Okay, so I want to tell you about all the stuff and Here we go reality check the fork happened. It was painful. It was painful for all of us We lived through the confused narratives the changing the moving goalposts. They moved more than the ball did the ball was kind of stationary and The constant fighting the bickering the trolls and everything. It's over. Okay, so it's now time to look forward and And and so we have two different visions for how this currency is or how the original currency could play out One of them is a store of value Proposition and they've been pushing that that that that vision pretty hard and they've been celebrating with champagne or whatever that thing is the the idea of high fees and let them do that let them let them drink their champagne and Let's focus on the the world ahead and that world starts with increased adoption and on this front You all have been doing a fantastic job. Okay, so the number of good news in terms of adoption that's coming in is is Incredibly good to hear and with adoption comes greater scale the need for greater and greater scale So how are we going to get that scale? Can we possibly tweak the block size forever? that's a good question and Indeed, so let's actually sort of make sure that we've established the baseline Increasing the block size was exactly the right first move. Okay, so we have extensive measurement studies on this my group was the first study of actual resources that Bitcoin knows actually possess and we've done longitudinal studies Spending multiple years on how much these these resources the network bandwidth and so forth have been increasing So I can tell you from a position of scientific measurement that it was indeed possible to Increase the block size without any threat to centralization as as the Bitcoin cash community did and in fact Continuing to tweak the the block size is going to be important because we don't live in a static world We have more and more bandwidth available and as we do we can increase the block size But will is that going to be enough and here? I'm here to tell you maybe something that you might not be so prepared to hear but it is true regardless Greg Maxwell and friends are not entirely wrong. Okay, you can't tweak the block size completely to You can't continually tweak the block size over and over again and and scale by just simply upping that one single parameter Demanding use cases like microtransactions internet of things and so forth Require a level of scale that you just can't get with bigger and bigger and bigger blocks Not only that but now that we have a sort of vibrant community We have to lead intellectually it is not sufficient to sort of take the code that's developed elsewhere and Incorporate here and it's very dangerous to be in a position where you are on an island some place And there's another island somewhere else and these people are living under a perhaps kind of insane perhaps self-imposed Resource restriction and developing a whole bunch of resourceful protocols as a result They can just come over to your island and suddenly bring you you know all sorts of things That that that you you might not be prepared for you need to be on the lead here So it's essential that we understand how to scale up further from here And what I'm going to do in this talk is talk a little bit about options for scale both on chain and both also off chain Because the main my main point there is going to be you've been indoctrinated with the lightning network But there are other options available and there was a coherent vision for off-chain scaling that fits into the Bitcoin cash world And I'll talk if there's time available about scaling in the network the often underlooked Sort of orphaned child of this whole stack is the network stack So let me tell you a little bit about Bitcoin and G and G is short for next generation This is work from a long time ago now maybe four years ago that we did when this whole thing was just starting We decided me and and it I a all and Robert friend in this and and another student if a ginger to to see how one might Scale up Bitcoin without changing any of the the core vision parameters if you will that is retain the miners Retain almost everything there is to retain about the system when it comes to security when it comes to assumptions of trust and Yet allow a couple of orders of magnitude by a couple. I just mean one or two Unfortunately, this is not going to get us all the way to a million This is just one piece of this like three pronged puzzle So I will tell you a little bit about Bitcoin and G But I would really very much encourage you to read the paper to take a look at it because this is sort of a road map for How I believe a proper scientific inquiry about scaling ought to happen The paper does three things it proposes a protocol and you've all seen protocols proposed Yeah, everyone seen those terrible white papers, you know a sends a message to be decent You know those sort of descriptive things about how you could do things But in addition to doing that protocol description, it also introduces metrics Quantitative measures for how we can achieve how we can measure whether or not we're achieving our goals and then it actually develops a full simulation framework for Running the entire Bitcoin network in a data center and simulating it all and then it actually looks at the result I want to give you a sort of a sense for what we did So just so that we sort of understand how not to fall into that pitfall where you've got sort of Developers making up stuff and doing design by gut. Okay, so they're good. No, we all know how that actually played out So let me tell you a little bit about Bitcoin and G the core core thing here The core insight is to notice that in Bitcoin blocks serve two purposes Okay, so here's a block and there's one component of this block That is the crypto puzzle and what it really does if you if you sort of put on the right glasses Is that the crypto puzzle gives the right to a miner to dictate what happened in the last 10 minutes? It's sort of like a leader election by solving the crypto puzzle You become the leader for the preceding 10 minutes and you get to then Serialize what happened in those 10 minutes you get to add to the end of this distributed ledger Once you see things this way once you realize that this is a Retrospective protocol where we elect a leader who then determines what happened in the past We can then make a very small change and a very small change takes us to an interesting Interesting location now. What would we like to do? We'd love to be able to expand the block size We'd love to have huge blocks, but if we do that then we start getting forks We start leaving the smaller miners behind or We might want to have huge frequency of blocks But again if we do that we leave small miners behind again That's going to cause Centralization what I would love to do is to be at the intersection of these things I would love to have low latency and high throughput but without a fear of forks and If I go back to this picture when this stuff is happening when regular Bitcoin transactions are happening What we really have is a network that's mostly quiescent There's almost nothing happening except you know Joe pays you know Jane and so forth Just transactions are being floated around then suddenly a block is found and everybody goes into a frenetic activity They try to disseminate this block as fast as possible and then you know it goes back to quiescent state again It would be wonderful if we did not have such frenetic periods because those periods are really the stressful times So how do we do this? Well? I'd like to have you know as I said high throughput low latency secure protocol So here is how Bitcoin ng proposes to do this. It says take your blocks Split them into two that serve two different purposes we're going to have something that we call a key block and That key block is going to serve the purpose of selecting a leader if you will and And the number of micro blocks and the micro blocks will serialize what's what's happening as it happens in real time and Instead of a retrospective protocol that serializes what's happened in the last ten minutes We're going to have a forward-looking protocol that selects someone and And that someone then says okay this happened and this happened and this happened and this happened So how does that look? Okay? It looks like this inside every key blocks key blocks are going to be found with proof of work Using the same old miners we always have Inside the coin base. There is going to be a key just like there is a key today There is going to be no other identification of the miner no IPs no ports Those are all immaterial and not at all on the blockchain on the ng blockchain But there is a key just like there is today and that coin base key is then used to mint a series of small Micro blocks that contain transactions as they happen So the key things to notice here are that key blocks are very small and rare They come every ten minutes just like before Micro blocks are very very small, but they're frequent so instead of having a giant block every ten minutes And you're going into that frenetic mode what we're going to do is we're going to smear the creation of that block Across those ten minutes and take away the centralization pressure from the system So pictorially how does this look so here? Let's let's imagine that we have a blockchain those those two green things show us that the tail of the blockchain And then a miner comes in and they find a block a key block that says hey I found a good crypto puzzle and here's my key and From that point there's no other content in that block It's just their key that accomplishes the leader election task and from that point on as Transactions come in that miner takes that transaction signs it with the key in his coin base So he then starts minting these micro blocks up there that I've shown two of that That continually extend the the blockchain those blocks are threaded together in the in the typical blockchain manner Okay, so you can't just take one out without breaking the entire chain So so that of course gives us this ever expanding chain And at some point some other miner in this case the yellow miner might come in and find a key block of his own And he will hook in you know to this this ever expanding chain at whatever point that that he hooks in that Okay, and that might actually cut off a couple of the micro blocks, and that's okay so so the The interval between these key blocks as I mentioned is still ten minutes so the centralization pressure is completely off and And the the frenetic activity is reduced immensely the block sizes here are now tiny And they're actually distributed across a bunch of time now those of you who are technical in the audience would say hey That sounds Nice, but there are all sorts of attacks you could imagine yes indeed There are all sorts of attacks they come down to two Two formats if you will one is the leader could hide micro blocks or he could ignore micro Microblocks that is if you are the red fellow here You could you could hook in not at the tail end But earlier and try to steal some micro blocks for yourself Or if you're the blue guy then you create a long chain, but you don't give it to someone you squat on it Hoping that you will be the red guy and and sort of extend your own chain longest yourself Those are both reasonable attacks and and in fact that's where the discussion gets a bit complicated I'm not going to go into this too much except to say the reward structure is a little different Okay, so to gain theoretically incentivize people the right way Here in this universe what we what we do is we