 One, two, one, two. There we go. Fantastic. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me. This is my first time in Prague, which I say to my great shame, because I grew up in Europe, and I've traveled throughout Europe, but I never managed to visit Prague until today. It's really an amazing city, quite spectacular. Parallel polys is just such an incredible experiment in community here. I was told that everybody who's here bought their ticket with Bitcoin, which the average meet-up in the United States would get three people if we tried that. They'd have to teach the other two hundred people how to get the Bitcoin. I titled my talk, Thoughts on the Future of Money. In fact, I titled my talk for all of the European cities. I'm visiting Thoughts on the Future of Money, which in summary means I haven't yet picked a topic, and I won't actually pick a topic until 24 hours before the talk, and I picked one this morning. So, actually what I'm going to talk about is scaling. A lot of you probably have noticed that there's a very interesting debate in Bitcoin today about how do we scale Bitcoin. That's the topic I want to address, not from a technical perspective, but from a broader perspective, to understand what it means to scale. So, gather around, and we'll talk about a long, long time ago. It was 1989, and the internet was dial-up. And not just the connection of users to the internet, the backbones of the internet, in most cases, were dial-up between universities, between research stations. There were a few permanent connections, high-speed connections, high-speed, 256 kilobits, 512 kilobits, high-speed connections, but the internet was mostly dial-up. Email had not yet really started to take hold, but there was a really special place on the internet called Usenet. Usenet was a discussion system, a system of discussion groups where you could post a message in text. And other people would see it, and then they would respond. But this was not instant messaging. This was slow messaging. Because in order for Usenet to work, all of the messages had to be transmitted by a dial-up system, and propagated from node to node in a system called Store and Forward, Store and Forward. So you'd post a message, and it would take 24 hours, 48 hours to reach everyone, and then they could respond. And it would take 24 hours for you to see their response. Today, we would compare that to trying to communicate with Matt Damon on Mars as part of the Martian movie. And so, at that time, there was a really big conversation among the engineers of the internet, because Usenet was getting very popular, and it was getting very big. Kilobytes and then megabytes of text information that needed to be transmitted. And at first, these dial-up connections would take 30 minutes to an hour, but then they started getting longer and longer, and to get all of the Usenet messages would take one hour, two hours, and then three hours. And so all of the experts predicted, if you draw the point we are here, the point we were six months ago, and you connect them in a line, very soon it will take 26 hours to transmit one-day messages. And then we have a problem, because we only have 24. So what happens then? The internet will collapse. Clearly. It can't scale. It won't possibly scale. At the time, there were two parts to Usenet. There was the regular part of Usenet, which contained very carefully structured groups for academic discussion. And then there was another little part of Usenet called the alt, the alternative groups. And this was optional. You could carry it if you wanted to. You didn't have to carry it. So if you were a Usenet provider and you made these groups available, the really interesting providers offered the alt groups. And of course, all of the interesting stuff was in the alt groups. Some of the early, amazing groups, alt folklore, computing, alt security. And of course, like everything else that's been driving scale on the internet, alt sex. And these alternative groups being optional were the focus of this great debate. Should we carry them? Because at this point, we've started seeing the world's first spam. I remember receiving the first spam. It was a message posted by a Los Angeles lawyer firm that was posted to every Usenet group. And you did not do that. That was not cool. About 1,000 people told them it was not cool. That was the first internet backlash. So the discussion was, do we carry alt groups? Because if we carry alt groups, the internet will surely melt down. And there's no way it can ever scale. If this becomes popular, people will discuss more. And if they discuss more, we won't have enough capacity to deal with this data. This conversation lasted for more than two years. And there were a few brave service providers that carried the alt groups. And they used massive hard drives. Five megabyte hard drives that were the size of a very big thing. And again, the main idea was, if you take where we are here and where we're going, up there we hit a wall. So the internet couldn't scale. That was the basic beginning of the scaling issue on the internet. And it couldn't scale. And wouldn't scale. Clearly. And many people wrote their PhDs on why it wouldn't scale. But of course, the thing is, networks don't scale. Networks fail to scale. And some networks fail to scale gracefully for decades. And those are the ones that succeed. So we solved the use net problem. The digital connections were upgraded, more systems connected with leased lines, and direct connections, dialogue gradually got replaced by leased lines. People started investing in the infrastructure, and we could comfortably carry use net. So people started using email. And we started the problem all over again, because now email started getting popular. And as email got popular, it started replacing and eclipsing the size