The Bitcoin Group, the American original, for over the last ten seconds, the sharpest sitoshis, the best bitcoins, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Kristoff Atlus, from anonymous Bitcoin book. Good to be here. And Megan Lawrence from Bitcoins, not bombs. Thanks for having me. Moving on to issue one. Two-bit idiot with draws threat against the Bitcoin Foundation. He said he had the evidence for a war. He said he was going nuclear. All he did was destroy his own credibility. Once the noted leaker of the Mt. Gox presentation, now merely a two-bit idiot. But what about his claims? Should the Bitcoin Foundation have warned people about Mt. Gox? Should they have stricter standards for Bitcoin exchanges, especially Bitcoin Foundation board members? I ask you, Kristoff Atlus. I think the whole Bitcoin Foundation stuff is a bit of a yawn for me. I don't care too much about the Bitcoin Foundation. I think the idea of having a centralized organization that somehow going to coordinate the efforts of a decentralized currency is kind of silly in the old world. So I can't get too excited about it as far as what their responsibilities are. I mean, it certainly would be nice if they had done more to warn people about Mt. Gox. Now keep in mind that some of the people on the board, they have conflicts of interest with Mt. Gox. So that puts them in a bit of a sticky situation. First of all, I mean, there's not that many huge people in the Bitcoin world to be on this foundation right. So conflicts of interests are pretty difficult to avoid entirely. But let's say that they had warned people, then people would be saying, well, he has a company that's competing with Mt. Gox as a conflict of interest. This is not within the purview of the Bitcoin Foundation. So I can sympathize with being kind of stuck between a rock and a heart place on that. I'm not sure that they have any particular moral duty. It's just, you know, it's a voluntary organization that people can donate to or not donate to. People can pay attention to it or not pay attention to it. I do think it's important for us to make a very clear distinction between the Bitcoin Foundation and the Bitcoin company, which doesn't exist, right? It's just an organization. They can consider themselves to be very important, but, you know, very fundamentally, I don't think that it matters too much for the long term of Bitcoin. And this is important to make you clear that if something goes wrong with the Bitcoin Foundation, it doesn't have anything in particular to do with Bitcoin. It's just this isolated organization that is around the Bitcoin scene, but is not equivalent to Bitcoin. Megan, Lord. If you declare war, you need to bring the bombs. So what Tupiti it did was you brought in a lot of hype, but didn't really produce anything. And I was glad to see him kind of backtrack and, you know, apologize, at least, but it was a very strange apology where he was like, oh, I still have the information. It's like, release it if you do. But it's also something that I can't really get excited about in general as far as Bitcoin Foundation. I pretty much agree with Christophe on this. It's not something that I pay a whole lot of attention to because they don't represent me as a person in Bitcoin. And this whole idea that we need these protections on people that they should have been telling people not to use Mt. Gox. I think it's kind of silly and it goes completely against the idea of Bitcoin, which is self-accountability and self-responsibility. There were a lot of individual Bitcoiners who were saying, hey, get out of Gox. It's not good. Of course, you know, our reach was limited. You had all of these new people coming in, you know, the first thing that would pop up when you type in Bitcoin on Google would be Mt. Gox. So a lot of them just didn't know. But it's not really the foundation's responsibility to tell them that. It's up to the market, really. And, you know, we saw what happened with Gox. It was obviously terrible. And people had been saying for months to get out. But it wasn't the foundation's responsibility to do that. I don't really believe that there should be a centralized foundation anyway. And yeah, as far as stricter standards for Bitcoin exchanges, I don't, you know, I'd like to say more decentralized approach anyway. I'm not a huge fan of exchanges in the first place. One thing I'll just throw in there is that the Bitcoin foundation is not their responsibility as long as they're not claiming it, right? If they are like, we are Bitcoin. You know, we, everything that you need to know about Bitcoin goes through us. We make the biggest decisions. We are the Bitcoin dictators of the world. Then I guess they are assuming the responsibility. I don't really know about what they've claimed as responsibility, though, because I don't really pay attention to them. So, you know, it's possible for them to take on that responsibility if they're going to go ahead and say that they're doing that. I believe Christoph made a good point when he said, there is no Bitcoin the company. In the absence of a Bitcoin the company, it does seem we need something like the Bitcoin foundation to let people know what Bitcoin's up to and presumably at the very least to pay Gavin Andreas in the lead developer of Bitcoin. Now whether it should be the Bitcoin foundation we have right now or a different one, I'm not sure, but you bring up a good point on Gox. What could they have done if they had warned people it would look like they're causing Gox to collapse, which would have of course caused Gox to collapse, whereas they did nothing and they allowed Gox to collapse. The real problem could be is if as Too Bit Idiot said, if he has evidence of insider trading, if they use their access to Carpellas to get privileges that other users didn't have, that might not be acceptable, but it doesn't look like we're going to find out because Too Bit Idiot has clammed up. And this insider trading is the kind of thing that we could detect if we have audits, which was not going on it, on it, outgocks. And that's something that I think should be covered in audits in the future of these exchanges. Make sure that everything is secure and fair as well because we don't have any government outside organizations keeping a watch on any of this stuff. It's up to the market to provide information about this and certainly as an exchange user, I care whether there's someone that can jump in front of line ahead of me and in exchange. The Gox situation has certainly been a learning point for Bitcoin. I think that the new exchanges are going to be cryptographically proven, they're going to be stronger, and they're not going to be run by one person. So while I hate to say we had a learning opportunity with so many people's money missing, we had a learning opportunity. Exit question, what should Too Bit Idiot have done? If you were in issues, what would you have done? Christoph Atlas. That is an interesting question. I'm not sure what I would have done. I'm not sure if he has a particular responsibility. He received some insider information. When it came to the Mt. Gox stuff, he released it and people seemed to be happy with that decision. People are able to make more informed decisions based on receiving that information about my Gox. I wonder, would this Gox stuff have dragged out even