In this video, Matt Corallo talks about the privacy and censorship resistance of Bitcoin. He also discussed the future technology of Bitcoin and answer questions from the audience towards Bitcoin use a transporter payments and more.
Transcript
Transcript generated by YouTube auto-captions. May contain errors.
[Music] [Applause] yeah okay um so I'm more jealous of Jones that he got to talk about the technical part and I have to talk about the more uh social aspects of Bitcoin but uh that's what I'm going to do tonight um so I've been as mentioned I'm been developing uh various parts of the Bitcoin ecosystem for a long time since kind of 2011 uh on and off with Bitcoin core I've been doing Bitcoin core fulltime for a while now uh back doing it full-time from uh taking a break and doing some other random things um but uh tonight I want to talk about kind of somewhat scoping kind of why uh different people are interested in Bitcoin what different use cases of Bitcoin are and kind of why Bitcoin is interesting to some of those use cases and then also get into of a bit more personally why I personally am interested in Bitcoin why I choose to spend my time working on bitcoin and why I continue to be excited about the technology and the the potential aspects of it um and so of course if we want to talk about that first we have to ask what is bitcoin uh no I don't mean uh blockchain technology I don't mean private blockchains I mean specifically Bitcoin and because Bitcoin is kind of a different class of Technology from private blockchains you might share technical similarities but in terms of the use cases and the social aspects and and what it's actually useful for they're really fundamentally different um and so it's kind of useful to take a step back and look at it in a historical context and to see kind of where Bitcoin came from um and it it grew out of ecash it grew out of uh an attempt by a lot of people a lot of people worked very hard on trying to create digital cach schemes for the internet back in the 9s kind of even early 9s up through the 9s up into the early 2000s and every single one failed and there are a lot of attempts and a lot of really awesome technology that people build but they all failed for one reason or another and ultimately really they all failed for one reason and they all failed because there was some Central company that you had to trust in some way often they had really awesome technology so you didn't have to give up any privacy and you didn't have to trust them to steal your money or anything like that but you had to trust them to keep existing and they just went out of business because they weren't managed well maybe they were doing something kind of fici thing uh facilitating money laundering or whatever and the government decided to shut them down but for one reason or another they all failed and Bitcoin was the first one to come along that really hasn't failed because it took a step back and said well what if we can come up with some way and not have to trust anyone and so Bitcoin is really an attempt to build a digital Cash System where you don't have to trust anyone at all and it gets very close occasionally it doesn't quite get all the way there but it gets super close and the way it does this is that every node validates everything as you might have heard in any kind of reasonable introduction to bitcoin the only thing the miners do is resolve double spends right if you take two transactions that are conflicting you try to spend your money twice there's no way because of the limits of the speed of light that everyone can agree on which transaction came first and so you have to have some process to resolve those kinds of transactions and that's what miners are for but everything else you validate you validate the signatures you validate that the 21 million coins limit is never violated you validate that every transaction is from money that exists and money that people had and they had the right to spend all of these things um but you know the way in order to actually use Bitcoin without trusting anyone you can't rely on three confirmations or one confirmation right because a minor could actually reorg the chain Maybe pools get hacked get owned we've seen this in the past and some people steal hash power for a day well realistically you need to wait a week maybe a bit longer to accept a transaction if you really don't want to trust anyone and so what I really want to talk about tonight is in what ways do people use Bitcoin where they choose to trust some parties other parties and what are the kind of classes of different parties that people don't want to trust in Bitcoin um and so I really do think like it all comes back to trustless in one way or another so you know in New York I talked to a lot of Traders on Wall Street a lot of them are really excited about Bitcoin because they get to hedge Fiat they get to hedge the US dollar the Euro or the Chinese W or the Venezuelan boulevar cuz you never know what's going to happen it's good to hedge it's always good to have hedges in small amounts whatever Bitcoin turns out to be a pretty decent hedge because that 21 million coins limit that fundament limit to the number of Bitcoins that can ever exist is enforced by every single node on the network if you download Bitcoin core and running it you are validating the 21 million coins limit