[AUDIENCE] There are six hundred altcoins already, and around one hundred went to zero [value].
[ANDREAS] Well, they don't have zero [value], they went to 0.0000015 bitcoin. [Laughter]
Someone still has them. [AUDIENCE] Yes, but how do you know that bitcoin won't turn out like these altcoins?
What is the difference between bitcoin, litecoin, or another cryptocurrency? Why do you prefer bitcoin?
[ANDREAS] We did it first, we did it best, and we have the most amazing development team in the industry.
The most intelligent scientists and software engineers building great stuff every day, and I can barely keep up.
Just when I think I am done reading for the day, somebody drops Segregated Witness on me.
I am amazed again.
The other important [aspect] that most people don't realize: Bitcoin today is not what Bitcoin was in 2009.
It is the same name, the same 21 million coins, more or less the same transaction structure,
but a lot of other things changed quite dramatically.
In stories of scaling, sometimes the only thing that scales is the brand.
I am forty-four years old; not a single cell in my body is the same as one that I was born with.
They have all been replaced, in some cases many times over, but what remains is a pattern.
When I was in college, they said that Ethernet couldn't scale to one megabyte.
Then, Ethernet couldn't scale beyond five megabytes. Then, Ethernet couldn't scale beyond ten megabytes.
Ethernet is a networking system, if you are not aware. I installed Ethernet coaxial cable as thick as my thumb.
[At the time], it could only go for 100 meters and only do five megabytes.
Today, all of the local area networks (LANs) run on Ethernet, and can do 10 gigabytes over fibre.
But how much of that is really Ethernet? [Something] we have attached the word "ethernet" to?
It is now a different distribution medium and architecture; what remains the same are...
maybe the frame size and the brand.
You must reconcile yourself with [the reality] that Bitcoin in fifteen years from now may only share the brand...
and three or four fundamental properties, such as the 21 million supply cap. That will not go away.
If [the supply cap] were to go away, it is not Bitcoin. Besides the brand and basic architecture,
everything else may change and be completely revised.
But we will still just call it "Bitcoin."
I don't believe that we need to worry too much. To me, altcoins are an important part of the ecosystem.
The more we have, the more we experiment, the better it is.
Something really important happened this year. People [are selling into Ethereum instead of fiat].
That was awesome, because all the previous times [when people sold out of] bitcoin, they left...
the cryptocurrency economy [altogether]; this time, they simply switched lanes.
They didn't abandon cryptocurrencies. They left bitcoin and went into ether, to see what that side was doing.
"What is happening here? They are not fighting... yet." [Laugher] "It is all cozy and nice, with smart contracts."
They also have humans, and human nature always prevails. Pretty soon, [the same issues will happen].
Bitcoin was scaling fine in 2012. Nobody was arguing then.
The bottom line is, we are now keeping people in the cryptocurrency space.
As people went into Ethereum and the price went up, new people came in from the outside.
In order to buy ether, even when they didn't believe that bitcoin was a good medium of exchange, still needed...
to buy bitcoin so they could buy ether.
We will see, but I am very optimistic.