longer if that information had not come to light? It wasn't very long before Mt. Gox shut down. That Mark of Pelis was just saying, oh, we're making some great changes. Just wait until Monday. It's going to be up again. All that kind of stuff. I guess in general, I favor the release of information. I can understand that he's trying to make a judgment call by saying that there's a lot of stuff going on with Bitcoin right now. A lot of stuff that can be interpreted negatively by the mainstream media. Let's not pile on some more stuff right now. If he wants to make that judgment call, I'm comfortable with that. I'm not sure exactly what I would have done in that situation. I probably would have released it. If he had released it, then there would be some people that hated him for releasing it. It might be a kind of a no-win situation for him. Megan Lawrence. I don't know enough about the details of the situation. I don't know what information he's seen or has in his possession. I don't know that I could make a judgment call on what I would have done. I hope that if there was some severe, obviously, there were some severe problems happening in the situation. I'm always for the truth coming out. But I definitely understand why he wouldn't want to release it. Right now, I mean, the media is having a frenzy with the Gawks situation and trying to demonize Bitcoin. It could very well feed into that. Like I said, I don't know what information he has. Maybe it's so serious that he's afraid for his life. I'm not sure. Maybe it's not as serious as he perhaps thought it was in releasing it, which is not really make that much of a difference. So it comes down to what he has, what he's seeing and the importance of that information and relevance of it. I'm with Christoph on this one. If you've got the information, release it. Don't even bother with this ultimatum article. Just let it go. Let the people decide if it's bad, if it's worse, let the people decide. I think the ultimatum, sorry to interrupt you, but I think the ultimatum thing is kind of like at that point, it becomes less about what's the best for the welfare of Bitcoin and more about what's exciting and fun for a two-bit idiot. And there's been a lot of people raising that question. How much of it is a matter of ego? And it's kind of hard to see how he can hope to essentially plan the Bitcoin information to the extent that he's making demands about who needs to step down from this organization and so forth. So I think those are some fair criticisms to Levy his way. And his original article did have a lot of hyperbolic language. He mentioned attacking, going nuclear. He went well overboard. And I think there was difficult to back up after that to do anything. So it's kind of trapped. Moving on, issue two, Bitcoin Foundation adds DC talent. The former director for the Kato Institute and a former White House press secretary joined the team at the Bitcoin Foundation, calling it a once in a lifetime opportunity. The Bitcoin Foundation is now turning towards DC and opening an office in London. Is this the right future for the Bitcoin Foundation? What is your idea of a dream? Bitcoin Foundation? Megan Lords. I don't have a dream Bitcoin Foundation in mind. I don't really believe they're absolutely necessary to the longer successive Bitcoin. But if you are going to play the DC game, if you're going to be talking with these politicians in DC, then you have to be able to speak their language. Of course, a DC insider who used to be a press secretary would be perfect at doing that. She's going to have a better understanding of the rhetoric they use. And then the person from Kato too, I mean, that's great. If you want to play that game, you have to use their language and their tactics. But I don't play that game. I don't do the politics thing. I don't have a dream idea of a Bitcoin Foundation. I really don't pay much attention to it. You're joined by Will Penguin from Bitcoin Milwaukee. Will, what's your idea of a dream Bitcoin Foundation? What do you think of the new members recently added to the Bitcoin Foundation team? You're still muted and delayed. Okay, we're having issues reaching Will. We'll see if that works out. Christoff, your idea is. My first reaction to this news was, so I looked at the Bitcoin Foundation website earlier and they have this link. There's a section of the website called Why We Need A Foundation? Which to me, sounds kind of desperate. How many organizations have a Why This Organization needs to exist? A section of their website? Well, it's going to read you part of it. So our vision up here to appear our organization, we are determined to keep Bitcoin rooted in its core principles, non-political economy, openness and independence, and it goes on from there, right? So I went to, then I went to look LinkedIn and I looked at the resume for this woman that they just added. So let's see. She's the vice president, or she was the vice president of Public Affairs for the United Nations Foundation, the senior vice president of communications for the RIAAFU director, public affairs for some company I've never heard of. Deputy assistant to the president and WD Press Secretary for the White House, communications director and press secretary for the Democratic National Committee, communications director for the strictly nonpartisan, of course, campaign for America, congressional press secretary campaign manager for a US representative, Democrat from Oklahoma, and it kind of goes on from there. So my question is, what is the Bitcoin foundation doing that is useful when they get involved into this politics stuff? They're burning through money that was given through to the foundation. I guess the idea is that they're going to be able to participate in this kind of back office politics that everyone else is participating in. But I'm a little bit skeptical that this is useful. I think that you're trying to outspend the bankers that want to shut down Bitcoin. It's in their very selfish interest to try and accomplish something like that. And there's no way that the Bitcoin foundation is going to be outspending JP Morgan Chase. That's a silly goal. So I'm concerned that when they bring in more people from Washington, which by the way is the exact opposite of what people have been calling for when they talk about the Bitcoin foundation, they always say, oh, it should be less US centric. It should be less to do with these insider people in Washington or Silicon Valley. And what they did was they brought in two more Washington politicals, which is to me kind of gross. I'm concerned that this is just a big funnel for money to take useful Bitcoin that was earned by all the early adopters and deposit them to useless people that are lawyers and lobbyists and so forth. I think it's a bit of a drain. I wonder what we could have accomplished if we had taken all that money and given it to software developers and said how much could we have circumvented censorship by the government instead of trying to argue with the government about censorship? These are the kind of things that I wonder about when I see these kind of decisions by the Bitcoin foundation. It's one of the reasons why I'm generally not interested in getting involved with the organization. I know this is not the only thing that they do, but it's the it's the main thing that we hear