The American Original for over the last ten seconds, the sharpest Satoshi's best bitcoins, hardest cryptocurrency talk featuring Andreas Antonopoulos from Let's Talk Bitcoin, Dovey Barker from Bitcoin.bombs.com and Derek J Freeman from PeaceNewsNow.com. And I'm Thomas Hunt from Mad Bitcoins. Issue 1. Bitcoin Bubble. Bitcoin prices are soaring. Bitcoin value has exceeded 200, even on the venerable bitstamp to say nothing of the outrageous 233 on the legendary Mt. Gox. Is this the new norm? Are we headed to the moon? Or is this just another Bitcoin bubble? I ask you and Dres and to Nopoulos. It's another Bitcoin bubble. But on the good side, every single time we have another Bitcoin bubble, but we take off, we head for the moon, we get our wings clipped, but on the land, we're quite a few thousand feet above where we were when we started. If you look at these bubbles, they've been happening now at decreasing intervals. So the first gap between bubbles was more than eight months than the next one was six months, four, three. We're gradually accelerating the rate of which we're doing these bubbles. And every time we crash from one of these bubbles, we end up at a price level that's much higher than before. So even in this one, the price a few weeks ago was 125. That was pretty nice price. And yet now that's well in the past. I don't think we're going to return to it anytime soon. So I think this is just a national response of a market with a lot of volatility, a lot of sentiment, not enough liquidity, not a stable enough base. I compare it to a Zodiac, bouncing up and down in the waves next to the US dollars Titanic. Yeah, you're getting a much more stable ride up there, buddies, but I can dodge the iceberg. Donnie Barker, what do you think? I actually kind of, maybe I'm going to put my financial foot in my mouth here, but I have a problem with the nomenclature bubble. I mean, to me, bubble is when there's an inflation in the price of something as a result of tax subsidies or government handouts of some sort of fundamental market manipulation. And what we're talking about is actual people buying and selling actual Bitcoin and actual exchanges. And so that's what it's worth to them at the time. So I like to think of it more like the tool of craze. I would rather use the term like a craze or a mania or some of the older economic terms that we used before we used the word bubble. And that says yes. I think that this was some Bitcoin media that we've come down from, but as Andreas said, we didn't go all the way back down to where we were. I think it's at 185 right now and I'm very happy with that. So no, I'm not going to call it a bubble. Derek J. Well, Bitcoin's still in its relative infancy as a currency. So the various exchanges that it's traded on fluctuate wildly. All of its moves are exaggerated. But from my amateur analysis over the past two weeks, I'd say this is the beginning of a healthy run-up powered mainly by Chinese investors. It's responding to a lot of good news, especially coming out of China. And we experience a little profit taking over the last two days. That'll probably continue, but I still expect volume to continue to increase along with price. So headed to the moon, no, bubble, no. But a healthy run-up to a new plateau, most likely maybe 200 will be the new 125 for a while and the price will go higher in the short term and in the long term. Part of the reason it's behaving like a penny stock is because well, it's got the market capitalization of a penny stock. So it is volatile. That's normal. The seesaw effect we see is a periodic oscillation and it will continue to go like that. It's basically overcorrection. People get too excited and they get too panicking and they get too excited again. So we're basically oscillating around the actual price mean just because of overcorrection every time. I think Dovey made a good point about the tulips. But it's not totally analogous with that because at the end of the day the tulips were all valueless. Bitcoin is something that's very exciting and it makes sense that there'd be a mania around it. The question is how long will that mania last and we're still heading up eventually I think. I think it lasts until it's a global currency because every time there's a fresh influx of Bitcoin users, those users are their newbies, their virgins. And so they come in with a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of volatility. And so every time there's a new crop of people they're going to panic more. They're going to buy and sell faster and it's going to take them a couple of crashes and burns before they calm down like the rest of us. And so we're going to see that until it's everybody. Exit question. The value of Bitcoin will go up or down. Dovey Barker. I think it's going up. I don't think I don't think it's going up in the short term and the long term. Andreas. It's going to bounce around chaotically in the short term but in the long term, Bitcoin can't do a gradual rise. It can only do explosive. In the long term we're going to the moon. Issue 2. Bitcoin's in China. Popular Chinese exchange, BTC China is operating without exchange fees during the Chinese holiday. The price of a Bitcoin in China is surging. The government is turning a blind eye. Is China the new engine of Bitcoin in China we trust? I ask you, Dovey Barker. I don't know that the Chinese government is turning a blind eye. I think as Americans we're sort of predisposed to think that a government reaction is immediate overreaction. And I just I don't think that's necessarily the way all governments in the world today. If I were the Chinese government, I would probably