 We are ready to start now. In case you are still looking for a seat, there are seats back there. People are raising hands. So if you want to sit down, go back and sit down. I'll repeat the announcement about the filming crew. There's a filming crew that is filming this talk from the back and they will also do audience shots. If you don't want to be on the shot, don't look backwards because they're filming from the back. And I would like to welcome Andreas Antonopoulos. He's the author of Mastering Bitcoin and Internet of Money. And this talk is called The Future of Money, which he said that it keeps changing. So his talk is always different. So we're really excited to learn what the future of money is now. So please warm welcome for Andreas. Wow, this is my first Haggers Congress. This is amazing. What an incredible event. Thank you so much for coming here today. I really appreciate it. This talk will be on video in a couple of weeks on my YouTube channel. But also it is licensed under Creative Commons attribution. You can do whatever you want with it, pretty much. So feel free if you do use a recording or you can just take it from my YouTube channel, whatever you want. Thanks for coming. The talk is going to be called A Tsunami of Innovation. And what I want to talk about today is innovation in open systems. You've probably heard me talk about this before. One of the defining characteristics of the Bitcoin blockchain... but also of other open blockchain systems, is something we call permissionless innovation. And permissionless innovation is the idea that in a system that is decentralized... where people can connect to the system without asking for permission... where they can create their own applications without asking permission... where they can launch these applications and use the platform without asking for permission... something magical happens. The best example of this, of course, is the internet. And on the internet you don't need permission to create a new application. You can assign it support numbers, you can write an application protocol... you can distribute a binary or source code, anybody can run it... and if they run it, they become your market for that application. So what is the minimum market size you need to run an application on the internet? Two. Two nodes, two people, two systems. As long as two systems want to use a protocol to communicate with each other... that is an application, that is an application market... that is the basis for running a new application and you don't need anybody's permission... to innovate on this system. Why is this important? Because in closed and permissioned systems, innovation is determined by the least common denominator. If you want to run an application on the phone company's network... you have to find a way to persuade them that this is an application... that will be broadly used by millions of people who are participating in that. And you have to ask for permission. And only if your application has a very large market share will it ever run. And the essence of permissionless innovation is that you do two things. One, you create the possibility of micro-innovation. Innovation for a market of two. A special purpose application that nobody in the world cares about... except for these two people, or these two systems. And they can do micro-innovation in a tiny, tiny environment... and create exciting new applications for which the only two people who are excited... are the ones participating in that application. And that's enough. It's a hyper-local micro-innovation. But at the very same time, it's also a platform for macro-global innovation. The very same application that appeals to two people can go to people, 2,000 people... 20,000 people, 200,000 people, 2 million people, 2 billion people. You're probably going to need to optimize the code a bit. But you have the possibility of simultaneously appealing to an audience as small as two... all the way up to a completely global audience, all without asking for anyone's permission. This critical function is offered by Bitcoin and other open blockchains... by the virtue of open access, by the virtue of a neutral platform... that is not controlled by a central entity, by the virtue of being able to use that platform... to develop your own applications. What happens with that is something that people often underestimate. We've seen how big markets underestimate the possibility of innovation on the internet. There's a reason why you can easily underestimate this form of innovation. If you're a big bank or a big corporation and you're paying 1,000 very expensive... highly trained professional developers, you have the cream of the crop. You have the best of the best innovating for you in a focused and directed manner. How could anyone compete with that? How could anyone compete with that budget... that marketing, that infrastructure, that support? I mean, it's almost ridiculous to think that you could take decentralized innovation... and make it work on a large scale. Maybe you can do it for things that are not important. You can play with your little internet toys. We have important work to do here in our large corporation. One day, some board student at the University of Finland... who can't afford to buy Microsoft Windows, comes up with the most ridiculous idea. I'm going to write a scalable, multi-processing operating system that competes with Unix. The only response to that by any sane individual is, That's ridiculous. There's no way that will ever