Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Jed Mccaleb: Stellar and the Vision of an Open Financial System

Episode Date: April 25, 2016

When Jed McCaleb discovered Bitcoin, there didn’t even exist an online marketplace to trade the cryptocurrency yet. The experienced founder who had earlier started file sharing site eDonkey, acted fast and started the first Bitcoin exchange MtGox which he later sold to now-infamous Mark Karpeles. Jed later founded the pioneering Ripple project before leaving to start Stellar. We discussed his journey through the industry and the ambitious plans Stellar has to create an open financial system that will give access to financial services to a much broader spectrum of humanity. Topics covered in this episode: Jed’s early involvement in the industry and founding of MtGox and subsequently Ripple Why Jed left Ripple and started Stellar How Ripple and Stellar differ The Stellar Consensus Protocol Why the organization behind Stellar is a non-profit foundation Stellar’s focus on developing markets and Nigeria in particular The role and distribution of Stellar’s currency Lumen Episode links: Stellar Website Stellar Consensus Protocol Bitcoin-Lumen Giveaway Stellar Graphic Novel Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/128

This is Epicenter Bitcoin, episode 128 with guest, Jeb McKalep. This episode of Epicenter Bitcoin is brought you by Ledger. Now accepting pre-orders for the all-new Ledger Blue Developer Edition, a Bluetooth and NFC touchscreen hardware signing device. Learn more about the Ledger Blue at LedgerWall.com and use the discount code Epicenter to get 10% off your first order. Hello and welcome to Epicenter Bitcoin, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and startups

driving decentralization and the global blockchain revolution. My name is Brian Fabian Crane. And I'm Meher Roy. Today we have a very special guest, Jed McCaleb. He's currently the city of Stellar. But previously he has been the founder of E-Donkey, Mount Gawks, the Bitcoin Exchange, Ripple, and Stellar itself. So we are going to talk about what Stellar is doing,

what kinds of market it's targeting, what kind of concern technical challenges, technical systems it's building. And before that, let's have an intro from Jed. Yeah, hi, guys. Thanks for having me on the show. Yeah, I, like he said, I'm Jed McCaleb. You know, I've been involved in distributed systems for years and years

and was involved in Bitcoin from fairly early on and was super, super excited about it and wanted a way to buy Bitcoins and so founded Malcox, which only ran for a short bit. But yeah. And how did you go from Mount Gawks to something like Ripple and then still there? Well, when I first learned about Bitcoin, I was, you know, prior to that, I didn't think there was a way to even solve this problem, this whole idea that you could have a distributed database, essentially distributed database that nobody has direct control over, but no one can change arbitrarily, that it's changed by this fixed set of rules.

And once you kind of see that there's a potential to do that, it's like super, super exciting. So I really like the idea of Bitcoin, but I just tried to think of other ways to solve the consensus problem, just because that's, you know, I've been a computer programmer for a very long time, and that's kind of what you do. It's like when you see one solution, you kind of try to think of other solutions as well. So, yeah, so I started Mount Gogh just as a way to get Bitcoins essentially, and because at that point there was really no exchange and it was just clear that there needed to be a marketplace for them. But that that problem itself is not very interesting to me, which is why I didn't, basically, I pretty soon sold

it to this guy in Japan, Mark, unfortunately. But yeah, but then after I kind of was done with Mount Cox, I was still intrigued by this whole problem of consensus and how you can have a distributed database with, you know, with everybody agreeing on the state of the database, but no one controlling it, which is, which can be used in lots of different ways as we're starting to see now. And so basically I came up with this idea of how to do it that that evolved into being Ripple. So, so basically a way of a way of solving consensus problem without the mining. So that's kind of what led me to Ripple. So. So one of the things that just, just as, you know, us and and a lot of people listening, right, who are so involved in this, in this space with Bitcoin

and blockchains and cryptocurrencies, you know, sometimes it all sort of all starts. feeling a little bit normal and it's just, you know, the way the world, the way this world works, right? But then one of the books that, so there's a book called Digital Gold. We had Nathaniel Popper on as well to talk about that. But that sort of writes about the history of Bitcoin, really. And it's a fantastic book. So I really recommend people check it out. But I thought what it really made me sort of made very kind of obvious. to me and like brought to light. It's just what a crazy story this is.

And like what an insane concept, an insane vision. So it does a fantastic job at that. And you play a significant role in there. And it really does. I actually just went back before and I look briefly at the, on, you know, on Amazon. One can look for the search for recurrences. And it talks a little bit of. about those early days, right, when Mount Gawks started and before there was basically no way

really of buying Bitcoin. I mean, you could maybe email some person and then you started Mount Gauks and within no time, it just completely took off. So yeah. Yeah, yeah, it was definitely a very interesting time. I mean, it was totally unclear whether the project would work or not. And I think most people were hopeful, but didn't like thought, you know, realistically, this is probably not going to work, but just because the idea is awesome, but you're asking to change kind of the fundamental structure of how things are done. And, and, you know, usually that doesn't work. So it was always just kind of amazing. I think for everybody involved early on, it was always just amazing anytime, like it would get further adoption or like, you know, you would,

you would, you'd read about it in some, some article or, you know, some famous person would say something about it. Like every time something like that happened, everyone got, got really excited and just slowly became more and more real. Like, over the years. years. Like when I like talk about it with people I knew from back then, it's just always like, wow, this is so surreal. Like when we came into it, it was like literally a penny of Bitcoin. And now it's like this worldwide thing. So yeah, the whole time was like super exciting. Especially like the whole cast of characters was was very like fringe of the internet. So it's interesting to see it kind of become more legitimate over time and and just how that whole

whole thing has changed. It's just, yeah, it's been cool. So. So today, the whole block option spaces has really taken on a very different role. Like today, a lot of the activities and people investing most heavily in this are banks, which probably is the last thing people expected back then. Yeah, no, everybody would always talk about, well, as soon as banks, banks understand this or like realize what's happening here, they're all just going to try to like do some conspiracy theory to shut this thing down or like everyone is like super paranoid of it. But yeah, I mean, the reaction from banks has been like the most surprising thing to me because like

literally I think every bank on the planet has their blockchain exploration division at this point where they're all interested in this technology. I think they all see that the world is shifting this way and it's a really important technical development and nobody wants to kind of be left behind in it. So yeah, so yeah, the reaction has been super positive actually. And then yeah, Ripple too, right? Very exciting project and sort of very early on. I mean, we had also Stefan Thomas on before to talk about that. So the original vision for Ripple was to enable Fiat currencies on a sort of p-to-peer Fiat payments. Is that correct?

