 Hey folks, it's Brian. I'm here at BTC, the Blockchain Training Conference. I'm sitting here with a pretty prominent member of the Bitcoin and Blockchain community, Andreas Antonopoulos. Thank you very much. Great to meet you, Brian. Great to meet you as well. Andreas, you've done quite a bit in the space. You've written a book, you're a very popular speaker, you've taught courses at a university, consulted for various startups. Tell me a little bit in terms of how you first got into Bitcoin and Blockchain and you know what you, the progression that you've seen up until today since you have such a kind of high bird's-eye view of everything that's going on. I got into the space in the beginning of 2012. I'd ignored Bitcoin a couple of times before that. I kind of dismissed it as gambling money or silly internet's money, geek, nerd money. I read the paper December of 2011 and it's changed my perspective. I realized that there was a lot more depth to this and in January 2012 I dropped all of my other professional associations and projects and devoted myself full-time to Bitcoin and nothing else and started working full-time in the space. Didn't actually get paid for a very long time so it was a bit of a jump into the wilds, you know, into the unknown and you know really focused on education, on trying to use some of my skills at explaining things and talking about Bitcoin and helping people understand what it is, how it works, what implications it has. I'm putting it in context, in a broader context. In 2013 I started writing the book Mastering Bitcoin. It was published at the end of 2014 and it's now being translated into 14 languages. It's available under an open-source license. Anyone can download it to read it for free or of course they can also buy it on Amazon if they want, which is great. I've been teaching in the space. The space has developed dramatically and in many ways it's changed. I think in the early days you had a core of highly committed, ideologically focused people who embraced this, who really took to Bitcoin because of specific ideology, like really focused on private money, on money without intermediaries, without banks and governments and looked to Bitcoin as a tool to create a new power structure, if you like, or to change power structures. Now as the technology has become more mainstream, so has the audience, so have the influences and we've seen a rush of investments into the space and in many cases it's not ideological investment, it's predicated purely on profit motives, which isn't a bad thing, it's investing in the space. Ironically we now have the banks singing our tune. We went from essentially being ridiculed as a space to this compromise position where they're trying to cherry pick the things that they're comfortable with, the blockchain instead of Bitcoin. 2015 I think was the year of Bitcoin is bad, blockchain is good. Now we come full circle and Bitcoin is the new blockchain and people are beginning to figure out that oh you know what, maybe Bitcoin is where all of the really serious blockchain activity is actually happening and now we've got the banks singing our tune which is funny and we've seen kind of a shift in perception. We went through a period where there was a lot of negative propaganda and perception. At first kind of dismissing it as a pyramid scheme or an investment scheme, missing the technology and the uniqueness of it and then gradually going into kind of more negative coverage about oh it's going to be used by criminals and this that and the other and now a realization that it is in fact a platform and this platform can be used for any purpose and you know it's my firm belief that as you broaden the applicability of this technology you broaden the audience that get participates in this technology and it becomes mainstream, it becomes mainstream in its culture, it becomes mainstream in its values, it becomes mainstream in its motives and what our mainstream values and motives, feeding your family, shelter, health care, education, sanitation, you know the fundamental values of family and society get reflected just like the internet at first was full of weirdos and geeks and in many cases scam artists and things like that and now it's full of cap videos. I do find it interesting the conversation has definitely changed. I mean I first caught wind of Bitcoin some time after 2012, 2013, 2014 and even then till now I've noticed the conversation drastically changed so I can't imagine what it was like if you were in Bitcoin that same 2010 or the one that came afterwards where it started off with your early adopters, your anarchists, your type of libertarians, the people who are against the state and now you have outside banks, consultants, major accounting firms interested in the idea of this Bitcoin and blockchain but we've yet to see this idea of a killer app, this amazing technology where there is this one or two subset of applications that can kind of blanket everything and across the world. What is your opinion of a killer app? Is it something that's going to come out? Is it something that's already in the works? What is your thoughts of a major application that will take this technology and bring it to the next level? I think we already have a killer app. I think we have a couple of killer apps. It's difficult to recognize them as such because in many of the circles