The Bitcoin Group, the American Original. Phil and I, for over the last 10 seconds, the sharpest Satoshi's, the best Bitcoin's, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Blake Anderson from Facebook.com slash Got Blake. David Barker from shiny badges.com. How's it going? Chris Ellis from Federcorn. Hello. Chris Doth Atlas from anonymous Bitcoin book. Nice to be here. And I'm Thomas Hunt from Mad Bittcoins and I shaved. Woo! Issue one, single bitter, buys all 30,000 Silk Road Bittcoins. Venture capitalist Tim Draper, working with the room, a company that designs Bitcoin exchanges for financial institutions, have announced that they have won all of the Silk Road Bittcoins and will be using them to increase liquidity in Bitcoin and spreading Bitcoin to the third world. Bitcoin price went up shortly after as the many losers turned to the open market to buy their Bitcoin. How do you feel the sale went? Blake Anderson. Well, I think that it sends really positive signals that once there is more ability to purchase large quantities of Bitcoin in the West without exchanges having their depth really, really messed up. Like right now we have Coinbase and that's a good place to buy and exchange coins, but it's not a trading flow. They're a financial services institution. So this sends a signal that when one person buys almost 1.6 million dollars for the coins all by themselves that there's going to be some major players dumping some major capital into Bitcoin when the Western exchange is open and that I think that people should try to get some exposure to Bitcoin before that happens because it would be great to have motivated and intelligent risk takers benefit from that. Dovey Barker. I've got to hold my skepticism and wonder whether or not this person is complicit in the crime. I mean, like now that this person is known and he has a name, I have to look at his actions from here on and say, you know, how loyal to the government is this guy? Is he really going to use it to benefit the third world or is that just your typical sort of like corporate PR stunt? I don't know. I'm going to be paying close attention. Chris Ellis. Actually, the real criminals are the feds here. They're the ones with the stolen dollars that currently reside in their account. Tim bought those Bitcoins fair and square in an auction. I think that he does have a good record. Of course, I'm encouraged to encourage people to remain skeptical, but he is an investor in Skype, Hotmail Tesla, Badoo, to name a bit of a few. He does have a good reputation. For me, this was the least worst of all of the outcomes, short of actually sending some funds to Ross's defense team. Chris Ellis. Yeah, they certainly are stolen funds. It's pretty comparable to buying a car that's been seized by the feds or something like that, which is a pretty pedestrian thing at this point. I think, for the most part, it's not something we focus on as Liberty-Minded people. I guess it's positive that these very worthwhile digital tokens have been liberated from their previous owners to someone that's looking to put them into some actual use in the market. That's certainly a positive thing. I think Chris is right here. This is the best of all possible solutions. A single-bitter bought them all, presumably at market rate or even above market rate, as we've seen the rest of the bitters turn to the market and drive it up afterwards. Bitcoins are valuable. They had an auction and someone bought them all. This is the best possible outcome. Moving on. Issue 2. New Egg accepts Bitcoin. The world yons as total Bitcoin adoption is becoming commonplace. New Egg, just another drop in the bucket, making one assume that Amazon, Best Buy and Walmart are watching and waiting. Are you excited by New Egg? It's still muted. And now freezing. Can we hear Dobby? It came as a surprise to me because I thought New Egg already took Bitcoin. It did seem like with Tiger Direct overstock, there was some confusion as to whether New Egg had gotten on board. But now they seem to be on board. Obviously we have a connection issue. Chris Ellis. One of the noticeable features of that article is they do quote the marketing director of New Egg, which tells you a lot. I'm getting a little bit of fatigue with all these articles. I'll be more impressed when we get some big players like Amazon on board. It is good. They mentioned in the article something that was quite funny is that you can buy computer equipment to generate money to buy more computer equipment with the very equipment that you're buying it with. Which I thought was quite nice. It kind of alludes to an interesting technological ecosystem. It's the circle of life. Kristoff Atlas. Yeah, I have to agree with the people that have been kind of jaded by this type of announcement. I noticed in the article that they talked immediately about how they were converting their big coins to dollars through big pay. I would imagine that most of them are doing it 100%. It was actually more accepted when a week or two ago I heard from Patrick Burns that Overstock has been for a while now apparently holding approximately 10% of the big coins that they take in through sales and converting the remaining 90%. That's actually a much more significant piece of information because this means that there is a very large company that is valuing the tokens not just as a medium of exchange to instantly convert value but also they're actually valuing the currency. They are putting their trust and valuing the future value of that currency as well. I think that's a huge step to me. That's one of the next big things in Bitcoin adoption is holding on to the big coins and not merely dumping them off immediately through big pay or coin base. I'd like to see more companies dipping their toe into it. Just start off with 1% of whatever it is. Hold on to the big coins for a while and see what you can do with that. You can encourage your suppliers and the other businesses that you do business with to accept a big coin from you. Then we really start to see that the coin ecosystem really get going instead of just going in and out of fiat and a kind of cyclical fashion over and over again. In addition to holding the big coins, I'd also like to see them offer refunds in Bitcoin. So far all of the refund programs have been store credit for Bitcoin. It's too complicated