The Bitcoin Group, the American Original, for over the last ten seconds, the sharpest satosis, the best bitcoins, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Davy Barker from ShiniBadges.com. How's it going? Chris J. from Feathercoin. Hello. Derek J. from Peace News Now. Peace be with you. First off, Atlas from Anonymous Bitcoin Book. Happy Friday. Megan Lourdes from Bitcoin Not Bombs. Thanks for having me. And Will Penguin from Bitcoin Millwaukey. Good afternoon, Bitcoins. Issue one, Wikipedia unsure about Bitcoin donations. This just makes so much sense. Much like the EFF, who years ago was unsure about Bitcoins, so they refused their Bitcoin donations, only to accept them two years later when they were much valuable. Should Wikipedia accept Bitcoin donations? Play Devils Advocate. Is there any reason for them to refuse? Does this make any sense? Davy Barker. You want me to play Devils Advocate on Bitcoin, huh? I can't think of a good reason. Absolutely, Wikipedia should accept Bitcoin for the same reason that Wikipedia is superior to Encarta. It is a company that has embraced innovation in technology and crowdsourcing information. I mean, it's right up their alley. It is their philosophy. So there's no reason for them not to accept it. Chris J. Apparently, the more options you give people to pay towards a charity, the less they give overall. I'm rather confused about this as well. I did a whole bunch of research leading up so far. Jimmy Wales has received, oh, I don't know what it is in dollars, sorry, but it's 6,400 pounds worth of Bitcoin, which is 22.12 Bitcoin at the current exchange rate. So they are already receiving donations, but that's going to Jimmy Wales' personal Bitcoin account that he's holding. The only reason that I can see that they're not taking it is because of the other board members on the Wiki Media Foundation, which isn't the same as Wikipedia. It's like the overall foundation, the board that looks after it. So I did Google all of their names, all of the members, and I used different keywords like cryptocurrency, Bitcoin criticisms. I couldn't find anything. So all I can think is is that perhaps this is an administrative problem. Maybe another thing that they're worried about is that if they are seem to be taking Bitcoin and governments around the world decide to take some critical stance on it, that they could end up being tarred with the same brush because they were associated with Bitcoin that maybe they'll have other accounts shut down or be investigated in some way. It shouldn't really be a problem because I think that the pay is already offered for free to handle their Bitcoin wallet, and all they would do is give them the dollars. So the Wiki Media Foundation would have to have nothing to do with the Bitcoin directly. So I don't see why this should be an issue. It also seems like the Silk Road has been shut down. Other sites have been shut down. Bitcoin is much more reasonable now than it used to be. Derek J. Yeah, you've all been fooled. It's a huge fake out. And they got you because Wikipedia, it does make so much sense. They've had experiences having their sources of revenue blocked before, and that just can't happen with Bitcoin in the same way. Since there's no central authority saying like, no, no more Bitcoin donations. Except for Wikipedia itself. So I think that they're just trying to stay under the radar and then they're going to have this huge announcement. Boom, we accept Bitcoin and a flood of donations will ensue. Jimmy Wales already accepts it. So it's a fake out. You've been fooled. Don't worry. Christoph Atlas. Yeah, it's hard for me to understand why they wouldn't go the bit pay route. I don't really understand that. I know that the EFS was, the electronic frontier foundation was a bit cautious with regards to Bitcoin due to the regulatory uncertainty and how it might affect them and their donors. Definitely the 501c3 designation is like a real delicate title to have in the United States. You can kind of, it's kind of, you know, once you get it, it's this precious resource. If you lose it, it's a really, really huge deal. And so I think that might be part of it. I think it just kind of, it's interesting to contrast that with a charity organization like Free Aid where they said screw that 501c3 stuff we're just going to do our thing will accept Bitcoin and not worry about the rest of it. So I, you know, it would be interesting to see if more charities go that route in the future. Megan, Lord. I was a bit bomb to hear the news because it seems so, it seems like it would work perfectly. I would want to donate Bitcoins to Wikipedia, but at the same time to play doubles advocate, they don't have to take Bitcoin. They're going to do fine with just taking dollars. And I think that's the real reason why I think they're a little bit cautious. They're kind of waiting to see things out and see what direction the regulatory side is going to go. And they're probably a bit nervous. But yeah, at this point, they don't really have to take Bitcoin to survive. So, Penguin. Yeah, I guess if I'm playing doubles advocate, I'm wondering, you know, since the open-source nature of Wikipedia and that of Bitcoin would seem to align. And they have obviously plenty of demand, I'm sure, in flux of emails, posts, and for years now. New stories are just clamoring, really, from most or much a good segment of their community to do this. Why wouldn't they do it? There are no disadvantages as Chris pointed out. If you take a free service from a payment processor and have everything converted to the currency of your choice, no banks will shy away from that. So if I'm playing doubles advocate and we're looking at things and we're seeing agendas or philosophies that would align, perhaps they don't align for whatever reason. What might those reasons be? I guess it could be as innocent as some PR concerns. Silk Road was mentioned by some of the previous panelists or just the instability or whatever reasons people have. But again, those reasons have all been addressed repeatedly. So the only other thing I suspect is that there's some kind of entrenched interest on their board or some authority figure behind the scenes who stands not to benefit if they were to accept Bitcoin. Now, I won't speculate any further than that, but that's my doubles advocate position, I guess, that perhaps we're all on the outside thinking the philosophies would align with open source and so on, but maybe there are some interests there that don't. Maybe the individual authors of Wikipedia could start accepting Bitcoin donations for actually correcting the blog posts. Maybe they should build that into their reputation system because one of the most innovative things about Wikipedia was actually what it did on the back end. It's the most interesting bit, isn't the way it looks when you go to it. The most interesting bit is the self-governance, the anarchistic governance structure that goes on back end, so maybe you could actually build an incentive structure with tipping into the reputation system. I think that's a good idea. Once you had the donation authors or addresses for the authors, you could have some kind of automatic tip bot. If you read their article, you donate them a nickel. Exactly. You just keep the order through the site donating nickels to authors. And if they get a pile of nickels, it could be some good money. As people get up, we ramped up with Change Tip as they start to learn about Change Tip and move from the Reddit tip bot to Change Tip for all the social media channels. Maybe as Chris pointed out, these Wikipedia authors maybe Change Tip needs to add another little vector for their business so that they can provide this for these Wikipedia authors and just circumvent the whole board, authority, slope, bureaucracy, structure altogether, which is again exactly what Bitcoin does. It could just as easily create a Wikipedia article describing the Wikipedia authors that take Bitcoin