Video - Nick Carys Keynote About Bitcoin

Nicke Cary CEO of Blockchain talks about bitcoin, the development of Blockchain and some cool stories regarding bit coin from all over the world. He shared Bitcoin's importance on the economy of the world without financial boarders.

TRANSCRIPT

Okay, thank you very much, Stewart, for that pot full introduction.  I'm very excited to see as many people up this morning.  I know a lot of people were out late last night.  These events actually sometimes feel a little bit more like a reunion than a business conference and that's because people show up from all over the planet and they're so excited about what they're working on that they go out and they talk and share and they really collaborate quite a bit.  So, today I'm going to take a little time to basically do an overview of Bitcoin.  And make sure that everyone is current on what we're building and why.  Also do a little bit of a review on where we stand as the State of the Union basically.  Kind of a reflection over the past year.  And then share some stories.  Blockchain and blockchain employees travel an awful lot to visit with groups around the planet at a really grassroots level but also interfacing with government regulatory affairs type folks as well.  To make sure that we're learning and educating people wherever we find them.  And I got some really kind of neat and compelling stories to share with you today.

So, I'm based in the UK.  So, it was a quick trip for me.  London is really turning into a hub of digital currencies.  And it's not a big surprise.  This place is super exciting.  There are people from all over the planet to bring their ideas here together.  So, it's a very creative place for Bitcoin.  And what I'm witnessing here is pretty cool.  There are places you can get a soup for in Bitcoin.  You can buy beers which is great because they are crazy expensive here.  And all kinds of other things as well.  So, lots of exciting things happening in the UK and across Europe as well and around the world.  So, we'll go through some of those stories today.

Almost all the photography taken in this presentation was done throughout journeys this year.  So, I've traveled to just about every continent except Antarctica.  But I'm hopeful that we can do some Bitcoin related things there eventually.  I'm really hopeful in 2014 that someone does the first transaction between the United State or between this world and like outer space I think we can do that this year.  So, we change a lot of world's first.  And I'm like crazy passionate about Bitcoin related things.  So, hopefully that comes through a little bit today.

So, what are we really doing?  For me, I'm trying to imagine a world without financial borders.  A world where you can send value from here to here instantly.  I want to imagine a world with completely frictionless payments.  And we want to build a payment -- a payments platform where users always come first.  So, this is really about people.  And a Blockchain we're about reimagining how the world transacts.  So, before we can really talk about that though.  I do want to take a little time to talk about Bitcoin.  A lot of these conferences sort of assume that absolutely everyone is an expert and that's not always the case.  Bitcoin is changing quite a bit.  But it's important to remember what it is and its fundamental properties.  So, we'll go through a quick introduction.  I'd like to cover the history of Bitcoin.  Some of the economics, a few charts and trends.  And quickly discuss the future although that's sometimes a little ridiculous because we have so much building to do first but it's also kind of fun.

So, Bitcoin; Bitcoin is a technology.  It's often completely misunderstood especially by our friends in the media.  It's also a protocol and it's network.  It is the world's largest distributed computing project on planet earth.  It makes things like the Human Genome Project and others look trivial in comparison.  There is more computing power securing this network than anything else.  It's really -- really critical to remember that bitcoin is not a company.  And it's not centrally controlled.  It's not proprietary.  And it's not balanced to any one jurisdiction or place.  So, I think a lot of times people get stuck in the echo chamber of believing that bitcoin is going to grow out of Silicon Valley or some VC-backed little silicon replicas somewhere else and that's just not the case.  Any programmer in the middle of nowhere can be just as effective in contributing to the overall cause that bitcoin is anybody else.  So, those are important things to remember.  This has huge implications for the speed at which bitcoin can develop.  And it's one of the things we've seen in the space.