and you're making sure that it never is violated so you don't have to trust anyone there similarly a lot of people talk about Bitcoin transacting without a counterparty be your own bank right um and this is again getting away from trusting someone right modern Banks facilitate trust that's what they do they exist so that when a bank tells you you've been paid you trust the bank you don't have to trust the counterparty who's paying you because who knows what kind of crazy scammer they are and modern banks are hugely good at this they do a great job at facilitating trust but occasionally that trust breaks down whether it's 2008 and you're going to bed at night and not sure whether your bank's going to be there inor not they're going to get a bailout whether or not your like $250,000 limit is all you're going to have or whether you're in some country in subsaharan Africa where Banks decided H there's too many scammers here we really can't do business here because we're kind of getting screwed on scammers nonstop well Bitcoin exists to provide in a way for you to transact without that counterparty without having to trust a bank or you know if you want to provide Financial Services maybe you're a bank you don't have to trust the person who's coming to you with potentially fake currency of some kind or at least have to trust them less similarly people talk about Bitcoin being Global it crosses borders easily it is this wonderful thing that you can uh pay you can use for remittances whatever again this comes back to not having to trust someone you if you want there's a lot of remittance corridors where you know there's maybe there are financial services that exist in these remittance corridors but maybe they charge a lot for the trust that they're providing right they're acting as a trust anchor maybe they charge a lot for that maybe they impose crazy restrictions that prevent you from being competitive in that market well by using Bitcoin by having this thing where you don't have to trust anyone else or at least the existing people who serve that remittance Corridor all of a sudden you can run your business you can say I'm going to serve just this remittance Corridor and there's a good Bitcoin exchange on both sides and I'm going to partner with some of these Bitcoin exchanges or maybe some peer-to-peer exchanges or maybe I'm just going to be a broker and all of a sudden I don't have to worry too much about whether uh Western Union or Deutsche Bank happens to be willing to facilitate money transfers between these two rather unstable currencies and all those are great and all those are awesome but I want to get a bit more personal about why I like to work on bitcoin why I think Bitcoin is exciting um and that's access and really access starts with financial censorship and it starts with how do people keep get and maintain access to financial networks obviously Financial networks are pretty critical you know you kind of have to have access to a financial system in some way or another to do any number of things every day you know whether Starbucks and buying a cuple of coffee you probably want to pay with a card in many places you can use cash but that's often not convenient and often uh in some countries not even really realistic anymore um but similarly you're say an organization like cage who does great work out of London doing research into uh CIA black sites and people who are held in Guantanamo Bay and doing legal advocacy work for these people trying to get them out of Guantanamo Bay and various uh prisons around the world they can't get a bank account and they can't get a bank account because someone decided that the work they were doing doing research into secret government programs was unacceptable and trivial add them to all kinds of risk lists I'm sure there's a lot of people in the audience who are very well familiar with risk auditing systems at Banks and how you have to uh prevent access to a number of customers just because they're on some list that's managed by some other foreign government because that's the requirements for the modern Financial system and so folks like cage can't do the important work that they want to do you know they show up at a conference and they present the work that they're doing and you ask how do I donate money to you how do I support your cause and the resp is I don't know do you have cash that you can give me because I can't accept money online I can't hold a bank account realistically and so I want to you know after 9 a lot of this grew out after 911 there was some more uh reasonable restrictions on what government can do but after 911 as we all know Patriot Act and a number of other things in the US and eventually grew outside of the US uh had a lot of impact on what governments could do to prevent people from Gaining access to the financial Network and so I want to read a quote by uh someone who was at finsen uh right after 911 who was responsible for implementing a number of anti-terrorist financing regulations with finsen um and he wrote a book about you know being in finsen at this time and what kind of their approach to things was and one of the quotes he said was uh at the time they kind of you know had latitude to decide on what their regulation was and he said quote governments did not have to demonstrate that designated individuals or entities actually intended