 Hey, folks, my name is Adam B. Levine, and this is Speaking of Bitcoin. Before this show was called Speaking of Bitcoin, we produced episodes for seven years under the original name Let's Talk Bitcoin. On today's show, we're traveling back in time to June 7th, 2013, for episode 14, where we'll get a reminder of just how far we've come in eight short years. At the time, the price of Bitcoin was just over $72 per BTC. And although much has changed, far more has stayed the same. In this episode, we discussed the wild idea of a microtransaction-powered social network, the very first regulatory outreach efforts conducted by then-in-Beta Kraken's parent company Payward, the idea of a retroactive Bitcoin paywall as a way to solve media monetization, an interview with one of the very first Bitcoin ATM or Bitcoin machines, as they called it, manufacturers with Zach Harvey from Lamasu, and finally a discussion about full nodes versus light nodes in the world before. If you're looking for current news, this isn't the episode for you. But if you want to take a peek at the world before Ethereum, or even tokens that didn't require their own miners, thanks for listening and enjoy the show. Hi, and welcome to Let's Talk Bitcoin, a twice-weekly show focused on the ideas, projects, and people building the new digital economy and the future of money. My name is Adam B. Levin. I'm a writer and speaker who likes to talk about complicated topics in understandable terms. Joining me in our twice-weekly search for clarity, Andrea Sam Antonopoulos is an expert in distributed systems and decentralized networks. Hi there. Dr. Stephanie Murphy is a scientist and syndicated radio host. Hey. So we're going to jump right into listener emails today, because we've got one, and it's a pretty long discussion topic, so let's get right into it. Hi, Adam, really enjoy the show. I have a question that I hopes you could give some insight on. As I understand it, micro payments are not really feasible at the moment. Do you see that as being resolved in the future? I wonder, because it seems there could be a system of pay-as-you-use websites and services that allow something like a social network without ads or any kind of invasion of privacy. People could choose the option for something like Facebook or a separate network with this model. The only problem is that it would need to involve such small payments that I don't know how such transactions could be done. In the same vein, would it be feasible for a similar system to exist, but instead of payments, the user provides bits of mining for the site? Maybe this has all been covered, but it just seems like people could pay half a penny or so each day they use Facebook, but eliminate all the ads and other intrusions. It would probably be worth it for everyone involved. Thanks. This is where I see the most potential for Bitcoin. When you talk about large transactions, that site is almost already taken care of by the existing financial structures that we already have. Sure, there are costs and fees associated with it, but it's possible to do it. As opposed to these microtransaction concepts where you're sending pennies worth of value or $0.10 worth of value, that's pretty hard in the existing system. So again, this follows on the topic that we spent a bit of time on last episode talking about the idea of neutrality and which transactions are okay, which transactions aren't okay. At this point, do you guys think that microtransactions in the penny range are feasible and moving forward, what does that look like? I think there will be a solution that's created as long as people have an incentive like Facebook or whoever to make money off of this. I mean, it's kind of as simple as that. Something that I could envision would be them kind of bundling these micropayments, so you wait till you have a month's worth of penny payments or you pay in advance for a month or something like that. Perhaps they subsidize the transaction fees and they bundle the payments together. It's really up to them to get creative to kind of solve that problem. It also brings up the question of what is a micropayment, you know? We don't really have a firm amount under which we can say, yes, this is definitely a micropayment. It's kind of a sliding scale. And so as the natural disincentives that come with smaller payments become evident, like the transaction fee potentially overshadowing the actual amount that's being sent, there'll be more incentives to bundle those payments into larger payments and avoid having these kind of dust transactions. I think this is more easily solvable if we stop thinking of dust transactions in the context of Western developed countries. This is all about the other six billion, the unbanked, the people who live around the world not in developed countries. So the real microtransaction is what it costs to buy a cup of coffee in the Sudan or in a small cafe on a beach in Indonesia. A couple of rupees, ten rupees, someone talked about that at the conference, in fact. They challenged the developers and said, you know, what you think of a microtransaction is not a microtransaction in my country. We would like to see ten rupee transactions. Just for context, the minimum fee that's set in the client and accepted by most is 0.0005 Bitcoin, or what is that, half a millibit. And half a millibit is six and a quarter cents on the US dollar. If you do the translation, I may have gotten that wrong. But the bottom line is that puts a lower limit. At most, if you consider the microtransaction one that is no less than twice the size of the fee. So you can really pay about 12 cents, half of it going to the fee and half of it going to the transaction right now. That's the lower limit. But the whole point of that change made recently was to allow miners to gradually reduce that limit while enabling market mechanisms to properly compensate them for including smaller and smaller transactions in the blockchain. I think that the idea of defining microtransactions is challenging. But it really is very contextual. Because you're thinking about it from the other six billion perspective, but my primary area of focus has been content monetization. And so microtransactions are a huge deal there. When people use PayPal, the minimum that they're going to send somewhere is between $2.50 and $5.00. Below that, it doesn't really make any sense with the fee structure. And just in general, I've never heard of anyone even asking for payments much below that outside of flat-out donations where the fee is being waived by the company. For my purposes, when I think of microtransactions, I'm thinking of anything that's like a dollar or less. A dollar and below is something that nearly anybody has the ability in, again, the developed world, once you start talking about the Sudan, then obviously the equation changes. But in the developed world, that's a doable figure for just about anybody. And for even people who don't want to buy something but just want to support something, those are the numbers where it kind of makes sense. And so with that in mind, that's a 6.5% transaction fee on something that is ostensibly supposed to be tailored towards these small transactions. And ultimately, that's a pretty large number. You're still talking about, you know, that's like 0.08 of a Bitcoin, I think, for a dollar transaction at current exchange rates. I think that the solution in the long term here is to try not to screw it up by putting rules in place and then over the long term move to mechanisms so that it isn't being set by a person or a group of people. And so the rate can be floated and you can have people who have high priority transactions, subsidizing people who have low priority transactions and are essentially doing micro payments. Yeah, I like that. Even in your content monetization scheme, Adam, if someone was paying, say, two or three bucks a month to follow their favorite website and wanted to be able to read 100 pieces of content on that site and wanted to make that up with micro payments, essentially you're looking at enabling micro payments of 2 to 3 cents per piece of content to get 100 pieces of content to add up to a couple of dollars, which most people would feel comfortable with. So even in your content monetization scheme, you're looking at that, and in that case, the fee is 300%. Right, exactly. Now, let's point out, that's the current fee, right? So there's two issues here. One is the minimum fee was recently changed into a parameter rather than fixed in code so that over time, it can be set independently by