The Bitcoin Group, the American original, for over the last ten seconds, the sharpest Satoshi's, the best Bitcoin's, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome the panelists, Inclus and Tenovelis, Bitcoin developer and commentator. Jolly Barker from shiny badges.com. Chris J from Feathercoin. Hello. Christoph Atlus from Anonymous Bitcoin book. Good to be here. Megan Lourds from Bitcoin, not bombs. Thanks for having me. Derek J Freeman, Peace Propagandist from Peace News now. Peace y'all. Will Penguin from Bitcoin, Milwaukee. Peace. And now, issue one, Mount Gawks bankruptcy, Part Four. The price fluctuated over the weekend on a false rumor of resume transactions, but by Monday, it was over. Mount Gawks was no more. Their webpage was blank and they deleted all tweets. A United Statement from the remaining Bitcoin exchanges in the Bitcoin Foundation led to questions of solvency. And now, on Friday, February 28, 2014, Mount Gawks has declared bankruptcy, with a law succeeding 850,000 Bitcoins, more than 63.6 million dollars. And, Jolly Barker, ends in Anonymous. Your thoughts. Well, I look at this two ways. The first is that a lot of people got hurt by this. And I have a lot of empathy for the people who got hurt. I hope that some restitution can be found at least partial restitution. It's going to take months to unravel this mess. It's going to be a complex investigation with forensic accounting and bankruptcy proceedings going on. It doesn't look very hopeful, but at the same time, I think it's important to focus on the people who have suffered a great tragic loss. And then the second part is really simple. Dallas has wasted our time, our focus, and our energy on his bullshit for far too long. It's finally over for Bitcoin, at least. Mount Gawks is out of the picture. Stop paying attention to him. Stop wasting time. Let's move on. Let's innovate. Let's focus on the exchanges that are properly managed. And that was the last Gawks. And the reign of terror of Gawks is now over. D'Avi Barker. There's been a lot of price manipulation as a result of Gawks. If you look at the averages to other exchanges, Gawks has always been the outlier in the group. And so now that they're gone, I'm excited to see some real price discovery. And we can start to get back on track to what Bitcoin is really worth. Chris, Jay. Hi. So I know what you're thinking. You're thinking those numbers are on the screen. You thought you knew what you had, but then it turned out that they weren't really there. Sounds a lot like the banking industry, doesn't it? So I hope that this will be the last time that we learn this lesson. And I hope that we can learn the right lesson from this and teach the banking industry how it should be done, namely that this organization is going to fail. And we're going to let it fail. And someone preferably, Carpella, if he is culpable, if it turns out that he is, that he should go to jail for this. And not like what the way we handled the financial crisis in 2008. So I think that's what we can learn. I'd also say that a lot of people were still on the IRC channel today on the MTGoc support group. And I made a comment on Twitter, perhaps it was a little bit unsympathetic, that the theft was still taking place. That people were still wasting that time. My advice is to just let go of the coins that you had on there. And just to assume as if you're not going to get them back, it's easy for me to say, I mean, I did have some coins on there, not very many. It's easy for me to say hard for you to do, I know. But otherwise, you know, all these rumors about where they might be. I think it's great that people are doing all this forensic accounting, by the way, it's very encouraging that we now have the tools and everything we need to sort these economic problems out for ourselves without relying on third parties. But I think a lot of people are just torturing themselves by getting nostalgia for the future that they thought they had with the money that got lost. So yeah, like Andreas, I'd like to extend my sympathies to everyone who's been affected by this. It's interesting, like you say, Chris, that it was a support group for tech support, but now is actually a real support group. It's a therapy group. The victims of Mt. Gox are many, and they need our support in the same way as any other victims of a large scale financial crime need our support. Can I just say one other thing as well? Because there were lots of people in the Mt. Gox IRC channel, and already that were predicting this. And they said, look, there's something not right here, the way the support staff are acting, they said it even before it became apparent. In fact, I remember people last year predicting that Gox was a bit dodgy, and that something wasn't right. I think we should actually go back and try and find out who those people are. These are people who really respect the truth. They know how to stand up to authority, and they tell the truth, they tell it early to the people that need it. If you're in a work environment, okay, where your boss builds a climate affair, just walk out. Right? Ask some hard questions, and if you get some pushback, just walk away, because the reason they put up those barriers is because they don't want you to find out what's on the other side of that anger. So that would be my advice. I hope we can learn the right lessons from this. Chris, staff, Adless. Well, I find some of the information that's coming out still to be very confusing. There's this 850,000 Bitcoin's lost figure. And if Mt. Gox has been open for four years, that comes out to around, I would say, 580 Bitcoin per day on average. So the question is, how could they possibly lose that much over this period of time? They're supposed to be settling their books at the end of each month. So what exactly is going on there? And that includes having Japanese regulators looking over the books. If the funds were simply lost rather than stolen, there was, you know, very significant mismanagement of private key data. Because, you know, 900,000 Bitcoins were mined between January 2009 and July 2009. And we could be looking at a situation where all those coins are suddenly gone from the supply. So I'm curious to see what happens with that. For the regulators and the people that are looking to regulators to remedy this situation, to come in and fix the Bitcoin Ecosphere, what I would say to those people is, Gox was able to exist this long in a completely, you know, disarrayed state because of the barriers to entry that were in place. A related to regulatory uncertainty, legal costs for potential new exchanges. And so forth, why are there no exchanges until very recently that are in New York that's silly. It's supposed to be the capital of finances in the world. So if regulators think that they're going to come in and fix the problem, the reality is that they usually contribute to the creation of the Gox problem. It's not just about Gox and Mark Pellis, but it's also lots of other things that have played into getting where we are today. Absolutely. And a great point, Christoph, that the lack of regulations led to a climate where only in exchange like Mount Gox could exist without regulation, no better exchange could come into fight them. Megan Lords. Well, this has definitely been a tragedy and I think it's going to haunt the Bitcoin community for a long time. And it also does a lot of damage to just the overall reputation trying to get people to, you know, trust us, the Bitcoin is the superior payment system and protocol. And so it makes it a lot harder to get mainstream people into Bitcoin. I don't think that, of course, you know, the Gox problem is going to get obviously hasn't killed Bitcoin and it can't kill Bitcoin. But I am also curious to see the innovations that come out of this. I think we're going to see a lot more people and companies stepping up to help the people affected by Mount Gox and put in better protections for people who are new. I think a lot of people who were affected were new users who just jumped in in the past couple of months and, you know, when you type in Bitcoin on Google, Mount Gox is a person that shows up. So a lot of people were just like, oh, I'm just going to go with the first thing I see, even though there had been these warnings for months, like get out of Mount Gox, like there's something wrong, there's some sketchy activity going on. But I think in order to kind of build confidence, we're going to have to see more innovations coming out that are going to protect people. And even, you know, even something like, you know, having to do security for them, I think there's a huge market there for people who are more experienced with security, helping people who have no idea how to do it themselves. So I hope to see more of that. And I think that will be a better solution, of course, like what Christophe said, regulation and all that often that causes that in a way affected the stock situation. Derek J. The most amazing part of this Mount Gox fiasco has been Bitcoin's resiliency in reaction to it. The price has been relatively unaffected. So despite how the mainstream media has been portraying it, just trading continues on other exchanges and life goes on. So my heart goes out to those who lost serious money. We're all wiser now. But my God, surviving the collapse of the largest exchange without a significant price drop, what a robust currency. Long live Bitcoin. Will Penguin. Yeah, I just want to echo some of the things the other panelists have said, you know, I really am impressed with the forensic accountants that's going on on a grassroots level. Just to see that this kind of activity exercised, which is, which is possible with the Bitcoin protocol for the average Joe with the know how to dig into the blockchain and do some research, you know, from from their basement. From their basement, from their, you know, their bed with the pillow behind their back or something, I like. I just love the fact that this kind of a system is so opt in opt out voluntarily organized that it suits very well for, you know, all commerce. So that's exciting to me. It's encouraging. I also am really eager to see like Davy said what the actual price of a Bitcoin is now that we don't have $20 to $20. $250 price spreads. And, you know, it's curious why that spread was so great for so long. You know, just thinking about that, what kind of, I think sure it had some to do with dollars taking a while to get out of that exchange. So only withdrawal possible for convenience sake was Bitcoin. So maybe it should have been 10 to $20 higher on that exchange. But surely they were trying to make up lost ground there in Japan, you know, maybe trying to cover their butts. It's amazing that that it just continued to get worse for them despite seemingly having the charade carry on for years. You'd think, you know, some, they'd have some ability to catch up and cover their butts. The price resiliency is also impressive to me. One hour of a major dip and the price was basically back, you know, within 12. That's, that was more impressive than the Silk Road, you know, flash crash and recovery in my opinion earlier this year. And I've heard from folks who are heavy into the trading space who've used mount gocks and other exchanges, but mostly gocks. And some of them who lost large sums of money, I've been told, aren't coming back to Bitcoin. And that really saddens me. I hope that doesn't end up being the case. I think it's too powerful of a technology for folks to stay away too long. I totally sympathize with why they might feel that way at this moment. And I hope they can stick around and that there will be a nice little support network. Underlying them, you know, that they have folks close to them that they can lean on in this tough time. It's, it's, it's tragic that the trust was shattered so, so horribly. There are a lot of warning signs mind you for about a year or more maybe. And I just think playtime is over, you know, the, the, the, shotty business models that maybe nursed Bitcoin along in the early days are going the way of the dinosaur quickly here. As quickly as Bitcoin moves, we're starting to see more professionalism entering this space and amateurs, entrepreneurs, VCs and all of them. There's more professionalism I'm seeing across the board. And, you know, the shady characters and shady businesses can't last in a transparent environment such that Bitcoin provides. So it's very exciting time in that regard. And my heart goes out to those who are hurt so badly in this exit question. Will we be talking about Mt. Gox again next week and dress and to Nubless? Well, inevitably we're going to be talking about this for as long as this investigation continues because the media will be interested in it. I hope that we will limit those discussions and focus on innovation. And the most important innovation we can do right now is programmatic solutions to security and proof of solvency, Kirk's or African proof of reserve, multi-sig signatures for escrow and backup and recovery of keys, security solutions that we can implement. This is programmable money. We can implement security like it's never done before. And we can make this the most unhackable and unsteelable money ever created. Let's focus on that instead of worrying about the incompetence of one man. Absolutely. Dovey Barker. I think that we'll be continuing to talk about it. I mean, as long as it continues to produce stories, I mean, we'll be talking about it. But I look forward to the day when this is behind us. Absolutely. At some point it's got to end. At some point it's got to end. Chris J. Yeah, what Andrea said, I think we need to take this as a marketing opportunity for a lot of exchanges so they can start advertising fraction and reserve. If you're a customer of any of these exchanges, you need to demand it. You need to write to their help and their support emails. And you need to ask for proof of existence. What's it called? Andrea's proof of existence or proof of reserves? What's the most important thing that you need to do? Well, I think that's what we need to do. But Chris, off at this. The discussion is going to morph from the terrible catastrophe of Gox and to how the industry learned from Gox. That's what we're going to be talking about in the long term. Megan Lord. This has definitely