 What I'd like to talk about today is what I call the re-decentralized web. The concept here is to talk about not what impact Bitcoin will have in general, but specifically what impact Bitcoin will have on the internet and the web more specifically. Even more focused on content creators, people who create music, art, video content, writers, authors, publishers, people who create content on the internet. How many people in this room are involved in some kind of content creation? Quite a few. Good. Well, it looks like this is a good topic to go on. Back in the days, when I was still young, the web was decentralized. If you wanted to put content on the web, you installed a web server, and you ran that web server, and you put your content on that web server, and then nobody could find your content, because search engines didn't exist yet. Then we had search engines, and people could find their content. The web at the time was very decentralized, but it was also not a very good place to do publishing. It was very difficult to publish content. If you were a small artist or a musician, you don't have the public eye yet, and actually getting people to find your content was very difficult. Gradually, we started solving that problem, so we had peer-to-peer technology, such as Napster and search engines, that made it easier for people to find content online. But then there was another really important problem, because when people found the content, they couldn't buy it. They couldn't pay for it. The reason for that is that independent artists can't easily become merchants to sell things by credit card. The credit card system was never developed or designed to be used online. If you're a content creator, you can put your content online, and people can download it. People can now find it online, and that's great, but no one can pay you. You either have to give out your content for free, or what we saw happening was the centralization of the web. Companies started building platforms, and these platforms grew up around the ability to concentrate payments. This really pernicious effect of payments, the fact that credit cards are broken, they're never designed to work on the internet, to provide an online mechanism. If you want to buy a song, how much is a song worth to you to play once? Five cents? Maybe? One cent? Maybe? Half a cent? Great. The minimum purchase you can do is $3. Also, you have to enter your billing address into a form in order to do that. You're not going to go and do that if every time you have to buy something online, you have to enter your billing address and give your information out. Then you give a credit card that, in itself, poses the risk of identity theft and fraudulent charges. You're not going to do that for something that is worth half a penny to you, which is the playing of one song. The only way to really make the web of content work was to get very large audiences together, on a single platform where they would give their billing address and credit card, and they could get charged once, $3 or more, in order to buy content that is available from a very large library that makes it justifiable to pay that much money. Or, instead, you take the personal information that your customers gave you, and you sell it to advertisers at which point your customers are no longer customers, they are the product. We become the product. I've said before that on the internet we already have a micropayments economy. The only problem is that that economy is an economy of advertising that is driven by micro violations of your privacy. Anytime you consume content that is not valuable enough to pay for directly, you are paying for it by giving up your information. You are paying for it by violating your privacy through a platform, and at that point you have become the product. The web started out decentralized, and then it gradually became more and more centralized. The reason it became centralized was because payments act the way a grain of sand works in an oyster, and it gradually gathers material around it, or the way a small density fluctuation creates gravity that pulls more matter in, that pulls more matter in, until you have Apple iTunes. One of the shittiest pieces of software ever written that can drive billion-dollar industry. At this point, I will ask everyone to please accept the terms and conditions of Apple software, because I mentioned them three minutes from now. I'm going to ask you to accept the terms and conditions again, just for fun. This is the Apple way. So the bottom line is we see this enormous concentration around these platforms, and the reason is because you have to bring this enormous library of content to this enormous audience of people just to justify the single middleman visa, MasterCard, the credit card system. In order to make their business model work, we have to disrupt the link between creators and their audience, and introduce in between a platform that is actually selling the record labels to advertisers, and the audience, they're part of the product now. And the artists, they make nothing, and they're invisible. You've broken the link, introduced behemoth corporations in between, and separated the most important thing, the artist, from their audience, and it doesn't have to be that way. The reason the web has become centralized is very much related to payments. If you think about that for a second, you might start seeing this pattern pop up everywhere. What exactly does Uber do? I mean, they don't have any cars, and they don't have any drivers, and they don't really find passengers. Passengers find them. They're a peer-to-peer taxi service. Well, they're a peer-to-goldman tax-to-peer taxi service, because they're not peer-to-peer. Uber sits in the middle, and Uber is the Goldman Sachs with wheels. In fact, they recently did a billion-dollar deal with