 Welcome to the Daily Decrypt, your home for currency competition. I am Amanda B. Johnson, your host, and today's episode is brought to you by BitShares. One of the reasons that Bitcoin has gained so much traction since its birth in 2009 is because its network has no single point of failure. People can feel confident that an earthquake in Asia, a power outage in South America, or political censorship in North America, won't take the network offline. In the cryptocurrency sphere as a whole, however, Bitcoin itself now threatens to become a single point of failure as its developers have failed to keep the available supply of processing capacity in line with the demand. How is it a single point of failure? Well, because the majority of altcoin trading is done with the other pair as Bitcoin. Very few goods and services are currently traded directly for an altcoin. If cryptocurrency as a whole is to succeed, this must change. In order for Bitcoin not to take down the entire ship, which it is now threatening to do, users of altcoins must now put in the legwork that early Bitcoiners put in. This includes talking to your common trading partners about accepting your favorite altcoin directly. If you yourself accept cryptocurrencies for payment with a neat tool like the shapeshift button, this includes setting your default conversion currency to something other than Bitcoin. The infrastructure in altcoins, like fiat exchanges, mobile wallets, shopping cart plugins, payment processors, are not nearly as developed as they are in Bitcoin. The task at hand is monumental, really. But if the promise of cryptocurrency really is to eliminate single points of failure, that is exactly what has to be done. So rally your tribe together, because now is the time to decentralize all of the things. Today's episode is brought to you by BitShares, a currency with three second block times and a neat hangout every Friday where users can interact directly online with BitShares lead developer Daniel ByteMaster Larimer. The currency also offers a fiat on-ramp through the exchange CCEDK and you can find out more at bithares.org. Nobody ever said it was easy being a pioneer, did they? Sometimes somebody in your party dies of dysentery, but it is only through blazing new trails that we will get to places that we have never been. So get the fuck to it.