be reserving judgment and watching to see what sort of benefits and harms come out for me. A passive reaction makes sense to me for them. But we're going to see this anytime new population centers. When Bitcoin becomes prolific in India, we're going to see a very volatile couple of weeks. And so that's what this means to me is as new populations come on, it sort of reveals the sort of populist impulses in the price of Bitcoin. Derek J. China is absolutely leading the way. When we saw last month they took over the majority of volume purchases globally. And I expect that's going to be the norm for the foreseeable future. China's the new engine for Bitcoin in part because the government's turning a blind eye to Bitcoin as you put it. But also in huge part because they're turning a blind eye to most regulations in general over there. They've lifted literally billions out of poverty in the last two decades and created a new middle class which will be the engine in driving up prices for years to come. Andreas. The Chinese government isn't turning a blind eye. They've had three documentaries lasting more than an hour on national television. I don't think that's the individual expression and whim of some kind of editor. That was run all the way up the polls and got very very explicit endorsement from the top. Otherwise, it would not have happened. This is not a free media market. You don't get an hour documentary on Bitcoin on Chinese TV unless someone at the very top said, hmm, we don't have the world currency reserve. Hey, maybe no one should have the world currency reserve. So if we can just unseat the dollar, maybe a reserve currency that's controlled by no one is a better reserve currency than one that's controlled by our major international competitor. I think this is absolutely deliberate. I think it's opportunistic and I think the Chinese will continue to support Bitcoin just to stick in the eye of Uncle Sam and to free themselves essentially from the pervasive cost of holding petro dollar as a national reserve which really China can do without. That's a really great point that hadn't occurred to me about those documentaries. It's an interesting idea Andreas. Do you think that Russia will join in? Will we see a new currency Cold War? Oh, absolutely. Russia has already joined in. I've been on RT three times talking about Bitcoin on Russia today. I've been on Bloomberg once. And part of the reason for that is because any time Russians can say that America sucks and should be replaced as global haggamon. Yeah, they'll get a really nice audience for that. So again, Bitcoin is an opportunistic approach to Shavan is sticking the eye of Uncle Sam. Now, I for one think that a world reserve currency that's controlled by no one is better than a world reserve currency that's controlled by Ben. Wait a minute. I have to interject here and say that governments have every interest in preserving their fiat empires. It's a lot easier for them to spend money that they create out of thin air than to acquire it justly. So I don't know if I wholeheartedly agree that these governments are interested in getting their populations into Bitcoin. Oh, of course not. They're interested in getting our populations into Bitcoin so that we lose our reserve currency status and they can then regulate only the Chinese currency existing in their state. I don't expect them to suddenly re-liberalize and go, hey, let's all go play with Bitcoin. But if they can persuade enough people that Bitcoin is viable on an international trade basis, you know, nudge the Saudis a bit to drop the petro dollar, that would be such a monumental strike against the supremacy of the US dollar that would be absolutely in the national interests of the Chinese. Here's what they understand. They understand that if they rile everyone up in America, you can't close the door and in China, you can. Because in America, you can use regulation and in China, you can use rubber hoses. So as a result, they're much more confident that they can control their own population and they can so disruption in our population. And that's a very opportunistic and cynical way to look at it, which really is what politics of that level is. You know, that has such far reaching foreign policy ramifications. I mean, there's an analysis to be done of American military adventurism that it often has to do with maintaining the dollar hegemony in the world. Well, if there's no country to invade, if there's nobody issuing Bitcoin for them to attack, then what happens when people start abandoning the dollar as they're reserved for Bitcoin? It's not just about people abandoning the dollar. The other side story here is the really bad situation in the relationships between Saudi Arabia and the United States. Most people don't understand that the primary reason every single country in the world holds its reserves in US dollars is because that's the only currency with which they can buy oil. They made a whole dollar in order to buy oil. And that's primarily because the Saudis will only take dollars for their oil. If the Saudis tomorrow morning started taking euros, the US dollar would be in serious trouble. And if the Saudis tomorrow morning started taking Bitcoins, hold new world. Exit question. The Chinese government will continue ignoring Bitcoin for a time period, six months, ranging until the heat death of the universe. And Reyes. Minus. Six months. Davi. Stop ignoring. Well, I was originally going to say that they just started paying attention, but I think Andreas is right. Dare J. I stand corrected about the infomercials of which I was not aware, but hopefully government agents in China