and what their addresses are. That would be a start just adding factual information, right? Yeah. Just get it together, it's all any, but the real reason that Wikipedia is not accepting Bitcoin, I can tell you right here, this is an exclusive. Wikipedia is developing its own coin, WikiCoin. Is it question, how long before Wikipedia changes their mind, Dolly Barker? I'm going to put my money on Derek's answer and that they have already changed their mind. I think he's right. Chris, Jay. I think they'll probably try something out on social media in the coming months. I don't think they'll put it on their main page. Derek, Jay. It could be as soon as right after this episode of the Bitcoin group. They're going to listen to the feedback from the people who use their service. They're going to be facing a lot of feedback in the next coming week. I say the timeline for Wikipedia to accept Bitcoin is in weeks, months, certainly by the end of this year. Days, not months, months, not years. Chris, off, Atlas. We certainly don't know, but Chris's response gets me thinking, what would stop someone from creating a competitor to Wikipedia, simply fork Wikipedia and include a tipping system in there for the authors? I can't really think if I'm someone that's editing Wikipedia, why would I bother editing on Wikipedia in the future if I can do the exact same thing and receive some compensation for it at the same time? It's a good idea. Megan, Lord. I want to be optimistic about this and say within six months, hopefully by the end of the year, but they have to be shown that it's going to be valuable for them to take. I think it's up to Bitcoiners to show them that and really provide that feedback to encourage them. This is something they want to do. Well, Penguin. I'm very suspicious as to why they haven't done this already. There is no risk for accepting Bitcoin, especially on a site such as theirs with the structure of publications such as theirs. I don't think they ever will. Maybe we can circumvent that as I said in my previous answer. It's a very safe bet for using prices right rules. Moving on, issue two, Amazon says no to Bitcoin. Walmart says no to gift. A tough week for Bitcoin and retail, as gift had to retract their Walmart gift card service and Amazon flat out said no, citing a lack of customer demand. Walmart is famously suing Visa over swipe fees and Amazon used to be a technology company. Why would they both say no to Bitcoin? Chris Ellis. You came to me and I just set up a link on Twitter between Wikipedia and Change Tips. I just did that and I linked them to the video. You called me off guard a little bit. This is the Amazon story. I want to draw everyone's attention if I may. To the fact that you can spend money on Amazon at the moment. I'm not being paid to say this is a purse.io. I know some people have used it. It looks very good. You should also check out and we'll tweak this out in a minute from Twitter accounts. The Amazon page, which is the general questions contact us page. You can only get to this page if you're already logged in to Amazon. You can register your complaint here. You may want to put it in less profanious terms than I've chosen to just there. Let me remove that. Essentially you say no more non order questions and then you just go for other and then you just say take my Bitcoin, take it now or I'm moving my business elsewhere. I don't know. It was the question something like why don't they take it. I think probably because the whole news at the moment is slightly fatigued about Bitcoin. Things really happening at the moment were in this limbo period. I actually do think that we are perhaps getting a bit to ahead of ourselves from publicity perspective around Bitcoin. As people who are trying to advocate it, I'm certainly rethinking the way I talk about Bitcoin. I'm talking much more now about the Pro2Cool and the network and the idea itself. I still think there are fundamental question marks. Whether or not Bitcoin is just a brand. As a brand, whether or not that's the one that's going to succeed or whether or not the idea still needs to be implemented. Maybe Amazon have got their own plans. In fact, they do don't know. They have an Amazon coin already. I would say that large companies like this are probably going to want to see another year's worth of resilience in the market before they adopt it. Derek J. Why would they both say no to Bitcoin? You. You. You. Listening. You all on this panel. Myself included. I've shopped on Amazon dozens of times and I've used Bitcoin to do it in the past two years. How many times did I tweet them to say please accept Bitcoin? How many times did I send them an email or fill out one of these complaints? I think it's time we take personal responsibility for these companies that aren't listening to our demands. I mean, we're still shopping at these places. Let them hear us and not just be talking to each other but write to them. I'm curious to know how many of you have actually addressed Amazon personally. So I think they're procrastinating and they're underestimating the power of the Bitcoin technology because they're simply not hearing it from enough people. It seems as though the gift middleman is coming back on us there. We all can buy things easily so we just don't care and we don't bother them. So it's a good point. The statement that Amazon made doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. They said we're not hearing from customers that it's the right payment technology for them. But it's a payment option. It's not like Amazon, you know, they appropriate Bitcoin and then everyone's locked into using it. They're like, oh, how the hell did I get my hands on Bitcoin? I can't figure this out. No, it would just be, it would be alternative to the existing payment mechanisms. I think probably the main reason why they haven't adopted yet is because they don't have a vision of this cryptocurrency future. They don't have a sense of what is going to look like in the future or maybe they don't have a sense of how quickly it's going to come. Maybe they're pessimistic about how quickly it's going to come. And if they do try to adopt Bitcoin, it's not a trivial matter. You know, they do have to change their software. It's going to cost the money to actually build the software to, you know, integrate it into their company. And so if it's not going to be offset by, you know, profits in the near term, they're accountable to their shareholders and, you know, all those kind of people. So they may just be waiting for the right moment. And it does look like Bitcoin is in a bit of a lull right now with the price and the sentiment. And maybe they're just waiting to see a bit more spark in the Bitcoin space. More people getting in there before they jump in there themselves and make the commitment and the investment into applying Bitcoin. I think you make a good point, Christoff. We've been far too reasonable with them. We've been saying they should just accept Bitcoin. We should say they should stop accepting Visa and MasterCard and only accept Bitcoin. That's a better stance. Megan, Lord. So this is disappointing, but it shows the reality from the perspective of the rest of the people who aren't in Bitcoin. We sometimes live in this bubble with Bitcoin. We're very enthusiastic. We are very excited because we can see the future. We can see the potential of this technology, but not everyone shares our vision with this. And we have to bring it to them and not just to Amazon, although I think that's a great idea. I definitely agree with Derek that we need to be more proactive as Amazon customers and demand that they adopt this technology. But at the same time, they have a lot that they have to do to prepare to do that. And if they already have their own coin, maybe they're already thinking about going in a different direction. So we need to get other people on board with it too. Other people who would be shopping at Amazon and show them the value