 Several weeks ago, I gave a presentation here at Monerotopia in Miami Beach, and I met many of you guys, and it was a great event. However, here's my issue. They put up the record, there was a video recording of this, here's my talk. You can actually watch this, I recommend you do, on videos.luxmit.xl, I'll probably put this on YouTube by the time you're seeing it on YouTube. But they put out the recording of the presentation, and it was just not good in terms of AV, like the audio was bad, you couldn't even hear the audience laughing at my hilarious jokes, and the video wasn't super good, you can't really see the slides. So in this video, I am actually going to give you the talk that I gave. I want to talk through some issues. Again, this is at Monerotopia, what is Monero, right? So the slot that they gave me in the conference was Why Monero Matters, which at the conference is kind of a waste of time, it's like preaching to the choir. I assume everyone there thinks that Monero Matters, but you on the internet, you might not even know what it is. Monero, briefly, is just Bitcoin done right, Bitcoin that's not purposefully debilitated. Bitcoin with sensible features built into it. For example, the biggest thing that people talk about with Bitcoin versus Monero is Bitcoin ultimately is a privacy nightmare. All transactions, if you ever send Bitcoin ever, that is permanently logged in a block chain that is visible to everyone. Monero has technology that avoids that, or Monero also has technology to avoid the transaction fees of Bitcoins, the need to use some kind of second layer application to do things so you don't need all this proprietary garbage. Monero is kind of just Bitcoin done right. And I think most all of the people who kind of fell into the original, I don't know what's the word for it, I don't know, the original Bitcoin hacker ethos, or the crypto anarchist ethos, a lot of them moved on to Monero. So I'm going to talk about why it's important, but this is less about Monero and Bitcoin. This is more about the direction we're heading. I guess the wider context, that's the goal of my presentation that I wanted to do because all these people already knew about Monero. I wanted to give the wider context of things. So my talk is entitled Monero for dystopia avoidance. Now the reason I entitled it that is a lot of times people look at innovative technology, they look at cryptocurrencies or whatever, and they think about it like, oh my goodness, this is heckin' cool technology, and it's going to change your life, and we're going to live in this great society that's going to do a lot of that. They think of it in terms of what new things is it going to get us. And that's not how I look at it. I look at Monero and cryptocurrency generally, but specifically Monero, in that it is good because it is going to not give us something good, but avoid something bad. It is going to help us avoid the dystopias, which we have been ever so gradually moving forward in the past several decades. And I think that if you don't understand the direction we're heading in, well the talk I'm going to give you, in fact the talk that I am giving you right now, I'm going to talk, I guess in two different ways. I'm going to first convince you that there have been a bunch of, a series of bad events that have led us to what functions as a dystopia, okay? And then there have been helpful developments that help us save that off. Monero is one of those helpful developments. It's kind of the capstone of that. But let's go ahead and start off. But when I say dystopia, what do I mean by that, okay? So dystopia is, I define it operationally in my talk as distance in lifestyle from the 1990s, okay? So this is why I have my first slide as like this 1990s nostalgia meme. Actually, even looking at this picture, it just wells up my heart. You Zoomers would never understand. But so why do I say the 1990s? And it's kind of tongue in cheek. But what I'm going to argue is that since the 1990s, that was the last period where we had all of this great technology, this nascent technology. But bad things has not really started to happen with it. We didn't have social media giants. We didn't have government surveillance using digital technology. We didn't have any of that kind of stuff. It was kind of theoretical. It was kind of like a skit-so thing that conspiracy theorists would care about. Now it's been mainstreamed, we all know about it. The government talks about the fact that they want to do contact tracing and vaccine passports and they want to monitor your metadata and what you say online and things like that. But back in the 90s, there was this idea that technology and especially the internet was going to be liberatory. It's going to free people up. We're going to be able to do whatever we want, okay? And it's really going to, it's going to destroy the post-war era where you have three network news channels and all your information comes filtered through them. No, the internet's going to let us talk directly to one another, right? That was the idea back then as people were just starting to get into the internet around the mid-1990s, right? And very bad things have happened. So bad thing number one is the Patriot Act, okay? In the United States, really we're not just talking about this one law in the United States but a constellation of different laws. And specifically in the Patriot Act. Now the Patriot Act nominally on paper, the reason it was passed, was in response to 9-11 in the United States. Now of course, a lot of the components of the Patriot Act came from other bills that couldn't get passed because there wasn't the fear that 9-11 generated. So 9-11 was kind of cynically used to pass this thing. But the Patriot Act contained a bunch of really bad things that compromise people's privacy. But in cryptocurrency, the thing that people know about is what's called KYC-AML, right? So KYC stands for Know Your Customer Laws and AML means anti-money laundering laws. So it used to be back in the day that you could walk into a bank and more or less say, okay, I have a thousand bucks in cash, I have $10,000 in cash, I want to start a bank account, okay? And you could start a bank account with that bank and unless you were doing something super illegal, they were not really gonna care. They're not really gonna ask too many questions. Maybe if they see some suspicious activity, they'll notify you. But what happened in the Patriot Act is the government said, okay, we want banks to tell us, we want them to know their customer, right? We want them to basically get as much biographical information as they can about people, people need to give in their social security numbers, they can't make accounts under pseudonyms. A lot of the things that people now take for, people think this is just how the world has always worked. And some banks have had more stringent policies in the past. But really, once this happens, it really locks down finances. You can't really have aliases in the way that you used to. If you wanna skip town and change your name or something like that, that's harder to do, right? But this isn't just for criminals or something like that. That's not what I mean it. But there's a sense in which this very normal party of your life is now becoming under regulation, right? And of course, who are the original victims of this? Well, the original victims are supposed terrorists. They're bad people, right? But this is something that is now affecting everyone. Because if you have any kind of account, now this affects cryptocurrency, as I said, because a lot of people will wanna buy and sell cryptocurrencies. And a lot of platforms where they can do that are highly constrained by the Patriot Act and other legislation, right? So this finance is very important. A lot of people underestimate the importance of finance. They say, oh, it's just like for rich people or something. But it actually, I mean, if you do not have custodianship over your own money and you have to jump through legal hoops to do things, that is a way for the government to control you. And that is a dangerous precedent that will only get worse, okay? Bad thing number two I talk about is cell phones. Warrantless wiretaps, okay? So around 2007, 2008, cell phones became normalized. And I talk about it in the talk over here. Problem with cell phones is they're not like normal computers. You don't just, a computer knows what you type into it. Cell phones listen to everything and they have geo-location, right? I think I said in this talk, a lot of people out there, I find it very cute when people will