about from the foundation and it's something that I'm not personally interested in. It does look like they're getting rid of their non-political ideas and ramping up for a political fight. Well, I agree we're not going to match JP Morgan. We should at least put up a battle. And if the Bitcoin foundation puts a positive image out there for Bitcoin, we're going to need that positive image as much as we won't be able to fight their negativity. We're also joined by Will Pangman from Bitcoin Milwaukee. Will, can you hear us? Yeah, I hear you guys. Do you have any thoughts on the Bitcoin foundation and the new members that they've recently added? Yeah, so I'm not 100% sure of the exact distinctions, but I know there are distinctions between foundation employees and foundation members. For example, I'm a foundation member. I've been relatively active on the education committee. And I don't really, one thing can attest to is that it's been somewhat a chore sometimes to get any communication between the committee that I've been on for several months now. And the board. And I think there's a lot of worthwhile functions that they are performing. Certainly interfacing with regulators, governments, and working with these very important and big, Bitcoin startups and Bitcoin businesses that are in the space and have pioneered a lot of territory for Bitcoin itself. And I would even include Mount Gox in that category. We all are familiar with their struggles and dishonesty. And it appears. But certainly they played a very valuable function in the early days. And I think the foundation is doing that. I think there's a lot more it can do. I have lots of ideas about that. I'm also interested in seeing, I think, Chris off made a good point about the allocation of resources. There's this pretty well-endowed. It would seem foundational body that its mission is to standardize, protect and promote Bitcoin. And it certainly has been doing that when it comes to governments and regulators to the best of its ability. I believe that's what I've seen. But there's a lot of other things that are lacking because perhaps maybe all their attention is being paid to that. And we can argue the merits of how, whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, but the point is it has to happen for Bitcoin to continue to grow. It's not going to go unnoticed by large corporations, banks and governments. You're going to have to contend and participate with that at some point. And so to do so as amicably as possible is advantageous to all parties involved and to try and facilitate the understanding, the thorough understanding of this new technology and its potentials is incredibly important so that we've all seen what happens when innovations that are poorly understood. And we can see it in the press all the time. And even in statements by senators who want to ban the thing, that the lack of understanding leads to some, I'm sorry to say it, it is idiosy running amok. And so cleaning that up is a hugely important task. And the foundation seems to me to be really the only logical group at present to be a point of contact for the state, for governments, for banks, and for large corporations that have competing interests, let's say. So that's, I think that's valuable. In ongoing, there's been a definite lack of community interfacing on the foundation's part as a whole and certainly the board as well. So some things I'm working on are to bridge that. And now's the time. Obviously there's a lot of, the stupidity, it's getting lots of website hits. He's writing lots of great link bait ever since his antagonistic letter a week ago. And he's putting things out there that I think resonate with the sentiments of lots of people in the community as well. So a lot of people think the foundation can go away and everything will proceed just fine and dandy. I think that's probably true, but while it's here, it's performing a valuable function, it can continue to perform. And as for leadership changes, I don't know if that's what's needed. I don't know enough to say that. In fact, I think I've seen a lot of decent leadership in a lot of ways from the board and board members I've been talking to directly on occasion. What I haven't seen is enough action in the community or with the user base. And that's something I'm looking forward to having a role in facilitating. I agree. Well, I'd like to see more community on the Bitcoin foundation exit question two empty seats on the board. Who would you like to see added to the board of the Bitcoin foundation? Megan Lords. I think the foundation has sent a clear message with who they've already selected. And it's looking like they're really wanting to play the politics game, which is a filthy game, by the way. And I don't know. It's at the end of the day. It's not up to me who they add. They're going to add more political people as what it looks like. I'd like to see a couple anarchists add there to maybe make things interesting, but I don't have any specific names. Again, I think the whole the whole foundation, what they're doing as far as outreach and education is awesome. What Will said about kind of bridging that gap with the community and the higher up members, I think is definitely necessary. But I think you're seeing that gap kind of widening. I don't have specific names. I'd like to see some, I guess, disruptive elements thrown on there, but I really don't think that's going to happen. I think they're really going to lean more towards the political side of things. And I think that's really unfortunate because this system is not designed for people to win. This was this is a very old long and trench system. It's been around for a very long time and it's slowly dying. And I'd like to see more focus on outside the system solutions, privacy solution, security solutions, coming out of the technology side of things, and not so much a focus on, well, what do we do politically? What do we have to do to satisfy these dinosaurs who are very comfortable with their power? Will, Penguin. One name that jumps to mind is Brock Pierce. He's been really out in public and actively involved. He's one of the earliest adopters, or at least, you know, he's in 2009, he was mining bitcoins, I know. But he's someone who's had success in the Bitcoin space as an entrepreneur and in other areas as an entrepreneur. He's not the only one. But he'd be good. I know his values align and were attracted to Bitcoin's core principles, you know, some of the things that a lot of us on the panel attracted us to. And he's also someone who deals with governments quite a bit. I know most of his more successful ventures are in Asia, South Korea, China, and Singapore, and things like that. So certainly he has the, I don't know, global appeal or global reach experience. And then the industry experience as well too. I like that concept. And then I would like to see some folks who I think wouldn't probably assume a role or, you know, maybe haven't in the past. And maybe that's evidence for Roger Verre, Eric Voorhees, Nicholas Carey of Blockchain. And just these are two industry seats. So I'm not thinking of community advocates. Of course there are many of those as well. You know, I think Chris J would be great as a board member for a community seat. Maybe even an industry seat, I'm not sure of his level of involvement that would merit