So, bitcoin as a payment system is a gigantic public distributed peer-to-peer ledger.  That's kind of a mouthful, the best way to think about this is your bank has effectively a big database of all transactions that happen there.  So, when you move money from your savings account to your checking account they keep track of that for you.  When you do that you surrender all of your money to an institution a third-party.  They have to secure it.  They have to insure it.  They have all this overhead and their financial regulatory burdens for them.  Bitcoins all looks to address some of these issues by basically putting a database all over the world and letting a huge computer network keep it in a constant static consensus.  And this is the key innovation of Bitcoin.  If you take nothing else away from this as a protocol as an invention which is something that's not going away.  It's a computer network that agrees on things without a central authority.  And when you have that you can prototype all kinds of fantastic applications.

The first one we're sort of testing this with is money bitcoins the currency.  So, in order to use this big network.  You need to have the credits in order to ride the rails and those are the bitcoins.  So, when a transaction happens, it maybe moves from one person's wallet to another.  It's publicly broadcasted to this giant spreadsheet that are stored on all these computers.  And the payments are happening all day long, every day.  And I'll show you some of the speed at which these things are happening.  Sometimes it's kind of hard to actually know what a Bitcoin transaction looks like.  But this is a, what it could look like.  So, it starts off with maybe a blockchain wallet or a wallet from somebody else.  You take a picture of a QR code.  And then it sends money and you can go look at it on a block explorer and instantly know that it went to the address that you sent it to.  Now we're not perfect.  We're seeing some really cool developments though in this space.  You know Apple Pay just came out with you know contactless payments.  People have been experimenting with this in Bitcoin for a few years already.  You can go see the Airbitz guys.  They've got a prototype in the next room.  It's really cool.  So, we're going to get to a point where that's happening to.  We just won't have necessarily an Apple logo on it but who cares.  Anyone will be able to participate and won't just be for a few people to have fancy phones.

So, the history of Bitcoin.  It was introduced conceptually by a developer, a group of people we don't really know.  But it's an open source project.  Just kind of like no one really knows who invented the English language or the wheel.  It's kind of irrelevant.  It's for anybody to participate in use and work on.  And the network launched in 2009 as an open source project.  In 2010, some very basic marketplaces were formed.  The first transaction history of Bitcoin happened when someone sold a pizza for 10,000 bitcoins.  So, if you do some quick math.  You'll know that's probably the most expensive pizza in the history of time.  But as soon as people discover that those value to being able to send something for one place to anywhere else in the world instantly basically for free it immediately created a value for bitcoins the currency.  And the first transaction ever was for a pizza.  So, in Bitcoin lanes there's a pizza day where everyone in the Bitcoin space goes out and orders pizza and honor of this first transaction.

So, in 2011, we saw accelerated interest in Bitcoin.  And there started to be some SEED capital that moved into Bitcoin related projects.  2012, a few thousand merchants around the world started to accept Bitcoin.  And 2013, I think was really the year where there was a huge amount of attention on it.  People started really sort of being curious about what this thing was and how it worked.  And some more money poured in the Bitcoin.

So, bitcoins the currency.  How does it work?  Well, bitcoins come in circulation through a process called mining.  And this is one of the more complicated aspects of Bitcoin.  But basically, computers that people use all over the planet keep the network secure by verifying all these transactions.  And when they do that they're rewarded every once in a while, with newly minted coins.  Now a lot of coins were put in the circulation early to help facilitate and encourage people to transact with them.  But over the arc of time, fewer of them will be released.  The difficulty to mine more coins will increase.  It's all regulated by mathematics.  There's not a person that controls any of this so, it's predictable and this is important.  The whole thing is secured with cryptography.  There's a limit of 21 million bitcoins.  Which is often criticized.  However, they're divisible by up-to eight decimal points.  So, that means that there's something like four thousand trillion bitcoins eventually out there and it's more than enough to facilitate global commerce in the event that we really go big with this.

So, a couple things to remember the currency and why it's so innovative.  If you were to design a perfect currency.  This would be very close to getting there.  They may not be ideal.  But we as humans have taken enormous efforts to invent things for a purpose.  We invented a wheel for transportation.  We invented a car to facilitate the human freedom of movement.  And we can also invent money that works better than what we have today.  So, if we were to invent own money for the digital age.  We wanted to be able to move it anywhere in the world instantly in a secure way basically for free.  We want that money to be very -- very difficult to counterfeit.  We wanted to be incredibly durable.  And we want probably or potentially the supplied to be scarce.  So, they can't just be inflated copied and grown.  So, Bitcoin has all those properties and that's one of the things that makes it pretty compelling.

