The Bitcoin Group, the American original, for over the last ten seconds, the sharpest Satoshi's, the best bitcoins, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. This week we'd like to welcome Davy Barker from shinybadges.com. Hello. Chris J from Feathercoin. Hello. Megan Lourds from Bitcoin, not Bombs. Howdy. And Will Pengman from Bitcoin, Milwaukee. Good morning. Will Screenshare Work. Issue 1. Apple Bands Final Bitcoin Wallet from the App Store. The Apple of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak is truly dead. No reason was given with many speculating that Apple is using monopolistic control of the App Store to clear the way for an Apple branded payment network. How damaging is the banning of the final Bitcoin wallet from the App Store on a scale of one to ten, one being not bad at all, ten being absolute cataclysmic devastation. I ask you, Davy Barker. I mean, isn't Apple the company of cracking their merchandise? I mean, people don't like Apple products. People crack Apple products. People put whatever software they want on it. So I don't see this as particularly devastating. I mean, it makes Apple look stupid. It's going to make them look even stupider when they have to change their position. But no, I mean, they're going to lose business. But anybody who wants to figure out how to put Bitcoin on their iPhone, I'm sure they can figure it out. And the Blockchain app is available in CIDIA, the unlocked or jailbroken iPhone store. Chris J. Yeah, I think that the Apple are just an average company ever since jobs passed away. They just do everything that's far too predictable, far too rational. They're not giving people any surprises, like we used to get. And so, yeah, I think this is Internet Explorer all over again. And it's going to massively backfire because you're going to have projects like CoinPunk, CoinPunk, but all got the pleasure of meeting Kyle the other day who's the founder of that. And that allows people to actually host that own Bitcoin wallets from their own server and then access their funds through a browser. So, I Bitcoin, sorry, Apple aren't going to be able to ban access to funds through the browser. They're also not going to be able to ban SMS access as well. Megan, Lord. Yeah, I'm going to have to go with probably like a three. This is predictable Apple behavior. I mean, they're always trying to crush their competition, but they always go about it and really bad ways. And this is just going to cost them business. I've seen so many people literally destroying their iPhones too, and switching over to droids. And it just makes sense. And they're going to lose a huge emerging market, you know, Bitcoiners. So it's a really bad decision, but I think it might kind of get in the way a little bit of trying to get businesses on board who are already comfortable using Apple products. Who don't know, who don't have, you know, the understanding to be able to jailbreak the phones and get those apps in there. So there might be a little bit of a hindrance with that, but I think overall it is a really bad decision, and I think they're going to regret it. Well, Penguin. In the near term, I would say a four and a half five, because I think one of the best outreach tools that Bitcoin proponents or Bitcoin evangelists have is, you know, as soon as someone approaches them or they approach some person on the street to talk about Bitcoin, one of the best mechanisms to getting folks involved is skip all the talk and just go right to downloading a wallet app and then give that person a dollar or a few dollars. I love that approach. I know I've shared it on this show a number of times, and we do it every week at our meetup with anyone who doesn't already have any Bitcoin. So that puts a huge dent in the, you know, so many people are iPhone users, especially the wave of adopters that is about to come and right now that we're seeing. Most of them are, you know, from the more mainstream crowd, if you will, and less the tech savvy crowd, at least at this point. And yeah, so the inability to help folks who have on iPhone and get a bit coin wallet, at least in the short term, is severely hampered. And it's bad moves. It's just like the other panelists said, it's a really unwise play on the part of Apple because there's so many workarounds. And if there aren't, if there weren't any workarounds, I'm sure within a week we'd see them. So all those things are exciting. I'm really, you know, I talk all the time. I really like to see the hypocrisy of these various, you know, entities shoved in their face. Or, you know, it's like a pie joke, you know? It's like a cream pie to the face once they, you know, they have to eat their words. And I think like the panelists agree, you know, Apple's gonna have to either reverse this decision or step it up a notch, neither of which is good for them. So very, very unwise play. We'd like to welcome Andreas Antonopoulos. We were just discussing Apple who earlier this week banned the blockchain out wallet from the App Store. What are your thoughts? So a quick disclaimer, I have a conflict of interest. I'm the Chief Security Officer of blockchain. And so this comes with a matter of bias and personal interest. I was a poll that just wrote on the op-ed on the Boeing Boeing blog, which just got published about this. I think it was a rather ill-advised move. But, you know, blockchain was the last Bitcoin wallet remaining in the App Store. And when you are the gatekeeper of innovation in a walled garden with a world that's moving far too fast to keep up, that's a really lonely spot to be in. This and there were maybe half a dozen wallets in 2013. And that's just on Bitcoin. Now we have hundreds of cryptocurrencies. Apple is going to get absolutely overwhelmed with a deluge of applications. And they're either going to have to decide that they're banning cryptocurrency as a tech industry and innovation movement as a whole. Or they're going to have to revise their policy and give up some of the lucrative 30% margins they make on the in-app purchases and close wallet systems that they use. I think they're going to have to reverse this decision. But quite honestly, it doesn't really matter. HTML5 is coming. It's a powerful web platform for developing applications across all browsers. And with HTML5, we've seen one of the last hurdles, which was capturing a QR code from the camera in order to use it to know wallet has now been overcome. And the HTML5 wallets are coming. I can tell you that blockchain is working hard to deliver a fully functional, beautiful HTML5 wallet that will work across all mobile browsers within the next few months. So this is something that's going to happen across the space. And then Apple really has even fewer choices. They can either go completely or well in and start putting up a web site block on their Safari, a great firewall of China. Or they're going to have a massive inconsistency between what users can get through the browser versus what they can get through the app store, which really just makes it look like a platform that's lacking in capability. Absolutely. And to pick up on Megan's point, it's not difficult at all to jailbreak or unlock your iPhone. All you do is download a program from the internet, run the program, back up your iPhone first, of course. And the program will allow you to install any program that you want on the hardware that you paid money for. They call it jailbreaking, but unlocking is a lot more apt. But to Wool's point, I mean, this has been the main way to create user adoption. And we don't necessarily want to stay within the confines of the geek community that have been in the industry. This is the only one lock. Leaving London last week, I took a taxi ride that only lasted about eight minutes from the hotel where I was saying to Kings Cross and Pancras. And I spoke to the taxi driver about Bitcoin. As we were driving, I helped him install the application. I even clicked through some of the screens on his iPhone. And by the end of the taxi ride in eight minutes, I had installed an iPhone wallet and given him his first three or four millipits. And I do that with every person I meet. This is a very important adoption tool. It's a very important education and user awareness tool. And to keep it only for the geek technology is a terrible blow to Bitcoin. We really need mainstream adoption. And Apple, whether we like it or not, it is the phone of the common man. It's the easiest one to use. Not everyone wants to use more sophisticated and open platforms like Android. Those that do have already made the switch and droves. But we want to get everyone. And that means we need to be our miles. I can also announce today that there is a Dogecoin wallet that has been released in the App Store. It's called My Doge. So everyone is counting down to see when they pull the Dogecoin wallet if they indeed do. Well, exactly. I mean, that's the point. It's like it's not just Bitcoin. There are hundreds of other cryptocurrencies each with their own dozens of wallets. And that's just counted wallets. There are going to be many other financial innovation applications based on cryptocurrencies. So Apple's position is not simply their banning Bitcoin wallets. Apple's position is there abiding the technology wave of cryptocurrencies. And that is a very difficult position to hold in the long run because whatever happens to Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies are here to stay. And they're going to be a hugely empowering technology for billions of people around the world. Apple can't stay on the sidelines for long. Exit question, how long before Apple changes its mind, if ever, Dovey Barker? I give it four to six months. Chris J. When it affects that bottom line, Megan Lorde's. That's pretty much what I was going to say when they start seeing people leave and droves. Will Pangman? I'm going to give him three months. Three months. Andres Antonopoulos. I'm not that confident. I mean, I think Apple is a giant behemoth. And we're just a net. I would say by the end of the year, they're not going to feel the pinch from this at all. Issue two. Bitcoin now accepted at every 7-11 in Mexico. 