Welcome back. So before the break, we were looking at the Old Testament law and trying to figure out in what way it applies to New Testament believers. So we saw that an entire bunch of mosaic laws, we don't even have to consider them because they stand abolished, cancelled, nullified. We don't even have to think about following any of those. There are some which Jesus talks about in the New Testament. So we need to pay attention to what he is saying in the New Testament regarding those particular laws. Obviously, you know, he talks about loving the Lord and loving your neighbor. So there's a lot of emphasis placed on that. So that applies to us new believers. I mean the New Testament believers. There are other Old Testament laws which he talks about and he gives them additional meaning. He gives an additional explanation regarding them. So obviously, those will apply to us as well, like the law on not murdering, the law on not committing adultery, his perspective of the Sabbath and how, you know, it focuses more on God's completed work of deliverance and how it's the Sabbath is more about focusing on God and doing works which please God. So all that. There's a third category of Old Testament laws that Jesus kind of touches upon in the New Testament. Those are the Old Testament laws which had completely been corrupted. I mean the original Old Testament laws had almost lost meaning, you know, with those particular laws because people had misused them in such a bad way that now those particular laws had lost their original meaning. So Jesus is very strict about those things, especially about divorce.  So now, you know, she has no financial support.  Otherwise, there's nothing left for her. Maybe prostitution is all, you know, that's left for her. So people had reduced this, you know, this particular law to that extent where you can just divorce your wife for whatever reason. So in Matthew chapter 5 verses 31 and 37, Jesus makes it very clear. You are talking about divorce. You can only talk about divorce in terms of sexual immorality. If your spouse has, you know, cheated on you, deliberately and broken the covenant, then yes, you could consider it. Then, of course, you have other verses which talk about this. So let's not, you know, just take this one verse and say, you know, divorce is good. So, you know, there are other scriptures which talk about it. But Jesus touches upon this.  So he says, you cannot do that. So there are, and this other law which about oath-taking, which is also mentioned in Matthew chapter 5 verse 33 onwards.  And you, and you say, I take my vow. I swear my, you know, I swear my vow, my oath by the temple. You can break it because temple is not very important in their eyes. On the other hand, if you've taken a oath based on the gold in the temple, oh my, that should not be broken because you say, gold is very important. I mean, imagine their value system. The temple of God is not important, but the gold inside the temple is very, very important. So they had reduced oath-taking to that level where, you know, if you, if you swear an oath and say, I will do this and I will give this much money to the Lord at the time of the festival. And then you want to back out. If you have given that oath based on, I mean, if you have sworn by the temple, it's okay, you can break it. But if you have sworn by the gold in the temple, you better go and fulfill that vow because it's a serious thing.  So he says in verse 37, Matthew 537, all you need to say is simply yes or no. Anything beyond this comes from the evil one. So don't swear by, you know, by Jerusalem. He says, don't swear by heaven. Don't swear by this and that. Keep your word. You tell the Lord that you will do something, you do it. So there are some laws which had been treated so badly and corrupted and twisted so badly that God, you know, Jesus brings back the right perspective on how these laws should be kept. So what is the conclusion? Anything that Jesus talks about in the New Testament, any Old Testament law that Jesus talks about in the New Testament and says, please do this, live in this way, follow it in this way. It applies to us believers. Everything else does not apply to us believers. So in Sunday school, maybe it is not necessary for us to teach the children the 10 commandments. What we should teach them is that Jesus took those 10 commandments and this is the meaning that he gave them in the New Testament. So please follow these commandments in that manner because you are followers of Christ. This may be what we should tell the children, rather than just asking them to mug up those 10 commandments because then they will get the wrong impression that if they keep those 10 commandments, God will be very, very happy and, you know, he will answer their prayers and our salvation is based on grace. It's not about works. So let us not, you know, build the wrong foundation for our children in Sunday school. Let them know that this is a faith which has to be expressed through love.  It's not about keeping those 10 commandments outlined in Exodus chapter 20. Okay, so it's very important for us to get these things correct, the perspective correct. So having spent a lot of time on the Old Testament law and how we should view it today, let's move on with another to the next topic. So if we are not going to be following the law, then what should we be doing? So that he goes on to talk about in verses 16, all the way up to verse 24. A lot of important things are said over here in verse 16. Galatians 5 verse 16, this is what he says. So I say, walk by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. Again in verse 18, he says, if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law because you see in the Old Testament time that Old Testament law acted like a guardian. It acted like a tutor. It forced the children of Israel to behave in a particular manner. Sometimes they listened, sometimes they didn't, but at least the law tried to forcefully impose itself upon them because that's basically what a guardian and a tutor does with little children. Little children haven't yet learned enough. They haven't matured enough. So sometimes you just have to say, no, do it. If you don't do it, you'll get a beating. That's it. Very, very basic. You've got to use force to make them learn the right things. Hopefully as they start growing up, they will realize that whatever they have been told is actually good. It'll actually benefit them. So hopefully they start maturing in their thinking and then you don't have to force them by the time they are teenagers. Hopefully they will now understand that this is good and beneficial and they will start walking in it on its own. So that's the physical worldly example. So in the same way, in the Old Testament times, that law, the Old Testament law acted like a tutor. It forced these children of Israel to do it, whether you like it or not, do it. And hopefully as the thousands of years went by, these Israelites began, hopefully began to understand that what God is, the standards which God is setting are good. It is something that can make a difference for them in their lives and hopefully it also convicted them that they can never do this on their own by their own strength. And so you have Ezekiel and you have Jeremiah speaking up and saying, a day will come and don't worry, the law will be written on your heart. You'll actually be able to keep it because God is going to do something and when that thing happens, the law will be written on your heart and you will be able to keep it. So all these lessons, the tutor, the Old Testament law, try to teach these people. So here Paul is saying, those who are led by the Spirit don't have to be under the tutor anymore. Now the gentle Spirit will lead them. He will tell them what to do and what not to do. They don't have to look at those 613 laws. They just have to follow what the Holy Spirit is telling them on a day-to-day basis. So he says, those who are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. And so in verse 16 he says, so I say, walk by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. And then he goes on to talk about what are these desires of the flesh. So in verses 19 to 21, you have a list of the acts of the flesh. All the actions, the acts of the flesh are mentioned. And then in verse 22, it doesn't talk about the acts of the Spirit. It talks about fruit of the Spirit. Look at the contrast being made over here. Verses 19 to 21, you have a long list of the acts, the actions of the flesh. And then verses 22 to 24, you don't have the acts of the Spirit being talked about here. You have the fruit of the Spirit. It's very, very significant, very, very important to understand this. Let's look at verse 24, Galatians chapter 5 verse 24. There it says, those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. And then verse 25 it says, if we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit. So here it's talking about people who choose to walk by the Spirit, who choose to be led by the Spirit. What are these people basically doing? On a daily basis, the Spirit tells them, take that desire, nail it to the cross. Take this passion of yours, crucify it. Do what I'm asking you to do rather than following those desires and those passions which are driving you in different directions. So people like this who have made a choice to crucify the flesh with its passions and desires, something happens to them. A fruit starts growing inside them. They didn't produce the fruit. They could not have ever produced the fruit. The Lord tried for centuries to produce that fruit and said them it could not. Now something amazing is happening. All these people are doing is they are walking by the Spirit. They are being led by the Spirit on a daily basis, listening to him and he's very specific. He says that grudge you're holding against that person, please nail it to the cross.  I need to prepare you for that. I need you to be spending those three hours with me. Going to the mall is not a bad thing. Going to the mall is a wonderful thing if you have money in your pocket. So it's a good thing. But when the Spirit says to you, take that and nail it to the cross because I have something else in mind for you. You choose to nail that desire or that passion to the cross. You're doing that on a daily basis. And as you start doing that, he starts producing a fruit inside you. You see, that's the point. A tree doesn't work very, very hard to produce the fruit. A mango tree just sits there, enjoys the sunlight, draws upon the water which is coming from the ground. It just is, it just sits there. And then as it sits over there and the branches are abiding in that trunk, fruit starts forming on those branches. Those branches didn't do any hard work. They just chose to abide in that trunk. And as they did that, the fruit began to form on its own. And so if you notice over here in verse 22, it doesn't say fruits of the Spirit. There are not multiple fruits which are being produced over here. One single fruit is being produced. What's inside that fruit? When you open up that fruit, you will find joy, love, peace, reverence. So you know the branch doesn't say to you, today I'm going to try with all my might to be joyful in the Lord and produce the fruit of joy. No, all you're going to do is just be led by the Spirit, walk with Him. He will tell you kindly take this particular passion nearly to the cross. You know, crucify this desire that you have. Obey me, submit to me as you're doing that. You look at yourself one day and realize, oh my goodness, I'm more loving. I'm becoming more and more joyful. It's a fruit which He produced in you while you were just doing your little part of walking along with Him. So such people don't need to be tutored by the law, by the Old Testament law. These people are free to just walk with the Spirit of God. Which is why in Matthew 11, 28 onwards, He says, all who are weary and burdened and you're tired of all these laws that you're following, come to me, I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me because I'm a very humble and gentle teacher and you'll actually discover that my yoke is not heavy, my burden is light. This is a completely different kind of spiritual walk which is being taught to us in Galatians. So we don't have to struggle and say, today I'm going to produce the fruit of self-control. Oh, today I'm going to really work hard and being more genki. No, you choose to keep your eyes on the Spirit of God and say, Lord, I want to nail this particular passion to the cross. This thing which you're asking me today, yes, I'm willing to give it up. I want to do all of this, but Lord, I need your enabling power.  