of use net. Now we had an even bigger problem, because people wanted to communicate directly. Now a message didn't take 24 hours. It took two hours to cross the internet, which meant that people started having real-time conversations near real-time. So email started exploding, and so the internet couldn't scale. Because if you looked at where email is today and where it was six months ago, and you draw a line, it will melt down. And people wrote more PhD theses about how the internet would die under the load of email and never scale. But then gradually we started optimizing that and solved it. So we solved the email problem, and when I say we, I was watching, because I was just a 16-year-old who didn't know what the hell was going on. But we as people, as humanity, we solved the problem, so we scaled it. So the internet failed to scale for use net, and then it succeeded to scale for use net, so that it could fail to scale for email. And then it succeeded in scaling for email. So some smartass idiot went and invented mine, multi-media internet messages, which meant that you could attach things to email. And these attachments were ten times the size of the text, because people started sending bigger things, like drawings and pictures. And of course, once again, sex. So we could scale for email, but not for email attachments, so everybody was up in an uproar. We were never going to be able to scale for email attachments. The internet will surely melt down. And then we solved it, until some British guy, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who then was just Tim, invented the web. And now you could put the pictures into frames. This was about 1992. I downloaded and ran the first web browser, NCSA Mosaic. At my university lab, we gathered together three or four friends. We worked for hours to get NCSA Mosaic downloaded, compiled, and installed. And then we launched it, and we visited the web. All of it. I can say a sentence not many people can say, because in 1992 I visited the entire web in an afternoon. Both sites. Because there were two. And I visited both sites. And I looked at that, and I thought, oh my God, this is going to be huge, huge. The internet will never scale. And just imagine what you can do with sex on the web. Of course, this became the scaling application. As we all know, it's been driving internet development since. But we don't talk about that in polite company. So then the internet was failing to scale for the web. And people say, we can never do all of these images in hypertext documents. And it will totally fail to scale. And more PhDs were written, and more discussion. And the internet was still failing to scale. But by now it had been failing to scale for more than a decade. Very gracefully, very successfully. So then some idiot invented voice-over IP. And now some other people decided, why don't we just replace the entire phone system with the internet? Now that was a crazy idea. So the phone companies then started this massive campaign to inform us of why packet switch networks could never carry voice. And really, the true quality approach to voice was always going to be hierarchical switch networks owned by national monopoly telecom companies. Because the internet couldn't possibly scale to carry the world's phone calls. Those same companies now route all of the phone calls over the internet. So first, they didn't want the internet on their phone networks. Then they allowed the internet on the phone networks. Then they built their phone networks on top of the internet. And then we started sending videos. And then the internet couldn't scale again, because YouTube was going to melt down the internet clearly. And we needed some content quality and filtering, because we can't allow every idiot to go and publish a video about their cat. Because there are already 1,000 cat videos. And if you draw a line from how many cat videos there were yesterday, to how many cat videos there are today, and you extrapolate. By the end of this decade, there will be a billion cat videos on the internet, which is exactly what happened. Pardon me. But we scaled. And now we do 3D video and 4K video, and then Netflix came along. And so we see the same mistake, which was that in 1992, when I visited the first website, my thought was, wow, TV is so dead. Because one day we will be able to transmit movies instantaneously. Now, if you go and say that to a respectable network researcher in 1992, they call you an idiot. Because clearly, if we had Netflix in 1992, a single video stream to a single user would melt down the entire internet. And yet, here we are today. And by the way, the internet is failing to scale for Netflix, and all of the other companies that are doing live video, and it will continue to fail to scale incrementally and gracefully. And soon we will be doing Oculus Rift holographic 3D, 4K VR. And then it will really fail to scale. And people will still write PhD thesis on why the internet is about to melt down. And the reason for this is really simple. It is because scale is not a goal to achieve. It is the definition of what can you do with the network today? And the moment you increase the capacity, the very definition of what can you do with the network today changes. Because somebody says, hang on a second. You mean I can now do X, which has ten times more demand than what I did before? Let's do some of that. And then you fail to scale again. So scaling is a moving target. Scale defines the edge of today's capability. And as it moves forward, capability increases. Bitcoin is failing to scale. And if we are really, really lucky, Bitcoin will continue to fail to scale gracefully for 25 years, just like the internet. Because the very same types of companies that then were saying, the internet can never work for all of the email. It can never