set up a slightly different game Where the miners are compensated both for the work they did and also for the work that they extended Okay, so we're trying to make sure that everybody works most for the public good And so that red fellow is not only going to get some money for the red micro blocks He means but he also gets some reward for the blue micro blocks that he extends So that particular setup will require some kind of math and I'm not going to go into it Except sort of to flash it at you and say okay Well, so if you read the paper you will see that there are some constraints on On what that payoff ought to be and it turns out that if you actually compensate somebody 40% for their own blocks and 60% for the blocks they extend It leads leads to sort of a virtuous cycle where everybody has the right incentives to work together and extend the longest chain So so that's the core idea. I'm very happy to take more questions about this After the talk if you will but but then now what what next and the reason why I came here is Probably to try to sort of talk to you about how to really do this Okay So at this point one could start emailing and and start hiring troll armies or a small army of people who fixed the narrative or whatever The proper terminology is but the real right thing to do at this point is to actually come up with some metrics And I was shocked when after three years of this block size debate nobody actually did this So what we did was okay. Well, we're going to propose a new protocol. We should know how to measure this This is this is the only way to do science. So we came up with with about five metrics Mining power utilization fairness consensus delay time to win and time to prune. I'll talk about some of them later on But you need metrics if you're going to be doing this And the second thing is you need an apparatus for measuring and evaluating protocols We then went into the lab and we measured everything There's the measure for every single public Bitcoin node and we've been doing this for years now So our goal was to create a miniature world a replica of the Bitcoin network inside our own basement So for every node out there I want to have a node in the basement Configured with the exact latency and bandwidth characteristics between that node and every other node So that's that's the miniature world idea so Let me sort of show you some of these metrics mining power utilization is very simple It's the amount of of hash power that went into the chain And if you look at this for Bitcoin, it's in the 99% if you look at it for Ethereum. It's actually by design It's lower It's an interesting metric. It's a simple one the time to win and time to prune are the complicated ones Fairness is an interesting one You want to make sure that the people who experience orphans I experience them in regard to their hash power You don't want the small p small miners experiencing more orphans Because if that's what you have then the small miners will tend to coalesce and that will give you centralization pressure So and there are a bunch of other metrics as well So we built this miniature world thing It's actually very difficult to figure out the network conditions between nodes But we did our best to do that and that we created a one-to-six replica for the purposes of this paper back in 2014 one-to-six the replica of the Bitcoin Bitcoin network So let's see and then we took realistic data from the hash power distribution. So here are some Interesting graphs. I think I'll flash only one at you On purpose back then we did not want to take a side in the Bitcoin side of Bitcoin block size debate So we we changed the x-axis quite a bit So that it wouldn't be directly comparable to to any of the sizes that you know So here we essentially changed a couple of parameters so that we could see interesting effects But they're not going to correspond directly to sizes that you know because the frequency has been changed And we also don't have no we can't wait ten minutes with nothing happening in between key blocks We don't have that much life to live If we did it that way we had to speed everything up So just to give you a sense though the entire block size debate is being was was being waged on What would be considered the left-hand side of this this graph? So going from one one megabyte to eight megabytes is essentially always Summer over here. So the big fight was around from around here to around over here You can see the error bars so people are getting really worked up over over that over essentially noise Okay, so you could have gone to the right and there would have been no change in fairness At all and so that entire narrative just quantitatively did not make sense We tried to sort of bring this up with the the core devs and so forth But of course they have a bunch of mechanisms for for shutting down any any scientific discussion. So No, I didn't mean to I don't maybe that was too harsh. I mean, they're individually great people But but the forums did not lend themselves to a scientific discussion. So Let's see So you can see the the interesting thing here. They are not wrong So as you make the block size bigger and bigger Bitcoin does decay its performance drops In fact immensely and you can see of course that Bitcoin and G does not and it should not be surprising because it's by design still issuing one block every ten minutes and Is not going to suffer from from the same problems as as regular legacy systems So I have a bunch of other graphs. I'm going to skip this stuff so What's the sort of takeaway from this portion of the talk reparameterization can only take us so far and So maybe Bitcoin ng can give us in the medium term a way to scale up if if reparameterization Runs into trouble. Okay, so I'm not here to push Bitcoin ng You know, you guys can take it or not But at least you should know that it's there Okay, and it's good to know that there is actually a path out in the future so But how much can it actually help it gives us about a hundred transactions per second or thereabouts and that's good Okay, I mean it gave us a hundred transactions per second back back then right so or thereabouts It's it's good, but it's not quite Google scale. It's not going to be IOT scale So what should we do? Can we do better than this and I want to talk to you a little bit about going off chain Okay, so you've all been indoctrinated you've been sold the idea that the only layer two solution is the lightning network and I get I will grant to you. I will grant to you that it's got the coolest name Okay, it's got a cooler name than what I'm about to show you, but it's a false narrative Okay, it wasn't the first layer to solution and it's not the best layer to solution There are other alternatives that every community should should explore and I'll talk about one of them So let me tell you a little bit about the lightning layer problems I'm not sure if I have enough time to do this, but I'm not gonna be able to fix all of them Some are inherent to layer two. Okay, so I have a slightly different vision for a layer two than what you hear from core But let me actually all the hands are going up. Yeah, okay So I've been hoping to have some time to write a blog post about this Well, the first and biggest problem is it has limited capacity the capacity of that network is unknown Despite so many years of noise around it. Nobody has actually gone and done a scientific study and That actual emergent capacity is going to depend on the credit relationships between people and we don't know what that's going to be like And it's not that that credit graph is going to look nothing like the Facebook social graph The fact that I know and love Tariq does not mean that I'm going to extend to him You know a hundred thousand dollars worth of credit. It's just sorry, but it's not gonna happen so that network may or may not actually have any carrying capacity and It's economically broken So I was a broken there is no benefit unless the endpoints have frequent interactions So Tariq and I and end up interacting once a year that is not enough of a reason to open up a channel between us even if he were credit worthy for a hundred thousand and Worse an exchange needs to have funds on hand tied into channels that are proportional to the float for per person times the number of people that they want to support so Suppose somebody could receive up to ten thousand dollars from Coinbase and Coinbase has I don't know ten million users So ten million times ten thousand Ten billion a hundred billion dollars gets tied up. Is that right? I don't know That was so you know in that that future world where they want to do that if LN really takes off a lot of coins Are going to be all tied into these payment channels The system is insecure requires new intermediaries, you know So you all know about the Mali ability fix the kitchen sink known as Segwit Segwit That if I were to propose it, I'm sure it would not have been accepted and yet somehow Somehow it got into Bitcoin core So so it requires keys to be kept online You need this new thing called watch guards to watch the chain 24-7 or else you lose funds you blink you lose But I close the channel with an old state and you lose your money and counterparty misbehavior can lock up funds Some bad thing happens and now we have to wait for time out. So Let's see it erodes privacy I Don't know. So yeah. Oh, yeah, this is important. I should mention this routing involves an inherent trade-off between finding out what paths are available in the network and That is an inherent trade-off between efficiency and privacy. So to find a good money route to you I need to know about everybody's credit relationships And I need to be able to do this in real time as it changes And if I were to do that then I'm actually monitoring you right? I find out that that gentleman over there has a credit relationship with the the the person behind him Well, I do it over and over again and suddenly if the capacity changes I know that somebody paid someone else over that link and that is is that gives me the ability to do what we call network Tomography and that is not at all a good outcome Routing is difficult except for hub and spoke models and you know, the user experiences overall a mess So will I be able to fix all of this? No, I sadly it requires much more research to fix all of them But I will tell you about how to fix some of them in particular The capacity of the network I can't fix But we can fix the economic model and we can fix the the insecurity the malleability fix the requirements for malleability fix So I will let me present to you one way of doing layer two that works on Bitcoin cash today Without segwit without any malleability fixes and the core sort of foundation for this is a new Capability that new chips have many new chips from Intel arm AMD and ledger and so forth have a secure element capable of doing three things this element can run some code with Confidentiality without revealing what it is do what that code is doing internally with integrity without allowing you to attach a Debugger and change what the code is doing or allowing the code to be manipulated in any other shape or form Even if you are attached to the bus even if your unepoxied USB port has some foreign device Even then you cannot molest what that code is doing and then the third thing that you get out of these These new chips is attestation and this is the critical part I can ask a question to Omri Let's say and say what hash are you running right now and he has to give me as his chip Will give me a fingerprint of the code He's running so I know exactly what behaviors he can engage in and I also know what behaviors He won't engage in and this is the critical insight so instead of a Byzantine world these chips carry us to a fail-stop world So the worst you can do is stop execution, but you can't willy-nilly misbehave so Yeah, I mentioned this you only need to trust the code that's running inside the chip and it has this fingerprint thing That's so Alice can ask Bob What's what's your hash and he says something like it's a dead beef and you know exactly what Bob is going to do? Bob himself cannot molest his chip to execute something other than the dead beef code after that attestation So let's see the key thing with t-chan is that both parties exchange their secret keys and become capable of Closing the channel on their own without cooperation from the other side and And so there is a typical very similar to lightning There's a setup event where one of the parties talks to the blockchain, but subsequent to the setup They no longer have to communicate with the blockchain Alice can pay Bob without monitoring the blockchain at all Hey, this is crucial.  