The Bitcoin Group, the American original, for over the last ten seconds, the sharpest Satoshi's, the best Bitcoin's, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. Welcome to the 2013 year end, Bitcoin Group, a world spectacular featuring Dovey Barker from Bitcoin Not Bombs. Hello. I'm Tom from Mad Bitcoin. The Bitcoin Group is sponsored by Alpha Lion Technologies, Alpha Lion Technologies. They don't make the Altcoins. They make the Altcoins of the future. Learn how to make your own Altcoin at AlphaLionTechnologies.com. This episode was also sponsored by Let's Talk Bitcoin. Let's Talk Bitcoin, the premier Bitcoin podcast. Listen to fascinating interviews, helpful how-tos and more at Let's Talk Bitcoin.com or on YouTube. Moving on to the categories. Our first category tonight is Biggest Winner. Dovey Barker, who do you think the biggest winner in Bitcoin was? But I think the biggest winner is, I would say, Bitcoiners themselves. Anybody holding a Bitcoin, I think, did very well this year. This winner, we need to go to the envelope. Dovey, do you have the envelope, please? I sure do. I have this envelope here, which has been hermetically sealed for security purposes. What kind of seal is that? It's a hermetic seal. It's been hermetically sealed. Very good. And the envelope, please. All right. Here you go. Here it is. Hermetically sealed. Cardac. The Magnificent. And it is. Bitcoin is the biggest winner of the year. The currency of the future with more than 42% of Americans aware of its existence. Look for that number to double next year, along with the price. Our next category, Biggest Loser. Who is the biggest loser of the year? Your opinion, the government of China. The government of China for banning Bitcoin, perhaps making their decision a little bit too early. And we're looking at the books. The biggest loser is Ross Olbright. The alleged dread pirate Roberts foolishly operated the Silk Road from within the United States. Millions of dollars on his computer, and he lived with roommates. Nothing set aside for a legal defense fund allegedly caught by failing to use tour and posting on message boards with his real name, a true American tragedy. Moving on to Best Company of the Year. Dovey Barker. Who is the best company of the year? I think this one's pretty objective. I think it's blockchain.info. I think it's been shown that they're the most popular online wallet. I think they've got the best features. And they've got my vote. I like blockchain.info as well. But the best company of the year is Coinbase. Easy to use, ease of use, and ease of use. Coinbase makes you feel safe when you use it and offers new Bitcoiners away in, where it doesn't even seem like they're using that. And now with more than $31 million in venture capital, they will continue to impress in the new year. And now on the other side of the coin, the worst company. Who is the worst company in Bitcoin? Anything the Winkle Voss twins touch. The Winkle Voss twins. So you're blaming them for the ETF getting lapped by a second market? No, I'm not a big fan of the regulation beggars. I'm not a fan of the people that want to get in bed with government. And it seems like they fly that banner. They're the head of that crowd. They do seem on the ideologically different side from you. But the worst company of the year? Mount Gox. By using a personal DeWalla account to transfer money and failing to get a money transferring license, causing many accounts to be frozen and leading to a situation where USD could not be withdrawn, preventing arbitrage, and causing the situation we have now, where one Bitcoin price is radically different than the others. Something to add Litecoin or the new, my just trading engine, yet announcing both. Perhaps for more manipulation. Can I take this hearing all on exchange is the worst company of the year. Can these be disputed at all? Because most of that was the government's fault. And we know thanks to Silk Road that the government is holding some Bitcoin. So can we declare the government the worst Bitcoin company of the year? We also have honorable mention for Apple computer for its rejection of Bitcoin apps for no good reason and bit mitt for closing and cheap marketplace for just being an outright scam. The most defining moment in Bitcoin. What would you say the most defining moment in Bitcoin was? I would have to say that the spike in Cyprus is the most defining moment of the year. Because at the same time that the government was aggressing against private holders of the indigenous currency. The first Bitcoin ATM opened in Cyprus and we saw a huge roller coaster in price of Bitcoin as a result of people evacuating their fiat currency. It did seem like a major event where no one used to have this option before of taking your money out of the government currency and putting