where we discuss Bitcoin we have the privilege of banking that is very easy to use, inexpensive, that allows us multi-currency use but the bottom line is that the killer app has already emerged. The killer app is borderless, open, censorship-resistant currency and payments that cannot be interfered with, that are open to anyone in the world, that do not require a background check, a credit check, or the provision of identity that can be used on any phone and that can send money near instantaneously and for very low or no fees anywhere in the world. That is a killer app. Payments are a $1.7 trillion a year economy and so you don't need much more but there is more. The other killer app that we see again and again is immutability. Bitcoin is the immutable ledger. It's the one that provides immutability on a global scale, on a planetary scale with the underwriting of a very large investment in energy but that very large investment in energy is reminding actually provides a very strong thermodynamic guarantee of immutability. It's redefined the very word immutability. When you have terawatt hour immutability in Bitcoin, pretty much any other form of immutability isn't. It isn't immutable anymore because immutability is defined as the upper range of how hard it is to change something. I think that's a killer app, the ability to have something that is unchanging and that over time becomes more and more immutable and more and more strong. Plus payments. That's all the killer app we need to go mainstream. The need is enormous. There are billions of people who are unbanked. There are billions more who are underbanked. There are billions more who have use of just one currency, live in countries where the governments and the banks are thoroughly corrupt and where monetary crises and currency crises and hyperinflation on war and refugee situations are part of daily life. Can I see the use of Bitcoin to buy my morning latte instead of using a Visa card at Starbucks? No, but all that demonstrates is the privilege of being part of 3% of the population that has that level of banking. Well, the other 97% have much bigger needs, needs that are not being served by the current banking system. So what do you need once you have that killer app? And the answer is really simple. Time. All we need is time. As time goes by, the adoption, the usefulness, the ease of use, the ease of security increase and spread. And we see broader and broader adoption of these technologies. And we're seeing the result of time. We're seeing an explosion of startups in the ecosystem, venture capital come in, major industry players who didn't really consider Bitcoin or blockchain as a thing now learn more about it. So they're really in a large learning stage right now. Tell me about the skill gaps because now everyone can understand or is beginning to understand the need of Bitcoin and blockchain. But what about the supply of talent, the supply of people who understand it developers, marketers, so on and so forth, where are we there when it comes to it? Oh, it's it's a tiny pool of skill. And that skill is very varied. There's probably a few hundred thousand people who know what Bitcoin or blockchain is beyond the very surface layer, who've used it for a year or so who have some experience in it. There's probably a few 10,000, 10s of 1000s of people who understand the basics of how the technology work. There are single digit 1000s of people who understand the technology in depth. And there are probably just hundreds of people who have deep expertise who understand the real nuances and the subtle aspects of this technology. Now that number is constantly growing. And of course, you know, in a space where being a veteran means you've been in the space for four or five years. It's really, you know, computer science is a young science compared to law, accounting, and some of the other things we touch, right? Bitcoin and blockchain are affecting economics and law and accounting professions that have hundreds, thousands of years of tradition in them. Computer science is a 60, 70 year old discipline and blockchain science is a five year old discipline. It's maybe a six year old discipline, if you assume some of the very early people involved in this. But don't confuse age with impact. And this may be a new science, but it's going to it's it's punching above its weight range is going to have a very big impact. And you're going to see a seven year old science change 1000 year old professions like law in ways that are completely unanticipated. To do that, we have to train business management, administrative roles, sales, economics, finance, regulatory compliance, all of these professions. There is enormous demand for people who have the ability to understand and specialize in blockchain related technologies. The skills are very transferable. If you learn Bitcoin, you also know many of the other blockchains, you learn the fundamentals, whether whether you're working in Bitcoin, in Ethereum, in a private ledger, or in any other space. All of these skills are transferable, which is ironic, of course, because not only are Bitcoin people training to to be useful to the banks, but the banks pour a billion dollars into training people who can learn how to do Bitcoin. So it's it's kind of that double edged sword. The more people they train in this technology, the more it's