put little pieces of tape on their webcam, on their laptop. So their laptop can't secretly take pictures of them. If their kernel is exploited, theoretically that could be something that happens, right? So they're being cautious about that. But that's kind of hypocritical. If someone does that and they don't do that to their phone, because a phone is an infinitely more dangerous device because unlike your laptop, your phone can connect to the internet all the time. It has two cameras, actually if you have an iPhone, it has like 15 cameras, it has a microphone, none of the stuff you can turn off. It has geo-location, it's a disaster, right? Now at the beginning, none of this happened. Back in 2007, oh, well, they're just phones. Oh, so what if Apple theoretically has access to my information, no big deal. But what happened soon after that is regulations in the United States and other countries came out like FISA where the government could now, again, this is to prevent terrorism or whatever, where the government could basically look at metadata or warrantlessly wiretap whoever. It used to be if the government were spying on your phone hypothetically, they would need a warrant for that. But that is no longer the case in the United States. Again, since we're falling from grace in the 1990s to this, things are getting worse and worse. Now, not just we have these devices that can be monitored, but the government now even has legal precedent to do it. They have granted themselves the authority to do it. And every president since, you know, George Bush, Barack Obama, Trump, I don't know if Brandon has signed it yet, but I'm sure he will when it comes up for renewal. They've all renewed FISA, right? So another thing I wanna show people, I showed this in the talk and it didn't really show up very well because I don't know, again, you couldn't really see the slides, but I will just play this in the background. This is actually from a company called Tectonics and what this is is a piece of software that they have and they are looking at, you're zooming in on a map here. This is of, they're zooming in on Florida. This is cell phone metadata, okay? Quote unquote, anonymized cell phone metadata. So what they're doing is they can use this big data software suite that they develop. Now, Tectonics is the company that makes this graphical interface, right? And you can zoom in on some particular time period and some particular place. Now what he's doing is he's looking at spring break, okay? You can actually see this video on Tectonics's YouTube channel and you can then say, what he's doing over here is you can basically lock in these particular devices that were at that particular area and then see how they spread out from that point, from that time and place, you can see how they spread around the country, right? So this is what you can do with cell phone metadata. Now, notice this is anonymized cell phone metadata. They don't need to have your name and social security number to be able to do this kind of stuff, right? This is like, this is the privacy ideal for metadata and it's still as bad as possible because obviously, let me go back here in a second. You could easily figure out using just this metadata, who everyone is. Like you can go and find, excuse me, let me pull this up, you can lock into one data point and see, oh, it moves to Billy Johnson's house and then Billy Johnson's his workplace so we know that this dot is Billy Johnson, right? So that's why I actually really hate the term anonymized metadata. There's no such thing as anonymized metadata because if you have enough of it, no one is anonymized if you have their metadata. It just doesn't matter. So this is the kind of stuff that companies are doing right now. They're doing right now. This is a real software company and you can look on their YouTube channel. I pulled up a tab here before. This is them talking about how great their software is for preventing the global pandemic. Ooh, contact tracing, stuff like this. You gotta love these video titles. Coming home for Thanksgiving, take a look at the data first. You don't wanna get grandma sick if you go home. So yeah, this is crazy and this is the stuff that's happening now, okay? This isn't a conspiracy theory. I'm not freaking, you know, some schizo who, I don't know, who's saying things that, well, frankly, even the people who are saying stuff like this beforehand, before there was evidence that this is happening, they're still right because you can't judge things in terms of, you know, evidence for these things happening. You have to look at things in terms of the government can do this, private companies can do this, they have the means, they have the motivation, okay? We have every reason to expect they're doing this. So you can check this stuff out now and I will say as an aside, I remember seeing this like normie show once. I think it was like a CSI kind of show where it's all fake, it's fictionalized or whatever, but they had this, there was supposedly like some kind of crime scene in like a party where there were all these people who all had their cell phones and they couldn't figure out what happened in this room so they used this like big data audio science to use their cell phones as like sonic divide, like basically using echolocation and then they recreate the room and like where everything was in the room because the acoustics would bounce off all the objects and all this kind of stuff. Now that is something hypothetical that I saw in a fictional show, right? And so there's no reason to think that something like that happens, right? But the tools out there to do something like that are out there, we have, we have a big data science, we have neural nets, we have all these kinds of stuff that can get us closer and we have tools that let us record things all the time. So you have to, like things are bad and things are gonna get worse. That's what I'm trying to get at, like just to sum it up, right? So they're already tracking where people are moving and they can do things a lot worse. Like if you have a cell phone on you, everything you're saying, like I have a cell phone right over there right now, everything I'm saying, well I'm recording this video for the internet, right? But if I say something in this room and the presence of a cell phone, that is compromised, okay? That's the way that people really need to look at things. And you don't need to wait 20 years for some, I don't know, leak to come out about it. Speaking of leaks that came out about it, this is actually a slide from Edward Snowden's release of all the government data about the fact that they're doing all the stuff we're talking about, right? So actually it's, I think I made the joke in my presentation that, yeah, it's pathetic that our government puts together slides that look like this. It's absolutely disgusting. By the way, if you wanna get blackpilled about any of this kind of stuff, look up any of these words and you will learn about these government programs. All of them are about monitoring you, collecting data from Yahoo, Google, blah, blah, blah, and then feeding it to this FBI service that feeds it to all these other programs that do the kind of things that we've already been talking about, right? Now, it's just important to remind you before the Snowden leaks, when were they? I don't know, there was some time in the Obama years, I'm gonna say, were they 2014? No, they were probably like 2010. I'm not quite sure. Some time around that time period. But the thing about those, this is your normal, your typical normie cope because before Snowden, people would say things. They'd be like, well, the government doesn't care about you, you're not important. They're not gonna monitor you. Why would they do that? They're stupid. But the thing is, then the Snowden leaks came out and those same freaking normies who just wanna make up excuses for not giving a crap, they would say, well, of course, the government's spying on you, but it doesn't matter for some reason, right? This is the mindset of a lot of people. Either way, this is happening, this is real. This is the world we live in. We're already living in a dystopia where all of the connections you make to all of these services, they're compromised, right? That's the point. So bad thing number three is information control, okay? Now that the government has all this ability and not just the government, but also corporations and as if there's really a big difference between the government and other powerful parties, they're all the same thing, right? Bad thing number three is information