to send back Bitcoin. Well if you're holding some, it's not too complicated. Just send back the same amount no matter what the dollar value is. I gave you some. You give it back. Blake Anderson. Well, I like New Egg and I've liked New Egg for a long time. I'm disappointed to see them waiting, but I really am excited that New Egg is going to take a Bitcoin directly. I think that there can be a negative impact on the market relative to them using liquidity towards letting go of Bitcoin and getting other stuff and then transferring that back into dollars. So that's a little bit of a leak in the system, but I think that the increased your Bitcoin adoption hopefully will be worth it. I do want to mention that gift to YFT. You can get gift cards with Bitcoin and spend those on Amazon.com which really unlocks a lot of buying power. So I use gift and my wife uses it free. They need to go and buy all kinds of stuff. So I'm excited about gift and about New Egg and really excited to hopefully have Amazon at some point look at how many gift cards from gift were spent there and how much Bitcoin paid for those. I think that would be a really cool article to see or even write or research. I'm sure whoever's in charge of the Amazon gift card program is not going to tell Amazon about the gift cards. It's not happening. It's just a promotion we're doing. That's why we're selling so many. It's not the Bitcoin coins. Exit question. Who's next? I know we say this all the time, but many had New Egg as their pick and now it's come true. So who's next? Chris Ellis. I don't know. It's impossible to say. I'd really like Paypal to get on board with it because they've been talking about it for a long time. Excellent. Guess, Christoph Atlas. Well, if you wanted to kind of complete the circle in terms of mining of these cryptocurrencies and then spending them, you would hope to see something like an energy provider accepting big coins for payments that would obviously be helpful to the miners. Blake Anderson. I think it could be really exciting to see a bigger company like Walmart or Amazon really, really, really breached the diet and come in and say we're going to accept Bitcoin and have everybody go, whoa, one of the biggest corporations on earth or the biggest if ending up what you're talking about is now taking it. And then, you know, people may disagree with the regulatory capture practices of Walmart and things like that, but hopefully they would use some of their weight and toss it towards good or neutral value as opposed to just continually capturing everything that they can. Good answers all, but the correct answer is Netflix. Netflix will accept Bitcoin. You'll be able to put in a certain amount of Bitcoin, subscribe at a monthly rate. They could just hold the bitcoins and just keep cashing out a little bit for you each month. It's online. It's digital. You should pay in bitcoins. Netflix. That's who's next. Question three, Silk Road, Silk Road Bitcoin sale, no boon to Ross Ulbrich, the fence fund. Ross Ulbrich, the alleged dread pirate Roberts is still in prison awaiting trial and even though the bitcoins from his alleged company have been auctioned off, his legal defense fund could use some donations. They're accepting donations at free Ross dot org, donate. Your thoughts on the Ross Ulbrich case? Just off, Adless. Ross is in a very tough position that I'm sympathetic towards. I know I think a lot of people are reluctant to donate to the cause because they're concerned about flushing their hard earned bitcoins down the legal drain. We don't really know if you give money to a legal defense fund. We don't really know how useful those funds are going to end up being. Are they going to take a year off as a sentence? Is it somehow possible through some kind of miracle mistake on the behalf of the prosecution that he would get off completely? It's really hard to say. It's not like what you would typically put your bitcoin towards where it's more obvious the return that you're getting on your investment. Even if people want to help Ross, I think that's why people are reluctant to donate bitcoins is because they're not sure exactly how much it's going to help him. I really feel for Ross, he's either a brilliant, somewhat very risk-taking, future thinking aggrist, perhaps the finest aggrist of all of our time. He's an unfortunate early bitcoin adopter who got caught up in some kind of federal prosecution that's going after the wrong person. I think most likely he probably is DPR, but we'll see what the facts of the case decide. I wish that there was something more that I could do to support him beyond just handing money over to his learn and hoping for the best, but that's what we're left with. Blake Anderson? Well, I think that the Christophe made a lot of very fair and valid points, but I think that what the case represents is the opportunity for the state to set a precedent relative to being able to pile all kinds of data through exploration onto somebody that they're going to charge with a crime. Then just say, we're going to put this macro criminal title on you, like Kingpin or something like that. Then you go through and just know that this orgy of evidence is going to have something in it. Then we're just going to say, there's more than a evidence when you don't need to prove anything that violates the right to face your accuser, the right to be able to defend yourself because you understand the charges. That pretty much fundamentally violates everything that justice stands for. If you are going to donate to the case, I think that that might be a really good reason. We don't know Ross, but we do know that the system has him in its jaws and that it's a dangerous system. If we can maybe get increased legal support, maybe argue from a standpoint of none of this is legal, that might be able to help him and I think that people maybe should donate for that reason. Chris Ellis? So actually Lynn got a really, really warm reception at PortFest and we spent a lot of time sort of trying to help her out and talking to her and trying to conjure some support for her talk. She was very nervous before she gave her talk, but she got a standing ovation when she did. In fact, actually, contrary to how that article sounds, they did actually raise 28.7 bit coins whilst they were at PortFest on the Tuesday. So it wasn't all