 Αυτή η Πόλη είναι η μόνη Πόλη στην οποία όλοι μπορούν να πούν το όνομα μου. Η μοναδική Πόλη. Σε όλες τις άλλες Πόλεις, αν το πανός, αν το πωλής, αν το πούλους, τα να κατεύουν. Εδώ πέρα όχι μόνο μπορούν να πούν όλοι το όνομα μου, αλλά μπορεί να είχε κανάς άλλο σαν τον όπουλος, δηλαδή δεν είναι και σπάνη ο όνομα. Σατός είναι ακαμόπουλος. Σατός είναι ακαμόπουλος. Ευχαριστώ πάρα πολύ που ήρθατε. Την πρώτη φορά που έκανα παρουσία στη Ελλάδα, το 2013, στο Hacker Space, ήταν 8 άνθρωποι. Την δεύτερη φορά που έκανα παρουσία στη Ελλάδα, το 2013, στο Hacker Space, ήταν 8 άνθρωποι. Την δεύτερη φορά που έκανα παρουσία στη Ελλάδα, στο συνέδιο της Disrupt, ήταν περίπου 800, από τις οποίους για Bitcoin δεν ήξερε κανένας. Την τρίτη φορά που έκανα παρουσία στη Ελλάδα, στην Κυφυσιά, ήταν περίπου 40 άνθρωποι. Τώρα, 350. Καλά πάμε. Τα άνθρωποι often have different motivations, they ask me different questions about this technology. Τώρα, στην Ελλάδα, a lot of the interest is about how to find ways to invest. Okay, so how many people are interested in investment? Great. And how many people are interested in technology? You're lying. So, and people ask me often, what should I invest in? And I don't do investment advice, I'm a technologist, but tonight what we're going to do is we're going to talk about that. So, tonight's talk is about the next Bitcoin, which is a question I get all the time, which is what is going to be the next Bitcoin, right? Sometimes I get asked what is going to be the next Ethereum. So, that's what I want to talk about tonight. And in order to help you, I'm going to start by telling you the answer at the beginning as a spoiler. So, the next Bitcoin, which you might consider investing in, is going to be Bitcoin. But here's why, and this is important to understand. A lot of people are looking for an opportunity to invest in something that did what Bitcoin did since 2009. They're looking for an opportunity to find the next thing that's going to be super successful, that's going to maybe do 10X or 100X in its price. Not going to happen. And the reason it's not going to happen is because Bitcoin was created and born in very, very unique circumstances. So, what are those circumstances? Some people call this Bitcoin's virgin birth, the immaculate conception, right? Which I'm sure is blasphemy, especially in Greece, but that's okay. So, what do we mean by the virgin birth of Bitcoin? You got to realize that back in 2009, when Bitcoin was launched, and if you went to anyone and you said, hey, how about instead of governments doing money, the internet does money, and everybody was like, yeah, that's never going to work. That can't work, no. And then if you explain nobody, it's a really interesting algorithm. First of all, most people, when they hear the word algorithm, they automatically switch off. Unless they're computer scientists, you say algorithm, they're like, there must be someone else at this party I could talk to. Because this person just said algorithm, so we're not there. If you say it, it's very interesting. It's a decentralized system that allows you to create a monetary supply of deflationary assets that's distributed in a fair method through approval for a consensus. And then at that point, they're really like, there must be someone else at this party I can talk to. So, you got to realize in 2009, nobody believed any of this shit could actually work, which is why it did. Because if you believe it works, what are you going to do? If you actually believe this thing is going to do 10x or 100x, it's going to increase in value 100 times, what are you going to do? You're going to sell everything you have and buy this thing, and then when it becomes 100 times bigger, you're rich, you go home, you retire, I don't know. You go to better parties. And if you know that, then everybody does it. And if everybody does it, then it doesn't happen. One of the most guaranteed ways you know that this technology is in a bubble is when people you haven't seen since high school call you up, like me, and they're like, hey Andreas, remember me? No, not really. Remember me? Is this a good time to buy Bitcoin? I heard that the price... Yeah? Is this a good time? No. If you're calling me for the first time in 28 years to ask me, this is a clear indication to sell, probably. Like at this point, I'm beginning to think I should sell because if it's beginning to attract your kind of people who had no interest, they'd be busy 2 years ago. Now is the time to get out. This is what happens with markets. If too many people think that it's a sure bet you're dealing with suckers. And as they say in poker if you can't tell within 30 minutes who the idiot at the poker table is, you're the idiot. So, if you're like, no, this is a sure thing, I've told all my friends about it. θα το δούμε. Ευρών śmετινά με τον ναγό και η διακόληση εσύ, αυτό είναι το time να γινήσει. Κομμάτω για να αφού τον Πόλη και και να δουλεύω και να το διαπραγματικώ. Δημιουργείς, σχέση και οδηγίας, σχέση και γνωπερού. Γιατί γνωλεύω δεν πιρ Kliss, 40% της αρχιής σε ένα ανασχέσης. Δεν υπέφερης, δεν υπέφερης από τον κλείο που σκοτήθε. Η γνωρίζωση δεν παίρνει από το κυβέρνητο ή τίποτα συμφωνία. Η γνωρίζωση δεν είναι έκανη από τον Πρόεδρο Τρομπ σήμερα. Η πίκονα έκανη από τον Πρόεδρο Τρομπ σήμερα. Αυτό