Today we have a very special episode on account of our very special guest Professor Emin Gun Sirer. Professor Gun is an associate professor in the computer science dept at Cornell University, the Co-Director of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3) and an expert on consensus and distributed systems. His work and research focuses on self-organizing systems and decentralized systems and his accolades/contributions include research into bitcoin vaults, discovering potential attack vectors and vulnerabilities in multiple blockchain projects as well as an innovative protocol called Bitcoin-NG (next generation) which rethinks how blocks are mined and is a potential long-term solution to the blockchain scaling debate. Our conversation ranges from the blocksize debate, the innovative Bitcoin-NG protocol as well as some of the politics going on in terms of incentives and motives of players in the space.