Video - Peer-to-Peer Money In A Historical Context
Money is an ancient technology. In this presentation, Andreas M. Antonopoulos examines the historical context of money as a technology and analyses the inflection points that lead to the most recent innovation of peer-to-peer money.
TRANSCRIPT
ANDREAS ANTONOPOULOS: I’m so glad to be back here especially speaking about Bitcoin to a very warm crowd and thank you so much for coming today.
So, today everybody enjoyed lunch? Feeling a bit sleepy? All right, we’re going to make this fun. I hope we’re going to make this fun and just wake everybody up and get back to business.
So, let me start with a quick question. How many people in this audience are familiar with Bitcoin? Okay, I think I saw three hands not go up. How many people in this audience have Bitcoin or have used Bitcoin? Fantastic. And those of you who didn’t raise your hand now find one of the other people who did raise their hands and have them show you how to use Bitcoin. Come to me after the talk I would be delighted to not only show you how to use it but also to give you a small amount of Bitcoin so you can try it out. Not a whole Bitcoin, no. A fraction, a few millibits but you can try it out and see how it works. I think it’s important to experience Bitcoin.
Today, I want to talk about the history of money. So, a lot of people asked me if I could talk about the latest things in Bitcoin but really what I wanted to talk about is ancient history. I want to provide a historical context for money and talk about why Bitcoin is important in this historical context.
So, first a little pop quiz for the audience. If you think of money as technology, as technological system that human civilization has invented, how old is this technology? Any ideas, how old is the money technology? Lots of different answers here. It’s always surprising to me that people will say, you know, it’s four hundred years old, a thousand years old, two thousand years old. In fact we don’t really know how old money is and part of the reason we don’t know how old money is is because we have yet to discover civilization old enough that didn’t have money. So we know it’s as old as civilization. And one thing that surprises people is that money is older than writing. And the way we know this is because when we look at archeological discoveries of writing we find hieroglyphics and we find cuneiform and we look at all of these ancient forms of writing guess what they’re writing about – money. They’re writing ledgers. All of the ancient writing we find the first purposes of writing are ledgers. They are writing about money because money is older than writing.
Is money older than the wheel? I don’t know but we do know that wheels were used as money so they might be as old as wheels. Perhaps the first wheel was sold for money or was used as a form of money itself.
Archeological sites going back into the Stone Age show us the presence of money in the form of shells and feathers and beads used by Stone Age people. In fact, we can teach primates how to use money. If you have – and they’ve done several studies where they teach monkeys, chimpanzees how to use money. They teach them a specific type of stone can be exchanged for bananas and then they try to see what the monkeys will do with this new information and they very quickly invent armed robbery because they figured out that if you beat up the other monkey and take the stones you can exchange them for bananas. Surprisingly the second thing they invent is prostitution. They figure out that sexual favors can be exchanged for stones which can be used for bananas.
What does that tell you about the nature of money? I think the important insight into the nature of money is that money is a form of communication. At its basic level money isn’t value. Money represents an abstraction of value, it’s a way of communicating value. It’s a language and therefore money is as old as language because the ability to communicate value is as old as language and money in many ways has these characteristics that make it a linguistic construct. So, it’s a form of communication. We used money to communicate value to each other. To express to each other how much we value a product or service, a gesture. We used it as the basis of social interaction because by communicating value to each other we create social bonds. So money is also a very important social construct. So this is an ancient technology and yet ironically it’s one of the technologies that is least studied from a historical and technology perspective.
We look at Bitcoin today and it represents an invention, a new form of doing money. And think about for a moment how often the technology of money has been transformed by invention, how many different forms of money we’ve had. At a very basic level the way to communicate value is to exchange things that we consider equal value.