είπε ότι δεν είχε καλύτερη στιγμή και πιστεύει από πρόεδρος. Είμαι πίσω πίσω πίσω από τους φίλους. Η απόσταση είναι ότι η γνωρίζωση και η εξωγεία είναι ένας εξωγένωσης που μπορεί να φτάσει. Και αν πίσω πίσω πίσω πιστεύει, η γνωρίζωση και η εξωγεία που βλέπεις από πίκονα δεν πάρει. Επίσης που μου πω πίσω πιστεύουν ότι ναι, πιστεύω να σε πιστεύω. Yeah, yeah, but what should I buy? And that's the problem, right? Because if you have an indication of something you should buy, you shouldn't really go buying that, okay? And if you need to ask someone else what you should buy, that means you don't understand the technology well enough to make that decision on your own. Are you confident enough to say, I think this technology has some unique differentiation, good market fit, the timing is right, the momentum of the market, the liquidity is there? Like, if you understand all of that, then okay, you're qualified to make that decision on your own, and if you're not qualified to make that decision on your own, you really shouldn't be investing in this thing, right? So, is it an investment or not? And what is the next Bitcoin? And that's the fundamental problem, because there is no next Bitcoin. Bitcoin was able to achieve what it achieved because nobody for three or four years believed that this thing could work. That's why it did what it did. When you see someone investing in a technology that every single person around them think is insane, and then they make a hundred times a return on their investment, the reason they made a hundred times a return on investment is because everyone around them thought they were insane. They were taking an enormous risk, right? I'll tell you about the first time I bought Bitcoin, okay? So, I had known about Bitcoin for almost a year, and I was reading all of these scientific papers and I was trying to understand how it worked. And it was very interesting to me as a computer scientist. I was very interested in the technology, but I also wanted to try to use it. So, in order to try to use it, I needed to buy a tiny amount of Bitcoin. So, my comfort at that point was I needed to buy like $100 worth of Bitcoin. So, in 2012, I decided I'm going to buy $100 worth of Bitcoin. Now, in order to do that, I had to go to a grocery store to use a service called Moneygram, where you stand in front of a red telephone in America and you call someone so they can charge your credit card to transfer money. And this is used mostly by poor people who don't have a bank account in order to pay their bills. So, you put cash in the machine, or you give cash to the person at the grocery store, and once they verify that, they send that cash so you can pay your electricity bill or your telephone bill. It's used by people who don't have bank accounts. I used that service to send $100 worth of Bitcoin to an exchange in Japan, which was the only exchange that existed for Bitcoin at the time, called MT Gox. And if you know anything about MT Gox, you know all of the horrible things that happened after. But they didn't happen to me at the time, because I actually managed to buy some Bitcoin that way. Every single person in my life said that I was crazy. Not only that I was crazy, but that I had lost all of my money, which I was okay with. Alright, it's $100. Now, people today want the same answer. They want to find out what can I invest in today, where I can put in $100, and it's the next Bitcoin, and it does one of these things. And the simple answer is that that doesn't exist. And the reason it doesn't exist, because the whole world is looking for that. And when they're looking for that, what happens is, people with a lot more experience in markets and a lot more money than you are now interested. So if they see something, they think could work. What do I mean by work? I don't mean they think this is the technology that could replace Bitcoin. What I mean is they think that you will think that this is the technology that could replace Bitcoin. They're like, oh, lots of people who know nothing about investments will think this is the one. It's got slick marketing, it's got some people on the web page, it's got some fancy words like quantum, AI, drones, autonomous. And people who know nothing about this market, the people who are looking for the next Bitcoin, are going to believe this is the next Bitcoin. So what they do is they get into the market with a lot of money when the price is really early on, then they wait for all of you to go, I'll just put in a hundred euro. What's wrong? Worst case, I lose my hundred euro. Yeah, that's exactly what's going to happen. And that system of investment is called pump and dump. So what they do is they put the money into this investment, then they go out on social media and they buy people to go and say, this is the next thing, this is the next thing. You go in and say, I'll just put in a hundred euros just in case. You know, I mean, maybe I could get lucky. You're better off playing the lotto, right? You're better off playing propo. Do they still have that here? It's like the football sweepstakes. And so as soon as lots of people who are not informed about these investments, go and buy it with their little hundred euro investments, they then do the second part of the plan, which is called dump, right? So