So all you're doing is just walking with Him.  From your side, what you need to do is keep away the temptations because temptations will always come. So rather than focusing on your eyes on those things, you choose to continue focusing on the Spirit. You do your part. He will start making you Christ-like. So which is why he goes on to say in the next portion, since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit because when you keep in step with the Spirit, you know, daily you're walking with Him, He produces that fruit. What actually is this fruit of the Spirit? It's basically Christ's nature. I mean, if you look at the list of those fruit, or the things which I mentioned in that fruit, all those things are basically what Christ is, right? That's His nature.  You just do your part.  As you're doing that, you look at yourself one day and you think, my goodness, I literally have the fruit of Christ in me, the fruit of the Spirit in me. I am now becoming like Christ. I literally have the nature of Christ in me and that will increase in measure more and more. A younger believer will have less love, less self-control, less joy, but then as they continue to grow in the Lord and that love relationship is being strengthened more and more, they're abiding more and more in Christ. So more and more of Christ is being released into them so that fruit becomes greater. So, you know, somebody like Pastor Ashish probably has got more love, more self-control and I know I would have it at a much lower level, but we are all in the growing process and we are all, that fruit is, it's not we doing it. God is producing that fruit in us while we are just doing our little part of walking with Him, being led by Him, listening to Him, being willing to take those passions and desires and nail them to the cross. So we do our part and God does His part. That is the way we are supposed to walk, not by keeping the mosaic law. Mosaic law is not going to help us in any way. So having understood all of those things, let's move into Galatians chapter 6, where we are encouraged to do something very, very important. Galatians chapter 6, if we can have someone read out for us versus 1 to 5, please. Galatians chapter 6, versus 1 to 5. Brethren, if a man is overtaken in any presence, you who are spiritually restored, such a one ill spirit of gentleness, considering yourself, please, you also be tempted. Bear one another's burdens and also fulfill the law of Christ. For if anyone thinks himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself. But let each one examine his own work and then he will have rejoicing in himself alone and not in another. For each one shall bear his own load. Yes, very important point being made over here, which will actually help us in our Christian walk if we choose to follow this. Two things I mentioned. First, we are told that we should carry each other's burdens and then in verse five, we are told we should carry our own load. So it looks like a contradiction. So are we supposed to carry each other's burdens or carry our own load? So it looks like a contradiction, but once we understand the Greek words that are being used over there, the whole thing becomes very, very clear. So point one, two points are being made over here. Point one that is being made is, there may be a believer who actually has got caught in a sin. So it's talking about a trap. That person, instead of using his brains and instead of continuing to walk with the spirit being led by the spirit, what did he do? He focused his eyes on the temptation. He went near the temptation to look at it, not to actually fall into the temptation, just to look at it, admire it from all angles, see how pleasing it is, how dangerous it is, just wants to examine it. So now instead of being led by the spirit, this man is very happily flirting with the temptation, but the temptation is a trap, it's a dangerous trap, so he gets caught. Now he's stuck in that. He's trying very, very, very hard to come out of it. He's been in it for many years now. It's become like a stronghold. He's unable to come out of it. So over here in verse two, where it says carry each other's burdens, that word that is being used over there for burden, that is a Greek word called barrows. It talks about a burden that is too heavy for one person to lift on their own. You need about two or three people to together lift that kind of a burden. So here it's saying, brothers and sisters, no, please watch out for each other. This Christian life can't be lived all alone. It's not like, you know, one man army. You can't say, oh, I'm a soldier all by myself. I'll be victorious on my own. We are meant to be there for each other. So if you see a person like this who's trapped, caught in a sin, please go to them and walk with them, help them, bury their burden. And when you need encouragement, they will carry your burden. So help each other in staying true to the Lord, in obeying the commandments of the Lord. So help each other in following the Lord. Carry each other's burdens. And this is not something that we see in the church much nowadays. It's a very sad thing, isn't it? We have believers struggling on their own to please the Lord. And every time they fall, they feel so ashamed of themselves. And they wonder, is there any hope for a person like me? Will I ever grow in God? Does God even have any purpose left for me? It's so sad and we have heaps, hundreds of people like that in the church today. Why? Because everyone is so isolated. Everyone only watches for themselves. We hesitate to go to someone and say, can I help you with this? I can see that you're struggling with this. Because we don't know, they may get offended and we don't want to offend them. Because we all have got this very, I don't know, very individualized perspective nowadays. It was not like that earlier. I mean, in the early church, and in fact, in most of the Middle Eastern communities, our Asian communities, it's more like a family. Families there for each other. You help each other in your weaknesses.  You support and encourage each other. The Christian family is supposed to be like that, which is why someone came up with this wonderful idea of cell groups. Someone is like such a blessing. Because in a cell group setup, you have at the most, let us say maybe, I don't know, 12 people, 13 people, 15 people maybe at the most. So it's a small group where everyone gets to know each other and then they can actually help each other, carry each other's burdens. It's the only way to really have a successful Christian life. You can't do it on your own. You need the support of other people. You need the encouragement of other people. God works through each of us to help the other one. And that person helps us in return. God uses us like that for one another. We are meant to walk the spiritual walk in that way, carrying each other's burdens. So if we are not part of a cell group, please go and become part of a cell group. A small setup where you can be there for others and the others can be there for you. It's going to make a big difference in your spiritual walk. After having talked about walking by the Spirit, keeping in step with the Spirit, being led by the Spirit, it doesn't just stop there. He's coming to this point where he's pointing out that we need each other in doing this. It can't be done alone. You can't just say, Holy Spirit and I on our own, we'll do it. I don't need the rest of the church. No, it's not going to work like that. Paul has very lovingly laid down the guidelines on how to live a victorious life. So we need to take these things seriously. And then having explained this, that we should be carrying each other's burdens, he explains further in verse three he says, if anyone thinks they are something when they are not, they deceive themselves. So just because you're helping another believer who is weak in some particular area, now don't start having a superiority complex. Don't start thinking that you're perfect because you too have your own weaknesses. So don't deceive yourself. Just because God is using you right now to lift someone and bring them out of their trap, please don't get the wrong impression that you have arrived, that you have now achieved. No, because Paul himself never said that about himself. If you look in Philippians 312 he says, not that I have already obtained all this or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. So even he admits and says that he has not yet arrived. So in verse three, Galatians 6 verse three, Paul says, while you're in this process of carrying the other person's burdens, helping them come out of the trap, don't deceive yourself. Don't start thinking, oh, I have arrived. I'm perfect now. Don't have the wrong impression. Rather, he says verse four and verse five, each one should test their own actions. Then they can take pride in themselves alone without comparing themselves to someone else. Because if you compare yourself to that weaker believer who's struggling in that area, you know, looking at him because he's in a weaker position, you'll think, oh, I'm in a better position, so I'm strong. So stop comparing yourself with others because that will give you the wrong picture about yourself. Compare yourself against the word of God. The word of God says you should do this. Am I lining up with that? Am I meeting that standard? If I have not yet reached that standard, like Paul, I'll say, or have not yet obtained, I have not yet arrived, but I continue to press on till I reach that standard. So compare yourself with the word of God, the standard set by the word of God.  You'll think that you're really great and perfect and then you will get to a point where you'll only be giving advice. You're not willing to take advice and be corrected in turn. That's a very dangerous place to be, which is why, you know, he says, do not deceive yourself, rather test your own actions. Then instead of comparing yourself with others, you'll be able to take pride in yourself, if you know if you're actually meeting up to those standards. For why am I saying this? Because each person should carry their own load. And the word that a Greek word that is used over there for load, that's a Greek word, fortion, which is talking about a load which a laborer carries. Now, this is a load which one person can carry on his shoulders. You don't need two, three people to lift up that. So he says, all of us have a responsibility of testing our actions and making sure that we are walking in line with God. And while we are busy carrying our own load and doing that, we should also make sure that if someone else is struggling, we should have the heart to go to them and invest in their life. Because you see, this is something that will take effort. You can't go to a person and preach to them and say, you know, you're doing wrong and I think you should follow these five steps. If you follow these five steps, you'll be able to come out of your temptation. Be encouraged brother and walk away. One sermon is not going to do that. And in fact, nobody likes being preached at. What you do is you go sit with them. You understand why they are not able to come out of that stronghold. What is holding them back? You know, what is that temptation which is so strong? You talk to them, you'll find out what is going on. And first of all, they'll talk to you if they trust you, which means you have to first build a relationship with them. That is what mentoring was all about, right? I mean, we talked about it last week when we had the leadership conference. So, I mean, you know, there's a lot involved in helping each other carry each other's burdens. So you first build a relationship with them. They start trusting you. Then they'll open up to you. Then you'll be able to start investing in their life. And then you will be able to build them up. And then when they see the weaknesses in you, they'll say, brother, you know, you're helping me with this, but I can see the defect in you. Shouldn't you address that? And then you should have the humility to say, yes, I do need correction in that area.  