control, okay? So when I say information control, I kinda mean two things. There's this superficial thing and the superficial thing is like bannings, mass bannings, which really began, I mean in America it started like around the period of Donald Trump. Like when Donald Trump got elected, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, all of those people realized, oh, we're not in full control of things. So we're gonna start banning people. We're gonna start curating content. It actually didn't really happen before Trump was elected, but I think after he was elected, they realized, oh shoot, like we don't automatically win by having these platforms or we're gonna start using them to our own benefit. So that's one thing that's accelerated, but I think it's, and people know about banning. They know that YouTube is just not what it used to be. YouTube used to be able to watch Alex Jones on YouTube. You know what I mean? If anyone remembers the comment section of any video back in 2010 or something like that, it was infinitely different than the comment sections nowadays, okay? Comment sections nowadays, it's basically like the Google AI, I am convinced that it basically, automatically deletes any comment from someone with an IQ over 90. I'm absolutely convinced. But that's the second part of content curation and information control. The first part is obvious stuff, it's banning. The second part is, what I've talked about in other videos is being kind of the Skinner's box of social media. That is, the worst ones are Twitter and Reddit, but YouTube does this just as, almost just as bad Twitter and Reddit are just freaking egregious about it. But they will always put their fingers on the scale to make sure that content they want gets big, content they dislike gets very small. And the reason for that is not just to put things in people's faces, it's to give them the false idea that the things that Twitter or Reddit want you to believe are the popular things, okay? It's easy to make, you know, there've been old news article, I think it wasn't the one on like Business Insider or Forbes or something like that about, you know, this person who spent like only 500 bucks to make just like fake stuff on Reddit go viral, right? And if you can do that with 500 bucks or so, for organized parties that are hired shills or anyone else, it's very easy to manipulate these kind of programs or the platforms, okay? And I mentioned again in the talk that, you know, having a YouTube channel, I can see this happen like at the ground level. Like I will see certain comments with certain words in it, they become suddenly unlikable. If I press like on it, it will not increment the like count and it will be stuck at one like forever. That's kind of weird. Even like I can even pin comments, okay? They haven't put their foot down in pinning yet, but I could pin a comment and it would still be unlikable or there are certain words that just will never come up or, you know, just weird, weird things. I've noticed this happening. I know I did a video a while, couple of years ago about the day that YouTube banned the word cuck and that showed up in everyone's YouTube view in my comment section or like the comments menu they give you, right? Because they have basically, they have a like marked as spam category and I saw all these posts from like five years ago being marked as spam because YouTube retroactively said, well, this word cuck is now officially on our ban list, right? Now, since then they've gotten smarter. Now they ban words without even me knowing about it, right? Like it's just you have to do trial and error. It doesn't show up on the video creator side, right? But that's just kind of the stuff they're doing. But so things are bad, they're getting worse and bad thing number four, and this is maybe the worst. They've always been doing all this kind of stuff, but now they give themselves a justification for it. So now bad thing number four is unrepentant personal monitoring and bodily control. And I think the next, oh yeah, yeah. So slide here, tweet. We went from 15 days to slow the spread to you're fired if you don't get the jab to your bank accounts are frozen if you protest against us. Somehow we are still the conspiracy theorists. Yeah, so what's happened now, especially since 2020 is that all of the stuff is happening, the monitoring is happening, the censoring is happening, the metadata harvesting and all this kind of stuff, all of this is happening. And now they're saying, that's why this is a good thing. They're saying this is somehow something we need to do. We need to be able to monitor your movements, right? So this company, Tectonics, if they had put these videos up three years ago, instead of two years ago, everyone would be like, oh my goodness, this is terrible. And of course, well, actually people now will still be like, oh, this is terrible. But now there's this fake engineered reason for why we have to monitor people. Or in America there's now this absolutely nonsensical and non-existent domestic terrorism threat which is now we have to monitor everyone who is law abiding in this country basically for political speech more or less. That's the kind of stuff that's going on, right? All of this is serving as a rationalization for implementing all these things. So it's not just like the government is not doing any of this stuff secretly anymore. It's not just in the open. In fact, you will get more trouble for noticing it or saying that it's a bad thing or what you don't want us to be safe. You don't want governments to protect us from the highly deadly coronavirus. Like that is the mindset of people now, okay? So that's probably the worst thing. So, oh yeah, I forgot about this meme. Instead of calling them conspiracy theories, we should call them spoiler alerts. I really like this meme. Anyway, so now at this point we're at rock bottom, okay? So this is the mid divider of my talk. I've been talking a whole lot more than I did in the actual presentation because I don't have time constraints here and I have more stuff to talk about. So we're now at rock bottom and so things can only go up from here. That's the good news. But just to be totally clear, if we do nothing, we have to think about what the future is gonna be. So what's the future gonna be like? Here are some snippets. Here are some meme snippets of things that will definitely actually literally happen. In fact, what am I kidding? They're already happening. Card declined. Please delete all tweets that violate your bank's hate speech policies, the process payment already happening. This is a Babylon B article. Restaurants now requiring proof of Ukraine support. And of course, classic. Shout outs to Facebook. Facebook, do you watch my channel? We're sorry, your Amazon smart refrigerator has denied you access to your groceries due to a homophobic comment made at dinner last night. So this is already the world really we're living in but things are just getting more absurd. Like, I mean, in the case of a refrigerator, this used to be something, this used to be technology that we can control. And now this information grid, internet of things, these terrible people who get Amazon crap and Google draw, everything's connected to Google or something. Like, you are so royally screwing yourself, it's ridiculous. And this is inevitably the direction we're going towards. In fact, we're sort of already here. It's just them gradually being more honest about abandoning the pretenses behind us all. Okay, so we are at rock bottom. I forget exactly why I put this meme up there, but maybe I thought it was funny. It's not really about that. But yeah, that's basically us in the 2020s. Things are so bad now, it can't get any worse, right? So that's a cause for optimism. I view that as optimistic, right? Maybe you don't, but you're wrong. I'm right, optimism. So good thing number one, what's good thing number one? Well, the good thing number one is the free software movement, okay? So during the 80s and the 90s, there was a very, very, like, things were almost, we almost lost the battle of software a long time ago, okay? Because it used to be that every piece of software you wrote was proprietary code that you wouldn't, you know, the company selling it to you would tell you what it does, but you can never look at the source code and you can never really know what, you know, what any software is doing. So it could be monitoring you, it could be stealing your information, and of course you couldn't take that code, fix it, modify it, or at least get, you know, give it to someone else so they