So, where are we right now?  Over the long history of time, Bitcoin has seen a pretty wild market.  It definitely has a lot of instability in the price.  And that's because people are still trying to put their finger on how valuable is this whole thing.  So, this is basically the last couple years.  You've seen the price of Bitcoin get all the way up to $1200.  And right now, it's around $480 today and it moves around quite a bit.  The total number of wallets is one indicator of usage and this is a statistic from blockchain.info.  So, we published all of our numbers.  We have about 2.2 million wallet users and if you combine that with some publicly available data with some of the other large wallet providers.  It sounds like there's somewhere in the neighborhood between five and six million wallets out there.  That doesn't necessarily mean five to six million users.  So my imagine a lot of us in here test a bunch of different services.  It's very hard to know exactly how many users are out there.  But if we look at this over the course of time and this chart is a little bit squeeze.  But this would actually look a lot more like a hockey puck.

One of the things more interesting to me though is transaction velocity.  So, and that's how quickly are people moving their coins around.  So, this to me is an indication of people's belief in Bitcoin as a currency.  You can believe in bitcoin as network.  You believe in Bitcoin as a currency maybe you embrace both.  But transactions are pretty interesting.  And right now the network does about 71,000 transactions a day.  Sometimes in the neighborhood between 150 up to 300 million dollars.  So, it is basically the size of PayPal as a payment network.  So, why is this a big deal?  And why are their conferences happening every week?  And why is there hundreds of millions of dollars in ventured capital pouring into bitcoin?  Because bitcoin represents the world's first scarce digital commodity.  It's borderless, it's frictionless and is completely digital.  So, it was designed for the age of the internet.  And it's designed so beautifully as a form of money that people use it voluntarily all over the world.  And it's the first time that we have a payment system with absolutely zero counterparty risk.  So, you're talking about something that from an order of magnitude and an efficiency perspective can save people money and it's going to really disrupt the way finances thought of around the planet.

So, where's Bitcoin headed in the future?  There are some really innovative ideas.  And there's some people here you should probably visit with who spend a lot more time working on those things than me.  But bitcoin is going to be used in a variety of different digital copyrights capacities.  Bitcoins as a currency is just sort of one example of that.  But you'll hear Smart Contracts as an example or maybe the ability to, I don't know, store your property right at your house or a car or stock in a public blockchain.  Those things are all on the table as well.  So, that creates a lot of interest in Bitcoin because you don't have to come necessarily from a finance background or software background.  You could be an insurance or you could be a broker.  You could come from a variety of places and start to see how this technology is applicable to your business.  So, that's when things like to do is kind of challenge and encourage anyone to start sharing these ideas with people.  Because it creates inspiration and they come out and help build.

So, one of the things I start to expect is that bitcoin will definitely be interesting for remittance payments.  These are cross-border payments where people send money back home to their families.  It's definitely a big deal there.  Western Union, MoneyGram, why those other businesses have very high fees.  And it still takes time to move that money across borders.  On Bitcoin world, will definitely confront those businesses.  M-Pesa is in digital credit system in Kenya.  And I think that Bitcoin has an open source solution will probably challenge those types of regimes as well.  And then basically a lot of other types of financial services.  There are 2.5 billion people on planet earth that do not have access to financial services.  They have just been completely ignored.  So, with a smartphone you can put a piece of software on there.  That gives them access to a financial system that allows them to transact with anyone anywhere on planet earth instantly basically for free.  So, if you compare that with what's in your wallet that's pretty compelling.  Now it doesn't have to be for buying a house or buying a car or shopping on eBay or Amazon.  Most of these transactions that happen in frontier in the third world are cash payments anyway.  And they already have smartphones in a lot of these places.  So, this stuff is going to take some time to build out.  But it is kind of a digital inevitability.