going to disrupt them. So yes, skills are my main focus education is my main focus. And in building this new industry, that means training up 10s of 1000s of people over a very short period of time. And I mean, that training is ever evolving. Right. One of the interesting things with the network and people that I work with is that it makes you question a lot of things. Bitcoin and blockchain just being in the space, it makes you question the first thing for me that I got into it was what is money? Yeah, what is money? Absolutely. So first learning about Bitcoin after kind of reading the white paper, watching some of your videos and other videos, it just led me to that question. What is money? Which if you think about it, most people go to work for 40 hours a week for this concept of money, but most people don't really know what it is. They have no idea what one of the oldest technologies of humankind is how it works, how it affects their life. And Bitcoin puts contradictions in place that force you to question some of the fundamental assumptions about money. Because it doesn't provide the standard answers. And so it's easy to confuse money with the form of money we have now. But that is not money. Money is a far more abstract and more fundamental technology than the current instance of what we mostly accept as money. Money is paper money backed by debt money issued by central bankers. You know, that hasn't always been money. It won't always be money. And Bitcoin forces you to look at that contradiction and reevaluate. I think there's many more deep insights that come from learning this technology. And, you know, I mentioned earlier, I said we have to train up tens of thousands of people. Perhaps that's a slightly formal way of saying it. And maybe I should back away from that a bit and say, it's not just about training. This is not going to be a top down. Let me teach you Bitcoin kind of moment. It's not going to be an academic institution thing only. It's not just going to be educational organizations or even certification organizations like C4, who's sponsoring this conference and I'm a board member. A lot of it is very informal, very grassroots. It's 14 year old kids dabbling in in Ethereum contracts from high school and learning how to program like I was when I was a kid and learning how to program in my early teens. It's people in colleges, people in other jobs who are just playing around and trying to learn these concepts. A lot of it is informal. A lot of it is experiential training, which is far more valuable than classroom training. There aren't enough classrooms to teach the people we need. A lot of this is going to be in the classroom of public action and participation and experimentation. When I say training is a slightly formal way, we need to think of it much more broadly. This is a learning space. In this learning space, it's continuous learning. In this five years, I work in this space full time. I am learning full time. Every week I learn something that surprises me and that forces me to reevaluate some of my assumptions and insights. And then usually soon after that, I do a talk to tell everyone about the new insight I have in this space. It's never boring. It's always exciting. And if you enjoy learning, it is a wonderful space to be in because you are learning all the time. Absolutely agree. Maybe we can shift gears a little bit. So we've thrown out the term Bitcoin and blockchain. An analogy that people have told me to explain the differences and the concept between the two, it's like imagine blockchain being the internet and Bitcoin being like email. So an application that's built on a protocol. So Bitcoin is really just the first application that we're going to see of what the blockchain can do. Is that analogy correct? How would you explain to someone just learning about the differences between Bitcoin, blockchain and what blockchain can do? I'm biased. So I'm going to flip that around and say, actually, I don't think that is correct. I think Bitcoin is the internet of money. I think Bitcoin is the internet. Blockchain is the information super highway. Blockchain is cyberspace. Blockchain is the word that people use to describe something they don't quite understand. That's nicely hyped up that they want to put a nice headline around. If you were around in the 90s, when the internet was growing around and you were listening to the conversation, people were talking about cyberspace and the information super highway. They were trying to pick and choose the parts of the internet that felt like futuristic jets and sci-fi. They tried to pick the parts that sounded corporate and investable and safe and comfortable to them. They weren't thinking that the information super highway would launch a revolution in Egypt or run drones that are looking at police brutality from the crowd's perspective or that the internet would be used to subvert powerful institutions, many major institutions in our life. They wanted it to be about leisure and consumption and television delivered to you 24 seven. And that's not what's really interesting about the internet. What's really interesting was not having corporations stream entertainment to us. What's really interesting is about subverting the role of producer and consumer about empowering individuals about connecting the world about shrinking the globe about bypassing