can troubleshoot it or something like that. It was a very restricting environment and that caused the emergent of the free software foundation. Of course, this is its founder, Richard Stallman, one of the most attractive people in computer science. Here he is, he actually has a little button here that says don't be tracked, pay cash. So the free software movement is arguably, like, one of the greatest things that's happened to us and we should be so, like, everyone in this world, even if you don't know who Richard Stallman is, needs to be very thankful for him, because if it weren't for him and other people who are agitating for free software, okay, free and open source software, we would still be living in a time where we didn't have a choice. We would have to basically use Amazon for everything, you know, the equivalent of Amazon. We would never have any idea what kind of software they're running or anything else. Now, if you are using Amazon crap or Mac crap or Windows or something like that, you are screwed, there's nothing you can do. You're using proprietary software, you're screwed. However, thanks to Richard Stallman, we have the GNU Linux operating system and, you know, and of course, this actually incentivized the massive development and many other kinds of free software. Where now you can, you know, most all web servers now and things like that will run Linux and you can have, you know, I've used Linux on my machine for five, six, seven years and without any kind of proprietary code. And of course, even people who still use Windows have the choice of using free and open source software. So you don't have to use like Google Chrome, which is just a monitoring device. You can use Firefox with a sensible privacy default settings and use free and open source software that doesn't monitor you, right? So that is an option for people, okay? So before, you know, without the free software movement, we would be totally screwed. And again, like even if you don't use Linux, you have benefited from this. Like this is already getting you stuff. There are a lot of servers online. Frankly, the internet could not even happen as it is without free software because so many of the core utilities on the internet, it only makes sense to have them as free software in the first place and you'd be nuts to have to rely on some corporation for it. And this is, I mean, even big, even big demonic corporations are now even moving to open source, right? Because it's actually just the better way to develop things anyway. But all of this is to say that we now have, you know, we have an alternative, right? You can't, any person you know can use all free and open source software without any kind of hitch. It is more functional. I'm not gonna say, oh, it's just as functional as Windows. No, it's significantly more usable and more functional than Windows. You can have elite hackers set up like mine and all have cool Windows. You don't have to do that though. You can have a normie operating system that doesn't have stupid updates, right? That is now within our control. And if it's free and open source software, especially licensed in the GPL, it's always ours. It cannot be, you know, exploited, you know? So that's a nice thing. But the only drawback about Richard Stallman is, you know, he always wears this burgundy, burgundy, you know, polo every day. I don't know, it doesn't actually suit him well. This is what he looks like without this polo. Okay, so there's Richard Stallman. I don't know if you've ever seen him shirtless. But if you use free and open source software, you too, can you look like this? Okay, so the slide I have here, it just says Chide. And this is actually a note that I made for myself in the Minera Talk presentation. And the reason I have Chide written on the slide is because I needed to chide people in the audience because if you're a cryptocurrency person, I will just, I'd just like to interject for a moment, okay? If you think you're super cool for making fun of normies who have Bitcoin on big centralized exchanges and they have proprietary, you know, know your customer, crap, and you know, they don't have custodianship over their Bitcoins or their Minera or whatever, that's all well and good if you wanna make fun of people like that. But you have absolutely no right to do that. If you are not also using free software, because proprietary software, if you're running Windows, if you're running freaking Google Drive, that is the exact, that is the exact software equivalent of using custodial services for cryptocurrency. It's insane to do in cryptocurrency because you are just, you're literally giving your money to someone else to watch over. And it's equally insane to do in computing. It is insane to have a computer with anything secure on it, with any personal data that you have Windows installed on. Or if you store sensitive information, even encrypted in a Dropbox, you're certifiably insane, I have to say. And you have no right to judge. If any of the reason I say this is because a lot of people in cryptocurrency, including a lot of Minero people will, are just running Windows and they're doing all this stuff, they're running freaking Google Chrome when they could just, they could literally, in the case of Google Chrome, you can just install Chromium. It's literally just Google Chrome without Google stuff. Like it is just as easily installed as Google Chrome. You could just use Firefox with some privacy improvements. But, so it's nuts to me. So in this part of the talk, I just had to try some Minero people because a lot of them, unfortunately, are using cloud services. They're using like Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon, whatever, to do things that their normal computers can use. You could just have free and open source software on your own computer that does all of this kind of stuff. You could use a freaking USB drive. You could use anything. Just stop using these things because they are literally the equivalent of sending your bitcoins or Minero to a centralized exchange for them to just watch over them. Where they have ultimate authority and you don't. That is literally what proprietary software is, okay? That is my triding, okay? All right, so anyway, good thing number two. So good thing number two, this is actually a lot of, this is kind of undersold. People don't often think about this. But good thing number two is encryption has become very much normalized on the internet, okay? I gotta take a, I've been talking nonstop for like so many minutes. I'm gonna take a 30 second break. Okay, that's close enough for 30 seconds. So good thing number two is starting in the 90s, but really as the prism revelations, the Snowden revelations came out. Websites and other people on the internet, even evil people, even like Google, decided okay, we really need to start encrypting things like encrypting everything, okay? So now when you go to basically every website, basically every good website will have HTTPS rather than HTTP. Now those might be exactly the same to you. I'll just explain the difference. If you connect to a site over HTTP without the S, that is just normal HTTP, not encrypted. That means your ISP can watch what you're doing, okay? On what you're clicking on that site, what pages you're loading. You can fall prey to a man in the middle attack, right? Someone could steal passwords you use or basically anything. Like it makes you very exploitable. And the government of course during the prism revelations, this was partially revealed that the government was using this fact that they could do man in the middle attacks to exploit people and take advantage of their lack of privacy. Now HTTPS, what you do there is of course you make a connection to a server and you establish an encrypted layer, an encrypted channel where you can send data back and forth, right? So nowadays, now Facebook is a good example because Facebook is a privacy nightmare, okay? If you're using Facebook, but Facebook does have HTTPS. So it is a nightmare because you're giving data to Facebook, but the data you are giving to Facebook is not visible to your ISP, okay? Your ISP just says, oh, they have this connection here going to Facebook and they're sending so much data or they're getting so much data, right? So this actually does significantly help things. Now again, you can still use terrible, you can still be sending your data to something evil like Facebook or Google that's gonna give it to the government or someone else eventually, right? But in principle, most connections you make to websites, they are not gonna