Okay so, I'm going to take a little time to talk about what's going on with blockchain.  We've heard a lot at firsts in the last couple years.  We launched just so you guys know in 2011 so one of the older Bitcoin companies.  Initially we were built as a website to study currency statistics and look at the Bitcoin Blockchain.  So, the site was basically built as an interpreter of all the transactions that are happening in real time.  It's kind of a fun place to take someone if they've never seen Bitcoin before.  It's a little intimidating because these are a lot of numbers going on.  But you can actually see the transactions happening in real time right on the homepage.  And it's kind of fun if you watch it for long enough you'll see a ten thousand or hundred-thousand-dollar transaction.  And it's like a heartbeat for a new digital economy it's kind of neat.

So, we launched our wallet in November of 2011.  We immediately open sourced all of the software that it works on.  And we also documented and open source all of our API's that we build on as well.  We went mobile right away with android wallet and iOS wallet.  We went multi-language right after that.  It's always been our belief that Bitcoin was going to be growing all over the planet at the same time.  So, we wanted to be helping people wherever they are and starts to use Bitcoin.  We had a million users in January of this year.  And in spring, oh sorry, then we launched a Merchant App which is kind of a fun project.  We're trying to encourage adoption at a local level I'm not aware of them.  So, again we open source this app.  In the spring, we negotiated a long-term deal to manage Bitcoin.com as a web property.  So, we've got a lot of ambitious plans for that.  But right now, it's essentially kind of a landing page to help coach new users on what bitcoin is.  And where someone was talking about the need to improve education and Bitcoin this is a huge deal we need people to help with that.

And just in early August, we hit the two million user mark.  So, when you look at the overall velocity not just in Blockchain but across the industry.  It's critical to respect it there is an enormous amount of movement headed in Bitcoin related projects.  And just looking at the growth and users is one of the things you can look at.  So, we've had two million users in the last couple years.  We've helped transact 22 billion dollars' worth of bitcoins around the world.  We hit a record in August.  And we did two billion dollars in transactions through Blockchain Wallet and Wallet API's.  And we do about a hundred million impressions a month on our web properties.  So, people are going to these things to look at news, to look at statistics currency, information and more.  So, PayPal is an example of a company and FinTech that was really well respected and everyone was very interested in how it grew and was successful.  I want to take a quick moment to share with you a chart that shows their growth charted against blockchains.  And need to take a moment to look at the difference between what an open-source transaction network looks like in comparison to a close source one.

So, that little horizontal line is PayPal's growth.  And the red ones were blockchain at the same time in PayPal's growth against blockchain.  So, you should expect and anticipate that you will see this across the industry though as Bitcoin continues to grow.  So, as a footprint the blockchain properties are lots, we have iOS wallet and Android wallet and a web wallet.  We have blockchain.info which were, we have Enterprise API's.  So, anyone can go there and build on things.  So, there a lot of companies that rely on these that create their own wallets.  I met a woman who's building a Bitcoin purse.  She's building them on Blockchain API's.  I met a guy who's building a wallet for his kids that's pretty cool.  It basically GeoTrax where his children are and if they leave a certain area it deducts money from their wallet.  So, you can kind of like keep them from running away or something.  But kind of wild ideas and those are kind of neat things that would not otherwise necessarily be possible.  ZeroBlock is a news and financial App we have which you can check out it's free and then Bitcoin.com.

So, in this industry in this space although I have an enormous amount of enthusiasm.  We have a lot of things we have to work on.  So one of them is our user interfaces.  Blockchain was very successful despite its design.  We say often that we have kind of a or called like a Soviet aesthetic.  I may be like drugs report or something like that.  So, we have a lot of work to do it to get better.  We looked at wallets these summer and spent a lot of time redesigning our Android wallet.  These were the top three wallets in the Android store.  And if you look at these things they are actually almost exact copies of each other.  And that's because one person forked a code base and then just sort of rebranded it including ours.  So, we decided to launch a new simple and secure wallet.  And one of the things we're really eager to do is to make Bitcoin wallets look a lot more like other services you're used to.  So, we want to help people discover where they can spend their bitcoins.  So, I've got a quick little presentation on what that wallet looks like and we'll play it now.