Here’s a goat I will take twenty bananas for my goat. That’s not really money because it’s a barter transaction but it’s the first form of communication about value. And then we start seeing abstract forms of money. So the first major technological evolution is to start exchange in something that you can’t eat – a feather, a bead, a string with knots on it, a colorful something that can be used for aesthetic purposes and then money takes this abstract form as first major transformational technology moments for money when money stopped being about the tangible consumption of intrinsic value but became something that referred to value as an abstraction. Very quickly one of the most popular forms of these abstractions was to use precious metals to express value, precious metals combined some of the most important characteristics of money being hard to find, scarce, easily transportable more for example than a giant rock or a whole barrel of feathers or other forms of money, easy to divide. You can cut gold coin into pieces and subdivide the pieces and universally valued for aesthetic purposes. That’s a major second transformation in technology and it took thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of years before we saw the introduction of precious metals which is the beginning of the agrarian civilizations in the Fertile Crescent area in the Middle East we start seeing precious metals. The Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Romans, the Greeks developed these precious metals to major technological revolutions and then nothing for a few thousand years. And then someone came up with this brilliant idea which was well, if I deposit like gold with someone trustworthy then they can give me a piece of paper that says that I have my gold in this trustworthy vaults and I could then really start trading the paper instead of the gold. It’s easier to carry and as long as I still trust that my money is in the vault then I’ve got a new form of money.
Now with every technological revolution and money there comes skepticism and I think this is the moment of the greatest amount of skepticism in human civilization. For a lot of people this new invention of money as paper was somewhat controversial. You think people are freaking out about Bitcoin? Imagine how much they freaked out when you told that now instead of trading in gold they would trade in pieces of paper. For a lot of people this was unthinkable. I mean after all clearly this thing does not have any value. It took about four hundred years for paper as money to become accepted broadly and trust me it was a big aberration. Then about sixty years ago we saw a new form of money in the form of plastic cards. In fact, the first cards were paper again and then in the United States Diners Club was the first to create a credit card which was a form of traveler’s check and then people took that and they said this isn’t money why don’t you give me some of the good old paper money that I know and that was another big transformation in money. And now we have Bitcoin and Bitcoin is in my mind a pretty radical transformation as radical as the change from precious metals to paper money. Perhaps even more radical. So what is Bitcoin?
This is the fundamental issue in describing Bitcoin is that if you use references to our existing experience that experience is based on thousands of years of understanding what money is in a very physical form and now we try to explain a form of money that is completely abstract, that is a token that represents acceptance in a network, a network-centric form of money but it doesn’t even begin to describe what this thing is. And so what is the fundamental misunderstandings that I get when I tried to describe Bitcoin is that people think it’s simply a payment system. That Bitcoin is simply a form of digitization of money. It’s like it’s digital money. Great. Well, that’s kind of pointless because we already have digital money. All of you use digital money every day long before Bitcoin came along. You have bank accounts, those bank accounts have digital ledgers, you use those bank accounts to send payments electronically, that’s digital money. Bitcoin isn’t just digital money. Bitcoin is a fundamental transformation of the technology of money and it’s difficult to grasp because it is so different from everything we know before. So take a different stab at it.
I want to talk about network architecture for a second because Bitcoin is not happening in a vacuum. It’s happening in a moment in history where we are seeing a transformation of many fundamental social institutions and that transformation is the great network-centric era. For centuries social institutions were organized around hierarchical organizations, institutions, democracy, banking, education. All of our social interactions were organized around appeal to authority and these hierarchies, these bureaucracies of people and something happened with the invention of the internet. We started seeing more and more of these social institutions changing from systems that were closed, not transparent, unaccountable, hierarchical, complex with their own rules into platforms. We start seeing the introduction of systems that have interfaces, APIs that we can access where information can flow in and out of the organization and so we go from institutions to platforms. And then we start seeing even more important transformation when we go from platforms to protocols. And the interesting thing about the change between a platform and a protocol is when you have a protocol there is no central appeal. TCP/IP doesn’t work in reference to a service provider, TCP/IP works without contacts everywhere in the world. You don’t have to sign up for an account to use TCP/IP, you just have to use the language. And once you go from a platform to a language it opens up all of these possibilities.
Bitcoin in the first network-centric protocol based form of money and what that means is that it exists without reference to an institutional or platform contacts. I’ll get back to that in a second; this is a really important point.
So we say that Bitcoin is peer-to-peer money. What does that mean, peer-to-peer money? It refers to an architecture. Architecture used in terms of computer science or networking or distributed systems to describe the relationship between participants in a system. The architecture of Bitcoin is peer-to-peer because every participant in the network speaks the Bitcoin protocol on an equal level. There are no special Bitcoin notes, all notes are the same. Peer-to-peer means that when you do a transaction every peer treats you the same. It has no contacts inside the peer system other than that that it gets from the network.