censorship and giving open access to everyone. So when they say blockchain, what they want is a nice comfy TV version of Bitcoin. And Bitcoin can't be tamed like that. Bitcoin is raw, global, open, transnational. And it is where the action is. There is no other real blockchain. The only blockchains that matter are the open global blockchains, things like Bitcoin and Ethereum, things like that, that actually work and are large scale global experiments in network centric participatory economics. And then there is a marketing buzzword that people are doing proof of concept research on. And that's what blockchain is until they make something useful with it, something that runs in the real world, something that runs on a large scale. It's nothing more than a marketing term. If someone says blockchain, they haven't given you an answer. They've forced you to ask a lot of follow up questions. What's the consensus algorithm who are responsible for validating the transactions? What is the nature of participation? Is it open to innovation? Is it open to access? Is it a public ledger? Is it transparent? Does it increase accountability? Does it work across borders? How is it regulated? Blockchain doesn't answer any of those questions unless you follow up, right? And so I think we have to be very careful because it's not entirely accidental that people are trying to muddy the waters with like high marketing terms that generate a lot of VC capital. That's not where the interesting stuff is happening. Definitely. And you speak of public blockchain, so Bitcoin. Open blockchains. Public open blockchains. Yes. Bitcoin being one of them, Ethereum being another. Correct. Ethereum has been on the rise lately within, I'd say, the last year, a year and a half. Tell me your thoughts of Ethereum. What is Ethereum? Why is it so important? What's the difference between that and Bitcoin? Why is it an open public blockchain? Tell me a little bit about that. Well, Ethereum is another blockchain. It's an open public, open participation, open innovation blockchain. And whereas the primary function of Bitcoin is to implement currency and payments, and it can do some more complex smart contract operations with a focus on keeping them relatively simple to ensure very, very robust security, very robust and usability with a high energy proof of work algorithm. Ethereum is in a slightly different niche. It specializes in offering a much more flexible programming language for those who are computer scientists atturing complete programming language that allows the expression of arbitrarily complex contracts, which are basically programs that are autonomous, that can own and spend money, that can call other contracts that can own and spend money that can have users interact with them, send them payments and receive payments from them and execute logic to decide how to organize financial association and transactional activities. So with these smart contracts, you can build things like voting organizations that allow people to build essentially ad hoc virtual corporations. You can build alternative currencies, tokens, reward systems, registration systems, et cetera, et cetera. So Ethereum is specialized more in offering this flexibility and richness of expression in a different way than what Bitcoin does. And in that, it has some applications that you can't do with Bitcoin. And of course, there are some applications in Bitcoin that you can't really do with Ethereum. Some people call them rivals. I don't think they are. In fact, I look at them essentially like the lion and the shark, like both dominant within their respective ecosystems, but they can never fight each other because one will always be out of its element in the other's element, right? So that they can each exist in a niche, thrive in that niche and be very effective in that niche. But what makes a shark perfect for water makes it useless on land and vice versa, right? So what makes Ethereum flexible enough to run smart contracts makes it very difficult for it to be used as a reserve currency or robust and mutable ledger and to offer the same levels of security and robust as the Bitcoin has and vice versa. Bitcoin is limited in the expression of contracts that it can do, but the ones that can do much more focus, much more simple, also much more secure. And some. The thing is with with this space is that it's so early that you can really carve your own market. There is there is no direct competitor. Well, there can be direct competitors, but there's such an opportunity that you can really carve your own market right at the end of the day, right? This opens this technology opened an entire ecosystem which has thousands of niches and use cases and applications. And we're going to see a lot of different systems developed, some of which will specialize very narrowly, some of which will be much more broad and generic. And they compete only in the loosest sense. Primarily what they're all doing is exploring the brand new ecosystem to find niches where they can be applied. Exactly. Being useful is the primary competition right now. Finding a place to be useful. And there are many places to be useful. It's going to take a long time until you start seeing, you know, really direct head to head competition in a specific use case. Sure. And it's interesting to see that kind of Bitcoin wouldn't be able to