never actively interfere with people exchanging Bitcoin. bureaucrats in other countries like Thailand have outright banned Bitcoins. I suspect it will take years for the Chinese government to declare a ruling one way or another. They've already had enough trouble embarrassing themselves as it is trying to censor the age of information. So hopefully they'll realize it's pointless to try and regulate it and they never attempt it. Excellent. Issue three. Bitcoin island. How will Bitcoin take off? Will it be a large industrialized nation like the United States or a small island like Cyprus, Iceland or Costa Rica, which will be the first to fully adopt Bitcoin and use it in day to day transactions? What kind of business will be the first to adopt Bitcoin and how long will it take? I ask you, Derek J. I could go two ways. How will Bitcoin take off? There's promising things coming out of Cyprus like the B and Neo payment network, but also from the wide dissemination of apps that are already available that make it easy to spend Bitcoin in regular stores. Gift has already come a long way in aiding adoption for folks in the US and don't forget about places like Kenya where already a third of the economy has transacted via mobile phones. So companies like Mpazer are making it easy to integrate with Bitcoin and now just news this week from Soft Touch POS that they're going to develop a POS system for restaurants that will integrate Bitcoin and allow payments just like cash. So people at a regular restaurant will be able to spend their Bitcoin and it'll seem like cash to the to the restaurant. So that's all thanks to businesses like BitPay and so to answer a question the first types of businesses to accept Bitcoin will be restaurants and coffee shops and the places that have already come to accept new types of currency. Like we've seen if you've seen a store that uses an iPad for a register or an iPhone for a credit card processor they'll be accepting Bitcoin by this time next year. And Dres, your thoughts? The United States will be the last country to hold heartedly and completely adopt Bitcoin because it has the most to lose in the least to gain. There are 130 some currencies in the world, only one world reserve currency. We have it good here and we don't realize how bad it is in other countries. So in order to look at this we have to look at the adoption criteria and there is a tipping point. There's a point at which the just a raw utility of Bitcoin compared to the national currency become so compelling and the barriers to adoption availability of electricity infrastructure internet connectivity smartphones cultural acceptance religious acceptance etc all of those things start falling like dominoes until you reach this tipping point. At that point I really think that Bitcoin can act as the red cross of currencies coming in dropping in basically an exit relief valve that allows a country under significant financial stress to bail itself out by exiting its fiat currency. I expect a country like Argentina might be first perhaps a smaller nation state like Singapore, one of the distressed countries in Europe or some other country that wants to start this off as a financial haven but this is not a first world currency. The relative utility of Bitcoin is much much greater in the second world where you have that perfect combination of underlying infrastructure and really really useful stuff. Davi your thoughts? Well I'm wondering if the geographic limitations of the question are sort of relevant. It seems to me that the internet itself is Bitcoin island and the more that we move into a Bitcoin economy the more we are fundamentally living on the internet. So I mean if I can do business with someone in Argentina I will. If I can do business with someone in China I will and that's because we have the sort of like conduit of of information that that allows us to communicate and do commerce and things like that. Bitcoin has already taken off and we've already seen which kinds of businesses are going to be the first to adopt it and it's sort of technological leaning businesses on the internet. So now it's just a matter of creating spaces in you know meat space where there are enough people around you to get the sort of needs of food and rent and utilities and things like that and that's not even bound by geography per se. It just happens to be wherever you're living. Individual could get off of their local fiat currency as soon as there's enough sort of to sustain them around them. So I think the internet is Bitcoin island and it's already off the ground. Excellent. Derek what do you think about that Bitcoin island? Well for an island that may accept Bitcoin I would say Cyprus is coming first because they've got Neo which is a brick and mortar bank and the B payment network which is a first of its kind way for people to spend Bitcoin in real space the same way they would a credit card. If your government is not accepting Bitcoin but every single person in that population is already trading in Bitcoin does it really matter? So I think to Dovey's point if the internet starts getting a critical mass of Bitcoin there's even if they're distributed widely geographically they become their own economy and like a metal layer across geographies and if a lot of people in a country adopt Bitcoin the government may simply not have another option. That sounds right. Force prediction what island nation or small country will be the first to adopt Bitcoin. Dovey Barker. I'm the Maldives. It's in the middle of the Indian Ocean it's you know longitudinally the same it's a volcanic string of islands like Hawaii but it's you know it's