of this technology so that they can also demand it. I don't think they have to take Bitcoin, though, for a lot of reasons, but a lot of it has to do with their limited in their perspective in regard to the future. And they're doing just fine without it. Let's be honest. Bitcoin users make up a very, very, very small percentage of the population. Amazon doesn't need us really, is what it comes down to. So while I was really disappointed in this, it wasn't completely surprising. I, of course, hope they changed their mind on it, but it's up to us to show the value of the technology and encourage other people to do that too in our same Amazon. Will, Penguin. Yeah, I think what we're seeing is, I think like Megan mentioned, they're comfortable, they're in profitable, they're not interested in applying any additional resources. I don't think they'd have to spend a lot of additional resources. Coinbase sent a developer to Overstock.com and got them implemented. I presume they'd be happy to do that free of charge with Amazon as well and just reap the fees from the purchases. So I don't think it's a question of resources or maybe even ideology. I don't think that's it either. What I think we're seeing is that Bitcoin user adoption has far outpaced merchant adoption, perhaps, and perhaps also outpaced the ability of Bitcoin from a source code standpoint to scale along with adoption. So we've heard for the last couple months about the core developers struggling to get needed fixes and patches in place and there are some new innovations that are hopefully going to solve that concern with Bitcoin core and maybe even side chains and stuff like that. But it's a slow process to improve the code of Bitcoin or add features to it. As we've seen, it's not a matter so much of bureaucracy around it. It's just a very delicate thing. You don't want to screw up. So hopefully, we'll just see some more large merchants take the leap of faith. Patrick Burn from Overstock did. A lot of them are seeing this trend now. You only have to talk with haunchos like Mark Andreessen wants to be swayed to the threshold of actually adopting it. People like that can have a lot of influence here in the space of merchant adoption or other innovations like that. So I'm not worried about whether or not Amazon ever does accept Bitcoin. I'll just go to snapcard. Join snapcard.com and buy whatever I want on Amazon through them. Or gift.com is another one of those services. I know the other part of this topic is Walmart. There's a lot of things that I need that I don't want to go to Walmart for in the first place, even if they carry the product. You can find it cheaper elsewhere, a contrary to popular belief in a lot of cases. It's nice to walk into a store like Walmart and show your phone with the gift card on it and just check out like that. I like doing that at a gap. I saw Derek's video commentary on that last year. That was lots of fun. That's Burn Me to do the same at CVS right before the closure of Silk Road. Or Decrying Bitcoin as you can only buy illegal drugs with it. Well I buy legal drugs with it. I go to CVS pharmacy and I buy my prescriptions there sometimes. I would tell people that and that would get people thinking. There's too many tools that we can use as advocates to sway people, merchants and consumers. But there is kind of a bottleneck at merchant adoption that we really need to overcome. It might be a failure of education, to be honest. It might be, this is one of my biggest focuses, biggest concerns. I put a lot of energy behind these things. If we aren't able to get merchants on board without the nature of accepting Bitcoin being essentially risk-free for them, we're doing something wrong with education. So we got to clean up our message or get better at delivering the message. Dovey Barker. The firms get big. They get cautious. It's much more difficult to change the direction of a buffalo than a field mouse. We sort of all, like in the Bitcoin space, hover it around Amazon and I think that's because we really want that headline that Amazon accepts Bitcoin because Amazon is kind of the buffalo on the internet. But Amazon's statement, and to some extent, like the comments I'm hearing from the rest of the group here, make me actually think that it's not even just about Bitcoin. It's also that Amazon is losing its competitive edge. And that is something that also happens with large firms. I think that this quote belongs to Steve Jobs and I'm paraphrasing either way, so I'm not sure. But I believe that he said something like, I don't try and sell people what they say they want. I try to sell people what they don't even know they want yet. And if you look at Amazon's statement and you listen to the comments that are being made here, we're all saying customers are telling Amazon what they want. And Amazon is saying the customers are not telling us that they want this. Well that means that Amazon has lost its competitive edge. And so I think maybe it's because Amazon is large, Amazon is cautious, and Amazon is going to be compliant. And the further we go into this space, the further intervention that we get in the Bitcoin space from the government, the harder it's going to be for the buffaloes in the room to comply in a dot Bitcoin. So part of the transformative edge the Bitcoin is going to have is that it's going to make it easier for small firms to adopt and harder for large firms to adopt. And we're going to see a reversal of the kind of state crony capitalism pressures that create large firms and punish small firms. So I actually am kind of thinking maybe Bitcoin isn't for Amazon, at least not as they're currently constructed. What makes it question how long before Amazon changes their mind? Chris J. Well we've got 0.9 out now of Bitcoin clients. So that means that you can actually issue refund addresses with your transactions. So there's no excuse. But I think it will be sometime, not least because I think they've got their own agenda. I think that they're pretty megalomaniac around there. So they're probably going to want their own coin. So I wouldn't expect any something. Derek J. One year, that's forever in internet years. And if the techies at Amazon aren't screaming into the years of management by that point, Amazon might have bigger problems behind the scenes. Kristoff Atlas. I was just thinking if it's a matter of them having their competing coin, which is not going to be a cryptocurrency, but some other kind of digital currency, probably peg to the dollar. Maybe that would be a good application for a side chain to Bitcoin. So that way they are not necessarily intertwining themselves with the value of Bitcoin or Bitcoin as a currency, but Bitcoin as a payment network. And they're still able to have their own coin. That could be a nice marriage of the two technologies. Megan Lord. Megan Lord. So pessimistic with this. They don't have to. And as long as they don't have to, they won't. I don't know. They don't really see them changing their mind on this. I really hope they would, but they don't have to. They're very comfortable in the position they're in right now. Like Dovey said, they're very comfortable with the way things have been for a while now. And they don't really have a whole lot of incentives to expand a Bitcoin. Again, we make up a very, very small percentage of the entire population that uses Amazon. Yeah, I don't really see them changing their mind on this. Will Pangman. Never. Dovey Barker. I want to be clear. I do think that they are going to be changing their mind, but I think that they're going to be kicking and screaming when they do it. And what it's going to come down to is they're going to realize that all of these third-party processors that allow us to use Bitcoin on Amazon anyway are bleeding their profits. There is a point where that's going to be too much for them to sustain. Like to use my original metaphor, the field mice are chewing on the buffalo. So I do believe that they're going