Goldman Sachs to sell subprime loans to their own drivers that lock them in to driving only for Uber. Yeah? Talk about evil vampire squid. So, here you have this company. What exactly do they do? What have they done with the billions of billions of dollars of funding that they raised? Lawsuits? How many people here think that they put all of that money into building the best possible ride-sharing application ever? No one? I see you've used Uber. The app stocks, the drivers are upset, they're getting fleeced, right? And it's miraculous. Don't get me wrong, it's miraculous. And the reason it's miraculous is because we're comparing them to the alternative, which is the regulated taxi license system, which is atrocious, right? So, if you can do atrocious minus a bit, you get miraculous. And that is the business model of Uber. What is the purpose of this company in the middle? They are payments intermediary. You might think that what they're doing is also providing insurance. But that's only because the insurance companies are also payments intermediary. You can see this pattern again and again. If it's becoming obvious to you now, start thinking about Airbnb. What does Airbnb do? Somebody's house, not theirs. Someone's staying, not theirs. 20% cut. Wow, brilliant, right? Why can't I pay the person because they can't take credit cards? Why can't I pay my driver because they can't take credit cards? Why can't I pay the driver and an insurance company on the basis of a four minute ride to ensure me for those four minutes while I'm in that car? Because I have to put a credit card in the middle. And the credit card pops out again and again and again as this massive centralizing force. The banking system is no longer a system where people pay people. It is a system where people pay corporations that pay corporations that pay people maybe, right? We have actually accepted this as normal. The only places where people pay people nowadays is when they tip with cash. And that is the tiny exception. And that is gradually disappearing. Under most circumstances, you cannot easily pay another person without inviting a corporation into your little dance, right? They're the third wheel. It's like you're on a date and there's this dude just sitting there with visa on his shirt going, huh? 20%. It's like, who invited him? And this is all has to do with the fact that we cannot make payments from person to person and we cannot make payments below two or three dollars unless we're making billions of them. And we cannot make payments for small things over small periods of time. Otherwise, I could pay my Uber driver and the insurance company for a four-minute ride done, walk out. Nobody needs to take a 20% cut. I could pay for my hotel room or my rental room directly to the owner without anyone taking a cut. I could pay for the song that I just listened to, a penny. And the artist would make 10 times more than they make when they pass that through a giant machine of intermediaries. And so I pay Spotify or Spotify serves me ads because I'm the product. Spotify pays the record label that pays the producers that pays the lawyers that pays the financiers that pay everybody to set up the accounts in such a way as to show a loss so they don't have to pay the actual artist. And this repeats in every form of content. So as a content creator, we're feeding all of these intermediaries, all of these vet prior squids that have found the flow of money, walked up to it, taken a straw and going, I have a business bomb and just suck profit out of other people's work. And the only reason they exist is because credit cards are broken because you can't email cash until 2009. And now we can email cash. And now we can make payments that are tiny and we can make payments for services that are tiny. We can make payments by the millisecond for video. We can make payments by the 1000th of a penny for services for content. We can give payments to people writing smart comments on Reddit and make it expensive for people to write stupid comments on Reddit. If you have to put down a 25 cent deposit every time you write a comment on Reddit, and if it's great to make a return, and if it's stupid you lose your 25 cents, it gets really expensive to be a troll. Because you now actually have to pay for the attention you're stealing. Money isn't just about income. It's not just about making livelihoods. Money is the most efficient way of discovering the true value of something through a marketplace. Money is the means of exchange, the system that lubricates economic activity, social activity, trading. And you can use it to express value even if that value doesn't really buy anything. But you multiply that by 10,000 people or 100,000 people and it suddenly starts being important. The network effect of money is gigantic. We now have the ability through our payment systems to remove that very nugget of centralization, the force that has been centralizing the web for the last 15 years. We can take that back with services that offer the ability for people to sell directly to people, get paid directly from people for their products and services. And we're beginning to see these things pop up. Open Bazaar is one example I talked about today, which I find quite exciting. There's a taxi service and my brain has frozen right now, so I can't remember what it's called. Oh, Arcade City, which is a competitor to Uber that does people to people direct access. And they use either cash or Bitcoin. A cash society is not a dirty economy. It's not a bad thing to live in a cash society. It's a society where people can pay people for products and services and keep it within a community rather than people paying corporations that pay corporations that refuse to pay people. And we can get that back. Bitcoin is not just a new currency. It is the seed that allows us to