 Well, this is really cool to talk with you Vinnie. So let's just start with the article you wrote on the two bitcoins because you have a really interesting, exceptionally well-informed and impartial voice that is really relevant. Tell us about the two bitcoins. So look, I think the reality is you have two set, the communities have been split over the past year around what the direction is for bitcoin. And so you have the Bitcoin Cash fork because a lot of people believe that it should be a lot cheaper to use and it's more of a transactional currency than a store of value. Really it's like, is it money or is it a store of value? And I'll try to articulate in my article if you haven't read it to check out on VinnieLingham.com on my blog. And I'll give you the two different strategies for what each community is trying to do with the flavor of the Bitcoin code base right now. And so we can dig into details around that. Yeah, yeah, sure. So I mean, well, first of all, one of the interesting things in your article is I think the difference in values, what people are actually trying to do with these two different bitcoins. So do you want to explain that? What is it that the Bitcoin core side values and what is it the Bitcoin cash side values? Yeah, so again, I speak for myself and my own observations on this. I won't say that I'm a part of the core team or the Bitcoin Cash team. My perception so far is that the Bitcoin core development team in the community wants this notion of everyone has to run a node, government resistance, sensitive money, and the block side needs to be limited because with a smaller block size, that means everyone can run a node. And I've been in Bitcoin for a long time, so since 2012, 2013. And I read the white paper thousands of times. And the separation of nodes in the white paper as to what it is today, where the white paper nodes and miners were the same thing. And today they're not, they've been spit out. And the notion that the block size has to be constrained in order to give everyone the chance to run a node is kind of a deviation. I believe in what the white paper originally said, because the whole system is about proof of work and logic, capitalism. People, miners invest money in money equipment that secures the network. And then we have the notion that all these nodes can do a user activated soft fork. I mean, I used to be a big supporter of core and Bitcoin, well, the Bitcoin core sort of roadmap strategy. Even Segwit to the extent, I was like, look, it doesn't look too bad. It looks like it'll solve some of the scaling problems. But the reality is we activated Segwit using a contentious soft fork. And so if you look at what happened how, and you guys, a lot of you know this already, but we've sort of transformed, we've Bitcoin transformed nodes from miners to sort of, what would you call them? Non-mining nodes, and how we've been taking soft, if you look at the Bitcoin white paper, and I always go back to white paper, it's all about consensus. And consensus is always based upon hash power. And the moment you sort of separate the two, I think it's not looking like what it was promised to be. Yeah, yeah. So is it fair to say, so just a way to frame what you're saying, on the Bitcoin core side, they want to keep the cost of running a node as cheap as possible. And the Bitcoin cash side want to keep the cost of transactions as low as possible. Is that a fairer statement? I mean, how does that sound? Yeah. Okay. By the way, I've had some food poisoning, so I'm not very coherent. I apologize. Yeah, that's a good, that's a good, the thing is this, I'm a very practical guy, being entrepreneur, having both many companies. And I really struggle with the notion that every one of the world needs to run a node. And so when I'm asked a lot of the core supporters, why, you know, what's the, what is the sufficient number of nodes in the world that the system is sufficiently decentralized? You cannot get an answer. You know, I said, well, is it seven billion, is everyone on the earth? No one answers, no, no, no, but everyone on earth needs to be able to run a node. It's like, it's not very practical. Like, is, do we think that if a hundred thousand companies in the world ran a full node and the block sizes were 32 megabytes, would that be sufficiently decentralized? I kind of think, yes, I think it's very difficult for governments, it's, you know, to, to, to, to sort of attack a hundred thousand companies. Why do individuals need to run nodes? Well, so they can validate that the money's there. So, well, do you check the serial number of every single node that you receive when you go to a store and get changed? No, when you go to ATM, like, does anyone, yeah, anyone, you know, check serial numbers of nodes against black lizards? No, it's impractical. We just trust that the money's good. Right, right. So, so part of it is like, you know, who, who has an incentive to run a node? So, you know, merchants, for instance, and this is something we've talked about since the early days of Bitcoin, but, you know, I always thought, you know, merchants would run a node, they'd run a non-mining node because, because they're processing a lot of payments, they want to be absolutely sure about all those payments. But if you're only receiving, say, five dollars, why would you run a node? Yeah, all you need is like a bit-pay, all processes are good for you. Right. So, I think we lost a lot of, like, what, what, and I, so for those, you don't know, I ran GIFT, I was, for co-financy, of GIFT, before we sold the first data, and we, we did about 