bad. I would say that one of the things that I've been getting from people is that the reason they don't want to donate is because there's a perception and it comes across in the comments on the coin desk article that he's already made a lot of money as an individual, that in fact, he is one of the largest grossing early bit coiners ever that he made $80 million doing this thing. And actually, one of these comments is quite scathing. He says, you know, I'll start a large legal underground drug spasaw, soliciting for help with coding on this spasaw with various social network sites that all lead back to my real name. And then I'll order fake IDs from Canada, have those IDs sent to my actual residence, and then have a visit by Homeland Security offices questioning these items. And he goes on to basically lay in to drug pirate robots and behavior. But then I think later on, we get actually quite a wise comment from someone called Crypto Scythe. Actually, it says that nobody knows if he's actually guilty yet. And that basically he does deserve a defense. One of the points that Lynn made in her talk was that this actually breaks a lot of very important precedence that essentially you're just going to charge somebody for creating a space where people can trade. Well, you could do that, for example, just by, you know, the state owning a particular piece of land, you could say, well, whatever that you do on that land, the person that owns it is culpable. And the fact of whether or not he's made a lot of money whilst he was operating, this is besides the point, the fact is he doesn't have those funds right now and he does have the rights with defense. And that's one of the things that I think, you know, Lynn is really fighting for. So I think, you know, he definitely deserves all the help that he can get because otherwise this take this case isn't going to be well tested enough. It was very moving to hear Mrs. Albrecht speak and it is very unfortunate what's happened to Ross, although he is accused of running a very dangerous black market or dark market. He does deserve illegal defense. As many have said, this is very similar to the Craigslist case. Craigslist was declared in just an open carrier of its users. Craigslist was not held responsible for the action of its users. And this could very well be the case if you can get a proper legal defense. Moving on. Did you know we just got back from Washington, D.C. and New Hampshire, but we can't stop going places. Next week we're going to go to Silicon Valley to the Bitcoin Beauty's art show. And the week after with your help, madbitcoins.com will go to Chicago for Bitcoin and the Chicago way. New episodes of madbitcoins start next week. Get excited. Issue 4. Code as law. How Bitcoin could decentralize the courtroom. With excellent talk by Pamela Morgan at Bitcoin in the Beltway has become an excellent article by Vice. Which one of the potential improvements to the legal system interests you the most as we move away from centralized injustice towards decentralized justice. Video chatting with the court. Experts on juries for expert cases. Smart contracts. Justice, coin. Blake Anderson. W reconnected. I was so excited. I forgot what you asked me. Which one of the legal things excites you the most? Justice, coin. Smart contracts. Experts, juries. I think that they're all very, very exciting. I think that the availability of information and the fact that digital storage of value can make it a lot more decentralized and permanent by having fault tolerance turned down to pretty much zero. I think that it's going to have a lot of implications for law on discovery and the kind of work that we need to do to have justice. Basically, what happened a long time ago was we needed justice because we needed some agreements on natural law and then funding the justice system spiraling to the state. If we can decentralize justice and take some of that workload off of the state and put it into better systems, that's really, really exciting stuff. D'Avvy Barker. So by expert juries, do you mean the presentation in Washington, DC a couple of weeks ago? Yep. It's now an article. Right. So that, I think of all of them. I think that one interests me the most. And the reason is because that's the one that is equipped to deal with tort or unforeseen conflict, whereas smart contracts are precedent or sort of designed to preemptively resolve conflict. As we all know, most human conflict is unforeseen. So that one is the one that to me is the most interesting. I like the expert juries, too, because a lot of cases in the computer in the future are going to resolve computers. And you're going to need people that understand how computers work to really understand the cases. And we could skip a lot of that early explaining computers nonsense and get right to the case if we knew that we had several expert jurors, especially who could video chat in. Chris Ellis. Yeah, I really love that talk. It was the highlight, actually, of that day that I watched it and it was one of the best ones I saw at the whole conference. It's certainly the most forward thinking. I think one of the sort of issues with it that I would have is that the law does require a lot of interpretation. So the smart contracts to me, I still need to be a little bit more, I need more persuasion. I think the blockchain is a notarization service is a very, very good idea. I not only think the contract should be notarized in the blockchain. And I also think all of the discussion that leads up to the formation of that contract should be notarized in the blockchain because one of the main reasons why people end up in disputes is because they form what are called unstable agreements where one side kind of capitulates because they need something and they come under pressure or under duress. And so they sign when they, when the perhaps they shouldn't. But like Darvi, I also think that the jury selection was the best idea of all. I also think that the jury deliberation that they go through should also be documented and notarized will be encrypted. So that if there's a read trial or if there's a hung jury, a future jury can come back. Look at what went wrong in the first case and kind of learn from it. It might also get around the, some of the problems that you're likely to get with jury selection, which already is a fairly