to support terrorism or even knew that their money or activities were being used to support terrorism to preventatively freeze their assets further we needed to have 80% shity that our targets were legitimate in order to preventatively freeze their assets and so here's someone in the treasury writing a book well he's now uh moved on a bit and I believe he's still high up in the treasury somewhere but here's someone from finson writing a book about what their was to literally Financial censorship to deciding people couldn't keep access to their money and he's saying yeah you know if we were 80% sure we with no court oversight we a committee of people at treasury were 80% sure that you might be indirectly being used for terrorist financing in some way and we're not quite sure but we think so then we're going to freeze your assets and then you have to sue to get your money back and sure this is completely reasonable if it's used actually against terrorists you know I don't want terrorists to have money but there's plenty of examples where it's not just used against terrorists um for example there were folks in the EU who were Middle Eastern folks had bank accounts in the EU who the US government decided you know we're not sure but we think you might be somehow involved in Terrorist Finance Network we're just going to freeze your accounts in the EU right reached across borders no problem told Banks to freeze their accounts and their money was frozen and they had to file lawsuits they had to file very expensive lawsuits in Europe and eventually won and got all their money back but you know not everyone has the ability to file these kinds of lawsuits not everyone has the ability to sitting somewhere in the Middle East file a lawsuit in another country or higher expensive lawyers to fight the US government in court and say no you had no right to take my money of course you know Financial regulation that governments take explicit action is one thing we can challenge that in court that's maybe not a huge deal arguably it's kind of sucks that people have to spend a bunch of money on lawyers but arguably that's okay but of course for those of you who are in Zurich and know the banking system that's not the only way that governments prevent people from getting access to financial networks ultimately financial institutions have a reputation to uphold and when it turns out that their accounts their customers are in some way being used for something that's illicit whether it's money laundering or or terrorist financing or as the US government has decided selling guns which is legal in the US or being a porn star or being any number of other legal businesses then maybe it is bad for the bank's reputation for them to have that and they can say wink wink nudge nudge these people you probably shouldn't be doing business with them it's going to look bad for you at some point and so what do you do you say well [ __ ] it's not worth it to us to have these customers we have no obligation to serve them as a customer in some count you do in the US you definitely don't um we have no obligation to serve these people so whatever they're just going to lose their accounts maybe we'll pay them out and it's not a big deal but all of a sudden these individuals in the US we had this thing called operation choke point where the justice department did exactly this they went to a bunch of Banks and they said oh These Guys these payday lenders they're sketchy as [ __ ] and you shouldn't do business with them and let's be honest payday lenders in the US are sketchy as [ __ ] and it's good that they don't have bank accounts but as a part of this whole thing they also caught up a bunch of gun store or a number of gun stores which are legal uh some porn stores and some other people who like doing completely legal businesses reasonable business and they were prevented from Gaining access to financial networks and some of them actually went under because you know they couldn't accept credit cards so all of a sudden they're a store they're trying to do business and they can't take credit cards yeah and so Bitcoin right so Bitcoin is something which can help these kinds of issues it can push back against this General uh Financial system of you know there's no obligation to serve customers and we have very centralized institutions which end up being pressure points of course that's not to say that Bitcoin is not something which government should be able to seize governments can obviously still seize Bitcoin they can show up at your door and take your computer they can go into your bank deposit box and take your Bitcoin paper wallet but they can do that with a warrant not with the wink wink nudge nudge at a bank similarly to how we have for those of you who are technical SSL certificate transparency we've added a social cost to the NSA showing up and doing technical attacks against people accessing websites and man in the middling and stealing some data we had a social cost to these actions so instead of it being trivial for the government to get banned people from the financial networks all of a sudden now it has to be done publicly it has to be done visibly often hopefully it has to be done with a court order but nonetheless it's visible and we can have a discussion as a society about whether these actions are acceptable whatever you think about Edward