So, it should be so easy that you can press on someone's face and send them Bitcoin.  And it should be so easy that you can find a place to spend your bitcoins wherever you are anywhere in the world.  So, this summer that's when things we worked on.  And we just launched this wallet five weeks ago.  We've seen fifty thousand downloads or so in four and a half weeks.  So, just for any entrepreneurs who are working out there.  There's a huge amount of space and runway to build completely new wallet services and encourage you guys to start experimenting our approach is just one and there are lots of ways to get this right.  So, here are some of the screens from the Android wallet.  Let's get through these quickly because you can go download it and check it out yourselves if you want.

So, contact integration simple things these aren't necessarily that innovative but they just hadn't really been done effectively.  So, those are all things we're working on and the merchant map was kind of a big deal.  We actually went through and called every single one of these places to make sure they're actually accepting Bitcoin.  And that's because oftentimes they're like stories that pop-up on reddit and someone says that they went to a place they don't accept it anymore.  So, our intern Kevin had a fantastic time doing at this summer.  But he's been super helpful so.

All right.  This place is actually in London here you can check it out.  Back this fall, I'm going to go through some personal stories now.  We've launched, sorry, this spring, we've launched our merchant map.  And this guy is named Sophie, he lives in Paris.  He runs a tiny little bar.  He's from Algeria and it was always his dream to basically run his own business.  He immediately understood the value of Bitcoin.  And we went and brought him an Android tablet during the night because he decided to start accepting Bitcoin.  And he did about twelve hundred euros worth of transactions at night and it was awesome right on his screen.  You could see all payments coming through instantly.  He tours and keeps all of his bitcoins isn't seldom.  And that's because he believes longer-term they'll be more valuable for him.

This guy's name is Francesco.  He lives in Bristol and his wife is Francesca.  He was a flight attendant and she was a stewardess or something.  And they're from Italy.  They decided to open a Deli together and they source a lot of expensive things from Italy from there like hometown village.  And he accepts Bitcoin using the Blockchain Merchant App.  He actually is trying to build a closed-loop economy.  So, that he can buy his goods and save a little bit on his margins so kind of a nice guy.

This woman name's Suzanne.  She's from the Canton region in China.  And she also accepts Bitcoin at the Seoul Miceli in Paris as well and right there.  She uses these she does not accept credit cards.  She's got a big sign that says that it's because it takes too long to process the transactions.  So, not only does she save money but she moves students through her line a little bit faster with Bitcoin wallets.

This was the first transaction in a bar in Santiago Chile.  So, you've got an American football on one screen.  You've got soccer and on the far right is the Bitcoin blockchain or transactions coming through.  And that was CNN filming the first Bitcoin Transaction Durbar in South America.  Across the world there are University students that are now forming groups studying digital currencies.  There's a huge one in United States it's called the CCN.  This is University of Pennsylvania.  And in China there are groups forming every single week they have meetups.  They talked about what's happening in Bitcoin.  Trust me the Millennials understand digital currency.  They're going to expect it.  And they also don't want to pay for these things.  They don't want to pay for their email.  They don't want to pay for their storage.  And not going to want to pay for the financial services in the future.  So, bitcoin is a really nice fit for them.