An interesting issue in distributed system is the issue of contacts and state, right. If you logon to Facebook and you have an account with Facebook you’re not using a protocol. All of the state is controlled by Facebook. You have a login session and all of the data is held by them. We called that architectural client server. And Bitcoin is different because it’s peer-to-peer just like e-mail or TCP/IP.
So one of the interesting things that happens with money is that we are reluctant to discuss money. In fact it is shocking that in almost all countries money is not part of the education system. Five-year-olds have great questions about money and most parents find it almost impossible to answer these questions. What is money, mummy? How does money work? Why do we not have more of it? Why can’t everyone have more of it? And you don’t say “Susie, go back to your room and study inflation like a good girl and don’t come back until you understand the answer to that question.” We don’t discuss money.
It’s interesting that when you use a technology as a foundation of every aspect of social interaction almost and yet it is a completely taboo subject. We all pretend that we don’t particularly care about money, at least not intrinsically. We have higher goals and aspirations. We use it in everyday experience but we don’t really talk about it. It’s a dirty topic. I think the architecture has something to do with it.
You see before Bitcoin the previous situation of money, the fourth (0:15:55) situation of money when money started being issued in exchange for precious metals stored in a vault. What that represented is a form of debt and that’s a really important concept to understand because it covers our discussion. How many of you have money in a bank? None of you have money in a bank. Do you store physical money in a safe deposit box maybe then you could say you have money in the bank. Oh, few people say that. The rest of you have loaned your money to a bank. And for the privilege of loaning your money to the bank you will be paid the amazing interest sum of 0.00001 percent per year and your bank will take that money, turn around and loaned it to the people standing next to you for 24.99 percent APR. This is a client-server relationship because that money only exists in the form of debt in the ledger that you do not control. A ledger that is stored by a server and you are simply a client. In fact you have no control over that at all. You don’t even have basic interfaces to that money unless that interface is mediated by the server. That’s what a client-server architecture does.
We have another term in distributed system that describes a particular form of client-server architecture where the secondary party only has a copy, a weak copy that isn’t really meaningful. We called that a master-slave architecture. And if you think of the previous situation of money as a master-slave architecture you have to ask them uncomfortable question. Who is the slave? Because in a system of debt one of the two parties is always the slave. You are the client, you are not the server and the server doesn’t really serve you. They serve themselves because they are the master. And that is the architecture of money we live in. That is the architecture of money we used in our civilization, an architecture of money where you have no control and architecture of money where every interaction is mediated by a third-party, a third-party that has absolute control over that money. And today if you go to the ATM machine and you put in your card the bank may decide to give you your money. And one day as the people of Cyprus, Greece, Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and list of hundreds of countries over the last several decades and even centuries have discovered one day you go to the bank and the bank does not want to give you the money because they don’t have to and that’s the essence of a master-slave relationship.
Bitcoin is fundamentally different because in Bitcoin you don’t owe anyone anything and no one owes you anything. It is not a system based on that. It is a system based on ownership of this abstract token, absolute ownership.
We have an expression in the United States which is possession is ninth-tenth of the law. Have you heard of that expression? In Bitcoin possession is tenth-tenth of the law. If you control the Bitcoin keys it’s your Bitcoin. If you don’t control the Bitcoin keys it’s not your Bitcoin. You are back to a master-slave relationship with the bank.
Bitcoin represents a fundamental transformation of money and invention that changes the oldest technology we have in civilization that changes radically and disruptively by changing the fundamental architecture into one where every participant is equal, where transaction has no state or contacts other than a being the consensus rules of the network that no one controls, where you money is yours and you control it absolutely through the application of digital signatures and no one can sensor it, no one can seize it, no one can freeze it. No one can tell you what to do or what not to do with your money. It is a system of money that is simultaneously absolutely transnational and borderless and we’ve never had a system of money like that. It is a system of money that transmits at the speed of lights that anyone in the world can participate with a device as simple as a text messaging phone. And this represents a technological innovation that is terrifying to a lot of people because it is such a fundamental transformation of money. And what they will tell you is that they’re worried, they’re very worried. They’re worried that criminals will use Bitcoin. But the truth is that they’re far more terrified that all of the rest of us will. Thank you.
MAN #1: (0:21:19) you want to throw the first (0:21:23)?
ANDREAS ANTONOPOULOS: No, I’m not good at throwing I’m better at coding. Go ahead.
MAN #1: Okay, well.
ANDREAS ANTONOPOULOS: If I could throw I’d be on the basketball team and not the computer programming team.