Sort of, yeah. So basically when I came up with the ideas behind Ripple, like how you could, you could essentially be just because architecturally you could store other stuff. And it was closer to a database than what Bitcoin is. Like Bitcoin is less of the way a traditional database work. than what Ripple is just because technically the way it's designed, right? So there's Bitcoin is essentially this chain of transactions where you have to know all the transactions in the chain to be able to know the balances of individual accounts.

Whereas Ripple has an account and it will have a balance and then so basically you just need the current ledger to know what's going on. And so it makes it easier to stick other information in there like other assets. And so the original idea was just to do something similar to Bitcoin where there is just just one token, but then we kind of realized, hey, you know, you could send, you could put other assets in here and then have these trade against each other and make this more of like a full, full feature of payments network where it doesn't matter what currency people are holding. They can all kind of interoperate.

So it kind of moved in that direction over the development of it. But yeah, basically now, you know, now that is certainly the focus where it's on the actual other fiat currencies in it. So what was the story of how you left Ripple and then ended up starting Stellar? Yeah. So basically the person I brought on to be CEO, we ended up having like lots of personal just the relationship kind of went sour. And the direction of the company was going, wasn't really something that I thought would

work or really be a part of. So I left and then I took some time off and, you know, I wasn't really intending to do another thing in the cryptocurrency space, but I just couldn't get my mind off of it, just because it is, I think we are in this transitional time where we're moving from, you know, the way, the way money works, the digital way money and payments works is like kind of, you know, a big mess, right? It doesn't, nothing really interoperates and it leaves a lot of people out of the financial system. And it's kind of like the pre-internet days of the way, you know, information was sent around. And then there was this internet that came along and kind of democratized the whole thing and opened it up to everybody.

And I think we're going through a similar shift with money. And to me, it's going to be even more exciting because not only is it information, it's like economic activity, which I think can be more empowering and, you know, much more exciting. So like I just didn't see, like I took basically a year off. And like I didn't see anyone in the blockchain space kind of solving this. particular problem where what seller is really trying to do is connect all these different financial networks together. So, you know, there's like Swift and SEPA and ACH and like mobile money things in Africa and other parts of the developing world. And none of these things interoperate with each other seamlessly, right? So what the goal of Seller is to connect all these things. So it's, it's, you should be

able to send 50 cents to somebody in Mexico or, you know, you know, just in the same way you can send an email to anyone in the world. It doesn't, it doesn't matter what domain provides. they're using or anything like that, the payments should work the same way. And so we basically just wanted to solve that problem. So that's why, you know, that's what kind of led us to stellar. So, I mean, the original, like the original vision for Ripple was something very similar where when Ripple started and I used Ripple for the first time, I got the feeling that this is consumer focus play, right?

You wanted a lot of people to come out to the ripple network, a lot of consumers to come onto the network, transform money all around the world, and have very low friction doing it. But off late, like when I see ripple, I see that their focus is kind of shifting away from the consumer play and into a bank's play, right? Like they have been focusing a lot of correspondent banking. They actually shut down Ripple trade, which I really liked and which are used as a consumer. And I see that they are kind of focusing more towards banks now on the one side. And then they have the interledger protocol, which is meant to make financial ledgers of banks interoperate with each other.

But is it, would it be correct to say that Stellar is still focusing on the original vision for Ripple, which is a consumer-focused play? I mean, yeah, I'm not sure what Ripple's plans are currently. Like, I haven't followed them too closely, but it does seem like, as an outsider view, it does seem like they're pivoting to kind of be like Swift 2.0, which we're certainly not doing. I think, I don't know if we're a consumer-focused play. I mean, basically our thesis, and for like a lot of reasons, I think, where we want to focus our efforts is in the developing world.

because, you know, payments doesn't work perfectly in like the U.S. and Europe, you know, but you can use like Venmo and PayPal. It is easy to send. Like maybe it's not as quick as it should be or as cheap as it should be, but it's pretty low friction, right? But whereas in places like Nigeria, you know, half the people don't have bank accounts, you know, there's several different mobile money operators and none of them connect to each other. So if you're on one, you can't send to another, you know, payments are a huge, huge problem there, right?

So for us, like, we want to solve that problem where the pain is kind of the greatest, you know, for a few reasons. I mean, I think, you know, just morally for us, like those people are, you know, not part of the financial system. And that's, and financial access is like one of the huge blockers for poverty alleviation. I think that's why like Gates Foundation and all these other big institutions have kind of made this part of their mandate recently just because they've kind of realized as, they're trying to do programs there that, you know, if people don't have financial access, then it's hard to give them, like, education or pay for health care or, like, make small savings accounts, things like this. So it's a, it's a huge problem for a large part of the world. And we feel like if we can solve that problem, not only is it massively beneficial, but it is,

it is the, like, when we go and talk to people there, they get some, the system like stellar instantly because they do understand the need for this kind of thing, whereas people in the US and Europe, you kind of have to like walk them through like why this is better than what they have now. So it's it. The the need is not as apparent. So our goal is basically to get stellar working really well in one region, specifically Nigeria right now. And then once we've kind of demonstrated that, then other people can copy it in other countries or, you know, it can just be replicated because it is an open system. So anybody can kind of plug into it. So yeah. Cool. I mean, yeah, that That really seems like a very good vision, right?

Like, you've kind of zeroed it into Nigeria, and completely focusing on that. And kind of your blog also reflects that, right? It has so many articles about financial inclusion that it's, in a sense, it's very rare in the Bitcoin space. Like, you would go to a conference and have this guy talk about Bitcoin in Africa. Right. But when you go to the websites of Bitcoin community, like, of Bitcoin companies,

like, there's no, there doesn't seem to be any real. action towards that direction. But like when you go to the Stellar's website, I see there are so many blogs and like you have programs for enabling women in certain parts of Africa have access to mobile money and things like that, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah.

