 Yeah, so right now we know that Bitcoin has like the largest network effect. So In the event of a contentious hard fork, how likely is it that? Bitcoin becomes obsolete as the main currency and other currencies take over like by far. That's a very good question How likely is it that Bitcoin becomes obsolete? I Don't think it will become obsolete. I think if it faces a contentious hard fork This is an example of things to come Bitcoin will be attacked it will be attacked through its mining. It will be attacked through the network It will be attacked legally. It will be attacked in every possible way If you don't think Bitcoin is going to be attacked you've misunderstood what this is about You don't go and poke a 20 trillion dollar industry and go hey, we're gonna disrupt you and and Then wait for it to roll over right This is offensive to a lot of governments and a lot of very very rich institutions And there are a lot of people who don't want to see Bitcoin succeed because it's decentralized and they're going to attack every aspect of it Every aspect of Bitcoin will be attacked So if a fork happens we get to learn what happens when a fork attack occurs and We learn how to defend against fork attacks Make no mistake Anybody who walks into this thinking that a fork will be unopposed is Going to very quickly discover that this will be a battle on all fronts Day one we've achieved 51 percent. We are now going to fork Bitcoin Kind of seems like hey shipping date is here Our work is done. Your problems are just about to begin my friend You launch a 51 percent attack that means you are seven blocks ahead every 24-hour period if you can sustain it But inevitably The two sides are going to attack each other They're going to attack each other on the network. They're going to attack each other with denial of service attacks They're going to attack each other with hash rate. They're going to attack each other publicly privately Anonymously and not in every possible way and immediately every bug in the software We'll get poked and then poked again And if you try to fix it you'd better write that code well because if you put another bug in that's gonna get poked, too And then it becomes a battle about who has the best software development team And how quickly they can maintain that code and keep up time because that race is only seven blocks wide I don't think some of the people who are threatening to do a hard fork at 51 percent Have thought clearly about the implications of what happens immediately afterwards This is not going to be an easy game It's going to actually allow Bitcoin to test all the possible attack scenarios on Nodes on networks on relay networks on hashing transaction malleability replay transactions and everything else What will come out of that? Probably a Bitcoin that's worth a lot less or In my view a technology that's worth a lot more because it's battle hardened When it comes out of that it will have survived its first fork attack And we will know a lot more about what happens in highly contentious fork environments Ethereum taught us a lot But it didn't teach us much about a highly contentious fork The fork was initiated by the main development team which had more than 80 percent of the hash rate on their side The other thing to remember and I think this is important There's a lot of people who say if Bitcoin stumbles it's going to be overtaken by one of these other currencies It's very important to not mistake smooth sailing for good sailors Right in order to have scaling problems You first need to have scale in order to have governance problems you need to have a controversy to govern over right and Everything's hunky-dory kumbaya Until you have twenty billion dollars on the table and then the long knives start getting sharpened Since this is March we can use a reference beware the ides of March Right, and you can then Say oh, it's not what it looked like It's not what it looked like, you know don't pay attention to the stabbing Really pay attention to the fact that we all came together to stab together That's the Roman Senate quote The point here is that What's happening in Bitcoin now? isn't unique to Bitcoin if One of the other currencies gets to this scale and has to handle this many transaction They have a scaling problem which they're going to have to resolve there will be differences of opinion as to how to resolve that Some approaches will lead to massive centralization and a takeover by miners Some approaches will lead to failures in architecture and software these problems will repeat for every other currency These are the rights of passage you first have to grow up to face them right and so the big advantage that Many of the other blockchains and currencies have is they can look at Bitcoin watch what happens and learn these mistakes cheaply So that they don't have to repeat them expensively Now how many of the blockchains are actually doing that not many Because for the most part they're too busy going we're the best we're gonna win next right and not paying attention to the fact That these exact same problems are going to exist in their own blockchains. There are no easy answers There are lots of very delicate design trade-offs in how you deploy a trust where And Bitcoin is paving new ground. It's carving a new path. No one has gone here before Pay attention. We have a lot to learn. This is a fantastic experiment, but it's not easy. It looks easy back there I like to remind people who was here when Bitcoin was in 2013 anyone here who used Bitcoin in 2013 Yes, a few people. Okay, how much was the average fee? zero Right, how many blocks were full? Zero how big was the block size problem? Zero how much of a governance problem did we have or danger of a contentious hard fork? Zero you look back at 2013 and you go easy days, right? What changed? What changed was Now there's 20 billion dollars at stake and the game gets serious, right? So it's easy to think that it will always be smooth sailing for the other cryptocurrency because they got everything right That's not gonna be the case You