100,000 Bitcoin transactions over the, one hour, one hour's there. So, between 2013 to 2000, we sold them until 2014. So, 2015 I left in 2015. So, now about two and a half or three years, over 100,000 transactions for Bitcoin, zero conf. And we had no problems, I think we had one issue out of 100,000, but generally no problems, until RBF came in. And RBF basically changed the entire security model of what we were doing. And you could argue, well, you know, there was, there was ways to mitigate that. The problem is we're dealing with consumers. Consumers don't understand this stuff. So, trying to explain to them that they're using a wallet that, we got an RBF flag that would turn off to get a, to get an instant GIFT card. It doesn't work. Yeah. So, that's a, that brings up another sort of philosophical difference, which is, it seems to me, and you tell me your point of view, but, like on the core side, they want perfect security. On the cash side, we recognize, you know, it's okay actually to have a really tiny amount of insecurity, if the cost of that is like, you know, lower than the gain, right? That's exactly it. So, it's the same with, with GIFT cards, selling for credit cards, right? So, you know that you may have a 1% charge back rate, and you kind of bait that into your margins. And that's why you accept credit cards. If you said, look, credit cards are risky, 1% of them are going to get charged back. So, you wouldn't, you wouldn't operate, and that applies to any business online. If you were not willing to accept a small amount of risk for all your credit card transactions with online fraud, you couldn't operate. And so, it's what is this, what is the minimal acceptable amount of risk that you can take with any transactions? Yeah. There's another thing here too, like, you know, why, why on the Bitcoin So, I mean, I, like, I just gave this whole talk on achieving, you know, global adoption, stuff like that. I think that's really, that, to me, that's important. That helps me, that's part of why I'm interested in this. On the core side, they really seem to value some of these things quite highly, so highly that it kind of trumps adoption. Like, they're less interested in people actually using it. How can, how can that be? Like, what, what are they thinking? And like, why, how can that be so important to them that they actually are willing to like, say, no, you can't use this? The reality is that Bitcoin is supposed to be, in its current incarnation, a store of value. And I, can someone explain to me what that means? Because I don't understand what that means. You know, especially when you buy that 20,000, now it's like eight. You know, it's not very good doing its job very well. Like, I don't get the, and I've written tons of blog posts over the years and, and literally the conclusions are always, and, you know, again, what I'm right or wrong is up to the reader to decide. But I've always got the conclusion that Bitcoin, for Bitcoin to be valuable, it needs to be used. And people need, there needs to be industrial demand for these 21 million coins. There needs to be, you know, businesses needed or consumers needed. Back in the day, we were doing, you know, some gift card ledges. We were trying to do stuff on colored coins. So we're just experimenting, right? There's ways of using bitcoins and creating, you know, the scarcity that exists within Bitcoin was meant to be used, in my opinion. And the moment you take away the use case, especially limiting the block size and the number of transactions go, drop, sink, and slow, why do you buy it? Because it's going to go up. I mean, literally the reason people buy Bitcoin today is because the price is supposed to go up. And so it kind of looks, you know... Well, like a pyramid scheme or something, right? I would want to use those exact words, but, but think about it. Like, most of the, like, there are more Bitcoin transactions today on exchanges than in real, in the real world. Yeah. People buying and trading the Bitcoins. Like, what do you use Bitcoin for? You can say, again, store of value. Well, what does that mean? Yeah. I mean, let me follow up on that, because it's another, you know, Bitcoin Cash has a lot of the same economics as Bitcoin. I mean, there's a limited supply of Bitcoin Cash. Can't you just use Bitcoin Cash as a store of value and all of these other things? I mean, it sounds like that would be applied equally as well to Bitcoin Cash plus these other use cases. Eventually. The problem we've got is, so look, if you look at guys like Roger and myself and a whole bunch of other guys in the early days driving adoption of Bitcoin. I mean, we took out myself and the BitPay guys. We took out, like, what is it, Superbowl? It wasn't Superbowl, it was a Rose Bowl ad or something. You know, BitPay sponsored it with gift. And, you know, driving adoption was the key thing. Like, if you look at all the funds that we're trying to get people to invest in Bitcoin two, three years ago, one of the thesis for the funds was, look how many transactions are happening per day on Bitcoin, right? Transactions kept going up and higher and higher. And then, and that was the thesis for why the Bitcoin price would rise, because people were using it. Now that transactions have tanked and people are just like, eh, that matrix has gone to the window. For me, it doesn't quite add up. Yeah, yeah. So the transaction volume is one. I mean, another thing that happened over time is because it's literally just, you know, throttled at a certain number of transactions per second, basically. We've seen a lot of