they did the pump, now they do the dump. And what they do is they sell all of their shit coin and then the price crashes, but they made a huge return on investment. And all of the people who put in a hundred euros just in case go, ah, that wasn't the one. But this next one that's IoT, AI, drones and quantum is going to be the next bitcoin. So then they repeat and so on and so forth. The bottom line is that bitcoin happened at a moment in history when nobody was expecting this thing to work. And none of the people that were really involved in the early days believed that this was a good investment. They believed it was an interesting technology. And in order to try and use that technology like I did, you had to get some of it to try out. So it kind of accidentally became an investment. And by the way, if you think that story starts with, and then I went to the grocery store and I picked up the red phone and I bought bitcoin at $2 and then I became rich, right? That's not how it works. That's exactly what happened. I bought $100 worth of bitcoin. Each bitcoin was $2, so I bought like $50. Next week I bought another $50, right? And then you're like, oh, yeah, so wow. This is how it actually works. Three months later it goes from $2 to $8. And I go, yeah, score. I quadrupled my investment, which means that now if I sell my $200, I have $800 fucking dollars. I can buy an Xbox. So I sold it all and bought an Xbox. And this keeps happening again. This has happened to everybody who's gotten involved because it's very easy to think, oh, I would understand immediately that this investment would go to like thousands of dollars. But if you told me in 2012, oh, it's $2 now, but in 2019 it's going to be $13,000. Yeah, right. That's never going to happen. And if I told you today, let's do the same experiment. If I told you today, in three years it's going to be $150,000. How many of you think yes? OK. That's unrealistic. That's totally unrealistic. It might happen, right? But it might not. And do you take that kind of risk? Do you take the risk in January to say, oh, it's $3,000. It's been crashing for two years straight. Now is a good time to buy. Everybody thinks they do that. The strategy seems simple. On its face, buy low, sell high. In practice what you end up doing is a somewhat similar strategy called buy high, sell low. Where what you do is when everybody gets excited, you buy some. Then it crashes, then you panic, then you sell it to the lowest price and then you keep repeating that. How do I know? Done it. Right? Who hasn't? OK, really. Who hasn't? Oh, OK. Five people. Very good. So the bottom line is that we're all looking for this next opportunity and the reason it's not going to happen is because of the unique circumstances. I like to think of this a bit by comparing it to biology, right? And if you think about biology and you understand how evolution works and how an environmental niche or area works, if there's a very successful species, right? And that species finds an environment in which it is very successful. It has the right amount of food. It has no predators, et cetera, et cetera. It will dominate that environment, like dominate it. Think, for example, what happened when stupid Europeans introduced rabbits to Australia and there was nothing that could eat rabbits. Rabbits everywhere, right? And then they're like, oh, let's introduce this other species that will eat that species and then they've got too many of those. Because if you do that in an environment where there's no anything fitting in that particular niche, right? And it has no predators and it has plenty of food, what is it going to do? It's going to fuck all day until there's lots of rabbits, right? That's what it's going to do. And then you have a lot of rabbits. I mean, you know, they pop out eight in every generation which is approximately every six days. So before you know it, talk about exponential growth. Like Bitcoin has nothing compared to rabbits. The bottom line is that if you have an environment in which a species becomes successful, it dominates that environment. But interestingly enough, if you then introduce another species that is similar but slightly more efficient or more successful, it fails completely. Why? Because that environment has already been dominated and simply a sheer numbers mean that the new species, even if it's more efficient, cannot propagate in that environment because there's five of it and there's six million rabbits. So even if it manages to be very successful, it doesn't meet very many of its own kind but it keeps meeting rabbits, right? And every time there's an opportunity for food, a whole bunch of rabbits show up. This is the idea of biological evolution. If you have an environment in which there is one organism that is very successful, it dominates that environment and it then closes that environment to everything else that can fit in that environment. So what happened with Bitcoin? Bitcoin found a very unique application and that was non-government money that can spread globally that is completely uncensurable, decentralized, unstoppable and borderless in a pure digital form. Okay, that application in that environment is now taken. So when someone comes and says, we can do a slightly better Bitcoin. Great, you can