competitive thing in the US. As I understand it, their entire legal profession is dedicated to jury selection. There's a lot of profiling that goes on. So I think there could be a problem there because if you've got a wider pot of jurors to select from, it may be very tempting for a well-paid lawyer to make sure that you get just the right year for your case. But I said to her after her talk that I felt that one sort of line she should go with is just in time justice. That's what this is. One of the biggest problems with law at the moment is that the court, no matter how powerful it is, can't stop time and can't bring the court to you. One of the biggest problems with court cases is their emotional drain that they have on the individuals involved. So I think it's a very forward thinking thing and it's also about time that we started talking about the full range of capabilities that the blockchain has rather than this boring old conversation about currency and money. Kristoff Atlas. I actually hate juries. My perception of jurors is that the way that we choose jurors right now, this kind of idea that you select them amongst your peers, they would be randomly conscripted into leaving their occupations temporarily to give their time towards a court case. I think they make completely retarded decisions and they are easily manipulated by lawyers and judges and so forth. They're not even educated about what the law is or whether they have to abide by certain laws. It's just complete mess all over the world. So actually what I much prefer to as a model is arbitration services that compete based on reputation. They compete in open marketplaces like in open bizarre or something along these lines and they are pre-selected by participants attached to a contract. If there is a dispute that comes up, both of the parties have already selected a party that's going to come in who is going to arbitrate on their behalf. I also think that just generally speaking, if there are issues that human conflicts that come up that are not attached to contracts, like if someone commits a crime against you and you didn't have a pre-existing contract with them, that generally should be covered under other kinds of contracts, whether they are insurance contracts or dispute resolution contracts or whatever. I much prefer all of these approaches vastly over any kind of juror selection system and that's the type of thing that interests me the most. So I think out of those options, the smart contracts are the most compelling for me. Moving on, issue five. Inside the libertarian version of Burning Man, guns, booze and Bitcoin. The Washington Post takes aim at the Porcupine Freedom Festival in New Hampshire and finds many comparisons with another Freedom Festival, the Burning Man Festival in Black Rock City, Nevada. Of course there people won't be wearing guns. They hardly wear anything. And what good is a gun for other than killing and threatening? What are your thoughts on the Porcupine Freedom Festival? Any highlights or stories? Dovey Parker. Still muted. You're going to come to me first, huh? I had a great time and I am not a gun person and I'm not a booze person but I am a Bitcoin person and Bitcoin was present in spades. And so I had a good time. I caught some speeches. I think I participated in some of the best podcasts and radio broadcasts I've heard. And yeah, I mean it was a good time to have had by all the thing is it is to a size now where you can't see everything. And so you kind of have an opportunity to choose which festival you want to go to if that makes sense. I wasn't able to catch the build your own AR-15 workshop. Chris Ellis. You missed an absolute trick. You really did. There's nothing I like more than to make my own weaponry. No I thought this is a, I had a really good time like Darby says. The first thing that we actually did when we got there was we went on piece needs now. Got to meet Derek J. I got to meet Darby. And I got to spend a lot of time with Blake as well which I hadn't done at DC. If some reason Blake and I just hadn't really met that we had just obviously been in different rooms. We'd had a different conference. Gone to a different conference. But yeah, so I had a really, really good time and we were talking to him about the fact that everything at pork fest cost money because it's all supposed to be free market except there were no real arbitrage opportunities which meant everything cost quite a lot. And you were sort of, I liked what you kept bringing up Burning Man. You kept sort of talking about how everything is free and how that's, you know, that is kind of real freedom. And I did feel that there was some missed opportunities particularly with the laser display where they were like drawing like the laser messages on the roof of one of the buildings. And it was just used for advertising. This is true like free market and our capitalism, right? It was used for advertising all of the different products in the fair. And actually it could have been used to kind of, you know, put up some really good quotes or it could have been used to kind of engage with the audience and things like that. So I still like for me, there were still sort of things that I think could be done to kind of improve the experience, particularly for somebody like me who's coming in as an outsider who's kind of new to this, new to this scene. I definitely have an issue with the use of the term. Perhaps some of you more familiar with pork fest can, can educate me on this. Why if you are against the idea of a state, which you have what something called a free state project? Like I thought the idea was that it was supposed to be getting away from states. But as I understand it, you've got a free state project where libertarians are being asked invited to descend on the state of New Hampshire so that they can vote New Hampshire out of the union so that it can succeed from the United States. Now I don't know how the incumbent residents of New Hampshire feel about this. I can't imagine they're too happy that all these crazy libertarians descend from around America just for the purpose of trolling the US Constitution. But how does that work? How can you be like anti-state? Why was there an American flag flying in the main entrance? You come in, there's this huge star-spangled banner as soon as you come in through the