We're in the middle of the Sahara and we exchange exchange cash securely without ever ever touching the blockchain itself at all and when we go back We then one of us will close the channel and we can't close the channel with a stale state Why not because this is a hardware solution if it were software. I wouldn't know what you're doing You would have access to all previous states. So if you read the lightning paper about it's what 60-something pages and 59 of those pages are all about what do you do about the stale state? What do I do when the counterparty uses an old state? That's advantageous to him to close the channel that cannot happen here I know that he discarded the old states because I know what Cody was running because it was running on the secure hardware And I knew the hash of it. So We implemented this and we're seeing enormous enormous throughput per channel that's on my dinky laptop I was getting 78,000 transactions per second when sending money from London to Ithaca and the delay the the latency of a transaction in this universe is 0.4 milliseconds plus Network transfer so in this case about 40 milliseconds to cross the Atlantic and then fraction of a millisecond to actually make the payment So if you have multiple channels the throughput scales linearly and as I said it doesn't require a malleability fix We just don't care about about misbehavours involving malleability So now you can say well, aren't you trusting Intel here or aren't you trusting somebody? Yes. Yes, we are absolutely that's the trade-off we're making so That that is true But I would like to point out that you also are trusting Intel last time I checked all of you just issued a Transaction without manually checking the computations, right? So nobody has a little abacus where they read it the the modular Exponentiation it's a little tough to do so so you are already trusting that hardware base anyway But it's also important to notice that the trust is channel bound So if Intel decides to misbehave they cannot affect the system they can perhaps manipulate and and allow my counterparty to steal the funds I have in the channel with my counterparty that is the max So if I have a thousand dollars open to you and you're in cahoots with Intel you could steal my my thousand dollars and Intel makes about fifty eight billion dollars a year whether or not they would do that with you seems seems kind of nonsensical to me and But much more importantly we're not beholden to just Intel. There are many other vendors and And one could could actually conceive of other ways of doing this so that you you don't trust any single vendor alone So overall if you were to compare t-chan to lightning network, it's more secure except it's it's more secure because the keys Are not online and software They are in hardware itself. So it's it's hardens the implementation Counter-party misbehavior does not lack of funds the t-chan approach requires no change to the underlying blockchain No segwit. It doesn't require a change to the ecosystem. We don't need watch guards. We don't need banks That's the whole reason why we are here, right to be our own banks So you don't you don't have to be beholden to someone who's connected to the blockchain 724 and monitors it for you Or you don't you are not beholden to a routing hub It's economically efficient. I didn't mention this perhaps but exchanges need to tie up only money that's proportional to their float and So that gives us a factor of n improvement. Okay, so instead of n times float. We just have the float Coinbase will spend at most ten million dollars per day paying out. That's the amount of funds they need to have in the channels and So what's the vision here? It is not my vision that we employ this to create connections between you and your aunt Bertha, okay? That is not a workable model. That is the model that leads us down that UX user experience That's going to be absolutely terrible, but these kinds of solutions are crucial for frequently interacting businesses This is the kind of thing you need when you have two businesses like exchanges that frequently communicate It can give us great improvements in arbitrage and prices between exchanges So this is that's I think my vision that that in fact, that's the vision we're working towards which is not This deployment for users. Although the users could actually just as equally participate in this model I think that's a that's a bit of a pipe dream The sort of the the more sensible approach is to actually connect this to exchanges So and of course we do multi hop transactions and so on and so forth But these are all kind of if you ask me as an academic I will say these multi hop transactions are an academic idea. They're very cute very very cool We worked really hard to make sure they're atomic So your money doesn't get paid doesn't get stuck between your aunt Bertha and and like the person She knows in Boston and so forth on when it's getting routed So either payments happen up fully or they don't happen at all. So that's a very nice thing to have but But I don't think that I just don't think that that's where this this vision is going to take us The this I don't think that layer 2 should be should be deployed to the masses It's just not ready the routing will not be ready for another five to ten years at at best the routing protocols So let me just take one more sort of segment and talk to you about another layer the long Forgotten the long overlooked network layer and tell you a little bit about the work that we've been doing to speed up Communication of financial data between people who have it and the people who want it So it's users exchanges have it miners demanded users have it miners demanded or vice versa Miners have it and exchanges and users want want access to blocks So how what are the sort of the options here? Well, let me tell you a little bit about what happens today in a peer-to-peer system like Bitcoin We have a source a relay and a peer And this is time going down in this case and the source might have a block that they have discovered And they want to transmit that block. That's the start time That's the end time and let's say that takes time beta relay gets it relay checks the block and You know it takes time alpha to check the block then relay transmits it to the peer and that takes another beta And this poor guy receives the block at alpha plus 2 beta. Okay, so if there are n hops is alpha plus n beta so Yeah, okay, so and sorry. No, no, I apologize. It's not alpha plus and it's n times alpha plus beta is the is the full-on transmission latency so can we do this can we do this entire process better and the answer is of course and This is something that we already did for the Falcon system Falcon relay network that actually powers both Bitcoin cash and BTC so let me tell you about what Falcon does. It does the following thing a source finds a block The relay receives it. He checks only the header to make sure that the source is not misbehaving and then sends it on to recipients so so indeed it takes the the the Transmission of the block still takes time beta and but the delays the alphas have been compressed and If you have n hops then we have a big savings of n beta n times beta Remember that beta is the the significant time here So we actually took out a linear factor We took out the whole and to speed up dissemination of financial data So where does that leave us? It leaves us with new infrastructure that can be used to serve as the foundation of Currencies and Bitcoin cash could use it but many other currencies could use it as well In fact, we're talking to various different projects that want to use it as sort of an Akamai for financial data Whereas Akamai is sort of destined or designed for sort of throughput of web information This is for low latency. It's an overlay network for low latency with a bunch of nodes scattered around the globe Whose purpose is to send data from people who have it to people who demand it? So that brings me to the end of my talk Oh, I'm gonna conclude by pointing out that it's a super exciting time to be working on cryptocurrencies I showed you three three projects one is NG. It's available as a medium term solution for For on-chain scaling I talked to you about teach and and I hope I sort of tried to impart upon you The the possibility that there are solutions other than the lightning network out there and with the right sort of Culture we can pursue them and we can do better than what LN can do. It is not the end all of layer 2 third is I think I tried to sort of Discuss with you the idea that the network layer is has been often overlooked and improvements there can can actually greatly improve the scale of cryptocurrencies and If I leave you with one message if I could leave you with one message it would be this Whatever we all do we have to use scientific methods in discussing protocol changes. Thank you all Yeah All right Can we please welcome that presentation with great Q&A questions We only have about five minutes. Do we have any questions from the audience that reflects the quality of the presentation? I'm Justin Bonds from a cyber capital first of all I want to say I have a lot of respect for for the work you've been doing and we need more real scientists in the space So I really love that My question was regarding mining Centralization in the way that I see it miners generally don't run nodes pools run nodes And because of the nature of variance and the way that the Bitcoin network works will only really be 10 to 30 pools And I would argue these 10 to 30 pools can afford to run, you know, very large for nodes. So I'll just I was like your thoughts on that. That's sure. I think you're right So how can I what you so what got said was the minor community? will tend to center will tend to sort of coalesce into Dozens of of players and these players have the resources to have actually strong machinery I agree with this and how could I not agree with this because we have eight years of history to look back upon and that's what we see so indeed that's that's entirely true and And yeah, I don't think there was anything that I said in my presentation That actually conflicts with what you said as you're absolutely right So but can those pools afford to increase? Let's say block size to infinity. No No, I would just if I could make one more quick question Well, I would say I think you have a point in that We can't scale to cover all use cases and I agree we need second layers for micro transactions and and so forth but but I would say that The cash use case and also considering that that pools run for nodes, you know I see that is being quite viable For being on chain. Oh, you agree. I