decentralize the web by removing the most powerful form of centralization that the web has and enabling content creators to be rewarded and recognized for their work. But more importantly, what you do by removing the intermediaries is you allow an audience to reconnect with the artist that they want to connect to. And that is huge. If you're a content creator, the most important thing that's taken away from you by these platforms is your ability to connect to the audience. Using a digital currency allows you to create a loyalty system, to create a connection with your audience, to have them directly provide feedback to you as to what they want, what you should be doing, or what they like or what they don't like. Maybe you don't care what they think you should be doing, you'll do it anyway, and then you'll just find out how many people like that specifically that you're doing. But you reconnect with that audience. Bitcoin and all of the other digital currencies that we're seeing merge down and the blockchains that are supporting them. It's more than just money. It's about the fact that money is a social activity. And by reconnecting audiences with creators, you can take out the intermediaries and re-engage that social activity. Thank you. Thank you Andrea. Do people have some questions? Let's sit down here and do it. Oh yeah sure. I can repeat questions. Anybody? Anybody? Anybody? Here we go. Thank you. Thanks for coming out today. In the past you spoke about infrastructure inversion, where disruptive technologies are forced to survive on infrastructure that it's not designed for. So you mentioned Uber and Airbnb and I get it, the vampire squid suckers. But aren't they really paving a way for this infrastructure inversion of peer-to-peer? I mean, still they get no way. Yes they are. Right, in terms of payments. I get the payment part, but the software that brings people together, is it not just the beginning steps towards a more decentralized marketplace where people can share these products? Absolutely. They are paving the way and I'm sure my criticism is grossly unfair because the alternative, which is the traditional taxi system completely sucks and chain hotels completely suck. And I use Uber and Lyft and Cabify and Hail, this and all of the taxi services and I use Airbnb as my permanent home, effectively. And so yes, absolutely, they're paving the way. Would it be better if they paved the way without locking their own people into subprime auto loans and exploiting them? Yes. Would it be better if they took a smaller cut and spent less money on the things they spend? Yes. We can do better. Just because we can do better doesn't mean that they're not good. It just means we can do better. And recognizing why these centralization tendencies exist is what I'm really up for. Chris, I want to know that. Wouldn't you say a lot of the money that Uber stands is on market making? Like billions of dollars goes to like me only paying two dollars to get from downtown San Monica today. They are just losing money to build the market. It's hard to do that in a decentralized way. Absolutely. Just to follow up on the Uber and Airbnb example, wouldn't it be in their interest the shareholders of Uber and Airbnb to enable Bitcoin payments because then they don't have to pay three percent to their to describe or bring to the credit card processor. That's the thing that puzzles me about both Uber and Airbnb. Especially Airbnb because they do so many transactions internationally. They have to pay so many fees, wiring fees, foreign exchange fees. Bitcoin would eliminate a lot of that. Honestly, it's not a big enough market yet. There aren't enough people with the ability to have Bitcoin or to earn Bitcoin or to convert into Bitcoin to make it worthwhile for any of these companies. I'm looking at this from a much longer perspective. It took 15 years to centralize the web and it will take another 15 to 20 to re-decentralize it. We have the potential to do that in the meantime. I don't expect them to start accepting Bitcoin anytime soon. For them, the risks and the difficulty they would face in adopting something like that probably outweigh any of the benefits. They might do it as a marketing giving, honestly. But it might start raising the question of what exactly we're paying 20% for. And I also heard sometimes people find you get lower conversion rate by putting the Bitcoin logo into the credit card like this. And they're like, ah, so they just hide it and only tell Bitcoin users that they take Bitcoin and don't put it on the main page. Well, I try to persuade drivers to take tips in Bitcoin. And my argument is you will ride around with this barcode on your dash for the next six months and no one will know what it is but then one day, dude's going to get it to your car and he's going to look at that barcode and he's going to be like, you want to take Bitcoin? And he's going to give you the biggest tip you've ever received because that's what the community is like. Imagine, you get into an Uber, you see a barcode for Bitcoin. First of all, you're going to be really excited. You're going to be discussing that for the rest of the ride. And when you leave, you're going to give them the bigger tips than you ever give them. I certainly would. So that's my sales pitch. Is the one in six months unicorn Bitcoin user who will make, who will pay back for the one sheet of paper you used to print that? Thanks, Andreas. Great job. So, and that decentralized future that you see, what will be the incentive or driver for innovation and what will be the monetization of business models for people who would design those services and products? Because I don't think that each artist or content developer will be able to set up their own full-node and set up whatever number of services to get to receive Bitcoins themselves. There will