fairly primitive there's some technology but not much and it seems like a great place for people to go and it's got a lot of room for the economy to develop so I'm going Maldives. Derek J. Cyprus the CEO of Neo and the B payment network Danny Brewster did an AMA on Reddit and just last month and so you can read the exciting comments there yourself. Andreas Antonopoulos. One of the Caribbean nations that are already involved in offshore banking from Utah, Bahamas, Maldives or any of those or one of the small nation states that's involved in offshore banking or haven banking, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, one of those potentially or some obscure weird nation in the middle of nowhere that does exactly what Tuvalu did with a .tv domain and sees essentially a Bitcoin fiat sovereign backed currency as it's a little differentiator that it can use to break out on the world stage and take everybody's offshore banking business away. If we're allowing for landlocked islands I think I'd like to change my answer to Somalia. Good choice but the answer is they've got no government to regulate them it seems like a natural fit. I believe Derek J. is right the answer is Cyprus the recent bank crisis there will continue to force people to look for alternative currencies. Issue 4 Bitcoin and the homeless how can an online currency help people with real problems in the real world is access to banking enough to lift an entire class? How can Bitcoin help the homeless? I ask you and Andreas Antonopoulos. I haven't been homeless in a very long time was only very briefly homeless for a few days back in my college years so with the ultimate authority that comes purely from the fact that I'm a white male and can express my opinion as much as I like. I would say I don't really know. Listen for the homeless I think what we've seen is that smartphones and internet connectivity seem to not be a luxury but an absolute necessity. One of the basic fundamental tools are survival in a modern society even if you're homeless before you get a car before you get a home you need a smartphone you need it to get jobs you need it to find other people to help you you need it for all kinds of reasons and for that reason alone because the smartphone is such a or a phone at least an internet connected phone is such a huge component today of homelessness in the first world I would say that Bitcoin has the possibility of making an impact there but at the same time I really can't speak about that I have no personal experience. Dovi Barker? I think the central benefit that I see would be just one of some of currency substitution if they were not if they were not keeping and operating the dollar and the sort of inflationary problems with the dollar and they weren't scheduling a currency that was not manipulated by a federal reserve then they're then holding on to something they can actually hold on to something and they're holding on to something that doesn't become worthless over time so I think that systemic inflation in a fiat currency is a big part of why you have a lot of poverty and a lot of homelessness and on otherwise wealthy economy and so if you sort of in aggregate transitioned out of the inflationary fiat currency that would be a long-term benefit but that's hard to specify for the individual how it's useful. Derek Jett? Bitcoin not bombs is doing a fundraiser to give homeless people hoodies and for those who are recently homeless many of them have smartphones and can use Bitcoin with apps like gift to purchase food, clothing and even shelter using Bitcoin and eventually as the value of Bitcoin rises hopefully the bitcoins they have in their wallets will appreciate and you can't spend Bitcoin in most places where they would be spending them so Bitcoin will likely turn into a form of savings for a group of people who would otherwise have no safe means of storage or standard banking and ideas like Satoshi Forest are coming to life in the real world and giving the homeless a viable alternative to begging and one that's sustainable and enriches their lives in ways that just weren't possible five years ago. I think Derek makes some good points that the access to banking will help the homeless the ability to put five dollars ten dollars in an account and not have it be eaten up by transaction fees or any other kind of fee I think is a real benefit that they'll be able to unlock once they get into Bitcoin. The difficulty right now is I think there aren't enough Bitcoin ATMs so that if you really had kind of a begging to Bitcoin strategy you couldn't really implement the second half of it maybe if you went to some local Bitcoin meetings what do you think Andreas? I think first world homeless people are I don't perhaps this is not the right word but are essentially the the the environment in which we're going to see whether Bitcoin will succeed in the second and third world. The most important aspect of Bitcoin is its ability to bring the six and a half billion unbanked people online and allow them to participate in a global economy. Now if you can't do that with an appopulation that already has literacy, electricity, infrastructure connectivity and smartphones and has the need for that then certainly you won't be able to do it where all of those other components are missing. So whether we can successfully use Bitcoin to help homeless people and whether homeless people can use Bitcoin to empower themselves is really the criterion is whether we can use it to lift the rest of the world out of poverty and whether it will have that kind of disruptive effect. Dovi your thoughts? I like the idea of using it as a test case