All of this happens. So when you're doing all of this, you know, there's a beautiful statement which he makes right in the beginning of this chapter. He says when you're doing all this, you're actually fulfilling the law of Christ because you're acting in love. You are living in love towards these others.  The same way you're concerned about yourself. And so he says, that is the way we should, you know, be responsible for one another. And so having said that, he makes one more point in verse six. And then he goes on to, you know, kind of conclude this particular thought. So if we could have someone read out for us all the way from verse six up to verse 10, that would be helpful. Yeah, verse six up to verse 10. I certainly hope I have not put you to sleep. I'm really trying to explain in a clear way. Please, if someone could read out for us. Galatians chapter six, verses six to 10. Yes, thank you. So here in verse six, he says, you know, you carry each other's burdens while you're doing that, do not become proud. Be careful, continue to test your own actions and carry your own load. So having said that, then he says, one more point. Those who are giving you instruction in the word, he says, share all good things with, you know, with your instructors. The point that he's making is that, you know, nobody is becomes spiritually mature on their own all by themselves. There's a support network around you, which is helping you to become what you are meant to be. You are carrying others burdens. They are carrying your burdens.  And as you're doing all of this, there are people who have been placed with giftings like teaching and, you know, prophecy. And so those people are trying to impart to you things which you need to know, which will help you in your walk.   I mean, he's not a full-time employee of a church or anything. Nobody's paying him a salary. So he's, you know, Paul is saying, you know, even as you're carrying each other's burdens, these people who are giving you instructions, be nice to them. No, no, no, you know, make the part of your family. You know, if you're having a special occasion, invite them as well, you know. Let them be part of your family.  So he says, you should share all good things with your instructor. So never think that you have become great spiritual, spiritual giant all by yourself. That's a very, very wrong idea. We need a lot of other people, you know, walking with us, helping us to reach the goal that, you know, God has for us. So, you know, having said those things, now in verse seven, he says, you know, all the things that I have told you, please take it very seriously because God cannot be mocked. If you're really being led by the spirit, if you're really following his leading and, you know, trying to please him on a daily basis, then definitely you will reap eternal life.  God is watching.  And based on what you are, you know, sowing, you will reap that. So, if you have been on a daily basis, if you've just been sowing, you know, fleshly satisfaction, you feel like going to the mall, you just go ahead to the mall.  You've been doing all that. The fruit which you're going to reap, it's going to be destruction is what it says over here.  It's not unpleasant word. Your life will be destroyed. It'll come apart. The things which the plans which God has for you will not be fulfilled because you're happily sowing to please your flesh. So, all the things that you're doing are not bad things. It's just that the spirit asked you not to do that particular thing on that day and you failed to follow his leading. You said, no, it's going to the mall is all right, so I'm going to go. But that is not what God wanted for you on that day. So, you know, you choose not to please your flesh, rather you choose to please the spirit. Lord, you are urging me in my heart to do this. Fine, I will listen to you and I will do what you asked me to do. If you start pleasing him, if that is what you have been sowing, there'll be a wonderful reward which you will reap one day is what he says. Therefore, he goes on to say in verse 9, let us not become weary in doing good because sometimes, you know, for months on end, you'll be doing pleasing the spirit. But there's no reward coming.  And then you start thinking this wrong thought comes into your head. See how carefully I've been trying to please the spirit. But my prayers have not been answered. So, he says here, to not become weary in doing good for at the proper time, the Holy Spirit knows what the proper time is, you know, when your prayer should be answered. God knows when to grant you what is required. At the proper time, we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.  Obedience doesn't always yield instant reward. Of course, on many occasions, it does and it feels really good. But there are times when God wants to test our hearts, like he did with the Israelites. You know, why did he withhold, you know, water from them? I mean, he definitely did not want them to die. He withheld the water just to see what is there in their heart. Do they have faith which is expressed through love?  You do this for me, I'll do this for you. So, he wanted to test and see what was in their heart. So, sometimes God may not reward you immediately because he's just holding back to see how you'll respond. But if like Abraham, you say, oh, I will trust him even up to death, then God will, you know, do his part. So, he says over here, let us not become weary in doing good. For at the proper time, the God appointed time which God already fixed long back. We don't know when our prayers are going to be answered, but God already has fixed the time. He knows when it's going to be answered. So, if you hold on to him and don't give up, you know, if you don't stop doing good, you will reap the harvest which he has waiting for you. So, don't lose out on it and, you know, choose destruction instead where your life will be messed up is what he's advising. So, therefore, he says, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers. So, yes, we should be, you know, doing good to all people and especially to the family of believers because these are our direct family members. They are part of the kingdom of God. And so, we have a personal obligation towards them. Having said all of that, now Paul is finally coming to his last concluding comments. And there's some very lovely things mentioned over here which I think we should know kind of grasp. So, let's look at this. If we can have someone read out for us versus 11, to 15, yeah, we wanted the reds 15 and 16, right? So, okay, 11 to 14 if someone could read out. 11 to 14. Now, in these last sentences, I want to emphasize in the bold scrolls of my, sorry, I'm reading in the message translation. No problem. Okay. See with what large letters I have written to you with my own hand, as many as desire to make a good showing in the flesh, these would compel you to be circumcised. Only that they may not suffer persecution for the cross of Christ. For not even those who are circumcised keep the law, but they desire to have you circumcised that they may boast in your flesh. But God forbid that I should boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ by whom the world has been crucified to me and I to the world. Okay. There are two points that he makes regarding these, you know, false teachers, these two diesers who want the people to follow the mosaic law. Two things that he wants to say about them. And it's so important he's no putting it in his own handwriting. Up to now he's been dictating the letter to a secretary and the secretary has been writing down. But now he picks up the pen and he's using his own handwriting over here because he really wants to get this point across to them. He's telling them, please don't be impressed by these two diesers. Point number one, you know, these people, even though they're telling you to keep the law, first of all, they don't keep the law. Yes, they have been circumcised, but when it comes to the other 612 laws, they're not bothering to keep them. So that is one main argument against them. Okay. So they're asking you to keep the law, but they themselves, when it comes to their private lives, they're not bothering to keep the law. So please don't be impressed by them and follow them. The second thing, the reason that they are promoting circumcision is because they don't want to be persecuted for the cross of Christ. Because you know, all the Jewish people will go against them if they say, oh, we want to give up the mosaic law. And they don't want persecution. They don't want a position. So they want to see, they want to be people pleasers, please their entire Jewish community. The community will be happy with them. They'll be happy with the community. They want that. Another thing that he says over here, they're asking you to be circumcised that they may boast about your circumcision in the flesh. Then they can go around and say, you know what? I have this many followers. These are the number of people who have now, they subscribe for all my YouTube sermons. They subscribe to my channel. They are my, I got this many likes. So these people, these Judaizers are doing it with all the wrong motives. And the basic point is, they're not even keeping the law, which they want other people to keep. So please don't be impressed by them. Rather, you know what? You should be boasting in only one thing. And now he makes this very important statement. In verse 14, he says, so let us not be impressed by these Judaizers. Rather, let us boast in just one single thing. And he says in verse 14, may I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world. You know, I mean, we have been reading all these scriptures. We've been reading our Bible since from the time we were born. So we are like so familiar with these verses. Sometimes the impact of the verses don't even hit us. But words like this, when he would have spoken them in those days, in the time of the Galatians, those words would have hit those people, you know, literally they would have come out of the page with emphasis because he says here, I never boast except in the cross. The cross was not something to be boasted about in those days. It was something very shameful. It was something very low, very cheap. You know, in our Indian culture, I mean, in older generations, I think now maybe it only happens in villages and hopefully not even in the villages to humiliate a person, you know, they would strip them of their clothes or at least most of their clothes. They would make them sit on a donkey. They would put ashes on them and make them go through the village.  