that or warrant that. And then of course, Andreas, I think he wouldn't take it. He would want to do that. But he'd be a fantastic ambassador there too. So those would be my choices. And I think, you know, their terms are going to run out and they're going to most likely, you know, be replaced with some other capable people. I want to make it clear that the new hires of the foundation, while having like political backgrounds and stuff, we don't really know their politics. I'm interested to find that out. You know, that'll show me a lot and help me decide what they're all about. But they're not board members too, is the other important thing. So, you know, they're higher, they're, you know, their employees of the foundation to perform the functions. I think it's clear they're just job descriptions describe. So yeah, I'd like to see them in action. And then we can determine what their politics are. I think Bitcoin needs to be very apolitical. Of course, you have to interface with governments. But we need to, I think, avoid the political things as much as possible, you know, Christoph Atlas. I don't see any evidence for the idea to support the idea that we need to interface with governments at all. Here's my warning to supporters of the Bitcoin foundation. When you bring political people into your, your organization, the two people that are bought on are obviously very, very political people. People that have worked for the White House, people that work for the Kato Institute. When you try to lobby the government, when you try to change the system within, what happens instead is the system changes you. And so what the more that we bring people like this into the Bitcoin foundation, I use we and the Lisa Sands possible, then the more that the foundation is going to direct itself towards these kind of government interfacing efforts. Of course, the problem with these efforts is that they can't possibly be measured. They'll say things like, ah, yes, we're having very good talks with these senators behind closed doors. How do we know? We have no clue, no ability to measure the efficacy of these efforts whatsoever. All we know is that they will cost money. So that would be my caution to the Bitcoin foundation. And what mainly for the supporters of the Bitcoin foundation, because I think the foundation's going to do whatever they want to do. As for who would be my ideal people for taking positions of the board, non-political people, people that are going to help us spread Bitcoin to new areas, people that are going to figure out what kind of technological adaptations we need to move Bitcoin to places like Africa, Middle East, and so forth, India, stuff like that. And people that are going to help us circumvent the government rather than trying to interface that. I just want to respond to what Christoph was saying. You know, I think what I said earlier about having to confront or contend or I forget which word I used when it comes to governments and banks and and large corporations is that that's inevitable. And there should be plenty of people doing exactly what Christoph just described. And there should be people also, you know, who are, there certainly will be people who are interested in change from within or at least functioning in the roles that I guess we've seen the foundation thus far has function, which is providing this kind of, I call it a buffer. I know that's not what their terminology is. I don't really know how they would describe it or whatever, but to me it looks like a really convenient diversion for the kinds of efforts that Christoph alluded to. And it's also a necessary role to play because there is that point of contact that, you know, states, banks, and large corporations are looking for with this new disruptive technology. And people want to fulfill that role. And if there are people who formerly worked in government and see this amazing innovation and see it as a way of, you know, using their experience from working in front of governments and within governments and things like that. And now working in a role outside of that in a completely different world. And, you know, those are people that they look like on paper are perfect for the job. And hopefully their intentions are, I think they, we have no reason to suspect that they aren't, and, sure, intended people when it comes to protecting, promoting and standardizing Bitcoin, which is the mission of the foundation. So if they can do that and communicate that with the interested, uh, and quisitors, you know, banks, governments, and large corporations, then great. Hopefully they can do the great job of that while other people do what Christoph alluded to, which is also important. I agree with Christoph. I'd like to see an international member added to the Bitcoin foundation. Issue three, sorry banks, millennials hate you. Millennials have huge debt, hate high fees, and we'll soon be coming into great wealth. And they're not going to be keeping it in banks. Half of respondents said they were counting on startups to overhaul how banks work. And three quarters said they would be more excited by technological financial services. Could hatred of banks lead to a love of Bitcoin? Does Bitcoin's hopes lie with the youths? Will Pangman? Well, I was briefly on the call, um, or no, rather was a Facebook message that, uh, one of Christoph's posts earlier this week or maybe yesterday, even, um, about the arcane experience of receiving a check as payment. And I cannot help but, uh, resoundingly agree with whenever I encounter these old paper tools, if it's not a paper wallet, it's just like another little brief wakeup call. The more you live your life within and using Bitcoin and things like that and involve yourself more directly with that ecosystem, when you have to step back outside of it, um, it's hardly obvious how antiquated and obsolete it already is, how painfully slow it is and all of these things. I'm interested to just kind of, uh, like Christoph, open a can on this answer because uh, it's, uh, yeah, I really agreed with his, his post and DeYoung are definitely, uh, obviously first to be interested in technology. Um, it's attractive to that and it makes total sense. It's always been that way. Um, I'm really excited to do some projects with some college students who are already involved in college, Bitcoin, campus groups and things like that. Um, it's going to be really exciting to, I mean, I'm 31 and I'm going to, you know, I don't feel that old or whatever. I feel like I can hang with young kids and it's going to be, I like the energy that they bring to this and just kind of, uh, I have tons of motivation and energy about Bitcoin and stuff but even to see even more youthful energy than what I feel bubbling within is pretty cool and pretty motivating. Uh, so yeah, they, they're going to carry us through on this, um, again, they're, they're distaste for lots of antiquated, uh, institutional, you know, rigid systems and stuff is to huge advantage of not only Bitcoin but hopefully also healthcare innovation and, and other necessary, um, transportation disruptive technologies and all these kinds of things. Education, disrupting the institution of education. So these things are places that really need disruption and, um, and, you know, Bitcoin is at least from within making me see that it's really obvious. It's time