work. Twenty years later, Linux has completely taken over every data center, every computer operating system. Most of the people in this room are running it underneath their Android operating system, which is really just Linux built up. This audacity that you can out-innovate the largest players on the planet... combines with something really important, passion, interest, and deep knowledge of the community of your users. It's most powerful when the developers are the community of the users, or come straight out of the community of the users. When you have people who are developing an application that is for their own interests, that they have emotional attachment to, that they feel passion for, they will commit enormous amounts of effort into building that and treating it with great care. One, because at the end of it, software is art. Just like an artist, if you lack creativity, if you lack that spark, you can have a corporation that hires as many in-house artists as you want. You're never going to create great art. It will be soulless, it will be empty. That's what happens to innovation. When innovation is brought into large companies, it goes there to die. When they send their employees to workshops and seminars to teach them how to think creatively, in a four-hour seminar, a Wednesday afternoon, innovation goes there to die. If by some miracle an inspired creator arises from within the corporation, creates something truly unique, creative, disruptive, expressive, the entire mechanism of bureaucracy will stomp down on that idea and kill it very, very quickly. Tommy, we love your idea and your creativity. This is really a fantastic invention you've brought to us. We have conducted a focus group and assembled a committee. We don't want to interfere with your creative process. We have a few minor suggestions to help it be more broadly appealing among our customers and more in line with our strategic goals. That is the corporate sound of stomp on creativity. By the time that idea comes out of committee, it is a pale image, a skeleton of what it once was. Everything good and creative and wonderful about it has been sucked out. What's left is a soulless corporate piece of shit. Yet, when presented with decentralized innovation, when shown the potential of everyone on the planet, independently and on their own being able to innovate on the internet, to create content, to create beautiful works of art, to contribute to human knowledge, when presented with the idea that an open blockchain allows everyone in the world to create applications, they underestimate it, they cannot fathom how an unruly mess of untrained, untutored, and unpaid volunteers can ever compete with their finally-geared machine. Every time they miss the point. This happens again and again, and you see it through history. You would think, by now, after 20 years of observing the internet's work, this lesson would come through. Instead, what you see is corporate organizations and governments having innovation workshops, speaking about disrupting from within and all of this empty talk. When I was at the hackathon we did a couple of days ago, we found out that one of the key contributors to an amazing piece of software that was written, revealed himself to be a 14-year-old kid from London with no formal training in programming, who is outclassing many of the professional programmers in the space with passion. That is the most dangerous form of competition a company can face. That is unstoppable. Here's why it's easy to underestimate the potential for innovation. When you place two systems side by side, and one of them has a 200-year tradition of slow and careful and methodical developments, institutionalized knowledge, and a solid foundation of trust. The banking system. Then you bring this ragtag group of weirdo anarchists. I'm looking at you. With funny haircuts and too many pair of things, and weird t-shirts, you can't wear a suit. They say, we're going to reinvent banking. What can you do but laugh? The first version of what they present to the world is woefully inadequate. It's kluji. It's difficult to use. It hasn't been tested by a focus group. The design sucks completely. You compare the two, and you say, this is what they've done. This is what it took us 200 years to do. You laugh because there's no chance this little ragtag group of misfits is ever possibly going to compete with millions and millions of dollars in your project. But what you're missing is the most important part of the equation. When everyone is open to innovate without permission, and when the outcome of their innovation is open-sourced and available to everybody else to copy, incorporate, integrate, mash up, and build upon, what happens is an exponential curve. Every tiny idea is fed by a thousand other tiny ideas, and in turn spawns a new forest of tiny ideas that together creates another generation of tiny ideas, and gradually all of these things start building up. People who are free to do and follow their passion start creating applications you couldn't even imagine. They build on other people's work and give ideas to other people who then build on top of these, and the momentum increases. It takes a long time for that momentum to build up. It's very, very gradual at first. The key characteristic of an exponential curve is that, for the majority of its life cycle, it appears to be a slowly climbing horizontal line. It looks like it's taking a very long time to catch up with that plateau of 200 years of innovation, and