You would never wish that for anyone, you know, that you like for your family members or your friends or for anyone. The cross was something like that. It's like a stigma. I mean, if someone associated with the cross is stigmatized, everyone looks down on them. Everyone, they're considered cheap, they're considered low. Nobody in society, in respectable society wants to associate with the person who's undergone an experience like that. Jesus chooses that kind of a humiliating form of crucifixion and punishment and death. That kind of a sacrifice. So when Paul says, I boast in the cross, he's taking something very derogatory and low and he's saying, you know, what am I? My boast is that these people, juridises are boasting about how much of the law they know. They're boasting about how they have been circumcised on the eighth day when they were born. They're boasting about all those things. You know what I'm boasting about? I'm boasting about the cross. That would have been like a shocking statement for them because the cross is something that you talk about in whispers. It's not a pleasant topic. It's not something that you talk about and shout proudly about. Like back then in our Indians, nobody would say, you know, I was humiliated like this. I was made to ride on a donkey and I was, you know, ashes were put on me. Nobody would proclaim that loudly and say, I'm happy about it. They would in fact want to cover it up. They would in fact want to cover it up. So when Paul says here, I am boasting in the cross and moreover he says, the world has been crucified to me and I to the world. He said, these terms cross crucifixion which he's using in the Greek language those were strong words. They were shameful words. The word that is used over there, stauros. S-T-A-U-R-O-S. That's the Greek word for cross. Just not a nice word. It's not a word that people would mention happily in public. And from where do we get all this information? Basically, there's this person who was a Roman statesman named Cesaro. He wrote something called the pro-rabirio. Okay, that's his written work, which he wrote in those days. In that, he talks about the stauros. He talks about how humiliating kind of punishment it is. And in fact, he says, you know, when the judge would give out an order for someone to be crucified, he doesn't even want to mention that word stauros because it's a very bad word. So, basically that person would use the words arbore infelici suspendito. Okay, that's basically my treat. It basically means in English, hang him on the unlucky tree. They don't use the word stauros because that's a very cheap word. Rather, they would prefer to say the unlucky tree. Indirectly saying, I'm basically giving an order that you should put him on the cross. So, in that writing of his, Cesaro says, the stauros is not something that you discuss in respectable society. Jesus chose that kind of a humiliating form of sacrifice for himself. I mean, he went down to the lowest level so that he can identify with the lowest and cheapest sinners. In him, even the lowest and cheapest, the kind who are placed on a cross.  The kind who are actually hung, naked on a cross. He wanted to identify even with such rotten people. So, and he has set us free through his sacrifice so that we can walk in freedom, so that we will not go back into the yoke of slavery, of sin and the law. Because he has done such a great sacrifice that we can walk in freedom. Let us choose to be led by the Spirit. Let us walk in the Spirit. And even as we are doing that, we will see a fruit being formed in us. The fruit of the Spirit will get formed in us and we will discover that we are becoming more and more like Christ. Literally demonstrating the nature of Christ through our lifestyle. Because that fruit is formed inside us by God. So, this cross is able to achieve this kind of a fruit for us if we choose to follow. So, the statement he makes over here is, in fact, earlier also in Galatians 2.20, this is what he said, I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God. So, the old self was crucified on the cross. It was put to death. And then the Holy Spirit birthed a new creation. I am that new creation which he has birthed. That old self which I was, that person is crucified and gone. So, now I am going to start behaving like a new creation. I am going to start nailing my passions and desires to the cross because I know that I am a new creation. An old self would have struggled to do that. But now I know that I am a new creation and I know that I am empowered by the Spirit to actually be able to nail those things to the cross. So, I am going to behave like a new creation and I am going to live in this way. So, which is why here now in this last chapter, he says in Galatians 6, 15 to 16, he says, circumcision and uncircumcision doesn't mean anything. What counts is the new creation. I have chosen to start behaving like a new creation on a daily basis because this is what I believe. I believe that he actually made me a new creation that day at the moment of salvation. At that moment of salvation, the old self was crucified and buried with him and done away with. That's basically our romance is where all these things are explained in great detail. So, because the old self was crucified, I have now been made a new creation and that's who I am. I'm going to start behaving like a new creation.  So, he makes these amazing statements and so he says in his final sentence, he says, From now on, let no one cause me trouble for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus. The same way Jesus was crucified, the same way he paid the price, now I have placed myself under him and I'm willing to carry my cross on a daily basis. So, when you look at my physical body, you'll literally see the bippings which I got, the beatings which I got, all of that you will see. It will prove to you that I'm a true follower of this Jesus. So, he's saying I literally bear on my body the marks of Jesus. The crucified Christ whom I'm following, I have carried my cross and I have followed him. So, therefore, he says, Let these judas not cause me trouble anymore because I bear the marks of Christ and so he concludes with a wish. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ may it be with your spirit, brothers and sisters. So, let's just quickly close with a word of prayer. Lord, we just thank you so much for all the truths that you have revealed to us through Galatians and we pray, O Lord, that you would bring this back to our remembrance again and again because it is so important, O Lord, that we should be led by the Spirit because when we do that, you're going to start forming your fruit inside us and everyone will start seeing that love and that joy and that self-control and that forbearance and we will be so beautiful to look at because we will start looking like Jesus. Lord, we want these things to happen in our lives. We are eager for it. We are hungry for it. So, we pray that you would enable us to walk by the Spirit, to keep in step with the Spirit and to be led by the Spirit on a daily basis, O Lord. Help us, O Lord, in our walk. Thank you, Lord, in Jesus' name. Amen. Thank you so much. We will have, we'll start Galatians. I'm in Ephesians next time. Thank you.


Today's episode of The Bitcoin Show is brought to you by Mount Gox, m-t-g-o-x dot com, and bitcoinbonus dot com, and mezegrill, m-e-z-e grill dot com. Hello, everybody, and welcome to The Bitcoin Show. This is episode 45, and today we're starting something new. Every Thursday, kind of a panel discussion among key people in the Bitcoin community, some very well known and others less known, but just as interested.  First, Yifu Guo, who is sitting right here in studio with me, and Yifu is not only known as the creator of bitcoinnavigator.com, which is a new site that he created, just whipped up in our hurry right before the conference because there was a need for it, but it actually doesn't look like it was whipped up in a hurry. It's like really, really pro-site. You'll tell us about that more, but about bitcoin in the real world, the physical brick and mortar bitcoin world, and Yifu is also the host of the new, about to launch on Saturday, The Bitcoin Show in Mandarin Chinese. So welcome, Yifu. Thank you. And then also, we have with us Daryl Dwayne. Many people know Daryl Dwayne from bitcoinbonus.com. He's been an avid supporter and sponsor of The Bitcoin Show for quite a while. And so, welcome, Daryl. And hello, what, can you hear me, Daryl? Thank you very much. There you are. Okay. A little Skype delay. There we go. And Steven Wagner, he's not actually related to me, but, you know, like only in the spiritual sense, but, you know, maybe six degrees of separation, we had the same great, great, great grandparents or something. But Steven Wagner is from howmanycoins.com. Welcome, Steven. Hi. Thanks. And Jared Ostmeier. Many people will remember Jared from searchbitcoin.com. He was a guest on our show previously. He's the guy who created the widget, the famous widget that shows you all the things you can buy with a bitcoin. So welcome, Jared. Glad to be here. Thank you. Cool. So exciting to do this. And we have no agenda, no topics laid out or anything except bitcoin. And this, I think, will prove evident that there's never a shortage of things to talk about in the bitcoin world. Even if you're not up on the latest news, there's always something. So what's new with you guys? What's on your mind about bitcoin this week? Well, there was a few, a few pick happenings on the web with bitcoin. Yesterday, everyone was really blowing up about the Krugman New York Times article. Did everyone get a chance to see that? No. Tell us about it. I haven't seen that. Well, I didn't know who he was before, but Krugman, I guess he's a Nobel Prize winning economist. But he's also a Keynesian economist, which the bitcoin world, usually they're not too friendly with us because they're all about printing money. So he came out with an article. It was actually pretty nice. It was posted on the New York Times website. And he basically said that he checked out bitcoin, and it's kind of an interesting experiment, but he actually used it as an example for why the gold standard would be bad. And he was saying that transactions were decreasing, and there wasn't really any data to support his claims. Was he saying that bitcoin was good or bad, or was he making what was like his bottom line? Well, I mean, what was clear from anyone who was looking at it? Can you hear me still? Yeah. What was clear from anyone who read the article, who's looked at bitcoin for more than 15 minutes, is that he doesn't really understand it yet. He didn't really dive very deep into it. Most of his facts, he could have easily verified by going to Wikipedia and reading a bit about it. But it's really interesting, because he actually has a pretty large audience. And immediately after that article went up, I saw a few hundred tweets go by on Twitter, and it's definitely bringing a swarm of people to come look at bitcoin. So people are kind of interested to see what kind of repercussions it's going to bring. So basically, your take is that he didn't do a whole lot of research or verification, but just the fact that it's a major, major journalist in a major paper, it's bringing a lot more interest to bitcoin in general. Well, it's exposure, really. Exposure. Yeah. So what was his bottom line? What was the last sentence of the article? Was his conclusion pro or against? What was his take on it? Well, he's really getting called out for being... He was kind of contradictory, because he said that there's the hoarding issue. And he says that it's going up in value, and so people are going to hoard it, and they're not going to use it, which is going to make it useless. So but it's contradictory, because well, if people aren't going to use it, then the price should go down, which would stop the hoarding. And he says that because the price is going up, because people are hoarding it, that's going to make it unusable. So it doesn't... Is that going to make it successful or is it going to have no value? So it's kind of a contradictory claim. And if he's talking about it, comparing it to gold, well, isn't that kind of what people do with gold? They don't really go shopping at the mall with gold. If anything, they're storing it and holding it as a store of wealth, right? Exactly. And he compares it to gold and said, and that's why the gold standard is a bad idea. But he's ignoring the fact that gold has been taken off in this market, and it's becoming a more and more popular investment all the time. So he doesn't claim that gold is a failure? He's generally against gold just because of his economic perspective, and he's just for more government spending. And he thinks that there's nothing to worry about, the government can just keep on printing money. So yeah, that's his take. Yeah, so I mean, if that's your philosophy, that the more spending, the better we need spending, spending, spending, then obviously hoarding or storing wealth in gold or any other form is not going to be something you'd be in favor of. But it's interesting though, do you think it's bringing a lot of interest anyway into the topic? Yeah, I mean, it's introducing a whole lot of people to Bitcoin, who never heard of it before. And I actually ended up, I was participating in the conversations on the comment thread and ended up having a few exchanges with people on the thread who were investors and ended up turning into an email conversation with them. And these are people who are serious investors who are investing in