This photo was taken on the border between Argentina and Chile.  And it's called the Via De La Luna.  It's the moon valley.  In Bitcoin, we kind of joke that we're always hoping the price to go to the moon.  So, I threw this picture in there.  I've got a couple other ones.  This is a sunrise in Morocco.  I don't really know why this are in here but just a nice photography.  This is a ranch in Chile that accepts a Bitcoin to go fly-fishing.  This is Mount Toubkal in Morocco summiting.  And then I had a kind of an interesting epiphany this summer.  I was visiting my sister who is in Morocco.  She's in the Peace Corps and spends most of her life volunteering and women's organizations there.  She makes about two hundred dollars a day.  So, I like to go visit her once in a while and just sort of live with her and kind of get a little bit of a different view on life.  We went on a camel trek through the Sahara Desert.  And I told the story a lot this year but it really was one of the most important informative moments of my life.  We hadn't seen an electrical pole or a power outlet or anything for over a week.  And we were traveling through the desert with the Berber guide and is absolutely stunning blue Jalota.  And we're watching the sunset over these dunes.  And they were like the little dung beetles moving around and it was like a perfect Arabian night.  And it was just like amazing.  Except that the whole thing was ruined when this dude pulls out his iPhone 5 its ringing out of his pocket and answers his phone in the middle of the desert.  And he sells polished Geodes for a living to give you a sense of how this guy makes his income.  But we set him up with a blockchain wallet that day and I even paid him a little bit of Bitcoin for his help.  But to me to realize that someone in North Africa could have access to effectively in potentially a better financial system than the one were used to in the first world was a really important moment for me.  So, anyway stories from around the world.  The only other thing we're working on.  We've been getting a lot of feedback from people on our iOS wallet.  And we are launching a new one very -- very soon so here are some screenshots from that.  And our guys have been working on that one next couple weeks in coordination with the iOS 8 launch.

So, yeah that's blockchain and the picture taken in Punta Cana in Costa Rica some kids watching the sunset.  So, one of our challenges is to completely reimagine how the world transacts and its mission for everyone in Bitcoin.  So, I thank you for your time this morning I will be around.  And I'm happy to answer questions.

(Inaudible 00:24:45), nice, energetic keynote the way to start today, so anybody have any questions?  Anybody have a question we have a microphone over here, stand up and pose where you're from, and who you are?

Kendall Hunt:  Hi, everybody I'm Kendall Hunt, the chairman CEO VASCO Data Security.  We're the leading provider of strongly dedication to banks around the world and this is my first Bitcoin conference.  My question as a businessman is how do you make money at this venture?

Nick Cary:  Thank you, Kendall.  We get asked that question quite a bit on.  We have been incredibly focused on user acquisition this year.  One of the things that we did though very early on we'll start to sell some advertising on blockchain.info.  So, it may not be the most exciting thing.  But we closed a bunch of contracts in 2013 when the price of Bitcoin was quite low and then it went up quite a bit.  We also do recurring deals every month so we're not entirely that leverage in to the price.  But so, with so much traffic on our property we do several million unique visitors a month that especially for Bitcoin companies in the space that are looking for highly technically forward early adopters.  Usually ones that have a little more income.  We're kind of a perfect demographic for people that want to market to those types of individuals.  So, whether you're a car company.  You're selling CloudHashing mining or something like that.  A lot of our partners have been very successful advertising on blockchain.  So, one of them was gift which just recently got acquired for some undisclosed large amount.  But they were one of the early advertising partners for blockchain.

Great, any other questions?

Kendall Hunt:  Thank you I'm done.

If you had question please standup.

Andrew:  My name is Andrew.  (Inaudible 00:26:26) having blockchain and if you're going to send money (Inaudible 00:26:32).  I think the issue is a quorum bitcoin.  If I wanted sent 10,000 dollars to my friend in America or I'm going to send 10,000 dollars to exchange or bitcoin send the money to my friend (Inaudible 00:26:46) bitcoins I'm going to exchange and I take the money in, this charges (Inaudible 00:26:51) I haven't send the money in Bitcoins cost hardly anything but the transferred money from my bank to exchange (Inaudible 00:27:01) or in bitcoins on exchange as challenge and send the bitcoins (Inaudible 00:27:06) exchange is a challenge and taking money out exchange to the other person's bank was also a challenge.  What steps are being taken to make it easier to buy large quantities of Bitcoin so it's cheaper to buy the bitcoin and send bitcoin rather than just sending money from my bank to the other bank?