I mean, I think the rest of, I mean, just the rest of, in the same way that like Silicon Valley and technology in general is pretty much focused on the developed world just because that's where people live and that's what they're used to. But, but, you know, so it is rare that that companies are kind of focusing outside of that, not even in the Bitcoin space and just in the, technology in general. But yeah, we've just found that like this, this just makes the most sense to us,

and it is the most compelling use of it right now, I think. I mean, we do hope that eventually the whole world adopts us. And in fact, like, to solve financial inclusion, like they have to be connected not only to their local communities, but to the wider world because that's what that means, is that they can transact with people in Europe and U.S. just as easy as we can, right? Let's take a short break so we can go to Paris. I stopped into La Maison of Bitcoin, the house of Bitcoin, at the ledger offices, and I met with Ledger's CEO, Eric Larchovek,

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So one of the other key differences that I noticed with Ripple, and I have a, and I And I'm framing this in terms of ripple because that's what people understand more today, but because Taylor is a newer project. So is the consensus algorithm itself, right? Like, as far as I'm aware, there was this event in the July of 2015 where the Stellar Network experienced some difficulties regarding consensus. And then you've shifted a lot of your focus into solving those, right? Let's walk us through what this event was and what, what, what,

What are the kinds of things you're doing on that front? Sure. Yeah. So, yeah, Stellar originally, when we launched, we forked the Ripple code base. So we started with Ripple's open source code and started growing the network from there. We knew pretty early on that there was that the consensus algorithm wasn't very well specified and that we would have to do some work there. I started talking to Professor David Mazzarius, who runs the secure computer, the secure computing group at Stanford about the algorithm and like, hey, how is there

ways we can make this better? Like, what do we need to do to get a formal proof of this? And basically, he kind of looked at it and was, well, I don't really think that this direction is quite right. Maybe I'll just start from scratch and he got super excited about the problem and basically came up with this new algorithm, which eventually became SCP, the Stellar Consensus Protocol, and wrote a long white paper about that, which is available on our site if you want to, like, dig deeper. But so, but along, while this was happening, we were also doing the, the giveaway of

the Lumens, which maybe we can talk about a bit later, but, but, so we were growing really quickly. And so we got to, once we got to about two million, three million accounts, the, the network was having, like, scalability issues. And it was causing, like, servers to go really slow, like, to become really slow and, like, come back and stuff like this. So, so there was all these, like, kind of timing issues happening because the servers would be like one server would be like delayed and send its messages a little bit late, things like this. And eventually what happened is because the consensus algorithm wasn't robust in the face of these like timing issues, the network for. So like some of the servers thought the, didn't see some of the transactions

that some of the other servers saw. So so basically what we had to do is unfortunately we just reduced it to one server. So one server was running the network. so it couldn't disagree with anybody. And then because we were already pretty far along in the process of rewriting the network at this point. And so we were like, well, we'll just run it like this for the next few months until we can switch over to the new consensus algorithm. And so that's what they did. That's what we did. And then so probably a few months ago, we actually got the new software in production ready and rolled that out.

So to us, it's like way it's, it's, it's. really nice to be on the new code, essentially. So it's much safer, it's much more scalable, it's much easier to use. It's a complete rewrite. It doesn't have any of the code from the previous software. So it's much safer because it uses this stellar consensus protocol, which is like provably safe and correct and has this nice formal proof. So we're sure that it won't fork again.

It won't fork it. What happens is basically, basically with these distributed systems, you have a choice to make, right? You can either, there's a proof that you can't have fault tolerance, safety and likeness. So what that means is you can't make, you can't be sure that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, the distributed system won't fork, both won't fork and that it will keep making progress, right? So you have to choose which of those options you want to, um, forego. And so the old code was foregoing safety, and now we're forgoing liveness. So if there's ever an issue with safety, basically the network will stop making progress.

And then you'll manually have to go in and figure out what's going wrong. But you have to make this choice. And for us, like if it's a choice of not confirming new transactions, that's a better outcome than confirming transactions that you're like later people are disagreeing about. So it just would lead to more chaos. So that's the kind of the choice that the new network makes, which we think is a lot better. And then it's also much, much more scalable. So in the face, like we've tested it up to, you know, like half a billion accounts and like many thousands of transactions a second and it's working fine.

And it's much more modular, easier to use. We separate the code into like smaller components. So it's easier to maintain. We pushed a lot of stuff away from the C++ stellar core into like a more. more like like traditional web services systems. So like, you know, basically we have like this system written in Go that talks to stellar core. So both these things can be independently maintained and they kind of hope they they have

different responsibilities. So, um, and API is nice and things like this. So yeah. So people know of course Bitcoin, right? The proof of work. Yeah. So, you know, all listeners are familiar with that. And then, uh, while we hold.

also had tendermint on, right, which has some of the same choices there in terms that there can be no force, but it can happen that the network halts if there's disagreement. So can you explain how the stellar consensus protocol differs from Bitcoin's proof of work and from something like tendermint? Sure. Yeah. With tendermint, I think that they're built on PBFT, if I'm not mistaken, which is a a consistent algorithm that existed prior to Bitcoin.

And basically the way it works is the drawback with PBFT is you have a fixed set of nodes, right? You can't have arbitrary nodes joining, like coming and leaving the network, right? So, but under those conditions, I think I'm pretty sure PBFT also favors safety of reliveness, like the network will halt if there's ever some catastrophic issue. With Bitcoin, Bitcoin is like a pretty, interesting and novel solution to this consensus problem. Like it doesn't really draw from the from you know Paxos and PEPFT and all these like traditional distributed systems algorithms, which is why I was so cool because like prior to it, people kind of like hit this wall. They're like,

okay, we can't actually solve this problem. Or maybe they didn't even think that they should try. But so kind of the way it differs from SCP is, I mean, it differs in a few ways. ways. Like so, you know, obviously there's this mining process that that requires a lot of computational effort, whereas SCP doesn't have that. It's just message passing. You know, because it's just message passing, the transactions confirm much faster in Stellar. Like, it only takes a couple seconds. And just the way we've designed it, you don't need the history, the whole, the complete history, whereas Bitcoin, you need the complete history of all transactions ever, whereas with stellar, you just need the current state of the world, and then you can

kind of move from there. So there's some kind of differences, yeah. So let's kind of reframe what you've said. So there's two things, which one is safety and one is liveliness. So the way our kind of listeners could imagine that is, like, imagine like, like you, you know the Bitcoin network well. imagine a scenario in which for some reason

no messages can be sent to China for a certain period of time, right? Like the whole Western world can communicate with itself, but there has been some disaster, is a man-made or natural. Maybe the Chinese government went and cut all the cables and then you can't send

any messages to China. What would happen in Bitcoin, right? So the Chinese miners would build their blockchain, Bitcoin blockchain, and the miners outside China would build a fork, right? It would be like two different blockchains. So the network would keep running.

