 Hi, everybody. Okay, that's my Dr. Nick Riviera impression. Anybody know him from The Simpsons? Okay, so I'm the speaker that stands between you guys and alcohol, so I'll try to be concise. I won't go too long. So thank you all for coming. This is a great summit. I've had a heck of a lot of fun. The last year we did this over in Hong Kong, and it was about half the size of this one. So I hope we have exponential growth, right, if the trend continues. So we'll do it again. It'll be twice as large and so forth. And after 32 summits, it'll be more than all the particles. Okay, all right. Well, anyway, I'm Charles Hoskinson, the CEO of IOHK, and we're a research and development company. Our relationship to Ethereum Classic is that we work on the Mantis client. So let's talk a little bit about the past and where we came from and where I think we're probably headed as an ecosystem. So in the very beginning, there was Ethereum. There was no Ethereum Classic, and I was around during the very beginning, so I remember those conversations. And there were really two camps of people that lived in the Ethereum ecosystem in the very beginning. This is like in December, November of 2013. The first group of people were people who really liked Bitcoin, and they said Bitcoin's really cool, but it's just got some issues with it. And principally, it's really hard to modify, it's hard to do anything, and it's no coincidence that some of the people who worked on Ethereum also worked on color coins and master coins, so they were trying to build overlay protocols on top of Bitcoin to improve functionality. But they liked the principles of it, they liked the immutability, they liked the fact that when Mt. Gox collapsed, they still didn't fork the protocol to bail people out. They liked the finite monetary policy, they liked proof of work. You know, there was a lot of love of what Bitcoin had created. It's just they wanted to do a bit more. And they also had great words like aligality, code is law, these types of things. Then there was another group of people, and they lived in peaceful coexistence with the Ethereum people, and they were the world computer people. And they said, oh, it'd be so cool to kill Amazon, it'd be so cool to kill Microsoft and Google and these other guys, and have this decentralized computer where I can deploy dApps onto that thing, and I don't need a server, it's serverless, and it's censorship resistant, and all these other nice buzzwords. Now, these philosophies seem like they're somewhat compatible with each other if the platform's good enough, but the problem with the world computer view is that as you need to pursue a roadmap to get there, you're going to have to fork a lot. You're going to have to make lots of changes. You're going to make big mistakes. And when you make those mistakes, people are going to lose their money. Bitcoin was not simple by accident, it was simple by design, because if you embrace immutability, you're going to screw stuff up. And you want to screw as little up as possible, or else you're going to lose credibility in the system. So an event occurred, the Dow. And after that event, both camps kind of got to their sides. The code is lawish, immutable people, they went to one side and they said, okay, well, that was bad, but nothing we can do, let's just keep going. And then the other group of people said, what the hell are you talking about? We're going proof of stake and we can't have 15% of our money owned by some unknown hacker somewhere in the world. So they had irreconcilable differences, they fought and fought, and then eventually they split. And now we have Ethereum Classic and Ethereum. Now as a founder of Ethereum, I felt that because we raised money, and we raised money from both of these groups, not just one, we had a moral and fiduciary obligation to ensure a choice and an option. So shortly after the split occurred, I made a commitment, an unbounded commitment to the Ethereum Classic community to support it. So we put our money where our mouth was, we hired a bunch of developers, and we started active work on Ethereum software. So we didn't fork anything, we just took the yellow paper, the white paper, we took the documentation, and we just started writing code. It took us about a year to write them at this client. We did a lovely demo today about it with Alan. I'm really proud of that, actually. I think it's the best software for the amount of money and time we put in, and for the effort we put in, and the team size that my company's ever written. 15,000 lines of code, and it's a full load. It's pretty good. We even have now Ethereum support coming for it. So that's the past, that's where we came from. Now where are we going to go? Well, the magic of Ethereum Classic is that there is no leader, there is no one in charge. There's just lots of really passionate, amazing people. And like Bitcoin, we see kind of a continuation of that ethos. You can't point to anyone in the Bitcoin space who's deciding where that platform is going to go. It's not possible. You can't say, ah, it's Blockstream. Ah, it's Roger Ver. Ah, it's some company, who knows, Circle. No, it's just this large group of camps. And each and every one of them has an opinion, and they fight it out, and they write Bitcoin improvement proposals. And at the end of the day, somehow, some way, in a decentralized way, sometimes painfully slow, and