be, maybe they'll sell it to some company, but if you're on low scale sites, at least data harvesting will be significantly more difficult, right? And you have the ability now, if you connect to my website, you are just connecting to my website. No one else is gonna see that. I'm sorry, I don't sell data, I get rid of my logs, all that kind of stuff, like it's not like there's anything too secure on my website, I mean, it's just static site, but you know. So HTTPS has given us that. And aside from HTTPS, like just we now have ways of having encrypted chats, things like IRC, you can now have encrypted chats. I think I talk about Matrix and XMPP which are both usable for chats. I've used them both and of course they come, Matrix comes encrypted by default and most XMPP servers actually do too. There's a little more fragmentation there, but a little more extensibility as well. So encryption has kind of been normalized on the internet. Now the thing we really need is we cannot transact value with free software until of course Bitcoin, okay? Bitcoin is the big thing that happens, what is it, 2009 when the white paper comes out. So what is the point of Bitcoin? Okay, if you don't know anything about cryptocurrency, I will just tell you, ignore what everyone else says about making money, it's not about freaking making money, that is like an accident. That's literally an accident. It's an inevitable accident, but it's an accident. The reason that Bitcoin was invented is it was supposed to be free software for money. That's it, okay? So Bitcoin is, it has proof of work and that is a very ingenious way of having digital scarcity. And if you have digital scarcity, you can have money, right? And you can transact value from one person to another, right? And the important thing about that is there is no needed intermediary. So I can send money to Billy Johnson and Billy Johnson gets that money theoretically. You might say, oh, well there are miners who are mining things, but you know, due to how mining works and due to how the incentives work, it's not, you're not gonna be canceled, you know what I mean? Or you'll really be, because the system is pseudonymous and other reasons like you just have to have some miner that approves you. Either way, it's not an issue. The important thing is if I wanna send value to someone via PayPal, okay, I need a bank account, a credit card, they need a PayPal, I need a PayPal maybe, they need some bank account to receive that money and blah, blah, you need all of these trusted parties, whereas Bitcoin basically cuts them all out and says, we are just going to have this software layer, we use proof of work for digital scarcity, and now people can transact value using all free and open source software, okay? It makes sense, it's like, oh, finally, we finally have this, right? It was kind of the pièce de résistance, you know? It's like the last little thing you need, and Bitcoin kind of solved this in principle. But the issue was, well, I will say, at first it was good, there's no approval required, it's free software money, it's also sound, right? But the issue with Bitcoin is that it's kind of not complete, okay? I think I showed this comic again in another video, but it's two guys on an unfinished wall and it says, I don't know, that's how Satoshi left it, Satoshi being the creator of Bitcoin, I assume people know, but. So the thing with Bitcoin is it's not fully finished, it was not like, you know, Bitcoin is not, it cannot scale to a global scale, it is not private, there are, actually I think I have that on the side, okay, right. So here's why Bitcoin is unfinished. Firstly, it's a privacy nightmare, right? So when you send a Bitcoin transaction, your name isn't on the blockchain, but your account, where you've sent money from, all that information is on the blockchain, and whoever knows that you've sent that transaction, including the person who received it, they can look at your wallet, they can look at your previous transactions, they can look at where you got money, and of course anyone who now, oh excuse me, knows that wallet address, they know exactly how much money you have, where it comes from, all this kind of stuff, right? So it's significantly worse than having Visa and Mastercard, because if you're using Visa and Mastercard, right, you know, that is not private information, Visa and Mastercard know that you're transacting on their system, but at least they don't put that information on Visa.com, whereas that is exactly what Bitcoin does, okay? Bitcoin broadcasts transactions. Now you don't know exactly who did them or where they came from, but you have the metadata. I think I said earlier, you know, if you have enough metadata, there's no such thing as anonymized metadata, and that is 100% true in Bitcoin, because there's so much that, like we can, there are now companies that look at how Bitcoin transactions move around, and of course all of these companies doing, oh, it's all coming back together because they're doing know your customer laws, so they can now link people's names to their wallets, and then you can watch them move from wallet to wallet, and then to another know your customer exchange, so you know that Billy Johnson bought this Bitcoin and sent it, you know, three different ways, and it ended up at Sally Johnson's, you know, wallet, you know, Bitcoin's a privacy nightmare, okay? And I've said before, no one has ever lived in a world where all economic transactions are publicly broadcast. We don't even know how bad it's going to be. I'm just gonna tell you it's gonna be bad, not just for, oh no, it's gonna be bad for criminals. Criminals know how to avoid this kind of stuff. Normies do not. Normies who are innocent, they will go out and they'll send their money, and you will never know what kind of gossip comes out from a Bitcoin transaction, okay? So it's a privacy nightmare. There's metadata issues. You leak your IP when you send a Bitcoin transaction. It's not on the blockchain, but miners can see it, and there are many miners that can just basically take that IP, log it, and then they can sell that, oh, well we know where this Bitcoin transaction came from. Bitcoin, of course, uses addresses over and over again. It's unscalable. Bitcoin is built to only be able to, it is built, like this is a feature, quote unquote, to only be able to transact 10 transactions per second. I'll talk about that in a minute. And it's also harder to enter it because mining is very competitive. You need highly specialized technology. Okay, so that's where Monero comes in. So I think I said before, Monero is Bitcoin perfected. It solves Bitcoin's problems. It gives us that way of transacting digital money, but instead of having the kind of premature solution that Bitcoin has, Monero has a more principled, I mean it solves everything. Actually go to the next slide. So this is a counter to the slide we just looked at. So you have transaction privacy in Monero because you have ring signatures. And what that means is when you send a transaction, it doesn't just say Billy Johnson sent this amount of money or this wallet sent this amount of money. It signs transactions using multiple outputs from the blockchain. It's kind of like your transaction out input will be there, but there'll be 10 other decoys or actually they're gonna increase the decoy amount, right? So you never actually know where money's coming from. And there's also technologies like stealth addresses. So if you send money to my Monero address, it doesn't actually show up on the blockchain as my Monero address. Your wallet generates a once use wallet address and sends it to that. And my wallet is the only wallet able to look at the blockchain and say, ah, I can actually control that, right? So those are stealth addresses. Dandelion++ is to anonymize IP addresses so they don't leak. And you also have things like variable block size which allow you to scale up transactions. Monero does not have this transaction limit of 10 per second. And it also has tail emission. I'm not gonna go into all this kind of stuff. Maybe a Monero versus Bitcoin video in the future might be worth it just to spell some of this stuff out. But the purpose of this talk was just to give a general thing. Again, preaching to the choir in the presentation, but you don't need to know it if you're a newbie. We'll talk about it later. And it's also ASIC resistant, meaning the hardware, it's easier to get the hardware to get to my Monero. You can my Monero on your own computer, right? So this is, we haven't had a meme in a couple of slides. So I'm glad we haven't now. But