miners to create a market. And there's no market mechanism yet, but that's the goal. The second thing is to think about this being highly dependent on the current value of a Bitcoin. It's essentially over time, the deflationary pressure causes increases in the percentage of the fees. If Bitcoin was $1,000 today, suddenly that five-millibit transaction fee is six bucks and we're PayPal again. The setting of the parameters ultimately has to change and it looks like we're moving in that direction. The stop gap, Stephanie, I think is what you described, where basically you have an entity like Facebook, again, in the listener's example, if Facebook was going to, instead of running ads, charge everybody one penny a day, for example, to have a Facebook account that's active, then Facebook could of course take 30 pennies and say, okay, well, here's your month worth of contribution rather than doing it as each daily, we'll just do it as a month. So one of the exciting things about Bitcoin from a capability standpoint is that by enabling small stuff, it enables you to be really granular. Granular and granularity are words that I like to use when talking about this stuff because it means that you can take something that's very large, like say a whole Bitcoin, and divide it into 100,000 pieces and treat each piece as its own little entity that put together as a whole makes up a whole, but you can take each individual grain as its own entity unto itself, and you're still able to perform transactions with it in the same way as you can with this larger stuff. It's the same thing here, you're taking a month and you're trying to shrink it down into 30 days, and then you take each of those days and you shrink it down into hours. And so technically, if we can work out this system where transaction fees are based on utility and based on speed of delivery rather than just a flat rate, then you can do all of these really, really small things and it probably will be okay for the system overall. Adam, you're absolutely right, but the issue here is that if you try to bundle these transactions, you run into a couple of other problems. The first one is that you need to do some rather complex accounting, and the second problem is that Bitcoin is a push mechanism, not a pull mechanism. So you can't do recurring charges and debit someone. You have to essentially have them pay in advance for a month, which means then you can't really do that based on the content they consume, because they consume the content first and then they bundle the payment later, or you'd have to top up their account and it gets really, really complicated. So the solution essentially ends up messing up with the accounting of microtransactions. It would be much better if for every piece of content you could charge individually if you want or not and do the microtransaction right there and then and not try to bundle these microtransactions together. But I think we're getting there. The point is that the minimum fee as it is set now is simply a parameter, and over time the idea is that the minimum fee is the correct price point at which the supply of space in the blockchain meets the demand for transaction size. We have to think of that price equilibrium, not as a point in space, but essentially as a curve, and that curve exponentially decreases over time as the value of bitcoin increases, as the size of the blockchain increases, and as the number of transaction increases. So the deflationary spiral is reflected directly in the transaction fee, and over time that curve drops it until you're talking about charging satoshis for satoshis, not a percentage of bitcoin or five millibits. It's millibits, then nanobits, then femtobits all the way down to satoshis. That fee is going to have to move on a curve. We're joined by Constance Choi, the legal mind behind payword and the in-beta Kraken trading platform. Constance, you've been traveling recently to discuss the possible regulatory issues overshadowing bitcoins, otherwise pretty bright future. Can you tell us about your experience? Sure, and thanks for having me on the show, Adam. Well, first, it's a very complicated regulatory regime. But second, just how much businesses are now scrambling in the light of the recent guidance to really understand how these regulations apply to their businesses. We just came from the Bitcoin 2013 conference in San Jose, and the regulatory issues were on everyone's lips. You see regulators struggling with where to put us. You see businesses understanding how regulators understand us. And there's just a lot of uncertainty. The one good thing about the guidance that came out is that it actually does provide a good roadmap. And it also says for right now, this is what the state of the law is. I think that eventually the guidance and the scope of the guidance will have to be clarified and it may be challenged either under a petition for rulemaking or even a suit challenging the scope under the Administrative Protection Act. But for right now, Vincent has said, this is how we understand Bitcoin to work. The feds are definitely paying attention now to how the supplies to Bitcoin and they're actively enforcing. So at least for Bitcoin businesses, it's really, really important now that they cannot operate under the shadow of the law anymore, that this is not something that's going to fly under the radar by regulators. I just came back from a meeting in Washington with Treasury. The reaction there was actually surprising. On one hand, they did tow the party line. They defended the guidance. And on the other, they were willing to listen. And it was very interesting because one question that seemed to come up over and over again from Treasury was, why are all of these emerging payment systems now coming out and why is the existing system not sufficient? And so there seems to be actually a genuine question over there about what Bitcoin can do. And I think that reflects a kind of a fundamental disconnect between the innovations that Bitcoin can offer in the traditional old guard and Treasury. From your conversations, it seemed like Treasury just genuinely didn't understand why this was even an appealing option. They seem to question whether, you know, what benefits it would offer over existing technologies. You know, I see Bitcoin as having enormous potential. I mean, we're talking about frictionless transactions. We're talking about secure, instantaneous global exchange. And this is technology that is in existence that can help right now. And banks just don't operate that way. You know, if you want to send a wire from here to abroad, you have to take your little paper IOU, take it to the bank. The bank will enter it into a system. Then it hops through several intermediaries, each of which takes the slice of your money along the way, only to arrive days later in a different bank where they enter it into their system and release them as IOUs on their end. So you can see how with technology that Bitcoin offers and the protocol offers, you can instantly send it without any intermediaries. Just from a technology perspective, this is very, very new and very exciting. And I think that the regulators are struggling how to fit that within a traditional regulatory framework that didn't really take into account this kind of technology. So your impression is that genuinely, they're trying to work with the community to, I mean, more than anything, to understand what it is that they're looking at so that then they can try to fit it into one of the boxes that they already have prescribed. I mean, is that right? You know, I think that they try to understand it in order to know how to regulate it. I think that it's really up to us at this point to make this ecosystem survive. Washington is not going to make special rules for us and there's a deep entrenchment there. The laws favor the incumbents. So it's up to us really to survive in this regulatory climate to prove to regulators that we can be a legitimate part of the global currency flow. If we want widespread adoption, which I think anyone who's a believer wants, we're going to have to take our businesses and our practices from outside the shadow of the law into the light. The more that we can portray ourselves as legitimate business partners and responsible citizens, I think the better off that will be. Last month, Mount Gox got in some trouble with the Department of Homeland Security because of a form that was filed three years ago. At the time the form was filed, it doesn't appear they were actually out of compliance. It's only after this