precious metals or in stock markets. And they've never heard of Bitcoin before. And so I had that conversation with them and ended up sending a bunch of links and a few people got interested. Just tell me, Uncle Bruce does a show about it. No, I'm kidding. No relation, no relation. That's cool. So what do you have? Have you guys had a chance, Jared or Daryl or Yifu too? Did you see that article or on Glumpster? But I didn't really like take a look at it. How about you, Daryl? I'm just getting back from a week in the desert. So I don't have a chance to catch up yet. Oh, OK, on the latest news. Yeah. How about you, Jared? Did you get a chance to see it? I skimmed through the article and my impression of the guy is he goes through the same kind of introduction that most people go through when they first learn about Bitcoin. The first reaction is they're skeptical of it. And so that was my first reaction. Most people I've introduced to it, they're skeptical and ill-informed. And it's not until months later that when they see it again for a second, third or fourth time that they actually go, oh, this is starting to make sense. So I'd like to see what what he says about this, about Bitcoin, you know, six months from now or eight months from now. Yeah. What do you think? What do you think that when these reporters do these stories and it's a common theme, it seems that people say they're ill-informed? What would you say that like the top three things that they're ill-informed ill-informed about, like, what do they get wrong more than anything else? You know, it varies. I mean, I think the most important things to focus on when introducing the currency to people is that this is a digital equivalent of money. And the coins are stored on your computer. You can send them online. You somehow it's somewhat similar to sending an email. These are concepts that most people when they're first introduced to it don't hear about. Most people when they're introduced to Bitcoin, they're introduced to mining aspect or some other obscure aspect of the currency. And they miss, you know, the core values of the currency, which is, you know, the basics, it's decentralized or own it, especially the technical parts. That's like the biggest thing. They don't know how technically it works. And a lot of the news they've been hearing about has something to do with like third party related stuff, whether it's Mongols or my Bitcoin. That has nothing to do with Bitcoin itself, like the how it works in the protocol wise, and that's like the big problem. And and there's really no easy way to kind of explain it to you in layman's term. But I think in the future, everybody has to understand how it works in order to fully utilize it. The basics that it's not that it's the currency is not the bank. The bank is not the currency that has to be right. Difference that gold is not Fort Knox, Fort Knox is not the gold. That's two different things.  When you talk about gold and a vault that stores the gold, you know, mining is a side issue. That's like, you know, of course, where it comes from. But that's really not like the first thing you get into when you learn about investing in gold is mining, right?  Even now, even for technical people that screw up and accidentally erase their access to the coins and things that we know about this. So obviously, new technologies coming like any minute now, we're told, you know, it's going to make everything secure, protect us against currency risk, if you're a merchant accepting Bitcoin. And also, what's the other one that I always say? Security, the currency risk and what's this that's I like how you usually forget one. I forget a different one every time. But anyway, you know what they are. So the but the convenience, all the liquidity, that's what it is. Convenience, yeah, that you can just go to a convenience store and buy Bitcoin, like as easy as buying a Coke. It has to be as easy as buying a Coke and in order for it to take off. So these are the three things that are we're told the technology is coming that's going to fix all those things real fast. But in the meantime, it's not so easy. So it's hard to explain to someone, how do you do this when there is no de facto way to do this? And the Bitcoin don't isn't focusing on like UI at all, like the core people. And that's good because they totally just hacked up that, you know, WX widget thing and made it usable. But that's not even they just kind of chose it because it was universally enough to compile in the programming sense. But not definitely they didn't design it for like user experience or usability. And that will come in the future. Yeah, they figured that that's going to happen in any way. There are enough people that can develop for the user interface can be done by anyone, right? I mean, that's the the core Bitcoin is the is the really essential thing. And that's what they're focusing on. And now I guess it's starting with the core development, the core improving that the security of it, the scalability of it and all that. And that's that which is otherwise, right? Like multi signing is something that that's what the Bitcoin dev RSE channel has been talking about and a lot of people working on that. And that's that's one of the major what? Oh, just some feedback there. Multi-signing. So do you guys know what multi-signing means? Have you heard of that term? No, you haven't like a form of two-factor authentication. It requires two to log into your wallet file. No, no, it's once you explain it, even because there's a lot of people don't have never even heard of this. So would it explain it pretty much like right now you have a public and private key pair, right? Now you have multi multiple signing transactions where a transaction is signed by three public three private keys or and it could work in numerous amount of like logic equations where it requires key A and B to to lock or A, B or C, you know, and so you could have X sub Y, right? You could have you could require almost the way here. I'll explain it in my terms. You tell me if I'm right. So in, you know, my basic for dummy's terms for me, if, you know, you open a business account and you could have eight signers on a on a business account and you can set it up so that it requires four of the eight or five of the eight signers to to write a check, for example. So you can actually we're not talking about we're not talking about a bank or an e-wallet or a service or a layer on top of it. When we're talking about Bitcoin itself, like the actual when you sign transactions, the actual transactions in the blockchain. There's a method and some sort of a hashing algorithm that can be used a modification to it that allows X of Y to must authenticate it with it with like, say five of eight private keys. So I don't we don't have to all give our keys to someone else and trust that one person, right? We literally any five of these eight keys can be used to make this transaction. Is that right? I don't think they worked out the whole like any five out of eight yet. But the current proposal is I think there's five cases gathering road on the GitHub, which is like ABC or like eventually the end. So like you require multiple keys and currently it's designed to have or it's multiple keys plus one master key. Multiple keys or one master key or any of three keys. So it's not it's not as like I don't think they worked out the logic for five random keys out of eight to to work it because it's because they're using the script to do this. And the script language is is a like straight for a left the right thing. So it has to work in a stack. So I don't know how they're going to do five any five out of eight for the signing yet, but I think we'll figure it out eventually because they're they're they're working on this now. Like that's that's one of them. So they're using scripting, not a new type of hashing. It's a it's the scripting that's capability that's built into Bitcoin to achieve this scripting is how you're signing transaction now. So pretty much you're adding more logic on to the script when signing transactions. You understand that? Do you guys understand what he's talking about? Yeah, I talked about this a little bit with with Gavin when I was out in New York at the conference about the multiple sign trends. And interesting to see that's to be implemented how it's going to work. You know, there's if you have two keys on a transaction, then you have your more security being spent if it's stole from you because if someone steals your wallet, then, you know, they still there's a whole other set of keys that they need to be able to make it useful. But then, you know, I'm I'm interested in work because on the other hand, lose one set of key. You there's actually a little bit more risk there because now you have you have to have both sets of keys in order to to be able to use the money. So if you if you lose one of your wallets, then the key then the coins become inaccessible. So I'm curious to see how it's going to solve. I think there's there's probably definitely some interesting scenarios and possibilities for that to be used. Yeah, amazing. So yeah, I see what you mean. It's you're going to have to people are going to have to plan very, very carefully how they secure their things. Because if like you said, it's good that it it's kind of like the two keys that go into the safety deposit box when you go to the bank. You've got the banker has their set and then you have your set and it takes both keys to open it. But on the other hand, if either one of them loses their key, then you're locked out and you can't just drill the lock at $800. I mean, yeah, it's kind of a dangerous situation. We don't want to be losing your keys. You know, you also I heard you mentioned about well, what about the five out of eight situation? And there's this whole other technology that was just announced this week. I believe it's called open transaction servers. And it's actually a fellow traveler. Right. Yeah. So he posted a couple of videos online and he went really in depth showing what he's been working on. It looks like he's been building a pretty interesting product. And you know what, I cancel that. Cancel that we lost it. Just click cancel there. We lost them. They'll click this. Click that and go and close. Call and hold. So click it. I think it resumed on the bottom. There we are. Sorry. We if you were saying you were talking and I think we accidentally put you on hold there. So OK, I'm sorry. Pick up where you know don't don't do that. It you did it again. He lost it again. Why did you cancel all the calls? OK, group call. Just call group call. No, don't answer that group call. Decline that decline that group call. Oh God. Why does he join call now? Join with the video. Join call. I think they joined. I think they have reestablished themselves there. OK, are you guys there? No, hold on. Call group call group. We'll make it work. OK, don't do anything. Just leave it on. That's cool. It'll resume by itself. Just don't do it. Anything. OK, there you there, Steven. Yeah, I'm here. Sorry Skype technical. So you were what was the last thing he was saying that all about open transaction. Yeah, open transaction server. Yes. So yeah, it looks like what it is, is it can be like a replacement for either an online wallet or an online exchange. So it acts as a server that people can go to in order to facilitate transactions. But what's interesting about this server is that it's decentralized. So it actually acts as a decentralized layer of abstraction for Bitcoin. So it doesn't replace Bitcoins. It's not really part of Bitcoin. It could be used with other currencies as well. But there's a lot of interesting possibilities for how it could interface. How could it interface? And work as another layer of abstraction to facilitate Bitcoin transactions. How could it interface with Bitcoin? Can you give me an example of what that could do?  