agree. I agree. So look, I'm not saying something like Bitcoin it's a Bitcoin and you should be deployed tomorrow That's how I started the very first thing was to improve was to increase the block size the next step I think I was I have a bullet point that said next step should probably be to tweak it up as Technology permits us and we should keep on doing that But also I don't think we could tweak it up to infinity So there will be a time hopefully in our lifetime that we will see when these kinds of things start to bite us And at least we should be able to sleep at night. I personally can't sleep well at night unless I know That I'm covered, you know down the line So now I think I hope many of you can go well, okay If we actually hit that bottleneck, we know exactly what to do My old question one more Make it good. All right, make it good Great presentation So I was wondering is there anything that can be learned from Ethereum and whether you've looked at any of the stuff that they're doing around sharding for things for example Yes, there's a lot to learn from Ethereum So we did we just published a paper last February at the financial cryptography conference that looked at centralization quantified centralization for Bitcoin pre fork and Ethereum and it was a longitudinal study expanding multiple years So there were some funny funny results from there And there are too many to do that would be a separate presentation on its own. Well, I'll give you one hint Ethereum actually has less resources the average Ethereum node has less bandwidth available to it than Bitcoin nodes and Yet Bitcoin actually Ethereum processes more transactions per second than Bitcoin So they're operating at a higher point in throughput with less resources. So it's quite possible Another thing to notice I mean there were like a lots of interesting Outcomes in that space. They I mean we could go on and on they they suffer from more orphans They have a slightly different protocol designed to compensate for that They definitely need something like what I alluded to at the network layer to try to reduce that And I can just go on like this for a long time But the paper actually makes a cogent case of those two systems But sharding specifically have you looked at sharding at all? Yeah, no, we are we've thought about sharding quite a bit It's it's definitely one of the things that is being actively worked upon by my group and by my colleagues at I see three It would be great to see I mean I think the the framework that you put with with measurements and matrix is incredible because that will make these Different approaches comparable side-by-side and that's that's the really exciting bit. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you I mean for awesome presentation awesome question


Dear students, in this module, we're going to talk about how media affects the culture and our class. So media plays a crucial role in shaping the cultural norms, beliefs and values. You all are perhaps very much acquainted with the modern media, which includes the social media as well, and perhaps you would have been watching your favorite dramas and movies, including Bollywood, Hollywood or Pakistani dramas and movies. So these all have very gigantic impact on your culture, on your identity and also on your thought process. However, it is so subtle and so unconscious that we absorb them without even noticing the difference that the influence and impact of media on our mindsets, we can't even realize and our preferences, our ideology and our belief system gradually start changing due to this media effect. In Pakistan, for example, the media has contributed to the growth of consumerism, particularly among the urban middle class. So you see that you find the commercials everywhere in almost every drama, almost every telecast that is being viewed by the viewers, because media's source of income is that commercialization. So that is why these commercials are having a very strong impact on your mindset, particularly with respect to the way, how you purchase the things, how you are required to buy certain commodities in the market. The effect of media, which is because of commercialization, in this, we change our ideology, our behavior and our practices in a way that we do not feel. So media has also been used for the reinforcement and perpetuation of traditional gender roles. For example, however, if you see that in the recent past, media have modern gender roles to promote or modernization, which actually creates a kind of contradiction between what your society traditionally believes and how the modern values are being portrayed in the media. For example, when you see that the difference are very clear difference between your attires or dressing patterns, media can that your dresses use or your real life can the dresses use, which are completely different than what actually in your real life, what you're actually practicing. So it also creates a sense of confusion, particularly within your life ideology that how should I be dressed up and then the media has been used to create the idealized image of perfect Pakistani, which often reinforces the class and ethnic biases and ignores the diversity of experiences within the country that who should be Pakistani and how a Pakistani should look like, how Pakistani should behave, how a Pakistani should speak. So these these are, you know, the idealized images or idealized reflections being portrayed by the media, which creates a sense of spontaneity in your in your behavior in a way that you are always desiring to become one like that to become a person like that. The media has also been used to create a sense of national identity and pride, which has been used to strengthen the social cohesion in this country. For example, if you're watching a match between India and Pakistan, it gives you a strong sense of identity, a strong sense of pride if your team is winning as compared to that if your team is losing, then you equally feel disappointed. So this in a nutshell, we can say that media has a very strong effect or impact on your culture, on your identity and on your class status.


Penandarr good afternoon. Today, I'll be focusing on vaccination and the enormous amount of work to deliver what is the largest vaccination program that Wales has ever seen. We now have two Covid vaccines that we are using, the Ffizer-BioNTech and Oxford AstraZeneca vaccines. These are being used to protect thousands of people every day here in Wales. One third vaccine, the Moderna vaccine, was approved for use on Friday, but we won't be able to use that vaccine for a while yet as the first supplies will not be available to the UK until spring this year. These vaccines offer us a path out of the pandemic. They offer us a brighter future and a different relationship with coronavirus, one without so many rules and restrictions. Yn ymgymwysig o'r NHS ydych chi'n hyn yn blyneddol i'r ddweud i'r ffordd o'r pwylo'r gwaith yn gweithio'r ddaf a'r gweithio'r gwaith. I gael, rwy'n gwneud y cwmparau'n cyfan. Mae hyn yn cyhoedd ymddechrau'n cael ei ddweud i'ch bwysig o'r gweithio'r cyfan o'r mwyn. Mae'n amgylchedd ar gyfer sy'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Ac yna ddiddordeb nodi yn unig. Rhefwm edrych yn gwybod, ymdd ar y ddiddordeb wahanol o 5.5 miliwn ynoli ar y Ddwylo, yn gwybod ar y dyfodol yr adroddau sy'n gyblwyd gymaen i ddiddorol i ddodbit a hunainnol, you may also referred to as the JCVI. Yn ddoddi'r lluniau wandyngau i ddodd yn amlwg hanfodol, ddiddorol ag 10 o'r oedd lluniau, more than 86,000 people that had their first dose. We will be publishing figures every weekday from now on. The plan that I'm publishing today sets out three key milestones. By the middle of February, we aim to have offered vaccination to all care home residents and staff, frontline health and social care staff, everyone over the age of 70, and everyone who's on the clinically extremely vulnerable list or the shielded list. This amounts to about 700,000 people here in Wales. If we can vaccinate this group of people, it would protect those most at risk of serious illness and harm, including mortality, if they catch coronavirus. By the spring, subject to vaccine supply, we will have offered vaccination to everyone in the phase one priority groups. That's everyone over the age of 50 and all those who are at risk if they have an underlying health condition. By the autumn, our focus will have been on offering COVID vaccines to everyone else in line with the latest advice from the JCVI. We're also putting some early markers down. By 18 January, all frontline Welsh ambulance service staff will have been offered a vaccination. All people living and working in care homes will have been offered a vaccination by the end of this month. The number of GP practices providing vaccines closer to people's homes will have risen to 250 by the end of January as supplies of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine increase. These milestones will of course depend on Wales receiving regular supplies of the vaccines to match our ambitions and our ability to deliver. We have good supplies of the Pfizer vaccine because we've been holding on to stock for the second doses in line with the original MHRA rules. The MHRA are of course the independent regulator. You remember that these changed at New Year and the second dose is now being rolled up up to 12 weeks after the first which allows us to speed up the roll-up of the initial dose. And it's important to remember that the first dose of the vaccine provides significant protection from harm that the virus would otherwise cause. We have more than 250,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine which we expect to use by mid-Febru with more coming at the end of this month to the start of February. The Pfizer vaccine is mainly being given in mass vaccination centres to frontline health and care staff. But we are also vaccinating care home residents and staff and people over the age of 80 until the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine becomes available in much larger volumes. When we started using the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in early December, we had just seven centres, one in each of our health boards. Today we have 22 centres and that would increase to 35 vaccination centres in the next couple of weeks. Now these will be a mixture of mass vaccination centres and some smaller clinics. This map shows where those centres are. It will be available online and on social media and we will keep it updated. We've received about 44,000 doses of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine for use in the first fortnight. But we have been given assurances by the UK government that this will increase rapidly from next week allowing us to increase the scale and the pace of our roll-outs here in Wales. Now as you will know by now, the Oxford vaccine can be stored in a fridge and is much easier to transport than the Pfizer vaccine. It is being used to vaccinate the over 80s and it's been taken to care homes to vaccinate residents and staff. More than 100 GP practices will be running clinics by the end of this week and we have 14 mobile units taking the vaccine to care homes. Of course, this will then increase to 250, 250 GP practices by the end of this month. The military is supporting the roll-out of the vaccination programme in Wales with 14 immunisers working at centres and 70 other personnel working in the centre. On Friday, the first community pharmacy will start to provide the Oxford vaccine in a three-day trial that will start in north-west Wales. The roll-out of the Oxford vaccine will then be extended across primary care. Vaccination is