to, uh, see these old legacy systems go. So, yeah, let's, uh, let's do all we can to bring the youth along and, um, help them do the same for their contingencies, their friends, their peer groups, um, the adults in their purview and so on. Christoph, Atlas. Yeah, if you want to compare, um, Bitcoin with the existing banks, go to the App Store and look at the ratings for the blockchain.info app and compare that to the apps for, you know, Wachovia, uh, Bank of America and so forth. And, uh, you'll see about a difference of about four stars, I would imagine. I think that blockchain.info is probably about five stars. And, uh, of course, you know, it's not even on the Apple Store anymore because the, you know, the existing interests decided they didn't want it there. And I think that they'll see that the, the bank apps are, yeah, right, sitting right around one star out of, you know, with a minimum of one. Um, and it's funny to see what the banks sort of congratulate themselves for accomplishing. Like, oh, yes, but finally, we've had our sixth version of this app and finally, customers can scan their checks without it crashing. They can get their, their checks deposit and, and have their funds available at a snappy seven business days and then we are just doing fantastic, aren't we? Let's just give ourselves all a big pat on the back. Um, and meanwhile, big coins like, dude, we've been, you know, scanning and QR codes since the gig at Bitcoin. What the hell, what are you doing? You know, it's, so it really, it really shows you what kind of innovation is possible when you are a relatively free market company and what's possible when you are part of this incredibly decrepit old establishment of these banks. It's really quite, quite startling to notice the difference between the two. And you know, people say about the millennials and about young people, oh, they're so ungrateful. They, they, they can't, they're not happy with what they have. Louis CK has this great bit about, you know, people flying and complaining about flying. He's like, you know, he's like, you're sitting in a chair that's in the sky. You know, it's, or, or like, you know, the guy that is complaining about the online Wi-Fi, he's like, it needs to go, your cell phone needs to connect to space and then back. Can you just give it a sec to connect to space, you know, which I think is really funny, but I actually like that young people are so dissatisfied with the status quo and this brand new technology that they have because it means that they're going to demand and they're going to innovate for ever improving technologies. I think it's fantastic to not simply settle for whatever you have now. And the rate of technological progress is increasing faster and faster and that's exactly the way that it should be. And these old institutions like banks and I would argue governments are just going to get left behind in the dust and, you know, get rid of it. Get rid of this to them. Megan Lord. Of course, millennials hate the banks. These people traded our future for endless wars and unlimited debt. It's terrible. And I've written on it. I've written a few articles for Bitcoin.bombs on it. One of them was called Bitcoin is Solution for Millennials. And then my most recent one talks about how Bitcoin has literally helped some millennials be pulled out of poverty because they were a student of to invest their money early into this experimental technology. And that's what's really going to help us out of a lot of these problems that our generation faces, whether in student loans or, you know, any of these other problems is that they're open to new technology. So again, to this argument, this other libertarian leaning conference a few weeks ago with this older gentleman who was criticizing me and other Bitcoiners for not reaching out to older people, which is kind of silly because my day job is at a brokerage firm where that's basically our clientele and we're constantly, we're handing them out quick start guides. I mean, I do everything I can to reach out to anyone who's interested in Bitcoin. But what it comes down to at the end of the day is these older people are just not as interested in Bitcoin as these younger people. And that's where I'm going to focus my time at. A lot of people have been messaging me lately, a lot of my friends and people in my generation are much more interested. They're like, what is this Bitcoin thing? Please tell me more about it. They're much more open to it. And it just makes sense. It's way easier to use. Will was mentioning checks and the kind of antivated notion of getting this weird piece of paper and then it takes like a week to clear in the bank. That's so archaic when I can just scan a QR code of my money there or even I get it. I found myself getting a little annoyed, entering in a debit card number, a credit card number to buy something. It's like, this is taking forever. And yeah, Bitcoin is so far ahead of these institutions that have been set up. And Bitcoin is a huge threat to the banks. Millennials would of course be wise to get into Bitcoin because these banks do not have our best interests in minds. They've stolen billions of dollars from people and enslaved people. It's disgusting what they've done. So they have every right to hate the banks and to disassociate from them. Why can't Bitcoin see? Why can't someone like Google create their own payment system too? That's what people want to see. And that's going to be the direction things are heading. The thing is, Millennials themselves may not even know this when I mentioned it to some of them. We are the largest generation so far. That's huge. We have a lot more power than we think we do. Yes, we don't have a lot of money of course. A lot of us are trapped in student loan debt, but we have a lot of power in numbers. And that's a huge influencing factor for the direction of the future. And I think it's going to be very, very exciting. Exit question, how can we help the youth learn about Bitcoin? Contests, giveaways, word of mouth, cartoons about the honey badger? Will Penguin? Well, this is, I know I alluded to working on this kind of a project a lot and I'm hoping, well, I'm already working on it, but I'm hoping it gets a lot more support and I think it will. And I guess the idea is to pull in all of the existing groups that are run by students on universities or young people in communities and network them together and allow them to kind of self-determine a direction that's most useful for the whole network and certain places on the network, you know, what works in middle America may not work on the coasts and so on. But to facilitate the creation of a kind of human network where these ideas can be brought to bear, crowdsourced and self-generated. And there's all kinds of ideas and strategies that I've seen meetups around the country put to great use. Some of these things are so easily portable and arguably far more effective in a college setting on a campus. And so doing things like that, and also paying it for professors and academia as well, stimulating academic research in Bitcoin and all kinds of disciplines, not just engineering and computer science, but in economics and in sociology and philosophy and beyond, you know. And this can be done. This is a project that's in the works at the moment and it's going to be an open