7-11 put up a huge Mexico-sized test balloon recently, announcing that customers would now be able to pay in Bitcoin via the Padmobile Wallet Service. Bitcoin and convenience stores. Bitcoin and gas stations. Is this bigger news for Mexico or bigger news for Bitcoin? When will I be able to buy a Slurpee with Bitcoin in the US? Is brick and mortar about to go brick and Bitcoin? I ask you, Chris J. Yeah, and this is great for Mexico. I think I would really like to see more of these Wallet apps that already exist, things like M-Pace, take up Bitcoin, because now the merchant doesn't have to do anything. As far as I'm aware, the 7-11 brand hasn't endorsed Bitcoin personally. Have they? No, it's just the case that you can spend it there. And that's great, because the merchants don't want to be speculators in this market. And that's what we found as well. When we go out and we can just get merchant since cryptocurrency, they don't like the volatility. So if somebody can take care of that for them, then I think that's absolutely fantastic. Megan Lorde. I wish Derek James here, because he's always talking about how he wants to see gas stations and convenience stores take Bitcoin. This is great news for Mexico and for Bitcoin. And I'd like to see other places. I think it's still probably going to be a while, though. But yeah, I think it's excellent news all around. So hopefully that encourages other convenience stores to get involved. Will, Penguin. I'm usually very optimistic about these kinds of things, but full-scale wide, all the franchises in any large corporation, brick and mortar businesses, adopting Bitcoin. I don't see happening anytime soon in the US. But certainly, those franchisees can do it on their own. And we've seen that in a number of places. So I'm just going to put an open call out there to all of the passionate Bitcoiners get involved in your local meetups, develop strategies to reach out to particular business owners. So you might find friendly to Bitcoin adoption, and support them, and be their customer support, their tech support for them, facilitating an easy time. Small business owners spend a lot of time working on their back end, if you will. And that's not always where the money is made. So if you can help facilitate that, I think we'll see more retail convenience stores, gas stations, adopt Bitcoin because of the obvious advantages. And yeah, Bitcoin activists better get to work. Andres and Tenovelis. I think what's most interesting about this announcement is the fact that what we're seeing is large chain stores that have franchises. So franchisees are a hotbed to innovation in these spaces. So you see individual franchisees deciding to adopt things that will attract more customers into their individual store. But in this particular case, it seems like it's a chain wide reaction. I'm very happy to see this kind of thing, especially in Mexico, because this kind of option can really bootstrap through a mittens' float from the US to Mexico, which I think is one of the most important targets for Bitcoin. Dovey Barker. You know, this makes me think of BitcoinStore.com. One of the sort of mission statements of BitcoinStore.com when they launched was that they were going to charge a very sort of low profit margin because their purpose was to put pressure on other online merchants to begin to accept Bitcoin, otherwise they would lose business to Bitcoin Store. So I would really like it. I mean, Mexico is not that far away. In fact, for me, it's closer than a lot of the places that I'm going next month. So I mean, I would really like to see, if you saw adoption in Mexico, first off, you're going to see a lot of economic prosperity in Mexico, which is going to do interesting things to the immigration debate. But it would also put pressure on anybody who was losing that economic capital to Mexico in the sort of border states to say, well, maybe we need some of this business here. Maybe we need some of that prosperity here in Texas or Arizona or California. I would like to see it so successful that it puts pressure on merchants in the United States to say we should follow their lead. Absolutely. Just to build on Andreas' point, we talk often of how it's easy to send Bitcoin overseas. But for me, thinking it out in my mind, once they get the Bitcoin, what are they going to do with it? And this now, at least they can buy Slurpees. So little steps like this, being able to fill in the gaps in this market and to explain to someone, well, you sent a Bitcoin home to your mother, what's your mother going to do now? How is she going to convert that into pesos or food or whatever they happen to need? Well, is it like 7.11 here? Because it seems like maybe 30% of 7.11s here are also gas stations. And if that's the case, then that's much more significant than being able to buy Slurpees and hot dogs. It's tough to say. I believe it's mainly this padmobile wallet service has accepted Bitcoin because they also said it was, you could spend Bitcoin now in Gandhi bookstores. So there are a couple of chains that have this wallet service, which is just another way to convert your Bitcoin's into the wallet service and then to spend wherever you'd like. I believe Chris mentioned M-Pesa, which is a similar system. So exit question, which corporation should try out Bitcoin next? Best Buy, McDonald's, Taco Bell, Chris J? Yeah, it needs to be multinational. It needs to be somewhere so that we can actually start getting the wealth out of the Western world and into the developing countries. Because I think if we make that a priority, then the Western brands will have to catch up. Megan Lords. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know that I think more people at often Bitcoin is great, but I'd really like to see it kind of more locally oriented, getting your smaller sorts of all, or even some of the franchises are independently owned. So I'd really like to kind of see it take off on that level. Yeah, kind of keeping. Yeah. Will Pangman, Netflix, Netflix, Andreas Antonopoulos, local stores, I think are more important to the big franchise of Big Chains. They have the highest pressure on their small margins. So the little store around the corner for you, and you need to help them. Dovey Barker. I'm doubling down on video games. I'd like to see Blizzard or some other massively multiplayer online role-playing game company adopt Bitcoin as an in-game currency so that I can use it to buy swords or gold or wizard spells or potions or things like that. I think there is a real use for Bitcoin in market simulations as well as in markets. I agree. And just to build on Will and Andreas' point, it is time to help people with Bitcoin. I know I'm tired of removing viruses and spyware from people's computers, but installing a wallet, giving someone a little explanation of Bitcoin, it's not that hard. We should all be doing it. Every computer geek should be helping every non-computer geek get on board with this new currency because it benefits everyone. So moving on, issue three. Oh, the screen show is going to work again. Mount Gox with drawl issues. Magic the gathering online exchange, the venerable Bitcoin exchange is having withdrawal issues again, this time with Bitcoin, causing the price to drop 20% before recovering. Is this just one poorly written exchange or does Bitcoin have a real problem? Megan Lourdes. I think it's unfortunate that one exchange has so much impact on the market. In my instinct is to say this is a Mount Gox problem, but it is something I have to do more research on. So I'm going to keep it at that. I need to do more research on this. Will Pangman. Yeah, every time we've seen any shenanigans come from Mount Gox, it's deeply affected the Bitcoin marketplace. It's taken some time to recover even from some of these various missteps of theirs, I guess. It's well documented that they've had