exist without the Internet. Yes. Ethereum was based off of this idea of Bitcoin. Yes. And now there's this new project that has been a buzz, which is the Dow. Yes. Which wouldn't have existed without Ethereum. Correct. Because it's built off of the Ethereum, right? Speak to me a little bit about what the Dow is, your opinion of it, because they have had some recent news come out lately. What are your thoughts of the Dow that de-centralize autonomous organizations? The Dow is the first instance of a running large-scale decentralized organization. The idea is it is a programmable entity that runs on the blockchain that has voting members who buy shares and in buying shares, they create essentially shareholder capital within this entity. And those shares then give them voting rights to create this radical experiment in investment democracy, fund with many managing partners, if you like. If I can ask you a question, what's the difference between that and how a corporation operates? Because a corporation issues shares out to its shareholders. Right. And those shareholders vote for certain decisions through a board. What's the difference between a Dow and a typical corporation with shares? The board. Really, it's that a corporation operates based on a series of organizational structures, right? The articles of organization that set how the board can operate, how they're voted in, who's elected, etc, etc. And that's similar to how smart contract works. But effectively, a traditional corporation is a representative democracy, meaning that the shareholders vote for board members. The board members make decisions as representatives. The Dow is effectively a direct mechanism. The shareholders vote directly for proposals that they can bring up. Almost the way you can bring petitions in some states in the in the United States. Citizen petitions. You gather enough signatures, you get a petition passed and then everyone can vote. And if they vote, it becomes law and you cut out the lawmakers. You cut out the legislative function of that state. Well, the Dow did that with corporations. You put a proposal up if it gets enough supporting signatures, then it's it's eligible for a vote, then the participants can vote past that proposal and fund it. Now, this was the first experiment. Unfortunately, it uncovered a very complex bug in the code, which allowed one of the participants to exploit that bug and drain a lot of the initial capital from that contract. So now we're going to see what the response of the ecosystem will be as to how they deal with that particular problem. You know, it's really important to understand that none of this is theoretical. We're not sitting around writing papers or talking about what if we did some things to change the world? This is a space in which we're doing experimental application in real world, large scale networks of network centric and participatory systems that have never happened before on a scale that has never happened before. And guess what happens when you do experiments? Sometimes they blow up in your face. If you invest in any of these things, if you get involved in any of these things, you must be prepared for the very real chance that is going to blow up in your face. Right. In some of these experiments have shown much more durability. You know, Bitcoin's been running for seven years. The core protocol has never been hacked. We have seen bank failures effectively at the edges with exchanges. Many of them famous and these are part of the growing pains and lessons that are learned. You have to understand that in order to innovate, you have to risk and these are high risk, but they're also high innovation systems. And so, yes, the Dow at the moment seems to have become I wouldn't call it a failed experiment because we can't yet determine the outcome, but it certainly ran into some very serious problems. But it's also going to teach us some very valuable lessons there will be more Dow's. There will be more decentralized organizations. There will be more investment vehicles. The Dow itself was the largest Kickstarter funded crowdfunded project in history. And the next Dow will be the largest crowdfunded project in history and there will be many, many, many more to go. For reference, how much did the Dow raise as a crowdfund? I think at the top of the price, it was at about two hundred and twenty five million dollars in value raised over a period of about 30 days. And comparing that to Ethereum, Ethereum, I believe, raised 20 million. Ethereum raised 20 million at the beginning and reached peak valuation or market capitalization if you like of approximately two and a half billion dollars. Right. And so we're going to see that increase over time as more and more experiments and applications come. Absolutely. I think it's wrong to look at these as investment vehicles, to look at these as stocks or opportunities to invest. A lot of people get burned when they look at these in that way. You have to look at these as technology platforms. They're technology platforms that run with real money. So then you have to be very, very careful. But there's a lot to learn in this space. Yeah. And I like your statement of fact that this is not theoretical. This is live. So this is not theoretical. The only way to learn how to use programmable money is with real money. Everything else is irrelevant. Right. It