And once they're on the server, then you could send them to other users on the server. But what's really interesting about it is that since the server is decentralized, if one of the servers gets hacked, they're not able to steal anything or to get your coins. Because if the server network is decentralized and there's eight servers, then they don't have to hack into multiple servers in order to be able to commit any kind of theft. Right, so it's still the 51% networking problem that all distributed networking faces in theory. Or am I missing something? You hear what Eve was saying? No, I'm sorry. I didn't hear that. Just be clear about it, because this makes over there. But so what I think what Eve is saying is that if it's distributed, then you're still facing the 51%. Networking problem, like the 51% networking attack, pretty much.  I think that this one isn't strictly defined majority. I think it's user definable. It could be like 5 out of 8 or 7 out of 8, or whatever. Oh, so you could create your own hub, so to speak, hub networking of open transactions based on Bitcoins. Yeah, or it might just end up being one large swarm network that everyone's connected to. But since it's an API interface, you could have one server that's written to interface in PHP and another server that is written in C++ or another language running on completely different infrastructures, so it's not like one exploit would be able to exploit all the servers. Right, right, right. So I understand what you're talking about is a distributed, kind of like it could act as an e-wallet, but in a distributed way, and the underlying currency could still be Bitcoin. Exactly, and it could even do transactions in other currencies as well. I mean, you could place ounces of gold on there or a ripple credits or dollars, because it acts as a ledger. But it works really great with Bitcoins because the open transaction server could actually interface with the Bitcoin API. So when you're doing a transaction, the server can actually store the Bitcoins and transfer them digitally compared to if you were doing a transaction in gold after you commit the transaction onto the ledger, well, you still have to have somebody go physically pick up the gold and hold it in their possession and deal with all of these logistics. But with Bitcoin, that could all be automated through software. I mean, I went through the videos once and watched them. Of course, I'm sure I might be getting some details wrong. A fellow traveler would probably be the guy to have on here and have him talk about it, but that's what I got out of the videos, and it was really interesting. That is interesting. There's one other point to bring up, too. The system would be more robust. So let's say you have eight servers, and one or two of them go down. You should still be able to access your data, provided you meet the sufficient number of keys that require to access the data. That's important. Is this already exist now, or is this just a problem? I think open transaction actually was around for a while. I didn't look into it and it wasn't integrated with Bitcoins. And now people are talking about it as a good subset of infrastructure on top of what Bitcoin already provides, because they're all both distributed peer-to-peer networks. So it's just what needs to be developed, or has is being developed as being developed more or less like somebody has to write the RPC connection API called from open transaction to Bitcoin D. To Bitcoin D, that's it. Right. I think it should be pretty simple, theoretically. Theoretically. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, he was showing on his YouTube, I think it was almost like an hour or two hours with the videos. And he was going through and demoing the software. So he has a working version of the software. And it looks like it's just kind of entering testing stages. So you wouldn't want to use live large amounts of money or anything that you can't risk losing. But it looks like it's going to switch. I mean, we could just swap on the Testnet and play with that, I suppose. Like, if it's already, is it available? Like, they have a GitHub link or, you know, like, I don't. Is it available already? I think it's on Git. I don't have a link for you, but if it is. I mean, I'm pretty sure the viewers are like, I'm going to go home and look at it. Send me the link for the YouTube, and we'll put it in the show notes. So it's right here below this video for viewers who want to check that out. I want to check it out. And so it's either developed or ready or almost ready or in progress or something. It's beta testing. Beta testing. Beta testing, according to that video, so. And you think it's on the actual Bitcoin network, not the Testnet right now. Is that what you, your impression, Stephen? It looks like the software is separate from Bitcoin itself, and I don't know what the level of integration that has been created for Bitcoin yet. So I think that the open transaction server itself, that the decentralized transaction network, is available. The software is written, and it's maybe like an alpha or beta stage. And I think that the Bitcoin integration aspect of it is probably still looking to be developed. So if it can handle other currencies, is it's, I mean, is OpenTrack, I'm not that familiar with it. I keep hearing the name all the time, but I've never really looked into it. Is it, by its nature, capable of acting as an exchange between dollars and Bitcoin? It appears to be so. I mean, it appears that the API and what it's capable of, technically, it's definitely able to move that type of data where you could do an exchange, a trade, yes, in any type of exchange, or maybe it's an exchange for our products so you're using like an e-wallet. But somebody still has to escrow the US dollars, because they're not electronic. So somebody somewhere has to be responsible for having the bank of US dollars, right? Well, yeah, this, yeah, I guess that aspect would still need to be in there somewhere. And it might just be a place for people to move Bitcoin transactions. Like one of the benefits that was being toted was that it actually enhances Bitcoin's anonymity. Because you deposit, kind of like when you put Bitcoins on an exchange site, many transactions that go back and forth on the exchange, they're not actually hitting the blockchain. Right. Well, this would be the same thing. You could do transactions. It could actually access as a separate layer of transactions on the network. And since the Bitcoins, they're moving the ownership on the open transaction network is moving between each of the open transaction accounts. But the Bitcoins are never actually touching the blockchain. So you could do transactions that are not trackable through there. Is this open transaction system, is this already, I mean, is the open transaction system itself already in place? And then this Bitcoin development is just newly developed? No, the open transaction is in beta. The whole thing is in beta. The whole thing is in beta. They're lurking closely with Bitcoin simply because they share a similar infrastructure. Well, Bitcoin's in beta, sort of. Sort of. No, it is. We're just relying on it. Yeah, it's totally in beta. It's like Gmail is in beta for years, and we've been relying on it for years. But it's still in beta, technically. Who knows when that'll change? So this seems like a good point to take a break really quickly. And speaking of exchanges, thank Mt. Gox for bringing us to you. Of course, if it weren't for them, we wouldn't be here to talk about all these things and bring this interesting discussion to you. Mt. Gox is mtgox.com. And they are the number one exchange site on the internet. I think it's about 90% market share. But if you want to buy Bitcoins for cash or any currency, they have something like 14 or 16 different currencies. And now that they've added recently, and you can select your default currency, you can select your language. Actually, now they have Polish. They're adding more and more languages as we speak. And so check out Mt. Gox.com. They also have, if you have an Android phone or Android device, they have this thing called Mt. Gox Mobile app, which is formerly known as Mt. Gox Live. But it's Mt. Gox Mobile app for Android. And it allows you to do so many cool things. You can give yourself a voucher code or in the form of a QR code, same thing that actually acts as money so that you can transfer Mt. Gox dollars or Mt. Gox Bitcoins to anyone just by emailing them this code or giving them a QR code that they can scan. All kinds of really cool, innovative things Mt. Gox is doing. Of course, we're talking about them all the time. And Bitcoin Bonus. We lost Darryl. Something happened with Skype.  OK, so bitcoinbonus.com is the site where you can shop online at all the places that you normally do, like buy.com or whatever, wherever, Amazon, all the different online shopping you do. You can go there, but first go to bitcoinbonus.com and click on the link and get yourself an affiliate link that he gives you on that site, bitcoinbonus.com, and then go and buy the thing.  You just get a kickback in the form of Bitcoin. So what could be better than that? Just something for nothing. So go to bitcoinbonus.com before you click checkout, no matter where you are online, make sure that they don't have, they're not listed. They've got hundreds of companies that are listed there. So check that out. And we thank Daryl of Bitcoinbonus for sponsoring the Bitcoin show. And of course, Mezzy Grill, M-E-Z-E, grill.com, or authentic Mediterranean food meets modern flavor whenever you're in New York, passing through or you live here, whatever, go to Columbus Circle, three blocks south of Columbus Circle, and check out the world's first brick-and-mortar restaurant that accepts Bitcoin and sells Bitcoin for cash. Open seven days a week for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We thank Mezzy Grill for sponsoring the Bitcoin show. And Mezzy Grill is now offering franchise opportunities. So it doesn't matter if you live in Malaysia or, you know, Brazil, if you wanna open a Mezzy Grill in your town, then just contact Mezzy Grill at bitcoinatmezzygrill.com about franchise opportunities. That's bitcoinatmezzygrill, M-E-Z-E, grill.com. Send them an email and let them know you're interested in franchise opportunities. And you can be an owner of a Mezzy Grill in your town. So again, we thank them for sponsoring the Bitcoin show. All right, we're back. All kinds of Skype group calling fun. Are you guys all there now? Somebody's there. Okay. It's in Mt. Gox, and I was just curious. They have the 15 new currencies available now in their market. Yeah, so they have 15 or 16 new currencies. I was sitting right there next to Mark as he was adding them and he's like going, he's typing away, you know, hacking away after hours. Like everybody had gone home. The whole office was vacant except for him and I. It was a really cool time sitting right next to him and I'm watching him actually do the coding while he's adding these. It's so cool, so cool. I'm like, is that live now? Like you just did that and is that live? He goes, no. And he goes, click. Now it's live. I'm like, oh wow, that is so cool. Yeah, really neat. I mean, they have the computer, Ruxam, right? Or else I'm just starting to add a bunch of new currencies. I think they're up to like 18 now. I think a little bit more than Mt. Gox, but. Ruxam? Yeah, Ruxam.  Retain exactly, yeah. I've tried to contact Ruxam to be on the show, but I can't get any response. So I don't know, we'll have to keep trying to see. I'd like to, because everybody talks about it. I have a beta invite or something like that, but I haven't messed around with it that much. But yeah, I'd like definitely to get them on and interview them. So where are they? Yeah, for Ruxam, they brought solid coin on as an alternate blockchain onto their. And then they took it off because. And then they took it off. Right, solid coin and its problems. Kind of going back and forth. Oh, really? No, they definitely taken it off because pretty much, I don't want to start any flame wars here, but like solid coin has, developer isn't, how do I say it, worry a nice person to talk to. And there's a lot of rumors or whatever. But the fact of the matter is our forts, which is a very talented developer and who's the first person to discover and made GPU mining possible. And he said that there's a problem with solid coins like infrastructure, which is if you have a fixed transaction fee, you could easily do a transaction flood attack against the network. And pretty much he warned the head of solid coin about it and solid coin was like, no, that's not a problem. So he literally spent about like $6 with the Bitcoins and did a spam attack on solid coin. And this is why a lot of the nodes kind of just froze because they're on VPS with not a lot of RAM.   