transaction volume growth in Ethereum. We've also seen the market dominance of Bitcoin decrease. I mean, you know, it seems like, you know, Bitcoin's stature is being threatened by its sort of inability to scale. Well, that's always been the concern. Yeah. And, you know, I'm not a big fan of saying, well, we could scale Bitcoin a layer one forever. Maybe eight megs, 32 megs, who knows what the right number is. A layer two would probably be a good idea at some point, maybe. But to throttle it one megabyte, it's just seemed kind of silly. Yeah. So another sort of relevant subject is the brand. So a lot of, you know, when I talk with beginners, you know, they usually, like I said in my talk, you know, they'll look up Bitcoin Cash, they see a bunch of negative information about Bitcoin Cash, and that's just what they think about it. You know, tell us about the brand of Bitcoin and what do you think about the brand? So let's be frank. Bitcoin is Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash is Bitcoin Cash. Is Bitcoin Cash allowed to use the brand Bitcoin and add the word Cash to it? Sure. This is a permissionless world, right? You can do whatever you want. No one owns the brand Bitcoin. I think it's been very clear that Bitcoin Cash is not Bitcoin from a marketing perspective, I don't think anyone. You know, I know that there's, people say that Bitcoin Cash is Bitcoin. You could argue yes, based upon what's in the white paper, right? Say good is not, you know, there are a lot of things that make a difference, but you're a minority voice. So you're fighting the majority of the world, doesn't see Bitcoin Cash as Bitcoin, and no matter how loud you say it is, it's not yet. Okay, it could be. Now, what is interesting is the definition of, so if you look at what happens, this is interesting. I have a couple of thoughts on this. I haven't actually formulated it, but if you look at how we've evolved in forking, right? So the Bitcoin Cash fork was actually, had a very strong two-way repair protection, which basically meant that the UTXO sets were separated, and they could never be merged back in, right? Now, if you look at how we've avoided contentious hard forks over the years at Bitcoin, when do we get 95% of people to agree on anything? And yet Segur was set at a 95% threshold, okay? Now, 51% was actually the threshold defined, technically in the white paper, like if 51% of hash power agree on a certain set of rules, in theory, there's some outliers there, but in theory, then those become the new Bitcoin. That's what the Segur 2X group basically put together, was like, look, SPV wallets would follow the longest proof of work chain. So by definition, Bitcoin would be the longest proof of work chain, right? The cumulative difficulty, et cetera. Bitcoin Cash subsidized its breakaway from Bitcoin by having a different difficulty adjustment algorithm and issuing about 100,000 new Bitcoins temporarily, and then sort of readjusted afterwards with the November fork. But basically, it was never given a chance to compete for the longest proof of work chain because it's now two separate sets of coins. If Bitcoin Cash, if the community actually got big enough, and enough people around the world said, okay, this is more, the price went up high enough, the value, the demand started growing, could we get to a point where Bitcoin Cash is considered to be Bitcoin? It's possible, but the criteria for it would be very, very difficult. Okay. Under the definitions that we know. So longest proof of work chain, sort of tallest block height, cumulative difficulty, and then you'd have to have the price. So if the price of Bitcoin Cash ever exceeded Bitcoin, and there was a flippening, and the difficulty, the proof of work mining would accumulate to the chain, you could make an argument at that point. Yeah. But it's not clear. Yeah, okay. It does seem possible, though, just because on, you know, if Bitcoin Core is a store of value only, and as you're saying, like, what does that even mean? And Bitcoin Cash has at least as much of that, plus these other things, that just the utility of it, that, well, gosh, if people are using it as a store of value again, and so far as whatever that means, but plus all these other things, that would cause the price to rise, which would cause miners to follow, which would eventually lead to more mining power, which then eventually would lead to the being in the longest total proof of work chain. Now, this is, I mean, this is a scenario, and I've said this, that I think that is more likely than most people seem to think. But I think it's likely. It's getting impossible. But now you're dealing with social consensus issues, right? So if Bitcoin Cash was trading at, you know, whatever, two X Bitcoin for a long enough period of time, that would really mean that in terms of social consensus, the market out there is defining Bitcoin Cash as Bitcoin, and there's one rebrand to the other. I don't know, we don't have rules for this. There's no rule that says Bitcoin becomes Bitcoin Core, and Bitcoin Cash becomes Bitcoin. Like it doesn't work that way, right? So we have to be, we have to be very realistic that the world sees Bitcoin as Bitcoin, and Bitcoin Cash is Bitcoin Cash. Some people think it's called a B Cash. I started blocking people that call it B Cash, because I just think it's disrespectful. The community doesn't want to be called B Cash, and that's fine. But, you know, at the end of the day, what does it matter? Like, what do we care, right? Well, what's it a name? For me, it's more important that we find, we look at these two