do a slightly better Bitcoin. Nobody will care because all of the software developers have not been trained in your slightly better Bitcoin, right? So if Bitcoin is B, let's call the other one, let's start it with a C, so it's the next iteration. Sitcoin. So let's say you have Sitcoin and it comes along as like, we're the next Bitcoin and maybe that's true. Maybe it's a bit more scalable or has better security characteristics or is easier to use and it's got enough differentiation that if they both started out, it would win. It would absolutely win. If they both started out at the same time, it would win. But now it starts out in an environment where all of the developers already know how to do Bitcoin, where the book says mastering Bitcoin, where the software libraries are for Bitcoin, where the exchanges have Bitcoin and it has a lot of liquidity, where there's 26 different wallets for it, where you can easily find people at the local Starbucks or some better coffee shop to trade and get some Bitcoin. But if you start calling, well, do you have some Sitcoin? And you're like, well, no, but we do have some Bitcoin, but like it's better. Yeah, but I don't have any and everybody I know is already interested in this other thing. So how much does the new thing have to differentiate? Well, this is the real challenge because if it differentiates enough, if it's different enough from Bitcoin, well, then it's no longer occupying the same environmental niche. It's no longer competing against Bitcoin. Now it's competing for something else and maybe it becomes dominant in that space. And in order to do that, you have to do a lot of hard work because if you want to start a new cryptocurrency with its own security, you have to bootstrap that security in an environment where people are going to attack you on day one. On day one, nobody attacked Bitcoin. On day two, nobody attacked Bitcoin. On day 1074, nobody attacked Bitcoin. Nobody had really heard of it. Nobody thought it would work. On day 2500, nobody attacked Bitcoin, right? It took years before anybody thought this thing would actually work to start attacking it and by that time, it was strong enough to resist the attack. Now you go out and you're like, I have an idea and it's better than Bitcoin. Everybody goes, run! They attack your system and the next morning it's gone, right? Because you get hacked, you get crashed. You go out and do proof of work. Oh, I've got a new proof of work algorithm and everybody comes in with their GPUs. Why do they have GPUs? Because they've spent the last five years mining Ethereum or whatever, right? So they have plenty of GPUs. They're like, oh, could I take a few thousand GPUs and throw it to this new coin and see if I can dominate the network? They sure can, right? So then they dominate the network and there goes your security. They're like, oh, okay, we can't do proof of work. Let's do proof of stake. Proof of stake is going to be much easier because then what it really needs in order for someone to attack it is rich people. Oh, shit. There's lots of them and they're all trying to break crypto now. So you start proof of stake and who buys all of the stake? Rich people. And the only reason rich people didn't buy all of the Bitcoin in the beginning is because they thought it wasn't gonna work. But if you try to do it today, they're all looking for the next Bitcoin that they can sell to you. To the people who don't know any better. I remember when Ethereum launched and I remember receiving the email, the Vitalik sent out, to ask for comments. And this was in December of 2013. And he sent it out to a bunch of people in the space and he said, listen, I've got this new idea. We're looking for developers. We're looking for investors. And I'd like to invite you all to read the white paper. So I went and I read the white paper. And I had one question. And this question was, why are you not doing this on Bitcoin? Why would you go to all of the effort of launching a separate chain? So I called Vitalik on Skype and I talked to Vitalik in his kitchen and he patiently explained to me that he had already tried to do it on Bitcoin. He had tried to do it with what's called the master coin protocol on top of Bitcoin. And he had very quickly realized that Bitcoin was too specific to work for the purpose that Ethereum was. And that you couldn't really do the same security model. And he said, I think this is general enough, different enough and important enough that it's worth the effort to bootstrap a new security chain. It's really, really hard to do. And Ethereum was different enough that it did it. Maybe, we'll see, right? Maybe it will work. It's not yet certain. It seems to be doing okay so far sometimes, sometimes not so well, right? But they managed to bootstrap a new security chain because it was different enough from Bitcoin. But then the interesting thing that happened is now, if you talk to people who are really into Ethereum we can do everything, including what Bitcoin does. No, you can't. No, you can't because all of the things you did to differentiate enough from Bitcoin mean that you're playing in a completely different environment. You're playing for the generalized flexible smart contract space and every choice you make for that design means you can't