life-saving and in this pandemic it could be life-changing for all of us. This is a race against the virus to save as many lives as possible. The team Wales is rolling out the biggest vaccination programme we have ever seen with the help of a small army of NHS staff, health care professionals, military staff and volunteers. As we speed up the roll-out of vaccines across Wales, it's more important than ever that we follow the rules to keep all of us safe. That means staying at home and working from home wherever possible. Keeping our distance from others, washing our hands often, good ventilation and air circulation and if we do have to go out, wearing a face mask when we're in public places. Before I take questions I want to make people aware that there are a number of scams involving COVID including a particularly nasty one which people have been tricked into paying for a COVID vaccine and then jabbed in the arm. I want to be clear, our NHS will never ask anyone to pay for a COVID vaccine. These are free. The NHS will never ask for your bank details and vaccines are not being delivered to your front door by people who have not been identified as NHS staff. Everyone will be contacted directly by our NHS either by phone or by letter advising you about where you will have your vaccine. If you think you have been targeted please tell someone that you trust. Thank you very much. I will now take questions from journalists but as usual all the answers will be broadcast live on our social media channels. The first question today is from Adrian Masters at ITV Wales. Thank you Health Minister. When you say that you will or you hope to have vaccinated 700,000 people by mid-Febru do you mean that they would have one dose or both of the doses of the vaccine that was needed? I know that the BMA expressed concern about the decision to only vaccinate or initially to only vaccinate with one dose when they met you on Friday and also talked about anger, fear and mistrust amongst doctors which is not what you want at this stage. How can you address their concerns? So the position by mid-Febru is that the first 700,000 people on the priority list should have had their first dose of either vaccine. Now that's really good news because as you'll have heard not just from the Independent Expert Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation but all four chief medical officers across the UK and indeed Public Health Wales and other public health agencies each of the vaccines provide a high level of protection against harm from coronavirus. That's really good news for all of us. The second dose is important because it does have some impact on improving the protection but in particular we think it will provide longer term protection as well and so this is the choice that the JCVI and indeed our chief medical officers have had to weigh up before giving advice to Governs across the UK and their advice was if you think of it in this way if you have two doses of the vaccine available you could choose to give that to one person to provide them with full excellent protection or you could decide to give those two doses to two different people to provide both of them with high level protection. That's the advice that we have received from the JCVI from our chief medical officers from our public health experts that means we'll actually protect more people avoid more hospitalisation and frankly and honestly the clear advice that I've had is that doing things this way will avoid more deaths. Now in the face of that very clear advice I don't see how it be tenable for me to stand here as a health minister for Wales and to decide to put to one side the advice of those public health experts are JCVI and the chief medical officer and instead do something different knowing very well that public health advice that I've received is that would cost extra lives unnecessarily. So understand that changing the advice as it came through when people some had had their second dose appointments come through will be unsettling for some people but there'll be BMA members of course who will have given that advice. BMA members who no doubt sit around the JCVI table remotely now to give advice to chief medical officers and Governs across the UK and indeed the public. So understand the anxiety some will feel but I believe this is the right choice to make and it's my decision based on the advice this is how we'll roll out our priorities and in doing so we'll provide the best possible protection and we'll save more lives right across the country. Thank you. This is a question about child care which has come from an ITV Wales viewer Sarah White who but she expresses what many others have asked and it's a question that I know you've been asked to before now. Why is child care still open? She asks. We in child care work in very close contact with children all day we provide intimate care we have to comfort the children. In my mind we've been left a friend for ourselves and the Welsh Government has no regard for us. What can you say to Sarah and her concerns? Well we're acting as ever on the advice or first question was about advice we've received about how to have the biggest possible public health impact to avoid mortality and harm to people and these choices are a balance of course. Now the choice about childcare and in particular about early years childcare I do understand why people may wonder and ask the questions that are being asked but the Welsh Government certainly isn't abandoning people to fend for themselves we're making our choices based on the evidence and advice we receive and it's still the case that particularly for children we think that particularly for younger children they play a lesser role in transmission and so we're not risking people's safety in that way and we're also looking at how that point we made earlier about how you protect people at the greatest level of vulnerability from harm. So that's what we're doing so there'll be people who may be on an early access to the vaccine because they're in one of the priority groups because they're aged or underlying healthcare conditions so they will have their vaccine early and childcare is enabled to stay open we're not requiring childcare businesses to stay open in the private sector we're providing a framework of businesses to continue to run to provide childcare that is essential for many people in essential services. Now I've talked before about the fact that our NHS is running with about 10% of staff vacancies from sickness and from self isolation requirements largely driven by COVID if there weren't childcare available some of those people we'd have a more significant challenge with our numbers so I think about balancing all the different harms in every choice that we're making we're certainly not forgetting about our childcare workforce or indeed the interests of children and young people so there'll be more to come and more to learn and as I said several times before on this platform many others if the evidence changes again then we have to be prepared to make a different decision this is all about how we protect the public all about how we keep well safe. Thank you Adrian I've now got Owen Clarke from BBC Wales. You claim in your opening statement health minister to have made a good start in terms of vaccine rollout but yet we have dozens of people getting in touch with us and certain and anxious about when it will be their turn and some GP surgeries are posting publicly on Twitter saying they are receiving fewer doses than they were expecting. Why do you think that they are so annoyed? Well I think a number of people are anxious because this is a worrying time and it's entirely understandable on a human level why people are concerned and I think given that we have made a start in Wales but we recognise that other UK countries have gone slightly faster than we have I think when we say we have made a good start that reflects the fact that the 86,000 figure that we can report from yesterday to the people who have had their first dose does show a significant acceleration on the week before with more than doubled the rate of delivery of the vaccine over the last week so the significant step of delivery that I've described is already taking place and that's evidenced by the figures and you'll continue to see the daily figures the increasing delivery of the vaccination programme so I think that will give people confidence. I understand why some general practices will be frustrated about the vaccine supplies but we're delivering the AstraZeneca vaccine in supplies that we have to keep it going and as I said the availability of that vaccine is the current rate limiting step and significantly increasing our delivery because we know there are a range of general practices and others who could deliver more if we had more supply the supply they're being given is supply for the week it's not the stretch through for the whole population that they're covering so it's week to week supply that's being rolled out as we get more supply we'll push out more supply to general practices and others as I've described now look forward to community pharmacy coming on board as well so we have a much greater spread of people who will be able to deliver the programme. I understand why some people are are still concerned about when they'll get their appointment but as you'll know from colleagues on the BBC who have been reporting this today there are more and more people reporting they've had their vaccine and really pleasantly people reporting they've had a very good experience whether in a max vaccination centre or with the local general practitioner or with the homes who are going out to provide the vaccine to care homes so uh as I've said we're making faster progress in the last week I expect even faster progress of this week as we move forward because we'll need to continue to step up the pace if we're going to get through the first four priority groups by the middle of February as I expect we will do. Thank you for that um so might ask why it's taken a month from the appearance of the first vaccine for you to come up with a plan or to publish a plan and you acknowledge there that perhaps the Venetians were quicker out of the blocks than Wales but what was the limiting factor and what was different in terms of our position compared to theirs you just mentioned your belief that the supply was a limiting factor do you are you saying that Wales got less supply? No with respect they were talking about supply for general practice to go faster that's really about the supply of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine about 44 000 doses of that for the first two weeks we think we're going to get significantly more after that that's assurance we've had from the UK government who are responsible for vaccine supply to Wales now that means we will be able to go much faster in general practice and that's the point that I'm making we know that with the Pfizer biotech vaccine initially the very clear instruction from the regulator the MHRA was we had to hold back 50% of that for the second dose the rules then changed at around about the new year and we then had the ability to push out more so again last week and the week following and indeed the week following that you can expect more of that Pfizer biotech vaccine to be pushed out to our national health service to then deliver in those mass vaccination centres so you'll see the rate increasing because we're able to use that vaccine in a different way and the supplies we've had in accordance with our population share we've actually got those supplies at the end of December for a supply that's supposed to last us through the month so we're getting them