doesn't matter what you think will happen. Yeah. What matters is what actually happens. It's like you're on a rocket ship. It's in the air and you're repairing the rocket ship and coming up with new add-ons during the moment of. Right. Absolutely. That's really this. Yes. And then there's a lot of risk in that, but there's also a lot of value because it's the only way to learn the really important lessons and the innovation in this space is just absolutely breathtaking in its scope and acceleration. Yeah. Because a lot of what this technology does is, for example, you set a direct democracy as opposed to a representative democracy. And what that does is kind of take out the human element, the ability to be selfish in your decisions being that representative there and codifying that. Well, I think it doesn't take out the human element. It decentralizes the human element. It actually depends on people being selfish, but it depends on many, many, many people at the edges of the system be all being selfish and in that way, creating this balance of economic incentives, risks and rewards that keeps the system both stable and secure. We see that with Bitcoin mining. We see it with a consensus algorithm. We see it with a doubt, too. The idea is if you give enough participants twenty five thousand participants the right to vote that you engage the wisdom of the crowd in these proposals. What it does is though it disintermediates, it removes trusted third parties. It removes intermediaries, middlemen from any kind of system. It removes hierarchy. It turns them into flat decentralized systems. In the end, the best way to understand these technologies is they represent decentralization, which has been a fundamental force brought forth by the Internet in the context of money. So we're taking the concept of decentralization from the Internet and we're applying it for the very first time in history to the context of money. And decentralization is an enormously powerful system of thought and money is an ancient and enormously powerful technology. And when you bring those two together, a lot of things change. So we've talked about Bitcoin, we've talked about blockchain, we've talked about Ethereum, the Dow. What are some other interesting projects that are going on right now that you see that you think could be very, very impactful or just general interest? There's many very interesting projects. To me, I think some of the applications that are most interest are areas where traditional systems are failing to serve the needs of people. So anything to do with economic inclusion, remittances, the alleviation of poverty, connecting people to a global economy with a minimum amount of barriers in place. Those kinds of projects are interesting to me because I think they will have an enormous impact because there's enormous need for them. The other area that I'm very interested in is the sharing economy, taking untapped resources that exists on personal computers, untapped resources of labor or untapped resources of productivity that may exist and bringing them into a marketplace where people can trade for these resources. Think Uber utilizing the resource or lift of your personal vehicle to bring transportation to other people or Airbnb doing that for your home space, you have a room, it's not utilized, you monetize it, you give it price discovery, you connect it in a marketplace with others. Well, the role of currency and payment systems that we see through blockchain is really powerful in that space. A lot of the things that are centralized that require a company like Airbnb and Uber primarily require a company because that company has to process payments. You take away the need to process payments by introducing a blockchain technology, you can do Uber without Uber, Airbnb without Airbnb, lift without lift, person to person directly with just matching software without the need for a company that takes a 20% cut. We could really revolutionize industries that are only a few years old and could already be flipped on their head. Now think of how you could apply that to the fact that we all carry around laptops that have access this capacity that we don't use. Networking capacity, CPU capacity, we have Wi-Fi hotspots at home that are under utilized. We could take these resources, measure them, make them available, monetize them and share them so that I could share Wi-Fi at my home, earn some kind of token, Wi-Fi token, and then take that Wi-Fi token, go on vacation, and instead of paying a hotel $14 a night for Wi-Fi, I could simply piggyback on the neighbor's Wi-Fi and pay them in Wi-Fi tokens that I earned by sharing mine. And I redeem on the Wi-Fi that they're sharing. I could rent out computing or graphics capabilities on my computer so that someone in my building who's playing a VR game could pull in 20 computers from his neighbors over a local high-speed network and get much higher resolution in graphics processing just for an hour to play a game, pay with CPU coin, and then later during the day rent out their computer when they're not using it so someone else can enjoy a VR game at higher resolution. So, you know, this concept of taking resources that are underutilized and sharing them, I think that's really fascinating to me what you can do with personal clouds, personal computing and sharing economy. And I mean, the idea of sharing