to change, but I just think that they're too slow moving. So I'm going to say long prognosis in say two years. Issue three. Mainstream media wakes up to the Sabo linguistic evidence story. The who is a Toshinaka Moto story is back again. The media will never give this one up. This time they've got Nick Scabo, who at the very least participated in the white paper. But does that make him a Toshinaka Moto? Does the media have their man? Derek J. Yeah, it doesn't matter if Sabo is the guy or not. I mean, even if the media does have their man, they're never going to stop looking. So the purpose, in my opinion, of the mainstream media is to prop agandize for the authorities. And so they focus on authorities and figureheads, but that is irrelevant to Bitcoin. They don't get that yet. They soon will. It seems they almost can't understand Bitcoin unless they know who's behind it. The actual thing doesn't matter. It's just the leader of the thing. Kristoff atlas. I think there's a number of reasons why people just can't leave Satoche alone. It's kind of a John Gaul story, which is very compelling. You've got this brilliant mind that single-handedly invents a new technology that revolutionizes the world and has got this kind of shadowy identity. I think also some people are uncomfortable with Bitcoin. And so they want to kind of chalk it up to the invention of a particular man, rather than looking at as a evolution in a series of technologies, a movement towards cryptocurrencies from a legacy banking system away from fiat currencies, distributing power to a broader group of people. That's a very uncomfortable truth for many and a difficult one to swallow. And so if you just point to one particular nerd and say, it's just this nerd's idea and somehow it took off, I think that's a way of trying to disarm Bitcoin, but in the long run, it's not going to work. Excellent points. Megan Lort. So to Bitcoiners, this isn't very significant because a lot of us already believe that we're also Tatoche. That's kind of the point. That's the whole point of Bitcoin. It's this awesome, amazing decentralized technology. But to your average person, it's a scary thing, this idea of this anonymous creator. So whether or not Sabo is the creator of Bitcoin, it doesn't matter to Bitcoiners, but it's very important for answering the concerns of the rest of the world, who's very uncertain where this technology came from. And that's what I've found to be a hindrance to a lot of people that I've talked to about Bitcoin, is that it was created. No one knows who created it. And yes, I've tried to explain them well. You know, we're all participating in this all that. But what it comes down to is your average person is still locked in this mentality that there needs to be an authority figure. And as long as they're locked in that mentality, it's a very hard thing to overcome. It takes a very long time to overcome. And I think in a way, it could be a good thing if somehow Sabo is found to be the creator of Bitcoin because it would ease the concerns of a lot of people who have that fear of it. Again, it means there are different things to different people, though. So you have your Bitcoiners who, it's not a huge deal. Like I don't care who came up with Bitcoin. I'm not that concerned with it. But other people outside the bubble very much do. And it's going to hinder them from jumping on board in a lot of cases. But I do think a lot of this is just the media searching for a story. And that's what they're going to continue to do. They're not, I don't know that so many of them are looking for the truth about who's behind Bitcoin. But they're more looking for a story that they can raise suspicions about or they can kind of add to the alert Bitcoin. So yeah, it could be good or bad. It's significant to Bitcoiners, but it could be pretty significant to people who were afraid of getting into Bitcoin because they don't know who created it. Will, Penguin. So I have it on good authority that the people who currently work with Nick Sabo on the current projects, they jokingly refer to him as Satoshi and things like that and what do you do? The guy is a brilliant man, you know. Perhaps there's some truth here. Like as you said, Tom, at the very least, he had some maybe involvement with the drafting of the paper. Good. It doesn't matter who he is. Chris did a great episode with Andreas on the Let's Talk Bitcoin podcast. And they touched on this briefly about getting over, you know, as Megan is pointing out, helping the people inquiring on about Bitcoin get over the fact that they need to know who created it because it truly doesn't matter. Bitcoin is self-governing. It doesn't matter, you know, the code is self-governing, self-regulating and so on. And I'm interested to hear Chris's take on this answer. So I'll keep it brief. But these people asking about who the creator may be, whether it's the media or just, you know, anyone who might be curious but really needs more to be able to trust the thing more. If they need trust, they need to either learn how to read code or read the white paper some more. David Barker. Friedrich Nietzsche said that all great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks. And if people are afraid of Satoshi Nakamoto's anonymity or they're afraid that Bitcoin will be used for various and various activities online, I think that is just a terrifying and monstrous mask that this great thing is wearing. And I really hope we never discover who he is. I hope 30 years from now, Bitcoin is the dominant currency in the world or some version of it and this person is celebrated as a liberator of mankind and nobody knows who he is. Because if we do ever find out who he is, we're going to have statues of him and we're going to have monuments to him and we're going to have fake cherry tree. I never tell a lie kind of stories about all the similar to other quote unquote great men in history. And I would prefer that he was ever an international internet man of mystery. Well said, David. Chris J. Yeah, so actually there's a really good follow up at school in business inside of that I found where it said basically there's a gaping floor in the new Satoshi study and it's not. It was pretty obvious from the start, but they found this expert Jeremy Clark who's an assistant professor at information systems engineering at Concordia University in Montreal. And he said some things that I just felt were quite sort of revealing really. If you take 13 people, someone will always always be the closest to your definition. Essentially the sample size was really, really small. The people that they were using and they were comparing the text to. And also you don't see anything that a lot of the phrase theology that they were picking out was nothing you wouldn't see in nearly any crypto paper. There's also nothing to indicate that Nick can even write code. And he has been saying for quite some time that his Bitcoin, his bit gold proposal, which is something of a precursor Bitcoin, he still believes that it's better than Bitcoin. So all of this evidence is circumstantial. I draw everyone's attention to the fact that this has been a slow news week this week. There hasn't been a lot of drama. Another big government hasn't banned Bitcoin again. And I think this should point us in the direction with all this styleometry. The fact is that all this technology in the world, if you have a very small sample size, you're not going to arrive at the right conclusion. The thing is, if you spend less time as a consumer of content, actually just scaring the web for mere appearances of things and you're just getting obsessed over what people look like and who invented what. Then the media will just keep pandering to you and just keep giving you what you want. Yeah, so I think this is a massive distraction. I actually really liked one comment from Reddit that I'd like to read out from a user called Can't Get You A Toe. He said, Newsweek looked into it. They concluded, Nick