Kendall Hunt:  Yeah, you've identified a really critical weakness I think in the Bitcoin economy which are the on ramps and off ramps.  Just about every problem you just brought up though has almost nothing to do with Bitcoin.  And everything to do with old legacy systems and frictions that they have in order to move money around.  So, it's not really bitcoin's fault that it's hard to do.  But it's very difficult to build a business that does that because of the compliance costs.  My belief is that they're really three ways to kind of get bitcoins today.  One is to go buy the (Inaudible 00:27:55) exchange.  Two is to mine them.  A little more complicated and it has capital costs.  The third is to start to accept them or ask your employer to pay some of your salary in Bitcoin.  There are now companies that do that.  So, actually they'll deposit 60% of your salary directly into your bank account and U.S. dollars or sterling.  And the rest can be sent to you in Bitcoin.  So, there are other alternatives there.  But I do think that you know forming very very nice new exchanges is something in this space that a lot of people are trying to solve.  And you know Circle and Jeremy Allaire doing a nice job with that.  You got coin base United States.  It's a fellow here in Europe.  ANX at Hong Kong.  A year ago, there were maybe ten exchanges in the world.  They're probably 150 right now.  And I'm sure there's another 50 in the pipeline coming online.  There's a lot of latency in the development of services in software.  So, despite how much money moved in from a ventured capital perspective earlier this year.  It takes some time for those things to come online.  But I agree that it takes too long.  And it's an intimidating process.  If it's going to take six days to get these Bitcoins I mean that's too long so.  They're all other ways you can use local bitcoins.com for smaller amounts.  But it's -- it's not necessarily the best solution either.

(Inaudible 00:29:07) more question in front, just keep the mic over there.

Sorry -- sorry this (Inaudible 00:29:19).  I can transact instantly in friction from my cash account really online.

Kendall Hunt:  Yeah so in Britain.

So, what is -- so what is difference?

Kendall Hunt:  Okay I will challenge you to set up a new bank account today or download a blockchain wallet and see the difference in the conversion process.  And then you should try and send that money not between a bank account here in Britain and a friend in Britain.  But try and send that money I, even a hundred dollars into you any other place on the planet.  And you'll see how hard and challenging that is.  So, you're that's accurate in the UK it's very easy to actually send bank transfers back and forth.  And it's one of the nicer of financial services that's available here.  So, keep in mind that there are totally unique challenges in other places.  And while that problem may be solved nicely in the United Kingdom.  There are definitely other places where it's not.  But I think especially in cross-border payments.  You'll see a lot more benefit and less friction in your transactions than you would with a bank account.

Alan:  All right, my name is Alan from (Inaudible 00:30:17) Business School.  I have a question at the last enter the payments (Inaudible 00:30:24).

Kendall Hunt:  Can you rephrase your question?

Alan:  Well, how would you assess the situation you know Apple (Inaudible 00:30:32) the payment (Inaudible 00:30:33).  How would you consider that (Inaudible 00:30:36)?

Kendall Hunt:  Yeah.  So, Apple is the world's leading technical consumer brand.  And the fact that they just launched Apple Pay I think is a really good thing for Bitcoin.  It's very unusual for something like that to kind of come into the dialogue in the public around how do payments work and function?  Every single time they have a conference for the next three years.  They're going to have to talk about payments.  And every time they talk about payments is an opportunity for the Bitcoin space to show why it's better.  Fundamentally, Apple Pay is built on 600 million credit cards.  So, that's not a new or unique or special infrastructure.  That's a bunch of legacy stuff.  So, despite the fact that they may have contactless payments it doesn't change the fact that all the security issues with credit card still exist.  Maybe they figured out how to deal with not like losing your cell phone and not having your credit card stolen.  But the fact is and we're seeing more and more breaches.  I don't think it's like an enormous innovation.  But there's nothing that's going to stop Apple from just adding Bitcoin services at some point in the future.  And if they do that I think we all agree that would be a good thing.  So, I'm excited and I think it's a good thing for the whole industry.

All right great.  Well, on that note, Nick, thanks for the energetic and insightful keynote this morning.  Let's give him another big round of applause.

Thank you.

Written by Nic Cary on September 22, 2014.