 Jason has the top-rated question and asks, what would a state-sponsored attack, technological, not political or legal, on Bitcoin look like? What could be done to defend against it? That's a great question, Jason. I think I've talked before about political and legal attacks on Bitcoin, which are really the most viable ones. But what about technological attacks on Bitcoin? I think the most obvious technological attack is to try to block traffic, use denial-of-service attacks, flood the network with fake nodes that provide fake information, or delay things by clogging up all of the available connections on the real nodes, and then don't relay transactions and don't relay blocks. Or collect information in order to do various types of analytics, and clog up all of the connections on all of the nodes. Oh, wait, that's already happening. Other types of attacks might be specific types of attacks that have to do with the packet inspection. So looking at traffic on the internet, trying to determine which of that traffic is Bitcoin-related traffic, and trying to block that traffic, of course, all of these technological attacks will create various countermeasures. So if the network is under attacks like that, there are a number of things that the developers and the node operators and the miners can do to diminish the capability to do that attack. Of course, attacks like that are only going to spur on the deployment of countermeasures and for node operators, miners, and others, to strengthen the infrastructure by making it more resilient, specifically to those and related attacks. So there are a number of ways to get around these, including the use of Tor, which is the onion routing network, the use of encrypted communications between peers, which was introduced with two BIPs in the latest version of Bitcoin Core. If I remember correctly, those are BIP 150 and BIP 151 by Jonas Nelly. The use of various obfuscation, stealth, or VN techniques in addition to Tor to make the traffic much harder to find, analyze, the use of filler traffic, where packets are transmitted, whether or not the transaction exists, just to fill up the network so that you can't do traffic analysis on it, as well as the use of alternative communication channels, direct modem connections between important nodes, for example, direct satellite connections, so either satellite broadcast, which is a project that Blockstream has been working on, which allows your nodes to receive the blocks and transactions from satellite, in addition to network connectivity, or even private satellite channels for important uses like miners, direct satellite connections, have a bit of latency, but if you're being blocked, that's a price worth paying. For the first denial of service attacks, various forms of node reputation management already exist inside Bitcoin Core and other node implementations. In the P2P layer, if your node doesn't route well enough or gives incorrect and valid transactions or blocks, it will get banned, and other nodes will remember its IP address, and they will preferentially connect to nodes that have been useful, have been truthful, and are remembered from the past, which means that it's already resistant to the kind of jamming denial of service attack that is most likely to happen. Anonymous asks, if China requires all miners in their country to join a single government-controlled mining pool, can they effectively attack the Bitcoin network? Yes. And what they can do is they can deny service, resequence transactions, deny access to transactions, but they can actually steal any that other people own. They can also fork the network, which they can do anyway, and they can bog down things. Of course, if they do that and attack the Bitcoin network, the Bitcoin network will counterattack. It will counterattack in a way that will effectively not just disarm their attack, but also turn all of their equipment into worthless electronics, burning a multi-hundred million dollar infrastructure, which wasn't really used for very long. Very quickly, there will be a counterattack, and the counterattack may vary. It may be denying service to Chinese IP addresses, or cutting them off from the network, which may or may not be effective to a certain degree. Finally, the nuclear option, which is to switch the proof-of-work algorithm. That may also be used as a countermeasure to this. Who knows? There is so little advantage to attacking the network in that way. It is so expensive to do, with so little advantage. China right now has a unique advantage, which is that they are domestically producing bitcoins, but they are not importing, and do not require them to export to you on currency, in order to get those bitcoins, because of the presence of miners in their country. Talk about killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. No, I don't think that is a smart strategic move. Chinese culture is really good at strategy. You don't stick around for 3,000 years as a culture without knowing how to work out strategy. Ked says, Western government pumps Bitcoin price, mainstream FOMO at pumped prices. Government's tax price acquires BTC from panic selling, and causes short-term pure damage for masses. Pro is cons. That is a very, very expensive way to mess with Bitcoin. Also, government would not be the only one acquiring Bitcoin during the panic. It would be at least one other party acquiring Bitcoin during the panic. A lot of other people have a long-term perspective of this, and are not FOMOing, chasing after the pumped prices now. I think there are a lot of sophisticated investors who can use the futures market to make a lot of