work to do quality voice calls. It can never work to do quality video. The same kind of corporate arguments are now being said. So why Bitcoin can never do retail payments. It can never do visa scale. It can never do global scale. And if it's actually adopted, it will collapse. And right now, there are a dozen people writing their PhD thesis on why Bitcoin will fail, has failed, is dying, was dead, and has died again. There's a beautiful site called bitcoinobituaries.com, where you can read the pronouncements of the death of Bitcoin since 2009, regularly, like clockwork every three to six months, major newspapers, scientists, et cetera, saying, OK, that's it. Bitcoin is dead. In fact, this has now become an amazing recruitment opportunity. Because all you have to do is wait for people to hear, first, that Bitcoin died. The CEO of Bitcoin was arrested. Bitcoin was shut down by Putin. And then four months later, someone says, you know, there's some interesting new applications on Bitcoin, and they go, Bitcoin's still there? Bitcoin is still there. Is the marketing slogan of this community? If we can just keep doing Bitcoin is still there, people are surprised. They are confounded. It doesn't match their expectations. It's not possible that Bitcoin is still there, because very serious people, with very serious titles, working for very rich companies, told them that Bitcoin would not still be there, but Bitcoin is still there. Because we are failing to scale gracefully. When we fail to scale during a stress test or a capacity test, when the network is flooded with transactions, what happens? Some users experience a terrible situation. They do a transaction with 0.1 millibits, like they've always done. And it takes three days to confirm. And during that time, they're freaking out. Especially if they're new users. Because new users assume that the money has left their account. There are no accounts in Bitcoin. And it's en route to the destination account. Again, there are no accounts in Bitcoin. And therefore it's somewhere in limbo in between. But the money is really still in their account. It's just that their wallet says it hasn't been confirmed yet. It's either at the source or at the destination, atomically, with one transaction. There is no intermediate state. It can't be in limbo because Bitcoin doesn't transmit. It settles. So we experience these sudden problems, and some wallets, behave intelligently, and they increase their fees, sometimes by 100%. So, oh, woe is me instead of it costing four cents to send a global transaction. In seconds, anywhere around the world will full censorship, resistance, and open innovation. Open access to everyone. It takes seven cents to send that transaction. And clearly this is an indication, together with the people who had three days, to confirm the transaction that Bitcoin surely is dead now. And some of the developers go, ah, I give up. Bitcoin is dead. And the newspapers write, Bitcoin is dead. Transactions are not going through. Transactions are going through. They went through for me. I was running a wallet that was intelligent, doing its transaction calculations. But what happens in the aftermath of this capacity crunch? We get better wallets. And that's really the essence of a dynamic system responding to pressure. Because as we get better wallets, these better wallets calculate fees more correctly. And it's a lot easier to jam the network, if there's a lot of dumb wallets doing 0.1-millibit fees. Because then all you have to do is do 0.11-millibit fees, and you are king of the hill. Because the other idiots didn't update. And you jam the network with your transactions. But if they are able to do 0.12-millibits, now you have to do 0.13-millibits. And now we are in a race, and before you know it, you are spending 0.5-millibits on a transaction. Which, of course, if you are a legitimate user, is nothing. If you are trying to jam, the network starts getting really expensive, really fast. Which brings up an interesting question. What is a spam transaction? What is a legitimate transaction? What is an illegitimate transaction? There are two ways to answer this. One is a paternalistic, top-down approach that says, This is what is allowed. This is what is not allowed. And by making a list, we will prevent the network from filling to capacity. But that breaks the fundamental capability of Bitcoin, which is net neutrality. Bitcoin doesn't care who the sender or the receiver is, what the application is, what the value of the transaction is, all it cares about. Did you pay the fee? And if you pay the fee, your transaction is legitimate, by definition. Because you thought it was legitimate enough to attach that fee. The very act of paying the fee legitimizes the transaction. Because if we start making decisions about what is spam and what is not, we are now choosing the future of Bitcoin and constraining it into a set of applications that we can imagine. And the brilliant person who creates the application we can't imagine, that may look like spam to us, doesn't get carried across the network. Because we made a top-down decision to say that transaction is legitimate. And the other way of doing this is to say, how about we use a market to solve this problem? We have a market, we have a currency. Use the market to solve this problem and allow the market to establish the minimum fee that meets the requirements of supply through the miners and their need for propagating blocks fast, and the demand of the users for the applications they care about. And if you pay the fee, your transaction is legitimate. There is no spam transaction. There is no such thing as a legitimate transaction. There are only transactions that did get mined, and transactions that didn't have enough fee to get mined. And so this is how Bitcoin is going to play out. And