gates. I was just sort of noticing some of these contradictions. Can I feel this question? Is that all right? Yeah. So the free state project is a work in progress and it is agnostic as to the question of a secession versus anarchy versus working within the system. So really all that the free state project is is a bus. And it says if you're interested in liberty, if you're interested in the mission statement of more freedom in your lifetime, move to New Hampshire and we'll sort it out when we get here. And so in the beginning, it was much more of a sort of libertarian party, libertarian working inside the system. And there's still a lot of that there like the libertarian alliance or whatever it's called. But over the years, it has gradually become more of an anarcho-capitalist, volunteerist project, even though the free state project itself is not endorsing that as a strategy that is sort of becoming especially what pork fest is. So it takes all kinds of the answer. Right. So not so much anarchy, but just very messy. I mean, is there a difference between anarchy and just kind of like, oh my god, what the fact lets us do it and try something? Yeah, absolutely. Anarchy is. Yeah. Yeah. Anarchy does not mean chaos. They're not synonymous. Anarchy is one of the old definitions is no god, no masters. Anarchy is basically referring to, let's keep an even keel as far as everything that we can relative to negative rights. And so we can oblige inaction on people, but we're not going to oblige positive rights in action on people. So anarchy really does have really specific and tenable definitions. And it's kind of tragic that in the modern lexiconic it's conflated with chaos so frequently. And will I be allowed to fly into this free state? Like will I need a visa? I mean, how is that going to work? Well, I'm not talking about it in terms of the free state. I'm just talking about the word itself. The free state is kind of, I was laughing as you were. But is it new? I can't believe you think about flying. You haven't even considered air traffic controllers. All of which you have quite a lot of rules. So I wouldn't expect any air traffic controllers in the free state. Yeah, how is that going to work, guys? Like how are you going to comply with the most universally recognized set of rules in the world, which is air traffic control? Even like North Korea respects the air traffic control. Like regulations are so- I'm going to go ahead. I think regulations are supposed to be a set to agree upon things that businesses do to keep people safe and to keep business regular. And if you don't have white papers and standards like ITIL or the information technology infrastructure library to give you best practices relative to IT project management, it doesn't work very well. So the market creates an incentive to do things that work well, whereas the government really does not work well like creating incentives. And when the government does create an incentive they usually do so by stealing from people. So it's un-then-loss in those terms almost every single time. Why is it different everything? If we have self-driving cars, why do we need a bunch of old white men sitting around in a tower telling people when to land and when they need to pick another few laps? Because there's the technology that says isn't there yet. I actually know so many works in that line of work and he said we're not there. The technology is not there yet because humanity was not capable of making that happen by now. I was just trying to do it. There's not a lot of training. I was just trying to put into that because they're fighting against all of the interested parties that want to maintain track the air traffic control. I mean they spend billions of dollars on their stupid outdated software so they continue running it on Windows 98 machines or whatever it is. So here's the thing. Air traffic control is most important when you're approaching an airport. And in an anarcho-capitalist world, an airport is private property, which means that they're going to have the particular air traffic control rules that they want on their plot of land if you're going to touch down on their plot of land. Now this is probably going to happen a lot like trucker lingo where there's this network of travelers that communicate over the radio and time is short and so they establish a slang and it's going to become a very easy to communicate very quickly the standards that are apparent at that airport. And we know that markets do this because we're all currently communicating over a thing called Wi-Fi. And there is no sort of like air traffic control for the Wi-Fi signal. The Wi-Fi is essentially a standard for it's an internet protocol that was established by the market and it was adopted by the market. The same way USB was adopted. The same way all of these sort of standards are established by... But you know, Dauvey, you did drop a couple times during this call. So perhaps we should create another agency to coordinate packets. We need air traffic. Should it be tax-time? Of course. We need more fault tolerance. Otherwise, it suffers from a tragedy of the common. So of course we'll need to forcibly extract those funds from taxpayers. Yeah. I think we can plan on landing in another state and then drive to the free state. No, because then I went... The whole point was to be honest. There will be any roads. There won't be any roads. He's going to fail to ride. All times we're having const常ataneous. We shouldn't even talk about this. I mean, it's very clear who's going to build the roads. We're going to have a Nuremburg style like mass trial for all previous bureaucrats and the sentence for their crimes will be indentured servitude building roads. You know the status of the public. Whatever the quality roads. Think about the quality of the roads. The status is not a quality. There's going to be poor quality to almost as a point. They're going to have to repair the roads. You're going to have to have another meeting where you talk about repaying the roads. There's going to be a lot of meetings on this free state. It can be very anarchist. To go back and just to follow the road. We'll just fly everywhere. We won't have cars anymore. We're just like crystal. Delorean. Self-flying. He can invent them and we can just fly everywhere. We won't need roads anymore. To go back to