it into a safer currency and suddenly that option existed for the people of Cyprus. There might be a similar problem in Argentina. But the most defining moment in Bitcoin is Bitcoin 1000. The media went crazy and the price went up more than 107% in a week as governments around the world started recognizing Bitcoin and the general public became more aware. It was also only a few days after Andrea Santinopoulos' legendary $250 Bitcoin party where the price was already breaking 500. The biggest surprise, what's the biggest surprise this year in Bitcoin? For me personally it was the soft endorsement from Ben Hindenburg Bernacchi, Fed Chairman of the Federal Reserve in the United States who said that Bitcoin may hold long-term promise which is just hilarious because if it does then he and his whole organization are completely up to lead. Alan Greenspan did not agree with the other former Fed Chairman. They were in great difference of opinion. It was exciting to see his announcement. But the biggest surprise, Litecoin jumps from $4 to $48. After months of $2.50 all of a sudden Litecoin truly became the silver to Bitcoin's gold, surging all the way to $48 before declining. The future of Litecoin? No one knows. The Bummestrap. Who got the Bummestrap this year in Bitcoin? I would have to say that it is Caesaceous Coin. That Caesaceous Coin being declared by FinSend to be a money transmitter when all that it's really doing is minting a commemorative coin is a bum wrap for them. And now the media is going to have to change all their pictures. They always use Caesaceous Coins and their articles to illustrate what Bitcoin is because you can't take a picture of an actual Bitcoin. They're always using those coins. And I think they should have to pay them every time they use that picture. That makes some sense. Why not? The Bummestrap is that Bitcoin is a bubble pyramid scheme, Ponzi scheme related to tulips, beaniebabies, or the dot com boom. When the media doesn't understand something new, they rely on historical examples. And there are no historical examples for replacing all currency with digital currency. Until now, the Ferris Drap. Who got the Ferris Drap this year in Bitcoin? I've got to give this one to Roger Ver. And Roger Ver deserves a lot of recognition for his other things. But what I especially think he deserves this category for is that he gave 1000 Bitcoin based on a two year bet to himself that he lost. And he donated it to FE.org, which is the Federation for Economic Education, or the Foundation for Economic Education, based on his prediction that Bitcoin would outperform the stock market, the dollar, gold, and silver within two years, or by 100 times within two years. And it actually took two years and two months. It was an incredible self-prediction. And it was really impressive the way he held himself accountable, even though no one would take his bet. And his bet seemed crazy the whole time. And it was a large amount. It was a great amount of money. And Roger, all the time anyway. Roger, all the time. Yeah. If he held it in Bitcoins, if it would have gone, never take a bet in Bitcoins. Never take a loan in Bitcoins. The bad bet. The Ferris Drap, deflationary currency goes up in value. Bitcoin never really seems to get cheaper. The more you look at the charts, the more you realize the first time you heard about it was your greatest chance to buy the most for the least amount. Bitcoin goes up in value. The best comeback. Who made the best comeback of the year? I would have to say that the crash after the Silk Road, the Silk Road was rated in San Francisco, and it crashed for maybe 12 hours. And then it bounced right back up. And in fact, the price was up before I even saw the headline of what had cost the crash. And so I saw that as a lot of sort of panicked sellers on the Silk Road selling their money to a lot of more savvy investors. It was an incredible crash. And it came back so quickly, even with the most recent China news. It looks like we're coming out of the China crash as well now. The best comeback. Name coin. Left on the side of the road for dead after technical difficulties. It was revived by its developers and served back to life. The same could be said for feather coin. You know, of all of the altcoins, I've just recently started looking into this. I think name coin really has some promise. It isn't like at the front of the pack right now, the way that Litecoin is. But it is actually offering something unique in the marketplace of altcoins because it's backed by distributed URLs that you can register URL with name coin. And that is something completely unique. And I think that that gives it real future promise. Name coin seems to be the first in a series of Bitcoin platform services where something other than a currency is being offered on top of