 Hello, everyone! I am so excited to be here. I bring you heresy. Some people still think I'm a maximalist. They haven't been paying attention. I'm about as minimally maximalist as you can be, or maximally minimalist as you can be. I find it astounding after all this time that people still try to follow this idea of the winner-takes-all, one coin to rule them all, one chain above all else, were coming for you, the flippening. If you look at the data, if that was wrong in 2013, and then it was wronger in 2014, and then it was wronger and wronger and wronger, that's not really a word, but it just keeps... The data just doesn't support that hypothesis. This is about the difference between desire and reality. We can all desire a one-chain, a one-language, a one-religion, a one-culture, a one-politics, a one-color. It's blue. Fight me. No, don't. But reality tells us that that's not human behavior, that's not human nature. Human nature is diverse and fragmented. People are not rational. We follow whims and whimsy. We have emotional responses and attachments to even technology, but certainly money and community. All of these things are so varied that they will not be one-chain. I'm going to switch from why I think this is true from a philosophical perspective, to why I think this is true from a market and technology perspective. What I want to talk about today is where I think we're going. Where I think we're going isn't one-chain, but it might be one network connecting many chains. That's the vision I have. It's not a vision I have because that's the vision I want. It's not the vision I have because I think that's how it should be, or that you should invest in that future. I simply think that's the way we're going, like it or not. That's what I see in the data. That's what my experience tells me. That's my narrow understanding of human nature tells me that's where we're going. Follow me here. The first and fundamental reason we're not doing one-chain is really simple. We have to make choices all the time. Both users and developers and designers have to make choices, and these choices have consequences. They have trade-offs. There are inherent trade-offs. Every choice that's made branches the future, and we follow one of those branches to the exclusion of the other. If you make a chain that's flexible enough to do smart contracts, it is necessarily not robust enough... to do some of the most important security work, and vice versa. Those are inherent trade-offs. Some people talk about the trilemma of security decentralization and scale, but that's just one narrow aspect. We're talking about a massive, multi-dimensional field of choices that have to be made. Some of those choices are made by the people who are designing these chains, but some of those choices... are made by the users and the markets that come up with novel uses and decide that, sure, you designed it for that, but I'm going to use it for this, because I think it's a better fit. You don't get to say, because it's out there, and it's not yours anymore. It's not anybody's anymore. Maybe some of the choices are going to narrow the field, but maybe your users want to go in a different direction. I used to be afraid of forks. I'm not afraid of forks anymore. In fact, I now see this as the evolution of the blockchain multiverse. Every choice and trade-off no longer results in following one path, but all paths. Forks create this beautiful quantum decoherence of all choices. You want a chain? You get a chain, and you get a chain, and you get a chain. You don't like the way I'm going. You fork, and now you have a different choice. It's not about A or B. It's A and B and C and D in the whole multiverse, and many of them are shit. That's okay. Perfection is unattainable. Singularity is impossible. You might have this opinion that the economics of sound money will not allow any other possible outcome. Which is absolutely true if you were dealing with rational human beings. But you're not. You're dealing with emotional, rational, diverse, weird human beings. Who come from cultures that are unimaginable to you and I. They will make different choices. They might not make choices based on their best economic interests. They might make choices based on emotion. We may all think that if someone launches their own stupid coin, whatever, Billy Eilish coin, LeBron James coin, Shane Dawson, and Jeffrey Star coin, whatever the kids are doing today, Vasco Girl coin, whatever. It doesn't matter if you like it or think it's right or think it has monetary value. People create affinity for community, and they will associate with all of these things. Let's talk about the arc of this technology and how it is playing out. Naval, as well as biology, have both talked about this idea of a cycle between infrastructure and application growth. First, you need infrastructure. The infrastructure creates the capability for new applications. Then you have a period of application expansion. People start building stuff. As they build stuff, they come across limitations of the platform. They run into scaling and capacity issues, security privacy issues, fit and market timing issues. Then you need more infrastructure because you filled up what you have. You do another round of infrastructure, which creates the possibility of another round of applications. In Bitcoin, we've now had this four-year protracted scaling debate. It's over because everybody got what they wanted. Everybody got a chain, and they're all called Bitcoin. You get to choose which one you want to use, but you don't have to only use one. The bottom line is, the scaling debate is never going to end, because scaling is not a destination. Scaling is a journey. At every step, you will run into new barriers. As someone who loves tinkering with technology, if you give me a system that has capacity x, I will use 99% of that capacity. If you make that capacity ten times greater, I will come up with an application that I couldn't do before, that now uses 99% of the new capacity you give me. I remember the first time I got fiber to the home in one of the locations I was staying, and they installed it and told me, great, you have one gigabit ethernet delivered to your home. It's fully symmetric. One gig down, one gig up. So I called them and I said, can I use it? What do you mean? Can I actually use it? Of course you can use it. No, no, I'm an engineer. Can I use it? Yeah, sure. So I upgraded the switches and routers, and I stuck some servers in there. Then I pegged that connection at one gig up, one gig down, 24 hours a day. Somewhere in the back office, there was an executive going, why the hell is 80% of the bandwidth of this city going to one