if you're a Monero user, you've definitely seen this one. So privacy with Monero, you don't have to think about it. You just send Monero. Okay, that's it. Send XMR, that's the Monero abbreviation for some reason. Whereas privacy with Bitcoin, if you wanna be private in Bitcoin, you gotta get it from a non-KYC peer-to-peer exchange, use CoinJoin, ConJoin, they misspelled that. Use Tor, use the Lightning Network and Snore and signatures and Taproot, which actually have nothing really to do. People say they have something to do with privacy. They don't, well, they solve a privacy problem that no one actually knows about. But anyway, so yeah, so that's the issue. Like Monero, a lot of people say, oh, Monero is like this, ooh, it's more esoteric than Bitcoin. But actually if you just wanna use it like a normal person, it's way easier to use because this is what you're doing in Monero. Whereas if you're doing anything with Bitcoin, you always have to think about, oh man, in 20 years, do I really want someone seeing this transaction? Like what are they gonna think? What are they gonna do? I don't know, like whatever. So, this tweet is actually a repeat of it. Privacy isn't illegal, use Bitcoin privately. Run Wasabi Wallet, use CoinJoin to mix your funds. Use a hardware wallet privately using through Wasabi. Bonus points for your own node through Tor and use a Lightning Network with CoinJoin out. Okay, so all that complicated stuff, if you wanna use, who even cares what any of that stuff is? If you're a cryptocurrency person, you should know what all that is eventually because it's Bitcoin stuff. But if you're using Monero, you don't have to, right? Because you could just use Monero with default opt-out privacy and not have to deal with that, right? So that's the difference. So, the metaphor that I use in the talk and I'm using again here because this is still the talk, right? Is whenever I induct someone into cryptocurrency, whenever I'm telling them how to use it or how it works, if I tell them about Monero, I can be very confident. I feel like a father who's teaching his son how to ride a bike and I am confident when I let that son go off riding on his own, you cannot screw anything up with Monero. Monero is a bike that is stable. It's not gonna tip over. It's easy to ride. You don't have to think about it. You can trust in it that your kid is not gonna get scuffed up or killed or maimed in some way. Like he's gonna be A-okay, right? Whereas I have no such expectation when I'm talking to people about Bitcoin because they have to do all this crap. They have to use coin join, they have to use Tor, they have to use all this garbage. So if you tell someone how to use Bitcoin and you're metaphorically leading your son off, telling him how to ride a bike, it's a freaking disaster. He's just gonna get hurt. You know it. You know once you let go of that bike, you're like, oh man, he's gonna screw this up. Oh, he's gonna send this Bitcoin to some freaking stupid exchange because he can't transact with transaction fees low enough. Oh my goodness, he's gonna send all this money and everyone's gonna see it for all eternity because it's on the blockchain and blah, blah, blah. All this stuff is gonna happen, right? So Bitcoin's just a disaster. And I really, I'm feeling more like, I've kind of taught people how to get into Bitcoin but as time has gone on, I'm less and less confident about it. Like Minera, you have to just use Minera. There's no free, a lot of times I'll be like, oh, here's how you use Bitcoin but you should really get Minera. But now it's just like, you should really just be using Minera for everything. That's all I have to say, you know? So the one thing that's happened with Bitcoin therefore is that, if Bitcoin can't be used for a currency, what's it good for? So Bitcoin is not used as a currency anymore. You can buy stuff on Bitcoin. You can still buy a lot, right? It has the first mover advantage, probably more people except Bitcoin than anything else but it is very quickly losing ground to Minera in many places, right? Already in the dark net markets and things like that but Bitcoin is now, Bitcoin users are now talking about it as if you're not actually supposed to spend it. You're just supposed to hold on to it. It's supposed to be digital gold and you just hold on to it for eternity and it's gonna be worth more and even then you probably shouldn't sell it, right? It's not actually supposed to be that free software layer for transacting value on the internet. Oh well, we don't have that figured out, right? It's something else. Bitcoin is something else, right? So I actually had this example kind of sums up modern Bitcoiners, right? The compromised Bitcoiner and I anonymized this tweet. I mean, I guess you can look it up but it's from someone I never heard of but I think the thing that makes me sad about this is it's not just someone who tweeted something that I think is stupid but they even pinned this tweet. So let's read it out. Many think swiping their card instantly transfers money from their account to a merchant's. In reality, that's data being transferred on the second layer. Base layer settlements can take weeks. Bitcoin isn't replacing your card. It's replacing base layer settlement, central banks. So this is your modern Bitcoiners mindset. It's not about getting rid of all those parts. I talked about PayPal, credit cards, bank accounts, all this kind of stuff that Bitcoin was founded to get rid of. Now Bitcoiners are like, well, actually, you know what? You can keep all that stuff. You can keep your bank with your fiat currency. You can keep your mastercard and Visa and all this kind of stuff. Doesn't matter. Bitcoin, it's just gonna, for whatever reason, banks are just going to accept Bitcoin even though they can't get free inflated money from the government and Bitcoin because it's a hard currency, right? They are just going to move over to Bitcoin for no particular reason, and I don't know, other than the hype, right? And, you know, things are just gonna be magically better. And this is another quote here. This is actually from someone a little more famous in Bitcoin, but again, I anonymized it. I don't wanna call anyone out, but this is what he says. You're still going to be using that same exact card you have in your wallet, but now you can choose to spend your dollars or Bitcoin. Mastercard will say, hey, you can just use that exact same point of sale system. You can still use that exact same card network, but now we're going to support other assets. We don't ask people to change their behavior, but instead, what we start doing is to integrate the technologies and assets into what they are already doing, and they may or may not even be aware that there is a technology upgrade, upgrade, quote, unquote, underway and that there are other assets available to them. So this is how Bitcoiners now look at things. I think I put it on the next slide. So the Bitcoin revolution will not be televised because it won't make difference, right? So the modern Bitcoin or cope is that Bitcoin's gonna take over, it's gonna take over everything silently. Again, like private banks that basically thrive off of the Federal Reserve system and credit card companies that live off of harvesting data, they are just going to magically move to this free and open source software platform. For no, it poses no advantage. Like this is a software platform designed to put them out of business. And there's really just no reason that they're gonna do this, but a lot of Bitcoiners, unfortunately, have moved away from we're going to replace banks, we're gonna replace credit cards, we're gonna replace all of that with a more efficient and more privacy respecting and more freedom respecting technology that cannot be inflated, cannot be debased by a government. They talk less and less about that and more and more about, oh, we're just gonna have the world that's even more technological, we're gonna have all the bells and whistles we have now even more, but with Bitcoin, that makes it cool. So I think I say in the next slide, yeah. So we have the same spyware, same know your customer laws, same regulation, more monitoring because we have a public blockchain, but it's Bitcoin, oh, I heckin' love Bitcoin. So that is what I view as the worst thing about Bitcoin now. And this is exactly why Manero is needed because Manero solves the privacy problem, solves the scalability problem, or at least alleviates it. The scalability problem, I think, is something maybe worth its own video, but Manero is way better at it than Bitcoin. And then, forget, I