as being very good experiments. It's the core Bitcoin technology on both chains. There wasn't a pre-mine like some of the other Bitcoin forks. And everyone who had a Bitcoin at the point of the fork has a copy of Bitcoin Cash. And let the experiment play out. So it's not going to be easy to get, if you look at the transactions that go through Bitcoin today and look at Bitcoin Cash, to drive adoption, like we literally going back in time like three or four years, to get the adoption levels up. It's going to be a lot easier, obviously, with merchants like, you know, the BitPay community, et cetera, because the fee is a lot cheaper. But it only gets you so far. Upcodes being re-enabled, that's actually a big deal. That's a really big deal. And so you may find people get really creative with how they can use these new upcodes to do interesting things with Bitcoin Cash. And it's hard to predict how this all plays out. But I'm very excited about the prospects of what Bitcoin Cash can offer in terms of just more creativity versus Bitcoin is kind of constrained. So another subject is a lot of people are very bullish on the Lightning network. So they think that we can keep the block size limited, basically, and then recover all of the desirable properties with the Lightning network. What do you think about that? The jury is still acting like a network. I mean, they got DDoS two days ago. So if you're writing a note, 20% of the notes went down. You know, I think it's like a year and a half, maybe, from being really used. I also don't think that consumers are going to use it. I think it's really difficult for average people to go new. Like, Bitcoin is hard enough as it is. Cryptocurrency is tough enough as it is. By the way, people don't realize everyone's into cryptocurrencies. They're not really. They're all just buying and trading them on exchanges. Like, you know, my brother does it. He has no idea what he's doing. Like, you know. But I took him to a Bitcoin conference. He's actually from South Africa as well. But he lives there now. And he was in the States. He went to a Bitcoin conference. He was giving people advice on cryptocurrencies. He's a guy. Like, he's a technophobe. Not a technophobe. But he has no idea what he's doing. And it's just, we need to end in the shit-coin oracle. Because he would just watch YouTube videos and watch shit-coins to buy. And like, oh, you should buy this and buy this and buy that. But majority of people, they don't care about it. How many go into cryptocurrency worldwide right now? 100 million people? How many actually care what these cryptocurrencies do? Like, what? Five? 95% of the people just care about the price going up. And this is a recipe for disaster. We only have a few minutes, so maybe we can ask questions if you want to. Then we begin again. Questions for our peer here. I have a runner. Do I have a question? I got one down there. There we go, there we go, there we go. How's everybody feeling? Come on. There you go. There you go. You guys look so beautiful with your smiles. Question? Yes, hi. And I'm going here from Sweden. I have a question. Have you seen the adoption rate of Bitcoin Cash going up, down, sideways? Which directions? I mean, Bitcoin Cash is working in a very, very small base, very low base. It's like, it's just, it's very new. So yeah, Bitcoin Cash is about six months old, seven months old. It's very new. There's a lot of headroom to go. And I think you're already seeing a lot of adoption. The transactions, it's hard to tell. You look at the transaction volume, how much is real use cases and real utility right now. People are definitely experimenting. And because it's so cheap, obviously, for transactions through, you can manipulate that. But my sense is that just looking at, from a payments use case, it's going to get a lot of traction on the payment side, just because of the costs. Any other questions? We have a question here. Here you go. What would you like to see happen with opcodes? What would you build? Oh. So smart contract functionality was something which we really would have liked to have seen in Bitcoin. I think Vitalik tried to, as a former Bitcoin maximist, I was quite disappointed. Like, I never participated in the Ethereum ICOs. I was like, ah, you know. But I think the smart contracting nature, the nature of smart contracts, where it was supposed to, I wouldn't say it was supposed to, but the dream was that all that could come to Bitcoin and it never did. I'd love to see that happening. I'd love to see us using Bitcoin Cash for smart contracts. And that's the other thing, but there's a lot of hyper on smart contracts. No, it's really using smart contracts. Maybe there's some people trying to do it for atomic swaps, that sort of thing. But sorry? Kiddies. Kiddies, yeah. There you go. But I'd like to see some interesting use cases on smart contracts. It definitely is the low-hanging fruit. Because there is interest in it. There's a lot of demand for it, at least theoretically. But you need low transaction fees as well. Any other questions? Corner there. My runner is coming. How's it going? What's your biggest pain point with Bitcoin Cash at the moment? Look, I think, again, there's an uphill battle for legitimacy, right, for Bitcoin Cash. I think it's people may have unrealistic expectations of how long it takes to build a network. And you basically, to take on the Bitcoin network right now, the network effect that exists in Bitcoin, it's not trivial. And we spend years building that. There were a lot of people who spent like five, six years of their lives building