Hello, hello, hello. This is Max Keiser. I'm here with Jameson Lopp. Jameson, welcome. Thanks for having me. All right. So this is interesting because Bitcoin has a very strong presence here in North Carolina, principally because of you, I would say. You're kind of the Bitcoin guy in North Carolina. And if you're driving around the highway, you'll see a very sporty car that has a license plate Bitcoin. You were saying it was hard to get Bitcoin as a license plate. Very hard, only because the DMV is terrible and they have terrible software and a terrible fuzzy filter that thought that Bitcoin was in fact profanity. Because a BITC is the beginning of something that may implicate somebody who was running for president at some point. Yes, we can't have any of that. But thankfully I explained it all and they handed over the plate to me. All right. So in the Bitcoin space now, here we are in 2017, there's nine or ten people that are being followed to get good insight into Bitcoin and on Twitter and elsewhere. You're one of those people. I think the niche you've carved out, if you will, of the pundit class is that you're reasonable, you're modest, you're an engineer and you're not going to be taking any side too emphatically. You're kind of looking at all sides, along with Andrea Antonopoulos, I'd say. You two guys are kind of similar in that way. But what do you make of the politicalization of Bitcoin and the polarization of Bitcoin politically? There seems to be a lot going on with people coming off in quite strident terms. Your thoughts? It's all a result of frustration and it's frustration due to the way the system works. And because whenever there's conflict within the system trying to change the system, the result is the status quo. And there are so many people with different views of what should happen with Bitcoin. They're all trying to pull and get groups of people to agree with them and move Bitcoin in a specific way. But because nobody has been able to achieve sufficient momentum, if you will, instead you have everybody pulling in different directions and just canceling each other out. Okay, not being able to achieve sufficient momentum seems like part of the genius of Satoshi Nakamoto in the original design of the Bitcoin protocol. It resists dictatorships, if you will, has so thus far and has done a good job in doing so. But there's still this hangover of the scaling debate. Some would say it's no debate at all. It is what it is and just let it go the way it's going to go. Let altcoins fill in any gaps that are not in the marketplace. How do you come in on that debate? Well, I think part of what I recently spoke about in the very lengthy article I wrote about coming to a realization that it's not possible to fully understand Bitcoin because it is this amorphous concept that we're all trying to formalize and failing at doing that. That you really have to try to find what I call the Tao of Bitcoin, which is that you just sort of let go of trying to pull Bitcoin in a specific direction and just go with the flow. So a lot of the problems that have been having with the discourse in the community is just the vitriol and the politicization of technical things. So taking technical debates and turning them into emotional debates I think is what has caused a lot of this to sort of go down the drain and turn a lot of people off from talking about Bitcoin in general. So I think you just have to go with the flow and realize that whatever happens to Bitcoin is kind of the fate of what it was ordained to do. When you think about software projects in the past and even open source projects, let's say Linux for example, engineers would look at that and they'd start a company like Red Hat. And Red Hat would go public and the engineers, the founders, they'd do very, very well. But the ethos of the open source software itself remained intact somewhat. With Bitcoin, the money is the software. The software is money. And so people are not really spinning things off as much as they are actually getting it fabulously wealthy on the software coin itself. With the alt market now approaching $50 billion, you've got millionaires, multimillionaires, potentially 100 millionaires, and I'm sure we'll see in 2017 crypto's first billionaire. So they are swinging their weight around, right? Yeah, and I have no problem with people forking off the software, creating their own software. If you can overcome that initial chicken and egg problem and start to build your own network effect, all power to you. But kind of what you were going back to earlier talking about how Bitcoin automatically resists any dictatorship or centralization of control, I think one of the other sides to that sword is that even the perception of control or centralization of power in any way can also be seen by other people in the community as a bad thing. So you have companies like Blockstream and Chaincode and now Bitcoin Unlimited that they're just trying to contribute to the protocol and move it in the way that they think it should be moved, but people who disagree instead see this as an attack. And I think that's one of the problems with all of the vitriol that we've been seeing in the community is people not being able to just let go and understand that there are other people with other viewpoints and that's okay, and you can disagree, but you don't have to hate them. They're not inherently evil because you don't agree on those. I want to finish up with a topic you brought up in one of your recent stories. I'm talking with Jameson Lopp. He's a contributor for CoinDesk, some excellent articles there to read. Also, you're over there at BitGo. But you write about, quote, only 65 countries stand in the way of Bitcoin achieving top position in terms of global M1 money supply. You know, this reminds me back in 2011, Rick Fokvinje in Stockholm. He put all his money into Bitcoin when it was at $3 or less, and he talked about how if Bitcoin were to achieve only 1% of global Forex market, foreign exchange market, you'd see $100,000 a coin. And that's what he thinks will happen given the robustness and excellence of the protocol. So on top of that, thinking, what are your thoughts on this? I'm never one to make price predictions, but I can tell you that I myself am also heavily invested, and I believe that over the long term, we will continue to grow. We will overcome these capacity and scaling problems. It will take longer and be more frustrating than anybody desires. But at the end of the day, Bitcoin will remain stable and we will continue to add on to it. It might be through an easier path with segregated witness or existing improvements that are currently out there, or it might be a completely different path that no one even envisions at the moment. OK, but let me just follow up. In other words, for Bitcoin to become part of the global Forex market, central banks are going to have to start buying it for their reserve accounts. Japan certainly has taken a big, robust position toward Bitcoin. Russia is looking at Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. So do you think, not as a price projection, but do you think that we'll see governments start to look at this as a strategic reserve? I guess it's kind of a far-fetched question, but any thoughts on that? Yes. So there have been a number of people who have speculated that whatever nation state is the first one to decide that Bitcoin is actually a good thing to use as a reserve currency, they will in fact have a huge first mover advantage there. The real question is, which nation state has enough to lose that they might be willing to take that risk? But I think eventually someone will. Well, clearly you've got the three countries that are being pushed into a corner by NATO and those folks. You've got Russia, China, Iran. I think one of those three are Japan because they've just been through so much deflation and problems. I think those are the four possibilities. But anyway, Jameson Lopp, thanks so much for talking to us. My pleasure. I've been talking to Jameson Lopp. He's a contributor at CoinDesk. He's also, I guess you're an engineer at BitGo. Are you the owner or co-founder? What are you over there? I'm a team lead engineer. Team lead engineer at BitGo. Thanks so much. Thanks.