been a learning opportunity. And I think Andrea has summed it up well. I'd really like to see innovations come out of this. Propaganda is there pushing out. That's anti Bitcoin. We need to be doubling up on our efforts to get out our propaganda. Not really, to be insincere, not propaganda. Just reassuring people that the protocol is not broken. Derek J. We'll be talking about Gox until there's some kind of restitution. But we'll likely be talking more going forward about what customers are demanding from future exchanges. So one innovation I'd like to see in addition to security and transparency is a promise of restitution. Will Pagman. Yeah, like the other panelists will continue to talk about Mount Gox as this whole thing unravels. It'll be interesting to see how the layers of the onion peel here and get to the bottom of what happened if we if we ever do. I think it's far more likely that we do in an environment, a financial environment such as Bitcoin, than say, you know, the legacy banking system. So getting down, getting to the bottom of things in terms of fact finding and proper assignment of I hate to use the word blame, but for lack of a better word. And you know, the professionalism that we're going to see come out of this, you know, even six months from now I think, or once the last chapter in this Gox story is written, I think we'll look back and we'll chuckle about the kind of, you know, to steal a phrase from Andreas, the clownishness of this business. You know, it was necessary to give us initial price discovery three or four years ago. But the business is growing up around in this space, the more professional ones should give everyone encouragement. I'm sick of seeing the media talk about Mount Gox equating Mount Gox with Bitcoin. And as soon as that is behind us, that will that will be the signal that the that the last chapters can be closed. And we're talking about Bitcoin as a technology and the powerful businesses and partners and strategies behind growing this thing. Excellent. Moving on, issue two, US Senator wants to ban Bitcoin. The US Senate, that august and distinguished chamber has finally addressed Bitcoin and with a funny fever that would make Joe McCarthy blush. Senator Manchin is called for a ban on Bitcoin because it is highly unstable and disruptive. Finally, some recognition from the Senate. Is the fine senator from the great state of West Virginia right should Bitcoin be banned? Dovey Barker. Come at me, bro. I mean, what do they can do? What are they going to ban? Are they going to do house to house searches? Are they going to what are they going to do? So, you know, in my opinion, Congress is volatile and disruptive. So maybe we should ban Congress. Chris J. I think justice is there to give power. It should not be the reserve of the powerful. And that's what happens at the moment. Justice is there to serve the rich. The people that can afford it. And it's not there to defend the weak ones that need it the most. I think I was at work at university yesterday. Thanks, actually, to Tom because you introduced me to one of the students there who's looking for a speaker on a panel debate on the future of finance. And I have to say my expectations were like I was kind of expecting a lot of kind of conservatism. I was expecting people to be, you know, a bit, you know, critical of cryptocurrency. But actually, you know, these young students like 19 years old, like really into it. And they were very, very curious. And they knew all about the 2008 financial crisis because their lecturers in the iconic economics classes had taught them about it. They could tell me all of the reasons why it failed. And they were all of the right reasons. And so, in fact, one student told me about a bank. I won't mention the bank's name because I haven't done my own diligence on this yet. But he said that they are currently at a fractional reserve ratio of 40 to one, which meant that they would only have to their reserves would only have to be broken by about 3% or 3% of the loans would have to go bad and you'd have systemic failure. And if that bank failed, then lots of other banks would fail. So why I'm saying this is the way to prevent this from being regulated is to get this to younger people like we need to be getting younger people like under under 18, like people that are still in education to be setting up their own coins or writing on the Bitcoin post call itself because then you're cutting off the regulators at the needs, right, because they feed on students when they leave university. They go into government positions because it's a safe job. You get a nice comfortable salary and you know, I don't want to swear but nothing tell up calls it FU money, right. So this is money that you make so that you can say FU to the system and then leave it. Right, well, I say it's just leave it straight away or don't even put yourself in that position because these are golden handcuffs. Okay, you can't predict the future. And so you don't know what's going to happen. And I have a lot of my friends that I went to school with. I'm in my 30s now that did go into banking that did take the golden handcuffs. So you then wish they hadn't because what they didn't anticipate was the recession that came along and then of course they didn't have all the wealth to move to the Cayman Islands or whatever. So yeah, it's a mugs game. I'm not particularly faced by this article. I read it. I wasn't. Particularly it didn't interest me. I don't find this at all threatening. Christoph Atlas. Well, I think most likely the senator is getting the ball rolling on some new laws to increase executive branch powers. As a member of the banking committee, perhaps he was encouraged by some bankers to you know, loft the threat of a ban right at the time that Cox was collapsing to try and pile on and break faith in the Bitcoin markets. Towards the end of the letter that he wrote to the various branches, he mentions systemic risk due to a deflationary death spiral. He told the Bitcoiners for a long time that they can expect these kinds of complaints about systemic risk from the political class and I think we can expect a bunch more of that in the future. He also called out Silk Road as an example of anonymity and you know difficulty with law enforcement and of course that's a red herring. The Silk Road and some of our other websites have been shut down successfully. That said, I think that these markets are going to become more resilient. The anonymity technologies for cryptocurrencies are going to improve and I think he is right to be concerned that cryptocurrencies will complicate the tax situation for the political class especially income taxes. But the real question, the real pertinent question is which side of that fight is the moral one. Megan Lord. Yes, I've pretty much summed it up. I did expect this though with the whole the the Cox issues and things like that. Of course someone's going to come out and be like, oh, we just need to ban it because it's so bad. That's to be expected. I think this is typical political overreaction to something and you know he's just trying to do what politicians do which is kind of pleases constituents and be like, hey, you know, yeah, we should totally ban this bad thing because a bunch of people got ripped off. But of course you don't see it's a very selective application of the law. You're not going to see any politicians or bankers going to jail. So I think he's just talking out of his ass about it and yeah, good luck trying to ban Bitcoin. Derek Jay. Please mention ban Bitcoin. You might think I'm joking, but I am completely serious for three good reasons. One, if it's officially banned, then it can't be officially regulated by the sticky handed politicians. I don't trust the bureaucrats to regulate technology or finance and maybe it would be better off if they didn't bother. Two, if Bitcoin gets banned, too many networks are already formed around Bitcoin. They're not going to go away or give up on their favorite cryptocurrency. So security and cryptography experts will be incentivized to develop alternatives and for more security and anonymity features. It is exactly what I want. I don't know about you. And number three, it makes the tax implications a whole lot easier. You just get to keep your coins. Will, Penguin. Yeah, I agree and completely with Derek. I love seeing these idiots expose their shakhanry and their charlatan behavior. This just shows the world more and more how ridiculous the political system is in general, how ridiculous the two party system is here that we have in the West predominantly. And it's going to show more and more people who don't spend much time looking at politics or Bitcoin for that matter. Just how ultimately meaningless this whole social organization structure that we find ourselves in is. And there are better ways. There's a senator who wants to ban NFL players and things like this. I mean, please keep putting yourselves out there and making a fool of yourself. I'd like to see a bipartisan effort against Bitcoin because I don't think it will get very far, first of all. And second of all, right now, most of these issues that we have in society, they're socially divisive or is the left right thing. But Bitcoin is apolitical and it's neutral. It's natural. It's nature is neutral. So if you could have both of these parties or at least the most under informed, least understanding of the technology members of both of these parties coming and attacking this thing with, you know, just their flailing attempts. More and more people will see how ridiculous the game of politics in general is. And it'll cause them to look more closely at Bitcoin when they see all kinds of legitimate businesses, their favorite tavern, their favorite dry cleaner, whatever, accepting Bitcoin and not wanting to see them suffer for the advantage that that gives them in their local marketplace or whatever. They'll come around and they'll be supportive of their friends family and their favorite businesses, their favorite startups and the conveniences that are inherent in all of these. So yeah, come at us. Come at me, bro. We're also joined by Jason King from Sean's outpost. Jason, can you hear us? I'm not sure are you muted? Try to unmute yourself, perhaps. Can you hear me now? Now I can hear you. Go ahead. All right. Yeah, I actually, I love it. I love when they do these really obvious poise that just sort of expose the machinery going on behind the curtain. You know, the center there's one of his main campaign contributors is JP Morgan Chase. There's also been sort of at the forefront of harassing Bitcoin based businesses and cryptocurrency based businesses. So to be able to have such a, you know, a blatant connect the dots between those two sources of a bank that obviously feels threatened by Bitcoin and then the senator that's in the pocket of that bank coming out very overtly and saying, no, Bitcoin's bad. I think that's fantastic. And I think that the more they do that sort of stuff and the American people can, you know, in the world can just see what a circus or a political system is. I think that's actually ultimately good for all of us to stay able to see the inner working to all of that. Absolutely. And Dres and to nobleness. Joe Manchin is perfect proof of the Peter principle that in a large hierarchical organizations, people will rise until they achieve a position that far exceeds their own level of competence. This is probably true for the entire Senate and Congress. In fact, Joe Manchin's comments didn't even make it into the top 10 most stupid comments made this week. Another member of Congress actually said the women who have abortions are asking to be raped. So, you know, Joe, you have to really try harder. You're surrounded by invasals. You really have to try harder. Now, let's see about banning. What happens if people try to ban Bitcoin? First of all, in this country, you have due process. And due process is the ability to fight to diatic things like this in the court if you have enough money to do it. Guess what? There are venture capitalists who have billions of dollars on the management who have invested in Bitcoin companies that they can hire a thousand lawyers an hour for the next year to take you all the way to the Supreme Court. And then you will face an interesting choice. Your Supreme Court just passed Citizens United less than two years ago that said that money is political speech. You have a very good chance of losing that fight. And if you lose it, it becomes legal precedent. That is not a fight you want to pick. It was probably better if you left it as a gray area. Secondly, if you try to ban Bitcoin, you're going to find out the lesson that the recording industry learned with Napster. The Napster was probably the most benign and easy to work with the organization that they had and trying to ban it gave them BitTorrent. If you try to ban Bitcoin, you will discover that Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency is the most open transparent and benign version of a cryptocurrency we have. And the reason for that is because you haven't tried to ban it. And if you do, you will discover the evolutionary impetus and pressure will create a thousand altcoins, each of which will be stealthier and more anonymous and more evasive. And these cryptocoins will be venomous for the regulatory system. So what happens when you stomp of the little gecko is that it evolves to become a commoto dragon and the next time you try to stomp on it, it choose off your foot. Exit question, which state will ban Bitcoin first? West Virginia, New York, Florida, Dovey Barker? Oh, you put New York and Florida. That's tough. I'm going to go with New York. I think New York will ban it first. Chris, Jay, I just hope it's not Hawaii because I'm still up in those brochures. It's a running act. I would say it's probably Florida, which is going to make things interesting for me, but you know, come at me, bro. Chris, off atlas. I don't think any of the states have the wherewithal or the balls of trying to ban Bitcoin by themselves. And I'm persuaded by it. Andres is argument that a federal ban would be very sticky. I think regulators are actually the people that actually make the decisions are much more clever than people like the Senate intervention. I think that they realize