sowden at least he got a discussion started so that we understood what was actually happening and we can discuss whether or not this is a reasonable thing for the government to be doing and so Financial censorship is one thing you know there are some good examples to point to where government has clearly overstepped its bounds but know for the it's actually not that bad for now I know some people who are legitimately unjustly unable to get bank accounts but yeah okay very small number of people but what about financial privacy obviously zeric knows a thing or two about financial privacy um specifically the uh tax evasion aspect of it certainly a lot of regulations have been put into place toy try to make sure that there are no places in the world where you can hide money away and avoid taxes and the way you do this is you provide data you provide access to who has an account who has how much money in accounts and you share it to foreign governments so that they can check and make sure that their citizens are definitely paying the taxes that they owe further of course um you know just like with uh Financial censorship banks have a reputation uphold if banks are helping people evade taxes if banks are helping people do quote unquote elicit activity of some form or another then all of a sudden it can look very bad for that bank they're demonized in the media and possibly justifiably so and so as a result what is the conclusion well Banks just share the information because there are in fact explicit laws on the books that Banks cannot be uh or especially individuals with a bank can't be prosecuted for sharing too much information with the government these are in the books in the US maybe less so in Zurich and less so in Switzerland but what is your option when you're told if you don't share enough information you might look bad well you share more information and it's a reasonable tradeoff of course even further after 911 we've had further roll backs of some Financial privacy laws in the US and they've become un and kind of international standards for sharing information with the government so that they can do kind of transactional analysis and see uh money flows around the world but where does Bitcoin come into here um Bitcoin is interesting because we have all of a sudden a new technology we have a whole new technology that we can work with and we can develop software with Bitcoin where we can literally say I have this list of transactions I'm going to feed it into a program it's going to as a result output the amount of tax I owe and I can show that I ran that program Faithfully on a list of transactions in a cryptographic proof to the government and they learn nothing about my financial history but they learn the exact amount of tax that I have to pay them and this is a cryptographic proof there's well okay the cryptography is somewhat new it's still marginally experimental and there's still some work to be done but it is technically possible to construct these kinds of systems where you can avoid giving up your financial privacy whilst getting some of the benefits to Society of things like preventing tax evasion and things like hopefully also providing uh information for AML for terrorist financing and other illicit activities not just tax evasion um and further of course you know Bitcoin is not something that is unregulated Bitcoin is heavily regulated the on andof ramps Bitcoin is heavily regulated when you buy and sell Bitcoin it's almost always tied to a name and Bitcoin is generally very highly tracked and whatever you think of that as to whether or not that's good for Bitcoin it's certainly not the case that governments can't regulate Bitcoin it's just that because of the censorship resistance and the inability of Bank of governments to reach into Bitcoin and take the money out of the system directly they have to kind of take more traditional approaches they can still do a lot of the same analysis that they did previously they can see when Bitcoin came into the system where it came out they can show up at exchanges exchanges in Bitcoin hell they share more information than Banks do more of the time um and they can still do many the same kind of analysis and they can still show up and take your money or arrest you or whatever after the fact but again there's this increase in Social cost to the government to take these actions so instead of it being something which you know happens as a part of an emergency bill after a terrorist attack that never gets rolled back 10 years later it's something that is clear and explicit and you can fight it in court or not and you might lose but you know that's the way our government is set up at least in the Western World okay so I want to briefly talk about financial inclusion um Financial inclusion in Bitcoin is kind of a more complicated subject obviously Financial inclusion has a lot of different aspects to it and there's a lot of people who are super excited about Bitcoin for financial inclusion um there's kind of large different classes of fin Financial inclusion There's issues with financial inclusion in the US some parts of the western world there's issues with financial inclusion in uh developing countries and other parts of the world um and Bitcoin doesn't solve a lot of the problems with financial inclusion you know a lot of the problems we have with financial