And obviously Roxxon was also affected by this demonstration of vulnerability. And solid coins since then have limited block size or number of transactions included per block. I don't know, they did some hack fix on it, but solid coins dead. Well, here I said, solid coins dead. But yeah, that's pretty much what happened. Wow. So they were warned about this vulnerability and they said, no, no, no, that's not possible. And then they said, well, I'll show you, it is possible. And then they went ahead and started like accepting, be like, you know, be like, stand corrected. And they didn't stand corrected.  And that's not what Harford's did. So it's kind of like, yeah. It's an interesting, it's an interesting thing. And there was an issue with, they weren't releasing the source code or they were violating the open source license.  Wow. That's amazing. It takes a lot to start your own virtual currency, even if you're going to take an existing code base like Bitcoin and then modify it because it takes a lot. I mean, first of all, to improve on something that's already being scrutinized by the whole world. And then to actually really make an improvement. I mean, you might think it's an improvement because this is better. This number is smaller than that number. And this number is larger than that number. But it might not really be an improvement. And then to not have the community of developers, just one or two people or whatever the team is that's developing it, you don't have the skills, you know, involved. Yeah, that's totally, but I mean like forking, forking is good in technically in the open source community. It's evolution. It's not how you look at it. I mean, forking could be good in some situations, but forking could also not be a very good thing as well. Right. But overall, I think the general thing about forking, forking is usually good because in the long run, forking is good. Short-term, I think there's a bunch of problems with it, but I think eventually forking proved itself as a better force. But the issue with this particular case is more or less of not that they didn't have developers or anything. Or just not, like they just set out a war against Bitcoins to begin with. They're like, oh, this is better, but after being pointed out of their problems, they could have just easily fixed it and moved on and maybe eventually improved the whole Bitcoin or Bitcoin base in the future sometime down the line if they continue to work at it as persistent as the Bitcoin team has been. But instead they did not do this and so it kind of ruins the point of forking something if you're not going to continue to work on your fork. Isn't forking basically just evolution? And you say, well, evolution in general is better, but not every mutation is better. So you can have a superior mutation or an inferior mutation.  Right. Right. Exactly. Here's the thing is if we have 100 developers out there who want to work on cryptocurrency, then we could have 100 developers all working towards the same goal. Right. And where forking becomes kind of counterproductive is if there's a big division and now you don't have 100 developers, now you have 50 developers working on one project and 50 developers working on a very similar project, there could be a lot of duplication of efforts and lost energy while we're all really trying to work towards the same goal. True. Now, if it was like a 50-50 split, then maybe there's a really big decision, a difference in philosophies or development styles that needs to be worked out. And so maybe for a while, you do need to have two competing versions in order to figure out which one in the long run is going to be superior. So it's always necessary to have that threat of code forking because it keeps people on their toes. So it's part of the security of Bitcoin. It's why Gavin only has so much power because if he was to start making bad decisions, if he wasn't representing the users, then people would just move away from him and fork the project. Right. So you have to have that. It's actually the threat of code forking that keeps the leaders of open source projects of listening to their audience and listening to the users. Yeah. And these brilliant minds and coders, they don't want to waste their time. So I think that if they see something is inferior, they're going to very quickly abandon that and move on to something. There's only really two types of forks. It's usually a private fork or something really like, Steve has mentioned that really diverse in ideas, but usually it's pretty much a private fork or a fork that doesn't really work as demonstrated several times now.  And really, like, persistency is what really rules in the open source forking. Like if the master branch is always going to be the people who most commit it. And the most committed branch is going to be the master branch. So it's like, you either are or you become it or you are it. And just like, you know, all in economy too, is like you have 90% in market share where everybody else fights for the 10%. And that's always going to be the case. And also these creating forks and trying them is just another form of testing, very sophisticated testing, if you think of it that way. Because if people say, well, maybe a fixed transaction fee would be better. Well, let's try it. When they try it and they find out, maybe it's not better. It's a real live experiment. Total one. I mean, one of the big differences with solid coin is that it was touting faster confirmations. So I don't know if it was confirmations every five minutes or every three minutes. So they're accelerated. So you can get confirmations a lot faster. And so a lot of people are saying, oh, this is going to be better for merchants. It's going to facilitate faster transactions. It actually doesn't help at all. Because since the confirmations are so much easier to get, you know, you have to give them. The validity is still going to be like an hour. So yeah, I mean, so in Bitcoin, you need six confirmations is recommended. But in solid coin, so you have excellent security, you would actually need like 30 confirmations. So it's like a pretty useless change. And that's the kind of thing that could be pretty easily solved by education and communication within the community instead of having to work the code, necessarily. You know, what I would like to see in a competing currency or competing blockchain is if someone were to do this, I think it would be great. I don't know how easy it is. But it's to allow old coins to be remind. I don't know how big of an infrastructure change that would be. But the idea is that if a coin is sat in a wallet file for 10 years, it can be considered lost. And so that solves the problem of what do you do once you've mined all of the coins? Well, miners can mine old coins. And it encourages people to refresh their wallet files, to move their coins around from one wallet file to another every year or so. And when they do this movement, they'll be tempted to maybe spend their coins in the economy because, oh, I'm moving it, you know. Well, maybe I might as well just buy this thing right now. And so it has a dual effect of giving mine or something to do once the currency has been mined. But it also encourages more transactions because you have to keep your coins moving every few years. That's interesting. That's a really good idea. I never heard of this idea before. I just came up with it. Just now? I knew there was a reason we were doing this show today. Yeah. You just now thought of that? We're talking about this. This week, I actually heard a few other people talking about the same idea and talking about the pros and cons or the merit of doing such a thing. I mean, yeah, how do you detect old coins? You'd have to force people to have transactions to move their coins. No. The more coins they're brought into the economy, it's not really creating any additional value. It's, you know, whenever new coins are created, it's essentially redistributing the wealth and reducing the value of the existing coins. In a sense, but I think there's actually still, at this point, more coin lost from when they're worth like a cent, then there's coins available. Because I'm pretty sure. More coins lost than are actually controlled right now. Right. Well, maybe not now, but I think more than what I would feel comfortable with. In the percentile, I'm pretty sure it's above 10. The total circulation of bitcoins, I'm pretty sure 10% isn't in anybody's hands at all. And that comes from the mining before. And I remember cases where people have hundreds, maybe a few thousand bitcoins from the old days and are just completely gone. And I'm pretty sure that's not a small percentile. And it was very common back then, because it was worth nothing. And I think that might be interesting if you're able to remind it, if somebody's able to just do a system analysis on the blockchain, and to see what coins are on what address that hasn't been touched since they were generated. Because that's usually probably the case, because back then, all the coins are moved to an address, then it starts dormant, or it's generated to an address, and then it probably either haven't been moved since it got generated to the address, or it was moved once or twice, and it just stopped moving. And since we have complete transparency within the blockchain, we could easily find out what coin hasn't been moved since 2009, easily. And I think somebody did that. I think somebody did the math for that, because they were trying to make a funny thread about how Satoshi in them has over 1.5 million bitcoins, because that's the amount of Bitcoin that's been generated since the year 2009, or hasn't moved since 2009, but somebody did this right. It's actually really easy to find out when the last time is possible. But I think if we reach a community agreement on the dev team to be like, okay, so every three years, you gotta move your coins, otherwise it'd become invalid. That'd be really cool, if we all agreed to it. This brings up another point about the blockchain. How flexible is the protocol? I don't know myself, but I would hope that we could evolve to Bitcoin 2.0 or Bitcoin 3.0. We'll have to see, I guess. And I'm sure some people know this answer. I just wouldn't know who. I mean, I'm sure Cabin knows how flexible the protocol is. I suspect not very flexible, because basically when Satoshi and whoever else was working on Bitcoin, I suspect they decided to make it as firm and the protocol is firm and fixed as possible to prevent the currency from being manipulated. But I'm pretty sure you're still trying to do it. The protocol itself is, I mean, it's just software. So it could be modified or rewritten. You'd have to get over 50% of the people to agree to the changes, I suppose. Yeah, when a new version of Bitcoin comes out, I think what, 0.4 is gonna be coming out soon. People upgrade, that's pretty easy to do. But I think from a philosophical standpoint, and mostly a matter of, you don't wanna undermine people's confidence in Bitcoin. And if you change the rules of the game, if you change it so that somehow there's a possibility that people could lose their money through it, then that could be pretty detrimental. So I think from a philosophical point of view, Gavin said that it's pretty much set in stone. Yes, and I suspect the protocol is set up to be set in stone as can be made possible with software. No, well, if you actually wanna just stop, like for example, you wanna stop nodes from propagating transactions past that were made on an address before a previous time of say 2009, December 31st, you could do that. You could actually limit that from propagating. There's even an alert system built into the Bitcoin network to stop that period.  