that the ban is not going to work. What they're just going to do is they're just going to make it as much of a pain in the ass as possible. Introduce as much uncertainty and as much a cost to businesses that want to use Bitcoin as possible. And it's going to be the, you know, rather than trying to cut off your head, they'll just drown you in molasses. So I think we'll see something more along those lines. Megan Lawrence. Yeah, New York and Florida at the same time. That's a hard one. This is being this article about New York wanting to ban things like bottomless branch where you have a, you know, $5 for unlimited amounts of alcohol. Like petty stuff like that. But I think Florida is pretty big on banning other things that are important to you. I'm going to go I'm going to have to go with Florida. Derek J. Yeah, I don't think anyone's going to actually ban Bitcoin. They, they realized that that would create more problems for themselves. But if it were anyone from the options you listed, it would obviously be New York where you can't have trans fats, too much salt or a big goal. Will Pangman. I'm going to jump out there and say Illinois, you know, Chicago has one of the most oppressive as a city state at least has some of the most oppressive regulatory structures out there. Just incredibly high predatory tax environment. If it would be anything, I think it would be Illinois. There's, there's plenty of reason. There's plenty of competitors that are threatened by Bitcoin in Illinois that operate both on and off the books. Although Bank of America is based there and they've been relative, their executives at least have been relatively positive or friendly toward the notion of Bitcoin. Moving on issue three Bitcoin community update. The mad. United in its support for Chris Ellis and the Bitcoin Foundation board. Chris is an excellent and thoughtful speaker as I'm sure you've all seen from his appearances here on the Bitcoin group and mad. Bitcoin's live and the brand new world crypto network. Subscribe today at world crypto network dot com. It's also been rumored that Bitcoin magazine is planning a special Bitcoin media issue featuring the Bitcoin group mad bitcoins and let's talk Bitcoin. Additionally, we've got an update on Bitcoin across America where Jason King from Sean's outpost is running across America to raise awareness for homelessness and how to stop it with Bitcoin. Learn more and donate at Bitcoin across America dot com. Jason is now in Louisiana viewing this still remaining wreckage of boats from Hurricane Katrina. What is the most exciting event in the Bitcoin community right now? The possibility of electing one of its own to the Bitcoin foundation, the emerging Bitcoin media including the world crypto network or the continued success of Sean's outpost and other Bitcoin charities. In which way is Bitcoin changing the world best? I ask you Chris Ellis. Yeah, so the thing is right like anyone who wants power shouldn't be allowed it. So I'm not I'm not a big fan of these. Well, I don't know because I've never met John Matonis and I'd love to. But the thing is it's important that you just have as much impact as you can on relatively small area. That was why I joined the feather coin group because there were a UK based, you know, set of developers and I could actually, you know, relate to and they weren't trying to take over the world. It was just like let's try and set up a local currency that has global potential. Let's see what we can do with this technology and try to have as much impact when we had SMS wallets that we set up that we're still trying to roll up to the homeless in London. We're going up to whole next week, Hulsas Council, which is a very deprived area of the UK because they want to know whether they should adopt either adopt feather coin or we can help them set up their own cryptocurrency. So really we just saw it as a learning experience and that is how I would continue. In terms of running for it, I'd love to do it, even if it's just as a protest thing, you know, even if it's just to show that these kinds of organizations tend not to select alternative voices. And then maybe they can prove me wrong on that, you know. But yeah, I'm all for it. I was very, very flattered by the support as well. We have a special guest Jason King from Sean's outpost. How's it going out there on the road, Jason? It's going pretty good. It's been ridiculously cold lately. This polar vortex is complete BS and I'm really unhappy with it. But it's been great to meet really cool people and running with this crazy bus and getting all kinds of questions people wanting to know what the hell bitcoins about. And it's fun to be able to talk to people about Bitcoin all the time. Are you still in Louisiana? I am. I'm about 40 miles outside of Baton Rouge. And so I hope to make it out of Louisiana this weekend. Excellent. And how's the outreach going? Are people understanding your message of Bitcoin and stopping homelessness? Some people get it. You know, when I started helping the homeless, I had no idea what sort of push back we were going to get. How many people in our entrenched government have direct opposition to helping the homeless because it, you know, it pokes holes in this concept that the government is there to take care of you. Because if you show how poorly that they actually do of taking care of the people that they're supposed to, that's once again pulling back the curtain. And you know, we get outright attacked. The mayor of Pensacola actually called Sean's outpost an extremist organization to Al Jazeera yesterday, which was just hilarious because our extremist is that we go give people sack lunches that are starving. So I don't, you know, Al Jazeera deals with some extremist stuff and their work respondents, not at least. I think that, you know, I think they probably take issue with calling people feeding the homeless extremists. But that is what we go up against. But I think, you know, it's not just Sean's outpost. I think that cryptocurrency has this is going to enable so many things in terms of charities and nonprofits that just haven't been possible before. If you think about, if you think about just the difference between the profit and the nonprofit sector, it's really sort of a broken dynamic there is that. So something that we don't have in the nonprofit spaces, we don't have the ability to generate risk capital and, you know, you need, you need the ability to raise funds and to be able to take risks if you're actually going to, you know, iterate on solving a real problem. And so like if I wanted to make the next angry birds and said I wanted to raise $25 million for it, no one would have any problem with that. And then if I, if I made money on it and wanted to return money to my investors, no one would have any problem with that. But if I said, hey, I want end homelessness in America and I need to raise $25 million for it. And if you invest in that and we can find a way to generate the capital to return investment to you, people would actually demonize me for it because, you know, you can't have people making money on sale. You can make money on saving the world, you know, you can make money on, you know, video games or selling, you know, drugs as a pharmaceutical company or whatever. But if you actually want to do the steps that we applaud in the corporate world and you want to do, apply those principles towards the nonprofit sector, people get really, really squirrely about that. So like with cryptocurrency, we would have the ability to actually, you know, as Andreas loves to say, it's programmable money. We could actually program it where like if we did a fund razor to raise capital to actually, you know, to build a marketing team to actually raise more funds. And then that marketing team raised lots more than our initial investment where we could program it when the money came in, our investors that helped us get the investment to get more investment actually got a return on their investment. What's wrong with that. And so I think that I think we're going to see a lot of that kind of stuff coming up in the next couple of years. I think that it's going to be really an exciting time where we can start taking everything that we've learned from startup culture in terms of, you know, iterative design and failing fast. And actually being results oriented instead of process oriented, I think that we're going to see a lot of that start leaking into the nonprofit charity sector. And I think that's going to be a really exciting place to be. I think that's a great point that startup culture really will transform charity as well as the ability to accept Bitcoin's online from anywhere in the world to start up your donations to get things gone. For sure. Yeah. You know, we have a fairly small organization and this small backwater in Florida, but we get donations from, you know, over 40 countries that, you know, just think that it's wrong that it's illegal to be homeless in this area. And so they're willing to come to our aid with their treasure and they can do that, you know, in an instant frictionlessly for damn near free. And that's pretty close to a miracle, you know. Bitcoin's amazing. It's going to change everything. Absolutely. And viewers watching now can donate at Bitcoin across America.com and also at Sean's outpost. Correct. Be gone. Kristoff Atlas. Which one of these three things do you think is most important for changing the world with Bitcoin? I think that the donation stuff has kind of the biggest impact. You know, I hate to even form an opinion talking next to Sean who are Jason from that charity because I know he has a ton of experience. But just a couple of thoughts. I think that social welfare is much more officially handled by the private sector. In generalities. Eventually, they're going to displace the government welfare systems, especially as the systems run out of money and they're revealed for being terribly inefficient and corrupt. And Jason was sort of talking about how cherries in the future will have more and more room to innovate. And what really excites me about that is eventually they're going to be able to do totally new things that are not really being done on a large scale yet. Things like preventing disease and preventing social issues in our society rather than just trying to constantly play whack and roll with the symptoms. And I think that is going to have a massively revolutionary effect on our society when we start really, you know, stop wasting money on ineffective government social welfare system and start having organizations that will profit by the health. The health of human beings. Megan Lord. Well, with Bitcoin, the moon is a limit. So I'm really excited to see all of the different things that are coming out of this community. And of course I'm biased. I, you know, I'm part of Sean's outposts and Bitcoin.bombs. And I'm very excited to be a part of anything that they're involved in. It's very hard to argue with, you know, over 30,000 meals being delivered to the homeless, you know, over less than a year's time and all of these other things that are happening. I'm Pensacola. It's very exciting. But I'm also excited with what we're going to be doing with Bitcoin, not bombs and sorry, Davi, if I'm stealing your thunder, whatever. But we have translated some quick start guides into Spanish that we want to get distributed over the border to Mexico and eventually have plans to translate them into other languages and get distributed worldwide and really break down the borders between nations because that's what it's about for me is, you know, Bitcoin is for everyone. It's for the entire world and I'm very excited to see all of these all of this potential for world aid. You know, like Jason said, government welfare obviously isn't helping people. It's causing people to fall through the cracks. And then when you have the warfare state on top of that, purposely creating poverty in other parts of the world. Bitcoin is able to circumvent all of that and undo a lot of it too. And it's awesome. I'm very, very excited for the future and, you know, we're going to see so many innovations coming out of this that I, it is hard to pick a favorite. It really is. So I'm very excited for the future. There, Jay. The most exciting thing happening in the Bitcoin space right now is the flood of Bitcoin charities like free aid and Sean's outposts and host of others. What they're doing is changing people's lives today. You know, I'm really, really excited about the technological leaps that are going to improve all our lives in the future. But putting a roof over people's heads and giving them a pillow on which to lay their heads and giving them food to eat. I mean, Sean's outpost has served over 50,000 meals. Well, the mayor of Pensacola may be calling them extremists, but what they're doing is changing the world. And in the Ukraine, I can even share a picture with you that in the Ukraine, the protesters are using Bitcoin to finance their resistance to the government. This is a fast way to raise funds that was never possible before. And I think the ability to raise money to fund these revolutionary projects is changing the world in some really cool ways. Bill, Hangman. I love the Ukraine story and, you know, the kid at whatever college I forgot, but who held up the sign on ESPN and got $24,000 just shows the immense power. And I'm so glad he did that. It was a great proof of concept to show how this is this can be possible for, you know, activism around the world and the people of Ukraine are showing that too. So hopefully they're getting the support that they need to carry on their activities. I wanted to go off script and mention some of the community projects that I'm really passionate about and excited about. And I'm working on with just so many people are education related. So I've been in touch with lots of community, lots of community meetup groups and trying to pull all of them together, connect them to each other. You know, all of them connect to one another, you know, whenever they can see that help. Also, university, you know, student organizations, there's a bunch I've been in touch with lately and getting them to connect with one another and providing them some needed resources to do outreach on their campuses. And there's a project in the works, hopefully