source project. So, you know, it's it's slow building and it's kind of taking a life of its own on its own. It'll happen one way or the other, whether or not it's well coordinated, you know, whether it's just kind of isolated islands of communities doing their thing in their own area, or whether it's well connected sort of network made up of people in the spirit of the decentralized Bitcoin network, which is kind of where I think we can really have a nice effect, especially with the young people. Give them the tools to explain Bitcoin so that any background, affiliation, demographic, whatever can understand it, more more quickly, provide them with tools that facilitate the understanding like a blockchain wallet. It's unfortunate about the Apple Store. It was one of my outreach tools for, you know, so many people I encounter with iPhones or iOS devices. Give them Bitcoin, have them send it, and that is, you know, that's the 51% of the understanding right there. So, that's I think what we have to do. Let's let's stimulate interest in the young people. Let's support the people who are already heavily invested and interested among the young people and network everybody together, meet-up groups, college campus groups, trade organizations, professional organizations, and get in front of people in the physical, in real life, in meat space, and talk to them about this in forums where their ears are open. That's academia is a great forum for that. There are some heavy biases in academia, of course. We can all point to some, but it's also probably one of the most open-minded or critical thinking segments of society too. So, let's find those pockets and influence them. Christoph, Atlas. I think one way to bring youth into Bitcoin is going to happen inevitably when we start to incorporate Bitcoin into more stuff that youthful people use. So, I'm thinking of, for example, the gaming industry. I think that there's a lot of applications for Bitcoin in that space. There was just, there was a great interview by Let's Talk Bitcoin. I think it was episode 86, where Adam did an interview with Richard Garriott about his MMO and possible integration of cryptocurrencies into their MMO economy. Imagine young people, and this is a very open model for an MMO where you can provide services to other players and actually get paid for it. Imagine a bunch of young people, they go home after school, and they get on the game and they start crafting stuff or writing plays to be performed on the MMO, and they're getting paid in Bitcoin. I think that's going to be hugely attractive to the youth. Something that the youth haven't quite caught on to yet, but they will, of course, is that cryptocurrencies are going to be hugely freeing for them because the existing forms of money that we have right now, a parents tend to, it's very easy for parents to control them. You can't get your own Bitcoin account unless you have a parents or co-sign onto the bank account, and of course they can monitor anything that you do with the bank account. You can't get your own credit card. There's no way out to leave. You can't just start accumulating cash and keep it under your bed. Young people don't have that much financial privacy right now, but with cryptocurrency, there's huge potential for young people to have their own money, and no one can really stop them from doing it. Are you going to stop some kids from having a brain wallet? It doesn't even need a damn computer for it. I think that's going to be something that's hugely attractive to young people. Of course, they want to buy stuff. They don't want to have to get their parents to okay it necessarily. I'm versiferously in favor of this kind of financial freedom for young people. I think it's fantastic. Megan Lords. Some of her diversity of tactics. My favorite is what Will said just saying, hey, let me open up a wallet for you and send you some Bitcoin. I really like the Meetup approach, the face-to-face interaction, but I'd also like to see more incorporation to the social media side of things. I really love how Twitter has these tipper coin apps for feather coin and doge coin and Bitcoin and all of these different coins that are coming out. It makes it fun and exciting and you kind of need to focus on that too. I'd love to see something I got happened with Facebook. I'm not sure that it would or whatever new social media source comes out, which I'm hoping something does come out to challenge Facebook and compete with that because I think that's also something that these younger people are going to be interested in. They're looking for something that's going to be the newest, coolest thing and if you could have a social network fueled by cryptocurrency, I think that would be awesome. I really like Kristoff's idea too about the gaming aspect of it. I think that's really important. So in different geographical locations are going to vary in how you can approach people. I like when I meet someone who's interested in cryptocurrencies, kind of getting to know them, finding out what's going to work best for them, looking at them as an individual because you'll find out what their interests are specifically because Bitcoin can be applied to such a wide variety of interests. You find out what that specific person is into and you can find out what works for them as far as getting them into Bitcoin. So yeah, diversity of tactics, you know, I look at people as individuals who have individual goals in mind and kind of making the connections with how Bitcoin can help them succeed. Moving on, issue four, Mt. Gox again. No episode of the Bitcoin group would be complete without Mt. Gox. This week their source code was leaked. Downloaders beware, Trojans galore. A basic analysis says their code is horrible. They officially declared bankruptcy in the US and now things are getting worse. Their identity verification databases to may also have been stolen and is now for sale to the highest bidder. Is Mt. Gox the worst company in the history of corporations? Which is worse? The leaked source code, the bankruptcy, or the leaked identification database? Christoph atlas. Well, I think that, no, it's not the worst corporation. It's certainly pretty bad. I have a lot more, you know, dislike for corporations that are heavily subsidized and in bed with the government and stuff. Which, which Mt. Gox was not exactly. I think that what interests me the most about this, this hack stuff is the identity, the identities that were stolen. So the reason why Gox had these identities was either to fulfill actual KYC requirements they had, KYC is know your customer. This is like government regulation requirements on businesses. Or it was some kind of KYC stuff that they were anticipating. They were anticipating they're going to need this stuff in the near future in order to allow customers to do business with them. So I think we could expect that there are going to be thousands of identity thefts as a result of this hack. And who ultimately is responsible for these identity thefts? Not Mark Cappellis, not Mt. Gox, but the government. It's the people that put these KYC requirements in place, that say to businesses you absolutely must collect this information from customers, critical, you know, sensitive information, even though there's no way that you can possibly be trusted with it, even though you are turning