house? What is he doing? You said I could use it. And if you gave me ten times more, I'd run a mirror of archive.org. And if you gave me a hundred times more, I'd run my own Amazon cloud. And if you gave me a thousand times more, I'd stream 4K video to every person on the planet simultaneously. I can always use it. The moment you take the blockchain and you double the capacity, I can come up with ten new applications that I couldn't do before and fill it. The question is, do I still want to use it? Scarcity is a funny thing, because at the end of the day, the only thing that is scarce in this industry... is attention. It's your attention. If I can get your attention, I'm getting the greatest resource. Any chain can increase its capacity, and if nobody uses it, who gives a damn? Really interesting things happen when people start using it and building stuff. One of the cycles is infrastructure application build, infrastructure application build. With each cycle, we make it possible to create new applications and keep growing. Scaling never ends. But here's the other thing that's happening at an industry level. At an industry level, we're going through a cycle, which is very familiar to those of us... who experienced the early internet. First, you have a stage of experimentation. People try out things. A new idea dropped in the middle of human consciousness, with a white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto. Every person who reads that white paper walks away with a different opinion about what it is, what it can do, and how they might use it. It's not gospel. It's science. When you read that, you take away something and you start building. Eventually, people say, this isn't the right way to do it. I want to do it a different way, and they'd launch something else. Of course, they say, this is going to be better, so it's going to be the next Bitcoin. The flippening is coming. Really, in every choice and trade-off, what they're doing is carving out a different environmental niche, a different area of application use that has a different set of trade-offs for different applications. If they differentiate enough, they're no longer competing. If they don't differentiate enough, they lose the network effect. What happens after experimentation is fragmentation. Everybody gets a chain. We go in a thousand different directions. I remember when there was one API to get the one price of the one coin. It was a shitty site written in PHP, called MT Gox. I used that API. Now, you need a high-performance database just to list how many coins exist. That fragmentation is going to continue to happen. It's a Cambrian explosion of experiments, notions, and ideas. They're beautiful because they get to run every possible experiment. Even the failures teach us so much. The failures teach us more. After experimentation and fragmentation, something interesting happens. Standardization. We can't keep bombarding users with different experiences. Different user interfaces. Why? Because we're wasting the most precious resource, which is their attention. After that, we get standardization. You may think we're not doing standardization, but in fact there's a hell of a lot going on, and most of it is on the user side. Think about key management. There used to be a thousand different ways to store, record, and encode keys and addresses. Now we have effectively one industry standard, hierarchical deterministic wallets, with prescribed paths from multi-currency, multi-account wallets that operate against any chain... that allows users to have one mnemonic phrase that unlocks everything they own. It's a mess, because it's not fully standardized yet, but it's a hell of a lot better than it used to be. That's the first example of standardization. Then we'll get to something even more interesting, which is interoperability. My next book is on the Lightning Network. One of the reasons I'm fascinated by it is because it is not a Bitcoin system. It is a multi-currency system. It is a system of bilateral promises routed with time-outs and secrets. That's really what it is. What blockchain can do that? Any blockchain that can do time-outs, secrets, and promises. Guess what? Most of them can. We could easily create a system where you start a lightning payment with a Bitcoin amount, lock with one of your peers, and you find someone on the network who is connected to the Ethereum side. Somehow, you make a promise to them, they make a promise to the next person down the chain, and suddenly you're funding an Ethereum contract with a data payload to execute based on your Bitcoin payment. Now, we've created a decentralized exchange between these two currencies, but not just a decentralized exchange. It's an internet network. It is the first glimpse of the internet of money. Then we keep adding chains. But it's not just one network that's doing this. The Lightning Network, Plasma, Raiden, Cosmos, Polkadot... The interledger era has started. Now we're going to start bridging, linking, and building gateways. The most important concept in all of this is trustlessness. We are currently doing all of these things with trusted third-party exchanges that do not deserve our trust. We will turn those inside out and create trustless, routable promises that allow us to move any one of the coins... to any of the other coins, use any of the applications on any of the chains, from a single unified user experience... that allows the user and their wallet to control what they want to do. The internet of money. Someone is going to build a Lightning to Plasma gateway that will take promises on Lightning... and extend collateral promises on Plasma, Raiden, Cosmos. Gradually, that protocol will get standardized. That protocol is the internet protocol of the internet of money. It's exactly the same as connecting Token Ring, Ethernet, and X25, and all of the different attempts... that were made to create local networks for communication, and bundle them together with an agnostic protocol... that abstracts all of the details IP. We're going to do that again with blockchains. We're not going to a world of one coin. We're not going to a world of one chain. Not because I say so, not because I want so, not because I'm invested in it. But because that's what the data tells us. That's what human nature does. We will have many chains, but I am really fascinated by the strong possibility that, while we will have many chains... in the end, they will all come together under one network. We will have the internet of money, value, smart contracts, promises, identity of reputation... of decentralized systems that can change the way we interact as a society. One network, many chains. Thank you.