where some resources can come together to make that a much more organized effort, not only just for the student organizations, but for the faculties of these various universities providing them the adequate, you know, instructional material that they need to possibly include. Bitcoin material or issues into their into their class curriculum for different disciplines, not just computer science, mathematics, cryptography, software development, but humanities, you know, history, economics, sociology, and so on. So that's that's something I'm really excited about pulling there's so many great community projects going on. I'm really excited for Christof's book. I'm really excited for Bitcoin Bigfoot. They're going to basically parachute drop supplies to meetups around the country who request them and they're going to do it at, you know, for free. People are working on pulling in sponsorships for that project so that they can print 100,000 informational brochures. Similar to the one Bitcoin nut bombs is publishing and distributing as well. And there's so many community projects. I'm kind of making it my job to network with all of them and network them to each other, introduce them to each other and build, build the human network around Bitcoin so that the education can get out there and we can reach a critical mass of adoption well before any effective efforts for banning Bitcoin or any kind of like stifling regulation can come down and have any noticeable appeal or effect. So that's the that's the importance I see and we're doing that here with the show and media is another part of that. So the other thing I'm really excited to see is all of the media outlets. You know, we had such a we have such high quality media production going on in Bitcoin. There's so many Thomas the work you're doing the new world crypto network is very exciting and there's going to be lots of great content coming out there. Let's talk Bitcoin for a long time has been producing a plus quality stuff and podcasts like Derek's and free talk live and so many others out there are really paving the way and actually getting information out to the ears that have never heard this stuff before. In a forum that they are accepting of and ready to listen to not CNN, you know, saying Bitcoin is crashing and going down because the largest exchange shut down and it's a 30 second little report that leaves a viewer with no knowledge whatsoever of Bitcoin. The impression that it was a nice little toy experiment and it's over and gone. So we know that's not true and more and more people that get introduced to it from all of these community efforts I just mentioned every single one of them aren't going to have that notion seep in it's you know we're we're fighting a winning battle here and it's super exciting. And it's an endless. What we're seeing is the development of currency as a community of common purpose when currency is not a mandatory thing in post from above but instead is a free choice you associate with a currency that expresses your principles and allows you to express those principles to action and guess what we're not buying with Bitcoin we're not buying bombs we're not buying drones we're not buying attack helicopters. We're not buying patronage we're not buying bribes we're not buying cozy relationships with regulators we're not buying politicians we're buying charitable donations we're giving we're tipping we're donating we're creating education we're creating charity those are the voluntary actions of a community of common purpose that is arisen around this currency and that community is generationally defined is full of young people who are tired of the old way. And that is absolutely unstoppable. Dovey Barker. When we talk about these things I think it's very easy to imagine that what we're saying is that there's this new technology and that this new technology is a useful tool in these areas that we're concerned about but I actually think that it's much deeper than that and in fact the existence of a free market currency of a decentralized cryptocurrency actually gets at the root of the problem. Of the problems that we're talking about in the first place Bitcoin is not just a solution laid over top of these problems it's actually addressing the monster that caused these problems when the federal reserve act was proposed in nineteen thirteen the slogan of the day was break the grip of the money trust congress came out and told the people this bill will break the grip of the money trust and what they didn't tell them was that the bill was written by the money trust and since then the money trust has come. The money trust has controlled who gets houses through home loans who gets cars through car loans who gets education through school loans the money trust has gotten in bed with the military industrial complex it has bought and paid for most of the politicians in this country and so we're actually saying there's a systemic problem and it's caused these problems of poverty and it's caused these problems in society and we're going to address those two but fundamentally we're striking the root we're breaking the grip of the money trust. Absolutely exit question one month from now which one of these issues will we still be talking about Chris J. Yeah I think I probably the the Sean's outpost I was actually one of my favorite of all the Bitcoin phenomena that some merge since since the beginning because charitable giving is the most popular use case it still is and so what's interesting about this whole industry is that it brings together the money trust. I think it's probably going to be we're going to be talking about cryptocurrency based charities in a month and a year and 10 years from now because I think that we're going to be changing the whole game. I'm really excited to see what we have come from this because we do have a community that is committed to solving these huge problems that we have and I think that you know we are showing the world that we are compassionate group of people that that's not going to believe in the lies that we were told that we were grown up on and that we're going to rebuild things correctly from the ground up and I think that that's going to be really interesting time. I think because it's interesting we'll still be talking about it. Kristoff atlas. Well obviously we on the book Bitcoin group are going to be talking about the new crypto media and I think that's going to be a big thing moving forward you know these days if I want to learn something about the new crypto economy which is obviously the future. I go to individuals or very small organizations and when I read something that's that's any worthwhile in a website like the New York Times or you know the LA post or whatever it's shocking in most of the time I just find out that it's you know someone freelancing that already writes for coin desk so I think that's here to stay. Megan Lawrence. I'm going to be talking about the charity aspect of it even if that part somehow ceases to exist in the future which I don't think it will impact I think we're only going to say more people being helped we've already seen thousands of people help by these Bitcoin charities and it's only been around five years. Imagine when we start seeing larger populations working with this currency and solving these problems I mean we're going to see thousands of lives millions of lives change through Bitcoin charities so I don't think that's ever going to go away and I'll never stop talking about it. Derek Jay. Well one one from now we'll still be talking about cryptocurrency based charities this is the beginning of a new era of volunteerism and Bitcoin is made it possible by changing the way people do charity but it also means changing the way people engage with media as Christoph said you know gone are the days when people will tune into the mainstream channels for their news about decentralized currencies. I think we'll be talking about Bitcoin and the volume of those kinds of transactions in the space we'll be talking a lot more I think about education grassroots education and the injection of Bitcoin into formal if you will education in at the you know post secondary level university and I'm excited to see that happen and the sea change that that will cause we will see more excitement and a more positive tone on the reporting of such things and more and more folks will come around and see that this is not about you know buying illicit goods online child trafficking you know terrorism whatever all the dirty words they want to paint all over this thing those things aren't sticking I'm really grateful to see that that was really good. So this is my one major concern about Bitcoin when I first found out about it and first fell in love with it over a year ago was that the reputation of it could be solid and that the public is so used to being duped by such strategies that they would fall for it again but Bitcoin seems to be impervious to these kinds of things it's so resilient and that's encouraging so education and of course charitable giving. Yes and to not miss we're going to be talking about charity because Jason's going to still be running run Jason run. Davi Barker I can tell you what Bitcoin not bombs is going to be talking about we're going to be talking about borders and how it's sort of an obsolete concept and we're going to be attempting to demonstrate that in the coming months. Moving on Mount more mount gocks according to coin desk mount gocks has never conducted a single audit of its customer deposits and Carpellus may have been the only one who knew how to tap the company's cold storage the article calls him the wizard of Oz the one moving all the levers pulling all the switches the man behind the curtain. If this is true and it apparently is could it really come down to just one man how can we prevent this from happening again in the future how could it have happened in the past Jason king. See are you unmuted try unmuting uses. Is that better that's good sorry hello okay cool yeah I think it's crazy but I think I think what not got. I think what not got failing shows is is that you're going to fail in the sea co system is that there's no kind of anybody that's going to step in and protect you and if they're going to use these. Outmoded concepts that are worthless and are new economy that we're going to weed you out you know that that the market and the blockchain are going to weed you out this is not going to you're not going to be able to do this if you look at it yeah in Bitcoin years. Mount gox has been around forever but but it's been the short period of time and you know they did this huge basically scam to everybody and you know they got shut down you know this would have been. JP Morgan chase this would have gone on for 20 years they would have gotten two or three bailouts they would have gotten some congressional stipends or something to stay open. And you know we had this huge wrecking ball that's really been bouncing around the Bitcoin community for years now and just doing damage it's like you know it became a you know just a risk that you put into cost of doing business okay well you know gox is going to screw up in three months so we just need to take that into account now with whatever that we're doing. And then so I think we've been routing around this for a long time and see it finally sort of come to an end I think is good and and I think that the fact that mark was the only person that possibly had access to the cold storage I think that that's a problem you're never going to see again because you know people have been putting out all of these ways that they you can prove that that's not the case and I think that from now on and I think that you can. And I think that from now on everyone's going to expect those things to be implemented and I think for the most part I think everyone are most people already expected more than mountain gox I think that mountain gox was sort of grandfathered in and people were using it because they had been using it but I think that most people for their day to day transactions and Bitcoin's did we're already not relying on mountain gox you know they were at bit stamp or coin base they were they had figured something else out you know I think that's one of those things where it's like people talk about and column. People talk about and Columbus's day that like everyone thought the world was flat that's crap like everyone most people knew that the earth was round there was just some you know pedagogal people that were saying that it was the earth was flat and that's what they put out in the media but like common sense was already there that the earth was round and we didn't need anyone to tell you you know tell us that and I feel like it's the same way with gox it feel like everyone already knew something bad was going on there and yeah there's there's definitely some damage and I do feel really bad for anyone that lost money on gox. You know I have friends that lost a lot of money there I think Eric Voorhees came out and said he lost 550 coins out of just like laziness basically you know because it was just it was easy to keep it on there and so that stuff sucks but it's also it's kind of this breath of fresh air that it's done now we're never going to have any more of these times where gox is just going to get to come in every couple of months and you know bang down on the market that that part of the Bitcoin history is kind of coming to a close. I think what we're actually going to see is after the flash crash with the Silk Road you know people had said for years that the Silk Road was what was propping up Bitcoin and when it crashed I went on record I was like I think we're about to see a huge takeoff because people are going to realize the resiliency of this currency and the real resiliency of this community and that's going to translate into the price going up and I think we're probably going to start seeing something like that too with the quote unquote you know largest Bitcoin exchange take it back to the market. It makes a crap and the price barely goes down I think people are going to be like wow after all of the you know panic BS news dies down people are going to be like wow Bitcoin still here it's still valuable maybe I should get involved in this I think it's I think it's going to be