Sabo can't possibly be Satoshi. His name is not Satoshi. Case closed. Very good. The other big question is Nick Sabo said Satoshi Nakamoto. Yes or no? Derek J. No. Christoph Atlas. No. Megan Lourdes. No, and it doesn't matter. Will Penguin. No. Dovey Barker. Yes, in the I am John Gold, sense of the word. Chris J. No, and I don't care. Looks like a series of nose for Eskabo. Looks like I shouldn't ask him for a loan after all. Issue 4. Dozecoin. Gas station should accept Bitcoin and Ron Paul doesn't think Bitcoin is real money. What's more exciting for Bitcoin? The Dozecon? The world's first altcoin convention going off next Friday, April 25 in San Francisco. Or that gas station should be accepting Bitcoin, especially given the excellent development of the Bitcoin accepting gas pump by hero engineer Andy Schroeder. Or Ron Paul, the old gold bug who doesn't get it. The revolution that he always dreamed of is right at hand and he can't understand it because he's too old to email. Ron Paul, the Dozecon, or gas station should accept Bitcoin. Which is a more exciting development for Bitcoin. Christoph Atlas. What's most compelling to me is the Ron Paul story. I don't explain that. Ron Paul is this politician in the United States, former politician. He's retired now. For some reason, people are still paying attention to him. He was supposed to be the sort of the savior of libertarian movement as a political movement in the last several decades. I don't think he actually achieved any of that. What's exciting about this to me is that Ron Paul is a symbol of the old guard of the libertarians, libertarians being people that want to reduce government's impact on people's personal liberty. We're seeing this movement away from trying to change the system within to trying to take down the system from outside of it. This has been a very frustrating area for libertarians for a number of years. They tried it with politics. They tried getting jobs in educational institutions that are ultimately being, their paychecks are being paid by the government in some sense as professors of these institutions. They actually aren't forced to compete in a market because they have tenure as professors. We've had entrepreneurs that have tried to create giant companies and they generally find that they get to a certain size and then they have to morph into a state institution in order to continue their growth. This has been a really frustrating area for libertarians for a number of years. I think that they're starting to figure it out. The next movement of libertarians are crypto libertarians and it's all about attacking the state from outside rather than trying to change it from within. Ron Paul is the old guard and Satoshi is the new guard. Meghan Lorde. If you're still concerned about what Ron Paul has to say about Bitcoin in the age of the internet, you're doing it wrong. There's no reason why anything Ron Paul says about Bitcoin should be really considered weighty. He's not very social media savvy. I don't know how savvy he is in regards to the other functions of the internet. I don't view that as big. What's big is our gas station is going to take Bitcoin. That's really exciting to me because that opens Bitcoin up to a huge variety of people. Everyone has to go to a gas station just about. It's totally electric car. You're able to somehow avoid the things at gas stations. Everyone uses gas stations. You can get gas stations to take Bitcoin. That's going to make more people look at it as something like, oh, this seems pre-normal. I can get into something kind of safe. I think that's the main story. I was excited to hear about the Dogecoin conference or the altcoin conference. I think that's really exciting for people who are in the cryptocurrencies. I would like to see more of that because I'm fascinated with altcoins. I want to learn more about them. I think that's really exciting. I think the biggest story is Bitcoin. Gas stations hopefully opening up to Bitcoin. Will, Penguin. I want to disagree with the previous two panelists about the Ron Paul thing. Countless people have come to the ideas of liberty for lack of a better term through Ron Paul's previous two ventures toward the presidency. There was tons of mainstream media attention on the ideas he was bringing forth and millions of people converted to a lot of these ideas. Certainly he has an influence in that. I think a lot of those people were young people and a lot of those young people are now perhaps self-described crypto libertarians, crypto anarchists and archipelagoists. The types of people who have really allowed Bitcoin to mature as much as it has so far and supported the growth of the community into a large extent. His influence is important. I disagree with Ron Paul on quite a bit of things as a politician. Much like I disagree with Alex Jones on pretty much all of his alarmism. The fact of the matter is, for the last 15 years or so, both of these men have shown light on issues that are real and actual, not everything, but a lot of it that's needed the light of day and needed people to take a closer look at it and also spurred critical thinking and allow people to find virtue in determining things for themselves and using critical thinking in that regard. So I'd like to make that point. The biggest story for me is the Dogecoin. It's huge. Dogecoin brings more people to Bitcoin perhaps than anything else currently. And that's awesome because people are gravitating to this meme. They gravitate to an online currency and they don't even know what cryptocurrency means initially. The tipping culture is fantastic in that community. They have done so many things right from a marketing of PR standpoint, charitable giving standpoint. They're still kicking ass and I hope they keep doing it. I want to see the NASCAR. I want to see more charitable organizations jumping on board with Dogecoin, more merchant processors allowing it coin kite and so on. I mean, that's stuff's exciting. Go coin. That is what's going to bring people to this thing and see its viability. Because all of a sudden they have this magic internet money and then they take a look at Bitcoin and they see that its fundamentals are far more sound than the playful Dogecoin. So I'm big on Dogecon and think about it. We've got many vectors through which people adopt Bitcoin and a lot of them are very small subsets of society that have large voices or loud voices like forex traders, like venture capitalist communities, startups and libertarianism. These are small sections of society with large mouth pieces or large megaphone speaking of Alex Jones. Those groups draw a lot to Bitcoin and it's time that we allow Bitcoin to have more of a coming out party, more inclusive. Bitcoin's for everyone. I don't want to see this stay with quote unquote libertarians or just in the FinTech sectors or just in the VC space and so on. It's very important that we get young people on board it and this is done through Dogecoin. Gas especially, but hopefully before long, like man, before five years from now, hopefully we can get off of petrol altogether. It's a pretty dirty form of energy and I think we've had for dozens of years better forms of energy, more plentiful even and so on and so on. The gas thing will help people find a real world application for Bitcoin where they previously did not and maybe consider it. Dogecoin, man. Dogecoin, FTW. Dovy Barker. I don't subscribe to the great man theory of history. I actually don't think that Ron Paul revitalized the Liberty movement. I feel like the Liberty movement was there and ready and fertile and then someone appeared and it was there ready for him. I think that desiring the endorsement of Ron Paul is sort of like desiring the endorsement of Amazon.com. That being said, Ron Paul is to a large extent responsible for why I had the knowledge and the background on economics to know what Bitcoin was when I saw it. I have a lot of respect for the man even if he's old and