Like that's pretty much what we're at because I think all the software, and you could really do it. And then I could think of code to right now to stop that. Like if I could really just add a piece of code to stop certain nodes or certain clients in the future to stop propagating transaction made on an address that was older than certain dates, I could go ahead and do that. Oh, so what you're saying is like if they implemented a change to remind old clients? No, what would they do is they would implement a change to make all the address that were last received, last active on before a certain date. If they try to sign the transaction on those addresses, the network would not accept them. So effectively the coins are gone forever because the network would no longer accept these coins. And all those coins will be available for remind for whatever procedure that in the future we figure it out. But you could totally shut down a large percentile of coins by limiting what transaction propagates through the network. But more than 51% of the clients would have to have that. Right, yes. Otherwise, okay. So basically it's both, it's philosophical and then how that would be implemented technologically. So every minor is a vote. Everybody who's actually processing transactions is a vote has a vote. So it's kind of democratic in that way. Yeah, total. So the question is like, if you're able to, you think of it like, and we think of it in gold, like you drop a gold coin from the side of a cruise ship and it's gone theoretically forever sort of. It's not really gone, it's just inaccessible. Nobody can go and spend it. Similar. So if you reclaim those coins and then like a new minor, basically it's like discovering, it's like discovering a sign of treasure. Like they rediscover that coin. But isn't that the same thing as just adding more than 21 million coins and making the limit 42 million? I mean, what's the difference between that and just increasing the number of coins? And then which nobody wants? Well, I mean in rotation theory that it's still not in circulation. It's not like somebody buys something and then claim their credit card's loss. And then there's a loss of value. But if they no longer have access to it already. So this system is actually better because it's not differentiary because losing Bitcoins are happening like all the time. And our total would definitely be below 21 million no matter how we cut it. It's going to be now because we're already lost like, you know, hardware coins from since Bitcoin, early days, right? So this system will allow us to keep that 21 flat no matter how we grow in theory. It will affect the value because if these coins are lost forever that is reflected in the current value today because of supply and demand. There's only so many coins. So actually resurrecting these coins could actually lower the value of today's coins. It's all a matter of what kind of economy do you want to have? Do you want to have an economy that's deflationary? Do you want to have it inflationary? Or do you want to have it at fixed level? Reminding old coins, if that's even possible would be economy where you have a fixed amount of coins. It's not inflationary. It's not deflationary. There's 21 million, no more, you know. No less. They can't be, you know, if they're lost well we can find them again. It's an interesting concept. Yeah, that'd be interesting to, I guess when we mined all of it we could talk about it then. But right now it's definitely possibly in the way to like stop transaction from propagating. What's the current estimate of when we will have mined all the coins, all 21 million or less? Was it three or five years? Don't call me on that because I have no idea to be honest. Three or five, was it, I thought it was like farther in the future, like 20, 30 years or something. No, I don't think so. Well I mean it's pretty far in the future but the thing is that all the coins will never be mined. Never actually reaches 21 million because it just keeps on halving. So it's gonna go from 50 to 25 and then I guess 12.5 and it's gonna keep on halving and it's never stops. It just keeps on reducing that value. The real question is if or when will it become no longer economically feasible to keep mining? I mean at some point it might be so hard. It might not be worth mining the next Bitcoin because it's such a rare event and you have to spend so much electricity. It's just not worth it. And so the real question is when will it become, when will it no longer be economically feasible or practical to mine more Bitcoins? A lot of the variables are not known yet. Like the cost of electricity in 2030, it might be free. It might be like the cost of air to breathe. Who knows? The other thing is if with the lost coins and if Bitcoin becomes extremely deflationary and the value of a Bitcoin goes way up then the smaller fractions of a Bitcoin might still be worth mining by then, especially if electricity becomes nearly free. Well, I think more or less I think we're not calculating with something like previous costs. For example, the only reason our force is able to, I'm not sure because I'm talking really on nothing right now but he's able to get ASEX and all that FPGA working and he had the investment do that from the previous GPU mining of the glorious days that he had. Because at one point he was literally 25% of the network because he was the first one. What's his name? Artforz. Artforz, A-R-T-F-O-R-Z. Artforz, okay. And he's pretty much the mining person. And I think because of all this previous, like early adopter for Bitcoins, it's like great, right? So because he has all these resources ready he's preparing for the long run and that's why he is researching into FPGA and he is doing ASIC and doing all that stuff. I think in the future, even if, and because he is so ahead that it wouldn't matter how economically low for him to get because until like the whole curve catches up to him and that would be a long, long time before that happens. And I think that's what like, there's always going to be people who are mining because they have free electricity or they have something like, you could literally like right now like the whole, we're talking about the mining situation on how to improve, in the cost of maintenance whether it's electricity, it's actually better for you to probably to buy like a wind generator than for you to invest in FPGA because it was like, you could totally just, if you could get free electricity if you already have the hardware, like if you already broke even then electricity is your only thing, right? And if you could somehow get rid of that, then what's stopping you from mining? Like if electricity is not a problem and bandwidth is not a problem then you can mine definitely no matter what the price is. And if you use the wind generator to create the electricity to do the mining? Not yet. That'd be cool. Wind powered mining. Yeah, wind solo. You know, I think alternative energy, like everybody's pushing for it, like Conidison is pushing for it in our tri-state. I think that that eventually become a big thing. I think they're actually installing these like water turbines in the Hudson River to power stuff and that's going to go in a few years of salt. But yeah, yeah. Well, I, you know, I don't know about the future but you can't, you can't really hope to really predict energy costs in the future. You know, we're running out of gasoline. I mean, in 50 or 100 years, you know, we'll probably have mined all the gasoline that can be mined and, you know, we'll have to look at other energy sources. But that's a whole different question. I don't think you can really try to predict energy cost and say it's going to go down in the future. So. And also with the new processors that will be invented, they might require little or no energy. You never know. We might build some sort of bioprocessor that doesn't actually require any energy. It just runs on carbon monoxide or something. Who knows, right?  But it is fascinating to- But currently, yeah. But if you calculate all the previous levels, then there were so many people that saw ahead and it wouldn't affect them. Yeah, yeah. Interesting, very interesting. So do you guys think that the idea of being able to re-mine coins that haven't been used in three years is a good idea? Well, not through. I threw that number out randomly. Yeah, just through. Yeah, yeah. But I think people should talk about it. Like, I think it's cool. I think it's interesting in thought experiment. I don't really see what value it adds to the bitcoins. And notice anything that's playing with the supply of bitcoins, I think, has the ability to kind of undermine it as an investment. Yeah. Well, it always gives a fixed value, though. That's the thing. If we're able to re-mine old coins, but it's not like you're making new coins. So essentially- Well, sort of it is, because they're coins that did not exist in the supply. If they're lost, they're like they don't exist. Right, exactly. So you are almost like making new coins. You know what I mean? Yeah, but it's semantics, right? But your supply is always fixed at $21 million. Not really, because if a million are lost, you only have $20 million. You see what I mean? Right, I mean, as far as calculations, I suppose it'd be nice to be able to say, oh, there's exactly $21 million coins in circulation right now. But even if somebody just moved their coins once every three years and doesn't spend them, they're not really adding any value into the economy. It's not affecting the price. So from an economics point of view, it really takes people actually being out there and valuing these coins, purchasing them on markets, using them for products in order for them to affect the economy. Yeah, interesting. It depends on your philosophy, I guess. Because if the grandkids open up the safe or some treasure box in grandma's attic after the funeral and they pull out this stock certificate, bearer certificate for general electric, 5,000 shares of general electric from 1932, that isn't going to happen if everything just expires. Or you could have a box. I mean, there's an art installation. There's actually an art installation from, like, I don't remember where it's from. But it puts itself on eBay all the time. It puts itself on eBay? Yeah, it puts itself on eBay. So you connect it, and it's a black box with an ethernet jack on it. And literally, you power it up and it will just sell itself on eBay. So you could literally have these installations that just send bitcoins to itself. Oh, yeah, well, there you go. There'll be a service to do that. You could have a service, or you could have a computer that would continually recycle the bitcoins from one wallet file to another. It's a service. The idea is that if that service or that computer is ever lost, let's say there's a huge fire or an asteroid hits the city or whatever, then those bitcoins aren't lost. They can be recovered where that time frame is. Maybe it's three, maybe it's 10 years, maybe it's 50 years. But that if you're no longer able to recycle them, because something broke down, then they're obviously dead. They're lost. And with this concept, you could then recover that safe. But remember, bitcoins are nearly infinitely divisible. So they're just digits. You could just move the decimal place, and there's never really a limit, because you could talk about thousands of a bitcoin, it all goes back to what kind of economy do you want to have? Yeah. Do you want to have an economy that's deflating or inflating, or is fixed? Right. I mean, from the economics view, in Bitcoin, with a fixed supply of $21 million is going to be deflationary. Because for there not to be deflation or inflation, you're supposed to actually expand the money supply in order to keep up with the size of the economy and the GDP. Exactly. So it's actually how much is happening in the economy, how big is the economy, how many transactions, how many people, how many products that it makes inflationary or deflationary, not just the number of coins. This whole thing is so fascinating. We could just go on forever. And we're out of time. I ran right up to the very last second. I hate to cut us off, but I want to thank you guys. Steven Wagner, Jared Ostmeyer, and David Wayne, who we lost on Skype, and obviously Yufu. Thanks for joining us on Thursday panel discussion Thursday. And we'll talk more. There's never an end. See you guys. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. Bye. Bye-bye.