this is not going to be solved. It's not going to be solved because we will have the scaling discussion every year for decades into the future, hopefully. And every year we will fail to scale for the next application and succeed to scale for the previous ones. And as soon as we do better, people will invent new applications, and we will fail to scale again. The Internet failing to scale gracefully for 25 years. Bitcoin, let's keep failing to scale gracefully, and Bitcoin is not yet dead. Thank you. We'll do some questions? Yes. Very good. So thank you very much. We have questions. If you have questions, please just raise your hand, and I will rush to you with a microphone. So yes, please. And I will give you the first question. It is already, I think, two or three months that might have heard quite loudly about the Bitcoin community. And me personally, I admire him for his work. I was very surprised by his strict position on that the Bitcoin community failed. And this is why the Bitcoin failed. Can you tell us your position on his move? Well, coincidentally, I saw Mike two days ago. I was at a conference in Zurich, and Mike was speaking right after me on the other stage. And so we met, again, we've met a few times. We actually spoke at the same time at the very first conference in San Jose in 2013. His room was full, and my room was empty. I had begged them to give me a speaking slot, and they gave me one very reluctantly, and nobody came. You can see that video. It's online. It's pretty good. I talked about Bitcoin neutrality. Anyway, Mike was in the other room. He was doing his talk. He's been around for a very long time in Bitcoin. And so when I saw Mike, I said, again, hey, thanks for everything you did. Because the thing you have to realize is that even when we disagree, we're on the same side. Even when we disagree violently, we're on the same side. There are plenty of people out there who don't want to see Bitcoin succeed. But the one thing we all have in common is that we love this idea. And here's the interesting thing you might not realize, but Mike loves this idea, too. He just didn't think it was working right, but he still loved it. He wants it to succeed. He just doesn't believe it will. And more importantly, he's made incredible and enormous contributions to Bitcoin. His last contribution was to drop the price by $40, and allow more people to buy Bitcoin at a reduced price. Because of an article in The New York Times. And so people had the opportunity again to buy Bitcoin at $380. That might be a good opportunity for some, we'll see. And Bitcoin failed to die. So thank you, Mike, for everything you do. That's all I have to say. I don't believe in the angry debates, the paranoid conspiracies. I think Mike is wrong. I think my entire presentation was why Bitcoin will continue to scale. In fact, I think the governance problems that seem so acute are not really acute. What they are is the fact that Bitcoin is hard to change. And in many systems, when there is a very strong debate, the debate is resolved... because somebody says, you know what, that's all great, but I'm the boss. So this is what we're going to do. Okay, discussion over. And in Bitcoin, there is no discussion over, because there is no boss. Because no one can impose their position on anybody else. So we can go back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth forever... arguing about this. But some of the people who are arguing about this are screaming at each other... and saying, oh, you're a CIA agent, you're trying to destroy Bitcoin, and... you got paid to say that, and no, you got paid to say that. And some of the people are sitting down and writing some bloody code... which is how you succeed. Because Gavin and Jeff, and Tumen wrote Classic, and... Greg and Peter, and all the others went and wrote Segwit. Guess what's going to happen by the end of this year? We're going to implement Segwit. And we're going to do a hard fork to do Meg. And we're going to do Thin Blocks, and RBF. And Child Pays for Parent and Prioritization, and Extra Thin Blocks, and Extreme Thin Blocks, and other optimizations. And Invertible Bloom lookup tables that Gavin started working on almost two years ago. We're going to do all of those things, just to get to the next level of scale. And then we will invent new applications to fill that bloody network and fail the scale again. Thank you. So let's take the next question. Who wants to ask a question? My name is Galio. I'm writing for the Contelegraph, Chief Republic. Hello, Kara. Nice to meet you. And I think I'm a bit peculiar, but sometimes I'm in doubt. Yes, I'm in doubt. And my question is, if you have ever been in doubt about the future of Bitcoin, that's very important for me. Thank you. Yes, I have been in doubt. There was a moment where I really, really got worried. And that was the day I got a call from one of the people I know in Bitcoin. And they say, you know what? We have it on good information, but empty boxes and solvents and they're going to blow up today. And get ready for it because it's going to be ugly. And in those days, there were really just one exchange. And it did all of the ball human if the empty box blows up, we have a big problem. And it did blow up that day. But an hour after I heard it was going to blow up, it blew up. And I did, for a moment, get scared there. I was like, whoa, this is just going to be so bad. And then part of me, this little voice in my head is going, maybe it will go to 10. This other little voice in my head was like, if it goes to 10, you could buy a 10 again. And these were fighting because I wanted to panic. But at the same time, I was like, this is going to work. Here's the thing, there are so many people who will not give up no matter what the price of Bitcoin. They will not give up. I will not sell