That means the network is live, which means if I am a consumer in India trying to send a transaction to the US, the Western miners will confirm my transaction. So the system is live. It's not dead. But then once you have messages

coming in between China and the Western world, then you have basically like two different blockchains. And there might be some transactions confirmed in one of the blockchain, one, one, one blockchain and some transactions which are conflicting with those in the other blockchain. Right. So this is, this is a system which favors liveliness over safety, right? Yep.

And what are you saying is stellar is the opposite. That's right. Yeah. I mean, Bitcoin has an interesting take on it because, though it does favor liveliness over safety, that's why you wait for more than one confirmation, right? because you like there becomes less and less of a chance of a reorg like of picking a different chain like the further down your transaction is right so you know so if you wait for one confirmation yes it's totally possible that like somebody mines two blocks and then yours gets is not included

in the ultimate chain but if there's like 20 or 100 confirmations then it's really really unlikely that it'll switch right somebody would have to do a lot of mining to to make your transaction go away. But yes, it is technically possible, right? So that's, in that sense, it favors liveness over safety. And the other thing that we talked about, which is PBFT, practical Byzantine fault tolerance. So in Bitcoin, what's happening is the people that are coming to consensus, which might be the miners and the full nodes, they can change, right? Like, I can become a minor right now and drop off an hour later or something like that. But in PBFT, what tends to happen is you have a fixed set of validators or nodes.

So, like, if you want to imagine PBFT, imagine, like, what would five banks do if they wanted to run a payment system together? Right. The five banks know each other, and they know that only they should be able to run this system, so they use PBFT because they know each other. Right. And now, Stellar is something very interesting where, in theory, you know the other. participants in the network, but it also has some Bitcoin-like characteristics, right? So describe what these tradeoffs are. Right. So, I mean, kind of the big innovation that David came up with is that what you want,

you do want this system that is like Bitcoin, where nodes can come and go, right? So the innovation is that basically you can have this set of nodes out there in the world that are validating transactions, but you don't have to know all of them, right? So you only have to pick a certain subset that you're listening to. So say there's like 100 validators in the world and you pick like 20, right? That you're saying, you know, if, you know, if, you know, two-thirds of these guys think that this next ledger is valid, that I'm willing to say, okay, this next ledger is valid. And the interesting thing is everybody doesn't have to pick the same set of people. What you can, as long as there's a certain overlap between the people that are picked in the same way, like you can kind of think of like in fact.

Facebook, like people are different friends with different groups, but there's some like chain of connection where people are all, you know, you know, maybe I'm not friends with you, but I'm friends with someone else who's friends with someone else who's friends with you, right? And and it's the same way with stellar, like, you know, you have your 20 guys, somebody else on the other side of the network has their 20 guys, and then maybe there's some in the middle that has some of both guys. And then you can show that if the network is connected in particular ways, that there is this confluence of quorum essentially where if with certain, amount of interconnectedness, then everyone will agree upon the same value, right, if you follow the SCP algorithm. So, so either the whole network will agree on this one value or they won't, right? So, yeah, so that's kind of the neat trick, is that you don't actually have to know everybody in the network. And you can, you can have people coming on off the list of people that you're listening to, and it doesn't really affect the safety of the network as a whole. So with Bitcoin, right, one of the things that proof of work was meant to solve was to protect from civil attacks, right?

And then with something like PBFT, you, well, you don't have civil attacks because not anybody can validate. So are you saying that with Stellar, the way you can protect from something like civil attack is because a civil attacker, basically because of the network looking at the topography of the network and basically saying, well, you know, if somebody creates like a million new accounts, they aren't connected to other accounts in those critical ways? So, yeah, so I mean, this is kind of one of the tradeoffs is you, it requires a little more active participation on the part of the person running the validator.

You're not picking your nodes that you're listening to randomly. Like you shouldn't do that. You need to know who they are, right? So maybe you'll pick these three banks and like this, this nonprofit, these like two developers that you know, and that will be your quorum set, right? So, but the thing that you need to be careful about is the civil attack thing, right? You don't want to pick 100 people and they're really. all owned by the same, they're controlled by the same person, right?

So, um, so you need to make sure that the, the, the people that you put on your list are actually unique, like that, and that, that burden is on the operator of the validator, which is different than what the way it is in Bitcoin. In Bitcoin, you, you shift that burden onto the hope that not one person can control all the mining power, so. But presumably, right? So let's say now I wanted to participate in the, the seller process and I download the software. Like, how would I,

initially, H.U. says no, does it come with a predefined set of default validators? No, it doesn't. But you can listen to the network and then basically you can see who other people are trusting. And then also, we hope people will publish their validation key, right? So like if you're a stellar business and you were running stellar core, you should say, hey, this is my, this is my validator. And so people can add them, you know, so they could add different exchanges or different whatever, right? So, but you kind of have to go discover them, right? So, I mean, we will, we do publish a list of here's other people out there in the world

that are running validators and you can kind of look through it and say, okay, I trust this one, this one, this one, right? So, but yeah, but it's, it's, and you can see what other people have trusted. So you can see the graph of the network. You can see all the nodes that exist in the network and who they're trusting, but you shouldn't just add people blindly. You should know what they are. Yeah, so I guess that would be one of the challenges.

especially if the network scales because most people will take the default path, right? So they may not want to go to the effort of consciously choosing validators. Yeah, I don't think the common, like I don't think just end users are going to run Stellar Core. I think people that are, you know, that have businesses that depend on Stellar will run Stellar Core, you know, maybe people at universities will run it or like developers that are super interested. but I don't think it'll just be like an end user running Stellar Corps. The way kind of Stellar is designed, it's less necessary than with Bitcoin, just because you're usually dealing with Fiat, so you're usually trusting a particular entity anyway. Like if your anchor is, you know, if you have dollars from your anchor, some bank, basically,

if that bank decides to, like, cheat you, then they're going to cheat you, right, whether you have running Stellar Corps or not. So you might as well just let them run this. other core. So you also have a concept of well first of all light nodes and then do how do you see that playing out like do you think there's going to be tons of people running validators like in bitcoin thousands or or is it more going to be a few hundred like i guess with ethereum i think no with casper the expectation might be that there was only going to be maybe a few hundred validators yeah i mean it's super early

so it's hard to say. I mean, I would imagine maybe a few hundred. Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, I mean, that makes sense. I think the main people that will run them will be the stellar businesses. So to the extent that they adopted, I mean, if you're, you know, maybe if thousands of banks adopt it, then thousands of people will be running them. So we'll see. So what's the incentive to run a stellar node?