great and I think it's a good side of things to come. Absolutely. Christ off atlas. I think that I don't know if Cox was so much removed from the ecosystem as they they removed themselves I think that especially some of the old people in the community you know old relative to Bitcoin of course they could have done a better job for those that have voiced a any kind of vote of competence for market capelies over the last year maybe the OS a sort of an apology for that. But keep in mind that we are still a legacy banking society that's where we're coming out of and even the people that are the most seasoned with Bitcoin have lived the vast majority of their lives in that type of system so I'm not going to blame them heavily for still you know having it. Allowing themselves to have the kind of thought it's like well Mark is a good guy so you know you know if he says that he's doing things well then that's good enough for me when in fact we should be you know proving those things cryptographically and a decentralized manner looking for decentralized solutions to these issues that's that's the way of doing that's the Bitcoin we're doing things and so you know it's something that we will adopt in the near future I think I Andreas is pushing for a good example. Andreas is pushing for exactly the right kind of reforms in this area a third party audits real time auditing cryptographic proof of reserves all that stuff the only thing that I would throw in there as well as I'd love to see exchanges working with their competitors to form open trains actions based voting pools that would help deal with the threat of insider theft and this could obviously be extended to the black market exchange as well there's been a lot of insider theft or just a lot of things that I would like to do is to do that. So I'm just getting hacked and so forth and having a stuff stolen these are all decentralized solutions for protecting consumers it's something that you know we're realizing now that we absolutely need to have in place and the great thing about these solutions is they actually solve the problem they actually help solve the weaknesses in the market whereas when you introduce government regulation it's like a doctor a promising to remove a tumor with a broad sword so I'm really looking forward to the next phase of the good. The big point ecosystem Megan lord. If it's true that mark only had access to this wallet then it's an excellent argument against centralization because it doesn't get more centralized than one guy having control over everything so I think this is really proving the point of decentralization and that is a much more efficient way of dealing with these problems and I think we're going to be pushed even more in that. And I think it's also going to especially how this situation gets dealt with which of course it's extremely complicated but I think it's also going to be eye opening for people who are on the outside looking in and they're not quite sure what to think about Bitcoin and you know how how to feel about the community I think the way the community deals with this decentralization will be a great example for them to look to and kind of inspire trust and then and I think that's a great thing. I mean it's probably overly optimistic to think that it would be nice to see a kind of mind shift with with the mindset being applied to you know centralized controlling governance. Derek Jay. Unlike at Mount Gox in the future it won't come down to one man it will come down to zero man or rather one code because it's going to be decentralized and autonomous. The world is trending more towards empowering the individual and we want to know more about what the organizations that we interact with we want to know what they're doing are they solvent can we see the books can we have a webcam into the office I mean who knows what customers will demand from exchanges in the future but what we do know is that the customers will know more about their money than was ever possible before. And one thing I learned from the mount gox fiasco that I never realized before is how quickly an economy can survive or how quickly it can rebound after a large financial institution goes out of business I mean in my lifetime it's always been too big to fail institutions get a bailout or get put on life support and I wonder if the large banks were allowed to fail if the economy in the US would be recovering now it's nice to see the company. The companies can fail and economies go on and actually might even improve quicker than otherwise will hangman. Yeah just a pick up or Derek left off you know you cut out these tumors or they cut themselves out you know all of the cancerous cells die off and the healthy tissues around it can rebound and regrow and innovate and expand. So that's you know that's it to it's you know one man has control of this stuff you know speculating here perhaps but you've got you've got the first goxing or the first few goxings and they're you know struggling they have to go on a fractional reserve just to try and keep business going and keep confidence up and I know there's a better term for that but for the sake of argument just putting that out there. So he has to have control of it so that there can't be any major thefts or hacks or something like that and keep the thing going but if all they're doing is worrying about trying to catch up in the race again and become fully solvent and have a full reserve again they're not innovating and that's what we saw they never updated their website meaningfully you know they were they were still running it on PHP it's still I think there was a design update and that was it no functionality no extra features nothing really to speak up. For innovation so think of it this way like the other like Kristoff and Derek pointed out if you have these cryptographic proof of reserves other transparent practices put into place for exchanges or other financial institutions in cryptocurrency you have just freed up an immense amount of man hours for innovation and I'll just leave it at that. Andreas and to noblis. I think the Gauks fiasco points out a couple of lessons that we need to learn now I'm a huge supporter of using algorithmic solutions such as proof of solvency or proof of reserves essentially using a hashing algorithm and homomorphic encryption to add up all of the account balances of all of the customers and be able to prove to the world that you have the balance into each customer that their balance was included in that total. That's a very simple way it's it's a way that is not subject to manipulation beyond that I would like to see various other forms of automated algorithmic protections is including multi-sig with backup and escrow capabilities and things like that. However, as much as I love those algorithmic solutions I think it's also important to have independent audits and the reason for that is that even those solutions need to be implemented by people and you will have code that will need to be implemented by people which should be open source and should be reviewed by lots of other people. But the basic practice of doing independent audits is a good practice it's a practice that forces you to be subject to external scrutiny scrutiny that will put you into a position where you adopt good operational practices because you know you're going to be tested it also it also brings a fresh perspective to your operations it's very easy when you're in an environment to lose focus and not see things that to outsiders are obvious. Peer review is the gold standard for the scientific process and independent audit is also the gold standard. We're here to have lost and dress dovy barker. Can you repeat the question leave the question was how could mount gocks have been run by a single person does this surprise you? No, because mount gocks came from such humble beginnings. You have to understand to Bitcoin has exploded beyond most people's wildest dreams if you were in on it early and you were looking at it when it was crossing the penny or crossing the dollar where it is now is unbelievable. And mount gocks was the exchange when it was that small I mean it was the exchange when one person could operate in exchange and it grew faster than he could manage and it's understandable that the market wouldn't tolerate a single exchange. But no, it doesn't surprise me that it had one one founding member who wouldn't let go I mean that's the story of of that's hubris in a nutshell isn't it. It could be only one and dress you're reconnected you have more to add. Yes, I'm sorry about that well you know independent audit as I was saying is the gold standard of security it allows us to bring a fresh perspective so I'd like to see two things the first is collaboration between CSOs. Between the security professionals who are on the front lines of operating large infrastructure within Bitcoin because there will be threats even if those threats are not existential even if these threats are not systemic even if these threats do not affect the Bitcoin protocol we will see the knowledge of service attacks we will see malware we will see exploits and we need to share information on those things and then we need to audit each other and in the audit process we will learn from each other and we will learn better practices. If we can apply best practices then we can avoid what Carpellus was doing at Cox which was the very definition of worst practices security and he took it at all whole new level thank you Chris Jay. So this is the picture of the week right this is this is the humility that is that is required in the honor and if anyone is watching this who speaks Japanese I'd really like you to tell me there's a word in Japanese that I used to know in front of my school used to tell me. It means something like doing the right thing even if you really really really really don't want to do it but you do it because it's the right thing to do and I you know he got comfortable and I think the thing is it's very hard when you start from humble beginnings to remember those beginnings and to stay humble as you grow older I don't know what happened any more than anyone else does I think only this man knows what happened and the questions that we're asking now is who knew what and where. I think that we should leave it to the professionals or any of the sort of the amateur auditors that we've seen come out amateur as in you know they love doing it. I think those should should those people should be the ones to do it he needs to stop telling people that he might be able to get these coins back because the customers the victims that lost their money need closure. He continues to say that he might be able to get the money back and I don't think that he should be he should be saying that so I'm not surprised that it happens you know these things happen all the time but I deco all the things that you know the other guys have said about the full reserves and so on. Moving on issue five the TSA wants to count my bitcoins. Dovey Barker Bitcoin not bombs campaign navigator and regular panelists here on the Bitcoin group was recently harassed by the TSA while traveling home from the Liberty Forum when the TSA saw his Bitcoin and wanted to count it. Dovey what was this experience like. It was it was kind of frightening to tell you the truth in the moment it was frightening and then as soon as it was all over it became hilarious very quickly so. Yeah he said that he saw Bitcoin in my back. Did you have any Bitcoin pins or plastic toy coins any caissacious coins no I think that's what he was looking for because when I asked him what he thought Bitcoin looked like he said medallions or tokens. And I did have about 500 lapel pins in my backpack but none of them were Bitcoin lapel pins because I sold out of Bitcoin lapel pins but certainly other lapel pins must be interchangeable with Bitcoin lapel pins and work on the similar system right well not he would they were all pins all but what I what I had was I had my Bitcoin not bombs hoodie on and so he saw the B and he saw a bunch of. Metal and he thought caissacious coins I got to give this guy some trouble. Did they ask to see your phone did they want your pass or weren't interested in my laptop weren't interested in my phone weren't interested in my USB drive they were interested in the stock pile of metal that I had. These are highly technical TSA agents perhaps they were only interested in paper wallets or physical bitcoins well that's interesting if they are going to be looking for. Bitcoin embedded in objects they're going to have to scrutinize every single object individually because it can be written anywhere. I can tell you what I think happened so you know a little while ago Fincen you know they sent their season to cysts to the caissacious guy and around that same time probably what happened with someone. At the you know the higher levels of the TSA were a memo to send out to all of their. Their agencies to say hey look young look out for these caissacious coins they're really convenient way for someone to. Physically smuggle more than $10,000 across the border which they're of course very sensitive about. And of course you know the average person at the TSA is not exactly the the tool of sharp in the shed and so you know what they probably interpret that is they don't know the hell they coin is so they probably just say oh I guess Bitcoin is. Medellin shaped things that we need to be looking for those now so I think that's probably what was going on for a dovy. But caissacious coins are not a convenient way to physically smuggle money across borders Bitcoin is a convenient way to conveniently smuggle money across borders but I wouldn't take it the RTSH checkpoint but you don't need to physically smuggle bitcoins right you can just send them over the internet so. So you can send all of your bitcoins with one coin it's one QR code that gets through and suddenly thousands of bitcoins could be sent across you don't need little a bag full of little medallions to get all your bitcoins I could also be carrying a thousand little medallions that are all empty. They'd have to check each one to make sure that you weren't carrying any I mean I have them here i'm lucky I wasn't carrying these because I've got all of these blank caissacious coins you know like they're worth