 Can you please explain what is your opinion on Zcash and Ethereum as an alternative to Bitcoins? I'm very interested in both Zcash and Ethereum. I've used both of those platforms. I've ran Ethereum nodes for a while now. I still run one. Actually, I run two. I run one Gath and one Parity. I've run a Zcash node for a while. I experimented with the testnet. I've been involved in Ethereum since the very beginning. I'm interested in both of those platforms. Not as an alternative to Bitcoin, though. That's the critical phrase where you lost me. As a compliment to Bitcoin, as something that is specialized in doing something different from Bitcoin. Part of my argumentation in this subject has been that the two do not compete, Bitcoin and Ethereum, or even Bitcoin and Zcash. Many of the choices that one currency makes, or blockchain makes, to become more specialized in one direction and differentiate, make it unable to do the things that Bitcoin has specialized in. If it does the same thing as Bitcoin, then it's not really competing, because Bitcoin has been doing it longer. Network effect wins, there's no point. If it does something different from Bitcoin, then it's different. Bitcoin is different, and the two are not really competing directly. They compete indirectly for the attention of developers, and maybe sometimes for some of the speculative investors. But as a platform, as a technology, they do not compete. They don't compete any more than a lion competes with a shark. Yes, they're both predators. Yes, they both use oxygen. In the bigger sense, they're competing for resources on the planet, but they're not competing directly against each other. Because all of the environmental and evolutionary adaptations that a shark made, the apex predator of the sea, make it a flopping piece of soon-to-be sushi on land. Yummy for lions. Similarly, pussycats don't like swimming, and the lion adapted itself in an environment where, if it jumps into the sea, shark bait. If you wanted to stage a cage match between a lion and a shark, the outcome would not be decided by whether you pick the strongest lion or the weakest lion, or the strongest shark or the weakest shark. It would depend entirely on whether you fill the arena with water or not. That would determine the outcome. What are you doing with the platform? Are you doing smart contracts? Are you doing complex smart contracts that require flexibility? Okay, well, Ethereum. Simple. Do you want robust store value that is absolutely uncensurable and doesn't have consensus failures? Bitcoin. It is precisely the things that make Ethereum really good at smart contracts that make it very difficult to maintain consensus and not have an attitude of move fast, break things. You need that in order to do flexible smart contracts. It is precisely the things that make Bitcoin robust that make it useless for flexible smart contracts. The same thing applies. Zcash is making some trade-offs between privacy and scalability. Much better privacy. Ten times worse scalability than Bitcoin. Actually, a hundred times worse than Bitcoin. How do you reconcile those two? You don't. You choose the thing that fits the niche. You decide, what is the environment in which I need this, and what is best adapted to this environment? I like all of the platforms. They are all doing very interesting things and advancing the state of the art. Sometimes they compete for speculative dollars, but effectively, in the long term, they don't. Do you not think that Ethereum, Zcash, and other altcoins are competing with Bitcoin, at least in the short-term and medium-term, because of the block size issue? A lot of apps and even startups are likely to be considering or building on other blockchains because of this issue where fees are high and lightning isn't going to be implemented for a long time. Yes. Ethereum, Zcash, and many other cryptocurrency are competing in the scaling debate, which is hilarious. From a technical perspective, it's ridiculous. It's insanely ridiculous. It's laughable. The idea is, I don't like how Bitcoin scales, so I'm going to take my coins and go over to Ethereum. Really, Ethereum scales ten times worse than Bitcoin. The fact that you haven't hit a scalability thing yet is because you haven't scaled to the point of hitting the scalability things. But Ethereum proponents say, we'll do sharding. Great. When you do sharding, we'll do sharding. In Bitcoin, too. When both Bitcoin and Ethereum are doing sharding, Bitcoin will still be doing sharding, ten times more efficiently than Ethereum, because the underlying scaling architecture is ten times worse. The idea is that you're going to take your application, because it's not scaling on Bitcoin, and move it to Ethereum, which is going to run into just as serious scalability issues only ten times worse, or Zcash, which is ten times worse than Ethereum in terms of scaling. Those are trade-offs you don't want to consider. If the only difference in differentiation is something that scales slightly better, then essentially what you're talking about is no different than what would happen if Bitcoin was forked into two. One of them got the scalability solution that some people wanted. At that point, we get to evaluate if that answer to the scalability problem produces so much centralization that you can no longer trust the security, which is the argument that's being made about scaling. Scaling is not easy, and there are no easy answers. There are trade-offs. The question is, which trade-offs do you want to make, in which order, and how easy are those trade-offs? Maybe the answer is an alt. Certainly, even though the market is currently telling us that people are taking their money and moving it elsewhere, because of the problems that Bitcoin has in its scaling, that didn't last very long. You see these cycles happening again and again. Money drains into the alts, they inflate in price, people get excited about cryptocurrency. What do they do? They buy more Bitcoin so they can invest in more alts, and Bitcoin goes up as well. The market tips for a bit, then it balances back. When you look back three months later, you're like, the entire market has increased in cap by $2 billion. Everything rose, because this flow out of Bitcoin depressed the price. As the price got depressed, it became more attractive to investors. They're like, I missed my chance at $1,200, but now it's $900, and I know it can get to $1,200, so I'm going to buy me some Bitcoin, and even better, I'm going to buy more, because now I think I should also go into Ethereum. It creates a situation where the entire market benefits. I don't think it's bad to see these flows every now and then. I think that's how you grow the entire ecosystem. You also test the scaling limits of all of the currencies. They will all be tested, and they will all have governance problems when they reach that test, because someone is going to have to make a decision, and then all of the people who they thought were their friends are going to go, oh, you traitor, you made the wrong decision, and then you have drama, just like Bitcoin. Drama is unavoidable. I use the following analogy. If Bitcoin right now looks like this rusty old steel boat in 80-foot swells, and the entire crew is on deck, soaked to the bone, welding, cutting, patching, bailing as fast as they can, meanwhile, over at Ethereum, on the deck chairs. I'm like, this is really nice, isn't it? Are you having the shrimp cocktail with the lobster today? I heard the buffet has both. I don't know. Maybe we should do an ICO on this side. If you use a prediction market, that would be cool. They're like, look at those fools, they're so wet. Well, you know, the reason it's all dry is you guys haven't left the harbor yet. Come out here in the 80-foot swells and see if you can sit on that deck chair, and see if they're still serving shrimp cocktail, or if they're handing out buckets at the buffet. It's easy to not have scaling problems when you don't have scale in 2013. Did Bitcoin have scaling problems? None whatsoever. Did we have a governance problem in 2013? None whatsoever. What changed? Scale happened. Big money happened. That brought us to a level of maturity where problems started. That is such an idiot. He keeps getting upset over his job. He should really take a page from my book. I'm so chill in school. I have no responsibilities. I am winning at life. Yeah, give it two years. We'll see what happens. Should we go with this?