If I'm a stellar business, why would, what would drive me towards running a node? So, bear in mind that it's way less expensive. to run a stellar node than a Bitcoin miner, right? There's not this like CPU overhead. You're just, you just have a server there that's kind of exchanging transactions with other people, right? So it's not that much of a burden. And you would run one because you want direct access to the network, right? You don't want to, like if you're, if you're having to like submit lots of transactions to the network,

you want to do it to your own stellar core rather than to somebody else's. And, you know, for the same token as if you're receiving lots of stuff, you want to have that messages come immediately. and you also want to, you know, you're depending on seller, so you want to participate, you want to, you want to have, you want to make sure that everyone is obeying the rules correctly and validate that this is this money that you're getting in is actually money you're supposed to be getting in. So just for like safety reasons and for performance reasons, really. And what are performance characteristics here? So will there be something like sharding as well or is Stellar actually able to scale,

to, you know, handle with global volumes of transaction and commerce? Stellar can scale pretty far right now. I mean, the transaction of, like, the global scale of commerce is quite high. So eventually we would have to do some sort of sharding or something. I mean, one of the things that we're looking in pretty heavily right now, and I think is our next big project, is implementing the Lightning Network on Cellar as well and making it interoperable with the Bitcoin one,

which I think will be pretty exciting. You know, for all the same reasons why people are interested in Bitcoin. I mean, it's a really cool idea is that you're basically you can send, you know, essentially millions of transactions and it's all off ledger and doesn't like have any kind of scaling burden on the rest of the network. And like what we're finding is like between two big institutions, like say Bank A wants to integrate and Bank B wants to integrate and they're sending lots of stuff back and forth. They might as well just have this channel that keeps it all private between them.

and doesn't burden the larger network. And the same idea behind Lightning where if there's ever disagreement, then you can go back to the ledger to settle the dispute or to settle there occasionally periodically or something like this. So I think that's the route that we think is most promising right now, that there'll be kind of this global seller network that's handling a large scale of transactions, but you can get far beyond that through these kind of off-chain transactions.

So in terms of fraud numbers, how much, much can the cellular network handle and does it depend on the number of nodes or something like that? It really depends on the hardware you're running stellar core on, so it's hard to give solid numbers. I mean, we've gotten it up to like 4,000 transactions a second and that wasn't on really that crazy of hardware. It's basically just a machine with an SSD card. So, or SSD drive. But yeah, I mean, I think you could take it much further on big hardware. also haven't put in a ton of effort into optimizing too much, right? I mean, we're, you know, the network is still very small, so it seems silly to get it to much, much faster than it can do right now.

So, yeah, but we're pretty confident. There's a lot of areas where you can optimize still. So, yeah. And it also inherits the, the great transaction latency properties of ripple, right? In a few seconds, your transaction gets confirmed. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I mean, the confirmation times are pretty comparable. today's magic word is galactic that's g-a-l-a-c-c-t-tic head over to let's-talk bitcoin dot com to sign in enter the magic word and claim your part of the listener reward and in terms of like the like in ripple what you could do is if you ever say holding let's say no we

Norwegian Crone issued by Justcoin. That was like one of the, one of the gateways on Ripple. Yeah. Then I could basically, NF, say, Jed, I wanted to make a payment to Jed and he wants US dollars. Then I just have to issue my transaction and the Dipple network would just convert my Norwegian Krona into dollars and have those dollars in Jed's account. Right. So in terms of these properties, he's stiller the same, right?

Or have you innovated in that direction as well? Yeah, I mean, basically at a high level, it's similar. I mean, the technical details are a bit different. But yeah, I mean, you can still hold any kind of asset and trade any of these assets between each other. There's still an order book where you can put up offers to buy and sell these different assets against each other. One of the big things that I hope people do with it is it becomes like this decentralized exchange for Bitcoin, right? where you don't have to depend on one particular exchange. And I think this would be really beneficial because it would be this,

it would kind of pool all the liquidity because right now it's split between all these exchanges, right? So like you can either trade on Coinbase or BitSamp or Cracken or whatever, but you're not getting the full pool of liquidity. Whereas if there was this distributed exchange where everyone can kind of participate in one global order book, then it would be much better story for the spreads would be lower and things like that. So you can move higher volumes.

I think it would just be a lot better. So, but that's a little bit of ways off. Like, we have to start convincing people to, like, do the trading there. So, but it's a direction I hope that it would go. So how would that work? Because, I mean, presumably, right, if I'm going to trade Bitcoins with, you know, someone else for, like, let's say, U.S. dollar. I mean, one of the lessons, I think we have learned knowing the history of Bitcoin is that

a U.S. dollar in Bitcoin exchange, you know, they're not all the same. Yeah. So how can you have a global order book there? I mean, you would still, the dollars are still tied. Like when you put an asset into Stellar, it's still tied to a particular institution. So it would be like Cracken Dollars or CoinBase dollars, things like this. So, yeah, so they would still be tied. And those things can actually trade against each other.

Like if one of them is their website sites responding, then maybe you'd get a discount. I wanted to circle back a little bit to something you said before, which was the idea that Stellar is focused on. making all these systems interoperable. Like, how does that work and how does it differ with interledger and that approach? I feel like, well, so what we're, what I mean by that is basically, for instance, you know, there's a mobile money operator in Nigeria that we're integrating with right now. So what will happen is they, all their customers, they will essentially, they'll all get, well,

basically, this mobile money operator will integrate with Stellar. So what that means is all their customers can now send and receive through Stellar to anybody else on Stellar, right? So this mobile money operator integrates, some other mobile money operator integrates in Nigeria as well. And then now any customer of theirs can send anyone on seller, which is just these guys. So now they can interoperate. So say some bank in the U.S. integrates. So now these bank's customers can now send and receive from anyone on Stellar. So then now they can send and receive to these mobile money people, right?