then surprise, because here's the one thing I can tell you about exponential curves. They have an elbow, and the elbow is the inflection point where the horizontal becomes vertical, where all of the cumulative momentum building and building and building suddenly reaches that critical point, and it starts accelerating faster and faster and faster. It takes a very long time for these applications to reach parity, to appear to do the same thing that the established industry does. The thing about an exponential curve is that one month after reaching parity, it's exceeded by an order of magnitude, and one year it's exceeded by two orders of magnitude. While the traditional institution continues its slow horizontal curve, the exponential curve suddenly turns vertical. We've seen this happen on the internet. We've seen this happen throughout many technologies in our lifetime. Ray Kurzweil, an esteemed author, has written a fantastic work called The Singularity is There. I spoke recently at The Singularity University, which is an organization founded by Ray Kurzweil, and we discussed these issues of exponential growth. These exponential curves can be seen in many places in our post-industrial society. The acceleration of density of computer chips, computer memory, speed of processing, the amount of data you can send through communication, the number of documents on the web, the number of documents on Wikipedia, the number of people connected to the internet, the number of internet-of-thing systems connected to each other, the number of people working on Bitcoin, the number of contributions to the Bitcoin Core, the number of alternative blockchains poking up. All of these lines have one thing in common. They exhibit an exponential curve. For all of these, when you look at it as a human being, we tend to massively underestimate the impact of these exponential curves. We cannot fathom exponential growth. It is alien to nature. It only happens in very limited circumstances, and it is always surprising. We extrapolate linearly. We see the past, and we think it will continue at the same pace in the future. What we miss is the elbow and the curve, when things turn vertical. The amount of data you could fit on a storage device in the 60s was pitiful. You can watch photos online of IBM unloading a 5-megabyte hard drive from a truck with four people carrying it. It takes a very long time to go from 5 megabytes to 10 megabytes to 100 megabytes. But before long, you stopped counting in megabytes, and you are counting in gigabytes, and then terabytes. The curve is vertical. We see this with data, with participation on the Internet. We are beginning to see it with Bitcoin. I use the phrase tsunami of innovation. One characteristic of a tsunami, a wave in the ocean, a massive disturbance in the liquid structure of the ocean, is that the wave propagation happens in depth. If you are a fisherman and you are 500 miles out from the coast, and a tsunami passes, you cannot even distinguish it from the other waves. It is a little smush that passes you by. There is 200 feet of slosh underneath that you cannot see, and it is held at depth. Then the wave reaches the continental shelf. As it hits the edge of the continental shelf, it climbs. By the time it hits the beach, it is 200 feet high. If you are looking out in the ocean, it is like, oh, it is a little wave, a medium wave, a big wave. Oh, shit, wrong for the hills. This is going to be the experience of institutionalized banking. This is going to be the experience of institutional regulation of government. This is going to be the experience of decentralized innovation on the web. This is going to be the experience of applications of trust. This is going to be the experience of the blockchain-powered internet of things. Every organization that is observing this is going to say, oh, it is an interesting concept. Oh, it is kind of very interesting. Oh, it is getting kind of bigger. Oh, shit, wrong for the hills. The first indication you have, in fact, is that the water besieges. That is the wrong time to go sunbathing on the beach. Right now, it is very easy to underestimate the innovative potential of Bitcoin. Right now, you see the early-stage prototype. Right now, you see the beginnings of a system that has some promise. But its biggest promise is not in what is there. It is in what is to come. The reason the promise lies in what is to come is because of the power of innovation without permission... by individuals who have a particular interest, an interest that is not served... and will never be served by the current system. Let's look at just one example. Let's say you are a person with a disability. You have a problem with your hearing, or your sight, or a cognitive problem. You have some kind of difficulty with numbers, dysnomeria, or with words, dyslexia. What can you ask your bank to do to make your life easier? Can you ask them to modify the online banking application to make it more suitable to you? Can you ask them to modify their ATMs to make it more useful to you? With great resistance, they might try to serve you. In fact, they will be able to do it a lot easier on the web... than they can do it on their ATM network or their physical locations. Now imagine what happens if you are a software engineer and you have a disability. If you are a software engineer and your best friend, your cousin has a disability. You look at Bitcoin and you say, my friend doesn't have a good way of remembering pin numbers. He or she would be