recent guidance has been issued that then they were able to go back and say, okay, well this form that was submitted that said that they were not a money transmitter at this point three years ago, actually now that has changed. And so there have been actions that have been taken that don't seem to have had any warnings preceded them before those actions were taken. Payward is starting an exchange that is going to operate in the United States in this kind of uncertain regulatory environment that we have where we have guidance but we don't have rules and the guidance is kind of subject to change. Why is that something that your company felt important to take on and what are kind of the risks and rewards of doing it? Just to go back to your question about Mount Gox, the law imputes responsibility regardless of whether you knew you had to follow the law or not. So Finc's position is that the guidance is a clarification of laws that were already in existence. And we've heard from our contacts on the ground that Finc's and regulators are saying, we don't understand why everyone's so up in arms over this guidance. The statute itself says this. Their position is that the guidance is not new but rather clarification of existing law. And in terms of Mount Gox, the moment they started doing currency exchange and money transmission, it was upon them, especially after the Finc's and guidance came out, to go back to their banks and clarify exactly what their services are doing under the law. In terms of the challenges that we're experiencing now, we're at a very critical moment. Bitcoin is gaining traction. Ordinary people. In the past, Bitcoin has been more of a fringe or technologist outlier. And now it's entering the mainstream. You have articles in the Wall Street journals and Forbes and the Atlantic about Bitcoin. People are talking about it on CNN. I think that there is a real need here to have a legitimate ecosystem. In the United States, it's one of the biggest markets right now. A great majority of the users are here in the United States at this time. There is a need here for a fully compliant, secure US-based exchange. And it is, you're right. It is very difficult to do it in this climate. And you're right that Finc's and can come back later and say, no, we actually meant this. They're going to have to come back because the guidance is rather overbroad. But in the meantime, we actually have far more fixed signals from Finc's. We know that they understand Bitcoin to be like cash or like money. We know that they are starting enforcement actions. So we know right now that if you want to operate in the United States, not only that, if you want to service US customers, you have to be following the BSA. And what that means is you need to register as a money services business. It means if you are accepting USD for Bitcoins, if you are transferring Bitcoins to other people's accounts, you're a money transmitter under the current state of the law. And that requires you to register with Finc and as a money services business. And also to register in all 50 states in each state that you do business. And this is whether you are a US-based company or you're a foreign company, a foreign exchange who directs their activities and services to US customers also need to be following this law. So at least for now, we know we're in this money transmitter bucket and in the future that might change. But the requirements are actually very clear on what you need to do now. So it actually seems like it's easier to be kind of big in this situation and to have all the resources to have legal counsel, things like that. Now, from your interpretation, this is something we've been going back and forth on on the show. Do you think these guidelines apply to small person-to-person transactions too? I mean, if those could be detected, would those fall under money transmitter guidelines? The guidance was careful to say that an individual user who transaction Bitcoins is not a money transmitter for the purposes of the BSA. And they're right. This BSA, the Bank Secrecy Act, is meant to apply to financial institutions like banks and other non-bank financial institutions, not the individual end user. It's not meant to reach that far into private lives. Now, the problem is, in their definition of an exchanger, that language is broad enough to potentially cover individual users. And so it's clear that on one hand, they didn't intend to cover the users. On the other, the guidance is, you know, in terms of how they define an exchanger and those activities, it could be read to read upon a user's action. So they're going to have to come back and explain that. But I think that it's clear from the guidance that they really didn't intend person-to-person transactions to be regulated at the institutional level. So now we've talked about regulation in general, but there are two kind of camps when it comes to Bitcoin businesses on this particular topic. There are companies like Payward who think, you know, this is good and we should engage in this process because by participating in the process we can help make it less onerous and frankly better for everyone involved. And then on the other side, there are groups that basically view any sort of participation in the system as validating the system. I mean, it might be that by participating, you acknowledge that they actually have the right to be regulating this when previously people, you know, there was an understanding among some parts of the community that this was not something that would really be regulated by any national government. How do you reconcile those two sides? I mean, is that even a tenable position to take that this is something that won't be regulated, can't be regulated, we shouldn't participate in regulation? I'm absolutely sympathetic to the principle of privacy and anonymity for that sake. To remain anonymous is a matter of principle rather than because you're trying to hide illicit activities. You know, I'm an alum of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I come from a deep privacy background and on a personal level, that's incredibly important to me. But I think that it is a bit naive to think that you can run a legitimate business that handles millions or possibly billions of dollars that enter the global currency flow without some sort of oversight. And I understand on the government side, you know, if there was a company operating that took millions and billions of dollars from people, I would want somebody to be enforcing some sort of reasonable rule on how they should operate and what kind of duty they owe to their own customers, to the public. It's a balancing act. The law is difficult because it has to do that balancing act and it definitely doesn't do it perfectly. One small comfort we can take out of the regulation is that Treasury and Vincent have legitimized Bitcoin as a medium of exchange. They're saying we recognize that this has value and we're recognizing that this can be used as a global medium of exchange. Now they're saying, if you want to be a partner in global exchange, you need to have a certain kind of responsibility to make sure you are not financing terrorists and you're not allowing illicit financial crimes. I think that if we want the ecosystem to survive, again, we need to take this business from outside of the shadow of the law, from outside of Silk Road activities into merchants who take Bitcoins, to users who are able to spend Bitcoins at their local stores, to banks and institutions who accept payments and accounts that hold Bitcoins. So in order to do that, in order to be a player, you do need to follow the law. The law is reactionary. It doesn't prescribe what innovations and how the world should look like. What it does is it reacts to what the world is. I think that everyone would be better off if Bitcoin is adopted, if the ecosystem grows, and when it grows big enough, it may make sense for the government to look back at this and say, hey, here are all these different buckets we could have put it in. We could have said it was money. We could have said it was a commodity. We could have said it was just a different kind of foreign currency. That isn't a national currency. And it may be time once this ecosystem is big enough for them to say, maybe we need to create a whole set of rules because the existing framework is too clunky. And it doesn't really address what this technology can do and what it does. But just the plain truth is, right now it's up to us to survive in this climate and prove ourselves in this regulatory