the network effect to Bitcoin and now kind of got away from us. Because not everyone's, you know, Bitcoin is obviously Bitcoin. And to compete with Bitcoin, you have to build a network effect that's going to be equal to or greater than the current Bitcoin network effect, which is going to be very challenging. Not that it can't be done, but it's not going to take three months or six months. It's going to take years. And it's going to take armies of passionate people who are devoted to building technology on top of Bitcoin Cash. And so also like price chasing and all the other things, that's almost irrelevant at this point. Like it's, how do you build things which can change society today and do it in a way which, look, Bitcoin has become too restrictive for this. So people have to use Ethereum and other platforms to try and do this. Can they use it and do it on Bitcoin Cash? Who knows? I'd like to see the core Bitcoin technology. Like it's rooted in the original white paper, which is what sold me on blockchain technology. It's the original blockchain thesis. And I'd love to see that happening on Bitcoin Cash, even if it can't happen on Bitcoin. Hi. You mentioned that you were a Bitcoin maximalist. And they- Reformed. Reformed. Reformed, yeah. They used to keep saying that, oh, the smartest people, the smartest guys are in the blockchain kind of community are developing for a core. So what do you say to that? Like the smartest developers are supposed to be there. That's just a BS narrative. I mean, like, so you kind of have a situation where you have this selection bias, right? So people who disagree with core leave, OK? Whether it's Gavin Reeson or Mike Hearn or Jeff Garzik, like, you know, so what happens is you create an echo chamber. If people disagree with you on, if everyone in the room disagree with what I said and left, everyone who stayed behind would be agreeing with me. Therefore, I've created an echo chamber because there's no descending voices. And that's kind of what you have today. Also, if you look at diversity within core, how many women developers are there in core? Anyone know? I don't know of any female contributors. And some of them are anonymous, so you may not know. There may be. But my sense is that we don't, you can't say that the best of the best is sitting inside a core. It doesn't make any sense. I think just a comment on that. I mean, it is true that actually some of the good core developers actually left. And you might expect, actually, that maybe just these people that happened to be around back in 2010, basically, maybe weren't necessarily the world's best at this. What maybe we should have seen is maybe new people coming in that actually then become the dominant sort of developers. We didn't see that. I think that's interesting. I think it says something about the culture of Bitcoin core that that didn't happen. Well, you still don't have any. I mean, I don't know. I don't keep tabs on it too closely. But from what I know, there's almost fresh blood coming in. And I mean, I saw there's one 15-year-old kid who hacked the ledger wallet two days ago. Like, I was reading his write-up. I was super impressed. Like, wow, these are the types of kids that are coming out today. There's a huge, usually positive for our industry. I don't believe you could take any distinct group of people who, that's the other thing. When you're running companies, you don't want a group of people, 50 or even 100 people, all agree with each other. It's not a good thing. Echo Chambers are bad. And so I see a lack of dissenting voices in that group. And I think that's a problem. And I also don't think that you could ever take a group of. So software developers and development isn't something which is homogenous, right? Everyone thinks differently. Everyone has different approaches to things. And there's no way you could take three or four distinct groups of people and say you can stack rank them against each other. It doesn't quite work that way. You can't take, if you took four teams of 20 developers and they had a healthy mix of really excellent to good, it's difficult to say which is the best team. It's how the team works together, et cetera. And so I definitely say that I don't believe that you could say that the best is the best in that group. Because then you're saying that dissenting voices would not be the best. It's kind of a weird saying. Like, in other words, if you dissent with an approach, then you can't be a good developer, which is not true. How do we in the Bitcoin Cash community get the best people? Like, what can we do with all this in mind? How can we attract the best new people? Well, I think what's interesting is that you've got multiple implementations in Bitcoin Cash. You've got ABC, you've got a whole bunch of others. I think what people need to have is different communities that can be part of. So if you don't like one implementation, you can go work with a different team. And you can still work on Bitcoin Cash separately. So that way you'd have diversity of implementation teams. And that's probably the way to do it. You'd find a home that you'd like. It's kind of like, because Bitcoin is run by literally, you've got like a little bit coin as well, and there's Bitcoin D as well. But Bitcoin Core is 98%, 98% of the implementations out there. It's literally, you're either part of Core, or you can't contribute to Bitcoin. And there's no other implementation to work with. There's no other team to work with, so. Do we have any more time, Riyadh? Last one. Last one. How are you? Okay, thanks very, very much. Thank you.