much better served with pictures of animals. My friend doesn't have a good way of visualizing small information. She would be better served by the information being magnified. My friend doesn't have a good understanding of social engineering and cognitive threats. He or she would be better served by community management through multisig. How many people do you need to persuade to write that application? No one. You write it. You improve the world in a tiny way for one person. Others will find it. They will say, this is the application I have always been looking for. I now have been empowered by the innovation of a complete stranger. I can use it. The tsunami builds, the momentum builds, and every single developer operating in this space. We are not solving big universal problems. We are solving small local problems that matter to us. We control where we want to invest, our creative energy, and our passion. There is nothing in the world that can stop that once it gains momentum. It is an absolute tsunami of innovation, and it is coming. We have an hour. I don't want to bore you with my talk anymore. I would love to have a conversation with any and all of you. I think we have a couple of microphones here for the audience. If you would like to ask me a question, I would be delighted to answer it for you. Thank you. I just wanted to ask, I read an article recently that said the European Union is planning to register Bitcoin users and their transactions and keep a database of all of this in a centralized manner. Yes, I just want to know your opinion on that, and how you think that would move forward, and what kind of resistance they would face, or if it is even possible. One of the really interesting... So the question was about the European Union creating a registration database of some Bitcoin users. Because the idea that they can create a registration database of all Bitcoin users is a pipe dream. I think several people in this room would make sure that doesn't happen. In an open system, people have choices. Decentralization and centralization are not an equal, symmetric scale. In order for a centralized system of control to be effective, it has to be near absolute. But in order for a decentralized system to provide freedom, it doesn't have to be absolute. All it has to do is undermine the system of control. If you have a stadium with a concert, and the stadium has a hundred doors, how many of those doors do you need to check tickets for that concert to not be a free concert? One hundred doors. Ninety-nine doors is not enough. Because the moment one of the doors is not being checked, everybody texts everybody. Nobody shows up at the ninety-nine doors you're checking, and they all go through the back door, and you'll have a free concert. Control has to be complete, has to be end-to-end for it to be even marginally effective. But it gets worse. Because what happens if you have a system where some people, those who are educated, technically literate, or motivated enough, can choose to use the back door, can choose to use the system without registration, can be nimble enough with our communications, and their protocols, and their use of tour, and all of the other things that they might need to use the system that isn't registered. Who are you left monitoring? The innocent. And the idiots. And everybody who perhaps you should be monitoring is choosing to use the unmonitored avenues. And there are thousands of unmonitored ways to do. You cannot impose end-to-end control on a completely open protocol that is global in nature, that uses the internet as its underlying mechanism, that is in essence a content type, a form of speech, a communication medium on the internet. You cannot control it. Do you know why I know that? Because they can't even control it in North Korea. You can get American movies depicting American actors killing a simulation of Kim Jong-un. In North Korea on a USB drive, I imagine the penalty that applies to that is a bit higher than what the European Union will be able to pass legislatively. And yet they can't stop it. And if you can't stop it there, what chance do you have of stopping it in a multicultural society like the European Union, or in an open borders world like the one that Bitcoin creates? Let them try. They're wasting their time. And it gets worse. Because what are they going to end up doing? They're going to end up collecting the private information of millions of people who, by the definition that I just gave you, are innocent and some idiots. They will collect all of these people's information, and they will create one of the European Union's largest honey pots of private information, and then they will fail to secure it. As they always do, because there is no way to secure concentrated data, and it will get hacked. And they will end up hurting the consumers that they are actually presenting as protection. So one, it doesn't work for the stated reason of protecting against criminal activity, because if the criminals have a choice, they won't subject themselves to it. One of the characteristics of a criminal is that they don't follow the law. Go figure. Two, it will actually reduce the ability to innovate within the European Union, and it will harm most the properly organized legitimate small businesses that are creating jobs in this space. And three, finally, after failing to achieve all of its goals, it will hurt the very citizens that it aims to protect, because it will expose their private information. Are we going to see this