framework. Let's put on our forecaster hats for a second and wildly speculate about what various scenarios are that could happen. Broadly speaking, let's assume that things don't go well and that we get regulations that don't make things easier, make things harder. What do you think that looks like a year from now or so? It's very hard to tell. It's hard to tell how the regulators will react. And I think that we're going to see a lot of businesses who are operating illegally get shut down. We're going to see funds getting seized. I think that the people who will survive this process and the businesses that will survive this process are the ones that are able to be able to comply with the requirements. They might come back and they might come back and say, Bitcoin is too disruptive to the global currency flow and they may try to shut it down. But that's the beauty of the system. It's a totally decentralized network. And unless they shut the internet down, they really couldn't shut Bitcoin down. So I think it's important to note that a lot of the regulatory climate, the issues that we've been talking about are limited to the United States. So as we've talked to regulators in Europe, as we've talked to our contacts abroad, the reception there is much different. I think it's right when Forbes writes that Europe is about five years ahead of the United States and payments innovations. I think that maybe Bitcoin will flourish elsewhere if the United States started repressing it here, if they outlawed it here. You know, I think Bitcoin as a technology, Bitcoin as a medium of exchange will survive. It'll be very interesting to see what happens in the year. I think worst case scenario, countries start outlawing it outright. They try to suppress it, but it will survive in pockets. Do you think that that's a legitimate thing that could be tried? I mean, I know you just said that it wouldn't work necessarily. But do you think, you know, based on the conversations that you've had so far, which I realize are totally preliminary, that's something that is even on the table at this point, or are we just more, it's a question of how we regulate it? I don't think anyone is discussing totally outlawing Bitcoin right now. I mean, if that's a fear that's going around in the community, I think that that is unfounded. You know, our signals from Treasury have been, we are neutral on Bitcoin. And, you know, clearly they want to regulate it. Clearly they want to fit it in one of their boxes so that they can say, this is how we think, you know, it should be governed under the existing law. But I think this goes back to, should we work within the system or should we work without the system? I think that if we work in the shadow of the system, if we continue to fly in the face of regulators, if we continue to, you know, open up illegal exchanges, close down shop, open up another illegal exchange, I think that's where you'll see, you know, pushback. If we're not following anti-mundering, laundering laws, if we're not making sure that our customers are not persons who are well-known terrorists, that will be a reason to shut us down. I think that the more we allow our ecosystem to grow while engaging the lawmakers in dialogue and making sure that sensible policies come out of Washington as we grow as an industry, that's going to be the best way to ensure our survival. Let's assume for a second that all of your efforts over, you know, the next year work and that you get everything you want from the regulatory side of it and they basically are helpful. So what does that look like in this scenario? What is a helpful regulatory environment from your perspective? It's all speculation at this point, but in the future, I think that this technology offers benefits that even people from the old guard recognize. You know, when I went into that room and a woman said, you know, you know, everything is, this is a representative from FinCent. She said, you know, I do all my banking online. I'm pretty happy with it. I don't see what the problem is. It described all the different hops that money would take to get from one end of the globe to another. And then I just said, you know, just imagine, you have a wallet on your phone. I have a wallet on my phone. I can send you money and it will be in your account instantaneously. And nobody will have taken a cut along the way. And, you know, their eyes popped open when they just realized that in simple terms. This is just a much more efficient way of exchanging money across the globe. So, you know, I think that if we were to prove ourselves in this space, if we are able to ensure the integrity of our systems and make sure that we know where our funds are coming from, we know where they're going, we know who our customers are, I think that the regulators will be much more amenable to talking with us about how we can shape our industry to be a bigger part of the economy because they are interested in growing, you know, the economy. Once we've become big enough players for Treasury to pay attention to and for these different regulatory bodies to really, you know, wake up and consider us as players in the financial services market, the more they're going to be willing to work with us to make new laws that make sense for what our services do. You know, again, I'm talking about the United States. I think that in Europe and elsewhere, they're already embracing Bitcoin and virtual currencies as carrying a great potential. They're not as reactionary. So, you know, you may see very different developments outside of the United States than you see in the United States. So you see in the U.S., they are a bit more entrenched. They are very heavy-handed in their regulations. I think you will see innovations and new, more sensible laws happening elsewhere first. Kraken is a centralized exchange. There's been a lot of talk recently going around the community about the idea of these decentralized peer-to-peer exchanges that don't have a central structure are a way to automate almost the over-the-counter market that has developed for Bitcoin over the last three or four years. I don't really see a way that something like that can fit into the regulatory structure and so I'm curious for your thoughts about it, both from that perspective and competing against something like that. Anyone who handles Bitcoin or any other virtual currency right now, the kind that you're talking about, it is decentralized. So Bitcoin doesn't exist on any one system. I think that exchanges need to make sure that the partners that they're working with are also compliant because no matter how good your controls are, no matter how good your gateways are, the point of vulnerability is the weakest link. So if you're partnering up with exchanges that are not being responsible gatekeepers, then it really has the ability to change the entire system. And again, I think that you're right. It's going to be very, very difficult to regulate a fully decentralized network. And I think the government recognizes that. I think that right now, the peer-to-peer model is not inconsistent with what we can offer. I think that the ecosystem needs a lot of players. It needs diversity. And so I encourage other models. Hopefully the market will decide which one is the most efficient and that the governments will be able to regulate that practically. Constance, thank you very much for your time. Thank you, Adam. It was a pleasure. You're listening to Let's Talk Bitcoin, the premier audio cast providing news and insights that cover the rapidly evolving world of digital money. Our twice weekly shows include analysis of late-breaking news, updates on key technical, business, and regulatory issues, and in-depth interviews with the key people driving the new digital economy. Let's Talk Bitcoin offers sponsors an attractive way to reach a targeted and savvy audience. For more information, email sponsors at Let'sTalkBitcoin.com. Talking about the bundling problem and how you have to get people to pay before they... One of the other pieces that I like to think my focus on this monetization topic has spawned is actually a paywall application that won the hackathon at the Bitcoin 2013 conference. And when I first looked at this, I was like, well, that's not really going to work because I'm not a big fan of paywalls. I think that they haven't ever really been implemented successfully and you wind up sacrificing more of your audience than you gain from monetizing them because you essentially say, you can't read our content, you can't look at our content until you've paid us. And