their weight in aluminum. Well you know how the QR codes for passwords are now tend to be a bit 38 you know encrypted I wonder if we're going to have to come up with a new bit for encrypting the actual addresses so that some asshole doesn't scan in your QR code and start asking about the balance. It definitely could be an issue if you were wearing a t-shirt with your donation logo on it and they scanned your donation logo suddenly they know the value of your company or your charity or whatever it is it's right there. Dove you said they left you alone after they figured out that you were traveling in country does that mean that this kind of treatment is okay for international travel. No I mean they think so I don't think their existence as an agency is okay. Should the government be allowed to count our bitcoins as we travel internationally locally why not a counter at the mall that lets you find out if high value Bitcoin customers enter your store. So I don't know man. Yeah this is this is worrying on a number of different levels I mean for one thing that's TSA's jurisdiction and mandate is to protect security there's a narrow fourth amendment exception in the airport that was established by the stream court in order to check for for bombs explosives and other things that threaten the security of airlines. There is no exception in the fourth amendment for the TSA specifically to be looking for monetary instruments when when being transferred abroad or looking for other forms of contra vans and what they've gradually done is they've gradually expanded that now our exception to make it essentially a blanket warrantless search environment where they can refer it to law enforcement. There's also an important distinction here which is that the TSA have no law enforcement powers I believe Davi at some point they said if you don't answer questions they will refer you to law enforcement who will take you into custody is that correct. Yeah that's right and I asked them aren't you law enforcement and they said no or not. Yeah they have no law enforcement mandate furthermore you're not actually obligated to answer any questions even if there is an hour exception to the fourth amendment. There is absolutely no exception to your fifth amendment right to remain silent at all times they can refuse you entry into the airport and turn you back but they cannot force you to answer questions and if law enforcement did arrive the fact that you refuse to answer questions has nothing to do with anything it is not illegal and it is not a basis for arrest it's not even a basis for a reasonable suspicion detention under the Terry stop mandate that police have or the authority they have to have. For under reasonable suspicion to stop you for a limited time to detain you in order to further interrogate you at any time you have the right to not answer any questions so in many cases the appropriate answer to the TSA is it's none of your fucking business and when the police come and they say what did you say to the TSA you'll say I said it's none of their fucking business am I free to go. Now the other thing to remember is that under TSA rules you have the right to videotape in a checkpoint you have the right to photograph in a checkpoint they will tell you that that is not allowed but in fact you have a first amendment rights to photograph in an airport and videotape in an airport or any public space or space that is open to the public you can video interactions with public officials the TSA has guidelines on their side that say this very specifically that you are allowed to videotape in a checkpoint as long as you're not pointing your camera. They are directly at the screens of the checking equipment take your phone pointed towards the TSA agent use the forward camera so they can see their own face on the screen being recorded with a little blinking light and then continue the conversation they behave much better if they've got a live streaming video of that interaction going out on the air. The TSA do not have law enforcement power they do not have any more rights than anybody else and you do not lose your rights just because you walked into an airport so don't take that shit. I didn't I as soon as I realize I was still talking to security I immediately went into I don't answer questions mode. I was about ready to even ask for an attorney because they started threatening to arrest me. But the other problem with this is that they take all of your property when you go through the screening so at the moment that this happened my recording device was deep inside the backpack that they wanted to search and so I wasn't about to open the backpack and then say you can't look in my backpack that makes sense but in the future absolutely I'm going to be much more careful to have a recording device on my person. Right I generally turn on a recording device as I hand over my ID and boarding pass and I keep it recording live throughout the entire interaction until I leave the screening area. I always opt out and I do a pat down and when I do a pat down I narrate the experience to the live video making it very clear that it's being recorded as it occurs. Generally speaking I find that people are much more polite to me they're also much more circumspect in their accusations in their threats. And in behavior that can be used against them when seen on video there also much faster to get a supervisor I put it down on the floor next to me. Next to my foot and as it's pointing upwards you can not only see that it's recording you can see in the in the screen what it's recording because I use the forward camera so that it's obvious what it's recording. I've had TSA agents many times object to this where they look they see the screen that's recording and they go you know what the hell are you doing and I said you know I say sir man there are 10,000 cameras pointed at me and one pointed at you I'm sure you can handle it I am exercising my first man much right and that's how it goes and they can't do anything about it. Andreas could you describe for us what a narration of pat down experience sounds like? Yes I say things like I've opted out and I'm now preparing for the physical pat down with agents low pests of the transportation security administration and then as they do their normal spiel which they do much more carefully that's all recorded but all you're doing is basically indicating that this is now being recorded and that you're protecting yourself. And I do that almost every time I go through a TSA screening point. Can you walk me through where your phone goes from the extra machine to the pat down because I put my phone into one of those gray bins so how does it get from the gray bin to the pat down because they don't let me return to my property. Oh they pick up the property and take it with you and yes they usually pick up the bins and say which one is your property and they take it with you. And they will let me touch my phone. Okay cool. And you just keep the phone recording while you put it on the X-ray machine right absolutely it goes through and records the entire time from the moment I enter the checkpoint until the moment I leave the checkpoint and I've never had problems with this but you know quite honestly they might they might try to not let you take your phone but they're going to bring your property near you. So just be louder for the microphone. The key point there is as long as you leave it recording you're leaving some kind of evidence around so if something happened you at least have recording from the X-ray machine. Yeah the other thing to do is whenever you go with two people to the airport if you're being escorted by someone else what you do is you go through the security in two batches. First person goes through while the second person sits back and records the entire process from before the screening line and then as soon as the one person is through they start recording from the other end and the second person goes through. And that way you've got continuous recording from an independent witness throughout the entire process and they notice they absolutely notice this is happening they might come and ask you questions they might ask you why you're recording etc etc which case you just refuse to answer questions and point them to the TSA policy. But it's very important that you assert your rights rights are like muscles unless you exercise them they wither and die and the TSA did not cancel the Constitution just because they put on a blue uniform. It's absolutely tragic that we've come to this. Do you worry about wearing the Bitcoin symbol now do you think that your hoodie is a call to action for government authorities? I'm going to wear it from now on so we'll find out. And just a call to the rest of the group if anyone else would like to comment on the TSA checking your bags for Bitcoin Chris J what do you think about that? I've just been looking up on Wikipedia actually so it looks like this organization came in around 9 11 is that right just as a response to I would say I don't really have a lot to add on because I'm not really an expert on it. What I would say is that I would like to see somebody use a brain wallet go reporter because then all you've got to do is remember a pass phrase right and it literally you're just you're just entrusting your bitcoins on on the blockchain. So I don't even think you don't even have to pass through with any kind of QR code anything physically on you at all. You can just store the bitcoins on the blockchain that pervasive. And remember that the private key doesn't even have to be a QR code we're really talking about a string of numbers and letters that could be written down anywhere in the person's supplies are on their systems in parts there's a variety of ways to sneak a number through Jason King Sean's outpost you might be muted. Yeah, I think I'm not muted in my. I'm not on that. Yep. Okay, cool. So I had a similar experience to Davi in December. I actually I went to the dark wallet meetup in Milan, Italy. And I was actually detained by customs coming back into the US which had never happened to me before. I was taken off into a separate room and interrogated and they did a similar thing my old business cards were actually these little embroidered Bitcoin patches that I just had a shot in the Sean's outpost QR code on the back of them. And you know I had 50 of them in that bag and they pulled them out and the same thing is like what's the monetary value of these is like there's no monetary value to these these are patches. And then actually pulled out my new business card so they could compare the key work codes between these Bitcoin patches and it's like the incompetence there is just absolutely ridiculous. But yeah, it's funny because as soon as the word Bitcoin came out they got noticeably concerned and then you know they brought it another person. And then I wasn't speaking very much because I don't but the whole thing was fairly comical to me. They actually called my wife to verify who I was and my lovely wife so they called them and they said who is this and my wife is like you called me you identify yourself. And then so you know they would do through that and they were you know they wanted me to they had a million questions on Bitcoin and why why would anyone in Italy care about Bitcoin like why would someone from the United States go to Italy to speak on Bitcoin. And I was just like you know I don't know what to tell you man and you know my attorney is angry at me as hell because I didn't have them call him. And I should have you should call your attorney if that happens. And then yeah so similar thing the CSC is ridiculous I think I applaud Andreas I think that's a brilliant idea. But in that checkpoint I actually tried to turn I had my hand my phone and they actually took my phone from me so I don't know if you're in that situation at the border. I don't know if you can if you can do that because they did physically take my phone away from me so yeah and they can also you can't do it to the border in the border you're in a complete no man's land. Yeah which they've managed to carve out not just an exception to the Fourth Amendment but pretty much do whatever the hell they want which is wonderful because all of these people remember they take a note to uphold and protect the United States Constitution. They take that oath above anything else and then they violate it daily with their actions. In the case you going through a border I have a completely different procedure when I'm traveling across international borders. Before I depart from my host country I wipe all of my digital devices completely then I travel through the border with completely blank devices. Notify people of my estimate the time of arrival and tell people including on Twitter that if I do not arrive within that time frame to call my lawyer and escalate the situation. I expect one of these days I will be detained not for anything I've done not because they have anything to accuse me with but just a basic harassment to hold me for a few hours. Ask me annoying questions to which I will give them no answers and eventually they're going to have to let me in as a US citizen you have the absolute right to repatriation it is a right protected both under the US Constitution it has been validated by the Supreme Court and it has also been validated by the UN Charter of Human Rights. You have the right to enter your own country and they can only detain you temporarily ask you annoying questions which you answer none of them and repeat the same word over and over again until they let you go that word is lawyer. Christoff I agree I agree. Go ahead Jason. No, no, that was just agreeing with Andreas. That's a good idea. So good Christoff. Yeah. Any of these badge officials I don't really trust them to to uphold some stuff that someone wrote on a piece of paper. Some of them will take it seriously and some of them won't and buy stuff written on paper I mean the Constitution or other laws. So I think if you're in a public area and you're within the borders of your own country I guess I really only know about the United States and US enter that regard. Go ahead and film them because they'll take note of that and if they tackle you and take care of your phone from out of your hands then maybe someone else films