he's fallen behind and he doesn't see the sort of consequences of his own philosophy, that's okay. But the thing is that he acknowledges that and if you go back and you listen to his early speeches, he was always one to say this movement is not about me, this movement is about all of you and now that he's out of politics and now that it is clearly not about him because he doesn't have the podium anymore, this is what all of us have done. And even if he doesn't sort of see the economics of it, I think that and in fact I've heard him say that he does understand that a voluntary currency in and of itself is better no matter what. And so I don't want to get into the sort of name calling of Ron Paul or mocking him as an old man or whatever. I feel like he's the grandpa who has retired and it's time to go to his house occasionally and have tea and listen to him speak and then go about the rest of your lives. Like he deserves to be respected, but he deserves to be read a story and put to bed. Chris, Jay. Yeah, I was actually going with the Ron Paul story as well. He didn't actually say, well he said he was a big fan of it. He said that he liked the idea and that he felt that there should be competition in currency. So I didn't read it as being like a negative story and obviously I'm not American, I don't necessarily get the whole kind of history behind it. But I thought that that headline was a little bit misleading myself. I'm also excited about the Dogecoin conference, not least because I'd love to go. So if you want to sponsor me to go, I can like hang out in my black turtleneck, do my whole kind of Steve Joseph question with a Romy Mike and I think me and Tom, we're just going to go around there and party it up. So perhaps we should get a get a tipping address. Tom, what do you think? Let's get the Dogecoin address out on Twitter for Chris Ellis. Well, how about we just get the whole WCN crew down there? Well, how do we get one of those vans with sata-like dishes on the, how do we get one of those? Can somebody make that happen? How many people are watching this right now, Tom? 24 of you are watching that. So there must be someone who knows how to get one of those Scooby-Doo vans, right? It's got like the sata-lights and everything so we can do the link-ups. I know we were just last week. Dolly was requesting a Ninja Turtles man. So there is a lot of vand request going on. Yeah. I do like it. I am a little bit, I don't like the whole kind of PR stuff that I see coming out of Dogecoin. If you go on to the Reddit and you're in any way, critical of Doge, they kind of like jump on you. And so what I don't like, I'm kind of ambivalent. On the one hand, I really like what Dogecoin is doing for the crypto community as a whole because it's, you know, every industry has a fluffy, cutly brand and it does make it amenable to new people that would be otherwise skeptical. But I also don't like this kind of picking a team, like a football team and then you've got your team and you've got your team and then you kind of create this kind of tribalism in this conflict between the communities. I'm not a big fan of that. So I'm also quite skeptical because it looks like Doge have a lot of money out there in backing. They're clearly able to afford the PR campaigns. They're able to pay for this kind of level of sponsorship, which makes me question the sustainability and the long term survivability of it. I don't like the way that they put, like, you know, it's going to go to the moon and all this kind of stuff because that implies that you're only buying it because you want the price to go up and then at the same time Jackson will say on the Reddit bots and a lot of the community managers will say, yeah, but you're not supposed to do it so that the price goes up. You're supposed to use this for tipping. In fact, he mandates this in a lot of the competitions. If he says, like, if I give you this Dogecoin, you've got to promise that you're going to use it to tip people. And that, I feel, goes way, way against the libertarian kind of ideas that I felt that I enjoyed hearing so much, not as a libertarian myself, but I enjoy hearing from you guys because I don't think you should be questioning what someone else is going to do with their money. So with that caveat in place on balance, I think the net effect of Dogecoin is a positive one and I'd love to go and like hang out and do like a roaming news that the Dogecoin. We're going to give it a try next week, next Friday, Dogecoin. Exit question, just repeat after me, gas station should accept Bitcoin. Gas stations should accept Bitcoin. There we go. Wait a minute, I didn't get to give my answer. Sorry, go ahead, Jackson. The most exciting development is Dogecoin. It represents the progression of the blockchain technology, but I was surprised to hear Romm call this Bitcoin. I would think that he would see the similarities that Bitcoin shares with his favorite values of the Austrian economists. So do I want him to cheer on Bitcoin? Yes, absolutely, but I don't want my friends to adopt Bitcoin because Romm Paul said so. I want them to look into it for themselves and see that it can benefit them today and give them more freedom. So there are already our gas stations. I don't know why this isn't more well known, but there are gas stations that already accept Bitcoin. For example, Crossroads, gas station in Texas, it's called in my calling show, and there's also a free state-owned gas station in New Hampshire that accepts it. There are others. But the gas station in Durango, Colorado. But now Dogecon. I hear about a new crypto conference every day. Some people are learning how to use and mine cryptocurrencies, and it's encouraging them to learn about money, freedom, and coding. This bodes well for the free future that I want to see. So I don't celebrate the gap that it sort of creates between those who embrace innovation and those who want to shy away from it, but that divide is going to become painful. And eventually the caboose is going to catch up with the innovators. They always do. And netflix was around like 10 years ago, but it failed to rise into its own until the last couple of years. I see Dogecoin as a way to help spread adoption for all of these cryptocurrencies. So don't wait for the caboose to catch up or the slow pokes to move on to the next thing. Keep moving along, keep innovating, keep connecting with others in the cryptocurrency space. It's working. It's a good point, Derek. We don't know who's going to be at Dogecon. It's certainly not going to be the venture capitalist at the $300 ticket Bitcoin conventions that we've been seeing lately. I'm told the event is free. It sounds like pizza and beer or at least pizza and soda may be provided. I don't know if the audience of Dogecon can even drink beer. We'll find out. I was going to have you guys repeat, gas station should accept Bitcoin as the exit question because of this old story called Carthagode Dylenda S, which you guys don't know. So a long time ago there was this senator and after every one of these speeches in Rome he would repeat Carthagode Dylenda S, Carthagode Dylenda S, over and over these words again. Carthagode must die. Carthagode must be destroyed. And no one was really into it for a long time but he kept repeating it and he kept repeating it and he made it like a almost a greeting, almost a generic thing that you just say over and over and over again. Until eventually the Romans gave in. They sent the fleet over to Carthage. They killed everyone in the city. They burned the city to the ground. They raised the structures. They filled in the port and then they salted the soil so that nothing would ever grow there again. And that's why I think we should say Carthagode Dylenda S, gas station should accept Bitcoin. I just like saying it. And CS Lewis said, if you say something three times it must be true. So I like, I just like saying it. You guys aren't into it so I'm not going to make you say it. But