didn't set up this slide again. So as I said before, these people are kind of saying, oh, well, eventually, eventually banks are going to just move over to this Bitcoin for some reason. And the question I have is just why? Why would they? Because Bitcoin was not designed to be effective for a centralized server or like a Visa or MasterCard or something like that. And it's supposed to be a decentralized system. If it were optimizing for a Visa and MasterCard-like environment, it would be able to do that very well. But it actually can't. Bitcoin, as I said, it has a hard limit of 10 transactions maximum. And that's being generous. It's actually a little less than that, a good bit less than that. That's assuming like your transactions are as small as possible on the blockchain. Whereas Visa, they transact around 1,700 transactions per second on average, every second. So you have to scale up Bitcoin significantly in order to reach that. So the way that Bitcoiners, now, there is this kind of divine idea that like Bitcoin cannot be changed. You can't make improvements to it. Whatever improvements you do make to it, they have to be very conservative. And I do think there's a good reason for that. Like I'm not totally, I wanna be clear, I'm not totally anti-Bitcoin. I don't think that Bitcoin is usable for individuals, right? I don't think that it's, like I don't think it's going away. But I can't, if you are someone who's trying to transact online and use some kind of digital currency for that, Bitcoin is not what you wanna use, it's just not. Because you cannot use Bitcoin itself. What you have to do is you have to use software that's written on top of Bitcoin, okay? You have to use what's called Layer 2. And specifically, people talk about the Lightning Network. Now, the issue I have with any kind of Layer 2, just by definition, is that you have to make sure that it is just as foolproof, it is just as privacy preserving, just as freedom preserving as that original layer. Because the more layers you add, you really have to reinvent the wheel every time. You have to make sure every time that you are building software that is free and open source software. You have to make sure that it still is decentralized. You have to make sure that there's no, know your customer issues, that there's no metadata issues, there's no on and off ramps that can be exploited, all this kind of stuff. And Layer 2, as it has been, the Lightning Network has big centralization problems. It's still kind of theoretical. Again, I'm not knocking Bitcoin, I'm not knocking the Lightning Network. But the Bitcoin strategy is to keep the Bitcoin Core software basically static. And well, we'll just build stuff on top of that. Hey, and that can even include Visa and MasterCard. We love that kind of stuff. Actually, Bitcoiners just had a conference, right? And I wanna say it was funded by Cash App. Like Cash App, this is a business that should be out of business if Bitcoin were working, okay? Like this should be like, I don't know, they should have it at, if they're having target practice, they should have a Cash App logo. That's the only reason it should be at a Bitcoin conference. So the worst case scenario, what is the worst case scenario in Bitcoin? It is a Bitcoin app that requires know your customer, you have to take a picture of yourself. An app that's closed source software, you can't even see really what it's doing or what metadata it's harvesting and who's it sending it to. A custodial wallet, meaning you don't even control your own keys, your seed phrase, your government or some bank or someone else controls your money. Transactions monitored, which was already happening on the Bitcoin blockchain, but even in the Lightning Network, which does stuff off-chain, if you have one party that has basically every transaction routing through it, it's not really an improvement. Transactions can be limited to certain parties and even worse than that, the only way you could make that worse is if some company has custodianship that's under the US government or some other party. So you're just adding more issues. Now worst case scenario, I kind of say that facetiously and it's kind of pessimist, oh worst case scenario, that's kind of a downer. Really what that should be called is the El Salvador scenario, okay. Because El Salvador recently adopted Bitcoin as legal tender, which should be great news. And I think it's great that they've accepted it, accepted it as legal tender, but it perfectly illustrates why Bitcoin is not usable for a currency or for what it's supposed to be. Because in El Salvador, there is an official government app called Chivo, okay. And the first thing you do when you download and install Chivo is it requires no your customer. You gotta take a picture of yourself. You gotta, oh I gotta take a picture of myself smiling. And then you take a picture of your government ID and put in your equivalent of a social security number, all this kind of stuff. So KYC is the first thing that happens. It's closed source. And in fact, it isn't even written well from what people have said. And no one can see what it's actually doing, what it's like, if it's listening in on you or something like that. It's a custodial wallet, meaning the government literally controls the money you put into it. You do not have your keys. You do not have your seed phrase. And by the way, this isn't much better. Like the company, now of course, people can use other wallets than Chivo, but basically all the other wallets out there for Bitcoin, frankly, they're trash, okay. Unless you're using like Samurai wallet or something like that, which I don't think even has like Lightning network or whatever. But you know, one of the companies that actually petitioned El Salvador to accept Bitcoin or whatever is legal tender was, what is it, like Strike? They too have this custodial app where you don't have your own seed. It's a closed source, all this kind of crap. So yeah, in El Salvador, it's the worst case scenario. You have this play government app where you don't actually have access to your own Bitcoins. You don't have your seed phrase. They're not really yours. It's really just the government. If you put money into that system, it's just the government controlling it. They actually even, of course, they can monitor stuff. And they also even limited, one of the things was, when you got the app, you actually got, there's an airdrop. They gave you free money in the app, $30. And they actually even limited how you could use that. You couldn't just cash it out. You had to use it in a particular way. And worst of all, this comp, the El Salvador actually has their custodianship done by a U.S. company. I, was it Bitco? I think that's, no, it's Bitco. They give you gift cards. I should get one of this. You can look it up. There's a company under U.S. jurisdiction that owns all of this Bitcoin or has custodianship over all of this Bitcoin. So if the USG really wanted to, they could totally destroy all this El Salvador. Oh, we're fighting America or whatever. We're gonna be economically independent. It's all nonsense, okay? Because they just have this one, I don't know, this one party they're relying on that really has all the eggs in one basket. Now I don't exactly know how their multi-signature wallet works. There might be some kind of failsafe. Either way, we don't freaking know. The people of El Salvador don't know. They don't know about this technology. And it's freaking confusing because they're not actually in control of this. It's not actually open sources, not in their control. If you just install any kind of Manero wallet on your, or even a good Bitcoin wallet, I mentioned Samurai wallet or something like that. But if you use Bitcoin in the old school way, you don't have to worry about this. But if you use Manero, no matter how you use it, right? These are things you don't have to worry about. It's just not, it kind of can't happen, you know what I mean? So the last thing, as I'm told, I'm actually getting kind of tired. I've been talking, I've been screaming at my screen for a while. Gonna take another 30 second break. Okay, yeah, that was definitely 30 seconds. So the worst, even worst case scenario is what I call the government section hard fork scenario. And this is what's gonna happen to Bitcoin. So the thing with Manero is Manero, the Manero layer one works, right? The Manero software is necessary and sufficient. That is, all you need is Manero to transact with someone else with Manero. If you wanna use Bitcoin, you now have to, if you wanna be able to transact more