so that makes it so a lot of people just will say, okay, we'll never mind your content then. So anyways, I met yesterday with one of the guys who's developing this platform and they've come up with a really innovative way to do it. And basically what it is is it's not a paywall, it's a retroactive, essentially donation request, right? Where it keeps track of the articles that you've viewed and after you've viewed a certain number of articles, it pops them up and says, would you like to give value to any of these things? And so they have a way that you can onboard an amount and then they do their micro transaction thing to get around the transaction fee. But I thought that was really interesting is it's like a retroactive paywall where it doesn't actually restrict you, it just does a proactive request for financing. And so they're going to try to push this out to the Wall Street Journal and stuff. Yeah, if you think about it, publishing is essentially dying because of an inability to charge for content at a level that makes sense for people who are used to free. That model could really be revitalized if you just have the flexibility to get to micro transactions. I think that's a really neat solution and I think we're going to see more solutions by people who are motivated to implement easy ways to do value for value. And I think that's something that definitely content producers are demanding and that there's a real use for. So it'll happen. Maybe we don't know exactly how, but it'll happen if it makes sense. And if you take the lower end of the micro transaction and move it down, it creates an environment. It opens up this green field opportunity, this never seen before opportunity. Think about it this way. We have never had micro transactions on this scale in the history of humanity. When we were bartering for physical stuff, there's a limit to how small you can shave a chunk of gold or a seashell or a bag of salt. So we're opening up the possibility for completely novel ways of payment and monetization that have never existed before, simply because in the history of humanity, the size of micro transactions has never had the possibility of being this small. But I'd also like to just very quickly point something else out. We keep talking about the low end. I think what's really exciting about Bitcoin as a neutral platform, unlike all other payment systems, it actually spans an enormous range. So just for the listener's information, the largest transaction I see in the last few weeks here on the blockchain is $2.6 million. Let's put that into perspective. When we talk about Bitcoin, we need to think about a range from Fempto transactions to Giga transactions. And this is brilliant because there has never been a payment system that can span that kind of range. So it's not just about the low end. It's about the entire range and how we widen that to encompass areas of innovation that have never existed before. What was the transaction fee on that $2.6 million transfer? Five millibits. Yeah. It was actually two inputs, two outputs, very, very small transaction. Yeah. That's really interesting. It does bring up the point that potentially what you'll see in the future is miners specializing in processing certain kinds of transactions by setting their own minimum transaction fees. So you'll have a sort of a division of labor, I guess, among miners where some process sort of microtransactions and some process Giga transactions. You know, I was wondering about this actually when we're talking about specialized miners, as you said, that incredibly large transaction was actually a very small transaction as far as the blockchain was concerned because it only involved two inputs. Now, we are on the complete other end of that spectrum with our show wallet because we get all kinds of donations in the 0.00X number of bitcoins. It's a lot of the donations are quite small. So when I wind up making a payment, usually it tells me that my payment, that my transaction is too large for the amount of fee that I've put on. And that tends to be the standard, you know, the standard fee that I use. Is there a use scenario here where you have miners who specialize in taking all of these little transactions and essentially optimizing them into a larger transaction themselves or is that not something that's possible? Essentially what you're seeing, Adam, is dust. What you're seeing is that for the current price of Bitcoin, and that's a very critical qualifier, for the current price of Bitcoin, these transactions need to be added up in their hundreds of the transaction outputs, the unspent transaction outputs. They need to be added up in their hundreds in order to create a meaningful amount that you can then transfer to someone else. So if you want to pay $10 and you have thousand transactions of a penny each, you need to make a transaction set that has a thousand inputs and two outputs. Yeah, that creates a problem. Not it creates a problem. It's basically just expensive to do because you're taking up a lot of space in the blockchain. But the weird thing is the $2.6 million transaction I just talked about is only 258 bytes, pays a five-tenths of a millibit fee, and your transaction with a thousand inputs would pay ten times that because it's at least ten times the size. That's the weird thing about the way transaction fees work in Bitcoin, weird and wonderful, is that they're not dependent on the size of the payment, but rather on how small the inputs are. It looks like we picked the wrong end of the spectrum. Yeah, so you need to find a content monetization scheme where people pay you $2.5 million per piece of content in one transaction. I think that would be brilliant, Adam. Okay, I'll work on that. All we need is one patron. Or one very special piece of content. So there's a follow-up part to this question from a Facebook user. I want to hear your opinion about the blockchain size limit of one megabyte per block, seven transactions a second. How should we deal with the coming problem? What are the options, the pros and cons of each? I've been sort of following it and trying my best to understand it. So excuse me in advance if I get anything incorrect, but the blocks that make up the Bitcoin blockchain are limited in size to one megabyte each. They're generated every 10 minutes approximately. What that means is that per unit of time, there's only so many transactions that can fit in a one megabyte block. This is the seven transactions per second number that the listener is referencing here. Effectively, there's a limit on how many transactions can go across the Bitcoin network per unit of time. And some people say, even though we're not hitting a wall with that right now, as Bitcoin gets bigger adoption, that is going to become a problem and a hard limit that prevents people from using Bitcoin or prevents as many people from using Bitcoin as they want to. You could say, okay, why don't they just increase the size of each block so that more transactions can fit within it? Okay, well, there's a problem with that. It may stress out some of the nodes which are often just home PCs basically. And it may stress their internet connections and their storage and their processing capacity. So there's clearly sort of a Goldilocks zone for the size of how big each block should be. And people are debating exactly what that is. Is it one megabyte? Well, a lot of people are saying that's probably too small. Is it 10 maybe? But currently the limit is set in the Bitcoin code as one. So there's a big debate about this and it also kind of goes into the idea of centralization, right? Because there are some people who are suggesting in this debate that, well, we don't have to change the block size. All we have to do is have like basically third parties that do off-chain transactions that process some of these smaller transactions like sending a few millibits to the Coke machine and then bundle that together and send it to the blockchain at some point. There are some people who have a real problem with having mandatory points that everybody has to trust, mandatory trusted third parties. Some people may choose to trust a third party for off-chain transactions if they want to, but it shouldn't be mandatory. That's really not what Bitcoin was originally about. So it really goes a lot deeper than just the size of the block. And I apologize in advance if I got any of that incorrect. You know, you can email me Stephanie at Let's TalkBitcoin.com if you have comments about that or if anything I said was not accurate. But that's what I understand