 So Ethereum has something called an ERC-20 token which allows you to create a standard for issuing tokens for things like ICOs. Yes. And we've seen a huge explosion of them in the past year for some not so legitimate looking uses and scams. And then just yesterday Blockchain Capital was the first venture capital firm to raise money with an ICO. So I'm just wondering what your thoughts are on the spectrum of all the activity that we're seeing specifically in the Ethereum world with ICOs. I think it's very dangerous and very premature. What we're doing is we're accumulating large amounts of money in a code base that is still relatively untested. And we discovered bugs in the DAO, or some people discovered bugs. I was a participant, but I didn't discover any of the bugs. I didn't understand them though, and they were pretty insidious, those bugs. So every million dollars you put into any token built on ERC-20 is now providing a $1 million honeypot test on the Ethereum virtual machine, the implementations of Geth and Parity, and the ERC-20 code base. And on top of that, whatever code you added to do the magic sauce that makes it your particular DAP. Everybody know what DAP stands for? DAP, Deliberately Audacious Ponzi Plan? It's the killer app for Ethereum. Now, I'm being a bit facetious. I'm a fan of Ethereum. I think it has enormous potential, and one of its main areas of potential is in reinventing the modern corporation. The killer app for Ethereum turns out is the DAO. It's decentralized autonomous organizations, not done that way, not as venture capital firms, but as means of creating ad hoc organizations that direct human activity and ventures in a way that completely reinvents the modern corporation. That is an incredible application, and it will happen, it will happen. In the meantime, we can launch a few shitcoins on the way. One after the other, and see how much money people can run away with. And the greater full theory says that there's another one just around the corner, and people feeling flush with money. Ooh, Ethereum's high in price, and they're putting all of this resource behind poorly tested code, and we're beginning to find bugs. They found the first bug, not in ERC-20 exactly, but in the implementation that exchange is used and validating the parameters to ERC-20, which allows you to withdraw 256 times the amount that you had in your account from an exchange by left-shifting by one byte the amount you put into the field. Oops, these things are gonna happen. So the problem I have with these ICOs is that we're taking code that has not yet been exercised, and the way you exercise code is you put $10,000 into it, you let it run for a year, and you go, how secure is this code? Well, Bob, I think by now we can say that this code is $10,000 secure. How do I know it's still there? Great, bring in the experiment version two. We're gonna put $100,000 into this puppy. Put $100,000 into that puppy, run it for three months, go back, Bob, how secure is this? Well, I believe it is now $100,000 secure. How do you know it's still there? Okay, let's put a million dollars in it. Oh, money's gone, okay. So now we know it is somewhere between $100,000, but not up to $1 million secure. And hopefully we learn something, and we fix the bug, and we gradually escalate and build and build and build, until we have robust code that can actually carry enormous amounts of money. All right, Bob, how secure is Bitcoin? $20 billion secure. How do you know? It was a $20 billion, and the money was still there. Ethereum has to do that for every contract. That's the trade-off of doing flexible smart contracts. And these ICOs are now testing it far ahead of the ability to secure the network. Another ICO raised $17.5 million in 30 minutes. $17.5 million in 30 minutes. Now, if you understand anything about Silicon Valley culture, what happens to a brand new startup with a team of executives who've known each other for three months have a white paper and suddenly come across $17 million? I don't know, but it probably involves a lot of cocaine. And very soon, not many dollars, but a lot of cocaine. So this is, if you front-load an organization like that that doesn't have management experience, maturity, and anything other than a white paper, and you say, hey, here's $17.5 million. You understand why investors don't give out money like that, and why there are some advantages to having a tiny bit of pre-qualification, not for the investors, but at least for what they're putting their money into it. Now, many people in Ethereum have not yet learned this lesson. They will, the market will teach it to them when they lose their money. So ICOs right now, to me, are the biggest reputational risk for Ethereum. I think eventually, they will be one of the most interesting and explosive applications for Ethereum because opening up crowdfunding to a global economy is an amazing application when you have governance. But if you do it prematurely, every attempt that blows up on the launch pad tarnishes the reputation. Eventually, your launch pad is broken. Do you have a follow-up? Okay, a real quick follow-up. The what? You have DAF, something-something Ponzi protocol. A deliberately audacious Ponzi plan? There you go. Thanks. So right around the consensus of the industry conference in New York this year, William Mugiar, who published a book called The Business Blockchain, is organizing a token conference, basically telling people how to tokenize their business, create tokens, do ICOs. You know, what do you think about professionals who are in the industry, who are either venture capitalists or investors who are actively encouraging people to do this, where it seems like you think it's a bad idea? I mean, bad for who? Is it bad for the investors who put their money in? Well, caveat-empt or shouldn't have put your money in there. And sometimes those lessons have to be learned the hard way. Is it bad for Ethereum? If it causes more reputation damage than it does good outcomes? And by good outcomes, by the way, I don't mean a successful company. That's not happening. That's not gonna happen, no. What I mean is, before they go kablooey, can we collect some data? Like, will the telemetry rig survive the explosion so we can actually learn which bug blew them up? One of the problems with the data was the telemetry rig blew up, so all we knew is that the call function had a re-entrancy problem. We didn't find out anything about the actual code of the DAO, the split function, the governance model, the voting patterns, whether companies would be able to succeed, what kind of proposals might be interesting? Why didn't we find out? Because it blew up on the launch pad, and we didn't collect very good data. Those kinds of experiments are not very useful. I hope it produces good results. I hope somebody goes out there and says, I want $50,000. They actually take that and do something useful with it. Because it's such a small amount, it doesn't blow up, and they learn something about the security of the protocol. We all learn something. That's great. All of this experimentation creates exuberance and excitement, and if all of these companies blow up, we'll still be left with the knowledge. Just like the internet boom, right? It blew up right here, outside. You could probably see the big dollar-signed mushroom cloud out of this window in 2000. And the internet didn't die. All of the companies, they blew up. But out of the ashes came new companies that did interesting things on the internet, and the internet survived. So Ethereum will survive. It just may be set back by a year or two. Bitcoin survived Silk Road, it survived Gox, it survived Bitfinex. Actually, Bitfinex survived like this. It was a one-week dip. It was like, eh, whatever. So it will survive, but it will hurt a lot of investors. It will create some reputation damage in the meantime. If professionals are trying to advance that, you know, I hope they're reminding people while they're doing it, that what they're offering is not investment advice and that people should be cautious, et cetera, because otherwise they are going to get a visit by the SEC. The one rule you do not break with the SEC, the first rule is you do not promote securities to unaccredited public. You do not. That's what people go to jail for. And so that creates risk, mostly for them. I hope I'm wrong. All right, let's take two more.