happen again and again and again in this world? Thank you. Let's take another question. We have a question from people watching the stream, so I'm going to read it from the phone. What about Bitcoin democracy and profiling specialized Bitcoin mining companies gaining more and more power over Bitcoin network? Do you see this decentralization of Bitcoin network to be a dangerous thing or not? I think you meant centralization. Yes. Bitcoin mining is currently centralized, and my theory is the reason that Bitcoin mining and mining pools have become centralized, is because over a period of seven years, we saw an approximately one million times increase in the performance of mining equipment. We saw essentially two decades' worth of development of semiconductor capacity and density express itself in seven years in Bitcoin. From mining on a laptop, which was what Satoshi did during the first several months, even in two years, to mining on a graphics card, to mining on a field-programmable gate array, to mining finally on A6 at 60 nm, and then A6 at 48 nm, and then A6 at 36 nm, and A6 at 24, A6 at 18, 16. And now we're hitting that level where it's about at 16 to 12 nm. Basically, what you've done is you've replayed the history of the semiconductor industry in seven years, in fast motion. What that means is that if you create a piece of mining equipment in a semiconductor fab in Shenzhen, it has approximately 12 weeks of usable life before it is obsolete. Now, how far can you get this piece of equipment in 12 weeks and make it useful? If you put it on a ship, it leaves Shenzhen as a highly sophisticated piece of very expensive electronics, and it arrives in Los Angeles 16 weeks later as scrap metal. So instead, you get hired to build it, it goes on a truck, it ends up in a warehouse in the neighboring province, and it gets up to power as quickly as possible, where it sits on a shelf for one month, one and a half, two months at most, and then it gets thrown away, and the cycle starts again. That automatically means you can't expand the availability of these equipment. But something magical has just happened, and nobody has really noticed it. We hit the front of war's law. We went from performance increases of 1,000 or more per year to 2x, two times better, every 18 months. That's war's law. In every other area of computing, war's law is amazingly fast. In bitcoin mining, it is 10,000 times too slow. Now that piece of equipment that comes out at 16 nanometers cannot be out-selleted for two years, because there is no better than 16 nanometers. You have to invent the technology, build the factory. So that piece of equipment can now travel broadly. In fact, having a warehouse full of this equipment is now a disadvantage, because if you put all of the equipment in one warehouse and it burns down, you lose all of your capital. If your workers go on strike, you lose all of your capital. If you put it in one warehouse and your power is cut for four days, you lose all of your capital. But if you take 100,000 of these devices and you sell them, and they get plugged into 100,000 kitchens and they're used to make hot water for tea, then the reliability and resilience of that network changes dramatically. I believe that the bitcoin mining ecosystem is going to get re-decentralized because the fundamental economic pressure that existed, the most important economic pressure, has now changed dramatically. It's going to take at least two years until we see the impact. I also think people overestimate how much actual power the miners have that doesn't involve destroying their own financial interests. And finally, quite honestly, if bitcoin fails to achieve its decentralization potential, there are many people who understand how it works, and so we start with a new one. I don't think that's going to be necessary. But if it is necessary, I would like to buy some when it first starts. All right. I think the question also covered the not-so-open innovation access to Bitcoin Core commit, right? So not everyone can actually develop the Bitcoin Core software. There are some doors you need to pass first. So what about this democracy? Of course, there are alternative blockchain, so we can always move away. There are alternative options. So the reason Bitcoin Core is the choice of many of the companies that choose to use that, and many of the users that choose to run the software, is because at the moment they deliver better software. How do I know that? Because the market chooses to use it. This is an open market-based system. You can write your own, and if it's better, it will win. And I would very much doubt that if you have commits that are broadly viewed as valuable to the ecosystem, it will be very difficult to get them added to Bitcoin Core, or any of the other platforms that work around Bitcoin. It's an ultilayer system, and we're going to see. Now, granted, we do have some elements that are more centralized than I would like. But I have faith that over the long term, the important things are maintained and maintained well. Okay, who else wants to ask me a question? Thanks for the great talk. I view Bitcoin as a distributed but centralized system, because it looks to me that to make any changes on the protocol level, you need to have the majority of the miners to read to that. And we can see this block-sized debate, for example. What's your take on that? I think what the block-sized debate demonstrates is that if there is a bottleneck in one part of the development process, what happens