MAN #2: First of all, thank you. I have question. We were talking about scarcity and also about what’s – sorry, what’s it call again, the intrinsic value.
ANDREAS ANTONOPOULOS: Yes.
MAN #2: If you look at the definition of money according to Aristotle he said that well, he described gold basically as you just did and he said that the intrinsic value of gold was its scarcity. Do you believe that the same thing goes for Bitcoin?
ANDREAS ANTONOPOULOS: So, as a Greek I think I can say that safely Aristotle said many smart things and Aristotle also said many absolutely idiotic things which in the context of the time were fine but in retrospect we know better and understand more about the world around us. Scarcity isn’t intrinsic value. Scarcity is a completely different attributes of money. And in fact intrinsic value is a very slippery concept. We haven’t had money with intrinsic value since our money was bananas because you can eat them. And in fact unless you have scarcity even the things that you might assume having intrinsic value do not have intrinsic value. You know the most important aspect of life like water have intrinsic value only when they are scarce. So scarcity affect intrinsic value but is not intrinsic value. In this country as also in my country we use fresh water to flush our toilets and that shows you exactly how much value fresh water has intrinsically here because of a lack of scarcity. You know, I know that the Netherlands has a much bigger problem with keeping the water out than having enough but there are plenty of places where that’s not the case.
Intrinsic value is not really a property of currency or money. In fact currency that has intrinsic value is not very good currency because then you might eat it instead. It creates a market distortion because if you can eat your currency at some point if the value of currency goes low enough everybody starts eating it instead of using it although you can assign an intrinsic value to money. My favorite example was a farmer in Zimbabwe who was asked by the BBC when they were carrying a wheelbarrow full of hundred trillion dollar Zimbabwe notes stacked up and they asked them “Can’t you use it as fuel?” and they said, “No, not really because goat shit burns better.” That was the moment that the currency’s intrinsic value had degraded to the point that it was below par with goat shit.
Now, I have news for you there are at least fifty currencies in the world today that have an intrinsic value less than goat shit and that is the world in which we’re introducing Bitcoin. But more interesting concept, I think, one that we should explore more is intrinsic utility. Something that is useful as a currency and I think that Bitcoin represents a moment of immense intrinsic utility. It is useful. It is software money. Money as a content type, money as a service, programmable money that can be programmed to do amazing things and that provides intrinsic utility. Utility that makes it much more than just money for the internet but instead turns into the internet of money. So, intrinsic utility, I think, is a more useful concept that’s (0:25:21)
MAN #3: Hi, Andreas. I want to ask your opinion…
ANDREAS ANTONOPOULOS: Is that Max?
MAN #3: Yes, hello. Hey, hello Andreas.
ANDREAS ANTONOPOULOS: I know you are here.
MAN #3: Hey, you recognized my voice since many people do like…
ANDREAS ANTONOPOULOS: I’m so honored.
MAN #3: Oh, it’s like New York (0:25:33). Okay, so the banks are now getting into Blockchain we have nine banks trading at consortium apparently so like they’re competing with Blockchain etc. So, just what are your thoughts on this. Is it competition? Where’s it going? Your thoughts, thanks.
ANDREAS ANTONOPOULOS: How many of you here are familiar with concept of internet or have an internet at work? So an internet is the internal company network where all of the information that is out-of-date about the company is posted and where you can use most of the interesting applications on the internet but they forced you to use it anyway. So, the problem with an internet is that eventually you want to make it more useful and then you try to find a way to connect it to the rest of the internets around but to do that you use an intranet. And I think what we’re going to discover is that this approach of trying to take oh, let’s see well, we told the world that we wanted to disrupt our business in fact we said we wanted to disrupt our business from the inside out because that sounds good on the marketing brochure and then we discovered Bitcoin but that’s too disruptive, too revolutionary. We want something more corporate like the word revolutionized which means the exact opposite of revolutionary. It means to strip something of anything that is disruptive, turn it into a safe, mild, bland alternative that kind of fits the marketing brochure and then try to pretend that is revolutionary. It’s like the difference between Che Guevara and a Che Guevara t-shirt being worn by a hipster in Brooklyn. So what did they do? They look at Bitcoin and they say let’s see it’s an open, decentralized, borderless, transparent and peer-to-peer currency. Fantastic. Could we have that without the open, borderless, decentralized, peer-to-peer and transparent and instead add a nice dose of heavy control and turned it into a client-server model. Oh sorry, I meant a master-slave model.