yourself into a honey pot with a giant red target on your back for hacking to, you know, to steal these identities. Those are the people that are going to be responsible for the identity thefts. Now of course, Mt. Gox was usually negligent in terms of their security and so forth, but I don't believe that they would be collecting this information just for their own personal interest because there are lots of customers that simply decided not to do business with them on the basis that you had to do this kind of identity verification. I heard that from many, many people that I talked to in the Bitcoin space that said, no, I don't want to use Mt. Gox, I'm not going to send them my passport photo or whatever. So I think that's an important to keep in mind is that when people, you know, have their identities stolen and it may not happen right away, it might happen down the liberal road, you know, there's going to be some pain associated with this hack. Keep in mind that ultimately the responsibility doesn't fall on Mt. Gox in my opinion at least. Megan, Lord. So I was one of those people that saw when I used Gox when I first got into Bitcoin, all of the identification requirements and stuff and when they started to really kind of ramp up, I thought it was very suspicious and of course I figured that it was them covering their asses, you know, for the government regulations, but it definitely turned me off and I was like, okay, I'm out. Like I'm not going to, I'm not going to deal with this. Like do you want to mean I have to scan my license or my passport picture and give it to you? Obviously that's a huge security problem. And I think it does come down to it was Mt. Gox's fault too though. It was there's security issues. If you're going to have all of this information, all this very personal information being stored, you have to have top-notch security and whether this was intentional or just laziness and incompetence, either way, they still are a lot to blame for this. Obviously the regulations that caused them to want to collect the information in the first place have a huge role too. I definitely agree with that, but this was extreme negligence and as someone who's had there, I've had my social security number stolen before. This was a long, long time ago too before, you know, you would be even putting this information on the internet. It's a very scary thing to have happened and it's awful that if this information has been leaked by these hackers that they're basically trying to embezzle money from people to get their information back. It's terrible that that's happening, but that's what you open yourself up to when you're not on top of your business when you have all of this deeply personal information. So it's really, really disappointing. And I really, I don't know how it could be stopped at this point. Obviously it's out of the control of the people who are affected by it the most and I hope there's some resolution that can come, but I really feel for the people whose identities are out there now and can have this information stolen from them. This is extremely serious and in order to prevent it from happening again, there's going to be a lot more self-policing that needs to be involved. There's going to be a lot more accountability that needs to happen. I of course, when it comes to Bitcoin, a lot of that burden is placed on the individual and I still think that's a feature, but these exchanges really need to be extremely careful. They must know they're a target, especially Gawks. I mean, it's really just shocking that they didn't do more to prevent this happening, knowing that they would be such a target for these malicious individuals. Will, Penguin. Yeah, I agree with both panelists' points about fault finding. Certainly, it's a Paul. I'm a Paul. Every time I think about the amount of profits that Gawks was raking in at any given point of its operation and that they never really reinvested meaningfully in security or in better infrastructure, better due diligence practices. I mean, all of these things have had flaws over the years and people who've been around a long time have had plenty of warning. I know, or he's very public about his situation, taking the risk he was aware of with Malkox and being hurt along with many other people. Probably there were people who didn't realize the risk that they were taking with Gawks. But it's certainly their fault for not doing any of those things to improve their business. I mean, I just, I don't even know about that. And then, certainly, yeah, I mean, Bitcoin's designed so that we can all conduct ourselves, without identities needing to be revealed, private information required. I mean, that's the beauty of this thing. And here we are still storing private information on servers that we don't have control of. So I think we're going to grow out of that soon, but it should have been obvious from the start that these kinds of things, this is the point I always have to make to Bitcoin detractors or people who think they found something in the news that morning they can rub in my nose later that day or something like, I heard Bitcoin went bankrupt. Oh, and it's like, now let's separate this bad company from this incredible technology. And bad companies need to go away. So what do you know? The other often comment is, well, what about all these people? You need customer assurance and all these things. And it's like, well, you know, you're right. And I think we learned that lesson. And these people, you know, it was a lesson that had to be learned. And the two-bit idiot makes the point in one of his conciliation posts more recently that, you know, that's going to be the reason that the powers that shouldn't be a tech Bitcoin is because these things weren't in place. And the warnings weren't there. And the foundation knew and they should have warned. And who knows? But, you know, I like to make the point. This is what happens in a free market. This is what businesses, bad businesses need to fail. This really resonates with lots of people from both sides of the aisle too when they confront you with a, you know, less than understanding of this news because of, again, how it's delivered by the media. So to make the point that, you know, bad actors are weeded out by the process of, you know, free enterprise. And this is what needs to happen. You know, where everybody's going to be better for it. Like, look at all of the security measures that are being caused to, you know, innovations that were latent on the shelf that are now being implemented by data companies and tech companies thanks to the Snowden disclosures. You know, we've seen awesome steps. That should be at one indication that, you know, privacy is important. And if we have technologies that preserve privacy such as Bitcoin, such as encryption and things like that, why are we using them? You know, well, because it makes the internet harder to use or the user education isn't there yet. Well, let's get it there, you know. And let's make it easier so it's harder to get it to that point. And let's make it easier to use. And all those things are happening now thanks to Bitcoin, thanks to Bitcoin frauds and thefts thanks to the Snowden disclosures and excessive, you know, egregious spying by, you know, just to blanket, collect everything sort of doctrine with the NSA and other intelligence