play in the highly specialized, highly secure, robust, we can resist attacks from governments space for the open free money of the world application that Bitcoin already fully occupies. Ethereum can't be the next Bitcoin. But the funny thing that happens next is while Ethereum people are like, we could be the next Bitcoin. Some other people are going, yeah, but we could be the next Ethereum. And before you know it, everyone in Ethereum is looking over their shoulder and going, who are you? Where did you come from? Why are you coming from my application? It's okay because they can't be the next Ethereum either. For exactly the same reason, the application space for a virtual machine-based, general smart contracts application platform is solidly occupied by Ethereum. Not because it's the best, but because it got there first, survived long enough and did okay-ish for long enough to dominate the space. And now, all of the libraries are for Ethereum, all of the application developers are for Ethereum. And as a result, if you're trying to make your own thing to compete against that, you can't find enough attention. So, there isn't an next Ethereum because that space is already taken. What does it take for one of these technologies to be replaced? What does it take for something to replace Bitcoin or to replace Ethereum? It doesn't happen because someone invented a slightly better solution or even a much better solution. That will work. Instead, it can only happen if the system that already occupies this space fully fails on its own. So, in order for something to be the next Bitcoin first, Bitcoin has to fail. Like really spectacularly fail. Not a bit, not like, oh, we lost $200 million because someone hacked an exchange again. Obviously, that's not enough. Not we've been banned by China for the 37th time. And this time, they really mean it. That's not enough, right? Not Trump just called us drug dealers. Not enough. Like, we've been called drug dealers before by more serious people. It's not enough for even Facebook or JP Morgan to say, hey, we can do cryptocurrency too. No, you can't. Not enough. The only way Bitcoin fails is from the inside. It has to fail because of a critical vulnerability that cannot be fixed or that people don't want to fix. It has to fail because of a failure of community. It has to fail because of failure of trust or culture. And that's really difficult to do in a technology that has so many participants who have so many different motivations, different cultures, different languages, different operating systems, different software platforms, all collaborating around one core basic set of ideas. They have to all be disappointed for different reasons simultaneously. Very difficult to happen. And for the same reason that if you want to find the next Ethereum, first, Ethereum has to fail at being the current Ethereum in order for something else to pop up. Now, this is both good news and bad news. If you're trying to push the next chip coin, it's bad news because I'm sorry to tell you you don't have the next Bitcoin or the next Ethereum. In fact, many of the ideas out there are either too early to have any success or not differentiated enough from the current marketplace. You can have the best idea and the best team in the world. And if it's not your time yet, you fail completely. Some people say, but look at Facebook or MySpace or Google, Google was the 21st search engine. They waited until the first 20 failed. Right? How many here used Alta Vista? Yeah? How many here still use Alta Vista? Now remember, Microsoft came along and said, we're the next Google. We even have a fun name. It's like, bing! How many of you use bing unless you're on a new computer where you can't install an alternative? Right? It's very difficult to unseat a technology that has already fully occupied a space. Now, the good news is, at the same time, that if one of these technologies fails and vacates that environment, we now know that it's a rich environment that can support a very, very successful system. Which means there will be a whole line of candidates waiting to be the next X. Which should be really bad news to all of the governments and regulators and large corporations that are hoping so hard after 10 years of evidence that it's just not happening that this year, Bitcoin will surely fail. This year, Bitcoin will shut down. They've been hoping. They've been telling themselves, don't worry, there's no way governments would allow this. There's no way this will be successful. And after 10 years of being wrong, they're still holding on to hope that this thing will fail on its own because they have no fucking clue how to compete with it. Well, here's the bad news for them. The moment it fails, every single competitor that has a slightly better solution and specifically the ones that fix the thing that caused it to fail in the first place will flood that environment and bootstrap something new. And if they're really smart, if they're really smart, they're going to call it Bitcoin. Because that's the best branding you can do. And so it never dies because who occupies the space and has the name keeps changing but you still occupy the same space and maybe even you still occupy the same name. And that's why the next Bitcoin is Bitcoin. Thank you.