 Harry asks, who are the maintainers of Bitcoin Core? Is it possible to know what privileges they each have at any given time? Harry, first of all, let's disambiguate the term maintainer a bit. There's a difference between contributors, committers, and maintainers in an open-source project. The toasted-on GitHub of the style that Bitcoin Core is. Let's disambiguate those. Contributors are the people who can and do make pull requests. They are the people who are actively contributing code to the project through the form of pull requests. All changes to Bitcoin Core happen through pull requests. Nobody commits directly to a branch without a fully reviewed pull request. All change requests go through a pull request process. Maintainers are responsible for gathering all of the change requests that have been approved by the broader community, by the social consensus of the development group, which have broad consensus and acceptability to be included in the next release, and deciding how to sequence them, when to package them, in which order, and what each release should include. Even that decision is heavily influenced by the collaborative communication between all of the contributors, who are commenting on the pull requests. There are open discussions about whether features should be included earlier or later, and which release should go in. A maintainer's job is to schedule the releases and project-manage them to a timetable, ensuring that the right changes are included, putting them through their testing and quality assurance steps, and then finally producing a release, where a bundle of changes with a specific version number. That release then has release notes that tell you what changed, who changed it, who contributed, what effects it has, what any upgrade or migration steps are necessary, what the changes were, why they were happening, and collecting all of that documentation. The maintainer for Bitcoin Core today is Vladimir Vandalan. I think they have another maintainer who is now working to assist with Vladimir, mostly on the wallet side, known as the Wallet Maintainer. I can't remember his name, but he was recently given that responsibility. The overall maintainer is Orion Dab, W, or Vladimir Vandalan. The number of contributors is anywhere from 30 or 40 people who regularly contribute to almost every release, to more than 500 contributors who have contributed to different extents. People come and go in this project. This is a vast, sprawling project. There is another question, which is, who has commit access to the repository? That comes up all the time, but it's really not a relevant question. The reason it's not a relevant question is because the people who have commit access to the repository don't use that commit access. If they do have it, they don't use it, because all commits happen by the project maintainers who are maintaining the releases. It's a very different perspective. Who can sign with a trusted PGP key? Who can commit onto the repository? Who can register those commits into the repository? Versus who decides what changes happen for each release and on what basis they decide? Versus who contributes these changes? Those are all different roles. Specifically, at the moment, there are five keys I'm looking at, which belong to Vladimir Vandalan, Peter Wall, John O'Shaeneli, Marco Falca, and Samuel Dobson. These are the five people who have PGP keys that can sign commits into the repository. But those are not necessarily the people who are making the commits. Primarily the release, scheduling, and committing of changes made by Vladimir Vandalan. Vladimir Vandalan doesn't make decisions about what goes in. Really, Vladimir simply reflects and does the administrative work for the decisions that have already been made by the community. In fact, he exercises very little authority over what goes into a release, basically reflecting the decisions that have already been made in a very collaborative, open manner, through discussions on the pull requests and the project notes of the Bitcoin Core Code. It's very different than what you see at the surface. Yes, and there's a really nice article, by the way, for that. There's a really nice article by Jameson Lopp about the maintenance of Bitcoin Core, how it works, who has commit access, who has privileges, etc., etc. It's called Who Controls Bitcoin Core by Jameson Lopp. It's a medium article. If you want to read up on more of that, that's just one of the sources you might use. You told us that Bitcoin is getting stronger when it gets attacked. Yes. It has antibodies that make it stronger, and even the hardest threats seem to make it just grow better. Do you think there are threats that are maybe not so sophisticated, not so scary, but for which Bitcoin is less prepared to react, something that maybe can be subtle, could be technical, social, something that can be unexpectedly toxic and unhealthy for Bitcoin? Yes, I do think those do exist. I think, for the most part, we've seen a number of social attacks against Bitcoin, which are attacks against the community, and attempts to create unnecessary drama that distracts people from the real focus. One of the things that I think has become clear is that one of the ways to slow cryptocurrency down is to create drama inside the communities. That has been attempted, I would say in some ways. It has been successful. It hasn't stopped us, but it has slowed us down, so I try not to feed the drama. I think it's important to remain focused on the technology and to stop paying attention to the people. The more you spend time, if you are talking about people, that's gossip, it's not technology. So don't ignore the personalities, focus on the technology, focus on what's actually happening in this space. That's real, it's not fake drama. But quite honestly, one of the ways in which Bitcoin has changed is that it's not just Bitcoin anymore, which means that even if an attack was successful against one cryptocurrency, all that will do is create other cryptocurrencies now. Because all of these cryptocurrencies are all trying different approaches, different communities, different focus, different applications, different code base, different monetary policies, different security principles, that's diversity. That diversity, like biological diversity, means that we're much more resistant to any single type of attack, because even if it manages to stop one part, it doesn't stop everything. And in fact, the parts that are not stopped expand to fill the ecosystem and get stronger. So now we've got this adaptation to threats. It's not just Bitcoin that is anti-fragile, it's the entire crypto ecosystem, with all of its competing interests and competing developers and competing models that is advancing as a whole, and it is even more unstoppable than Bitcoin itself. So again, I find it harder and harder to come up with realistic scenarios of how this gets stopped. I really do. Hello, Andreas, and thank you for being such a great teacher. Thank you. And I have a question about governments and decisions in this system. How do we make decisions for this decentralized protocol? Great. That's a great question. Government, governance, and how do we make decisions in these decentralized systems? We don't know yet. This is the beauty of it. What we do know is that we've created a system of rules without rulers, a system that is extremely resistant to external change and very difficult to hijack. That's the starting point. Now, where can that system take us? How do we change it when we want to change it? How do we achieve consensus? How do we arrive at common decisions? We don't know yet. But what's happening is we're trying a dozen different ways, and some of them are working, and some of them are not. And that's the beauty of this. We now have a completely new field of computer science called consensus algorithms that did not exist ten years ago. And that field is inventing incredible things every single day. And the best part of it. What most people haven't yet quite grasped is that we are currently working on a system that is deployed in production, a hundred and fifty billion dollar live payment system that is the largest deployment of civilian cryptography, applied cryptography, that has ever happened on this planet. When I was a young cypherpunk in 1991 and I was enamored with PGP and wanting everybody to encrypt their email and trying to teach other people how to use PGP, I failed. And nobody was paying any attention. If you told me that in two decades, or three decades now, oh god, I'm old, in three decades, we would have a practical use and a deployed network for digital signatures that is using applied cryptography, some of the most amazing applied cryptography, with new technology that was never seen before, to run a real production network that is now growing to that level and has involved, what, 10, 15, 20 million people? We don't even know. I wouldn't have believed you. That's the platform in which we're trying this stuff. There's no theory about this. You take your lovely pristine idea that you developed into the lab, you gently put it out there, and it's ravaged by hackers in milliseconds because now it has to survive in the wild under adversarial conditions where the honeypot is a hundred and fifty billion dollars. It's the prize that awaits anyone. Bitcoin isn't here today because no one has tried to hack it. Bitcoin is here today because everyone has tried to hack it again and again and again and again. Each time they somewhat succeed, it adapts, learns, evolves, and becomes stronger, like an immune system. Governance is being played out on an evolutionary playing field with real money at stake. We have a chance for the first time to do it differently. People ask me, will Bitcoin be regulated? Bitcoin is regulated by mathematics instead of human committees. We already have systems that are regulated by committee. We're trying to do the other thing now, and that other thing is regulating by algorithm. We think it's going to be better, but we don't know yet.