the Bitcoin network. It is domain names. I think that's a big sign for the future for how much growth there is in this network. And how it's not just going to be currency, it's going to be things we can't even imagine yet or people are imagining now that they're going to be building on top of Bitcoin. Right. Well, it's just the technology of the blockchain is a new phenomenon and it's being tested primarily as a currency. But it can really be any time, any place in your life where you need something confirmed. Bitcoin blockchain is capable of handling that. It is a network. It's the Bitcoin network that is the future. Most original thinker. Who's the most original thinker of the year? I will have to give this to him to Cody Wilson. Cody Wilson is perhaps best known as the printable gun guy. He runs or he used to run defense distributed and he produced the first 3D printed gun. But now he's working on a project called Dark Wallet, which is combining a very user-friendly app, mobile or I'm sorry, wallet app with coin mixing and other sort of privacy protections. And I think that his ability to go from one radically changing transformative project to another radically changing transformative project very quickly makes him one of the most original thinkers I'm aware of. It's a very impressive project as long as they figure out how to put it in the browser but keep it separate from the browser as well because there's so much identifiable information coming out of that browser. So it is a challenge for them. The most original thinker and Dreas and Tenoppelis traveling the world giving speeches about Bitcoin and then tearing it up here on YouTube. A one-man tour de force. Did you get a chance to watch his video from Athens that went out this morning? No, I haven't seen it yet. It's really great. That is, and Dreas is a great competition for Cody for that title. I mean, he's more focused on Bitcoin so I can see how Cody's into multiple issues and that gives him a bit of an advantage. But Andreas' speech this morning that he gave a couple of weeks ago was really great about identifying how revolutionary Bitcoin is as a network and how we're only now just starting to see things built on top of it. We're really in the early phases and you really should see, you know, if the internet was just taken as an email writing machine, a fancy typewriter and then someone said, oh, you can do all these other things. The same thing's going to happen to Bitcoin where so many different technologies and services can be built on top of it. He also claimed the death of Western Union and PayPal again. So good to see. Did you give it timeline? No, no timelines yet. I think it's going to be tough for that company to see their 250th anniversary or 150. They have a big one coming up. Unless they change to being a Bitcoin company, I'm not sure they're going to make it. Best new offering. What's the best new offering in Bitcoin this year, Dobby? I'm particularly excited about the precious metals brokers that came on to accept Bitcoin like Maggie Metals and Roberts and Roberts because that means that the classical objection of honest currency advocates that something should be backed by something can't really say that about Bitcoin anymore because you can say, well, go buy gold. Right? And then you can just buy gold with Bitcoin. It is very exciting. But the best new offering is cheap air accepts Bitcoin. No longer do the Bitcoin rich have to stay in one place. Now they can go anywhere with cheap air. Honorable mention, Virgin Galactic for doing the same thing, but in space. Best technical innovation. What is the greatest technical innovation of the year in Bitcoin? I give this one to coin mixing. I think that the notion of obfuscating the source of Bitcoin and sort of jumbling it up so that you can add that level of protection, which is sort of threatened by the transparency of the blockchain, it makes Bitcoin as private as people originally hoped it would be. I would especially like to see coin mixing added as a normal option. So when you're sending coins around, you just have a check box. It's already checked and you just mix your coins anyway. And that way everyone's mixing the coins. It's really being used as a large scale system. The best technical innovation. Coinbase allows users to email coins to each other. No more copying and pasting Bitcoin addresses are scanning QR codes. Email coins to your friends. Even if they don't have an account yet, Coinbase will send them instructions on how to create one. So what's the worst technical innovation of the year? This is really the equal and opposite innovation from coin mixing. Whereas coin mixing is about privacy. My worst technical innovation goes to coin tainting, which is the idea that a coin can be marked because somewhere in its history of transactions