always be someone an intermediary or service or payment service that will facilitate that. So they're not always intermediaries. I mean, look at what's happened with OpenBazaar. The important thing to realize is that what's being created on these platforms is new open ecosystems, right? So first of all, as soon as OpenBazaar started, immediately you had people advertising hosting services to run the service for you, right? Marketing services. A couple of search engines popped up within the first couple of months, and these search engines use the API to basically index and crawl through the peer-to-peer network all of the stores that give you a web searchable interface. No one at OpenBazaar built that. That was third-party services that built it separately. Now they're building additional services on top of that. All of these APIs opening up means that now you're not looking at a single company or single platform. You're looking at an open system where people can offer layers and layers and layers of additional services, and you have a thriving marketplace for these services. So I think instead what you see is an explosion of innovation. Right now, no one has access to the data really at Uber or Airbnb or any of these services. The reason for that is because once again, who's the product? You are. In many cases, you'll see that I think over the next few years we'll see that a lot of these services are going to make more money selling data about where you went and when you went and who you visited and what you typed into the search engine and whether you typed the name of a business and visited that business and how long you were there. The same thing with Airbnb. They're going to make more money off the data about you than the cost of the ride. And once again, you're the product. So I don't see that as innovation. It's not innovative to turn people into a product. It's evil, but it's not ever innovative. I mean, it's been done. How do we get away from being the product and being the solution? Take control of your money and actually pay for the services you consume instead of getting free services for which you have to provide information. A good guide is whether a service is really offering you a service or if you're the product is whether you can use that anonymously. If you can use it anonymously, you're not the product. If you can't, you are the product. And it's not easy to do at this time. We all have entanglements with various platforms and services we use. And even if you try really, really hard, your data is going to get harvested somewhere down the road by several players. But we can gradually start to change that. The question is, you know, what kind of web are we going to give to the next generation? Is it going to be a web like the one we started on? Or is it going to be something completely different? Going back to your example with Airbnb and Uber, one of the things they do is provide standards, you know, standard experience, certain level of experience, and also sort of identity reputation. So how can you get decentralized payments with Bitcoin but then you also have this other problem of, you know, identity and rating and consistency of the experience and standards for either the Uber or how do you combine those two things together? Well, we're already seeing some very interesting experiments in that particular area. We're seeing experiments with using escrow services and moderators, for example, to provide escrow services between seller and buyer. And that's a voluntary involvement of the third party that you can select. We can see that building to arbitration and aviation systems that are built through smart contracts. And the other thing to realize is that one of the things that they saw through their reputation systems is civil attacks. They solve the issue of someone creating a bunch of fake accounts and every time they get a bad rating just switching to a different account, right? That's a problem. Well, here's a system to solve civil attacks. It's called proof of work. And then we use it to Bitcoin. And now we're seeing the development of proof of stakes as this is solved, civil attacks, where you can stake money against the reputation without it being identified, an anonymous reputation, but with money staked behind it that does not allow you to easily just switch out of it so that if you damage that reputation, it has to write financial cost to you. This is the innovation that is being created out of the, well, how can we do this without using identity? How can we do this while still remaining anonymous? How can we do this without exploiting the data of individuals? And the answers are, well, if only we had programmable money. Oh, wait, we have programmable money. Most of us in the room have programmable money. Some of us don't need it. Yeah, very few of us have programmable money. It's on the poll earlier. Let's wait for the microphone because it's not going to get caught in the recording. I'll hear you, but nobody else will. I wanted to see what are your thoughts on the government being an intermediary, or do you think that the government should be out of the equation in the next 10 or 20 years? I don't think government is going to be out of the equation, both from a practical perspective, because I don't think that's realistic. I'm also not a hardcore libertarian that says no government is appropriate. There is a role for government. Government is just us making decisions altogether. The question is, what is the government doing? Preventing outright violence between individuals, maybe? Building roads, not in this country, if you've seen the roads. You have to perhaps re-envision what government is. I think we have a model of government today, which is an 18th century model of government, and it's now the 21st century. See, it's time for a refresh. I don't know