 All right, so first of all, thank you all for coming to this talk. I know there's been a lot of interest in figuring out What the heck is this Bitcoin thing? I'm gonna do you one step further and I'm gonna tell you a little bit about why I think Bitcoin is one of the most significant innovations of our time. I got too fast, so I got to jump straight to the point. That answer is trust. Bitcoin is a system that reimagines trust. Everything that we deal with today depends on trust. The client-server model is a trusted relationship, right? It is the your client is accessing some remote server that you are trusting to provide some some data that you're expecting, right? In finance, this is a very broad problem, this problem of trust. In finance, we call it counterparty risk. Those of you who might work in financial services, you're familiar with this. In economics, we call it the central planning problem. The further away the decision-maker gets from the individual constituents, the less effective their decision-making capacity is. And in computer science, we call it the Byzantine generals problem. You have a cluster of nodes, a set of servers, or machines that are responsible for doing some sort of work. You don't know which of those servers has been compromised, which one of those machines has just got a bit flipped or maybe has a corrupt hard drive. This is described more loosely as the Byzantine generals problem. So we want to talk a little bit about changing modes of trust. Through network design, we're hoping to eliminate these centralized points of failure. Anytime you have trust in a relationship of any sort, certainly with computer systems, you have these parts of the system that will fail. We describe these central points of failure. We want to eliminate them. Really quickly, I want to talk about these graphs. Pick one of these graphs or two. And then pick two random points on that graph. How many nodes do you have to hop through to send a message from your first node to your second node? We want to think about that. So let's talk about 2008, what really sparked the whole conversation about Bitcoin. We're in the middle of an election season. Sound familiar? We had a crisis, huge financial crisis. These large institutions that we had trusted with our finances were using them in different ways than we thought. And we had to bail out. We had another large centralized institution use money and spend it to bail these centralized points of failure out. So what is Bitcoin? The general idea, it's an immutable database. It's spread out. Everybody keeps a copy of the database and you can verify proofs against that database. And we're building not just an internet of things, but an internet of commerce. We're building payment systems. We're building stored value systems. We're building smart contracts. We're building everything you imagine in the current web, in the current internet, in the current technology world is being built on top of this immutable database now. The value of Bitcoin, the currency reflects our trust in this database. The currency price on the markets reflects how trustworthy that asset is. And the reason this works is really cool. There's three parts to it. You've got the blockchain data structure, which is all that it is. You have an economic incentive for its security and a non-forgeable proof of work. It's a way to prove that you've done some degree of work. So let's talk about that proof of work. We can talk really quickly about it. It's very simple. It's pure entropy. It's randomness. You spend work by your computer and you pass it through a hash mechanism. And if that hash matches a special arbitrary pattern, you are rewarded with some new currency. And that's where the economic incentive comes from. The work that is done to secure the network is rewarded with a currency that only has value when that network is secure. If this network security diminishes, if that database is security diminishes, so too does the currency's value. So the miners would be disincentivized. But what is this blockchain thing? Well, blockchains are really simple. This is exactly how they were described for the very first time in the Bitcoin source code by Satoshi Nakamoto. It's just a data structure. But here's the trick. They're actually kind of slow and inefficient. You know, if you're trying to make a payment, at least in the modern world, you expect that payment to happen instantly. Banks do it, manage to do it in about three days. Other systems can take weeks or longer and they take significant fees because you have to jump a number of hops. But what they're great at is keeping history, keeping track, keeping people accountable. And that is what helps us restore trust. Bitcoin is a trust anchor. It provides a degree of certainty for any system that requires a shared perspective. And it's my belief that for that reason, Bitcoin is the most innovative thing that exists in our time and will continue to be so.