inclusions uh is related to distrust of different organizations and it's not clear that Bitcoin really steps up and provides that kind of trust although you know I can explain that technically you can run Bitcoin without trusting anyone there's a lot of people probably won't believe me who have a legitimate distrust of technology and that's fine um but Bitcoin can help with financial inclusion in some circumstances uh first of all the lack of counter party trust can really help increase competition in some of these markets right if you're basing a business on bitcoin because you have no other option you're not having to trust you're not having to show up at Deutsche Bank and say well you know I want to negotiate a banking peering relationship with you where we can exchange money and do wire transfers um which you know requires deutche Bank to trust you and you trust dche bank and it's really kind of a close relationship all of a sudden Bitcoin removes that requirement and you can act as a bank for customers without necessarily having to trust a number of other counterparties across the financial system which in theory can improve competition now of course there's a million other usability problems with Bitcoin this is much more of a long-term thing but there is still potential there um further Bitcoin this lack of trust of other institutions can help solve some bootstrapping issues so for example in Somalia there's kind of no remittance corridors left uh while back Western Union decided they weren't going to serve Somalia anymore because it was too risky I don't know if they've s revers that or what but Bitcoin can show up and say you know someone can show up and say like I'm going to use Bitcoin for this because there is no one who's going to say like man that country is fine but yesh we have to charge like a 50 and there's still a lot of Fraud and we just can't handle this so it's whatever we're going to scrap that well you know for someone else to come in and say like okay we're going to be the West replacement for the Som mittance Corridor great how are you going to convince someone else to give you a bank account uh in a foreign country so that you can actually do remittance more than Western Union was able to well not but with a technology like Bitcoin where there is no other trust there is no no one else who has to trust or who you have to trust or who has to trust you before you can set up this kind of business um so hopefully there's at least some potential to use Bitcoin in these kinds of scenarios all right um and then I'm going to briefly come back around and just for the technical people in the audience who might be a bit bored cover kind of what this implies for the future of Bitcoin technology you know I'm a technologist I'm a developer I spend my time thinking about how we can develop interesting software for the future of Bitcoin um and you know I tried to make clear earlier there's a lot of different use cases of Bitcoin and each of them comes back to trustless in its own way but that doesn't mean that each of them doesn't also mean you're willing to trust someone you know there's a ton of people who are really interested in using Bitcoin as a hedge against some kind of Fiat disaster in Venezuela who are perfectly reasonably able to trust some Bitcoin Bank like coinbase or some other Bitcoin broker who's going to hold their coins for them they don't care they just they want that trust that the 21 million coins limit won't be violated and you know maybe they don't have to run a node maybe they're willing to trust some Bank to hold their Bitcoin but so what similarly you know there's a lot of people obviously today who use Bitcoin with two three one confirmation on their transactions and this is something where you are trusting miners a whole lot more you're not using Bitcoin in this completely trustless transactions take a week to to confirm and you're validating everything and you don't have to trust anyone model you're using Bitcoin in this model where yeah you're trusting miners a tiny bit and it's probably fine and there's not really any historical precedent for it being completely broken at least and so you know that again it's a slight relaxion uh relaxation of this completely trustless trust model or lack of trust model that Bitcoin has that makes it just a whole lot more usable right all of a sudden you don't have to waake wait a week for transactions that would be insane that would be completely unusable and so people choose to relax the trust model slightly and so this is where other systems built on top of Bitcoin come in right if you are willing to trust a bank built in Bitcoin great go trust a bank they're going to have better user usability they're going to have better UI they're going to have a better website whatever it's going to be a whole lot more user friendly and transactions to other people within that bank or maybe through some correspondent Banks they're going to be instant and they're going to be probably free that's great similarly those who are willing to trust miners a bit more technology some of you may be familiar with things like lightning Network these things again take a slight step back not much of one but a slight step towards trusting that miners aren't going to be able to censor a transaction for a day or roughly a day usually in parameters that are selected