my Bitcoin. I would rather watch it go to zero than some ever. And I don't really have much Bitcoin. But that's not the point. But I will be one of the many thousands of people who absolutely refuse to give up. And all it takes for Bitcoin to continue to exist is two nodes. Hopefully one of them, at least, or both are mining nodes. And that's it. Maybe the difficulty will go back to where I'm mining on my laptop. I never got to do that. That would be fun. And so sometimes people tell me, Bitcoin will go to zero. I'm like, really? If you go to Rome, you can buy Roman cisterci at a store that hasn't been in circulation for 1700 years. And it's not zero. You can buy Drachmas in Athens that haven't been in circulation for a decade, and it's still not zero. Currencies actually don't go to zero. Because sometimes they just have sentimental value, and touristic value, and historical value. And I can tell you something, there's nothing that has more sentimental and historical value than Bitcoin. And I'm not going to bloody sell it. So nowadays I don't really worry anymore. I really don't. Thanks. Ask again. Please. But how do you... We know that there is around 600 of altcoins already. Yes. About 100 of altcoins went to zero already. So how do you... Well, they didn't go to zero. They went to 0.000. 015. Someone still has them. Yeah. But how do you know, or how do you believe that the Bitcoin is not the case with another altcoin? What is the difference between, for example, Bitcoin and, I don't know, Lightcoin, or another cryptocurrency? Why do you preserve Bitcoin? We did it first. We did it best. We've got the absolute best development team in the industry. The most intelligent, amazing scientists, engineers, software engineers, and development teams that are building amazing stuff every day. I can barely keep up. Just when I think, okay, I'm done reading for the day, and somebody drops a segregated witness on me, or some new innovation, and I'm amazed again. So, I mean, here's the other important thing, which people don't realize, is that Bitcoin today is not what Bitcoin was in 2009. It's the same name. It's the same 21 million coin cap. It's more or less the same transaction structure, but a lot of other things have changed quite dramatically. One of the stories of scaling is that sometimes the only thing that scales is the brand. I'm 44 years old. Not a single cell in my body is one that I was born with. They've all been replaced by now. They're all gone. All that remains is the pattern. When I was in college, they said Ethernet can't scale to one megabit, and Ethernet can't scale beyond five megabits, and Ethernet can't scale beyond ten megabits. Ethernet is a networking system, if you're not aware. I installed Ethernet that was a coaxial cable as thick as my thumb, and it could only go 100 meters, and it could only do five meg. Today, all of the local area networks run on Ethernet, but can now do ten gig over fiber. But how much of that is really Ethernet, and how much of that is just the word Ethernet attached to what we made it into? Because it's a different distribution medium, a different architecture. The only things that are really the same are maybe the frame size and the brand. One of the issues that you have to reconcile yourself with is that bitcoin, 15 years from now, may only share with today's bitcoin three or four fundamental properties, a 21 million-coin cap. That's not going away. If that goes away, it's not bitcoin. But the brand name and some basic architecture characteristics, everything else may change. Everything else may be completely revised, and we'll just still call it bitcoin. I don't believe that we need to worry too much, but altcoins, to me, are a very important part of the ecosystem. In fact, the more we have and the more they experiment, the better it is. Something really important happened this year. People fled bitcoin into Ethereum, and that was awesome. Because all of the previous times, when they fled bitcoin, they left the cryptocurrency economy. This time, they simply switched lanes. They didn't abandon cryptocurrencies. They left bitcoin and went into Ethereum to see what the other side is doing. Look at what's going on over there. They're not fighting yet. They're still scaling for now. It's all cozy and nice, and they've got contracts and smart stuff. They also have humans, and human nature always prevails. Pretty soon, you're going to see interesting things like the ones we have in bitcoin. Bitcoin was fine, it was scaling fine in 2012. Nobody was arguing then. The bottom line is that we're now keeping people in the cryptocurrency space. As people went to Ethereum and the price went up, new people came in from the outside, who in order to buy Ethereum, because they didn't believe that bitcoin was a good medium of exchange, first bought bitcoin to use it as a medium of exchange to buy Ethereum. We'll see how it goes, but I'm very optimistic. Hi, I'm Janne from Zarku. My question is, what is your personal selection for bitcoin if you go for the classic? We have started a new feature in Zarku in the past few weeks that allows voting for the type of coin you want to be in the future. I think today, Marek posted his own personal opinion, and we started a big friendly discussion. A big shit storm is going on right now, I think. I'm wondering what is your personal opinion and what is your personal preference? I'm surprised you're having a big shit storm on Reddit, because Reddit has always been such a civilized place. They never attack people. What happened? I run Core, three nodes. I run Classic, two nodes. I run Ethereum, one node so far. I ran XT, one node. I will run everything that comes out, that I have an interest in evaluating, understanding, and propagating. To me, this will be resolved one way or another. The simple answer