sometimes, in not the optimal way, the ecosystem decides. And much like that, there is no one in charge of Ethereum Classic. There was no ICO, there is no foundation. There are some loose groups, like the Lab, and the Cooperative, and ETC Dev, and IOHK, that are certainly committed, and in some cases have capital to commit. But at the end of the day, we're all volunteers. No one pays us. No one told us to be here. We don't have any fiduciary commitments. And what's really exciting about that is it's allowed us to develop a culture of meritocracy. So being at this conference today, and talking to you people, and yesterday, and seeing the projects, and talking to Kevin, and projects he's found, it's really impressive to see the level of innovation that's in this ecosystem. Ethnic, VM, Emerald, you know, there's a dozen or so really good ideas that people are thinking about. And the reality is that we actually have as a community the total freedom to pursue whatever roadmap we want. You know, we're probably going to stay on proof of work. What does that mean? It means that all the innovations that Ethereum is doing with Casper and Plasma and all these ideas they have are useless to us. So it means that we as an ecosystem are going to have to make a decision of where to take that. Do we leave it as it is? Do we add in ASIC resistance? Do we get rid of mining pools? Do we put dags in because that's the buzz phrase of the week? What do we do? Well, there's a lot of opinions in this room about what to do. I have my own. You guys have your own. And how are we going to decide? Are we going to have a committee? Are we going to have a leader? No, an ECIP will be filed. Probably a dozen or so. And at some point there will be a consolidation around of you. There's an open question about funding. It's a difficult space. It's a crowded space. And eventually money is needed to do things. Where does that come from? Now we have some sources, but it's probably not enough to be able to do all the development we want to do. So either there's going to have to be sustainable businesses built on top of ETC that have models that allow them to grow and thrive, or you're going to have to have one hell of an open source community, or we're going to have to have some sort of blockchain-based funding system. So I've always been a big advocate of a treasury system. Other people have not been. And that's okay. And we're going to have a big conversation at some point when the community is ready about how we will achieve sustainability and how we will continue to fund things. But the point of this is that we get to decide not as a committee, not as a leader, but we get to decide as a community. And there's a great lesson to be learned here, because at the end of the day, if cryptocurrencies are really going to be something significant in humanity, and they're actually going to be a decentralized option for humanity, not something controlled by patrons or governments or controlled by small committees, we have to somehow figure out how to evolve them, sustain them, pay for them without appointing a leader. And the great value, I think, of the Ethereum-classic community for the road ahead is that we now have to pursue a completely alternative roadmap from where Ethereum is eventually going to go, and we have to somehow figure out what that is going to be. We have to become our own chain. We have to become our own ecosystem. We see a lot of great leaders emerging who can help guide us there, but at the end of the day, it's going to be a fight. And the tools we use as an ecosystem to resolve that fight are ultimately going to be tools that are applicable, not just for us, but applicable for the entire space, every single cryptocurrency, whether you be Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash. And the advantage we have is we're still small. We're very decentralized, but we're small. Bitcoin's too big. It's too controversial. There's too much value at risk. There's too much brand at risk. They're right now having a meaningful debate about a 20-year-old signature scheme and whether to adopt that or not. They're not even talking about changing the scripting language, not even talking about, like, things they actually need to do to resolve existential problems they have. They're just talking about upgrading their signature scheme with Schnor-Sigs, and this is a meaningful debate that they're probably going to have for years. And anybody involved in the Segwit debate can sure as hell tell you how hard it is to do anything in that space. Whereas here, we realistically could do things quickly, and we could build great governance systems quickly. So that's why I still have a primary interest here. I felt in the beginning I had a fiduciary response that's an early Ethereum founder to offer the choice to people, but later on I recognized that this is still a great vibrant ecosystem to participate in. Now, what are some of the things I'd like to see? Well, if you believe in code as law, you probably ought to do a pretty good job at verifying that you've written the code correctly and you've captured intent correctly. Smart contracts are tricky things and they're seldom written correctly. Loy Liu wrote a paper years ago and he did some analysis of papers deployed on Ethereum and he found for the set of contracts that he analyzed more than 50% of them had some sort of critical flaw or major