in batches that mean it's not a week to week delivery it's essentially a month supply to see us through we're expecting another delivery of the Pfizer biotech vaccine for Wales at the end of this month at the start of February and in the plan we set out that going up the pace we're expect to will run out of that by the middle of February so that means that the supplies that are due to come in around about the start of February are really important to replenish that stock so we can continue going at pace in our mass vaccination centres so that's the reality where we are and the logistics what we're trying to do to cover as many people as possible as quickly as possible but I am confident that the increase we've seen over this last week that you'll see in our figure of moving up to 86,000 plus people who have been vaccinated you can expect to see when I return here again on next Monday a further significant increase not just in numbers but an increase again in the rate of what we're able to do and that's good news for all of us and I'm tremendously grateful to everyone right across our NHS who has been working on delivering this programme the people leading and running the service and military planners who worked alongside them, colleagues in local government who have been really firm friends and very very constructive in helping us to deliver a greater service and of course the staff and the volunteers who are delivering this programme it really is a team well's approach really big progress in the last week a step up in pace in the last week and more to come on exactly that basis in the weeks ahead. Thank you Ayn, I've now got Dan Bevan at LBC. Thank you health minister, good afternoon. The first minister said on Friday that this is not a sprint but you've said today this is a race to immunise as many people as possible but you wouldn't have said these targets if they weren't achievable in your views but there's going to be a lot of moving parts to this isn't there particularly with procurement and distribution. At the moment there's only one plant that's filling these vaccines at the moment it's currently in Wrexham but if there was any problems there that's going to cause significant supply chain issues isn't there. Do you think there needs to be more of those types of plants across the UK and in Wales? Well then I've said it's a race against the virus and we're working as quickly as possible to protect as many people as possible that's exactly what you'd expect and the figures that we've released today do demonstrate an increase in the pace of delivery of the vaccine programme within the last week and more than doubling of the rates of progress. Now within the UK it is largely the Wrexham factory that is helping to deliver to fill the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, they also have an ability to do that in Europe and so there are issues and challenges about getting that vaccine into the country but we've had supplies from Germany I believe where that's also being delivered so there's more than one centre within the European partner service but it's always a case that if there's a problem in manufacturing then that could delay some of the delivery but I've not just met with the UK vaccines minister I've also had a meeting with both of the vaccine producers Pfizer BioNTech and also with Oxford AstraZeneca and there is a a healthy level of assurance about their ability to supply millions of doses through the UK in the coming weeks and months so we're in a position where yes there are lots of moving parts but we have enough certainty to go ahead and vaccinate and protect lots more people and our ability to do more will be dependent on the procurement and supply and as I say that's a UK government responsibility it's then our responsibility to deliver that vaccine across Wales and to protect people here to allow us to make different choices in our future and where does this leave lockdown restrictions based on your plan would it be fair to say that come the spring we would be able to have far more freedoms than we currently do now? Well I'd certainly hope so Dan but that really depends on the choices that we're all making I don't think people should think that because there's a vaccination problem that is increasing in pace that means we can certainly be less responsible about the choices we're making because I'm afraid that the pressure on the NHS is it is severe and you'll have heard the chief manicrosser for England talking about these being the worst days and weeks ahead for the NHS in England but also a position that is mirrored across the UK you'd have heard colleagues in Northern Ireland describing the position they face as well and you would have heard the regular stories from our staff on the front line who are caring for people who are suffering with COVID we now have more people in critical care beds being being treated for COVID than we had in the first peak of the pandemic in the spring we have more people in our critical care units than at any time in the pandemic that's something that should make all of us think about what we're prepared to do about the reasons why we have a stay-at-home lockdown in force about the consequences of our NHS being overwhelmed that's why all of us still need to play our part to take care of ourselves and each other it really is a team effort a team effort to keep well safe thank you Dan I've now got Clakey Lynch from Spedwarek diolch weenidog prynhawn beth following photos of intensive care units we've seen in the press today could you give a detailed explanation as to what NHS front line staff are facing as we speak and could you inform us when was the last time that you as the health minister paid a visit to one of our hospitals with the figures and the information we've provided I've heard the figures that I gave in the recall session for the senate just before the new year and its increase since then at that time I said that our critical care facilities were running at about 140% of capacity they're now running at about 150% of capacity and all of the choices to expand critical care mean we're making other compromises compromising the way that care is delivered both in critical care with our numbers but equally compromises that are shutting off other areas of activity so Betsi Cadwaladr has had to stop elective surgery in the rexham area now because the press they're under we're seeing that because the surgeon cases that is happening across north wales going from east to west now that does demonstrate the reality what our staff are doing and I have of course seen and heard not just messages on social media but some of the direct evidence of people talking about what they see and have to do at each shift and people really need to account for the impact on our staff of what they're seeing and doing that's not just an impact now you'll have to deal with that for a period of time afterwards in months and years as an impact of that is visited upon our staff so again help all of us need to help our NHS to help us that's why we all need to do the right thing I haven't been to an NHS hospital for months I'm trying to think about the last time I was in one and that's because we're in a position where the rules have been clear for all of us and even when we weren't in a stay at home period of time a ministerial visit isn't always something that helps people to get on with doing their job but our NHS has been extraordinarily busy for a very long time I certainly don't intend to go to an NHS hospital during the level four lockdown I have a job to do I have to be here today to deliver this press conference but for the great majority of the rest of my time I'm working from home if I go to an NHS hospital for what would essentially be a photo opportunity some staff may be pleased to see me but actually there'd be a distraction there'd be a disturbance to how people do their job and I think I need to be a partner setting an example of working from home wherever and whenever possible after we come out of a stay at home lockdown then I would like to go and see some of our staff on the front line apart from anything else I'd like to be able to say thank you as I was able to do in the summer what I went to the Royal Gwent and I got to meet in a social distance way over 60 staff what was a bright and sunny and positive day I look forward to more such positive days to celebrate what our NHS has done together with colleagues in social care to keep all of us safe at this most extraordinary time that we're living through. Bioch we need dog. We're aware after speaking to energy staff in north Wales that the system to register for a vaccine is given to staff via a link a link that could be passed on to other colleagues or maybe even individuals who are not essential workers or part of a priority group. Are you willing to admit that there are flaws in the system relating to the rollout of the vaccine to essential workers and priority groups? Well it's always possible some people can try to cheat or work their way around the system no system is foolproof there's no issue with acknowledging that this is about all of us as I say doing the right thing and that means not going to bend or twist the rules to benefit ourselves friends or colleagues outside it it means not going to bend the rules to put other people at risk and it's really important that people do the right thing with the vaccination programme that means doing what you're asked to do in booking an appointment not calling the NHS to say when will I get my appointment when you're asked to make that appointment and again for our front line staff to do the right thing as well I understand why people will be anxious about colleagues friends family and loved one but the reason we have a priority list is to protect people as quickly as possible in the highest risk categories and if we do that in accordance with that priority list we'll avoid the greatest amount of harm to our most vulnerable citizens so all of us really do need to do the right thing thank you flaky I've now got Andy Davis from channel four thank you um some people may have been surprised to see over the weekend that wales had in fact around 200 000 more vaccines than it had so far administered can you understand why that might look like the Welsh Government isn't vaccinating people as fast as it possibly can and do you accept that the language used by the first minister about this not being a sprint risks suggesting a lack of urgency it is a sprint isn't it because every vaccine administered in effect is a chance to save a life well I think that there's the the risk of getting too lost in marathon or sprint the reason why we're telling this being a marathon is it'll take months to get through this you know we really don't think as indeed as the rest of the UK don't think we'll get through the adult population until the autumn now months of this well I think that's a marathon rather than a sprint we're not going to complete everything within the next few weeks that's the only point we're really making because of course we're trying to go as fast as possible and as I've made clear this is a race against the virus the damage that is being done the faster we can vaccinate people in those priority groups the more we'll be able to do to protect those people from harm the sooner we'll be able to make choices about releasing some of the restrictions that we're all having to live through so I just don't want there to be any confusion or a sense that actually there's a lack of urgency here when actually there's a very real sense of urgency here within the government and indeed our NHS who are delivering this vaccination program and on the figures as