economy is generally pretty new to be able to take my asset that I have and rent it out. But kind of what you're saying is that this goes beyond the realm of physical because with Uber, I'm renting out a physical car with a BVB, I'm renting out my physical room. For others, there's another sharing service, TaskRabbit, you're actually physically doing something. But what you're saying this allows you to do is rent out digital, is to rent out your storage. But it also, yes, it expands the scope to both virtual and physical things, but it also removes the need. And this is really critical. A lot of the systems in our society that are centralized are centralized because the payment networks are centralized. The reason I can't pay a driver directly to take me somewhere is because they can't set up the very complex operation of accepting a credit card. And with something like Bitcoin, they don't need to, they can accept it right on the spot, be guaranteed that it's not forged, be perfectly secure in that money once they receive it and give me a ride. So the question is, if you decentralize payments, then you also decentralize all of the companies that are centralized because of payments, like Kuber and Airbnb. Right. And the majority of companies that are valuable play that role of payment facilitation. They're intermediaries. Yes. And so that's that's a huge value add to the customer, but it's also going to take out many of the major players right now that facilitate these transactions. Yeah. The internet disintermediated communications intermediaries primarily people who had intermediary roles in marshaling and distributing information, newspapers, retailers that were trying to do market discovery and find audiences, news, media entertainment. Right. All of those things got disintermediated because the aggregation of information was the bottleneck and that got removed. Right. But the internet did not disintermediate the intermediaries of payments. And in fact, it reconsentrated them. Well, Bitcoin is the internet of money and it's going to disintermediate the payment middleman and and completely change and create a new wave of the internet, which has even further reaching implications. So maybe let's look forward here. So the the ability of what they're going to do payment wise is allow financial inclusion. So right now, of the six billion, 6.5 billion people on earth, there's a certain small percentage of people that have access to banking services. Yeah. So you and I can easily buy an item on eBay on Amazon, but let's say my family back at home in Vietnam, who operated in a cash-based society can't jump online, can't participate in this global economy. Absolutely. So what is the world going to look like once Bitcoin goes mainstream, once, you know, applications are in people's phones and people can actually contribute this? What's the world going to look like and how long will it take? Do you think I think it's going to take a couple of decades before you see very broad adoption of these technologies. But it's not going to be equal. As Nicholas Negroponte from the MIT Media Lab once said, the future is here today. It's just distributed unevenly, meaning that some places adopt faster in some places adopt slower and the penetration of new technologies is distributed unevenly across the world. You have situations where there's going to be enormous needs to implement these things right away. I think we're going to see adoption of digital currencies that are out to the control of governments in places where governments are failing to provide currency to people. So places that have monetary crises, Argentina, maybe Brazil, maybe Greece, you're going to see that places where you have very large expat populations that send large remittance flows, Mexico, Philippines, Vietnam, places that are cash-based societies where you have very low liquidity and flexibility of capital. You know, the statistics are really staggering out of the seven and a half billion people on this planet, the World Bank estimates two and a half billion people are completely unbanked, living cash-based societies. They only count the head of household in that two and a half billion number, and they only count completely unbanked. I would say the numbers are much bigger than that. If you were to take the underbanked those who have some access to banking facilities, but very limited single currency, very restrictive, you're probably looking at close to four billion. Then if you take it the other way and you say, well, I can open a brokerage account and be trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange tomorrow. You know, what do you call that? Privileged power banking. If you take the privileged power banking, the people who have no currency controls, the ability to operate in any market, any currency without restrictions from their government, complete freedom to do so 24 hours a day anywhere in the world. There's maybe a billion and a half people. So Bitcoin is all about the other six billion. The ones who don't have power banking and what happens when you give all of them power banking, extreme privileged banking, you give them the power to act as a bank, not just as a bank customer, but as a bank when installing an app on your phone turns you into a banker and gives you equal access to a world of payments. And you can do that both for