 I feel like Bitcoin has some pretty interesting philosophies about democracy sort of baked in to the consensus model. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on democracy and then the intersection between blockchain and democracy, and then democracy on a blockchain. Yeah, I mean, democracy is a loaded word. And democracy is a loaded word because for most people we project onto democracy what we think we want or believe democracy to be. I'm Greek. We invented it. Well, we invented it under some very specific circumstances. 3,000 land owning, slave owning, white males got to decide for themselves, and the 150,000 slaves, women and children who they owned as property. That's democracy. I don't believe in democracy. Democracy is 51% of the population having the ability to decide to kill the other 49 because they're inconvenient. Homosexual, Jewish, whatever, right? Democracy without restraints, without human rights, without civil rights, without constitutional protections is a brutal system of oppression where once you get that sliver of majority, you can eradicate everybody else. Strictly speaking, that's what democracy is. Now, most people have constitutional, Republican democracies, parliamentary democracies, and other means of sweetening that system a bit to ensure the minorities don't get oppressed. How well does it work? I don't know. Bitcoin isn't a democracy. Not even in the mining. Bitcoin is a system of supermajority consensus where it takes a very large percentage of the deciding groups, the five constituencies of consensus, in order to make change, which makes change very difficult. Bitcoin is a system that decentralizes power radically. Politically, many people call that cypherpunk, crypto, anarchy. In other words, we don't yet have. Bitcoin is redefining political and organizational systems, not just Bitcoin, open public blockchains. This technology, born out of the internet and expressing some of the radically egalitarian, open philosophies, a free flow of information, freedom of speech, freedom of association, on a transnational basis that transcends not just borders, but every aspect of identity, without identity. That's a radical new political system. It started with the internet. It's now happening to money. We don't yet have good words for it. Some people might call it democracy. I don't think that's what it is. Democracy, mostly in developed worlds today, is a system of hierarchical and institutional organizational principles that was born out of the era of industrialization in the 18th and 19th century. It does not scale anymore. It doesn't serve a planet of 7.5 billion people, where we have enough food to feed everyone. We just can't distribute it. We have the ability to produce energy for everyone, but we just can't distribute it. We can't solve problems like climate change. So hierarchical systems are failing. Flat, network-based, collaborative, decentralized adhocracies on the internet may be the new thing. Who knows? It'll be fun to find out. So I'm along for the ride. Just to follow on, essentially, from what you were saying, you've talked about the different constituencies within the ecosystem and the fact that the consensus on forks is formed by groups. So it may sound like it's a sort of K out of N consensus algorithm, whereas I wonder, I mean, is it really a distribution or are there coalitions that are able to force a consensus? What is the structure of the consensus? If you look at within the level of those few consistencies, I mean, it actually goes broader than that because you can take a more fine-grained view of the system of old small players, but take it at the level of those constituencies. And what's the structure of the consensus formation at that level? We don't know yet. We're finding out. And here's the interesting thing. You've got layers of this, right? So there's a political layer, which has to do with public statements and rallying the troops and signing agreements and negotiating with others, who you think are in power or may have enough power to sway others and using influences and persuaders and pundits, right? I don't play that game, but some do. And trying to create these coalitions, you know, pick your Venn diagram across these five constituencies and say, here it is, this is the new big blocker constituency. This is the small blocker constituency. This is though we haven't given it a name yet constituency. All of that noise doesn't change the Bitcoin consensus rules. At the end of the day, it's going to play out on the network protocol with nodes that are participating that express the economic interests of their users through choices about which set of consensus rules they use on their live systems and with their transactions. So money on the system, choices of the software you use, choices of the software you mine with if you're a miner, all of those things in the undetermined. And it's not going to be sometimes a clear cut determination. It may involve a prolonged tug of war. It may involve a realignment of incentives. My prediction is that talk is cheap in a lot of this. People will say anything. At that last moment, when push comes to shove, and you see that the consensus rules are moving one way, you know, you stick your finger in the air and you detect which way the wind is blowing, and suddenly your very sacred principle opinions go straight out the window and you follow your pocket because you can be right and you can be wrong. But if you break the consensus rules, you are poor either way. And that overriding, economic, practical, right now game theory that plays out on the network overrides everything else. People may say one thing and run different software. They may signal they want one thing and then execute something else. They may hold on until they start losing a lot of money and then change their minds. And we don't know how this is going to play out. We're going to find out, hopefully in a not too disruptive way. We may end up with two camps taking their own path. That's what Ethereum did. I don't like that particular solution from Bitcoin, but some others do.