I've dealt within a previous answer Andy the rules have changed about how the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine could be stored and delivered we had to store half of that vaccine initially to protect the second dose then the independent regulator the MHRA changed the rules on that and indeed the revised advice we had from the independent expert JCVI and the advice we had in chief medical officers about extending the dose interval that's meant that we can use more of those so up until at the start at the start of the new year we're said to keeping back a range of that vaccine because we had to we're having month to month supply so the supply we have has to last us through the whole month we're now in a different position to be able to use more of that supply able to use it in a different way to protect more people and I do believe we'll make very good use at a rapid pace of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine that we have before we get another deliver at the end of this month to the start of the next month when we then expect and we'll need another delivery because we'll have depleted our stocks and need more to carry on using that in our mass vaccination centres and as I said as we get more of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine we'll be able to do even more in primary care so you can expect to see when supply is increasing from Oxford AstraZeneca a much greater access and greater pace in primary care as need you'll see a much greater pace for our mass vaccination centres over the coming weeks I think there may be quite a few NHS workers who might be watching this interested to hear you raise the issue of the booking system before Christmas at another press conference I raised with you concerns in one health board about the vaccine booking system that there were NHS workers completely exasperated by the delays in getting through this morning I've been speaking to two other NHS workers in another South Wales health board one of whom they said they spent much of Friday at work internally trying to book a vaccine they got home spent five hours called 192 times but couldn't get through on Saturday another 224 failed attempts and then they gave up they're angry and it's adding even more stress they say given the amount of time that the government and the health boards have had to prepare for this shouldn't these issues have been ironed out by now well I am aware that many people have had their vaccine and had their appointment without going through the process that you describe now that doesn't mean that that person's experience isn't real and valid and a point of real concern for me and indeed people running our national health service and I understand completely the very real measure of frustration and exasperation that my NHS staff must feel so again Andy if you can provide me with the details because I can't comment individually on the detail that I don't know then I'd be very happy to make sure that gets looked at again because I've understood we've seen a real increase in the pace and step of the vaccination program for our NHS and social care staff but if there are instances where that's not working as well as it should do those are those opportunities to learn and to improve and I want to make sure they are taken up to do that because of frustration of the staff that you describe is an extra amount of pressure that our hard-pressed NHS staff really could do without so I'd be grateful to receive the details for us to do something about that because the two biggest parates for me today are to make sure NHS doesn't fall over and get overwhelmed by the extraordinary pressure it's under I'm going to look after our staff to make sure that happens in health and social care because if social care falls over we know we'll see a flood of activity coming into our hard-pressed natural health service and the other big priority for me is the vaccination program those are the biggest things on my agenda now my biggest priorities so please do some of the details and make sure something gets done about it thank you I've now got Mark Smith from Wales online thank you very much indeed health minister would you be able to give us an update on the more infectious strains of coronavirus circulating in Wales what percentage of cases are thought to be the strain that emerged in the southeast of england and how many cases are you aware of in Wales of the South African strain of the virus on the South African strain of the virus I know that we've had literally a handful of people from South Africa within the last travel window we've tested positive and I'm not aware that we've had the the genomic testing back to test whether that positive test is for the South African variant that is more transmissible as you say for the Kent virus strain that we've heard much about we published a technical advisory group report last week that set out the seeding arrange of that across the country it shows lots within north Wales where we think it's on the way to becoming the dominant strain if not the dominant we're not sure that it is the dominant strain in south Wales yet that's why public health Wales are working with colleagues in England to get more of that representative sampling done so I can't give you an exact figure in south Wales but in north Wales we think it's already at or above 50% of the the new positive tests that are coming back so I'm afraid it doesn't appear that it's already the dominant strain within the north of our country and that reiterates the reasons why we all need to do the right thing to avoid contact with other people not to mix unnecessarily with other households to wash our hands avoid touching our face have good ventilation and if we all do the right thing in this stay at home lockdown we'll ease and reduce the harm that we know is being caused we'll start to see the COVID rates come down right across the country we'll see an end of the surging that is taking place in north Wales and we'll ease the pressure on our national health service that otherwise could be overwhelmed all these things matter even more with a vaccine programme increasing its pace and scale because that really does show that more is happening to allow us to make different choices in the future only if we all do the right thing here and now. Thank you very much indeed and secondly you've said already that more than 100 GP surgeries will be running vaccination clinics by the end of this week and 250 by the end of the month would you be able to explain a bit more detail about who will be administering the vaccines in GP practices and whether you believe it will have any detrimental impact on those people looking to access their GP for non-COVID related problems? Well of course there's a trade-off between the enormous priority of the vaccination programme and other forms of of general practice and primary care now you can't make a choice that says that you can have all of your staff delivering this enormous huge scale vaccination programme the only comparable thing would be the smallpox vaccination programme that was run many years ago that's the scale of what we're trying to do and you'll have heard Simon Stevens say that in England he equated the getting to the mid-febri target of doing the same activity in five weeks that the NHS in England managed to do in five months in delivering the seasonal flu vaccine that's the scale of what we're doing you can't do that and manage to maintain every other part of our health so it's including in primary care there are choices to be made about where and how those normal activities are run and whether we can pause some of them to deal with the enormous priority of the vaccination programme now some of those are choices that are need to make about the primary care contract but I know that I think our general practitioners and community pharmacies and lots of our staff understand this will avoid so much harm that we need to make that balanced choice that isn't unnecessarily comfortable for everyone but that's the reality of living with this deadly pandemic and if we want a way out we have to make some of those difficult choices to allow all of us to enjoy a different and a better future throughout the rest of 2021 thank you mark I've now got Adam Hale from the press association thank you good afternoon health minister you say in your vaccination plan that people in particular groups will be offered a job by a certain date can you can you clarify for us whether you're saying those people will be given a first dose by that date or are you saying that they will just have an appointment in the diary for some time in the future we expect to substantially deliver the vaccine by then but it does of course depend on whether people accept those appointments or rearrange them so some people may simply refuse other people may not be available for other reasons that you could all imagine and understand so this is about making sure that our NHS is in a position to offer those vaccines and to deliver them or other things being equal with that supply or indeed people attending for their vaccination appointment thank you and can you expand further please on your comments in your opening statement about wearing a face mask when we're in public places is it now Welsh Government guidance to wear masks outdoors if there are other people around us no because we should be so few distance from other people but this is about the recognition when you're going out and about in the public when you're going into indoor spaces if you're doing a food shop if you're going into places where you can go then it's a reminder for people to wear your face coverings when you're doing that and I see a number of people who have them as they go into different parts of the town that I live in because you're going into one shop and into another if you're going to more than one to do your essential business then it's easier for somebody to keep their their face coverings on there isn't a change in the general advice that we're providing but this is part of what we can all do to protect ourselves to maintain our difference to wear a face covering where possible I think reinforce that message is a good thing thank you Adam we've now got Steve Bagnell from the Daily Post thank you Health Minister we've seen pictures of people queuing at vaccination centres and heard from people within those queues that social distancing is not being practiced sometimes none of the queues being policed is there a danger then that vaccination centres could actually spread the disease unless appropriate measures are taken and are there protocols with vaccination centres to adhere to to prevent this well all of the mass vaccination centres have a range of measures in place to help and support people but fundamentally it's about all of us doing the right thing and if you're going to a COVID vaccination centre to have a vaccine to protect yourselves and people around you the last thing you should want to do is to forget about the basics of social distancing but I do have some sympathy for people particularly if you've been following the rules as the great majority of people in Wales have if you've been staying at home and reducing your contact then I can understand why if you're in a queue with other people we are going through a shared experience of getting your vaccine then some of that social distancing may slip but we really want people to do the right thing and that still means you can have a conversation with people are more than two metres away from you but to please make sure that that social distancing is practiced to protect you and to protect other people not just those in a queue but the staff