is that different paths emerge. People find alternative ways to achieve the same goal that are perhaps more creative. So we've seen the development of both alternative clients, we've seen the development of better mechanisms for estimating fees and prioritizing transactions, which was really critical for the stability of the network. But we've also seen the development of secondary technologies, sidechains and lightning network and bi-directional payment channels and things like that. And quite honestly, segregated witness and some of the other transactional optimizations that are coming out of Core itself. So I don't think there's any limit to the number of choices that may be presented to solve a scaling problem. And quite honestly, it's not a dire problem if people are not trying to bypass the system that we have. And the truth is people are not. If the miners thought it was a dire problem and it affected their financial interest, they would switch in a day and we would see alternatives. Also, quite honestly, we have a broad open market for competition. And so other systems choose to use bigger block chain, block sizes, different rates of transaction creation, etc. Now, the argument is that that ends up centralizing the system even more and that some efficiency is the price you pay for liberty. And the nice thing about this is that you have this whole ecosystem where all of these questions can be resolved in a way that is completely voluntary. So people can voluntarily choose to use the currency of their choice, the blockchain of their choice, the client of their choice, the software of their choice. And by having these choices, they push the development to the direction that the market wants to go. And the amazing thing about having something like Bitcoin is it opens the door to give you choices. And now that we have the door open, you can switch your Bitcoin into any other currency in less than two minutes using a variety of open systems and in a very anonymous way even. And so if you have choices, the question is, what are you saying? Are you saying the market is wrong about choosing the current system versus another system? And I think there are many opinions, but in the end, the choices of the market really speak loudest. Because that's where you have the intersection of personal freedom and personal interest that gives you the best answer. It's really hot up here. Is there a chance that Bitcoin will have better privacy protection or better anonymity in the future? Absolutely. There's not just a chance that Bitcoin will have better privacy protection about anonymity. There are a number of actively tested beta test level solutions that significantly increase the anonymity and privacy of Bitcoin. Bitcoin at its core, as the first iteration, is loosely pseudonymous. And if you invest a lot in very, very good operational security, you can take it from loosely pseudonymous to weakly anonymous, and that's about as much as you can do. Developments such as confidential transactions, which is a collaboration between, I believe, Gregory Maxwell and Peter Wool, which allows for a ring encryption of the value of a transaction. That's a very important development. Schnorr signatures, some of the features that are coming out to the lightning network, that will allow you to essentially have an off-chain, onion-routed, multi-party, double-blind, storm-forward network without really knowing who is sending what to who. And that's a whole layer you could put over Bitcoin. All of these developments, both on their own, increase the functionality, anonymity, and privacy of the network, put together they can make Bitcoin and, quite honestly, many of the other open blockchains very, very strongly anonymous. But something else, again, which you have to look at is the ecosystem. Because if I have Bitcoin and I also have one error on Dash and Zcash, then I actually have the opportunity to use the currency that gives me the right level of privacy now, or use the currency that gives me the right level of security, or the right level of value store, or the right level of retail access, if that's what I care about, then I switch between them at very low cost, and very quickly, and perhaps even in a programmatic and automated fashion, until your wallet picks the currency that is most suitable for the current use. Maybe if you have Tor on and you're buying something on a website, then it automatically switches to use Zcash. Because it says, okay, well, we're in a privacy mode right now, and maybe that's what you need. So, I'm actually very optimistic about these developments. I think we're seeing, as I said before, this innovation, this momentum is picking up. And everybody's like, oh, look over there. You see the block size problem they have? They can't solve it. They're not talking to each other. Meanwhile, right behind them, there's these giant teams doing incredible innovation in Bitcoin. And there's this big, big, shiny distraction. I hope the banks continue to underestimate Bitcoin because of the block size drama, and don't pay attention to the innovation that is picking up momentum. I just want to be succinct about it. I see two different paths forming. One is the other people that are technically knowledgeable, they don't know how to use Bitcoin in an anonymous manner. But these, for me, would be the minority in comparison to mass adoption of Bitcoin, which would be required for it to become globally used as a universal currency. So, my concern is, is it even feasible, or