we're going to move on to questions and answers. There aren't a lot of questions but there is a good one. And I think it's science fiction and well worth answering. How do you feel about in the near future your own physical body using your own unique DNA as a hard wallet via touch or breath, etc. for Bitcoin trade? Dovey Barker, would you like to be part of the Bitcoin equation? I don't think I understand the question. Yes. I agree. Chris agrees. So like instead of a prior DNA is the blockchain. DNA is the original blockchain. Word. It makes perfect sense. And I've been thinking about that a lot. I mean, I have slight reservations because I don't like what it would, you know, what it would mean. And also I don't know how you'd get it out there, get around the side goat from identical twins problem. I don't know what you would do about identical twins. But yes. And blockchain apparently. So we go, so we go back and raid each other. Oh, yeah. Good for my. So wait a minute. You're saying we're using our DNA as a sort of private key in you. It's some sort of a blockchain technology. So a unique, big, serious, every human. Why wouldn't you be able to access my account by like cutting off my thumb? I suppose I could. I'd made your thumb. This is one of the concerns. Yeah, it is one of the concerns. You'd have to add it along with to factor or something you know and something you have as well, not just something you are. It sounds like if I had your thumb and maybe some of your breath and then like a touch, maybe your eye, like a variety of parts. That's one factor authentication. Yeah. So that, yeah, so you would have multi factor, but also more interestingly, there's also a research into brain waves and stuff as well. So apparently your brain waves are unique to you as well. And that cannot be easily surrendered because if you're under duress, they would no longer be a signature to you. You'd be able to identify somebody that was under duress. So I think there's an application for using a physical sort of key along with a key of the mind as well as if there was a mental key that actually identified duress. I would be all over that. That sounds awesome. Well, then you could just scan someone. You could be scanning someone at all times and see if they're ever under duress. Like, well, yeah. Well, I definitely see this as being the long game. I definitely see, like if you've ever read Dawkins, the selfish gene, like he'd be loving this, you know, because this is this whole idea that actually maybe Bitcoin was created because our genes made us do it. Right. Maybe all these centuries, all these millions of years of evolution has been slowly, the genes have been steering us towards the Bitcoin invention. And if you think about it, right, like maybe this is it, maybe technology has been using us all along and we never were in control of our desires. Maybe capitalism wasn't a choice and actually it was our desires pushing us more and more into like creating this technology. Why? And the most important thing is, do you remember in Tron, there were the natives of the Tron universe that were not created by the users. They were just sort of spontaneously emerging from the black in the program. I totally think that it's plausible that Bitcoin or Satoshi Nakamoto is some sort of artificial intelligence on the internet just emerged. I think it's a great idea that we're not going to spread our DNA to other planets, but we're going to spread the blockchain. So you know, Mars is blockchain ready, Jupiter, Venus, you know, that's the beauty of this though. Your DNA would be hashed along with your private key. So, so your private key would contain a hash of your DNA. So it would be mathematically mircled into that. So it would only be, so I do see this as a way of DNA like the genes propagating themselves and giving themselves this kind of permanence in the physics of the universe. I mean, I think we're all going to be wearing coughs on our arms that are Bitcoin wallets that would also let us know if a potential partner was a good DNA match. I think if once you have the DNA information, you're going to start comparing it right there and the thing could be, if you're in range, I don't know. Mark J, you're going to be wearing a cuff anytime soon. I charge forward towards transhumanism. I can't wait to merge with machine. It sounds like a wonderful representation of that. I'm for it all the way. Kristoff Atlas, are there civil liberty concerns? If my DNA now is just checked by all the civil liberty liberty. Oh, just in the small detail. I don't really see DNA being part of the private key where if you know anything about forensics, you know that you leave DNA all over the place wherever you go. Unless you're going to somehow remove all the skin from your body and hair and all the other stuff too. I don't think it's a particularly good device for, you know, to carry your bitcoins. But see if we all lived in pods like in the matrix and there wouldn't be a risk of DNA contamination. And I'm told people are evolving to become hairless. Megan Lawrence, are you going to be adopting the new DNA? I'm skeptical towards this. For the same reasons Kristoff said basically it's very easy to steal other people's DNA. But it's something I'm curious about. It's definitely a very ambitious idea. So I need to look forward to it. Will Penguin. Yeah, I like combining that with the key of the mind, you know, the key of the soul or mind, whatever, you know, depending on how Greek you want to get. But it's, you know, the important thing is you like to know if someone's under duress when they're submitting their physical DNA key and then have to submit their, the key of the mind as I'm calling it, I guess, you have to have an environment where there's an option to not give consent. So like that's totally foreign to what we experience in any Western government or, you know, large state government, right? There's no way to give consent to be governed because there's no way to not give consent. So there's, you know, you have to have the option to not give consent. So that might be, there might be some algorithmic process for defining what it is to be under duress and the ability to then submit voluntarily your consent or, you know, the key of the mind in that sense. I definitely look forward to a future where everyone's meditating and clearing their mind so they can get the ATM machine to work. There's a whole line of people they can't quite get safe enough. They have to work on a little more. There was a little device that came out in the news. They said they were working on the, you know, the strap where it would look at your, your blood pressure or something like that. And my first thought about that was like, okay, well, as soon as it's, you know, the first time it's, it's not working quite right. When your blood pressure starts to rise, it's working even worse and you just never get access here a bit. So I don't know. I think these technologies need to be worked out on the drawing board a bit more. That's what I was concerned about too. Like, what if you have like really bad social anxiety or something and like, you just, or any of the things that could be manipulated. What if I could inject you with something that like limited your access to your own funds because I activated your own adrenaline or activated your own, whatever the stress hormone is, you know, I mean, the bank could do that too. They could spray you with a mist. You can't withdraw any more money for the next one. We're freezing your account. We're freezing your account. First, you know, some, some Colombian drug lords might dose you with scopolamine or something and you're done. You're just going to be broke. Or worse, what if you live paycheck to paycheck and you just have anxiety about money? And so that means like the moment you're like, oh God, do I pay the electric bill or the rent? It says, oh, neither. I see also a lot of repulsion towards money from, let's say, you know, the extreme left or something where they don't want to even embrace Bitcoin whatsoever because it just includes this feature of moneyness about it, right? So they would be totally averse and that may not work for some folks of that ideology. I think the blood pressure at Cuff's are a great idea. If we could crowdsource that information, you could tell who is having stress in a certain area, avoid that area. It's a lot of good data there. I have to see how it goes, but we're moving on to predictions, story of the week or final thoughts when you share with us your story of the week that we didn't cover or of prediction or a final thought. Are you ready? Dovey Barker. Yeah, I guess my final thought, I guess I just want to announce this. You can kind of see it behind me. I've got the t-shirt over here and you can see them all organized over here. And what that is is the Bitcoin knot bombs. 