of the debate. And that was kind of hard to get. I'd like to put my debunking hat on. I don't actually have a debunking hat, but if anybody wants to send me one, that's great. Everything you said, Stephanie, is absolutely technically correct. However, I think this discussion is missing a couple of issues. All of these are moving targets. First of all, the current block limit of one megabyte was introduced just recently with the latest version. In fact, it was 0.81, then we had a little bit of a bug problem and now it's 0.82. It was only introduced recently. It was lower before and sort of expanding to that block level was part of the goal. From what I understand of the roadmap, the goal is to keep expanding the block size to adjust for scalability and growth in the number of transactions. I don't see a problem with that, honestly, because here's a couple of other things that are at play here. The size of disks is growing faster than Moore's Law. We've seen this explosion of storage capability over the last decade and a half to the point where effectively the marginal price of a megabyte has dropped to zero and the cost of storage drops even faster than the cost of computing. In terms of bandwidth, there is a lot of things you can do with Merkle trees and these basically allow you, instead of sending the entire set of transactions to basically prune parts of the blockchain, essentially summarize them as a higher level hash. And if you think about it, when you put a client on the blockchain for the first time, yeah, it's going to spend several days downloading eight, nine gigabytes or whatever the blockchain size is today. But once it's up to date, all it's doing is transferring additional blocks and those come every 10 minutes and if you have to download a meg or two or 10, once every 10 minutes, that's far less than the demands we put on our systems for video. I'm most excited about the potential of Bitcoin and just finding the solutions and our Bitcoin machine as one of those solutions. That's Zach from Lomasu. They're making one of the Bitcoin vending machines that looks and acts kind of like an ATM, but is it? Banks already see ATMs as kind of replacing their business model of bank branches and I feel it's kind of setting up Bitcoin for just saying, okay, thank you, that's a great idea, but we don't need banks anymore. So people are going to do most of their bankings through kiosks, but they don't really need banks for that anymore. To me, that's one of the big points and it works just as well here in Manchester, New Hampshire or New York City or in South Africa where people don't even have bank accounts, which again makes it easier for Bitcoin to take over. When you talk about moving away from banking and towards a kiosk approach, you described what you've got as a Bitcoin machine, rather than an ATM. Right. So there's clearly a distinction there. How come that, why is that distinction important and what does it mean? To me, it's not important. For me, it's, we call it the Bitcoin machine because that's just what we called it for now. I guess from a technical point of view, what ATMs do is they dispense of cash and ours doesn't. It dispenses Bitcoin. So if there are certain regulatory issues regarding ATMs, in a sense, it's important for us to say, well, this isn't a standard ATM. It's not a traditional ATM. You put cash into our machine like you would do with any vending machine, whether it's buying a Coke or a chocolate bar and instead you get Bitcoin. You can see it as a kiosk or a vending machine, but an ATM usually dispenses cash and that's how people usually understand them. So it's more of a confusion thing. But everybody's been calling it the Bitcoin ATM and there's nothing we can do about that anyway. So it's not like I won't understand what people mean if they talk about our Bitcoin ATM. Clearly, one of the biggest problems that has been present in the Bitcoin ecosystem has been this difficulty of moving US dollars or whatever someone's local currency is into Bitcoin. So ultimately, you're right. An ATM is a two-way street. You can put in a check or you can put in cash a lot of times and it can go into your bank account and that sort of thing, but it also goes the other way. So as a vending machine, this is really more of a one-way transit system where you're taking US dollars and moving them into Bitcoin. So do you think that this is how that problem gets solved? Do you think that these machines, this type of machine, whether it be yours or something else, or what's going to be the pervasive solution? I think it's one of the solutions and I think a lot of people that have been interested in Bitcoin for a while, for them that was always the big deal of how do we simplify this technology? Bitcoin's an amazing idea. How do we make it easy for people to get in and out and using Bitcoin? And so this is just one solution of many that are out there right now for Bitcoin solutions. I mean, BitPay, I think, is doing an amazing job for retailers, for making it easy for retailers to accept Bitcoin where they can say, well, yeah, you can have people paying you with Bitcoin and you don't have to worry about what to do with those Bitcoin. So I think that's one great solution and hopefully ours is another quality solution for obtaining Bitcoin and for getting people into Bitcoin that don't want to have to go through online exchanges and maybe they just want to put in three bucks to try to see what's going on and how it works. You can't really do that with an online exchange. So you've got to commit. You've got to say, okay, I want Bitcoin and I'm going to put in $500 and I'm going to sign up and I'm going to wait 30 days and hook up my account and then it'll be a little easier. With this, if you have our machine at a convenience store, you go in, get a bag of potato chips and put in a dollar and you have Bitcoin. So the person who owns the convenience store, do they also own this machine? Tell me about the model. How do these things work in actual implementation? It would really depend on where these are being placed and the rules and regulations of the area. I mean, in my opinion, it would be great if some convenience store owner would just say, yeah, I think this is a great idea. I'm going to buy one unit connected to my exchange or just use the coins I've been mining and I'm just going to run this machine. And it works for me because I want to accept Bitcoin because I don't like cash or credit cards and I think Bitcoin is a better form of transaction. I think that would be a great solution. That may not be a great business model in countries where there's a lot of regulation. So that guy may not have anywhere between $10,000 to $10 million to put aside for handling all the regulation. And in a case like that, it would be probably best to have a middleman that would deal with those things and kind of have an umbrella regulatory status for all these convenience stores. So now when you talk about highly regulated countries where that happens, are we talking about the United States? Yeah, I think the United States is probably the most over-regulated country as far as Bitcoin as it seems right now. I think it's going to be easier pretty much anywhere in the world to just go ahead and run Bitcoin businesses or accept Bitcoin or exchange Bitcoin for small businesses or even large as it seems now. I think the U.S. will be an issue. It's interesting because obviously Americans are great entrepreneurs and always have been. And from the different requests we're receiving, we don't get a lot of requests for distributors in the U.S. We get requests from a lot of business owners, a guy who owns a cafe or has a friend who owns a couple of cafes and they're really interested. And then we get requests from Canada and it's like I want to represent Western Canada for your machine. It's kind of a different approach, but in a way it's the opposite of what's needed. What we kind of need in the U.S. are a few guys, somebody in California to say I'm going to be handling all the regulatory issues and I will lease these machines to cafes in San Francisco and handle all the regulations. But it's a shame because there are all these cool small businesses that just want to have these machines and I basically have to tell them this probably isn't a good idea for you. So if somebody's listening to this and they're like, wow, I could totally handle that regulatory side. I mean, so it sounds like you're actively looking for partners at this point, yeah? Well, we are. And when I say partners, it's a little different