bodies out there. So, yes, it's both, it's the fault of both. You know, I'm wonder, you know, I like to have a discussion about whether or not some of these bridging needs need to happen or if we could, from Jump Street, design it, you know, like if Mount Gox was more apt or more capable as a business and they didn't maintain, you know, custodianship of your Bitcoins, if that could have been something that happened earlier on because Bitcoin is a serverless thing, that's great pretty much. And here, here are these companies relying on servers and asking to be trusted. I'm sure that's largely because they had to cover their butts somewhere along the way in 2011 with the hacker, who knows, but could it have been this way from the start, you know, or do we need to have the growing pains of, you know, unlearning the requiring of trusting third parties, you know, unlearning the, you know, using of servers that we don't have control, you know, relearning how to control your property. I think that's a great lesson that Bitcoin can teach everybody is it causes you to rethink this if you've never thought about it or practice it if you haven't yet had the arena in which to do so. And that is maintaining, you know, control over your own control and responsibility for your personal property. So it's so unfortunate with what happened here. The source code being leaked is a good thing. The identity thefts and then, you know, auctions are a really bad thing. And, you know, we're going to learn lots of lessons from it and hopefully one can be, you know, control your keys and control your private property, manage, assume self-responsibility for your private property. I do think this is one point where the dot-com analogy is apt. We have a young company rich with money, not rich with business experience or ideas on how to spend that money. The failure of Mt. Gox not to reinvest their riches back into their programmers, back into their infrastructure, back into their security. Having anyone but one person in charge of the entire system is why we've led to this failure. And I do think it was kind of necessary. Bitcoin was the Wild West. It's now being inhabited by people who are setting up towns. Of course, they're going to check their records and see that things were a little fishy. Maybe we had a crazy Frenchman running the whole thing. 70% of our traffic going through his system. Well, we need to upgrade that. We need to change that. And that's happening now. So I think it's moving along. Moving along to questions and answers. Let's see if we have any questions and answers. They want to start the fight. Someone, the Bitcoin Foundation should not charge for premium membership. That's a good point. That's about a question. Kind of running out of time. Let's move on to predictions. Everyone's favorite part of the show where I ask you to predict the future. Are you ready, Kristoff Atlas? Come back to me in a moment. I'll begin in a moment to come up with prediction. Megan, Lord. Okay. I think there's going to be an identity crisis leak coming from the government side of things that will make the situation that happened at Mt. Gauk's pale in comparison. We can say, Hey, look, see your information's not safe with these people either. Yes, Mt. Gauk's was terrible. But look at how incompetent these people are over here. Already starting to happen with Target. Tariya, I was about to say it's happened with Target. I mean, that affected way more people than Mt. Gauk's not to downplay the losses that people have incurred through Mt. Gauk's. But yeah, I mean, it happened with Target. That's extremely serious, especially during the holiday season and all of that. That's a much bigger deal, I think. Then there's much smaller percentage that was affected through Mt. Gauk's. Let me comment on that for a moment. I got a letter from the state of South Carolina just a little while ago. Oops, you filed some taxes with us. Someone hacked all of our stuff and they got a dump of every taxpayer in South Carolina. Don't worry, though. We're going to give you some free identity protection service. If you fill out form, ABDC, F and Z, and notarize it, and all that kind of stuff. Now, at least with Mt. Gauk's, if someone stole my identity, I had the opportunity to voluntarily choose whether I was going to do business with Mt. Gauk's, whether I'm going to send them a copy of my license or whatever. With the state of South Carolina, I didn't have that opportunity. They didn't ask me, like, hey, we'd like to keep some of your information on file. Do you still want to file your taxes this year? That's an interesting difference between those two types of organizations. In terms of scale, I believe that this state leak was much, much larger than what was happening with Mt. Gauk's. Will, Pagman. Yeah, I'll add another comment, kind of just agreeing with the prescient Megan Lorde's there. Yeah, healthcare.gov. I still read stories about how insecure that website is. Of course, the kinds of private information you have to supply to sign up there. There's, I guess, four million signups now with the goal of seven million. Four million may sound like a lot, but they're well short of their goal at this point. Who knows? But that certainly seems like a disaster. It's been a disaster for a long time. I think it's window dressing to get it as far as long as it is and make, you know, I'll concur with Megan's prediction. My prediction will be another slow news week. Thank God. I can take a few breathers. So yeah, my prediction is next week. We'll have another slow-ish news week. You know, maybe too bit idiot can give us something interesting to think about again, but yeah, hopefully we can all, you know, just take the blinders off a little bit. Kristoff atlas. Any prediction? Yeah, I think that even though Mt. Gox really screwed up, right? And they still, I bet we still haven't heard the end of them screwing up. They're going to find another way to do it. It's going to be during the bank secrecy proceedings or whatever, or it could be related to Goxcoin or all these other people that are hoping to actually extract some value out of Gox for their customers. We're going to hear about them again. But overall, the arc of this story is going to be about, you know, how we were using some very questionable businesses early on in Bitcoin, but then the rest of the exchanges learned their lessons from this. They took technological steps and business steps to, you know, adopt best practice standards to demonstrate that they have their reserves, that they're keeping customers funds safer from theft than they have in the past. They were going to see more and more decentralized exchanges come into the marketplace. And it's going to be a story about how the marketplace learned from a very bad experience and throw a series of calamities that will be linked with not only one, you know, very incompetent, short-sighted CEO, but also the kind of regulatory pressure that they were feeling experiencing while they were trying to be led by this mad, you know, captain of the ship. Excellent. Distributed and non-centralized Bitcoin exchanges of the future will not be run by one person in one place. They'll be decentralized. They'll be everywhere and yet nowhere, all at once. Distributed Bitcoin exchanges coming soon. We're out of time. Until next time. Bye-bye!