 Can patent law slow down Bitcoin companies, but it cannot slow down Bitcoin? Bitcoin is not a company. So who are you going to sue if Bitcoin core software implements something that someone claims is a patent? The people running it, the people who coded it, the people who coded the first commit of that specific feature, or maybe subsequently patched it, or then rewrote it completely? Who are you going to sue with patent law? You can sue companies. Patents are going to be a very big problem for Bitcoin startups. Trademarks are already a problem for, as you may have noticed in my little fight online with a company that trademarked the Internet of Money, which they did not invent. But these are going to be problems for Bitcoin companies. And so we must reinvent what it means to be a company. What it means to be an ad hoc association of human beings operating virtually across the world in a decentralized manner on a blockchain with voting rights and dividend rights in an association. That is theoretically still a company, but it's also something that doesn't look anything like a company. And if all of the members are anonymous, you've got a bit of a problem enforcing your patent law. So things are going to get interesting. We'll see. As always, the law lags by a decade from the application of technology. And they are writing laws now to regulate Bitcoin of 2009. Do you think they have any idea what lock time payment channels, segregated witness and confidential transactions are going to do to their silly little laws? Because Bitcoin moved on. And by the time they catch up with this, we're going to be ten years ahead. We've been playing this game on the Internet for 25 years. I think we're winning.