problem. And the reality is most of the code that's been deployed on the smart contract side is junk. So how can we as a community have the opinion that code is law knowing that the vast majority of the things that we are being deployed on Ethereum-style systems aren't working so well? The developer tooling isn't so good. The languages aren't so good. That's a problem. And we have the ability to solve that problem. We have the ability to write better tools. We have the ability to write better languages and we have the ability to build a better development culture. If Ethereum lives in a culture of, well, if you screw it up there's a bailout. If you screw it up we can fork it. If you screw it up we'll find some sort of escape hatch for it. There's no incentive to build better tooling and it doesn't seem to be a high investment priority, in my view, could be wrong. But for us there is no plan B. There is no option. You screw it up, you screw it up. So I think this community would be very amenable to heavy investments in better tooling, heavy investments in better techniques and into better languages. Now on our end we put money into understanding what the Ethereum virtual machine looks like. So we put about a quarter million dollars into formalizing the semantics with a partner at runtime verification. And the output of that was the KEVM. Then we put millions of dollars into building a better virtual machine called Yella, which actually has a lot of really great properties and it's based on some really good concepts from LOVM. That's something Apple put lots of money in back in the day and the custodians of it are wonderful computer scientists. And the output of that process has been a pretty deep understanding of how we can better understand this code and verify that it works correctly, write better tests, better tooling for developers. Now during the future we'll make proposals and our hope is those proposals will be updated and absorbed into this ecosystem and that's pretty exciting. Another thing I'd like to see as I mentioned before I really do firmly believe in treasury systems but it is a good question of well how do you do that? What should that look like? There are simplistic models like Zcash and Zencash or Horizon or whatever the latest rebrand has been. And those models are every time a block is produced we just hand some of it to somebody and that person will figure it out what to do with it. That's pretty good if you like centralization but this community doesn't. So if we were to actually go down that road how in God's name would we figure out how to get high voting participation? How would people submit ballots and these types of things? We wrote several papers on this. We wrote an ECIP last year and we wrote a paper out of Lancaster University with Bing Cheng, he's an academic there on using liquid democracy for this. So sometime at some point we'll make a big push for it when people are ready and the ecosystem's ready of a model. Now I don't anticipate that'll get accepted. Really don't. But I think it's going to be a great conversation because I'm really looking forward to seeing the rebuttals. I think there's huge value in there. It's another point about open source software development. It's not about your ideas, it's about why people think your ideas don't work. Why people think your ideas shouldn't be adopted that matter. Because in those arguments you generally find out that your ideas aren't perfect and you generally find out that there are things you can do to improve things. But the third option, the synthesis from the bad idea and the debate about the bad ideas generally what actually gets you where you need to go. So better tooling, better languages, bug fixing, a treasury debate that will likely result in failure and poor Charles having to take his shoes and go home. That's okay. These are some of the directions to go. And finally there's an interesting discussion about scalability. You know that's the buzzword of buzzwords in our entire space. How do we achieve scale? What are we going to do to achieve scale? Well, it's kind of funny. We have these replicated models where by design everybody has to have a copy of everything. Everybody has to have a copy of the blockchain. Everybody has to gossip the information. Everybody has to do the same computation and validation. You can never scale that, ever. But why do you do that? Because you get resilience. You get enormous resilience in the architecture. If everybody has a copy one person could actually regenerate the entire network. It's like DNA in that respect. Beautiful system. So when we start breaking that paradigm without descending into EOS levels of insanity how far do we want to push? What direction do we want to push with that? Is it okay to have heterogeneity in the network? Certain super users or super people, special people. This is the debate Bitcoin is currently having with lightning. And when you look at smart contracts you can go much, much further. There are techniques that were invented by Microsoft and other great companies like verified computation techniques one platform called Pinocchio where you can take a program and run it on an untrusted server and it returns an output and you can check that output with a proof. And if the proof checks you know the output's right. You don't have to trust the server. So if you live in a world like that do you really