because it is sort of poverty in the first world is a sort of best case scenario for solving sort of low standards of living in the third world and that's really interesting. I the thing is it's not conventional charity it's not that you are going to a person and lifting them up it's what Andrea said it's you are giving them a tool by which to empower themselves and so there's a learning curve there's some effort on their part that would be required. It really takes a motivated person to grab hold of the tool and figure out how to use it and how to benefit themselves and that inclination and that motivation is another necessary component that I have no reference point but I'm hoping that we can discover is actually there. The other interesting test bed for that is international remittances because it has the same issue of an imbalance of payments and flows it has the same issues of how do you enable the local exchange of bitcoins when they arrive at the destination water infrastructure is required and whether you can introduce the concept to people who only have interest in it from a value perspective and no ideological commitment either way so remittances and how we can help the or how the homeless in the first world can help themselves is really the test bed. I'd like to interject that I think philosophical components are of no significance with the spread of Bitcoin it's going to be how people find personal value in it and I have personal experience bringing Bitcoin to improves communities teaching people how to set up wallets and how to trade Bitcoin and it's a no-brainer people are instantly get it that whereas they wouldn't want to go down the street to set up a bank account with their driver's license they're eager to set up a Bitcoin wallet on their smartphone that they already have and trade it with their community for whatever they use within their community and it's it's going to enrich the community is more and more people start to use it you can imagine a year from now they'll be greatly enriched just by a little bit of savings in Bitcoin are you saying you've done this like on the streets in Philadelphia I have what can you can you tall get a gift of an anecdote I would want to tell you about it yeah so well one woman who I met is a dance instructor and hairdresser and she teaches classes and she's able to accept Bitcoin from her customers if she'd like now that she's been introduced to the concept whereas in the past she wasn't interested in having a bank account and when I brought up the concept that she was able to open an account instantly for free and attach no identity to it she was interested that's awesome that's a great problem with homelessness because they often don't have the requisite documents to open a bank account they don't have a permanent address often they've had their wallets stolen years ago and never gotten replacement ID cards you know like a lot of times they are they are from a paperwork perspective off the grid it's very important to recognize that the reason six and a half billion people are unbanked in today's world has very little to do with their productive capacity or their their their their cash situation it's not that these people have no money and no productive capacity that's not why people are unbanked it has a lot to do with politics with geography with access to infrastructure with access to documentation and identity with a difficulty for migrant populations for undocumented populations here in the US the vast majority of the unbanked actually come from from undocumented immigrant backgrounds where it's simply inability to have a legitimate documentation to to produce the bank so the important is very important to understand that the lack of money is not the reason people are unbanked and if you give them access they they have productive capacity they have assets that they can then start leveraging to to to better their own life so that's a very important thing because this fallacy that somehow you know they're just too poor to need banking it is ridiculous and yet it is the predominance idea here absolutely let's move on now to predictions this is the part of the show where I call on you and expect you to predict the future and dress and to novelist it generally well about Bitcoin I don't know predictions I've got one go ahead mine mine mine's last all right you put me on the spot I'll go for it so I think that the recent publicity caused by the close of Silk Road will take Bitcoin above $300 before the end of the year at the same time we could go all the way back down to 30 and oscillate in between at any point so what I'm looking to do is take a very long strategy with my Bitcoin holdings not get spooked when it drops hold fast and stay still and then just dive in opportunistically if it goes low I buy if it if it feels like it's relatively high I might sell a bit to to lock in some profits and then buy some more so you know I I see the trajectory is relatively positive but only if you are willing to hold and wait for the panic to pass Davi Barker I predict that the people of Thailand will completely ignore their government ban on Bitcoin and that Bitcoin will continue to be traded you know enthusiastically on the streets of Thailand excellent Derek Jay I expect within at least the next week that Bitcoin will stay above 120 despite more profit taking and I and I I believe that Bitcoin will break 200 again within the week Bitcoin popularity and usage will continue to grow once you start using Bitcoin you can't stop using it more and more people are getting the Bitcoin bug Bitcoin is unstoppable we're out of time until next time bye bye