than perhaps other businesses. I mean, we're just selling the machines right out. So we're not actually going to be providing any services, but I do think that would make more sense. So yes, we would be interested and distributors would be interested in buying a certain amount of these units, but more importantly, handling all the regulatory issues that have to be handled here in the U.S. So are you public with what the machines cost or are going to cost? Do you have a release date for when someone, just anyone can buy them? What's the plan for the rollout? Well, we expect a retail price to be around $5,000. The wholesale price will be lower. Those aren't absolutely final, but those are very close, in my opinion, to what the final price will be. We're still working on the last kinks of the design. So it's impossible to tell at this point, exactly. And then we start, as a second, we know the final price. We will start accepting pre-orders. And we expect that to be just in a few weeks because we intend on moving very fast with this. We expect to have a short production run around end of summer, I would say late August, maybe beginning of September. All goes well, probably within a month after that. We'll have our first production run of, say, 50 or more. Taking a step back from this project for a second on to kind of the broader picture of Bitcoin, if you're throwing your time behind a Bitcoin vending machine like this, I'm really curious to know kind of where you think that we're going. You know, not super far. Let's not do that. But you know, over the next maybe 18 months, I mean, do you have any sort of predictions for what, for things that are going to happen? I think we can expect to see, in a sense, more of the same, which is the Bitcoin price will keep being crazy. It'll go up. It'll go down. But I think that's less important. And what I do think is that more and more people will start to understand and use Bitcoin. I expect to see a lot more retail services expecting Bitcoin directly, instead of necessarily having third party services that act as a middleman. And I expect other countries to really start getting into it. Exactly where I expect Bitcoin to be in 18 months. I don't really have a prediction, but I definitely do expect there to be both, I guess, more widespread actual use and probably due to the services that are starting to come out now and will come out. And there will be more exchanges, of course. That's pretty much all I have in my head right now. I expect things to be clearer from a regulatory standpoint as well. Probably even more so in the rest of the world, such as Europe and Australia and New Zealand and Canada and such. And here, it's hard to tell. I would say that it's off to a shaky start, as far as regulation is concerned here in the US. You know, getting further outside the US, you mentioned that there are more barriers here than there are in other parts of the world. Have you had specific contact with people from other parts of the world, you know, talking about models that they want to set up or ways that they want to use your machines? Just in general, I'm curious what the outside the United States perspective is. Yeah, we've had probably the most interest from Canada and they're all looking into the regulatory status. Some of them think that they don't have to do anything at all for our machine after speaking to lawyers. Some just want to look into it a bit more. In general, they're just a good amount of distributors that are interested in putting these machines all around the large cities and in retail spaces, mostly. Be it cafes or convenience stores, bookstores, etc. And the same is true. We've had requests from all over the world, including places like Malaysia, Thailand, Pakistan, Libya, Israel, and of course, all of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, really all around the world. It's been pretty exciting. And so your machine is capable of taking, with minimal modifications, you know, any of these local currencies? Right, exactly. That's one of the reasons we chose the exact hardware that we're working with is we wanted one that we would be able to just ship anywhere in the world. So some small country in Africa needs two machines. We can just send it UPS or even put it into the post office and just ship them the machines. And that's kind of the idea. We wanted them to be small. We wanted them to be global. We wanted them to be affordable for a small business anywhere in the world. And if people want to get involved or want to purchase a unit or kind of get in touch with you about that, what's the best way to do that? Our website and my email, it's www.LamasuBTC.com. Lamasu is L-A-M-A-S-S-U-B-T-C.com. LamasuBTC.com. Zach, thank you very much for your time. Thank you, Adam. Want to set up an online store that accepts bitcoins? Go to openbitcoinsstore.com and you can have a store up and running before the end of this message. Just enter your email address and the store name and in less than 30 seconds, you'll have a secure WordPress e-commerce site up and running that accepts bitcoins and pays you in cash within 24 hours. And best of all, it's completely free. Go to openbitcoinsstore.com today and open for business now. Let's Talk Bitcoin is heard each week by thousands of people who are participating in the new digital economy. Our listener base of Bitcoin owners, miners, investors, technologists, and merchants is growing fast. We offer a limited number of short advertising slots in each show to keep our listeners engaged and to provide maximum impact for our sponsors. If you'd like to talk to us about Let's Talk Bitcoin, send us an email at sponsors at letstalkbitcoin.com. Somebody brought up the issue of mining on tour and how would a larger block size affect that? Because there are some people who want to be nodes or even mine Bitcoin with privacy using the tour network. Well, first of all, you would only need to necessarily transmit on tour. You could receive and listen and receive the other blocks outside of tour, the broadcast and public on the network. So you could create kind of an asymmetric system where you listen for the big blocks coming in. And when you find a block, well, you know, at that point, you've got a 25 Bitcoin reward making it worth sending out on the tour network, even if it is a few megs. I'm not really sure how you resolve that, and it may cause some problems for the tour network. But we do have other kind of layers of solutions here. You have potentially thin clients like Electrum that work on an overlay protocol like Stratum. They don't need to be full nodes. They don't need to have the entire blockchain. Essentially, they have a summary of past transactions based on a hash, and they only build things incrementally with the assistance of trusted servers. And these are not the off blockchain transactions you were talking about before, Stephanie. These are essentially just act as full nodes and store a trusted inventory of past blocks. Can we explain for the listeners who aren't familiar, what is the difference between a full node and a half node, a non-full node? One of the beauties of Bitcoin and the blockchain model is that I don't need to trust anyone. I can take a client, and in that client, in Hex, right in the source code is the Genesis block. It's written down as a Hex number. I can send it to everyone. It's in the source code of every single client. On that, you then can build the second block is basically got a hash of the Genesis block. So, with that Genesis block, I can validate the second block. Once I validate the second block, which I can just ask the network to send me, I can use that to validate the third block, and so on and so forth. And once I get to 217,000 blocks, or whatever the current height of the blockchain is, I have a completely independent perspective and verification of every transaction on the network all the way back to the Genesis block that I can trust intrinsically, because I verified it and don't need to check with anybody else. That's the beauty of it. Essentially, every transaction that comes in, I can tie it all the way back to the block where it was mined, and I can tie that block all the way back to the first block Satoshi mined. So, we all have trust on our nodes. That's a full node. A light node, essentially, will only validate back in time up to a certain point, and will only keep the difference since then. And essentially, we'll ask other nodes, well, what was the hash of that block and then build from there? You obviously need a trusted answer, because