need to use this replicated environment for smart contracts? Or do you just need to use that environment to check that the contract was executed correctly? So there's going to be a big debate about on-chain and off-chain and we as an ecosystem have to really think carefully through the implications of that debate and where we want to go with this. Is it okay to massively improve performance if we lose privacy or if we potentially could have some fraud or if potentially something could be reversed? Probably not, maybe. So I think that's the last plank and the last thing I'll mention for Ethereum Classic and the path forward is we as a community are not going to do plasma most likely or not going to do Casper and these things. So we have to figure out in the proof-of-work world how are we going to achieve that and how much of it is going to live on-chain and how much of it is going to live off-chain. As a corollary to that there's the idea of chain maintenance. You see maybe the taco I bought seven years ago with Bitcoin maybe that should be remembered for the rest of time but should the poker game that I played seven years ago the second hand, the fact that I had two aces in that round, should that be remembered until the rest of time? Should all of that information forever live on the blockchain or should we prune it out? When you're talking about computation intensely personal things things that aren't necessarily important to the global what should you do? Every smart contract system is going to have to have an opinion on this at some point. Vitalik's talking about potentially having things charge rent and if they don't pay they get pruned out. It's a reasonable model to think about with a certain context but we have to ask ourselves as a community what's the philosophy behind us? Is it okay to prune things out? Is it okay to let data go away? If not, are we prepared for petabyte scale blockchains? Because if we're successful we're going to have to store it all and where are we going to store it, how are we going to store it and who's going to store that and what incentives do they have to store that? It's a huge question and it's a hard question and it's something everybody in this space is eventually going to have to contend with but what's fun about it is we're all going to decide it together. There is no leader, there is nobody at the top of the pyramid with the tablets coming down from the hills saying I have solved your problem. I have made your problem go away. No, it's you guys in this room and it's the global community which will gradually get bigger and bigger. As a final point of all this when I look at the Ethereum Classic community it feels a lot like Bitcoin felt back in 2011 and 2012. I miss those days guys. Back in those days we didn't talk about ICOs or STOs. We didn't talk about the latest offering. We just talked about the philosophy and the culture and the projects. It was fun. I loved the meet-up groups. You'd occasionally see Roger. You'd occasionally see Roger trying to convince somebody to accept Bitcoin. In fact, one time he got somebody, a barber shop to take Bitcoin to cut his hair and then he went to a coffee shop and got them to take Bitcoin for the coffee. Then he went to a restaurant and said, sorry I don't have any money. You know, could you take Bitcoin? He convinced all three of them, the Trinity. That was where we came from. That was the ecosystem we came from. It was crazy. Some of my favorite conferences you go to there's 12 people show up and we have this big guy named Bruno show up in a pink tutu and we said, okay it's Bitcoin. It was great guys. It was fun. That's what ETC feels like to me. It's just a bunch of people who really love what they do. They don't really care if there's going to be an ICO next week or where the market prices or the liquidity is. They just want to go and build some cool things and have fun and as long as we have that vibe I think ETC's future is going to be very good and it's going to be very vibrant because at the end of the day it's a party that it keeps going as long as you guys want it to go. So thank you all so much for coming. Thank you guys so much for keeping the dream alive, keeping the ecosystem alive and I really look forward to having some vigorous debates with you in the future. No hard feelings. Thank you. I'll note the future relationship between ETC and Cardano or is there any? Cardano is a very different kind of project. The vision of it is to be a financial operating system and so these types of projects have to be somewhat comfortable with compliance and regulation and somewhat comfortable with mutability and have looser boundaries between permission ledgers and permission misledgers and Ethereum Classic looks a lot more like a higher grade utility, you know, a higher grade commodity. So I think that they're quite complementary. They use different technology. They kind of have different communities and stacks. We work on both but we have segregated teams. The Cardano team is a Haskell team and a Rust team and they think about different things. They're proof of stake oriented so no danger there and then the ETC team is a Scala team and they're just different developers. So there is no actual relationship between the two projects but there is some cross-pollination in that if we discover a good idea for Cardano of course we'll try to port that idea back into ETC