And then further, this bank is connected to ACH in the U.S., right? Because all banks are connected to the ACH in the U.S. essentially. So they could route a payment from this Nigerian guy that's sending it over their mobile phone to somebody on the ACH system inside the U.S. So now it's connected essentially ACH to this whole mobile money system, right? And so we hope that this process kind of continues through, you know, like all these networks, Maybe there's a bank in Europe that's on SEPA, things like this, right? And so it just kind of spreads to where it becomes this kind of universal system where you can easily send around to anybody.

That's what we mean by connecting all the different financial networks. Intelleger is a way to connect different cryptocurrencies together. Okay, that makes sense. And there's another thing I wanted to ask about, which is also sort of a question that I keep going back to it because I think it's a really important question, although people generally don't like to answer it, which is what is the governance in the longer term going to be off the seller protocol, like how are these decisions going to be made?

I mean, we have all seen the issues with Bitcoin where it's a complete mess at the moment and doesn't seem to any way of getting better. Like how do you anticipate preventing that? Do you think that the foundation is going to continue to play a critical role there? Yeah, I mean, that's one of the reasons. I mean, that's one of the main reasons we wanted the stellar to be a nonprofit

is because we do want this kind of this open governance. And we want to kind of model it as close as possible on the Linux Foundation where basically, you know, Linux has these same issues where there's lots of different people that have want things to go certain ways. And, you know, they basically all have to get together. And kind of there's a large board for the Linux Foundation where they all talk there's a technical board where they all discuss and we hope to kind of go the same direction like I you know I mean right now it's pretty much all stellar development

foundation but but we hope that as we grow and other people are invested in the system that that more voices are kind of added to to these decisions so so the role of the foundation is to basically spearhead the development of the protocol and in the future also have the governance piece piece in place right? Right. Yeah. Well, it's got two purposes really. It has that where it's making sure that the code keeps progressing. And the other big thing it does is because there is no mining, because SCP doesn't have mining, all of the digital currency kind of exists in the first place. And so we have to figure out how to get that into the world. And what we've done is we've reserved 95% of it that's held by the

the foundation as reserved to give away. So, so, you know, we're giving to, essentially when we started, we were giving to like anybody who would come to our site. We're doing it a little bit different way. We're, we're going to start that in a couple months. The giveaway, we're going to start again. Basically, we weren't doing it for a long time because we're rebuilding the network. And now that we've kind of got it to where we're comfortable that it'll work and is solid, we're going to start the giveaway again. So that's pretty exciting. A big chunk of that is actually reserved for Bitcoin holders. So 20% of that is of these, like, so 20 billion lumens is reserved for Bitcoin holders.

Essentially, they'll be able to come to us and, like, verify that they control a certain Bitcoin account, and then we'll give them their pro rata share of these, of these limits. So the idea being that we want to kind of spread this digital currency as widely as possible, because I think it's really important if you want these things to take off to that there's many participants and you don't want to keep anyone out of the system. So, yeah. So basically like the stellar network has its own native currency, like the Bitcoin network has its own native currency, the Bitcoin, the small B, the stellar network has its own native

currency, which is Lumens, right? Yeah. And there are 100 billion of them, of which 5 billion have already been given away. And now you're planning to give away 20 billion of them to all of the Bitcoin holders, right? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. So we're going to do that actually in a series of rounds just because we want to make sure it

go smoothly and there's not some huge hiccups. So I think the first three billion are going, we're going to give away in July, I think July 5th is when people can come to us and like prove that they have a Bitcoin account and then we'll give them their share of elements. And, you know, based on that, then we'll start doing them periodically over the next probably couple of years or something. So, yeah.

And do you plan to do more giveaways for other cryptocurrency holders like? This is just like $25 billion, right? $75 billion is still with the foundation. Do you plan to reward like ether holders, XRP holders, etc? Well, when we started Stellar, the main one by far was Bitcoin, like Ethereum wasn't launched yet. So we just had reserved them for Bitcoin holders. One percent is actually withheld for XRP holders as well. We'll give those at a later time, like probably one of the successive Bitcoin rounds.

But yeah, so right now it's just it's just. Bitcoin and XRP, like 19 billion for Bitcoin holders and 1% for XRP. The other pools of coins are 50% is just generally to the world. So we'll do something where people can come and there'll be some way to get, you know, a small amount of lumens. And that'll be that that's for 50 billion of them. 25% is reserved for other nonprofits and businesses doing, doing stuff in developing world. Because it's pretty easy for us to reach anyone on the internet,

but getting kind of this last mile is like difficult for us and it's not our wheelhouse. So the idea is that, you know, there's like institutions like, for instance, like give directly that give small amounts to people in Kenya, like actual like cash transfers. Maybe they would be able to also give like small amounts of lemons directly to people. But this is kind of reserved for like a little bit on down the line when these people have more connectivity, things like that. So there's been this idea like floating around in the cryptocurrency ecosystem of currencies that are distributed really widely.

We started with one of the most famous experiments was Aurora Coin, which was trying to give all the citizens of Iceland a particular currency. I've heard people say, what if we could have a cryptocurrency that we could give to every person in the world? Wouldn't that be awesome as a bootstrapping mechanism? And it just seems like a very hard problem because not all of these people have public keys, right? In a sense, like everyone did,

then it would be easy. Yeah. So I'd like to ask you about, like, kind of your previous adventures in this space, like your Facebook giveaway program, because that was quite interesting. And just have some broad ideas of how are you going to distribute this 50%? Like, you know, just method. Sure. So we can start away with the Facebook giveaway program.