what it's going to turn out to be. I'm terrified about the possibilities, but at the same time, I do know that the existing model is certainly becoming less and less effective at the things that government's supposed to do. Thanks. A couple of questions. First is about centralization of mining. We know that around 80% of solar power is on channel, and so how do you see this centralization problem can get solved? The second question is about before Bitcoin, another cryptocurrency to evolve in scale, so some level of change is needed. Both hard and soft forks have their problems, as opposed to with Ethereum hard forks. So how do you see this problem can get solved? Okay, let me try taking those two. The first one, mining centralization. I think I've talked about this many times before, and in my mind, I think mining centralization is the result of this very, very rapid acceleration in the hashing power and going from CPU-based mining to ASIC mining and straight up to catch up with Moore's law, the front-end of Moore's law. And I think we're going to see the equation change a lot now that we've reached the front-end of Moore's law, and now that the increases you can get are maybe 2x, not 10,000x in a year. That may change things. But one of the reasons this is happening in China, I think we need to be aware of this is not some kind of communist conspiracy to take over Bitcoin by the government of China. It's important to realize that one of the things that's driving mining centralization in China is that it's better for mining to be in China, and the reason it's better for mining is because China has experienced this enormous growth in its electricity generation over the past 20 years. At some point, I remember the statistic vaguely in 2012, they were turning on a new coal-fired plant every 16 hours. Every 16 hours, they were turning on a new electricity factory, a big one. And it was projected that that would not keep up with the demand for electricity because it was growing even faster than that. That's really quite astonishing. So what happens when you build a lot of generation capacity, but no distribution network? You end up with a situation that is very unlike what we have in the United States. In the United States, there are basically two distribution networks. There's a grid connects the vast majority of the continents with U.S. together, whereby electricity can be sent from Connecticut to Pennsylvania if there's excess capacity in all places and excess demand in your mother. Then there's a second distribution network that serves Texas because Texas, they're like, you have a distribution network? Oh, fuck, y'all, we're going to make our own. And so they have to. And so that was a terrible text match. Half British, half Greek, recently Americanized, that was terrible. Anybody who's a bit Indian, maybe? So what happens in the U.S. is if you have excess capacity for a factory and you have demand somewhere else, you just ship it across the distribution network. And in China, you don't. You just waste it. You don't have anything to do with that electricity. If it's generated and it's not used on the spot by the local area where you can distribute it, it's wasted. So there's this very big difference between what's being generated and what's being used. And what can you do with the excess capacity? What do you do with the electricity that would otherwise get wasted? That would otherwise simply get wasted. Well, one thing you can do is you can turn off the power, right, and turn off the plant. The problem is that some of these plants, you know, it takes six hours to turn it off and eight hours to turn it back on. So if you're going to have a law in demand for four hours, it's not enough time to turn it off and on again. So you just leave it on, wasted energy. Other plants, you can't turn them off at all. I was reading about this mining farm that has located itself in this tiny village in China where there's nothing, except for a hydroelectric plant that was built as part of these development projects. And they have a hydroelectric plant that generates way too much electricity that they're not actually using and it was getting wasted. So some enterprising person went there and said, hey, Bitcoin mining. I'm like, what? What's that? Free money from electricity. I'm like, oh, we'll take some of that. So now they're doing 50 or 60 megawatts of Bitcoin mining out of these completely ramshackle, warehousing buildings that we'll put up overnight. And you can think that's wasteful or it's concentration of mining in China. What they're doing is they're solving a problem. They have electricity that's being produced. They can't turn it off. They don't want to disinvest in electricity because eventually they're going to catch up with that level of capacity. And they found a creative way to turn that into money. Bitcoin is a battery. It's a battery that stores energy in the form of Bitcoin that they can then use to buy electricity in the future or to buy oil or to buy other forms of energy. It's an energy storage mechanism. And I think that's brilliant. I'm not worried about centralization of mining in China because the incentives are so high to keep it going. And the only way to keep it going is by playing by the rules of consensus. So the problem is that if a highfalutin official went in there and said, we're going to ban Bitcoin, everybody in that village would be questioned here. All of our income comes from that building. What are you going to give us if you turn it off? What are they going to do? We're going to send a warrant to shut you down. Great. Good luck finding a police officer who's going to do that. They're all getting paid by the mining equipment. And see the problem is that there is a big disparity between political power and electrical power. So I'm not worried about centralization