money, making this very expensive maneuver. Let's look at some parallels from history. If it was that simple, a lot of people will tell you that the gold and silver markets are manipulated. I have no doubt about that. I think the gold and silver markets are manipulated to a great extent, but they still can't do what you just described here, this kind of pump-and-tump. They can keep supply or demand for quite a long time by playing very big moves in the market. But they can't do this kind of pump-and-tump, FOMO-driven price fluctuation, because it gets very expensive very quickly, and it doesn't really achieve much. If it worked exactly as you were talking about, where the government then comes back in and buys Bitcoin from the panic selling, they will drive the price back up. What do you teach the markets? Hey, it can drop, but if it drops, it's also coming back. If you teach the markets that, they won't let it drop in the first place, because as soon as it starts dropping, they will buy the dip, because they think it will come back. That means the drops become shorter, and the whole pump-and-tump thing gets very expensive. I think a lot of people who are worried about this don't really understand how markets work. I probably don't either, but I'm not that concerned about governments manipulating the price to that extent, in a way that's not very expensive to them for very little return in terms of the effect. MJ asks, do you think that the United States and the European Union may be forced to embrace Bitcoin due to smaller nations doing it first? That's a fascinating question. Yes, I think we're going to start seeing a lot more geopolitics play in this space. As more nations are implementing their own cryptocurrencies, often cryptocurrencies backed by resources like oil or minerals that are available in that country. And using that sometimes to bypass sanctions imposed by some of the superpowers, or sometimes just to get more sovereignty, really. Connecting that concept, that cryptocurrency security equals sovereignty, first for small nations, first for rogue nations. Sure, okay. First for criminals. Sure, okay. And then the rest of them get jealous. They're like, oh, these criminals are doing a lot of privacy and sovereignty, and I'm not a criminal, but I like me some privacy and sovereignty. These rogue states are doing a lot of privacy and sovereignty, but I'm not a rogue state, but I like me some sovereignty, too. That changes the strategic and geopolitical impact of the whole cryptocurrency space, in fact, the entire monetary system itself. So yes, I think the EU and the US are forced to reckon with the fact that when they squeeze things out of their respective jurisdictions, there are plenty of other countries that go, hey, we'll take you, you know, Singapore, Switzerland, Malta, a whole bunch of other small countries may make a play to become the next Switzerland, the next Cyprus, the next Singapore, the next Hong Kong, by using cryptos geopolitically. So yes, I think that puts a lot of constraints on the actions of superpowers. In fact, what it does is it decentralizes geopolitical power, which is as it should be. The next question comes from Nacho, and Nacho asks, if you were a state actor that was comfortable carrying $200 trillion in debt and unfunded liabilities, how would you attack Bitcoin given your ability to print money and run deficits? Could you spin up 100,000 nodes? Could you take over consensus in some other way? What does the network response to your most likely attack look like? Thank you, Nacho, for that question. I think that because we're engaged in technology, we assume that the types of attacks that this system will face are going to be technological attacks. But that doesn't really make a lot of sense. If I'm a state actor and I want to attack a cryptocurrency, I would use technology as the absolute last form of attack. Why would I go and play in the turf of the other party? Technology is what we do, and we're damn good at it, and most governments are not that good at technology. It's like trying to attack a young person on social media. They're much better at social media than you are. You don't attack a technology platform using technology. That's not very good. You're going to lose that. It's asymmetric warfare, where the technologies have significant advantage. No, I would attack it by creating legal uncertainty. How about making it so that you have to file capital gains for every single dollar you spend, even if it's for a pack of gum or a cup of coffee, to make it impossible to engage in regular commerce? Instead of treating it like a foreign currency or any type of currency, treating it like a commodity... Oh, wait, they already did that, which is why it cost me more in my accounting fees than my capital gains... in order to do my tax reporting. How about making it legally vague as to whether you're allowed to hold it or not to hold it? How about creating various ways of scaring the middle class and the mainstream? How about using propaganda and media and dropping announcements by officials about how this technology... can't be trusted, you're likely to lose your money, and we're all drug dealers and criminals anyway? Those are much more effective. Finally, how about using paid sock puppets to infiltrate every public forum, and start screaming and creating dissents and noise and drama, and accusing everybody of being a paid shill of X... and a paid shill of Y, and lying and being fraudsters and scammers, and creating all of this loud, noisy drama? I mean, who wants to engage in cryptocurrency when all of the people in this space seem so nasty and