a lot of trouble. Is it a poorly written exchange? Are there liquidity issues? Who's to say, I don't know, those folks on the inside know? And the rest of us just need to take our business elsewhere. I know for those who've used Mount Gox, which is many, many folks, and you probably have balances on either side, fiat, and crypto. So you might be stuck for a while. And we saw this happen in the early summertime in the US with several US exchanges going down. Bitfloor was one. Folks had to wait a long time for those issues to be resolved. But of course, Bitfloor just completely shut down. I think we'd have much bigger problems on our hands than what we've seen yesterday and today if Mount Gox just completely shut down. So I'm rooting for them only so that they can come in for a landing and better businesses that I think are right around the corner. CoinCenter, CoinMarket, and all kinds of other exchanges in various countries stepping up. But hopefully we can bring it in for a landing without any massive disruptions. Andres and Tenoppelis. I'll never attribute to Malice what you can be explained by simple gross incompetence, clownish management, and idiots of the hell. Thank you, Gox, for launching this cryptocurrency at a time when there were no other exchanges. It's now time to fade off into the sunset. I don't think there are any liquidity or solvency problems of belt Gox. What we're seeing is the fifth Goxing in a series of sequential Goxings, all of which have been the result of gross incompetence and clownish management by Mr. Carpellis. And here's the thing. If you try to write an exchange based on PHP, MySQL is a single monolithic stack application. And then you build that on top of a custom version of Bitcoin that doesn't quite follow the consensus protocol. Every time you have a problem, that problem gets exacerbated by scale. Then you add on top of that to incompetent communications, the creative panic that further exacerbates the scale problems, and the whole thing comes crashing down when you've seen the story play out five times already. Now, the good news is they have the money. So eventually people will see their money and it's not going to be a huge problem. The even better news is that they only control 20% of the volume. So this is an insignificant glitch. And the best news of all is that Bitcoin went below 700 and I bought me some today at the Friday's Bitcoin sale. And it was awesome. Now let's get back to running Bitcoin the way it should be instead of clownish management like Mr. Carpellis. Moving on. Dahlie Barker. Now you guys have me following Andreas. So it's virtually impossible to say anything intelligent. So I'm going in the opposite. Never attribute to incompetence what you can attribute to Malice. I think that this is an inside job. I think Mt. Gox is struggling to remain relevant. And so they are causing a crisis to generate headlines. Because other than this, I haven't heard of Mt. Gox in months. I didn't even realize they were still around. So yeah, I'm saying that Mt. Gox is intentionally generating a crisis in an effort to remain relevant. Brilliant. It's a good thing. I've got quite a lot here. Do you really want me to do this? My pet hate are these exchanges. I think the exchanges are the worst part of our Bitcoin. And in any other centralized aspect of Bitcoin, the price goes up when we see more adoption and more diversity in more different ways to ramp into the market. We see the price go down every time some centralized entity like this screws up. I don't know whether or not they are solvent or not. I've spent a lot of the last few days trying to look into this. I put out a personal appeal to Mark on Twitter and on the IRC where they hide, by the way. They hide out on IRC. This is 1994 technology. And this is how they handle their customers, right? And then when you go in there, you get told, if you kick up any kind of a stink, even if you make some speculation, that you'll get banned. Sarah's in there. She's telling you you're going to get kicked off of here. If you kick up a stink, you're hanging on. You've got people's money. They have every right to get upset. So look, OK, so what she's saying really is, I don't mind if you speculate on the price if we can take a cut. But if you start speculating in the way that we can't make a margin on it, then you're out. So I don't like the way they've handled the communication. They've had ample opportunity to fix this. And this comes on a backdrop of just failed promises. Time and time again, they said they were going to do things and then they failed to deliver. And then they act surprised when people start flying into Tokyo and actually there was a guy on Reddit, I think I gave you the link to the Reddit post who literally just hung out in the lobby all day. Mark then turns up with a Frappuccino latte. You know, just walk us on into the offices if there's no problem at all. And the dude's like questioning him. He's door stepping in. He's saying, OK, where's the money? Let's see it. But the problem is, all these claims they come out with can't be falsified. They're just claims. And nobody knows whether they're true. And so naturally in the speculative market, like I say, a speculative market that they're more than happy to profit from. But then when it works against them, they want to ban their use of some an IRC channel, which by the way, you need a registered email for. So it's not even trivial to get that far. No, I think it's an absolute disgrace. The people that sell to shovels and spades are always the people that make the money. And that really does get me angry. You know, that really winds me up. So I really wish they would just go away. We need more things like local bitcoins. We need more of those peer-to-peer exchanges. Yeah, or a completely distributed exchange is a great point. Yeah. Excellent question. Does Bitcoin have a long-term problem from the Mt. Gox exchange? Or is this much to do about nothing? Megan Lords. Well, it's not much to do about nothing to the people who have been caught up in this. But this is something that's been happening quite a bit with Mt. Gox. And it's time for them to be replaced. It's time for there to be better solutions coming out. So it's really, yeah, it's really unfortunate what's happened. But this is a pattern of behavior with Mt. Gox. And people need to realize that and get out of it. Will, Penguin. Yeah, I'll echo Megan. I feel for the folks who have their fun stuck in that system. And I'm very optimistic. I think, yeah, I'm like Andreas and Chris both pointed out. The decentralized exchanges, open transactions, these kinds of innovations. Hopefully we'll see by the end of the year, hopefully sooner. And that will take care of a lot of the fud with regard to regulation or centralized exchanges, malfeasance, and so on. So I'm very much looking forward to that. And that's going to just make this whole ecosystem for all the cryptos so much healthier. And Andreas and to Nopolis. Gox is in a problem for Bitcoin. But what it does is it demonstrates that in an environment where decentralized finance is finally getting a foothold, the one part of it that keeps failing is the centralized exchanges. We now have a decentralized currency. But the owner of it's an off-brand since when out of that currency are the weak spots. The weak spots for regulation, that the weak spots for fraud, that the weak spots for theft on custodial accounts. And they're the weak spots for gross and confidence of cloud-ish management. And so as a result, we need to apply the same ethos of the blockchain and create decentralized solutions to decentralized financial systems. What Gox proves once and for all is that centralized financial services are vulnerable in many, many ways. It actually proves the point of Bitcoin and makes it even stronger in the long run. But in the short run, it certainly hurts. Dauvi Barker. The only sense, I think the only sense in which Mt. Gox can harm Bitcoin in any way is through reputation of people that don't understand the distinction. I think I get emails frequently from people who are interested in entering the Bitcoin market and they want my advice. And they'll say something like, I tried to get an account on Mt. Gox, but I couldn't figure it out. Help me. And I had to explain that a Mt. Gox account was not a Bitcoin account and that I did not recommend that they go there. So in this sense, Mt. Gox is being regulated by their reputation. If you're still using Mt. Gox, you're not reading the market signals. But as much as people are going to associate Mt. Gox with Bitcoin and think that they are the same, Mt. Gox could potentially harm the reputation of Bitcoin. But there's no technological harm. There's nothing about Mt. Gox that's going to harm anybody. He was not using it. So Chris, yeah. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. Everything that's been said, I think it does actually damage the reputation of Bitcoin in the short run. Because the first thing everybody wants to know is where they can get that Bitcoin. And like Darby said, that they confuse this with being a problem with Bitcoin. Issue four. Let's see. Come on, screen share. Issue four, Bitcoins banned in Russia. Stating that Russia's official currency was the Rupal. Russia's prosecutor general office banned Russian corporations and Russian citizens from using the fledgling cryptocurrency. Will this ban be successful and good for Russia? I ask you, will, Pangman. Will the ban be good for Russia? No. I don't think it'll be successful. The nature of this thing is people can possess Bitcoins if they want. And if there are certain risks that they're taking and certain jurisdictions for doing so, they can become knowledgeable of those risks relatively easily. They can mitigate those risks by, let's say, just speculating on the future value and hoarding a K.A. saving their Bitcoins. I think Russians would be much better off to do so if you ask me. So yeah, there might be very, very limited options in terms of transacting with merchants in Russia. So I guess no more subway in Russia paid for in Bitcoin. But yeah, they can still use it and they can still conduct international commerce. I'm eager to see. I have some freelancers who've done some odd jobs here and there for me who are in Russia. I've paid them with Bitcoin. They've been happy to receive it. And one of them I had to set up to do it. I encouraged them to do that. And I wanted to pay them that way. And they were happy when that went through. So I'll be interested to see if they'd like to continue doing business with me. But other than the short-term hiccups, again, I think this is another behemoth like Apple sort of. It's a bigger behemoth. It's a government too. But we've seen Russia reverse some of its totalitarian initiatives and go back and forth. There's been a lot of that too in Russia. So this might just be while the Olympics are going on. And maybe they weaken up after that. Because they've got a very tight grip going on right now. But yeah, it's bad. Bad for Russia. And Jaya sent a nopless. Yes, I would caution the idea that Russia has banned Bitcoin as a headline, has been repeated very often. What's missing from that headline is the scope jurisdiction and facts. And we've seen these types of headlines before they've been proven wrong. The fact has it in fact been translated correctly. And has this in fact being a ban on Bitcoin's the scope who banned Bitcoin's under what circumstances? And finally, the jurisdiction. Is this a local estate or federal agency within Russia? We've seen these pronouncements before. For example, when we had the headline, China Bans Bitcoin, what they actually meant was that the federal bank or the central bank had disallowed banks from using Bitcoin as an item on their asset balance sheet, which was a much narrower ban than what we thought. And then we saw exchanges adopting it again. So I don't think Russia has banned Bitcoin. I think we've seen already some articles that are contradicting that claim. Even however, if Russia bans Bitcoin as a whole, this reminds me of a time in the 90s when it was a tremendous storm in the North Atlantic, which had shut down all traffic in the channel between Britain and Europe. And some British tabloids came out with a memorable headline, Europe, cut off from Britain. If you ban Bitcoin, who loses? If Russia bans Bitcoin, does Bitcoin lose? No, Bitcoin is an international or transnational currency. The first of its kind, it's fluid. It moves across borders. Bitcoin succeeds. Bitcoin prevails. Bitcoin continues completely unfazed. Who loses? Well, legitimate Russian businesses that can no longer take advantage of Bitcoin, innovation in Bitcoin and Russia, investments in Bitcoin and Russia, and ultimately Russian users of Bitcoin, they all lose, and they get to feel the full totalitarian wrath of an out of control governments that came straight out with KGB. But other than that, Bitcoin doesn't feel a thing. Dali Barker. Enforced how? What? I mean, Russian is the official language of Russia. Do they ban German? Enforced how? There's no way to enforce this. I suppose if there were large corporations that were publicly taking Bitcoin, they could target them or whatever. But short of policing every single person's, every single communication, there is nothing preventing me from sending a mill a bit to Russia, right? The second other than not having a Russian friend that lives there. But I think it's interesting what Andres is saying, because a lot of the things that have been reported as bans turned out to be some weird sort of policy decision. But even let's take the worst case scenario. Let's say that they start dragging people out of their homes and forcefully searching their computers for Bitcoin. That would generate a tremendous amount of headlines. And Bitcoin would suddenly become much more commonplace than familiar to people around the world reading those stories and horrified by those stories. And it would only result in all of Russia's neighbors benefiting more than them. So it's foolish. It's the old world panicking. That's what these sorts of stories are. And you let them panic. Chris, Jay. Yeah, it wasn't banned. I said this on Twitter earlier. Posted the link in the site bar for you to tweet it out again. The link to the actual original Russian statement. They're basically they just advised. They just it's just saying, if you trade in Bitcoin, this is to commercial entities in Russia that you may be viewed with suspicion. But this is not a ban. This is a statement from a central bank. It's the same as it happened in Thailand. These magazines, okay, just want to sell advertising. That's what they're there for. So they will use link bait and they will entice you in. And we're in a situation now where the comments on a blog or in an article are more relevant than the journalistic piece that goes above it. So just scroll, scroll right down to the bottom first. Don't even read the article. Just scroll right down and look at the comments, especially like discussed, you know that the app. It now surfaces the likes, comments at the top. So just go there and say, show me the most upgraded comments. That's the way to read the media these days. This is junk. This is not been banned. Megan Lourdes. Yeah, read your headlines, read your bylines, and most importantly, read between the lines and the comments are really like Chris's perspective on that because yeah, I do end up learning a lot more reading higher rated comments. And there's so much sensationalism with so many headlines nowadays. And it's really important to read a little deeper into it when they say, oh, this country has banned Bitcoin. No, it wasn't a ban like Chris said. They're cautioning you against using it and cautioning against businesses. See him to have lost Megan there. Exit question. Yeah, cool. Sorry, Chris. I want to say when it's point out that the ruble has been rising against the dollar since about 2009. And I don't think this is a coincidence. Exit question, why do people in power refuse to learn the lessons of history? Every time you ban something, you only make it more attractive. Will the Russian people heed the ban and avoid Bitcoin? Yes or no, will, Penguin. Well, I find it interesting, you know, thanks for distilling the information better for us, Andreas and Chris. Maybe some Russian people are under the same confusion about these headlines and stuff. So yeah, many of them won't be swayed by this, but my optimism from a few months ago, hoping that Russia would be one of the next big, you know, big geographical centers to jump into Bitcoin acceptance is a little bit disappointed at this point. So they won't heed this dissuasion by the state, but it's certainly going to put a damper on adoption in Russia for a while. And, Andreas. No, no, it's not going to make that huge a difference. And least for the early adopters at this point, because the early adopters are already a self-selecting group. Listen, countries that apply heavy-handed approach to law with very little due process and a lot of capriciousness and arbitrary decisions are countries where the rule of law is not respected by the people. Trust me, I grew up in Greece, I know exactly what it's like. The more heavy-handed the law makers, the more heavy-handed the enforcement, the less people respect the law. And to us as Americans where the rule of law is somewhat stronger, it seems that if something is banned, that would be respected, but in fact, it's the exact opposite. When in countries like this, things that are banned continue to operate just as if the law hadn't been passed because there's very little respect for the law. There's more respect for power, or all power. And the law is just an excuse to exhibit raw power. That's how things work in Russia. Raw power matters much more than the law. So even if this has been banned, that will make a difference. Dali Barker. I think you're making too much of an assumption saying that they haven't learned from the lessons of