 MJ asks, does price matter? If Bitcoin does not greatly increase in value relative to goods and services as well as fiat currencies, can it still disrupt banking, prevent governments from stealing their citizen savings through currency debasement, reduce corruption, and or prevent unnecessary warfare funded by money printing? Yes, I think cryptocurrencies can disrupt a whole deal of centralized banking and financial institutions by the mere fact that they exist as an exit system, as a safety valve, as a safe haven. And it's not the increase in value that will allow Bitcoin to do these things. Rather, it's the other way around. It's if Bitcoin is used to escape from oppressive governments, to disrupt cartel and monopolistic banking, to allow people to have more freedom and transactions where they actually need it, to prevent their governments from stealing their money through inflation and currency debasement, then that will lead to greater value of that currency, because it's serving a useful purpose. It's not value that makes it useful, it's utility that makes it valuable, so it's the other way around. So Bitcoin will increase in value if it's useful, and it doesn't need to increase in value in order to be useful. That's confusing cause and effect. You spoke a little bit about the tools that are needed, or the tools that will change in the space over the coming years. Can you talk about what additional tools you feel are really necessary for the space to continue to progress? I get that question a lot, and what people want me to say is that what we really need is a combination of artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and IoT that will enable us to use prediction markets to bring forth the geek rapture or something like that. Unfortunately, the answer is rather boring. What we need in order to make it easier for more people to use these things and to get broader adoption, to promote this technology and get this technology in more hands, to make it a real choice for the people who really need it. Not to try to sell it to those who don't, but for the people who really need it. We need wallets that are easy to use, easy to understand, and secure by design. I remember a time when there was only one Android wallet, which was actually written by a German guy called Andreas, not me, and one exchange. Back in 2013, there was one wallet for Android called the Bitcoin wallet. It didn't need to be more fancy than that, not much competition out there. Wallets are absolutely necessary. Exchanges, ATMs, even better ATMs, more so than exchanges, and ATMs in multiple languages. My mission at the moment is in education, and I think one of the things we are missing is that Bitcoin today is primarily an English language phenomenon. That is a huge drawback, because the places where it is needed are Spanish-speaking countries, Chinese-speaking countries, Russian-speaking countries, and many other languages, not just English, certainly not predominantly English. Translating educational material, but also translating wallet interfaces and exchanges and ATMs. Quite honestly, throughout the U.S. Southwest, there should be in every single botega, every little convenience store, a Bitcoin ATM that doesn't have a word of English on it, just in Spanish, and it has one big button. It says, send money to Mexico, and to facilitate the remittance market, where they get charged ridiculous amounts by Wells Fargo, Western Union, Moneygram, and all of these exploitative companies to send money home to their families. That is just an example. These are boring infrastructure projects. They are not cool. They have no IoT, AI, or quantum anything in them. They require a lot of focus on user experience and design. They require product managers and product designers, who think carefully about the experience of using that product. That is something that most computer geeks are not that good at, especially the ones who work on protocols. The first group of people who got Bitcoin to where it is today, by weird coincidence, are entirely unequipped. It needs to get to the next stage, which is why we need to be nicer to the people with a purple hair, who know how to design a fucking user interface, and get them to join our industry and recognize that it is not just about the protocol. So, wallets, infrastructure, exchanges, ATMs, basic, boring stuff, and education. Education at all levels, from the very basic things. I've had 74 of my videos translated into Spanish by volunteers. If you speak Spanish, go to YouTube and help me do more. These are really, really important projects, I think. I started a company to do non-custodial stuff for merchants, so they can accept payments. I find that in the Bitcoin-friendly space that we have here, you've got these people skew either towards the hodlers for investments, and the crypto-commerce people, which I skew towards. I find myself going up against the hodlers who own all this Bitcoin, could very easily be spending a little bit of it, and make the whole space a lot more open. What do you say to them, if anything, to get them to be a little more open about maybe spending a little bit of their Bitcoin on commerce to move the space further? I don't say anything to them. The market is telling you that the current preference for this technology in this country, and in other developed countries, is as a political store value hedge against inflation and other geopolitical effects. That's what the market is telling you. If you're in business of doing commerce, and the market is telling you that right now, it isn't a very useful system of commerce, and the reason it isn't a very useful system of commerce comes down to two things. One, we already have useful systems of commerce. We already have credit cards, and we have PayPal, and we have all of these technologies that we can use to do commerce, and they're very easy to use. Most of us have access to these technologies, which means that in order for Bitcoin to be better than those technologies, it has to be significantly better to justify the steep learning curve, the difficulty in security, and all of the other things we don't have to worry about. I can tell you all day that it is, and the market is telling you that it isn't. So believe the market. If the market is telling you that Bitcoin is not sufficiently better than Visa, for an American to use to buy a cup of coffee, that is because it isn't. That's okay. Why? Because there are