than 10 transactions per second through the whole network, right? You have to use the Lightning network. You have to use all this other software. Or in the future, right? Well, we're gonna use Visa and MasterCard. Oh my goodness. So what's the inevitable end result of that, okay? The end result is that, is that we are going to live, again, in a financial system that looks exactly like ours, et cetera, now nominally uses Bitcoin. And what the government can easily do is say, hey, listen, this Bitcoin stuff, it's great. Wow, we love digital currency. We love the fact that we can monitor all these transactions. We freaking love it. But the only thing that can make it better is a little software update. We're gonna give you guys Bitcoin Plus, okay? And since you're already, hey, you're still using the same point of sale app, you're still gonna be using all of that stuff. But hey, if you wanna transact in America, you now have to use this Bitcoin Plus software. And what this means is, oh, yeah, it's exactly the same. We're not taking any money from you, but there's a little founder's reward. There's a little ability for the American government to tinker with us getting some free Bitcoin, or us, oh, we need to give liquidity to banks that we're now still using because the Bitcoin revolution failed. So it's very, like if you look at things, a lot of people will say, oh, well, Bitcoin tries to be like the Unix philosophy now. Like Bitcoin's just doing this one teeny tiny thing of preserving scarcity and all these other programs, they're gonna do everything else. They're gonna be able to transact fast. They're gonna be able to get privacy, all this kind of stuff. We're gonna build it on top of Bitcoin. No, on top is not, like you shouldn't talk about, Bitcoin is not a foundation. Bitcoin is just a piece of software in a constellation. And it can easily be taken out and replaced. And if you have a party like a government that can make specific demands of other large parties, that is something easily that can happen. And if you wanna see what's, and you might say, oh, well, I could still use the original software, but then you're gonna be in the same position as someone who uses like Bitcoin Cash or something like that. No one's gonna be using that. Like most normies, if they are prodded on it, they will go around along with using a government sanctioned hard fork, right? So this is the problem with Layer 2. This is the real problem. Like we can nitpick the Lightning Network or any of this kind of crap. You can look up stuff about that. I'm not really into nitpicking that kind of stuff. Again, Bitcoin is fine. The Lightning Network, I wish them the best, okay? I wish them the best. But this is the disaster that they're heading to. And this is why something like Monero, which is necessary and sufficient. You don't need anything else other than Monero. You don't need a Lightning Network. You don't need anything else. Monero by itself works. This is why you can't just take one piece of the system out because the whole system is one big piece, right? That is the importance of a software like Monero. Actually, this is a little article. I didn't really talk about this in the talk. I'm actually kind of tired so I might not talk about it this much. But there are already people who are trying to systematically change and lobby people to change Bitcoin's code, right? Or, oh, here's Greenpeace Crypto Billionaire Lobby to change Bitcoin's code. Change the code campaign. We'll run ads next month, blah, blah, blah. Basically to get rid of proof of work, okay? Which basically means getting rid of Bitcoin. And that might sound absurd, but now we are living in a time where there are a lot of parties with a lot of financial interest in affecting Bitcoin. And because you have these pressure points of more centralization, be that the Lightning Network or Custodial Exchanges or all this kind of crap, those are pressure points that can be exploited to destroy Bitcoin. Okay, that's the point. All right. Why Monero? It has to work. Oh, I basically already talked about why Monero, right? So the question I will kind of leave you with is if you're given the choice in 2009, would you choose Bitcoin or Monero? And I've heard people ask things like this. And there's no question. Like, the only reason people use Bitcoin is because other people use Bitcoin, it's a lot bigger. There's a lot more brand familiarity, things like this. But the thing is Bitcoin is not, it doesn't do what it's supposed to do anymore. Monero does, and Monero comes with privacy features. And if you were given the choice way back then to choose one or the other, why would you choose Bitcoin over Monero? I mean, Monero is a much more stable, much more robust currency. Now, in the question section, Doug Tumman actually asked me how can, oh, how possibly could Monero, hypothetically some other cryptocurrency? Let's say Monero, the developers become crazy and I don't know, some other cryptocurrency becomes the good one, right? How could anything catch up with Bitcoin? And what I said in response to that is Bitcoin and Monero are not really competing standards. I think I used the comparison of like Betamax and VHS, where VHS was just a year earlier, but it was a little worse and Betamax can never keep up. Now, that is the case because even if VHS was less good, it at least did the bare minimum, right? You could watch tape. You could record tapes on VHS and you could watch them. You could do it on Betamax, maybe a little better. But VHS was sufficient, whereas Bitcoin is not, okay? Bitcoin, again, people don't use Bitcoin for what, you know, for transacting value on the internet. They use it for holding on to it and getting money, like to increase their portfolio, right? They buy it and they hold on to it and the rationalization for why Bitcoin exists has now become, oh, well, it's digital gold that's gonna be useful for this. We don't need to transact on it or we'll design some other system on top of it, like the Lightning Network, which of course can work on Litecoin or some other thing, right? I mean, Lightning is not just for Bitcoin. It's just like some software project, right? Not, I mean, it's primarily for Bitcoin, but it can be used on a, it is not Bitcoin. It's a different thing, right? So, you know, this is kind of the issue. You know, Bitcoin is not doing what it's supposed to do. Monero is doing what it's supposed to do. And I think that is the big, that is the chance, that is the ability for Bitcoin to lose its position to something else. And I think Monero is the most hopeful choice for this. So, the last advice I give people, minimize all tech usage because you're always looking, leaking metadata, use all three software, it goes without saying. Never be unencrypted and use Monero to transact. And I think I have a final slide. I don't think I actually went to it in the presentation, but that's my final slide of a Monero robot. But yeah, so that's about all the talk. I'm getting really tired of talking, to be honest. Believe it or not, I get very tired of talking. So that's it. That is the situation I think cryptocurrency is in and Monero is in, like the wider context, right? Because this is not just, this is not technology. It's definitely not technology for getting rich or anything like that. This is technology for dystopia avoidance because we are moving to an environment where everything we do is monitored and we need constant developments in encryption and we need new technology to allow us to transact online without intermediaries. Bitcoin was revolutionary in that it came up with proof of work. And Monero I think is the most hopeful cryptocurrency. And I suspect already really that Monero is probably used for more real things than Bitcoin at this point. I think especially Monero people are much more apt to, I don't care about the core thing that cryptocurrency was developed for. And that is transacting, digital currency, right? And again, this is not about creating some new technological utopia. It's about avoiding a technological dystopia. And that's how I look at things. So that's about it. If you have any questions, I don't wanna leave them, email them in the comments, email them in the comments. You know what I mean, email me or leave them in the comments. I think I might do a video, a video, what was I gonna say? There's some kind of video on Monero. Oh, I wanted to do things that I think Monero can improve on, okay? And I think I might do a video on that. So that might come relatively soon, we'll see. But that's the end of this one and I'll see you guys next time.