history. If you look at the history of prohibition, of any substance, of any activity, of anything, it has almost never achieved the goal of reducing the sort of consumption of that product. But what it has achieved is the militarization of society, the centralization of power in the hands of political elites, the centralization of money. It makes campaigning incredibly easy for them, because suddenly there are campaigns where these very easy slogans about grubs or bad ones. So they have learned from the lessons of history. Prohibition makes their jobs incredibly easy. It just doesn't do what it claims it's going to do. Now, if their goal is to reduce the consumption of something, if Bitcoin really scares them and they actually want to reduce its use, they would have learned that open prohibition is a bad idea. But creating an environment of fear, creating an environment in which the law is vague, the rules are gray, and enforcement is arbitrary and severe. That might actually reduce people's use of a substance. So if they are learning from the lessons of history, they will be vague, they will not openly bend something, they will instead make examples of people. And that is what we're seeing. Chris, Jay. Yeah, I agree with all of that. I don't think that the Russians people will heed it. And also these laws are a reaction to threats. So they clearly see Bitcoin as a potential threat. That's why they're acting out. And the laws are also a response by governments that demonstrate what it is they want to do. These laws are a playing out and a dramatization of what they don't like. They don't actually achieve anything. So yeah, I don't know. Will the Russian people respect the ban? See no audio? All right, we'll come back to you on the next one. Issue five. Local, breaking news. Local Bitcoin users in Florida charged with money laundering. At least two men in Florida have been charged thanks to a complicated entrapment plot by the Secret Service. If the Secret Service hadn't have offered them $30,000 for Bitcoins, would they really have been able to break the $10,000 barrier? Is this just more Soviet behavior from the Secret Service? Pushing Bitcoin underground while doing nothing more than creating more work for themselves? Andreus and Tenoppelis. Well, I think there was a couple of interesting things going on here. First of all, the amounts in play were about $30,000. And so for someone to take a $30,000 train on local Bitcoin, I mean, how stupid can you be? I've had people come up to me and say, I want to get 5,000 Bitcoins no questions asked. Like, yeah, good try, agent Smith. I'm not that stupid. Entrapment is something that's happening all the time. And I think the bottom line here and the most interesting thing is that they've been charged on the two different statues. The first one is operating an unlicensed money service business or money exchange on the state's regulations and probably on the federal regulations as well, but primarily on state regulations. And that's a charge that's going to stake, doing a transaction of $30,000 in that circumstance would certainly be a problem under Florida's money transmission laws. Here's the other interesting one, though. They've been charged and the biggest headline has been money laundering. Now, money laundering is a charge about transmitting and structuring finances incidents to the commission of a crime. And here we have no crime. Money laundering doesn't just happen when you exchange money with someone. It has to involve a crime. No crime was actually committed because they were in tracks on the process of exchanging. So I think the money laundering charges are simply the long tail of the charge sheet that the prosecutor is going to have to drop pretty quickly because it won't stand up in court. In a half confidence defense attorney, we'll be able to get that charge thrown out. So then it goes down to a money service without license, which I don't know if the statute, if it's a class A felony or a misdemeanor or some kind of civil issue that's going to be settled with a fine. But certainly is something message. And the message I think is loud and clear. Don't do huge amounts of transactions on local bitcoins. I've often used local bitcoins to do transactions mostly with new users and mostly under $100. And that's a nice and easy way to get people involved in Bitcoin. And I have no worries or feel any risk doing transactions at that level. But $30,000 transactions, you're an idiot to start with. And then the prosecuting with charge with money laundering is a career or schmuck who's trying to self-aggrandize through these charge sheets. And it seems that Bitcoin is now the brand that prosecutors want to use to embellish their resume. So watch out people because you're going to be the patty that goes down for them. Dali Barker. This is that climate of fear I was talking about. This is a case which is not really designed to protect society in any way, but designed to get to garner a headline, which will fear people who don't understand it. And that's what's going on. Chris, Jay. Yeah. Andreas pretty much said everything I was going to say. I think the people that work inside of the government and law enforcement now are seeing Bitcoin as an opportunity to get something on their resume. I don't see any victims in this crime whatsoever. Megan Lords. Can you hear me now? Yep. OK, I'm on my phone. Yeah, Andreas pretty much covered it. I don't fault people for not knowing the money laundering laws because it's quite some regulations to read through. But you have to exercise common sense with these things. Yeah, if someone's trying to buy above that $10,000 limit, they're probably an agent. You have to be really careful with these things and exercise some common sense. But as far as the money laundering charges, well, they stick or not, it's interesting. It'll be really interesting to see how they would be able to enforce something like that. But yeah, be very, very careful, especially if you're in Florida doing anything, by the way, it's scary down here. As far as law enforcement, they will try to entrap you for anything and everything. So be extremely careful if you're in Florida. Will, Pankman. Yeah, it's interesting how the charge that'll stick, and I agree with Andreas on this, the charge that'll stick is not the one grabbing the headlines. People don't want to read about money transmission services and money transmitter businesses and all these things. That's not sexy. Again, if you watch the hearings in November, if you watch the hearings in New York a couple weeks ago, you know that the buzz word. Of course, they talked about terrorism and other things, drug activity and narco trafficking or whatever. But they all, I mean, every single time they were scared of anything, money laundering was the term they threw out there. John Matanis from the Bitcoin Foundation, I really am grateful that he's the chair of that foundation and he has come out in front of money laundering and calling it for what it is, basically thought crime. That's certainly where I stand as well. So it's interesting that that's the meme they're going for. So if there's any sort of, be careful out there people, like the rest of the panelists said. And again, I just want to point out, localbitcoins.com is one of the best exchange services out there because it's not centralized. And it's not all the way there. It's not all the way decentralized. Like we're going to see, hopefully, within a year, with some of these next generation technologies in the crypto space. But it's certainly just a great option. I mean, I like it to meet people. And I don't think, you know, the headline even on Bitcoin magazine publications, you know, CoinDesk and so on, is insinuating that this could be the end of localbitcoins.com. Or I think we're all bracing for stuff like that if you're the average user. But no, this isn't the end of these kinds of services. These two guys, I mean, they're in Florida. That's a place where there's lots of international trafficking of all sorts of things, legal and illegal going on. And that's, I think, why what Megan was getting at, it's so heavily surveilled and entrapment, you know, bait for entrapment efforts and stuff like that. So if you're going to do trades like in the five and six figure mark, you better trust somebody, you better have lawyers present, you better, if you want to keep it private, you can do that with lawyers present and trust the other party. And, you know, probably not meeting them online and then going to meet them in person for the first time. That's probably not the best way to do something like that. So maybe this is just sifting out some of the garbage. Maybe it's overzealous policing. The Secret Service was involved. So exit question. How long before a private secret website, like local bitcoins is created? How many of them will be created? Can the Secret Service and FBI ever hope to stop them all? Can they really stop a forest fire by burning down the entire forest? Andreas