if we can find it in particular improvements to network stacks and also improvements to the smart contract tooling. Yella, for example, would be a great VM for this ecosystem to adopt and it's starting to reach a certain level of maturity with the K rewrite and the K to LOVM backend and I think there would be a huge benefit to adopting it because of semantics-based compilation. So we could certainly write an ECIP and propose it and K is quite pluggable but that's an example of where some research there because it's open source is applicable to ETC but they're different people in different teams. Next question. What is your opinion on ASICs coming to ethash-based coins? Right. It's always a game of cat and mouse, right? The minute you have your ASIC resistant algorithm then somebody builds a damn ASIC for it but some algorithms no matter if you have an ASIC or not you don't get what we saw. I've been around long enough to remember when we went from proof of work to GPUs and that was amazing. We're like, whoa, that's incredible and then we went from GPUs to ASICs and that was also incredible. I actually bought a butterfly labs miner. I got it a year and a half later after I did the pre-order and that was great too and actually it had dust in it and it looked like they had been mining with it for like six months or seven months so yay, butterfly labs, right? So there are some interesting ASIC resistant concepts like this simple proof of sequential work and there's a lot of people that are saying well maybe you can never get ASIC resistant so maybe we should have proof of useful work or we actually try to solve useful problems or we try to brace the proof of work algorithm on some commodity that's also duly useful to the system like the research with proof of storage where you use things like Permacoin was the first foray into it but there's a lot of ideas that float there and I'd certainly encourage some research along those lines but it just kind of depends on are you okay with ASICs and then also are you okay with mining pools? These are the two things you have to kind of think about and what does one CPU, one vote actually mean to you as a consumer? In my view it would be really cool to try to democratize control of the system as much as possible. I don't like the fact that somebody can get a patent and build some hardware and only they have access to it and then they have the supply chain and they have subsidized power so it's not a fair competition it's not like I can just go and buy the hardware from them because what if it's proprietary? And they say oh but competition will occur and they'll build more well that's only if you have a certain market capitalization so if you're a very large ecosystem like a trillion dollar ecosystem it's reasonable to assume there'll be 100 vendors but if you're a billion dollar ecosystem and you're using something custom the ASICs built for that might only have one vendor and if they won't sell it to you they own the network, right? So that's a concern I do have and it would be nice to see some better research along those lines of mitigations but there are things like smart pool and things like sequential work and so forth that certainly have some validity to them. Wonderful, thank you. Alright, any more questions? Right over here. Bob. Hello. And thank you for the maple syrup, I really appreciate it. What motivates you? What really makes you want to get out of bed in the morning and get going? Oh, getting criticized on Twitter, obviously. No, I mean guys, for the first time in human history we have a game where everybody gets to play the game as opposed to a very small group of people. If you look at the arc of human history the narratives that control our life like how our money works and how our voting works and how our governments work, the laws, we inherited those things and they came from people who are special people, not us, it's the Popes, the Kings, the Brentwoods committee, whatever it might be. And then suddenly we've woken up and now we actually have all these tools that are sitting on the desk and we are completely free to use them any way we want and now we're in a position where we can completely rebuild consent. We can rebuild governments, we can rebuild markets, we can rebuild money and it really makes you start questioning the reality as a whole and how malleable things actually are. I was recently in South Africa and I was hanging out with Ramaphosa's son and we were at this safari park petting a cheetah and it was a really surreal experience because the cheetah didn't actually attack me so that was cool. But it was a surreal experience because we were having a conversation about Angola and Uganda and they said, oh and by the way they might actually completely get rid of their central bank and by the way you might even be able to consult on that. I'm a 30 year old dude who studied math in some state nobody cares about and now I could actually potentially have impact on building Angola's money or Uganda's money and I'm nobody special and so the fact that we have these opportunities, these tools, is a rare thing and if we deploy them in the right way we can deploy a marketplace that can work for billions of people and we all play the same game. We have access to the same marketplace we all have the same credit profile and these things are decentralized they're not controlled by some hierarchy so