and as long as you trust that miners won't be able to censor your transaction for a day lightning is completely secure great so you take this like half Stu back and all of a sudden Bitcoin becomes infinitely more usable and infinitely more applicable to whatever scenario you wanted to use it for whether that's payments or something or remittances or whatever and so really the technology that I decided to work on the technology that I try to make sure is going to be there in the long term for Bitcoin is technology that takes advantage of the trust relationships that users are willing to have while letting them opt out of the trust relationships they don't want to have and gives them the best user experience they can have in that context thank you any questions I'd be interested to um to hear how you use Bitcoin uh maybe with your travels or Germany or wherever just how you use it yeah um you know there was a question earlier about kind of the usability of Bitcoin I think the usability of Bitcoin still sucks the the ux is still kind of awful trying to use it for payments is generally slight I mean it's kind of always been slow and annoying like I can just type my credit card number and it'll just kind of work um and so Bitcoin definitely has a lot of ux issues to get over it's still a very young technology so it's not like we don't have the ability to build this we know we have plenty of ideas of how to design some of these systems uh personally how I use Bitcoin you know I have on multiple occasions showed up in a country and decided I wanted to uh get local currency and you know normally ATM works in the western world but like trying to find an ATM that takes my Visa debit card in mainland China there's a few at the airport but um so having Bitcoin there can be really useful it can turn out to be something where I can just use it across borders because I don't have to trust that Visa is going to Beed at an at of city um similarly you know I occasionally pay for things with Bitcoin I've been around in Bitcoin long enough I've bought things and sold things and bought Bitcoin and sold Bitcoin but it's all kind of random in here and there and I am excited about the future of Bitcoin and continue to hold Bitcoin and continue to build technology around Bitcoin but hopefully the ux will get to a point where I'm actually excited to use Bitcoin and not dreading it in favor of using freaking credit card that I can just swipe and it's a whole lot nicer okay thank you for coming it was very interesting to uh hear you uh so so far I saw a lot of advantages that you um told about Bitcoin um You didn't say so many disadvantages um but I have been thinking of uh one um that I would like to know your opinion about that so uh the whole uh Bitcoin uh uh network is I mean the economy around Bitcoin is a like a the flary system because uh as we have been seen uh historically it has is so the the price of the Bitcoin has increased all over the history and so the my question is I mean usually in the economy what happens is the the the currency uh uh Central governments and Banks they introduced some inflationary uh just to make the the money to be used uh and not stored and the problem with Bitcoin which I see is this is exactly that people are using it more to as a storage instead of uh of of being used and this uh I think it may lead to some problems in the future so I don't know I just wanted to know your opinion about that yeah I mean I think right so people have different opinions for what Bitcoin should be used for right there's people who are interested in using Bitcoin for remittances or payments and certainly the people who are excited about payments might have more of an issue for this there's a lot of people who are excited about Bitcoin because it has this clear limit of the total Supply and they're interested in buying that kind of system because it is a good hedge against some risk that they're worried about and so I don't know that that's necessarily a problem that might be a problem in that there's people buying into Bitcoin and a lot certainly a lot of the price action and a lot of the drivers for the increase in prices in Bitcoin uh are not people who are buying into it to use it as a payment Network both because the ux for payments kind of sucks right now and because the you know there's more money to be put into hedging some weird ESO payment Network it's getting there it's we're uh we're improving the software and eventually it'll be really useful for payments but further I I don't I think it's a strange assumption and I I don't hear it as often anymore from Bitcoin communities uh that they think Bitcoin is somehow going to replace National currencies because as you pointed out like look the fed or the ECB or I don't actually know what it's called in Switzerland uh they have an important role in the economy and they they do manage it you know whatever you know there's some people who disagree with their management policies maybe you see too many risks of inflation with current management policies whatever they do have a role to play in the way we've constructed modern economies and maybe you disagree with that but I see someone nodding here disagrees with that but that doesn't necessarily mean that uh but but I think that you know if Bitcoin might not replace the national currencies but it might also be a