who are helping us to deliver this extraordinary vaccination programme I don't want to see an outbreak that affects our staff and potentially causes a blip in the vaccination programme to reduce the possibility and availability of staff to help delivering this programme to protect more and more of our vulnerable citizens across Wales so it's really an appeal for all of us to do the right thing including if you are going to receive the good news of a protection from COVID with a first shot of one of the two vaccines available. Thank you and with infection rates in Wrexham at nearly 900 per 100,000 now why isn't mass testing being considered when in Liverpool it was done when the rates were much lower? Well of course when the rates were much lower in Liverpool they weren't in a stay at home lockdown it should be the case that we're reducing mixing between houses because it shouldn't be taking place there are very limited circumstances for people to see and have contact with people who don't live with them so we have support bubbles there are very limited other circumstances where it can take place if we're all doing the right thing then actually that avoiding contact should reduce the rates eventually the challenge is where the virus is already seeded the people you have contact with in your own household are likely to get that virus that is much more transmissible that is what lies behind the surging rates in north-east Wales in particular so if we're all doing the right thing then that is the best control measure that we can actually undertake and of course people who do our symptoms should go and get a test the testing infrastructure is still there and actually in the last day or two we've seen a significant increase in testing compared to the position that we were in a week and a half ago we saw a real lull after the Christmas and New Year period so if you have symptoms get a test make sure yourself isolate please don't mix with other household if you do that you'll be doing the best thing possible to get your family safe and other people too. Thank you Steve I've now got Rob Taylor from rexham.com Good afternoon on the new daily data the vaccination tab of the public health Wales dashboard still gives the old 49,000 figure for doses the front page overview gives the new updated 86,000 figure is that how the updates are planned or is that an error in the reporting and the dose per data per vaccine information has been circulated by for example your colleague our local MS and also you've stressed the importance of supplying stocks to understand the context of the process can all this data be made public on a daily basis? Yes we're committing to provide updated data on vaccinations through every weekday and indeed we're with the first UK country to do that because I believe other countries are going to publish later on today so we're doing what we said we do so we're not behind other countries we're actually ahead by a matter of hours so we will be able to provide that update on vaccination taking place the day before there'll always be some correction in terms of data entry but it should give people a better idea of the pace and scale of the progress that the vaccination programme is making because I recognise there's wide-scale public interest in this and I hope they'll give people some confidence and assurance and as for the matter tidying up the way that the data is presented I'm sure that we'll learn more lessons in doing that in the next few days so there's nothing sinister in that it's simply a matter of having data that is presented in a way that is as quick as possible but also to give people that trust and you will continue to see the weekly information published where we'll have more time to make sure that data is cleaned and again as I said in my opening will they be able to provide some more information as we're going through the milestones and other data we have available to us so we'll be able to provide more information not less as we continue to make progress. Thank you and you've previously said the Welsh Government looks around the world to learn from others about tackling the pandemic. Israel has already managed to vaccinate what would be the equivalent of over half the population of Wales and that's using the tricky Pfizer vaccine. The details to down the Welsh Government plan appears to be significantly slower than what is and has been done elsewhere. Why is that? Well it isn't significantly slower than what's done elsewhere part of the example you've given of Israel so actually within the UK we think we'll be able to match the pace if not do some catch-up with other UK countries because of significant expansion into primary care so people can be confident that the vaccination programme was already scaled up over this last week because we've seen the real increase in the rate per day and per week from the figures that we've published you're going to see more as we go through the days of this week the moment we get to the end of the week you should see not just an increase in numbers but an increase in the pace as well and I think that should give people real confidence that people are doing exactly what we've said we do more of the Pfizer variant vaccine going into mass vaccination centres the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine being used progressively week on week in much greater number as supply comes in and in particular a really big thanks once again to colleagues in primary care our general practitioners and then community pharmacies will be coming on board following the trial that will start in north Wales this week so there are reasons to be positive and you'll see from the figures an increase in the pace and the scale of what we're able to do to protect people here in Wales. Thank you Rob we've now got Tom Magnuth and Carersworld Live. Thank you very much health minister if I heard you correctly and accurately summarise you're saying that vaccination success stands or falls on whether people accept the vaccine offer and attend for their job. I'd be interested in your thoughts on a problem that we've had drawn to our attention from a 93 year old viewer in north Wales she received a text yesterday Sunday offering her a COVID-19 vaccine there was no date or time or provider in the message she was invited to make contact the text message was labelled no reply her phone is a basic mobile she has no internet at home can't call anyone on a Sunday so earlier today she called her GP but no one answered she's now really worried that it's her chance gone and she'll be assumed to not want the vaccine this isn't the first time we've heard that aren't you remind too much on everyone having the latest technology and we're going back to basic phone calls and answering 24 seven across this issue employ more people if necessary to do that no the NHS isn't going to forget and leave people behind so if there are some of those challenges and again the the particular details would be really helpful tom so we can take that through with our team here but with the local health board to see if there are things that we can improve on but there are plenty of calls that are being made there are plenty of appointment letters that are being sent out as well different people different contacts may want contact in a different way so it's doing this as quickly as possible to generate the fastest rate of progress for people to get the coverage and the protect and we know that most people are very very keen to have but some people may deliberately opt out as opposed to thinking I might have missed my appointment I wouldn't want people to feel anxious or fearful so if you provide the details for us we'll get back to you and as well as the health board looking at it we'll make sure whichever health board it is comes back directly to you so you can assure your viewers that the matter has been taken up with a response provided. Thank you very much indeed for that minister we'll certainly follow up and can I now move away from vaccines on to perhaps a more future thinking question from Sylvia from byla Glamorgan and she says when can Wales expect to have services for post viral patients with long Covid and MA like they've announced in England? Well we have a different pattern of dealing with long Covid here in Wales and I've issued written statements on this we've had a range of areas of work because it's about a multi disciplinary team because the range of symptoms and challenges that people live with with long Covid differs from person to person so it is about a range of different people working together to support that person and we've got a slightly different frameworks where they're calling them clinics in England but we recognise a multi disciplinary approach is the right thing and actually we'll learn more from what we do as we go on and on we'll learn more from what we're doing here in Wales and of course we'll learn for England, Scotland and Northern Ireland are doing too because none of us have the exact answers there's a danger that people just assume that whatever anyone else is doing must be better whereas actually here in Wales we've got an approach that's been worked through by clinicians and indeed working with patients themselves not every patient who's got long Covid would have been consulted and taught to you before the programme has been put in place but we have definitely taken account of patient voice and patient experience in doing so and I'll be very happy to provide an update in the weeks and months ahead about what we're getting from the multi disciplinary approach so we adopted here in Wales and then to understand there's more we can do because this is one of the challenges that we'll be living with for a significant period of time afterwards even after we've finally completed this vaccination programme we know that there'll still be many people living with the after effects of Covid we know there'll be a huge recovery process for our health service and our economy for many years ahead so big challenges to get through in the future but the starting point is we're in a really difficult position now but there is hope for a better 2021 ahead because we know that the vaccination providers with protection because we know there are different and more positive choices will all be able to make at some point during the year ahead many thanks Tom thank you to everyone for your time today I look forward to seeing you again next week


What's up everybody Jason here for Jasper's case breaks calm 2021 Canadian national treasures baseball just sold out pick a team number 10 with this random number block that has 11 teams that include the Yankees angels daughters Braves Padres Phillies Pirates Nationals Astros Mets and San Francisco Giants So again works just like any other random number block But only for these teams in this break we go by the first number the left side of serial number dash And of course any in our dead just go to spot zero anyone ones go to spot one and any non numbered cards are randomized to the group if there is any Here's the dice roller. Here's the customer names and the numbers. Let's roll Got us also three and a six nine times one two three four five six seven eight nine Boom nine times three and a six nine Alan down at Daniel and times one two three four five six seven eight nine nine times Two down to zero So again, there's the numbers you match up with guys Alan with two Diana with eight five Daniel with nine Diana with four Daniel with six bring you with three Mike Any one ones will be yours Michael with seven and then Daniel any in all redemptions will be yours So guys coming up next in a separate video is the break itself. Good luck everybody