Blockchains are going to decrease the cost of operating clearing houses within the world’s stock exchanges and banking systems. They will replace single point failure clearing houses and payment networks like Swift and DTCC and all of the other stock market backends in the world and they’re going to reduce the cost of investment banking. Woohoo, that’s not going to change the world and it really is a minor and boring application but I can see why it’s better than what they have today. To me the equivalent is really simple.
When the internet came out what did the world’s phone companies do? They designed color fax machines. Take the fax machine, add color look it’s just like the internet.
All right, next question?
MAN #4: Hi, Andreas. Thank you very much for that talk. What in your opinion are the biggest threats or problems at the moment in Bitcoin ecosystem?
ANDREAS ANTONOPOULOS: The biggest threats or problems – there are many threats. I think, you know, Bitcoin is very much an experimental technology, it’s an instance. I think it’s important to separate the design pattern from the particular implementation we’re running right now. I can give you a prediction over the next fifty years the design pattern of open decentralized digital currencies based on Blockchain technology will completely transform the world. Whether it will use the exact same technology we use in Bitcoin today, whether Bitcoin will continue to evolve as it has for the last six years very rapidly and be able to address all of the difficulties, get better user interface, design better security, scale to much higher levels and all of those things I don’t know. I think most likely whatever we end up with will still be called Bitcoin even though it may bear very little resemblance in its underlying engineering to what we have today. But it will still be an open, decentralized, peer-to-peer platform for money not because that’s an efficient way of doing money, it’s because it’s a free way of doing money and sometimes efficiency is something you sacrifice for freedom. Bitcoin is not efficient. If you want efficient you use a system where one person is in control and that is very, very efficient. Democracy isn’t very efficient either but it sure help better than the alternative.
All right, let’s take may be one or two more questions.
WOMAN #1: Okay. Talking about public and private I think that the internet is considered as a common good and do you see the Bitcoin as a public good, as a private good, as a government good or a new term and how can it be use it for public (0:31:03)?
ANDREAS ANTONOPOULOS: Well, I think that’s a really good question. I think the Blockchain is a public good. It is a societal construct that is not controlled by any one individual that is ruled entirely by a set of common principles and laws called the consensus mechanism and the rules of consensus define what happens on the Blockchain. Interestingly enough I think the Blockchain will create a completely new form of common good that we’ve never seen before. If you accept the idea that Bitcoin or something very much like it will continue to exist we arrive at a place where for the first time in history we have a shared historical record that does not decay in time and cannot be changed, immutable history forever. We have an expression which is, you know, put it is stone. Have you heard that expression? It’s an expression we use to describe the most immutable form of recording we can imagine which is to carve something in stone. Twenty years from now we will say “Oh, it’s as good as done. It’s like I put on the Blockchain” because we will have a much better form of an immutable history. So that becomes a public good and it becomes a public good that has a scale and time that we’ve never seen as a civilization. And if you think of what happens if the Bitcoin last ten years and the Blockchain last ten years that’s astonishing. But what if it last a hundred years? What if it last a thousand years. What happens if two thousand years from now you can go back and do Blockchain archeology and study the transactions between Satoshi Nakamoto and Hal Finney or study the 2020 presidential campaign based on Blockchain transactions. This is a very important historical artifact that we’re now creating as a civilization. So yes, it is a public good.
MAN #5: You talked about the properties of good money and in the light of the news (0:33:14) about BitPay blacklisting a transaction. I would ask you if you have (0:33:20) about the fungibility of Bitcoin due to the tractable nature?
ANDREAS ANOTOPOULOS: Yes. I think fungibility is one of the things that Bitcoin can definitely improve and I think over time we’re going to see some improvements to that but there’s already quite a few proposals on different ways to increase fungibility and anonymity. If we want to preserve this Blockchain technology as a good that is resistant to censorship and surveillance and control that really transform our monetary system, makes it global, makes it transparent, makes it possible for the whole world to be part of it we really need to address the issue of fungibility. Blacklist are inherently evil they cede control to the author of the blacklist and that control is absolute. It’s one of the fundamental problems we have in our banking system today.