there's no tolls to those systems or those tolls are always decreasing and they're market based. There are certain things I see that deeply concern me the My Citizen score in China this idea that they're going to take your social media and your political activities your voting history your travel records and put them all together and eventually your financial information in your head and if the number is really low you get cut off from society if the number is really high you get the good wife you get discounts on traveling you get promoted in your job that's 1984 on steroids in America every now and then I read about some kid in Virginia who's a drywaller driving down the road gets pulled over by the police he's just been paid and it takes the money it's called civil asset forfeiture happens all the time and he has to go sue the government to get his money back and maybe you get a settlement where you get half of it back that's the world we live in today so the very fact that we can build tools to prevent such things from happening and to build tools that allow us to all live in a better world not just a few people or one particular country that's what motivates me sometimes with gout getting fat falling apart a little bit but it's still fun and the other thing that motivates me is that I have never been swarmed by so many brilliant people and just in my own company we have the creator of Haskell we have world famous cryptographers we have brilliant game theorists like Lea Cazupas we have incredible engineers and these people are very challenging to work with they're incredibly opinionated they're very principled they can do whatever the hell they want and they don't have to work for me they can work anywhere they want to work the fact that we can have conversations and find common ground and work on common problems which are really hard problems that's worth getting out of bed every morning so those are the things that motivate me the goal to build new systems to make the world better come on over to you Hi I want to talk about Ethereum a little bit in terms of community or development or usages or many things because of the similarity of Ethereum and ETC the interesting thing is we can think Ethereum as a teacher sometimes because it's somewhat ahead of ETC so what kind of lessons can we learn from Ethereum or what can you share what should we not follow from Ethereum's experience we didn't get caught up in the ICO revolution everybody was mocking us for that they're like ha you know one's doing ICOs on your platform just wait until the markets go down let's see how that works out for you as they explode one after another they have to liquidate because they have a fiduciary responsibility but that aside I really think Ethereum Classic should use Ethereum as the benchmark and say whatever lessons they've learned are directly applicable to Ethereum Classic because the reality is Ethereum Classic is better Bitcoin it's the next generation of Bitcoin it's the thing Bitcoin ought to have been so frankly we should look to Bitcoin and we should look to the lessons of that ecosystem for inspiration not the lessons of Vitalik because he's just doing his own thing and he's going to be successful or fail based on those merits for example it should not take years to make simple changes to your system which are non-controversial at the end of the day gradually increasing a block size it's not a super controversial thing why is it my CPU can get faster my hard drive storage can get faster my internet connection can get faster but we should leave a system parameter that was set arbitrarily at the same way forever it's senseless it's insanity it's absolute insanity but yet that was hard and it was hard because of social dynamics not because it was a controversial decision so we have to figure out how do we avoid the same trap of getting into those social dynamics that Bitcoin got into that's one lesson I think we ought to learn a second lesson we ought to learn is yet it's okay to grow slowly Bitcoin grew very slowly it took years and years and years before anybody took it seriously there were times when people thought the network and legitimately good belief was going to die went from $30 down to $1 and a hash rate would drop all the time and you say oh well that's it party's over let's all go home so it's okay to grow slowly and methodically and it's okay to grow in productive ways productive ways include project oriented growth where people join your ecosystem to do something to produce some utility an open project they write code they're trying to solve something so I think that we need to learn the lesson of how to survive we have to be useful and to be useful we have to encourage that type of growth the growth that Ethereum experience was very toxic they had this great open source core and they had these great idealistic people and the early conversations were about DAOs and DApps and smart contracts and then when people realized that this was like the Rube Goldberg investment bank in the sky they said wow I can go and use this platform and raise a billion dollars and it encourages huge surge of people into the ecosystem that really didn't care too much about it but they viewed it as a means to an end to capitalize themselves so a lot of tooling and ecosystems were built that way and those people contributed very little the actual growth and development