2014 hoodie, the homeless fundraiser is launched. So you can order these t-shirts now. They're in their shiny badges.com behind the causes page and very shortly they'll be up at Bitcoin.bombs.com. And I just want to announce that. Excellent. Get your t-shirt today. Chris, Jay. Well, actually I just realized I won't be able to go to the dozecoin meetup next week because I'll be at the feather coin one year birthday meetup at the Oxford Blue and Oxford. We can do like a live link up between Arab and the dozecoin event and the World Crypto Network. That'd be pretty cool. That'd be very cool. That's good. So that's on Saturday. So if you want to come join us, you'd be very welcome. Every meetup we've done with Pat, more people than we'd had the time before. So it's very cool. We're already a year old, by the way. And also if you haven't already, you need to update your feather coin wallet. Just go to feathercoin.com because we've got hard fought coming up on Wednesday afternoon, I think GMC. So you need to have updated. You don't have to have updated. I mean, it's not a problem. You're not going to lose your feather coins. It just means you won't be able to spend any feather coins until you've updated. And that'll see faster block times and some other bug features and improvements. You can go to forum.feathercoin.com to find out more. Final thought, what I would say is this sort of came to me as we were talking about the dozecoin thing is it's not really the money we want. The real story about these blockchains is the communities that they support. And that's the story that we're not telling. I don't think it's the money we want. I think it's each other. Derek J. Final thought gas stations should accept Bitcoin. That's what I'm saying. Christoph Atlas. I heard on Twitter earlier that the dark coin, all coin, they just launched, fully launched their dark sends technology that's now in beta and being widely used for all of the dark coin users. So I'm very interested in taking a closer look at that. Very good. Megan Lord. I have a couple of announcements. So this week Sean's outpost went to a evidentiary hearing with the Skamy County and the Skamy County decided to drop some of the charges in regards to Satoshi Forest. And we're still waiting to hear the mattress trades ruling, but she did talk about dismissing the entire thing. So we're hoping to move forward with Satoshi Forest. And this is good news because it's been very stressful and we've been very worried because the county has a very long history of trying to stop people from doing good things. So we were a bit nervous about this, but this is very good news. And hopefully it will allow us to make some really good progress with Satoshi Forest. And also I will be interviewing Michael Mallis, the author of Dear Reader, the unauthorized autobiography of Kim Jong Il on Wednesday at 6 o'clock Central Standard Time. We'll be doing a Google Hangout. Michael's really interesting. It's a really interesting book. He's taking Bitcoin for his book. We're going to be talking about North Korea. It kind of comes from North Korea propaganda almost. We're going to be talking about that philosophy and stuff like that. So definitely check that out. I think it will be really, it'll be a different discussion. It's not going to be totally centered on Bitcoin. But I think it will be very interesting to people who are interested in foreign policy and stuff like that. Will, Penguin. Two things, I guess real quick. Monday, April 28th, Jeffrey Tucker will be in Milwaukee and we will be live streaming. His appearance at the Milwaukee Bitcoin Meetup on Monday, April 28th. So make sure you put that on your calendar and tune into that. That'll be lots of fun. He's a very colorful and wonderful speaker. Bitcoin magnate and CEO of Liberty.me, which is exciting. If you have early access to that, hopefully share your experiences with people so that they can see the kind of platform that that will be for people to use for publishing. And then probably, I was at the Toronto Bitcoin Expo last weekend and it was a fantastic time. Just very community-oriented conference. Really wonderful slate of speakers and just a great all-around time. But I did come back with one major concern. And it's something that some of us may have heard Andreas talk about too and some women in this space as well. There is perhaps a problem of foot with the way that women are treated in this space. We've seen some bloggers blog about this and I want to call attention and I guess a call to action really for the men in this space. Any meet-ups out there, community organizations, even regional or national or global Bitcoin type associations, please take notice. Especially the men. If there's any mistreatment to respect showmanism, misogyny, or even sexual harassment, which is happening at a lot of these conferences to women who attend and then elect not to attend future events or even participate in the space anymore because of some of this treatment. Obviously, it goes without saying the kind of problem that is whether you're concerned about mass adoption or just equitable treatment of people, whatever, just mutual respect, whatever. But I think the only way we can really combat this is for the men in this space to stand up when you see this going on in your meet-ups or in other interactions or in your companies or anywhere there are women entering these communities, entering these groups with interest and then being repelled or repulsed by the treatment they receive to stand up and put a stop to the other men doing this. If this is something that you can tell is wrong and it's happening in your midst, find a fair and reasonable way to express your displeasure with the way that went between some male and female interaction that you may have observed. The only way I see this really being stopped is if the men in the space stand up and put a stop to it, hopefully kindly and firmly because we're losing, I think, some really great female minds to the treatment. I heard from too many women in Toronto about this thing, it sounds epidemic even from some of the other conferences. Anyway, that's what I'd like to say. If you see this happening, put a stop to it so that we can make sure that we can achieve critical mass adoption and we need women, we need women leaders and we need to be inclusive of them and not talk them down, correct them or even be disrespectful or showvonistic toward them. This is happening and we need to stop it. It's an excellent point, Will, and everyone should feel comfortable at Bitcoin meetups. That's not acceptable behavior. Moving on, prediction, gas stations will accept Bitcoin. It makes too much sense. The enemy of my enemies, my friend, gas stations may be selling the fuel that's burning the world, but there are also no big fan of credit card companies and are paying outrageous fees. Gas stations will accept Bitcoin. Gas stations will accept Bitcoin. It will shock you when it happens, but it will be a large chain sooner than you think and all at once. We're out of time. Until next time. Bye, bye.