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Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland. For an arcane protocol,

Bitcoin has more than its share of drama. There is, of course, the mystery surrounding its

anonymous founder or founders, Satoshi. More recently, there is the battle over whether the size

of Bitcoin blocks need to grow to account for more capacity, or if it's just fine the way Satoshi left it.

The drama creeps in because there isn't much time left to make changes before Bitcoin blockchain capacity runs out, says core Bitcoin developer and security expert Mike Hearn. And running out of blockchain

capacity could spell disaster, he says. At worst things break quite badly, but even at best,

even if things don't break, some users won't be able to use Bitcoin, right? They will be kicked

out of the system. Effectively, there won't be enough capacity to handle them. Herne joins A16Z's Chris Dixon on this segment of the pod to discuss

the current state of the Bitcoin project, Hearn's own lighthouse creation, which is a Bitcoin-based

crowdfunding app, and what it will take to move the Bitcoin protocol into the mainstream.

If you're in the West and you have access to, you know, credit card payments and so on,

it's not always clear why you would want to use Bitcoin. But that's not because there aren't

good reasons. It's because we're not doing a good job of like telling people about them.

Chris Dixon kicks it off. Mike, thanks for being here. Thanks.

It's great to be here.

So let's start off talking about the state of Bitcoin.

There's a lot of debate going on right now about the block size issue.

I guess could you first kind of explain that and then talk about your views on it?

...