the people who have limited access to the people who have absolutely no access to financial services. It changes the world. Unfortunately, we continue to see reactionary attitudes. You know, you give me the example of Vietnam. Vietnam is one of a handful of countries that have banned Bitcoin completely. And which is really it's really a shame because I think there's enormous need and there could be enormous benefit. But the fear of new and different technology and losing control of money at a state level is so pervasive that they're treating it with great trepidation. Yeah, I think we're going to see those attitudes change. Yeah, people are going to see it more as an opportunity rather than a risk. Yeah. And you're always going to see people push borders regardless of what people at the top say. I mean, even though they say Bitcoin is banned in Vietnam, I think they have a blockchain conference happening this month. Yeah, making it illegal in countries where the rule of law is not respected strongly, where corruption is endemic, where the people who make the law are not trusted by anybody else may actually have the unintended consequence of increasing the circulation of these things. We saw that in the past when the Soviet Union tried to ban the ownership of hard dollars, the first to start stuffing hard dollars into suitcases with a very polite bureau that passed the law and it became extremely common to bribe politicians, police judges and military officers in hard dollars because that's why you knew you were dealing with a completely corrupt official. If they were willing to take dollars and break the law, you could trust them not to turn you in, right? And in fact, the circulation of hard dollars quadrupled over the next few years. So banning it had the exact opposite effect. I think we're going to see the same thing with with digital currencies. Right. Maybe last question that I got for you. Bitcoin price has been on tear lately. Yes, I think right now in Canadian dollars, it's just hovering under a thousand bucks, maybe nine hundred fifty bucks. What does that price have to do with kind of people's perception of Bitcoin and blockchain and where do you think the price is going to be maybe a month from now, two months from now? I wish the price didn't matter. I wish people would pay attention on the value and impact of the technology. The price is primarily driven by speculation. It's not driven by fundamentals. There are some fundamentals that are influencing it. The fact that Bitcoin survived, the fact that it went through a downturn and came back, provides strong evidence that there's more to it and it refuses to simply die. And in the end, that becomes a compelling feature of digital currency is its ability to be resilient and remain active. I think in addition to that, we are seeing kind of the end game of Keynesian central banking and monetary policy. We're seeing a fundamental global crisis and currency wars that have broken out. You know, right now, the US dollar and the yuan are in a race to the bottom for who's going to devalue their currency and debase their currency faster. Last last month, we saw the yuan have another devaluation. That drove a lot of people into Bitcoin. Now, a lot of that speculation and following momentum, I think some of it is also capital flight. It's using Bitcoin as an exit valve together with precious metals, gold, silver, etc. to get out of a currency that's being debased. Last week, the Federal Reserve in the United States refused to raise interest rates because the economy is dead again and is demonstrating that they are increasingly not in control if they ever were. That loss of credibility, the fact that by not raising interest rates, they're going to continue to debase the currency and drive inflation up and reduce the value, even though it's become a strong currency, will force the yuan to devalue again, which will then push deflation back into the US, which will force the dollar to devalue again. And this game to the bottom continues. And it's not just those two. It's not just those two. 20-some central banks have zero interest policies. We are in a massive monetary crisis. Now, how does Bitcoin stand in there? It is beginning to look like an exit. It's beginning to look like a safety valve. And that has very serious implications, putting a constraint on monetary policy, giving people options. So I'm not going to say that's what's driving the price. I think it's important to note that there is an element of that, and mostly it's speculation. But, you know, who knows where it's going to be next month? Right. It's going to be, you know, one Bitcoin, I guess, in the next five years is going to be worth approximately 1,000 millibits, which is a thousand thousands of a Bitcoin, which is a tautology. A Bitcoin is a Bitcoin. Right. When we stop talking about the exchange rate between Bitcoin and other currencies, then you know that this is really a long term store of value. In the meantime, we're going to see wild swings. This is the fifth big ramp up in Bitcoin's history. It's probably going to retrench to a lower level and then bounce back again and again and again. It's going to be a roller coaster. We're talking about a 12 to 14 billion dollar economy that is global, and that means that it's like a little boat buffeted by the waves. You have to get used to volatility.