a crime was committed and therefore the coin itself is guilty. And I think that that's absurd. I think that it is a real danger to the currency itself of people who begin to adopt this idea. And I think that it also will point the finger of blame at the holder of a coin who is not guilty of any crime. So I think it's a non-starter. I think it's a bad idea. Absolutely. They should have the same system for dollars. Every dollar you spend, they should have to check it against a list to see if that dollar was ever used in an illegal transaction. And then they should hold you responsible for holding that dollar that was previously bad. Absolutely. Any time that they're investigating a crime and money is found on the scene, they should investigate every fingerprint on every bill that is found at the scene. Like, that's what we're talking about. I think they even tried it historically. And the bank said we could never do that. Every time we make a transaction, we'd have to check the book. And then also you have to trust the book that it's always right. And we know that every time they make a list like this, they're like, well, a bunch of criminals, a bunch of activists, a bunch of people we don't like, put them all on the list, and then it becomes a really bad list. The worst technical innovation is we are in agreement, colored coins or coin tainting, allowing the third party to interfere with Bitcoin transactions to determine if the coins involved have been stolen or put on a watch list is the worst idea in Bitcoining. And it was shouted down this year. And it will be shouted down again. Enough already. What have you had enough of, Dobby? I've had enough of Peter Schiff. I've had enough commentators like Peter Schiff who feel the need to tell me what's wrong with Bitcoin when it's clear from their explanation that they don't actually know what it is and haven't spent very much time reading about it. So Peter Schiff, enough already. Enough already. Bitcoin is a bubble. It's time to retire this time-honored media trope and move on to something better. Adopting a virtual currency is something that humanity has never done before. And it's not going to look like anything else. The entire world adopting a virtual currency is a brand new phenomenon. And it's only because of Satoshi's genius that it's even possible. It has nothing to do with bubbles. And now moving on to the number one category, Bitcoiner of the year. Dobby, your selection. My nomination went to Jason King of Sean's Outpost and of Satoshi Forest. I think when it comes to Bitcoin charity in the Bitcoin space, Jason King is far and above the best choice. All worthy candidates and I do admire Jason King's work with the homeless. But the Bitcoiner of the year, and you'd think this category would be difficult to decide, but the voting wasn't even close. Mad Bitcoin wins in a landslide. From a Colton F. Deli YouTube show to creating the very Bitcoin group program you're watching today for creating the world's first Bitcoin game show who wants to be a Bitcoin heir. And for doing it all on a shoe string budget with generous donations from audience members like you. And of course, our sponsors, Alpha Lion Technologies, let's talk Bitcoin, Biddylicious and many others. Congratulations, mad Bitcoin, Bitcoiner of the year. Honorable mention. Who else do you have for honorable mention? I think I would like to mention the Free State project. When it comes to the use of Bitcoin as a point of sale system or the use of Bitcoin in intentional marketplaces face to face, the events like the New Hampshire Liberty Forum or PortFest are far and away the most thriving Bitcoin marketplaces that I've visited. Honorable mention, Roger there and the Winklevoss twins. Bitcoin Jesus has always been with us. With the Winklevoss twins really impressed this year with their large purchase of Bitcoins and their founding of the Bitcoin investment trust. And while they may have been lapped by second market, they still brought a great deal of press to Bitcoin and serve as positive symbols for Bitcoiners everywhere. Except for Davy who doesn't like their pro regulation stance. Anything else to add Bitcoin? Davy, anything about Bitcoin you'd like to say? It's been an exciting year. We've seen Bitcoin come up from the double digits to the quadruple digits. And so I am more excited than ever to see what comes in 2014. And I'd just like to say I'm very excited for the Mad Bitcoin's Christmas special. Monday at 1 p.m. PST live on Google+. We'll be back right here with all kinds of Christmas excitement and everything else that you've come to expect from Mad Bitcoin. So thank you for watching. It's been great having you, Davy. Apologies to the other guests who canceled. And we'll hope to see you next week and we're out of time. Until next time. Bye, bye.