is that, as long as the plan is working, then Core can execute that plan. If Core stops executing effectively, they will lose the confidence vote. The immense centralized monopoly power of Core will melt away in less than 24 hours. People will run an alternative client, and guess what will happen the day after? Core will merge the hard fork and keep working, because they will receive that vote and go with consensus. There are people who believe in big blocks and small blocks. You can have the most well-developed beliefs in Bitcoin up until one week before the fork. Everybody will say, I'm ideologically X, but the winds are blowing classic today, so I'm going with consensus. No matter what opinion you have, in the end, you may think this may not be good for you, or maybe good for you. But if you go against consensus, you suffer 100% loss of your income. The safe bet is always consensus. All of the ideology melts away, because at the very end, what matters only is the personal motivation, the invisible hand, that guides each person to make a choice on their own about their own best interests. That is the genius of Satoshi, and consensus wins every time. I'm not worried, because I'm not a classic or core supporter, or any other kind of supporter. I'm a supporter of good code that works and is currently in consensus. If that changes, I will take the new data and change my opinion accordingly. Okay, thank you. I'll try to keep my answers shorter, so that we can do more questions. Sorry if I've been rambling. Hi. So basically you are saying that you are depending on the decision of the miners, on the Chinese pools. That's what you are saying. It's not our decision. It's the decision of the miners. No. There are five consensus communities in Bitcoin. There's developers, there's miners, there's exchanges, there's merchant processing, and there's wallets, and they go together. Because if you're a miner and you're mining on a chain that doesn't have the support of the wallets, the exchanges of the merchants, then you're mining coin that you cannot sell, use, or exchange for anything. And then you're on the wrong side. You can get the longest chain, and if the economic consensus is on the other side, you're wasting your time. And of course the miners know this, so they're not going to make any move until they believe that the economic side is with them, and they know for sure that this is the way that's going to be the most successful way forward. And they're very conservative in that decision, because they have millions of dollars invested. You've got to realize something else. A lot of the miners today buy electricity on long-term contracts, six months to a year. Which means they've already paid for this. They've already got all of the hardware. And the only option they have now is to run and pay it off. They cannot turn off this hardware. So they will continue, no matter what the difficulty, what the price, or which side of the fork they're on, they are not stopping to mine. It's not just the miners making decisions. Just one additional question. Right now, new wallet is supporting SegWit. And I don't know if it's going to be in the red in BitcoinJ, because Mike, I don't know if he's used to working on that. So I'm not sure if... Well, that's not entirely true. That's not entirely true. One wallet supports SegWit, and that's the Core fork by Peter Woolley that runs SegNet, and that supports SegWit and works, and is being tested now for more than four months, I believe. SegNet, the production-level segregated witness test network, has been working and doing transactions for four months, with a wallet that obviously is producing SegWit transactions, but the standard is not finalized yet. And therefore, without a finalized standard, you can't go ahead as a wallet developer. I can guarantee you all of the developers are writing test code right now, all the serious ones, the ones that still want to be around, are trying to implement prototypes of SegNet and SegWit. I'm writing a prototype SegWit implementation for my own uses and company, and everybody is behind the scenes waiting to see what happens. But the current roadmap is for somewhere between April and June for the deployment of SegWit into production. So, have some patience, it's going to happen, yes. Okay, hi. No? There, yes. I'm asking everyone for proton mail, I just wanted to ask a generic question for Bitcoin. Proton mail is awesome. Thank you, thank you. Do you believe Bitcoin can survive government intervention and or regulation-alike global skip? Like, let's say, the big countries decide. I have never seen global collaboration between countries on regulating anything. So, if the governments of the world can't get their ass into cure to deal with global warming, that is literally a threat to the tiny little blue lifeboat we are hurtling through the cosmos on. You think they're going to get together and agree on Bitcoin, especially when, strategically, they're all thinking, well, Bitcoin happens, I'm fucked. But those guys are more fucked than me. So, maybe, if we let it happen, it can cause them to have a currency problem before it causes us to have a currency problem. And then we win. And I'm not joking about that, because I'm pretty sure that would be the kind of calculation that you would see in a lot of countries that are thinking about whether Bitcoin should be regulated. And so they regulate it, so what? What are they going to do? Threaten people with death if they use Bitcoin? They already do that in some countries. And guess what people will do? They'll use Bitcoin, and then when the policeman comes, they'll bribe the policeman in Bitcoin. And up the chain it goes until the head of the state is stuffing a wallet full of Bitcoin. The bottom line is that in countries where the rule of law matters, money is a