dramatic? Well, most of those people are not in the space. They're in fact trolls who are doing this for fun, or paid infiltrators who are doing this as a job. Just recently, we found out, for example, that I believe it was in Poland. The central bank paid a YouTube artist $30,000 to create this laughably bad public service announcement type video, where they make crypto look bad by having this guy take his girlfriend to a pizzeria, and then he tries to pay with crypto, and he can't, so she walks out, and it was just ridiculous. Anyway, this kind of propaganda is definitely happening. State actors, if they want to attack a grassroots movement, use infiltration, surveillance, intimidation, coercion, blackmail, rumors, and drama. They've done that with every grassroots movement in history, and it is naive to think that they're not doing it this time. Why not? Of course they are. So, state actors do not use overt, direct, and technological attacks, especially not against technologists. They're going to use covert, underhanded, and mostly psychological, reputation, and sentiment attacks to attack this technology. And they already are doing so. Banksters vs. Bitcoin, Yvonne asks, as big banks, governments, ruling organizations, are threatened, or should be threatened by Bitcoin. Eventually they will lose money and power. How do you see this big, upcoming battle playing out? It's very difficult to predict how this battle will play out. I'm actually gratified by the fact that, so far, the main reaction has been to underestimate the threat. There's one advantage here, which is that big, incumbent organizations historically massively underestimate the threat of disruptive technologies, until it's too late to do anything about it, whether it is Kodak underestimating digital cameras, and then getting steamrolled by Nokia, which wasn't even a camera manufacturer, whether it's car companies underestimating Tesla, whether it's Walmart underestimating Amazon and online shopping, whether it's Blockbuster underestimating Netflix. Until very, very late into the competition, you were still hearing many of the executives of these companies saying, we have a hundred years of tradition behind us, loyal customers, the tangible quality of analog film, the eternal joy of analog photography, these new technologies cannot possibly, will not possibly overtake us. Nobody will want to shop online. Nobody can really stream videos online. People like rewinding VHS cassettes. Okay, they never said that one. But still, hubris, dismissive attitudes, complacency are characteristics of large, incumbent organizations. One of the things that makes me optimistic is that I think they will continue to underestimate Bitcoin. And I hope they do for a very long time until it's way, way too late to do anything. And even if they did figure it out and wanted to try to do something, they don't really have too many options. They can't compete against it, because the very architecture of these organizations is centralized, and they can't compete against decentralized threats. They can't regulate it out of existence, because regulation is the first thing that this technology disrupts. They can't prevent people from using it, because in the places where it's needed most, people are so desperate to use technologies to gain their financial freedom, that they will break any law put in their place and risk imprisonment, or worse, as we've seen in places like Venezuela. They can't intimidate people from stopping to use it. And so, in the end, there's really not much they can do. But still, I'd rather they didn't figure that out until a lot later. Somewhat of a related question. In your view, what's going to be the geopolitical impact of this, especially when it comes to pegged currencies or rogue nations? Yes. The geopolitical impact of this is absolutely enormous. Part of the reason for that is because over the last 50 years, we have converted money from being a store value medium of exchange and unit of account, into being a system of control and a geopolitical pawn in a global game. When you have national money, what I call flag money. You remember the old airlines that had a flag on the tail? Those are obsolete. Now that's happening to money. The idea that money becomes a system of control to play geopolitical games through embargoes and currency controls, is itself a relic of the industrial era, and is being made rapidly obsolete by this technology. It has radical geopolitical implications. It removes the ability of sovereigns to control monetary supply. Most importantly, it removes the ability of central banks to take the entire population hostage on some kind of crazy hyperinflation drive into disaster. As we're seeing happen right now in Venezuela, we've seen it happen in Brazil, Argentina, Cyprus, Greece, etc. In all of those cases, the initial reaction is to apply currency controls, so as to stop the population from fleeing and keep them all bound into this experiment. That game is over, not yet visible, because only a tiny sliver of the population can escape the controls. Right now in Venezuela, we see the largest surge in use of Bitcoin in the world because of their hyperinflation problems. Only a tiny percentage of the population can escape. What happens when that's 10% of the population? When it's 15%, 20%, 25%, at that point the entire hyperinflation experiment goes wrong. The entire central bank currency control system becomes fatally undermined. This has enormous geopolitical implications. Your initial reaction to this is, but we shouldn't, but we mustn't, but we can't. But it is. That's the basis we have to start with.