decent use for uh crossb payments or something like gold is a good example which is arguably inflationary you know people can argue all day long about how much gold there is that will be mind but is also kind of an arguably deflationary at least marginally fixed cap value of uh this natural resource and so you might draw a similar comparison here to Gold than a national currency um and further you know if you think that the FED is evil or that the uh uh National Banks have done a particularly poor job in introducing too much uh risk of inflation well then maybe you should be excited about deflationary currency because you know tuning inflation to appropriately match economic trends is super not an easy job and is kind of a large part of what many central banks do um and trying to do that programmatically in a system where we can't design around uh human errors you know we can't Bitcoin is designed to kind of avoid human Errors By having this trustless you don't have to trust some other human to make the right decision to cause your currency to devalue um you know Bitcoin kind of can't have that to an extent it can't introduce that risk otherwise we get rid of a lot of value of Bitcoin so I don't know that it's there are limitations to that approach and maybe that means that it won't be used for uh some payments maybe that means it'll be a driver against people using Bitcoin as payments but that doesn't mean there isn't value and there's certainly discussion to be had about whether or not uh that opens up other use cases or say you know a lot of the recent discussion in the Bitcoin communities about changing Bitcoin and I think that at least personally my key approach to changing Bitcoin is to think about all of the different ways in which Bitcoin are used and say okay if we were to change that how does it maybe break one way in which it's used and is that a reasonable tradeoff for improving some other way so that was a long answer but I hope I at least marginally answered your question yeah hi hi M thanks for your work uh I want to ask you first do you think uh personally the the entire fee system and the fee discussion is really really needed in terms of when you do your ma and the blockchain and check if this is if there is enough space for paying Bitcoin without a fee and the second question would be um do you really think because I know you work lots of on the second on the second uh layer do you really think the second layers are the same safe that itself thanks for your answer yeah um so as for fees I mean that's obviously a complicated question um certainly in the long term as as we have a desire to keep the 21 million coins limit miners have to get paid somehow you know they have clear costs to providing security for the network and that has to be paid in way um so in terms of like the long term of Bitcoin or in fact in terms of whenever Bitcoin stops doubling every four years in price or whatever we decide that we don't want to bet the security of Bitcoin on it doubling every four years there has to be some fee pressure there and there has to be some kind of fee Market there now that's not to say that we necessarily need it today uh there's strong arguments to be said that we're fine today we have enough hash power at least for the value of Bitcoin that we're securing uh and maybe it's okay to forgo some fees now in exchange for uh increasing block size now or getting more features out of block or something like that um but the question is kind of what is that Trend towards the long-term look like and how does function um similarly I mean I I assume your question is in regards to kind of how we change Bitcoin now to adapt to these uh constraints and kind of make sure fees are with for uses of the system today um and you know I go back to kind of the long list of use cases and you know the key you the key feature to bitcoin to me is trustless right that you don't have to trust someone else to make decision negatively impact your ability to use Bitcoin and certainly there's a large argument to be made that the current system is negatively impacting people's ability to use Bitcoin but the only way that Bitcoin maintains trustless is long in the long term system and truly that means the vast majority of Bitcoin coin of Bitcoin users and uh developers and Miners and exchanges and Merchants whatever else agreeing that there is a new Bitcoin and that it is some hard fork or agreeing that there is a new Bitcoin and that it's the application of or whatever that is and you know that can have political implications and social implications and make it much harder to change Bitcoin but certainly I believe strongly that setting that precedent that Bitcoin changes by consensus which by the way setting that precedent also means that socially we will all enforce it that it keeps B bitcoin useful in the long term and without that I think Bitcoin uses loses lots of its utility now of course I wish people would be willing to come together more right now I think there's a lot of good discussion about technical proposals on how to increase block sizes and I think there's pretty broad-based consensus that a larger size right now is completely reasonable and lower fees right now especially before we have any kind of second layer Solutions are completely reasonable um and you know I don't have a good answer to politics there's a