form of speech, freedom of association, freedom of expression, freedom of speech protects political expression through currency. In the United States, we put that into a United States Supreme Court decision on the Citizens United that said you can't regulate campaign contributions because money is speech. So in countries where the rule of law matters, you pick that fight, head on with Bitcoin, and we're going to take it all the way to the Supreme Court. Do you know how many lawyers per day Mark Andreessen can hire? And the problem is that they may lose. And losing on a decision that says Bitcoin is protected speech is much worse than the status quo, which is kind of gray. So that's not going to happen. And in countries where the rule of Putin is the rule of law, ban Bitcoin, they say, and nobody gives a damn. Bitcoin is evil, really. You say it's evil. I'd better look into this, because every time you say something is evil, it's because it's good for me and bad for you, and I don't like you. This is happening in Venezuela right now. You're like, Bitcoin is the currency of terrorists, pedophiles, extremists, and criminals. Don't pay attention to our 550% inflation rate. And please leave your money in the currency of choice and go with us to the bottom as hostages of our insane policies. And what are some obviously technically literate, a very tiny percentage of the population in Venezuela are probably now thinking, really, I should look into this. Yes, who's got the microphone? I think over here was the next one. Yes, go ahead. 34,000 years in the future, there are dreams or visions. Is some face change going to happen in the nation's face with something like this? I try not to make predictions in Bitcoin exceeding 30, 40 days into the future, because the best way to be correct is to not make a prediction, because the future is very harsh when it comes to predictions. The worst part is that if you make a really stupid prediction, you will go down in the history books like that guy who said, the world will only ever need one computer, and that guy who said, electricity is a fad for the Paris fair and will disappear as soon as we dismantle the Eiffel Tower. Wrong two counts in the history books. I can't do a prediction out to 30, 40 years. I do know that the nation-state, as a system of organization, is being severely threatened by network-centric organizations on a global scale. Today, the ten largest populations in the world, four of them are nation-states, six of them are internet applications. Facebook is the most populous concentration of human beings on the planet. Instagram, Snapchat, WeChat, etc., follow that. Somewhere down there is China, India, and then in seventh place the United States. So the world has already changed. Whether that will affect nation-states, we'll see. One of the people in Bitcoin who is really interesting and has some interesting ideas, Balaji Srinivasan, who is the CEO of 21 Incons, told me, the future of politics is not left versus right, it's land versus cloud. Most of the world still lives on land, but some of us now live in cloud. Land wants to keep us tied up and tax us based on where we live, but we don't live in any specific place. We travel by air all over the world. This is going to be the dominant battle of the future, the global community of the network versus the land-locked feudalist past. We'll see. Hello, my name is Martin, I have a question for you. Andreas, what's your personal view on Halloween this year, and its impact on accentuating and difficulty? Sorry, what was the... Halloween accentuating? The halving, yes. The great halving of 2016. To explain, for those of you who are not quite familiar with this, every four years the amount of subsidy in each block decreases by 50%. We started with 50 Bitcoin per block, we're now in the era of 25. We are going to enter the 12.5 era, approximately on July 22nd, 2016. One of the interesting things about Bitcoin is that we know what the monetary policy will be in 2140. With the Federal Reserve, we don't know what the monetary policy will be this Friday, or with any of the other central banks. Although I have a premonition that will probably involve more stimulus and printing money. That hasn't worked a hundred times, but a hundred and first, it probably will. What happens in the halving? As I said, miners prepay electricity in many parts of the mining enclosures. That's not universal, but it is one of the characteristics of the mining community, which actually has some really serious implications on their decision-making process, because it's sunk capital. Secondly, we've now achieved a situation in mining, where we've seen from the CPU to the GPU to the FPGA to the ASIC, increases of 100 or 1,000-fold performance increases, until we accelerated straight into Moore's law. That's a wall, because 16 nanometers are done. Now, where do we go? We slow down to 2x increases every 18 months. Everyone can get the same chip, and there is no advantage in pre-ordering. You no longer have to switch chips every three to six months. Therefore, capital, connections to silicon fabrication, centralization of purchasing, no longer matter. This has started happening at the beginning of this year. We will go into the halving with a situation where there will be the haves and the have-nots, those who have 16 nanometers and those who don't. Those who do not have 16 nanometers will find themselves unprofitable very quickly, and the rest will not. We will see. I predict the price will go up and down. Then it will probably go up and down again, because the primary driver of price is still, by a great extent, sentiment. The halving is coming, and I think Bitcoin will go up. Bye, bye, bye, bye. Everybody else sees it. They are like, bye, bye, bye, bye. Everybody, bye. It is great. I am not too sure. I am a bit