So just for the benefit of viewers, what happened was there was a phase. when Stellar began, I think it was May or June of 2015, where you could log into your Facebook account, post something about the Stellar Network on your wall, and then claim a certain amount of lumens, right? And like, there was a time when I was like, I was getting like a lot of updates on my Facebook feed regarding the Stellar Network,

so it was a good way to bootstrap and get some publicity as well. But then I came, then I came to hear of reports that people could game this system using Amazon Mechanical Turk. So what happened there? Right. Yeah. So I totally agree. Like in the ideal world, we would be able to give a small amount of limits to everybody on the planet, right? But the challenge there is that not only does everyone not have connectivity, but everyone doesn't have a public key. And then also, it's really hard to identify everyone. So people, like, if I've given it to you once,

like how do I know I'm not giving it to you a hundred times? right? So like, I don't know, fortunately or unfortunately, Facebook is kind of the closest proxy for that. I mean, I think they have like 1.5 billion accounts. So it has pretty wide coverage. It's, you know, the largest collection of users in the world. So we were kind of using that as, as a way to kind of distribute it as widely as possible. So it works really well in the beginning. The issue is that there are people out there that have, lots of stolen Facebook accounts or lots of faking created Facebook accounts. So the fraud started really actually pretty low. And then it just kind of grew over time. And I mean, one of the takeaways is that we really just have to stay on top of the giveaway because, you know, anytime you're giving away something free on the internet, someone's going to try to defraud you, like try to like cheat in some way, right?

Just the way it goes. So it is sort of this arms race where, you know, we have to just like be changed. changing stuff and making the claim method a little bit different than people are trying to, you know, get around it and exploit it. So, you know, a long term, you can't actually, you know, you'll never be able to solve this problem of this arms race. Like people are always eventually find a way to cheat you, but we only have to kind of stay ahead of them for 50 billion limits. Like if we can just stay ahead until we give away the 50 billion, then we're good. So going forward, we have like a couple, we have a lot of like better ideas for this next round.

that when we're going to start it up again, that I think will help things a lot. And we'll just spend more effort in making sure that we kind of stay ahead of the people trying to game the system. But overall, like it was, I think, extremely good, the first giveaway, like it went extremely well. You know, it did give Lumens in the hands of lots of people, like let people know about the network. It got, for most people, it was the first time they ever had digital currency before, which I think is super exciting, expose people to this whole new world. You know, a lot of people went on to get Bitcoin and other things because of that, just because once they kind of get their feet wet and understand what this stuff is,

they get excited about it. So I think it's just good for the whole ecosystem and the whole like, you know, cryptocurrency space in general when you can kind of introduce this whole wide swaths of population to it. So we're pretty excited about starting it up again. So I think the next ways we're going to do it are going to be a lot better, I think. So in terms of the current state of the network, Like what are the kind of usage statistics like in Stellar? And who are the first users?

So basically, we just kind of put it back into production a few months ago. So the usage is fairly low. We're kind of, we haven't been talking that much or like focusing that much on existing cryptocurrency community. So usage is actually fairly low there. The people that are most interested are like solving these problems that we've been talking about in Nigeria. So like integrating to these mobile money things and these banks there and these other like payment networks in Nigeria to make domestic payments work much better than they do now. And so we kind of, it'll kind of, I think I anticipate a different usage pattern than what other cryptocurrencies are seeing because it's going to come from a country that, you know, hasn't really used this stuff before.

But like I say, it's very new, so we'll see. But yeah, right now, you know, usage is low just because these people haven't gone through their integration yet. But we hope, like, in the next couple months, things are going to start being announced and it should get kind of exciting. So, like, why did you pick Nigeria? Like, what was the, so I can understand the logic that, like you said before, that the reason to target the developing world is that the,

The pain points in moving money are higher in the developing world than, like, say, the United States or Europe. So it's easier to give, like, consumers, customers, a great user experience compared to the other things they have. Right. Right. But, like, I would say, like, the candidates for something like this are basically a lot of countries in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, perhaps. why did you zoom in to on Nigeria? Well, I mean, a few reasons. Yeah, I mean, I think there are many countries in the world we could have picked that would be equally as good.

I mean, some of the reasons are, Nigeria is like super isolated from even more so than a lot of the developing world from the rest of the world just because of, I mean, I'm sure everyone, when you say Nigeria, one of the first people, the first things people think about is like that Algerian scams and they're like, oh, Nigerian prints, this kind of thing. And it's actually has a huge, like that whole reputation has a huge impact on the country. Like, it's really hard for money to be sent into the country. Like, most U.S. banks won't deal with them directly because they think that you're, if you're trying to send money to Nigeria, you're probably being scammed in some way. And so this is really unfortunate. And it actually, like, is a huge detriment to the Nigerian people in their economy. Like, when we went there, one of the developers was telling us this story where he was, he was, He was developer. Someone had set up a hosting, like a, you know, like a host, like a web host in Europe somewhere for him. So there's his first way to like have a website on the internet. So he had this web host. It was in the other guy's name. And then eventually the guy changed it to his name. And then within like 24 hours, they shut it down because he had put his Nigerian address in there. And they're like no way. If you're in Nigeria, we're not going to do business with you. Right. So they're like really isolated from the rest of the world. And it's like kind of tragic. So, you know, for like this was pretty compelling. It's,

the largest economy in Africa, which is like really compelling. It's growing super fast. Like it's just kind of beginning to take off. And so I think it's just a really exciting country in general. You know, there's like some like practical stuff like they speak English there. So like that, you know, our whole team speaks English. So it's much easier for us to do deal with them. And you know, the people there are like super driven and they really like to get things done. That's that's exciting. There's there actually is a pretty okay development or developer community, you know, there's just lots of factors. But you kind of just have to pick one at some point.

But, yeah, our experience there has been really positive so far. So that's why. So what's the approach there? Like how are you trying to get people to use it? Are you specifically focused on remittances? So I think our approach first is actually in country payments and domestically. Because right now in Nigeria, if you want to send money from, say, Legos to the countryside, it literally involves like a 16-hour bus ride.

Like you put money on a bus and it goes. So this is like super broken. I mean, we were talking to other people there. Like there was someone who's running a small shop and anytime she wanted to go send a payment, she would have to leave her shop and go on a bus. And she would have to close her shop because she was the only one that worked there. Close it and go on a bus and go to the nearest ATM, which was like miles away, pay for the bus ride and then to send this transfer.

So basically cost her a huge amount of money, like a day's like a, like a, a day's wages gone and like the bus fare and all this stuff. So it's just really inefficient. So just solving the domestic problem, I think, is the first place to start. And then once that is kind of solved, then it's a pretty clear case for people to send money back to Nigeria using Stellars because if people are on it domestically, it's a very easy story. So that's kind of the idea. And then once you're using it for the remittances, then it's easy to use it between other

countries in Africa and things like this. And then, you know, Europe, things like that. So, okay. So, so, so one, one of the interesting things that, that came up during our conversation was, lightning networks using Stellar, but like lightning networks using Stellar fundamentally assume some kind of smart contract capability on Stell in the first place. Yeah, that's right. What are the, what are the moves you're making in, in that area?