and Tenovelis. So I believe there's already a site like local bitcoins is called Craigslist. And if that doesn't work, it's called Facebook. And if that doesn't work, it's called every other website where you could put a comment on and advertise the fact that you're going to be at Starbucks at noon and selling a bitcoin. I mean, this is ridiculous. You can't sell private transactions between individuals. And most importantly, local bitcoins doesn't handle your money. It doesn't have custodial access to your money. And it's not involved with a transaction. Any way, other than offering classified services for this, so they're not going to stop or shut down local bitcoins and they won't be able to enforce any legal action against it. It's pure free speech and it should continue. I think it would be advisable to put limits on the maximum amount. But yes, if they really do push it in some countries, you are going to see on the ground that the site is in the dark web, delivering these services instead. Dovey Barker. These sorts of websites already exist. There are exactly 637 squared of them. And there's no policing them. I mean, like, you shut down one website 10 show up. I mean, that's how it works. So Chris, Jay. Yeah, I think, well, first of all, we've already created a further call. We've already created an exchange on Reddit. And that took the guys about a week in.net to do. Now, there is, there is contrary to what Andreas said, there is a benefit to them because they do allow for escrow and reputation systems built in. So it is obviously better than say using Facebook. But the point is, well, taken. The fact is that states are there to regulate the way in which we can track and relate with one another. That's what they do. And when they intervene like this, and they try to stick themselves between compartments and everyday relationships, they are getting in your way. They are literally stopping you from becoming who you can be. So yeah, if it took us a week to do it in.net, it's not going to take anybody any amount of time to do. Megan, Lord. Right. Prohibition doesn't work. And like Dovey said, these sites already exist. So yeah, there's no stopping Bitcoin. I mean, it's bad for, I guess maybe make local Bitcoins look bad, but I think they're going to recover. And I think there's going to be even more services available. Moving on. Would you like to donate to the Bitcoin Group? The Bitcoin Group is now accepting altcoins with our cryptocurrency trade key or Bitcoins. Donate at thebitcoingroup.com. Now moving on to questions and answers. Your questions are answers. Of course, the first question is about Maxcoin. Is everybody ready to talk about Maxcoin? I generally, I mean, I've seen the launch, it sounds like they're having troubles. Initially, it sounded like there was a lot of pump going on, a lot of excitement. If you want to call it that, a lot of Twitter posts. So I can speak to this. So can I reset this story for the listeners who are not familiar with Maxcoin? Yes, yes, please do. Let's see, Chris, do you want to intro it and knock it down? Well, I mean, I was getting tip-offs about this like a few weeks ago. People coming up to me at the meetup, going, do you want to get in on this? Like, I was like, get on and what exactly? I'm a little bit disappointed in Max and I'm sorry if he's watching, because I'm a big fan of his. But I met Max at a meetup group just before Christmas at Bank to the Future, which is a Bitcoin startup in London. And he said on camera that he wasn't going to promote any more currencies. And he said that they were a distraction and that the only one that really mattered was Bitcoin. And this was right after Quark, because somebody sort of pushed him on it and said, look, is there a conflict of interest here? Because you've got a lot of followers. And clearly, the people that control the information control the beliefs. If you control the beliefs, you control the price. So there's going to be an element of doubt as to how much he holds. Now, I'm sure that he's a perfectly ethical guy. I don't think he's going to be doing anything wrong. But I'm a little bit disappointed that he's kind of done this. He's not behind the coin itself. That's something that's important that should be said. He's not associated. I think someone's just done this as a kind of vanity project, as a kind of way of trippeting to him. But yeah, if anyone else is anything else to say. Well, I have a complaint because I was on Max Kaiser's show six days ago. And I got no Max coin. I mean, what the hell, Max? I was right there. Not even a tote bag. Not nothing. Yeah, exactly. So here's an interesting thought. I hope it's interesting, at least. I've been revising my opinion as the cryptocurrency space. And I've gone from thinking that there will be hundreds of thousands of altcoins to being absolutely convinced that there will be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of altcoins. At this point, a five-year-old can go to a website, enter the parameters through the proof-of-work algorithm and the name, and create a coin in about 10 minutes flat. That means that people will be creating coins in primary school, people will be creating brand coins and meme coins and five coins and personal coins. And promotion coins and reputation coins and celebrity coins. And maybe that's absolutely OK. Not everything will have monetary value, but it will still have value, collectible value, or simply reputation value. So I think it's interesting. I think it's time we see how these coins play out. And if Max coin is one of the first ones, then that's great. By the way, Andreas coin is coming soon. And I'd like to encourage you all to join me in pre-mining the crap out of all of it. We've got pre-mining 99.9%. And then we're going to flog it. That's ripple, isn't it? It's something proud. It's Andreas coin. You've got to get the branding right. It's all about the branding. But seriously, I think this is an interesting development. And really, it shows that the value of a coin no longer comes from the fact that only a few entities in the world can create currencies. It now has to come from other sources. We have to evaluate each coin on its merits and on whether its adoption leads it to have monetary value. And you never know. Maybe one of these coins one day becomes a coin that actually has monetary value. And what's more interesting is that sometimes these brands show up when you least expect them. So you go to places in Africa and you see people worshipping brands that they see second hand from the Western world. Maybe Max coin becomes the national coin of the Republic of Congo by coincidence. And people have no clue who Max is. But nevertheless, they use this coin because it's tradable within their community. Weird things happen when you have a free and open market that has the full range of possible currencies in it from the really important ones with strong monetary value and backing like Bitcoin all the way down to front and dump standpoints. And it's healthy to have a broad range. Yeah, I agree with that. I want to point out something I read recently. I think it was maybe a Twitter post. But governments determine the value of Fiat money. And that's what we're used to. That's what we've been used to for thousands of years, perhaps. The people, it's often said that the people determine the value of any money. But that's not the case. Let's clarify that governments determine the value of Fiat. And the people determine the value of cryptocurrencies. That's the money that people can determine the value of. So just to Andreass's point, the coins that see network effect, the coins that see mass adoption, they'll have a value. And others will be more collectible or playful. I really like imagining what grade school would have looked like with kids, my peers, developing different coins for all the inside jokes we had or whatever. I mean, that would have been a lot more fun. Yeah, kids are so creative. It's definitely happening. I'd like to buy 5,000 fart coins from you, Will. Done. See, exactly. I mean, it's inevitable, isn't it? LocalFartcoins.com, my username is Will Lockey. Just a recap for those of you who might have not heard. Max Kaiser is a television presenter in the UK. He works for RT, Russia today, and does a financial services program and recently launched his own coin, Max Coin. So if you want to know more, Google that. With all the created or otherwise negative news in the last few weeks, and increased interest from VC investors, is there a possibility we're in the process of seeing the Wall Street boys coming in to clean up the organic open source community? I'm not sure. And what I'm seeing is, in Milwaukee, it's not the biggest player in terms of metropolitan areas in the United States. But there are some VC firms here. There are some accelerators. And their interest over the summer was practically nil. I mean, I could talk to alumni from my high school who work for some of these, and they had interest because I was interested