one of the previous questions as to how the locals in New Hampshire feel about being occupied by the free state project. When the free state project was first announced, the governor of New Hampshire actually invited them and asked them to pick New Hampshire as a state because at the beginning it was also Wyoming. It was also Hawaii. There were a whole bunch of other states on the list of potential destinations. But even now among the population there is natives of New Hampshire who have embraced the free state project and they call them pre-staters or granite staters. There are also those locals that hate the free state project. You get the anti-pre-key activists and stuff like that. How did we boondoggle Hawaii, man? How did that happen? Yeah. Hawaii is worse than California, man. It's too far of a stretch politically to move in this direction. This is going to be a long journey. Wyoming's cheap, man. How did it go? There is a free state Wyoming and you can also move anywhere. You can be a free state of one. That's libertarianism right there. That's the truth, but I just wanted to tell a story that I heard at pork fest that reminds me of this. Someone had written a short story. This is probably part of their story. They said, oh, the libertarian revolution has begun. This guy says he came out of his factory and he said, okay, guys, I work in this nuclear power plant over there. I'm the only one who can run it. I have to work there 24 hours, seven days a week. All I need is for you guys to bring me some food and some water so I can keep this plant running. Are you talking about the widest kids you know? Is that what you're talking about? You know how that turned out, right? Yeah, they'll beat up the guy with the colored teaching. The market took care of it. They only needed one or two nuclear explosions before the market took care of it. They didn't have a nuclear plant anymore. So there you go. Television teaching lessons. Kristoff, do you have any ideas on pork fest? We didn't come to you officially. Well, I was wondering, did you guys read the article that we were referencing? I thought that the guy who wrote it was kind of a douche. I mean, talk about trying to talk down and patronize the people and like, oh, well, hopefully libertarianism remains a far off ideal because it could never actually ever happen. In this way, no one will be able to prove they could never have had like, oh my goodness, what a jerk. You know, he's like some political writer for the DCB or whatever. So you wouldn't expect a whole lot more, but can't help but he like you said, oh, I made a bunch of friends at a pork fest. So I'm going to keep coming back in the future if they have me. Can't help but wonder if some of the people that hung out with him and thought, oh, this guy seems nice enough in person. They read the article and they were like, hmm, it's not really my friend anymore, you know? I thought that was quite a poor treatment of the ideas around pork fest. I'll certainly admit that there are a lot of smelly, unshaven, unprincipled, not very productive people that show up to gatherings like this, no offense, dovey, but, but you know, that doesn't have anything to do with the ideas whatsoever. I mean, the idea that somehow this reflects poorly on an opposition to aggressing against other people. That is, uh, pathetically bad idea to try and, um, you know, like to sneak into this article and I got into Washington Post. So yeah, but I mean, though it's sort of my take on the article of having to hear people how to different take on it. It did seem very much like it covered the surface of the event, not the substance of the event. It was there to make it a parade, make it was kind of a fun article. He made a little fun of their dance party too. I thought that was a little low. They tried hard. Blame. I'm going to go back to my head. Go ahead. Well, first of all, I was a last minute, a Chandee, so I came out there and I was like, I'm going to stay with my friend and you all fly out on Monday and so I, you know, went out there and was like, I friend, what's going on? Kind of come over. He's like, I'm not flying out till Thursday. And I was like, whoops, that's not good. So we'll be paying in things like the nicest guy. I was like, you can see with my family and the tent on the floor. We'll move the dogs instead. I was like, thank you, man. I don't have to sleep outside. I might not die from this. It could be great. And then Dobby's like, you could sleep in this caravan. I'm sleeping on the floor. And I was like, oh, Dobby, thank you so much. And at the end of the night, we got a Dobby's caravan. And he was like, oh, dude, there's an extra bunk bed with like lemons and pillows and stuff. It was like a bed. Sweet, dude. I slept in a bed every single nightmare condition. I had a really nice caravan. I had a great time of pork fast. I had a really nice party that I met was really, really nice. Really, really awesome. I made a lot of really good friends. I'd never been there before. You know, the dance party I got overloaded a few times and you could understand why maybe it freaks some people out. But it was fun to go ahead and then you get overloaded and you go out and look up at the stars. And it was just an amazing time. I've never been anywhere like it. So it was great to... Stars were very nice. Dobby, you have a story from pork fest? I actually have an idea for pork fest next year. This is sort of a practical experimental experiment. And I think Thomas that you'll appreciate this because you and as well as I have noticed that there is, let's say, a glut of firearms as far as the market demand is concerned at pork fest. But there is also a great depression in the quality of the Wi-Fi signal. And so I think if you created a Wi-Fi signal and the only rule was this Wi-Fi signal is a gun-free zone. Like, come, just you know, we'll give you a claim ticket. You can then you get your password. You can use the Wi-Fi as much as you want. But we want you to turn in your firearms. I'm going to be really interesting to see how people responded to something like that. Sounds a bit top-down to me. Sounds a bit horror. Not totally voluntary. It's totally voluntary. You own your Wi-Fi signal. That's the thing. I don't think they'd like it. Checking their firearms at the door. What is this? The Wild West? Then they