But smart contracts are programs. And so what does that mean? That means lawyers who are not programmers are not very good lawyers anymore. So if you're a lawyer, you become a lawyer programmer, or you acquire some skills enough so you can understand the underlying technology. Or if you're a programmer, you become a lawyer. So the jobs will change. The jobs will change. The bank nowadays is nothing more than a software company with a banking license. Yes. And you don't need the second part. Because I have a bank on my phone, which is a software company without a banking license. And I call it Bitcoin. It's kind of awesome. The biggest threat of the ING bank, for example, was Apple Pay and Google Pay. And now there's Bitcoin behind it. Yes. And the bad news for the banks is that up to now in the environment of regulation, one thing that allowed the banks to keep innovation under control is that all of the people doing innovation do it based on permission. And they only get permission if they follow the regulation. So everybody plays by the same rules. The worst possible nightmare for an industry is when someone can come in and not play by the same rules. And that just happened to banking because Bitcoin won't follow the rules. And so if you have a competitor who can innovate without following the rules that keep you slowed down, that's a problem. Banking is going to get transformed. Banking as an institution is going to get replaced by banking as an application and then banking as an open protocol. And a lot of the traditional functions of banks are going to disappear. Certainly a lot of the basic things of holding money and making payments, that goes away very quickly. But then a lot of the financial instruments I think will start becoming smart contracts and banks will transform. They will transform into much smaller, much less profitable, much less powerful organizations, just like newspapers. They're still around. They're less powerful, they're less profitable, and they're less influential.