is it even a possibility that, you know, you've got the technical community, and they are doing it in an anonymous way or more advanced way, and then you've got the normal way, which would be the banks, for example, in the Netherlands, that added the Bitcoin wallet to their online banking. And they're saying, hey guys, look, thanks for making Bitcoin the kind of wallet it is. We'll take it from here. And they just kind of take the scene and take mass adoption of themselves and tell people, yeah, it's on your online banking, no problem, you know, we'll add it to you. And then they have a complete database of all the transactions and everything people do as you referred to it before. And that, for me, is a huge concern because, you know, it's like the work was done by the people pushing for liberty and freedom, or whatever the reason may have been. And then, you know, what if they come in and say, yeah, thanks, we've got it from here. Yeah, that's happening. The future of money is going to be purely digital, digital currencies. By the time your children grow up, they will see cash in museums. And it will be banned everywhere. Cash as a mechanism will gradually be withdrawn until the only people who use it are the same people who go to a cafe here and say, do you accept gold? And the cafe owner goes, excuse me? Gold, I have gold coins. So you're going to be the grandpa kook who is just weird and wants to pay in cash in a world where currencies will become digital. And we will have a choice. Do we want digital currencies that have borders that are controlled by governments that are giant surveillance mechanisms? Those will be available, or do we want to use currencies that are open, borderless, and anonymous? And in order to make the second option appealing to people we need, better user interface design, better infrastructure, better software development, so that anonymity is not a choice. It's built into the everyday activity. It simply becomes an essential characteristic of the system. Now, the good news is, the advantage here is that there's almost five billion, four and a half to five billion people who have very, very limited access to banking who are not being served by the existing systems. And if we get them to leapfrog the technology and just go directly to probably anonymous digital currencies based on open blockchains, then we have the majority of the population of this planet utilizing the free system of money. And there's a minority that will continue to use the slave system of money. And that is going to be a fundamental choice that people will face in the future. If you have these two systems juxtaposed in parallel, and one of them is closed, because in order to apply control you must close all of the doors. You cannot have an open, borderless, immutable, censorship resistant, open innovation, open access permissionless system if it's run by a single entity that controls the blockchain. Because if they control it, they then automatically have a responsibility to censor any transactions that every government chooses to tell them are not allowed. So they will have to close it. They cannot swallow the bitter pill of an open, borderless system. They will choke on it. And that's great. Because they will build a closed system. And the closed system will be limited, in use, and most importantly, it will be a system of closed innovation. And it will innovate slowly. It will become the intranet of money where you run the Microsoft Outlook of blockchain wallets. And there will be some people who use it. The same people who ask you to fax the documents and send you a Microsoft Word document full of viruses and communicate via email and call you on the telephone, which I haven't done in two years. There will be people who use that. And the banks and the governments will be left surveilling the innocent and the idiots on these antiquated systems. But meanwhile, what happens to the open systems? They feed on each other and they explode in innovation. And they start delivering applications you simply cannot do on the closed systems, right? So, to me, I don't fear this comparison. But what I do recognize is the one lesson we learn from the intranet, is that if you want to make privacy effective on a broad scale, you make it invisible, you make it on by default, and you make it broadly available and easy to use. The most widely spread system of cryptography, as broken as it is, is a little green padlock at the top corner of your browser that you didn't ask for. That's why it's magical. How many people in here use PGP? You are not a mainstream audience. Just for the people who are watching from the cameras, that was about two-thirds to three-quarters of the audience. How many people here use SSL? Okay, that's a true question. We all do, right? And so does my mom. And so does your grandma. And so does your grandpa. And you're a weird uncle who doesn't trust computers, and they still use SSL. They don't even know they use SSL. And that's effective security. When we make privacy and anonymity in blockchain systems invisible, easy to use on by default, and then we add to that open innovation to create applications that are unimaginable in the closed systems that serve the needs of tiny minorities but empower them incredibly, that are completely borderless in nature, if that's the basis of competition, we win without a doubt. Okay, I think that was the last question. Thank you so much. Martin, did we have a book signing set up? Is that something we want to announce?