Think about it this way – it’s now 2015 we’ve had mainstream internet for 15 years. Now, if you look at the statistics of economic inclusion in the world how many people have access to financial services through this wonderful gift we have in humanity which is the internet. Economic inclusion has decrease. Why? Because we have found more ways to surveil or control and played you political games and now we cut off entire countries from the international financial system. That is not a healthy way to approach life and so I think the metric of economic inclusion is very much affected by fungibility and blacklists are antithetical to democracy. They’re antithetical to freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of speech which as principles of the enlightenment to something that we should aspire to.
If your government is worried about their own citizens’ controlling their money the most important question you have to ask is what the hell is wrong with my government. Not what the hell is wrong with Bitcoin.
MAN #1: One question.
ANDREAS ANTONOPOULOS: Okay, last question.
MAN #6: Yeah. This morning Mr. (0:35:41) was telling us that China and Russia are getting a lot of gold and that the States are more or less bypassed in this action. Does that mean that the United States has seen the light now and go for Bitcoin?
ANDREAS ANTONOPOULOS: I’m – I wasn’t quite sure I understood the question. I’m sorry. Could you – they’re getting a lot of gold, you said?
MAN #6: Yeah. The amount of gold is going to China and to Russia now-a-days.
ANDREAS ANTONOPOULOS: Ah, yes.
MAN #6: Yeah. So, and the States and Western royalties more or less getting rid of gold. Does it mean that they have seen the light and go for Bitcoin?
ANDREAS ANTONOPOULOS: No, it doesn’t mean they have seen the light. It means that we are now living in a world where we’re facing the most unprecedented currency and central banking crisis that we’ve seen since the introduction of central banking and a lot of people say, you know, what does it take from Bitcoin to succeed? How do we make sure that Bitcoin can beat the banks or replace the banks or eradicate central banking? We don’t need to do that. Bitcoin should not be aiming to conquer co-op or force anyone to adopt anything. Bitcoin is (0:37:02) and it’s a choice. We’re not looking for governments to endorse or adopt Bitcoin. That makes not sense. The idea of a national currency is as ridiculous and obsolete as the idea of a national airline or a national phone company or king. We need to get rid of these things.
The bottom line is that the banking system as we know it today does not need help to become obsolete. It’s doing a very good job on its own. When you have a giant centralized structure the biggest risk it face is is that by its very nature centralization introduces fragility into the system. The narrower the source of the decisions the more likely those decisions are they’re disconnected from reality. And we’ve seen that central planning fails and yet we accept central planning and monetary policies as if somehow that is exempt from that rule.
Centralized systems are fragile and they fail on their own. There is a reason why twenty-one central banks around the world have set their interest rates to zero for six years and cannot seem to get out of that trap. They say that currencies require control in order to be stable and yet we have unstable currencies and central banks that have lost all control even though supposedly they have the tools.
So the real question we should ask is not whether Bitcoin will succeed but whether we face a really substantial risk of our traditional monetary policy tools failing catastrophically all around the world. I just hope that when that time comes Bitcoin will be there to pick up the pieces along with many other digital currencies because the world has to continue to be able to transact and currency failure is a catastrophic event in any country. I’ve seen it in my own country in Greece, I saw it wiped out my parents twice in a single generation and everybody around us and this has happened all across the world and actual states of a state sponsored currency is collapsed. Statistically speaking there are only a few exceptions and they don’t last very long.
So, really this is not about Bitcoin winning. Banks are losing on their own they don’t need any help.
MAN #1: Andreas, thank you so much. I also really like the master-slave analogy because we have now Blythe Masters, I think, in-charge of Blockchain consortiums and maybe it’s a coincidence or not, I don’t know.
We have a few presents for you from (0:39:52)
ANDREAS ANTONOPOULOS: Oh, fantastic. Thank you so much. Thank you.
MAN #1: And we also have the Belgian Bitcoin Community and they brought you this whole basket. I’m not sure are you going to…
ANDREAS ANTONOPOULOS: In the United States it’s considered polite to open your presents.
MAN #1: (0:40:18)
ANDREAS ANTONOPOULOS: Now I’m going to claim that that’s the reason why I’m doing this.
MAN #1: (0:40:23) and then also from the Belgian Community we have here, a nice basket of Belgian beers and some fruits there on behalf of Belgian Bitcoin Community.
ANDREAS ANTONOPOULOS: Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.
MAN #1: Thank you very much, Andreas.