Are you going the Ethereum way or are you going the Bitcoin way, which is like less capability, what's your plan? Yeah, so, I mean, it's still not completely a given yet. I mean, so far, we've tried to keep the operations and the transactions very expressive where you can do various things. Like, obviously, you can build lightning on Stellar Now. You can build other things on Stellar now. You can build other things on stellar, like, bonds, you know, credit default swaps, things

like this. You can build pretty complicated things. It's not turning complete inside the network. but our kind of our hope is that most of the computation can be done outside of the network. So basically they're like the computation is done outside the network, but the transactions and the way accounts are structured can only be manipulated in certain ways that you can set that up beforehand. Like for example, one of the examples that we use is setting up a Kickstarter type thing

where everyone pays into this account and if the account reaches a certain threshold, then it'll pay out to the recipient. Otherwise, it'll go back to the people. And you can do this by setting up the account in a certain way beforehand, where there's only, and you can kind of pre-sign transactions and publish these, and they only work under certain conditions. And these conditions are satisfied outside of the system, and the logic of whether you submit one transaction of the other is done outside the system.

And kind of the benefit of that is that you should be able to be more scalable because the computation doesn't have to be done by the network itself. it can be done by people using just this part, like people that are just interested in this Kickstarter-like thing or just interested in this one lightning channel, they don't have to put the computation into the network to be done by all these nodes, right? So that's kind of the route we're going down now.

I mean, if it turns out there's like some fundamental things that we can't express that maybe it'll tend towards getting more turning complete, but at this point it seems like, it seems like I haven't found anything that's compelling enough to want us to go the full Ethereum route yet, although I think Ethereum is super exciting. So yeah, so that's kind of our thought right now.

So what I got from that is like the way you're approaching it is you have special account types, right? Like what you're doing is you're creating special account types on Stellar. Well, that have some pre-program logic. Sorry, yeah, they're not really special account types. They're just basically there's ways to. There's, we try to keep, we try to make the special cases as few as possible and make it where there's just like, for instance, an account can have any number of signers, right?

And the signers can have various weights. And this is a general thing, right? You can have three signers on the account and maybe one of them can sign on, or it takes all three or things like this. And so this is a general thing. But based with these like kind of building blocks, you can compose them in different ways to make interesting things. Like the transactions themselves can have multiple operations.

So you can have a transaction that sends to account. A and sends to account B, and it sends it from two different accounts. And these two different accounts have to sign the transaction as well. So, you know, you can do kind of, you can start to do interesting things just by the way the building blocks are set up in the first place. So yeah. Okay. So would it be right to say that you have things like multi-signature and like time blocks

and maybe something else? Yeah, yeah. And using these building blocks, people can combine them together to make interesting things. Right, exactly, yeah. So has there been any interest or activities in terms of kind of taking Stellar and then taking some of the technology you've developed and then using it, for example, in the financial context for any of the many permission ledger projects that are going on? Yeah, I think a few people are working on this, actually.

The Stellar Development Foundation is not working on it directly, but we would be excited for anyone else to do projects based on this. I mean, it's very easy to set up your private stellar network. You just change one line in the config file, and then you basically have started a new network. So it's easy for people to make these permission networks if they want to. And the code is obviously all open source, so you can fork it and do things that you want.

I think there's a couple projects that have forked it and are doing a more permissioned, like, thing tailored specifically for banks and other financial institutions. But yeah, so you can definitely use it for this. And are there other use cases people are pursuing? Like when I was reading the paper on seller consensus protocol, one of the things that the author David Mazeera seemed really interested in is having a stellar-like network to manage all the certificates that we use for websites.

So whenever there's a website, it has an SSL certificate. What if you had a giant registry of SSL certificates, maintain our network like Stellar? What do you think of that idea? And are you pursuing other directions using this consensus protocol like that? Yeah. I mean, there are, I think that's a good idea. And there are a ton of things that you could do with Stellar.

I mean, one of the things that kills small companies is that it's lack of focus. So us, we just have to focus. We're just focusing on the payments use case. But I think there are tons of stuff that could be built on Stellar. And I really hope other people do because to me it's like pretty exciting. And this idea of SCP could be even just use. using that and you can build other stuff on top, maybe not the stellar network itself, but you know, you could build some other like more generic database or other things that are

using this consensus algorithm, I think would be pretty exciting or things like the certificate authority thing. Yeah, so we hope that other people do, but we can't focus on it just yet. I mean, hopefully in a few years. But yeah. Cool. Well, Jed, thanks so much for coming on. It was great talking to you. And I think one of the things I find particularly, exciting here is that if you used to go to Bitcoin conferences or be in the space, it's always that people would talk about, well, how great it would be for developing countries and how, but of course being completely dissociated in terms of hardly any projects actually focused on that area and hardly any people talking about it actually had any clue of those worlds.

So it's exciting that there is now, you know, that you guys are pursuing. that and sort of sticking with it, I think at the time when I'm not sure who else is doing that, very few, maybe a few Bitcoin startups are doing something like that. And it, at least in my view, it doesn't look like Bitcoin is going to be the one winning that game. So I think that's extremely exciting. And I'm certainly looking forward to seeing how sellers are going to develop and how those further kind of rollouts and distributions of Lumens are going to go as well. Yeah, yeah, thanks so much. Yeah, it's really great talking to you guys.

Yeah, we're really excited about what's going to happen in Nigeria and other places. I think it could be really beneficial for people and make a lot of lives better. So we're definitely psyched. So, yeah. Okay, thanks so much. And, of course, our listeners, we're going to have links to the white paper and to the website and their blog, et cetera. So if people want to learn more about Stellar, there will be lots of resources to turn to and sort of become part of the Stellar community. And yeah, so thanks so much. We are part of the Let's Talk Bitcoin Network so you can find

our show and lots of other shows in Let's Talk Bitcoin.com. We put out episodes every Monday, usually, well, Tuesday, this time. And you can subscribe to the show using any podcast app or you can watch the videos on YouTube.com slash episode of Bitcoin. And if you want to leave us an iTunes to view, then we're going to send you one of those t-shirts. Now, I do owe some P-shirts or some people, but they'll come with stickers, though, as a sort of bonus. So thanks so much, and we look forward to being back next week.