them doing that. If they take you into a private area I wouldn't necessarily take that same approach for the reason that I don't really trust them to to follow laws. I mean these are a bunch of people that their job is to molest people on a daily basis or radiate them. Would you like some radiation or would you like some molestation? That's that's their version of would you like fries with that. And then you know when you're going through the border I definitely like I'd raise this idea of wiping the device I think it's a very good idea especially if you have bitcoins on your mobile device you don't want to give them access to that. If you don't want to wipe the device like probably the best thing you can do is just turn it off and make sure that it has a strong passcode like on my phone usually I just have like a forward digit you know whatever to unlock the phone. When I travel next week to go to the Texas Bitcoin conference I'm definitely going to apply a strong pass right on there. If the NSA you know comes up to me and says hey can I take a look at your phone the first thing I do is going to turn it off and then it's a you know I'd rather not do that and so forth but if they you know take it from me at least they need to they have to do some kind of sophisticated hacking technique to get access to it. So I think those are those are all important points and yeah probably the best thing to do is to wipe your machine if you're going to go into any kind of private space or if you're going over the border. One video that I saw was this was a border crossing the guys crossing the border and they say okay I need to prove that you're coming to the country for the right reason so call you know give me give us the phone number for your friend and he pulls it up on his phone and the agents like oh let me see that he takes the phone and you know supposedly to jot down the number and then he just disappears into a back room with the phone unlocked for like an hour. And who knows what happened there did they copy all the information off the phone did they install a some kind of root kid on the phone like you don't know so just be very careful about how you handle your your mobile devices especially if you have money on your on your device or some kind of record of financial transactions it's also very sensitive. Megan Lawrence. So I haven't flown in several years since they added the scanners in their port and with the Texas Bitcoin conference I was in a bit of a dilemma it has been resolved I will be driving over from Pensacolo but originally I was flying and from the minute I bought the plane ticket I had extreme anxiety about going because I think it's a really messed up situation to make someone choose between being a radiated and arrested and I think it's a I mean I understand why people opt out. And I totally am supportive of whatever people do it do people do whatever they need to to feel safe I think it puts certain people in very dangerous situations when they have this awful decision that no one should ever have to make where you may have to opt out and be sexually assaulted especially if you're a survivor of sexual assault it's very triggering and very you know terrifying and so I was I was kind of working on the phone. And I was working through this dilemma I don't want to let this agency stop me from flying and traveling the countries which is something I've always wanted to do I haven't been able to leave the US but I do hope to for some of these conferences overseas and I don't want to be hindered by that my personal position on is that I probably would try to record the entire interaction but try to go through the scanner because I think it's worse for people to be putting their hands on me than going through a scanner where at least I'm going to be able to do that. It's going to be inappropriate but at least they can't touch me so that's kind of my position on I know it's not a super popular one because I have I know a lot of libertarians tend to say oh well you should opt out because it shows them that you're resisting but I think it's a false try I think it's a trap I think they you know there's a lot of sickos in the TSA who I'm sure hoping you know women especially opt out and you know even even trying to lay low there's no way I can do that. I know guarantee that you're not going to be randomly selected for a pat down either it's a disgusting situation but I'm not going to let it stop me from traveling abroad it's something I've really thought a lot about the past several months changing my position on because I had a very strict no flying policy I will drive all over the country and I have for years now to avoid specifically going through that but it's something that I'm not going to let stand in my way and I really appreciate the tips that have been given. I buy Andreas and others about how to deal with the situation by videotaping it and having an attorney that you can contact readily available thankfully I've gotten in touch with a good attorney lately and I think those are all really really useful tips and it does come down to survival when dealing with these people their thugs they have no respect for human life and you have to outsmart them at every turn. You know I think it's really ironic that here we are having this conversation in the land of the free and the home of the brave and essentially what we're talking about is a whole number of law-biting citizens who have broken absolutely no law for engaging in lawful activity primarily related to speech not even anything else but speech by going to conferences and speaking about technology and a completely lawful activity and here we are having to take defensive measures against highly highly intrusive arbitrary capricious and ubiquitous searches that have nothing to do with law enforcement that have nothing to do with authority vested in them by any part of law or the constitution and where the weirdos where the weirdos for trying to simply exercise our lawful right to speech without being molested for it. It's really shocking and increasingly I think for many people it's becoming a reason to leave the United States and try to avoid travel either through or inside the United States as much as possible because you know it gives far too many opportunities for you to be harassed extra judicially with no justification in law for activities that are entirely lawful I haven't broken any law. I keep my nose 100% clean I do my taxes I you know I do everything by the book because I have a high profile and because I'm an honest person and yet here we are essentially taking defensive measures against our own government it is absolutely disgusting. I think it's worth pointing out it's got nothing to do with security either like between Jason and I apparently the TSA has managed to find two Bitcoin charities but they've never found a terrorist they've found plenty of tubes of toothpaste and bottles of water but they've never actually thwarted any security risk in an airport so like to it's like it's not just it's not bad enough that it's security theater that I'm going to be able to do it. Play is also a tragedy. It's designed to train people to unquestionally conform to authority authority that isn't even lawful in many cases and authority that is ever expanding ever more intrusive and ever more detached from the original concepts of security that provided the excuse to start it and it trains people to just unquestionally follow this authority and that is the kind of training that we should be avoiding in this country or in any country it is a very pernicious and poisonous idea to train people that anytime they see a badge in a uniform they should do exactly as told regardless of their of their rights regardless of the legality of the situation and just simply shut up and play along because that's what the people need to feel secure that is poisonous for us. It's poisonous for democracy and is a very dangerous precedent these are training academies for totalitarianism. Yeah, the idea about Andreas is being vested in in abject dunces. I mean we've heard all the stories and the thefts and the things like that but just what happened to Davi underscores it perfectly and even Jason's experience too. Showing up and asking them you know I love Davi what you wrote in your in your recount of this thing asking them are you sure you know what a Bitcoin is may I speak with your supervisor. I mean this is this is the the dangerous potential here for for this kind of authority to run a mock I don't know how we how we figured or what you know these policy makers figured would be such a great idea. About vesting authority in such dunces except for the fact that they would unquestioningly carry out their their their policies and for some reason because they wear fancy uniforms and badges and you know can call on call on the dog so to speak. If there's any real trouble going on that everyone just falls in line and conforms and that's that's the saddest part for me I find when I go through these checkpoints and things I just shut up and I really like the point that the tips you gave all you know some of the panelists gave great tips especially Andreas's tip about filming. I thought of doing that a number of times but never really knew a full comprehensive process of how to do it and Andreas you gave that to me so thank you but just I just end up shutting up I don't look anybody in the eye and I just try to get it over with and hope that you know I'm not selective you know selected for random you know enhanced pat down or whatever it's it's a terrible or deal it's often. Freedom is reasonable suspicion will all that activity you're doing asserting your rights believing in the Constitution sounds really damn suspicious to me I think more pat down are are in store for you. Derek J. Yeah I haven't flown in over 10 years because my last experience flying the TSA stole hundreds of dollars of clone from me because they were in bottles over three ounces so I'm surprised that dovey's pins weren't stolen you know and I have to say I'm impressed with dovey's ability to record right after you know as soon as possible you got the word out and that was the reason I think that this story what became so big was because you got some sort of a record while you were in the airport of what was happening to you it's audio it's an objective record even spread as far as info wars and it's no doubt because you are reporting this story that more people are going to take precautions when they go flying the next time and the intersection of the TSA and Bitcoin is particularly interesting to me because the TSA is this organization that's designed to protect borders right these imaginary lines through which they are going to take the TSA. So it's just things can't pass and they are the guards they're the checkpoint between you and the outside world but with Bitcoin as we've been talking about the borders are meaningless you can cross the borders with the Bitcoin in your brain if you're using a brain wallet. So the TSA looking for physical representations of Bitcoin is really a lost cause. And the most important takeaway that I can communicate to the crowd is that they're going to seize what they want. Constitution aside, they have the guns and the authority and the badges. So they're going to take what they want, whether or not they're not going to like check all the coins to see their value before stealing them. They steal things first and then later give them back if they were wrong. But there's no apology. So if you want to protect yourself, record, and another tip that we haven't mentioned yet is an arm trick that a lot of people have used with success in the past where you opt out, you go for the pat down, and then you say, I just tore my rotator cuff, I can't lift my arm above my head. They say, fine, they're apparently prepared for this sort of objection and you get a classic style metal detector, no invasive pat down needed. Excellent. And I guess we'll move on to question, well, I was going to try to skip question and answers, but they look pretty good. Let's see, starting off with the daily show. Does it hurt or help that Bitcoin was mentioned briefly on the daily show? For those of you who aren't familiar, the daily show mentioned Bitcoin and of course the Mt. Gox collapse. They quickly drew the parallel between Bitcoin and Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs is of course too big to fail and now has acquired yellow cake uranium through a various business dealings. So Goldman Sachs is closer than Iran to getting the bomb. That was pretty much the daily show that's covered. I think it's a good thing. All press is a good thing. So this is the thing. Good press for Bitcoin is great. It's good press. It gives us brand awareness. Bad press for Bitcoin is good press because it gives us brand awareness. Media all press for Bitcoin is good press because it gives us brand awareness. Pronounciations, the Bitcoin is dead is good press because people check three weeks later and guess what? Bitcoin isn't dead and that's good brand awareness. Every time Bitcoin is mentioned, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, someone hears it and Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin. The fourth time they buy some and they join because the more they hear the government saying you shouldn't touch this Bitcoin and they know exactly how trustworthy the government is and they know exactly how trustworthy the banks are. The bank's issue warnings against Bitcoin, people buy Bitcoin. The government issues warnings against Bitcoin, people buy Bitcoin. People say Bitcoin is good, people buy Bitcoin. Anything you do promotes the brand. Say whatever the hell you want about me, just spell my name right. B-I-T-C-O-I-N Bitcoin. Excellent. Well said. Does anyone want to comment on the end of the stream of Bitcoin flowing into China on fiatleague.com? It's truly mesmerizing to watch. Not everybody comment at once. I think it's very exciting that China is still buying Bitcoin considering the temporary ban that was later restricted to only a bank ban. Okay, it wasn't even a temporary ban. It was always just a bank ban. And again, this represents the type of negative publicity that is reducing the credibility of the media while creating brand awareness for