 Tim asks, how big in terms of storage will the Bitcoin blockchain get? Please elaborate on potential size. Well, I'm thinking about this big. Honestly, it's impossible to tell. It very much depends on how the future of optimization and scaling in this environment plays out. How much of the traffic is on-chain versus off-chain? How the traffic itself is optimized? The optimization and compression of transaction data. There are many exciting opportunities there, including things like signature aggregation using Schnorr signatures, Mimbo-Wimbo, and other techniques like that, that just came out, were recently discovered just in the last two years. Lightning network that's maybe five years old as a concept, really only three years old as a seriously studied concept, and a few months old as a practical application. We have no idea of predicting how these things will bend the curve of growth. Because all of this is about changing the curve of the growth of this system. It depends precisely not just on how much adoption we get of this technology, but how each additional unit of adoption of this technology and each additional transaction adds data to the blockchain. But predictably, the Bitcoin blockchain is going to get big. The good news is that storage and bandwidth are also growing quite fast. Really, the question is about the balance. Can we keep the growth rate of blockchain data, and specifically what's called IBD, the initial blockchain download, which is all of the data you need to download in the very first instance in order to fully sync the chain? Can we keep that to within a manageable and affordable level so that many people can participate in running full nodes? Without that being purely the domain of very large corporate data centers or just miners, that's important to maintain the decentralization of validating transactions. But again, that's really a design decision, so it's impossible really to say how far that's going to go. Since Bitcoin is not efficiently used for micropayments, which was Satoshi's vision, is the concept failing? Why do we need second or third or fourth layers atop the Bitcoin blockchain to do what was supposed to be done by design? Should we move to other altcoins? And the follow-up question is that, how is Bitcoin's blockchain better than other algorithms like iotism? Why do we try to fix scalability issues instead of using other technologies? Is it just because of Bitcoin's huge adoption and miners' support? Anastasios, this is an interesting question. One of the problems here is that when people talk about scalability, they tend to talk about it in isolation. So they talk about scalability as just one aspect of the system, optimizing scalability. Optimizing scalability is not difficult. Optimizing scalability of a network and allowing it to do millions of transactions per second on network. Totally possible. It is very much possible. The problem is that in doing so, you sacrifice other parts of the design. So the way to increase scalability massively is to centralize the network. If you have more centralization, you can achieve much more scale. Blockchains are particularly inefficient at doing things because they sacrifice scalability in order to achieve decentralization. So if you decide to instead sacrifice decentralization, make the network more centralized, or aspects of the network, such as mining, clearing, exchanges, wallets, transaction processing, then you can massively increase the scale of the network quite easily. So how do you achieve a Visa-scale network? Well, you can do it the way Visa does it, which is you have one validator and that's Visa. The problem with that model, however, is that when you have a centralized network like that, the central validator has enormous power. They have the power to censor transactions, they have the power to pick and choose transactions. They are a gatekeeper over the system. Bitcoin was designed to remove that central point of failure, so it chooses to maximize decentralization as much as possible. And in order to do that, it sacrifices scalability. Now, there's a lot of discussion about Satoshi's original vision. And part of that, I feel, is a bit of appeal to authority. Satoshi, whether that was one person or a team of people, were only humans. And they had a very limited perspective on what this technology would ultimately become. We are now almost ten years past that original vision, and a lot has changed. And we've also learned a lot about the scalability of blockchains, about the global competition in mining, and various other aspects of the system. And Satoshi, whoever they were, was just a human. Not a prophet, not a saint, not a deity. They did not have a magic crystal ball with which to predict the future. And so, while the original vision and design of Satoshi was remarkably prescient and had an enormous amount of things predicted correctly, that doesn't mean that everything Satoshi ever said is correct, or that everything Satoshi ever imagined Bitcoin would be is correct, achievable, desirable, or that Satoshi wouldn't change their mind when presented with new facts and evidence. For example, one of the pillars of Satoshi's vision was the idea of one CPU, one VOTE. The idea that the processing of transactions, the mining of transactions, would be done in a very decentralized fashion by a lot of different participants, allowing everyone who has a CPU to mine independently and have equal participation in the network. Now, that's not how it played out. In fact, if you read what Satoshi said, you can see that they were quite dismayed with the very rapid emergence of specialized hardware and the move to application-specific integrated circuits, ASICs. That caused enormous pressure for centralization of mining. Think about blockchains trying to optimize across three different axes. Those are scalability, security, and decentralization. Part of the problem is that when you try to optimize one of those, it might be at the expense of the other two. The easiest way to maximize scalability is by damaging decentralization and security. It's actually very difficult to optimize without making a trade-off. A lot of alternative blockchains propose that there is a simple and easy solution to scalability. Of course, what they don't reveal immediately is that that solution damages decentralization or security in some other way. That's a trade-off that they may be willing to make, and that's an alternative approach to solving this problem. But it's not the trade-off that Bitcoin makes. Bitcoin prefers decentralization over scalability. That means that in order to achieve scale, while maintaining decentralization and the security model, without reducing decentralization, you have to look at solutions that include second and third layers. When somebody suggests that there is an easy and simple solution, if we only switch to this other alternative algorithm, alternative mining scheme, alternative consensus algorithm, alternative currency, alternative blockchain, that blockchain has infinite scale or can achieve scale without any compromises. They are lying. You do have to make compromises, and often those compromises are brushed aside. The question is not how to achieve scale, but how do we achieve scale without sacrificing decentralization? Phil takes the exact opposite position in his question from Phil. Bitcoin is making substantial progress in the areas of transaction speed, with lightning, privacy, coin join and confidential transaction, and smart contracts, rootstock. Would I need to shift to altcoins then, which might represent a less decentralized technology? It's not clear, Phil. I would say, just as I said before, that there are no magic answers that solve all possible problems. I would say that also applies to Bitcoin. Achieving speed of transaction, scalability with lightning, privacy with coin join and confidential transaction, and flexible, rich, expressive programming through smart contracts, it may not be possible to achieve all three of those goals simultaneously. If that's not possible, then the question is, which of those is optimized on the currency or blockchain that you choose to use? These are not always choices that don't have side effects. So, maybe if you choose to have a blockchain that has a very flexible, rich and expressive smart contracts language, maybe you can do that with the same level of security, robustness, censorship, resistance as Bitcoin. I'm not persuaded that you can yet, and we'll have to find out. In every one of these cases, there are design trade-offs. This entire area is like any other area of engineering, a matter of deciding which trade-offs are worth making. That choice necessarily means that you don't get some of the other benefits of the other path you didn't choose. If you choose to go down the path of flexible, rich, expressive smart contracts, you may necessarily close the door to certain aspects of security and robustness. You may create a larger attack surface or exposure. You can't have both. I've talked about this extensively in one of my talks called The Lion and the Shark, which is about divergent evolution, the idea that you can be a top predator in one particular niche, but when you specialize in one niche, you choose that over others, and then you can't do both effectively. Comparing different alt-chains that have made different design trade-offs, it's not possible to compare them directly against each other. It doesn't make much sense. The real question is not which is the best solution. The question is which is the best solution for my problem, and you have to first define the problem.