in passionate about it. But, you know, discussions kind of peed it out. But now they're coming back not only to me, but other passionate Bitcoiners in this area, and in Chicago that I'm hearing. And in Madison was Concent, which is even a smaller town than Milwaukee, of course. So there is definitely interest in institutional money right now for any kind of idea. They're asking for software concepts and things like that. I'd like to see some other types of businesses than exchanged types of businesses, financial services, businesses, and software. I think they're thinking outside of the boxes and there's other ideas, community-based ideas, if you will. But that's what I'm seeing. It's exciting, you know, that some of these smaller firms and smaller cities would be open to this now is a big sign for me. Excellent. A person here has a great amount of Bitcoins, and they'd like to sell them for USD, and they're wondering what the options are to use them and to stay anonymous. I'd say the options we discussed earlier, Craigslist, Facebook, through your friends, things like that, probably be your best way to go. I don't know. Snapcard.com. Join Snapcard.com and spend them. There we go. So there's many options, but it is going to be more and more difficult to sell them anonymously, presumably for the purposes of tax evasion or money laundering. So they're going to be cracking down on that, it seems. Let's see, next question. I saw one. Where did it go? Well, they're going to be cracking down on that to crypto currencies, but they're not going to be cracking down on that if very large, too big to fail banks to it. Let's be clear about that. There's been absolutely not crackdown on money laundering. The biggest money laundering in the world still working the executive offices of HSBC. None of them went to jail. The second biggest money laundering in the world worked in the executive offices of what Copia that was acquired by another bank. None of them went to jail. Let's make it clear. And the prosecutors in both of those cases said explicitly that the reason they wouldn't pursue prosecution and with defer prosecution was because of the damage it would do to the financial system by causing these companies to fail. They basically spelled out that's too big to fail. Also means too big to jail. And that was the starting whistle for race to the bottom in terms of corruption greed and fraud. They gave blank slides to these companies to do as much crime as they want because they will not be prosecuted. Only the little fish gets dumped on. What Andreas just said, I think, we need to, anyone who's got a voice in the Bitcoin space, anywhere at all, needs to echo exactly what Andreas just pointed out whenever they're met with that criticism, with regard to money laundering or illicit activity. That should be the first default response. And then you can go into other discussions. That needs to be pointed out and repeated over and over. You know what, they beat us over the head in the media with endless repetition, neuro linguistic programming. We must kind of do it back to them. And this is a fact that just is undeniable needs to be repeated endlessly. Well, I think it's also important not to claim that money laundering is not a crime because we do live within a set of laws. So yes, money laundering is a crime. Unfortunately, fortunately, whatever your political position may be, that's not the point here. The point is that some crimes have consequences. Some crimes have prosecution. And there's rule of law that is being bent out of recognition. Because I think the most important fact of these numbers is that in the process of money laundering, $670 billion through Mexico, HSBC powered the Sineloah cartel. The result is in the best of 19,000 people, 19,000 people were murdered. And the blood is on the hands of HSBC executives who didn't go to jail and or COVID executives who both funded the Sineloah cartel. So let's not claim that this is just a victimless crime. Because sometimes when you money laundered to the cartels, they kill people. When you money laundered to individual users who go out and buy a joint on Silk Road, maybe it's a victimless crime. But it's not a victimless crime when HSBC does it on an industrial scale in the middle of a war zone as is in Mexico. Next question is a little technical. How do contributors to Bitcoin's core protocol on GitHub achieve consensus in the case of a patch versus patch conflict? Andress, I'm going to take that one. They do the individual contributors to a core request and then the rest of the developers weigh in with either an endorsements like a plus one if they agree with it or with corrections, usually with questions, corrections, and discussion, which gradually causes the patch to be modified. But this is for patches that don't cause a hard fork in the blockchain. Any kind of thing that would cause a hard fork in the blockchain takes months and months and months of preparation that happens extremely rarely. And there the issue is not achieving the consensus of developers, but achieving the consensus of the other four major constituencies in the Bitcoin consensus system, the Myers, the merchants, the end user wallets, and the large web wallet companies. And such changes are very difficult to do. In fact, my prediction is that over time, we're going to see those slow down to a trickle. And so probably within a year and a half, what true from now, it will be absolutely impossible to do a hard fork change to Bitcoin because the economy and the stakes will be too high behind it. And at that point, whatever we've baked in is done. And the rest of the stuff will happen as higher layers or if it's critical in an earthquake. Very good. Another technical question. Is there script mining software that works better than CG Miner? It seems to be working poorly for him. The kernel needs optimization. Is anyone working on a software miner for script? It's a little technical for me, anyone? Well, I think the only other miner I know of that operates with scripts, I think it's the FG miner, but I'm not sure. So I... That's a lot sure. Those are the two top miners. There's another question about ghas.io and the 51% attack, but I think we covered that really well last week or a couple of weeks ago if you want to check through it again. Basically... 31% attacks are not a problem. 51% attacks are not a problem. For God's sakes. Who's been... It's down so exciting. It sounds like you would over weigh them and you'd be 51%, you'd take over the whole network. Doesn't it sound like... For 10 minutes, at which point you'd be kicked off the network and nothing will happen. It's not... Listen, 51% attacks are problems that are bootstrapping and they were problems for Bitcoin in the first two years and they're problems for all of the altcoins of two leg bootstrapping off hash and power. At this point, the incentives are aligned in such a way that no one can do a 51% attack and gain anything other than strengthening the network against 51% attacks, outing themselves and falling flat on their face that it cost the hundreds of millions of dollars. There is no issue with 51% attacks. We just... Please drop that topic. Before we drop the topic, I want to just make sure one thing's clear. Sorry, Andreas. But this is the point that doesn't get explained very well, I think, to the people who are asking the 51% attack question. And that is, you know, even in front of these hearings and stuff, being asked this question, the lovely panelists who are advocating for cryptocurrency even miss the mark, I think, on this. And maybe you can clear this up one more time for all of us so we can explain it better to people. For 10 minutes, they can perform this attack. And in Bitcoin, it would require hundreds of millions of dollars to do that for just the first 10 minutes. After that point, they'd either be booted off or they'd have to invest much, much more money to continue the attack beyond the one block. Is that... Can you help me? No, no. In cases that in order to mount a 51% attack, you have to probably covertly assimilate enough computing power and then launch it on the network, which is going to be noticed. Or you're going to have to co-op large mining pools and persuade them to what you're doing as relevant so they don't abandon you as happening with GHASHIO. But the bottom line is that the only thing you can achieve with a 51% attack is a double spend. So you could do a massive double spend and you would only be able to do that for as long as nobody notices. But as soon as you do a double spend and pause a fork in the blockchain, that gets noticed. I mean, those things happen about once every two days or once a day on average, you have an accidental fork, not accidental, but a coincidental fork when two people discover a block at the same time. But major forks don't happen very often. And forks that have double spend certainly don't happen very often. These things get noticed in those monitoring systems in place. So if you did pull