worried. I am so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so. Up and down we go. It is going to be a roller coaster. Volatility will probably increase. We are in a period of pretty low volatility. We have been for at least a year now. The volatility of 2011 and 2013 is in our past. We have been relatively stable for a tiny $6 billion global currency. We are going to see increased volatility. And so my suggestion is take a deep breath, relax. Don't try to play the casino unless you are an experienced stock gambler. In which case, good luck to you. Sit back, relax, watch the fireworks and read the news about how Bitcoin is dead or about to die because of the halving. And then wait until right after when Bitcoin is not yet dead. Who has another question? Yes, go. Hello there, so I would like to, like, continue with the Carlos question, the very first one, I would like to touch it a bit. As when he asked you if you were, like, doubt sometimes, I'm becoming, like, really believer. I'm pretty new to Bitcoin, though. And I'm just, when I'm reading the articles about, like, big corporate companies and banks investing, like, a million of dollars into research of, like, blockchain technology and stuff, but what do you think about, like, why should they adopt a currency which, like, a 60, 65% is already out there between the people where, like, early adopters have planted all that. And what makes them to stick with Bitcoin and not to make their own currencies and, like, you know. Nothing. Banks cannot adopt Bitcoin. They cannot adopt Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the poison pill of global finance. Bitcoin is the pill you cannot swallow. Because Bitcoin is global, is borderless, is not controlled, is peer-to-peer, is censorship-proof, and none of the financial world can allow any of that. And therefore, they can't do it. Because if they are banks, they are institutionally trapped in a regulatory system that they built as a castle around them to prevent competition. And in which they are now prisoners in their own castle and can't leave. Because they cannot go outside of regulation. The same thing that prevented competition for 50 years is now their prison. And so they cannot do Bitcoin. Until they have to, because everyone is doing it. Maybe. Or maybe not. And they will build. They say, great, so we heard about this very interesting, open, decentralized, peer-to-peer, borderless, uncontrolled, censorship-persistent currency. We would like to create one just like it, only not open, not borderless, not peer-to-peer, not decentralized, not censorship-proof, and controlled by us. The problem is that we use a blockchain, which is an incredibly inefficient way of settling global transactions, because we want to get the benefit of financial freedom, censorship-proof, global access, open access, empowerment for all. And if you don't want these things, and I can guarantee you the bank stones, then why pay the inefficiency price? For a blockchain that doesn't give you anything, because it's no longer immutable if you're doing signing. It's no longer unforgivable if you're doing signing. It's a giant honey-put for anonymous. It's going to be so much fun when they start breaking into the bank blockchains. Or when they take over the signing keys of a central bank's fancy new blockchain-based digital currency that they launched, and hold them to the most amazing ransom-wherever, we have your country. We will begin issuing or not issuing currency with your keys, or you have to change them in a very disruptive operation. Unless your queen dresses in a hot dog suit and dances in the garden of the palace on YouTube, you have two hours. Blockchains without proof of work are not secure, and so I have this free advice for the banks. Purchase and install Microsoft SQL, data center edition, so it's scalable, make one of the fields a hash pointer to the previous field, and one of the fields the digital signature of the proof of authority. That's not a blockchain, but it's a hell of a lot more efficient and does everything you want to do, which is signing instead of mining and chains of transactions with hashes, right there. It's going to be a thousand times, ten thousand times, twenty thousand times, a hundred thousand times faster. Let them do blockchain. We are building the internet of money. They are building the Microsoft front page of money, the outlook of money, the intranet of money. What is the intranet? It's the place that is not secure, where you can't run any of the cool applications, where all you can do is read stale content that your IT department approved six months ago, about what are the latest HR policies. That's what they're building in a currency. Okay, let's take maybe one more question and then wrap it. Hello, I have one. It's amazing. Thank you. Can patent law slow down Bitcoin? Can patent law slow down Bitcoin? Patent law can slow down Bitcoin companies, but it cannot slow down Bitcoin, because Bitcoin is not a company. Who are you going to sue if Bitcoin core software implements something that someone claims as 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't sue it. 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 trademarks the intranet of money, which they did not invent. These are going to be problems for Bitcoin companies, 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. If all of the members are anonymous, you've got a bit of a problem enforcing your patent law. Things are going to get interesting. As always, the law lags by a decade from the application of technology. 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. By the time they catch up with this, we are going to be 10 years ahead. We've been playing this game on the internet for 25 years. I think we are winning. Thank you all for coming here today. Thank you.