they were actually a distraction so we're unencumbered by that for now but if we become successful we will eventually become encumbered by something like that so it is important to figure out how do you grow the community in a productive way and if there's any investments made by commonwealth others it ought to be in that particular direction as effective community growth and management and project oriented growth and management and that's real simple people hire themselves they make videos they write code they have projects you find them and then you validate them you go and reach out to them you say hey I notice you're doing X would you you know like a little funding would you like a grant would you like some help and you bring them into the family and they say wow this ecosystem is great these people are really friendly and cool you know I recently I had some questions about hollow chain and that didn't work out so well it's not a very welcoming community at least for me so we should avoid those types of things yeah so I think those are things get the social dynamics right and invest in cool projects that are really interesting and produce real utility and then little by little you notice that your size just keeps growing up and then eventually you reach a certain point where you go viral and explodes and you become a very large ecosystem and if you've done the right homework about those social dynamics when you get really large you still can make decisions with Bitcoin because there wasn't just the right leadership because Satoshi left and the successors weren't so good at managing that the social dynamics didn't get set in a way to make it productive and Bitcoin fell behind and it lost a lot of great opportunity next question all right I think we got time for one more okay so I'll come over this is not a question for Charles but Charles I wanted to say thank you Anthony for putting together a fantastic summit for those people in the audience who want to support ETC and important events like this what do you suggest they do both time and money was that a question for me or for the audience? for me you know I'm never a fan of conferences I went to consensus two years ago and I didn't go to consensus last year I heard it had like 5,000 people and it was just insanity in a madhouse there was like three yacht parties three not one but three it's crazy I think real value comes from intimate meetups one of my favorite conferences I ever attended was put on by a guy named Pavel and it's held in Ukraine bi-annually it's called BIP Bitcoin Improvement Bitcoin incredible party maybe 100 people who show up 50 to 100 people that show up and you have this great conversation Vlad usually goes there every year it's the only time I ever drank Athens and I drank it with him in Odessa which was great actually that was in Lviv which is in the west side of Ukraine so I think if we want to support ETC the biggest bang for our buck can be through meetup groups and the biggest bang for our buck I'm interested in funding and governance to have a governance conference and just say everybody bring your ideas bring some ECIPs maybe make that the criteria every speaker has to have an ECIP and anyone can come as long as they have it so those are the types of things I think we ought to diversify as a community because it's less about oh let me tell you about my product and sell something to you and it's more about hey we're trying to figure out where to go and what to do and if anybody has an idea what's their feedback from the community about the things you're interested in and they care about and that's what grew the Ron Paul movement that's where I started back in 2007 I remember coming into that campaign and we had 5,000 people and I left in 2008 and we had 2 million people 5,000 to 2 million in less than a year just from meetup groups and it was real simple all you do is you go to the Republican meetup group these guys make sense and you go up to that guy and you say hey would you like to start a meetup group and he'd be like yeah I'd like to do that he's like here great here's your startup kit so organic growth can really be achieved there and those investments don't cost a lot for our end we hired a community manager for ETC because in the beginning it was just crazy we had people like Mike Trout and others and god that was fun but we said hey how about we just bring somebody in so it was Christian Severino was one there was Carlo Vecari and now we have Kevin Lord and just mostly to say whoever's doing interesting and cool things let us know and then we created Let's Talk ETC as another opportunity I think we're almost at our 50th episode now so little things like that they don't seem like a lot but that's what made Bitcoin big there was Let's Talk BTC and that's where Andreas and Antonopoulos came from and Adam Levine came from and so forth you know and these meetup groups for Bitcoin is what carried Bitcoin through during the bad times when we went from $30 to $1 or somebody went to jail or some bad thing happened and everybody thought the ecosystem was going to die so those investments I think would be great and would definitely help the community grow tremendously and also allow us to identify people who really do want to do interesting things versus people who are just trying to find a way to make a quick buck anyway you guys have all been great thank you so much