Bitcoin. They said China banned Bitcoin and the volume didn't change. And who did that cause to lose credibility? Bitcoin or the media? Every time the media tries to discredit Bitcoin, it discredits itself because you look three weeks later, Bitcoin is still there. I'd like to urge everyone to make sure that Bitcoin is still there. It's bittcoindead.com. Visit it every single day. Refresh it in your browser. Just a check. It's bittcoindead.com. And guess what? The answer is always no. Excellent. How likely is it from merchants to offer customers discount that pay in Bitcoin instead of credit card? I would say they're already offering it. Tiger Direct has offered a special discount for Bitcoin. Firstock.com is working on a special discount for Bitcoin. The more we see merchants that go through a pretty similar pattern, first they need to know what Bitcoin is, then they can accept it, then they realize how much they're saving from not paying credit card fees, and they realize that if they could increase the amount of Bitcoin they're taking in, they could reduce their amount of fees. So it makes a lot of sense for them to add a little discount for Bitcoin paying customers. Yeah, I'm talking with a small coffee shop around here who's interested in starting to accept Bitcoin payments. And they're very eager to offer 33% off for one cup of coffee if paid in Bitcoin and happy to hold on to all those bitcoins and not pay, you know, I think for $1.75 cup of coffee they pay like a flat fee for the credit card fee if it's paid in a credit card, not the 3% or whatever it is. It's like $1.25 that they have to pay their merchant processor or Visa and directly or whatever it may be. So they're very excited about a 33% discount for a cup of coffee. And I guarantee you that will lead to a lot of people who shop their daily exploring what this Bitcoin thing is all about. Exactly. Well, and what a wonderful loyalty program for customers. You come back every day, you pay with Bitcoin, you get a discount every day. The business profits and so do you. You know, this is how deflationary currency is supposed to work, right? You're supposed to discount and incentivize. Well, look at the underlying premise of inflation. What they're trying to do is they're trying to control your spending behavior. But the thing is we don't even want the junk that's on sale. So by devaluing my money, you're actually going to get less of what you want. It's absolutely appropriate that merchants discount their products for these deflationary currencies. Absolutely. Moving on, the next question and this may or may not be true. I've read a disturbing post on Reddit where somebody apparently shot his brains out because of his loss of Gauks BTC. And I'd like to say just as a community, these reports could be fake or they could be real. If they're fake, we need to shrug them off and not be grossed out about it. But if they're real, we probably need to set up some type of funds to try to help these people some outreach to provide condolences and whatever we can do because people have lost a great deal of money. And there is going to be this feeling and this sentiment through the community. And hopefully we can reverse it, help the people affected by it and fight it. Anyone else thoughts on that? In Roger Verdes video about Mt. Gauks, he was a really interesting phrase. He said that he lost a life altering amount of Bitcoin. And I thought that that was really interesting because it's not a numerical value. It's very subjective. Each person would describe a life altering amount of value differently. But I think of it like when I heard this story, I thought of it like this. Bitcoin set a lot of people free. So people that grew up feeling like they didn't have a future, feeling like they didn't have a retirement, feel like they would never see the wealth that they saw around them, feeling like they were born into a cage and stuck there. Sort of felt free for the first time in their life. And this happened to me to some extent. And so to have that then taken away from them, it's like a bird breaking out of a cage only to discover he broke into another cage. I could see that being truly tragic and heartbreaking. And so I guess what I would say to everyone is that it isn't just about the amount that's in your account. It's about the future that's being built. And so even if you lost something, it's worth staying in the game because we don't really know how fantastic a future we're building is yet. Yeah, I want to echo that, Davi. I tell friends of mine after they've come around to Bitcoin that, you know, when they ask really why I got involved or whatever, that I saw it as a way to save my life, to give me new motivation, to recreate myself, new confidence. And I had a couple times since I've owned any bitcoins where I lost almost all of them, embarrassing situations even, things that were close to life-rooting. And I never wanted to leave the game because of what this technology provides, which at least for me personally was a way to, you know, I always tell people, you know, I wanted to be involved in all kinds of different activism and organizations and things like that that I kind of agreed with, mostly agreed with or whatever. But there was always something about them that I couldn't completely get behind. And I know I had some gifts to share with the world and all of us do. Every single one of you watching out there does. And Bitcoin came along and it finally was that one thing that there was nothing about it that I could not get behind. And so that's why I jumped in with both feet. And that's why I stayed around even when some embarrassing moments happened where I lost nearly almost all of my Bitcoin well. And it's because of that that, you know, it's because of that that we all should stick around and we should all, you know, get one Satoshi again. And just put your gifts to work, give your gifts to the world. It really brought me out of my shell. And it really allowed me to give gifts to the world that had been couched up or bottled up. So I'm so, so grateful to this community and this technology Satoshi Nakamoto, him, her or themselves. And please stick around, stick around with us, reach out to people. You'll find, I mean, I couldn't ask for a better family, the biggest family in the world probably. And I don't often, you know, I don't think any of my family is watching so I can probably say I've not felt a sense of family for my own family. And a lot of folks have that experience. But I have not, you know, my small young family that I have, you know, my fiance and our child, we have this immense caring family that we feel from the Bitcoin community all the time. And if you don't feel that yet and you've been involved in Bitcoin and you had a huge loss recently, please just open up your mouth a little bit to some folks nearby and we'll come and embrace you. Yeah, don't go posting on Reddit. You may not find too many sympathetic ear. Go to Reddit. If you're feeling despair, if you're, if you've lost the large amount of money and you're feeling despair beyond reaching out to the community, in the US at least, there are support structures available. There are in many other countries in the US, there's a 24-hour suicide hotline where you can talk to people who can give you hope and who can help you work through that despair. The number for that is 1-800-273-TALK. That's 2738-255. Now, I'm not suggesting that the story is true. I certainly hope it isn't because for me, Bitcoin has been life-ulturing in a positive way. It's not because I invested all of my money in Bitcoin and made a lot of money. It's because I invested all of my skills in Bitcoin and I've learned so much and because I invested a lot of my social interactions in Bitcoin and I've met incredible people. Because I've invested a lot of my hope in Bitcoin and I've been rewarded back with hope. I hope out of Bitcoin, you get not the money, not the return, but the investment in community and hope in the possibilities of a technology and in your own skills that will give you a lifetime of opportunity to earn and perhaps if you've made a loss to earn back. So don't give up and if you need help, call the national suicide hotline, don't despair. Absolutely. Good advice, Andreas. We have one more question tonight for Chris J. I'm a UK resident and have an account with Gox and have lost a lot. Is it possible here for me to go to a lawyer to file a lawsuit or would that be pointless as Gox is in Japan? Well, I'm certainly not in a position to give any legal advice, but I do understand that on the Bitcoin talk forum, somebody was talking about doing a class action or so. So it's pretty searchable on Google if you type in MC Gox class action. That should come up because it got a lot of posts on the forum, but I'm not a legal expert. I'm afraid, really sorry. Absolutely, but check out for a class action lawsuit. There may be something in your country or your area. So don't give up hope completely, but accept your losses and do what you can to move on and reach out. We're moving on to everyone's favorite part of the show, predictions. The part where I ask you to predict the future and perhaps you didn't prepare anything. And Dres has already suddenly disappeared. That means you know it's prediction time. We're looking at you, Dovey Barker. I'm predicting that the Austin Bitcoin conference is going to be awesome. I'm predicting that we're going to meet a lot of cool people, see a lot of cool announcements and that we're going to sort of set the tone for Bitcoin moving forward. Chris, Jay. I predict that after this grand mistake of outsourcing our wealth management, we're also going to outsource some of our thinking. And lots of people are going to be blaming Bitcoin on this problem. But I also predict that lots of people are going to come to the defense Bitcoin. And a lot of people in this space are going to redouble their efforts. This is going to make us even stronger. I'm working on the Bitcoin fight, which is on the 5th of April. We've got a show at the O2 involving some kickboxing for Bitcoin. It's going to be the biggest Bitcoin event of the year just like plug that. And I think that even like the sense that I get with Start Join, you know this new sort of crowdfunding thing that Max Keiser's launched, everyone just is more energized. Now this has happened. We want to fight back even more. So I think I anticipate more stuff going on as a result of this. Jason King. Oh, we got it on mute. Sorry. No, still can't hear. We appear to have lost Jason King. Can you hear us Jason? Hello? There you go. You ready? You got me? Yep. Okay. So prediction. I predict I'm going to continuously burn out running shoes for the next three and a half months. And I'm going to agree with Davi. I think that the Texas Bitcoin conference in Austin is going to be killer. If you haven't checked up the line up there, it is amazing. I think it's going to be a very synergetic event. I hate the word synergy. I think it's overused. But the sort of mass of Bitcoiners in one space combined with the Bitcoin. It's combined with the South by Southwest and all of the people that attracts in one spot. I think Austin is going to be off the chain next week. And I think if you can be part of it, you should be part of it because I predict it's going to be amazing. Kristoff Atmos. Yeah, I'm very much looking forward to the conference. Hopefully someone at least a couple people will show up to my talk, which is scheduled at the same time as Stefan Mollenew. But that is the great. In terms of predictions, I think that there's going to be this tension between government regulation and self-regulation. The Bitcoin economy, the Bitcoin community, is ready to come forward with some amazing self-regulation, some crypto regulation. A new form of regulation that has not previously existed on this planet. They have responses to these mistakes. And that's all we need. But the government is also going to try to take this opportunity to step in and say, hey, we told you so. We need our guardrails and our Nintendo law skis and so forth. And so I'm very curious to see how that will play out in the court of public opinion. I think that the way that people will process that information will be important. And so it's very important to us to keep beating the drums of this new crypto regulation and letting people know that we don't need some strange. A club to crack to step in and try and fix things for us. Megan Lawrence. Kristoff said what I was basically going to say. I think we're going to see some decentralized solutions come out of this on. You know, improved S. Chris versus even competing insurance services to not necessarily like, you know, the FDIC or something. But I think something along those lines, you know, will be interesting come out of it. And I'm really excited about the Texas Bitcoin conference also. I think that's going to be great. And I definitely look forward to participating in that. Derek J. I'm excited about the Texas Bitcoin conference. And Michelle Seven's Big Barbecue Bash, which I think you're all attending as politicians seek to steal your Bitcoin at the airport, ban it in your state. And call you an extremist for trying to use Bitcoin to feed the homeless. I predict people are quickly going to learn about the current situation of freedom in this world and take action to do something about it. Starting with trading and free currencies like Bitcoin and building the free future we all want to see. Will Pangman. I'm going to go for a dry prediction, but a topic no one's mentioned yet. So maybe it's a little fresh for that reason. We're going to see some more misinformation, clumsy stuff come out of Mt. Gox in terms of statements and, you know, diluted facts and vagaries. And that will, of course, produce some fun in the community. And we'll see a drop in price again. Maybe not substantial, but significant. Followed by our next major rally past a thousand and staying there. And my prediction, Bitcoin adoption wave continues to sweep America. After the Sacramento King successfully adapt Bitcoin in March. Major League Baseball will seek to become Major League Bitcoin. Will America's pastime also become America's first Major League sporting event to accept Bitcoin? Are they really that smart? We're out of time. Until next time. Bye-bye.