 When do we think we're going to see blockchain adopted by the biggest marketplaces like Amazon and by the mass sellers and buyers? What kind of blockchain? An open, neutral, borderless, censorship-persistent blockchain? Arguably, it's going to be difficult for big sellers to adopt that, because they have to operate within a system of money... as weaponized political control. So they cannot accept money that is open. It creates this incredible conundrum where open money is a bit of a poison pill for closed, centralized corporations. The question is not whether they will adopt it, because they represent centralized, hierarchical controlled retail. The question is, will you adopt it to sell your product directly to another person? If you think commerce should be person-to-person rather than person-to-corporation-to-corporation-to-visa-to-investment-bank-to-mastercard-to-corporation-to-JP Morgan Chase-to-corporation-to-person. If they're going to adopt it, but who gives a damn? Why don't you adopt it? Why don't you build something? Commerce has always been local, and we can make it even more local today. What about scaling, though? Local commerce is nice. If I know the buyer, if I know the buyer, if I do things back and forth... I don't need money. I can actually do my... I used to build websites for companies and ask them to build me laptops, so I don't have to pay taxes on the money that they gave me, and they actually could get it back from tax for building me computers. This was a great thing, but it didn't scale when I started traveling around the world and going to other places. Yes, because in that context, you need trust of the other party in order to transact. What this system solves is that you don't need to trust the other party in order to transact. In 2013, I sold my car for Bitcoin. I met a person who I had never met before. I met them at 11 pm on a Wednesday night in a parking lot, during a time that all the banks were closed. This is a transaction I cannot do with the traditional banking system. If they give me a check, it might bounce. If they do a wire transfer, it might be forged, and I can't check its validity. If they give me cash, it might be counterfeit. Three confirmations later, I gave them the key to my car. After three confirmations of the Bitcoin blockchain, that money was mine, irreversible, unquestionably real. Cannot be forged. I could verify that independently from my cell phone while I was having Chinese food, waiting for three confirmations. That is a transaction you cannot do. That is person-to-person commerce, kicking out all of the intermediaries, and without having to trust anything other than the network protocol. That is exactly why we can do commerce locally now. Which ties into the next one we have here. Do you worry about Bitcoin failing because the masses don't understand Bitcoin? As much as I worry about the internet failing because the masses do not understand BGP, TCPIP, or Windows. Today, the system is only usable for those who have some level of technical expertise. I sent my first email in 1989. I used the command-line client, about two years of UNIX experience, on a mainframe to send an email that took three days to cross the internet using store-and-forward UUCP. That was an experience no one in my immediate surroundings could replicate for another twenty years. In 2009, my mother sent her first email on her brand-new iPad, by going like this. That is the gap of experience we have today in Bitcoin. Bitcoin is exactly where the internet was in the very early 90s. Possibly before DNS, because we don't even have good naming systems that are decentralized. We still have the equivalent of IP addresses, these long strings that are indecipherable to normal humans. The experience today is as geeky, impossible to understand, and unintuitive as you might expect. Which means that probably the only people in Vienna who are capable of using it today are all in this room. But that's okay, because if you take that experience and turn it into this, you can build a massive opportunity for employment for yourselves. You can build a new career. You can build a great new software project. You can create the applications that are needed for us to take this mainstream. It's an interesting argument in people understanding the internet with TCP, IP packages, and these kind of things. I've worked on Firefox OS, which was a completely open operating system, trying to get into mobile space based on web technologies, understanding all the web stack. It failed immensely. 80% of the traffic on the internet nowadays is either owned by Google, Amazon, or Facebook. People publish first on Facebook, then on the internet. So the open winning argument of the internet as much as it hurts me is problematic, because Facebook made it easier to publish, much like banks make it easier to understand money. What do we do about that gap in the perception of how easy it would be to have an open payment system? We wait, because if you think Facebook is going to be around forever, then you need to remember that at some point Microsoft controlled 80% of the operating system market, because they made Windows easy to use on the desktop, and you could not use anything else. And now, Microsoft is dominated by open technologies and open source, because they had to succumb to the open internet. They lost the battle to close that, and I think Facebook is already losing. How many here use it as your first platform of choice? Oh, not a single hand. And kids nowadays don't join Facebook because their grandparents are on Facebook. So the bottom line is that even if 20% of the internet is the free part, it is so radically free that it can give rise to completely unexpected phenomena like bitcoin that cannot be controlled. And those phenomena then turn around and create a foundation for funding free open mesh peer-to-peer infrastructure and applications through cryptocurrencies to re-decentralize and liberate the web. We're only getting started. The skirmishes are going to be delightful, but I think in the end open always wins.