don't need a Wi-Fi signal. They've decided that the importance of owning a possession of open-carry firearm is more valuable to them economically than access to a Wi-Fi signal. It's just a straight, practical choice. Well, and that's interesting. Once we got all the guns, we'd have all the Wi-Fi and all the guns. They want to be amazing. Right. The people talking about pork fest. And then we make believe and play pretend to government and then take over all the pork fest with all the Wi-Fi and guns that we've used for communication in the South Pole. The libertarians would never see that coming. They would never see that. You would be taking out guns. You could be like, we're going to take your guns. We took your guns and we're turning off the Wi-Fi. It's over. It's all over. Let's go to Burning Man. All right. Moving on to the quieties Wi-Fi, the reporter's stolen firearms. All right. There are no questions and there are no answers. That's great. That means we get to move on to predictions or a story of the week. Are you ready? Everyone who's never ready. We're going to look at you first. And you know who you are. Are you ready? Blake Anderson with a prediction or a story of the week. I don't know much about computers. My mom got one. She put some games on there and I played them. And I think that'll probably get you to have to keep playing games in the future. I just did my prediction. Alias. I have not a hacker without an alias. I have no identity. I have no identity, man. I don't know. I also have a company that's working on the company. I'm hoping Mr. Anderson. All right. Welcome back to you. We'll go to Chris. He had his hand up. Yeah. So yesterday, I went to the leads forefront of FinTech event, which was like a business conference with a lot of people from the legacy banking system there. And I went with my friends to see her bed who's a good friend of mine. She does UX and design work in London. She's always been very supportive of me. So she wanted me to appear on a panel about cryptocurrencies. We were interviewed and asked to give our questions. There was also a chap called Kevin. I forget his last name from the Bitcoin Foundation. Bitty, Licious were there. It's a fellow were there. So it was good fun. And I wanted to talk a little bit about it because I had some things to report. I was sort of live tweeting from the event. I was surrounded by men in suits. I did also go undercover. I was wearing a suit normally. I just wear jeans and a t-shirt. But so I was wearing a suit. And in particular, this slide came up, which I, maybe I'm misrepresenting the speaker slightly, but essentially the title says protecting the industry, which is kind of how I felt a lot of this sort of thing was. So these were the people in finance who were semi-consciously aware that things were changing underneath them. And they like going to conferences and talking about those changes. But I did feel a kind of lack of energy and enthusiasm and genuine understanding of the blockchain technology. When we came to talk about Bitcoin, given that it's now five years old and given that these people work in the finance sector, we did have to kind of give them like an Eli-5 interpretation of Bitcoin, which I felt was a shame. I would have liked it if more people had already understood it. I would also have liked it if more people had stuck around for it as well. And I did hear quite a lot of buzzwords. I heard a lot of things about community and about helping people make better decisions about their data and all this kind of thing. But one of the things that really comes across about these kinds of events is, this was the turnout. So this hall was actually three quarters full when we got there in the morning, but by the time we did that, it was less than half full, which I felt was a bit of a shame. I think one of the things I wanna say is that data is the new oil. And so this is what you now make money out of. That the information about what you spend your money on is actually more important than the money. And this is something that is true and has crept up on us very, very slowly. I would say that money has been digitized for the last 30 years. And the banks just assumed, and I think a lot of people, particularly in the tech sphere, particularly in the dot-com boom, just assumed that if you shared your data that it was perfectly okay for them to monetize it, the paradigm shift that I hope I got across at the event was not so much the technological shift because Bitcoin isn't that innovative. A lot of the technology it uses is well understood cryptographics that go back 20 years. The innovative thing about it was the values innovation that it brought, that honesty had to pay more to them fraud, that you wear the inside on the outside, that the blockchain is public, that everybody has a copy of it. And I do feel not just in FinTech, and I also feel it a lot in East London as well, where this tech industry is booming at the moment, that there is a real fear of the loss of living standards now that a lot of the jobs have gone. So a lot of, you've got a lot of middle class people that in my view were overpaid, including me for the last 10 years, they've lost a lot of the jobs because those jobs were automated away. You're talking about a class of people, particularly in high finance, who had no problem with your automation of manual jobs when it was happening to the working classes and when it was happening in the factories, but now that it's happening to their industry, they're almost kind of like, they're using the right terms, they're saying the right things, but what they're doing instead of really innovating, is they're building incubators and accelerators. So the most popular startup category at the moment is the incubator accelerator, right? Not the startup inside of it, there was actually a panel discussion that talked about incubators and accelerators. And it was full of community and how you engage people and mentors and all of this stuff. And then at the end, I asked, well, what is the success rate? How many successful exits have you had from these incubators? And the answer I got was, well, they've only been going for seven years so we don't have enough data, seven years, and you don't have enough data. I'll tell you what the answer is, virtually none of these startups succeed. Failure is the norm, 