this off, you would expend an enormous amount of money to do a double spend. Now here's the thing. As soon as you do that, the reputation damage you would cause the Bitcoin, cause the price to drop. So a double spend transaction you would have done would be in a currency that has far less value than when you started. But you spend all of the computing money in the fiat or a dollars or something like that. So this is now to profitable exercise and all you can do is a double spend. The most important thing to realize is that you cannot use a 51% attack to change the core protocol or to invalidate to any previous transactions or to steal money from somebody if you don't have the keys. Because there are broader consequences in Bitcoin. So all you could do really is affect the next few blocks. And that's an attack that is unprofitable and would be very, very quickly noticed. The only other point that I would love for you to cover for everybody, for us on the panel here, so that we can better explain it to the people we talk with and for anyone listening, is what if the incentive isn't to make money but to destroy Bitcoin? Well, if the incentive is to destroy Bitcoin, then you can do a 51% attack by spending hundreds of millions of dollars. In which case, you wouldn't get protocol consensus to change anything. But all you would achieve is a double spend, which would seriously damage the reputation of the network by showing that 51% attacks can happen. At which point you get booted off the network, you would have wasted your money. We'd recover all of that by rebooting the blockchain from a previous point, undo all of the work you did with a double spend, and then Bitcoin would get stronger again. So it would actually end up proving the double spend attacks and not effective unless you're bootstrapping a small coin. So even with malicious intent, with no intent for profitability, it would be enormously counterproductive. There are far easier and more effective ways to attack Bitcoin than a 51% attack. It's better to play by the rules and use your mining equipment for mining than to try to steal. And that's correct. I mean, the sentence structure of Satoshi's vision worked beautifully and the bigger the network gets, the more effective those incentives are. We have a follow-up friend, Dres. How do we implement the Bitcoin neutrality, fungibility if there is give and take year timeline before we can implement the fundamental that would cause a hard fork in the blockchain? I'm not sure. Well, I think, well, I mean, this is a key point, which is that we probably only have about a year and a half to two years before Bitcoin is so large that we cannot do hard forks without lining so much consensus that they become almost impossible. Essentially, the model I'm looking at is, at some points, the IP, the internet protocol IP before achieved such network effect that we couldn't operate it anymore. And IPv6 is now being a 16 year effort to operate the core internet protocol that has been supported so many times because it's embedded and hard work's embedded and developer consciousness, et cetera, et cetera. If the same thing happens with Bitcoin at some point, it's gonna have so much momentum and inertia that'll be possible to get enough consensus to do a hard fork change in the protocol. We need to bake in several of the core features of the protocol before then, if we wanna make changes to the core protocol or if the developers wanna make changes, all the stakeholders wanna make changes. So I think I'm an limiting fungivable piece of keyword. Now the good news is a lot of people are working on this problem, a lot of very, very smart people. So there are many core developers such as, for example, Peter Todd and Adam Beck and Greg Maxwell who are just cryptography geniuses. I mean, hats off to all three of them, as well as many of the other core developers who have strong principles and great coding skills, but those three really have some incredible retrieval skills. And they're working on several improvements to enable greater fungivility and anonymity. And I would love to see those make it into the core protocol. But even if they don't, I think anonymity is something we can also implement at the edges. I'm using protocols like CoinJoin and newer developments that Peter Todd developed, which is CoinSwap. There's a lot of things that you can do at the edge of an open network where innovation is permitted by applications connected to the edge to achieve anonymity even if the core protocol doesn't allow it. Even after, for example, IPV4 names stable and could not be operated anymore, changes of the edge such as network address translation and quality of service within the TCP protocol, allow us to implement voice and video at large scale, things that are originally were considered impossible once IPV4 got ossified. So I think we've got plenty of opportunities and these things will get done because there's demand for them. All right, the final question today. Does anyone have any thoughts on Iceland's 50% pre-mind Aurora Coin? Nope. I did read recently that there's Mazekoin, the official currency of the Lakota Nation, which is very exciting for sovereign Native American nations like that. And if Iceland wants to do some things, they'll learn, hey, they've led the way out a number of things. Hey, they jailed bankers. Oh my goodness, right? Yeah, go Iceland. Yeah, I think sovereign points are going to be a big theme in 2014. We're beginning to see smaller countries peel off from the herd. And once that starts happening and people start looking around, then you're going to see a stand-pick reaction. We're also going to see small banks within these nations peeling off from the herd and adopting, co-opting, or embracing cryptocurrency, either Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. And again, what that does is it causes a stand-pick, because nobody wants to be out-competed. If you see the bandwagon starts rolling, it wants to be on top of it instead of underneath its wheels. I think it's unfortunate that the Iceland coin isn't officially backed by the government. I know that the designers have the idea to give every citizen an Iceland about 33 aurora coins, but I'm not sure how they're going to carry that out without government assistance and support. So Megan, yes, I'm just going to say go aurora coin. I hope it works out. I think that's awesome. And Iceland has already shown that they know what's going on. And like Will said, they jailed bankers. And I think the people are going to be really resistant to a lot of things that other countries may not be. So yeah, I really hope aurora coin succeeds, Iceland. And now it's time for everyone's favorite part of the show, predictions. Dovey Barker, are you ready? I'm all set. All right, go ahead. I think next week we're going to be talking about name coin. Chris J. muted, not ready. What about name coin, really? And now that we have the theory, then they didn't they didn't they like, Regisse name coin. Look at that. Do you think we're taking a week? Took 30 seconds. We're talking about name coin. Probably win. I will say that name coin is definitely the slowest wallet. I've been trying to synchronize for the last three or four days. I don't really wait faster than Bitcoin when I first installed my Bitcoin wallet. Now lately, it's taking you three to four days to sync up your name coin wallet. I'm not sure it's really working, but yeah, are you doing it over dial up? No, I fight. Megan, your prediction. New Hampshire will succeed, and Florida will fall into the ocean. Wow. That's deep down. Will, thank you. I had one a second ago, and then Davy made me laugh. Dang it, Davy. We're still waiting for a prediction from Chris J. We could come back to you. Chris, do you have a prediction for the fans at home? I think this Gok saga is going to continue. So I still think we're talking about the Gok saga. Will, Penguin, anything? That was perfect. I remembered. Yeah. Potty-O-O to me, the next Native American nation to have a coin. Potty-O coin. Unfortunately, as James and Dennis has escaped our prediction round, so we'll just move on. I have a prediction for Andreas. All right, Davy. Go ahead. Andreas is going to predict that Apple is going to try to save face on this whole Bitcoin thing by coming out with their own cryptocurrency called the Ringo. Whoa. Ringo is a very popular one. My prediction is Apple's attempt to control Bitcoin will fail. Blockchain will soon release their HTML5 Bitcoin wallet, and the ban will be rendered toothless. The Emperor has no clothes. Apple users will continue using their iPhones for now, and will ignore Apple's new payment service. Apple products will no longer be seen as cool, and as each contract expires, more and more people will go Android. Never has there been a bigger miscalculation than Apple's decision to ban Bitcoin. You can't fight technology. Steve Jobs knew that. The current Apple board doesn't, and it's their loss. Bitcoin prevails. Until next time, bye-bye.