if someone gives you the wrong hash, then they can subvert your verification mechanism. And that's what Electrum does, as far as I understand it, and I'm sure I'll get corrections by email on this. Essentially, what you're doing is you're just verifying a smaller number of blocks or transactions based on almost like a checkpoint, which is higher in the blockchain. So, the Electrum service checkpoint, the blockchain for you and you, essentially, only look at the difference. If everybody started using these light nodes, could there be potential problems if nobody were to verify the entire blockchain or act as a full node? Well, miners, by definition, act as full nodes. So, as long as you can talk to miners and ask them, and you can, of course, because you can find out what inventory they have, then you can verify that you're getting the correct information. And because the highest blockchain always wins by consensus on the network, you can just go out and ask randomly many, many nodes and see what answer you get and persuade yourself to a degree of probability that what you're hearing is, in fact, the highest blockchain. So, it's not really a problem. If the vast majority of nodes went into light mode, then you wouldn't have a problem. But I think that for the foreseeable future and perhaps with the increase in storage capacity forever, the ability to have a full node, at least on your personal computer or personal server in the cloud, is perfectly feasible. The number of transactions is growing slower than both storage capacity and bandwidth. And we know what the upper limit is. The upper limit today is about 10,000 transactions per second which occur on the Visa network on Christmas Eve. And even for Visa, that's at least 100 times their normal transaction load. But we really know what the upper limits are today with existing payment networks. And the developers are very clear that we can reach those without running into significant problems. But the thing that we don't know, and the thing that is still definitely up for debate, is what the network for Bitcoin is going to look like once we have all of these micro transactions involved. Because the Visa network that you mentioned, yes, it has 10,000 transactions per second at peak, but that is above a certain minimum limit. And for most people, for most people, places where they accept Visa, that limit is like $10. So if we're going to take that limit and cut it down to 10 cents, then you've got to imagine more transactions are going to happen. I think this goes to assertion programming mentality and development mentality and principle, which is absolutely true, which is don't optimize a problem until you have it. We don't have a problem. When we have that problem, we can optimize it. But right now, there's no reason to start optimizing it in advance. I think a lot of this worry is misplaced. At least from what I hear from the core developers, they're not worried about the ultimate size of the blockchain or the inability to process enough transactions. They are worried about stuff going into the blockchain that isn't spendable and therefore just fills it up with useless information. But that's a whole different problem. When we talked with Alan Reiner at Bitcoin 2013, this was a topic that came up because with the full node client, you have a lot of security because you're doing all that verification yourself. And so you can trust it because you've essentially verified the whole thing. It's like having the whole ledger there and going through it yourself and doing that except you outsource it to computer. The problem with that, of course, is that from a usability standpoint, not everybody has the ability to devote that to it or frankly wants to wait the three days in order to hook up their wallet for the first time. So what they're moving towards is a system of essentially federated servers. It's like when you set your clock on your computer. You can set it yourself and then eventually it'll fall out of timing because it's based on your computer's internal clock which usually runs just a little bit slower or faster than the standard because it's based on how fast your cycles are. Or you can sync up with a server online. And so the idea of a federated server is that anybody who wants to run a full-note client and make it available online can put it up and make it available from a drop-down list where you go through and you select five or 10 or however many you want to select. And then your computer or your client doesn't just rely on one of them but rather checks them all and is able to determine because they're all run by different people and they all have different interests, it's a safe bet that they're not all colluding against you to make your client act in the wrong way. And so through distributing the trust and the information to these multiple places, you're able to get an accurate reading without exposing yourself to all of the trouble of actually having to do the maintenance and maintain it yourself. Yeah, I think you've hit on a really important point there. Trust itself is a probabilistic thing. There is no 100% trust. There is no absolute trust. It's really a, to what probability do you trust the network to give you a correct answer and is that probability greater or lesser than the cost to mess your transaction up, right? So you're willing to spend a certain amount of money or fees on security and on trust up to the point where it's more than the actual transaction you're trying to protect. And we see this in the real world. You know, we walk around with these little green pieces of paper in our wallet and we know quite well, or at least most of us know, that probably one in a hundred of those is forged, is fake, is counterfeit. And we don't check them all the time. I certainly don't hold up every dollar bill to check the watermark. But what we do is we expect that one in five merchants or one in 10 merchants will put a UV pencil on it or will look at the watermark, especially if the value of the bill is higher. And that's enough because it gives us a level of certainty that there is some checks in the system and it also gives us some certainty that the next person in the chain will trust our transaction and our currency. You don't need 100% coverage to create trust. You only need kind of this distributed selective checking that gives you a level of certainty higher than what amounts you're spending. I still have another question about this. Two questions, actually. One of them is, can a node basically choose what maximum size block it would relay or broadcast? Like could the block size essentially be determined in kind of a market way? Well, I think that's exactly where it's going. You create this equilibrium where block size is the supply and number of transactions is the demand. And the fee represents the equilibrium point at this moment based on the USD price of Bitcoin, the amount people are trying to transact, the difficulty mining, and all of those other factors. That equilibrium point is reached by the fee. That's the basic idea behind a market mechanism for fees. It's not implemented yet, but I think it will create all kinds of opportunities because by setting that clearly, then people can start innovating around that. Markets will create new services, new capabilities, and new approaches to this that you won't see in a kind of constrained, centralized approach to setting fees or setting block sizes. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Let's Talk Bitcoin. Whether you liked, loved, or hated the show, we want to know what you think. Please send a listener mail to mail at letstalkbitcoin.com. Content for this episode was provided by Stephanie Murphy, Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Constance Choi, and Zach from Lamasue. Music for this episode was provided by Jared Rubens. For links to his work, visit www.letstalkbitcoin.com slash music. If you're an open source musician and think your work would fit well on the show, please email Adam at letstalkbitcoin.com to start that conversation. If you like what we're doing and want to support us with Bitcoin or Litecoin donations, please visit letstalkbitcoin.com for episode-specific addresses. If you've got a question you'd like answered on air, call us at 1-855-WE-TALK-BITCOIN. The editorial calendar is still in the making, so these next show predictions wind up wrong some of the time. Stay tuned for episode 15, releasing Tuesday, June 11th, and featuring my interview with Peter, lead developer of Feathercoin, and more. Have a great weekend.