of mining in China because centralization in mining in China is representing the best of entrepreneurial capitalism in a very destructive way in a country that desperately needs the best of entrepreneurial capitalism. We should be applauding it. And honestly, we wouldn't be having this discussion if it was mining centralization in Sweden. Everybody would be going, yeah, another terrible accident. So I'm not worried about that. I think it's going to change and I think it's not a problem while it doesn't change. I think hard forks are a bit of a difficult topic. It's very esoteric for most of the audience here. So I'm going to take that one offline. But what I do want to say is that in the very first five, six days of the Ethereum hard fork, I was wrong. Like totally wrong. I said, oh, this seems to be going very well. It went off without a hitch. So lesson learned. Take them more overweight. And technologically, the Ethereum fork went off without a hitch. Politically, it went off with a big hitch. And now we have two Ethereums, Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. And Classic isn't going anywhere. It's simply not going anywhere. And the ideal solution would have been perhaps for those who wanted it for hard fork to be nice and clean. The second fork just disappears, done. That didn't happen. It looked like it was going to happen for the first five days. And then things changed very rapidly. And I'm now revising my opinion based on the presence of new data. And it poses some very interesting questions. I think it becomes a warning to Bitcoin that even if the technology of a hard fork in Bitcoin is easy, which it is not, it is much harder than Ethereum, you have to think of things like replay attacks and being able to do a clean break for the past so that the two chains are not compatible to avoid attacks against the exchanges, replay attacks, confusion for users and all the other things. And you need a lot of planning because I can guarantee you that if we do a hard fork in Bitcoin and it's pulled off without a hitch technologically, politically, the next day we will have two Bitcoins. There are plenty of people who will go for the non-hard forked Bitcoin and will hold forever and will probably mine it. So if that's what we want, maybe we can do it. If not, we also need to find other ways to scale. All right, let me take another question because we're a bit long. Thanks for coming out and talking to us. I've seen a few of your talks. You've been around the world talking about Bitcoin. What city most impressed you as far as startups or community go? And one more question. Do you think apps like Satoshi Dice that use the Bitcoin blockchain as a database almost is a good or bad idea? Is it spamming the network? Or is it just what do you think is apps like Facebook? So I have to say that on the first question, the Bitcoin communities that have influenced me the most are the Bitcoin communities in the developing world. I visited Brazil and Argentina are probably foremost in terms of the impact they have on my thinking because they showed me what it means to have a very clear understanding of why government money is a bad idea. It may have something to do with whether your government was throwing people out of airplanes in the last couple of decades, like recently. That encourages people to think more openly about alternative currencies. Being in a society, I grew up in Greece. I saw currency shocks three times when I was growing up. I remember bank loans, long lines, destroyed fortunes. So that was an experience that I've always had with me. But seeing it play again and again recently in Argentina and Brazil to a certain extent, that made me understand why Bitcoin matters everywhere else. And I've talked about that a lot, this concept of the other six billion, why it matters much more for the places where, just like in the US, there's no difference between corporation, bank, and government. They're all one thing now. But in this particular case, they're also homicidal maniacs. And so if that's the government corporation bank you're stuck with, you're much more motivated to seek a separation of states of money. Those communities influenced me a lot. Your second question is, is subsidized good or bad? Oh, yes. I've talked about this as well before. The idea that there's no such thing as a spam transaction. There's no such thing as a good and bad transaction. That is a normative judgment that no one in Bitcoin is authorized to make. Bitcoin is a system without normative judgment. The question you ask about the transaction is simple. One, does it validate according to the current consensus rules? And the answer is clear. It's either true or false. And two, did it have sufficient fee to be prioritized and included into a block by the miners who are guided by their own self-interest and still validate according to the consensus rules? If it did, it was a valid transaction. It's valid to someone. It was valid enough to pay a fee, therefore it is valid. The whole point of Bitcoin is we don't make judgments on transactions other than the intrinsic validity of the transaction according to the consensus rules, and we let the market decide if someone is willing to have their transaction carried, it is worth something to them. If what is worth to them is a fee that makes it worth to a miner, then it is worthy of being included in the blockchain. It's a very simple system of decision-making because it removes all of the possibilities for problems. The problem is the moment you introduce a normative judgment, you also introduce a judge. So, if the question is, what is a valid Bitcoin transaction according to a normative judgment, then the second question is, who gets to decide that? And that's where things get difficult very, very quickly, as we've seen in the traditional banking industry.