Finance committee  Yes. I would say that there are some competing networks that resemble some features of the Bitcoin blockchain. However, the true nature of a blockchain is the fact that it's immutable—you cannot tamper with data. To have that property, you have to have true decentralization. Havi

Finance committee  It's because most of these projects are fakes or scams. The real interesting use cases will be based on public blockchains like Bitcoin. In fact, the only way to write and store data on a blockchain like Bitcoin is by doing a Bitcoin transaction. People now are actively developin

Finance committee  You can, if you want. You can start today, but Bitcoin has billions of dollars of computing power behind it to enforce the consensus and the authenticity of transactions. There is a network effect. It's the same thing as not wanting to create a second Facebook or a second Google.

Finance committee  It is in fact $21 million.

Finance committee  You are right. That number was in bitcoin's initial submission, which laid out the particularities and attributes of bitcoin under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto. We don't know who he is. It may also be a group. This decision could be changed, but the consensus required to ch

Finance committee  At bitcoin, users vote. It's a false belief to think that minors control bitcoin. The actual people who control bitcoin are users, who vote, in a way, by choosing the version they use. To change that attribute, what is called a fork would have to be done, which means going to ano

Finance committee  Yes, the country of Georgia did it. You mentioned a really interesting use case. There's also a pretty interesting use case with the traceability in the supply chain of medication. I work in a few emerging markets, especially West Africa, where you can buy medicine in the drugsto

Finance committee  On the intrinsic value of Bitcoin, first of all, I will restate that there was never a price set for Bitcoin. The value that you see today is really based on—

Finance committee  Yes, the market value. Some economists say that gold is also a bubble, but it's a 5,000-year-old bubble. I would say that Bitcoin has value because people see utility in the network. It is secure, easy to transact, and fungible, and you can separate every subunit of Bitcoin to th

Finance committee  I would say that people were pricing a future Internet revolution that probably a lot of the companies involved in were not able to deliver. I would say the difference between the Internet bubble and the actual cryptocurrency market is that the Internet bubble was using a lot of

Finance committee  First, there's a finite amount of Bitcoin—there are only going to be 21 million Bitcoin. It's kind of like gold in that it's a safe asset. It's funny to say this when we have 30% to 40% fluctuation, but it's still an early and young market. Probably in the early days of gold, gol

Finance committee  I think they are, on a rather minimal level, as I said in my opening remarks. I am referring to the report according to which less than 1%, or around 1%, of transactions might be related to illicit trade, for those reasons I mentioned earlier: bitcoin transactions can be traced

Finance committee  In nominal value....

Finance committee  For example, the Under Secretary of the Treasury was saying that the U.S. dollar and the traditional banking channels are used much more by people who are trying to launder money and for financing terrorist activities than technologies like bitcoin.

Finance committee  I don't know what the percentage is, but it's....