lot of people taking various Hardline views it always disappoints me but if that's how Bitcoin maintains its security is that people are able to take Hardline views and prevent things from changing then that's how Bitcoin maintains its security um as for your second question about about second layer systems and the security thereof uh yeah I mean I think it is there that there is always some kind of security reduction there's always some kind of reduction in uh trustless in using a second layer system but I think a lot of the things that people are talking about now the designs are super minimal trust reduction I you talk about like lightning Network and the security of uh lightning network type system at least many of the payment Channel type systems is you know you always have this time limit and a lot of people people propose maybe a day or even potentially a week timeout for these time limits and the security assumption here is that you're able to get a transaction in in that day or that week or whatever that time limit is and like that's pretty reasonable assumption I hope Bitcoin if it if it has lost its censorship resistance on the time frame of a week you know okay it's probably reasonable that a lot of people are going to Miners and fix the censorship resistance uh maybe on a more human time frame than a week or a day um excuse me um but I think that's still a very reasonable assumption to make and certainly compared to assumptions people make today payments with one or two or six confirmations by the way the censorship resistance argument of a day or a week is probably much stronger than accepting a payment on one or two or six confirmations at least in the Bitcoin we have today and so there are varying levels of it of course you know you look at this ultimate second layer solution is a coinbase is a Bitcoin bank that just holds your money for you obviously that has a huge reduction lightning Network and other similar things have a much much smaller trust reduction maybe better than Bitcoins used today um but yeah you're right there is some trust reduction you know when I use Bitcoin often I actually will you know I use Bitcoin with some party who I marginally trust but I don't really fully trust it's been there for a week so me it's slight trust reduction but for most uses not so much thanks hi so we know today there are roughly two billion people who don't have access to the financial sector in general do you think that Bitcoin or the cryptocurrencies in general can um allow these people this part of people to have access to the financial system in general and if yes how yeah I mean that's a complicated question you know there's a lot of issues to unpack there there's a lot of people in the US who don't have access to the financial system and for many of those people you know we have a pretty robust Financial system in the US there's some issues with financial censorship and other stuff but that doesn't impact most of the people who don't have uh have bank accounts or have access to financial system and I don't know that Bitcoin has huge opportunity to help there and that's just a personal opinion there's other people who have founded startup to try to address some of these issues even in the western world world and they obviously have a very different opinion from me but I do think in some of in some other parts of the world there is more potential of course now you start to get of people don't have access to Computing devices you know maybe they have a old school not even smartphone you know flip phone and some of those can run apps most of those can still run uh Facebook's chat messenger whatever they call it I forget the name of it now um most of them can still run various Facebook Chat whatever because these companies have lots of money to invest in building apps for that and in fact many of them uh you look at um oh [ __ ] subsaharan African system that's mobile someone knows this B PESA thank you um and yeah you look at some of these guys and yeah they're trying to um help bridge both um remittance gaps which is a legitimate Financial Service that people need access to and also help further in some other parts of Africa uh provide effectively banking services built on bitcoin you know often it's not about people being their own bank and holding their own private Keys it's about you company providing being effectively a bank to people holding the Bitcoin for them maybe even hedging it to make it more stable as a value um and there is some potential to provide useful Services there because all of a sudden you know they don't have to get a uh deal with Deutsche Bank to be able to send and receive currency across borders to get to other countries they can use Bitcoin for that um and that's you know a little piece of where trustless can help there um I that said you know I think there are a lot of restrictions and there's definitely a lot of hurdles with usability and things like the in unstable exchange rate which you know customers don't want to see that prevent Bitcoin from being a massive and clear win there um but there is definitely potential and there's some remit ERS where Bitcoin is already starting to be used as either a backbone or as a way to avoid having to set up some of these correspondent banking relationships um where Bitcoin is starting to provide some value there okay thank you