four billion people in the world who don't even have access to that. They will do something much more important than buy a cup of coffee. They're going to buy some freedom with it, in a country where they can't even imagine that happening. The fact that Bitcoin encourages holding or hoarding, as it's called by mainstream American economists, or savings, as it's called by rational people, is because implicitly people recognize that the published inflation rate today is not the real inflation rate. So the published inflation rate today is what? 2.8% today? Excluding housing, energy, food, and healthcare? So as long as you don't eat, breathe, live, or get sick, 2.8%. The bottom line is that people implicitly feel that there is inflation in many parts of our lives that is much greater than that. When they feel that, they take preventive measures. They look at various places, they could invest their money, and they consider Bitcoin as one of them, and they invest in that. The reason you're not able to get e-commerce working is because it's not the right time, the technology is not ready for it, and more importantly, the technology is already serving a goal that the market considers more important. That doesn't mean that Bitcoin can only be store value. It just means that it's more useful as a store value here than it is elsewhere. In the future, it may play other roles, and in different demographics, economic environments, it will play other roles. But right now, that's where we are. As an entrepreneur, listen to the market. It's okay. If it's not the right time yet, find something else to do with this space for which there is the right time. The next question comes from Daniel. The question is about real-world Bitcoin uses for the unbanked. Daniel asks, why are there as many as 4 billion people unbanked around the world? Is it mainly a matter of cost-effectiveness for banks to have branches in rural areas? Are there so many people who don't have a valid form of identity to submit to the bank? Or is it a matter of people not trusting the current financial system? Daniel, all of the above. It's identity, access to banking infrastructure, literacy, and numeracy. It's distrust of the financial system, corruption in the government, corruption in the banks, theft directly from banking institutions, and all kinds of other things like that that occur all around the world. It's shocking how many people don't have the ability to open a bank account worldwide. It's a very large number. Even if they do, the kind of banking they get is very restricted. Even though the numbers are somewhere between 2.5 billion and 4 billion people who have zero access to banking, so cash-based entirely, there's also another 2 billion people who have access to banking, but that access is severely restricted, so they have access to perhaps one currency with very few choices. They can't change currencies, they can't trade internationally, they're under currency controls, they can't send and receive money from other countries. They may be severely restricted in how much money they can deposit and withdraw, where they can use their money for what purposes, etc. So it's not really their money. All of this great sum of people who are either unbanked, completely, or under-banked, is one of the things that I think we may be able to solve with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in the long run. Honestly, I was hoping we'd see better and more solutions for the unbanked sooner. We see that in areas where there is great need, such as Venezuela, we're seeing greater adoption of cryptocurrencies, so it is working a bit. Daniel asks, do you know of any particular case in which Bitcoin is helping out, like EMPESA in Kenya? The answer is no, not yet, and there are several reasons for that. Maybe we see some of it in Venezuela, but again, it's only for a very small percentage of the population. EMPESA in Kenya has been touted as a huge success of mobile money, but don't forget that that is still very strictly controlled. It's very difficult to move money in and out of EMPESA to other countries. From what I understand, there are, effectively, currency controls on that, too. It's not an open system, it's a completely controlled single-provider closed system. You still need to have an account with an essential organization. The reason Bitcoin isn't able to help out with these particular use cases is because Bitcoin isn't ready to help out. The reason it's not ready to help out is because we don't yet have the scalability to have broad adoption. We don't have the ability yet to do micropayments with transaction fees that are low enough to allow people who live on $1 or $2 a day to be able to use a system like this. We also don't have easy-to-use technology that can be used on the most basic of smartphones securely, and with ease of use for everybody to be able to adopt it. These barriers are barriers of maturity. Bitcoin simply isn't ready yet. That doesn't mean we can't get there. There are many promising technologies that are gradually evolving to get us there, from hardware wallets to the development of smartphone operating systems, better software wallets, Snore signatures, Lightning network, and various other technologies that will allow smaller payments for smaller fees, rapid settlement of payments, and more scale to be able to put many, many, many millions of transactions into the blockchain. All of these things need to be mature before we can see adoption in other countries. In my opinion, this is very much like the early days of cell phones. When cell phones were the size of a suitcase and cost $25,000, they're not going to affect communications in Kenya, because people can't afford that. But that doesn't mean you can't see where this technology is going. As the technology progresses, it gets smaller, smaller, and smaller. It gets cheaper, cheaper, and cheaper to buy, and cheaper to run, until eventually we see the proliferation of cell phones in countries where there were no landlines, and no infrastructure to support fixed telephony. I think similar things will happen to Bitcoin, but it might take 10 or 15 years. I'm still very optimistic, and I think that is absolutely the number one application for cryptocurrencies, which is giving people the freedom to transact internationally without taxes to a bank account, without prior verification, without fulfilling some arbitrary requirements, and giving them financial freedom.