99% of them fail. What these startups really are is just a way of churning people so that we can all work out who we wanna work with and who we don't wanna work with. That's what they're really about. One of the biggest problems you have when you're working a startup, is communication and working with other people because one of the most prominent features of joining a large company is the communication system. You have to use their particular protocols and procedures for communication. Basically, you become an email monkey, you're shuffling a lot of spreadsheets, you're making a lot of PowerPoint slides for the boss's presentation, you're doing all the things that the boss doesn't wanna do. Essentially, the boss and the people above you make money out of your time. They make money by relying on your effort. That's how it works. But nowadays in the information age, you bring the means of your own production to your work. Every individual now has their own laptop, they have their own software, they have that own way of doing things. Some of us like to use trello, some of us like to use Google Drive. We've all got our own habits and our practices that means that when you recruit someone, when you decide you wanna work with someone, you're really hiring an individual. I felt a little bit that the problem I had with it, the whole talk on the incubators and accelerators was that not enough was being said about the truth of the situation, which is that the smart money is being a middleman. If you are running a coffee shop a bar or an incubator accelerator in London right now, you're doing pretty well because you're selling the shoppers in spades, only the idiots are digging for the gold in particularly in tech city, right? Because none of these startups are going anywhere. Even when they do go somewhere, the exit strategy is to sell to Facebook and Google. Essentially, you're not there to disrupt anything, okay, you're not there to try and make something payingless for a consumer or try to understand their problems with some clever UX. What you're really there to do is to get them to enter their personally identifiable information into a database. You have to put a nice shiny wrapper on the outside, do lots of nice marketing, hire an SEO guy, get a hundred thousand followers on Twitter and just pump that message over and over again. You know why? Because the underlying possibility that behind advertising is that consumers can't be trusted with their purchasing decisions. You have to tell them what they want and you are going to tell them what they want. You know why? Because you've got five angel investors who aren't running charities. They gave you that money and they expect to return. And I know a lot of startup founders that have been particularly stressed, they come every Friday night, they come to Silicon drink about and they're drinking. They're drinking because it's been so stressful the week before because they borrowed this money, they lived beyond their means. And I think the reason behind all of this is that we are not willing as middle class, British people, we are not willing to let go of our living standards. The last 10 years we got used to a certain lifestyle that we were living in a two bed apartment. You know, it was in East London. And now those rental prices are going up because all the suffering wealth funds come in from overseas and they've been buying up a lot of the London property which has been pushing the prices up. The cost of living and earnings have, you know, just gone completely separated. So a lot of my friends now have to move out of London. They can't even afford to live there anymore. And I think that's really at the heart of it. I've seen a lot of very good people make bad decisions because they don't want to piss off the right person. They've invited people onto our shows to speak some truth about some of the things they've gone through and said, well, I don't really want to offend that guy. I might need him in the future. So a lot of these compromises, people don't feel that they can tell the truth because they don't want to lose out financially. And I feel a slight sense of, I don't know, lament. But I will just end on one good thing though, which is that this is good for leads. Like this is a city in the north of England, not too far from Hull, where we're working on the Hull Coin project. And I really liked the fact that this is finally somewhere outside of London in the United Kingdom. It does have some really fast access to, I think, the states via the internet that they were saying so they put a lot of data centers there. And it would be very good if the United Kingdom could decentralize and actually bring some of the wealth outside of London and Southeast. I'm going to start an accelerator for incubators and an incubator for accelerators. That's what you should do. I'll see you in decentralized court because I'm doing it too. Ha ha ha. Ha. Go ahead, Christophe. So today is July the 4th, which of course is Independence Day in the United States. You know, some white guys on, a couple hundred years ago, it got together and did something. And we celebrated by burning shit down with fireworks and drinking beers and eating lots of brighted products with beef products. And so I think this gives us a pretty good sense of like, what this whole American experiment, this idea that you can constrain the state, the Leviathan of the state by writing shit down on paper and expecting people to follow that like the Bible. I think that, you know, we've really seen how that pans out. The United States government is now the largest government in the history of humanity has the largest military, the military is much larger and better funded with more nuclear weapons and cyber weapons and all the other kind of weapons that you could possibly want to have. Much larger than, you know, the next several countries combined. And this is what July 4th has come to mean is like, it's a little, we do these, we participate in these trivialities on this date that no longer really, it doesn't have very much meaning any longer, it's just a, it's the, it's the day that we used to commemorate a failed experiment. The good news is that we're moving on to new experiments. So today is also the two year birthday of the crypto note cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, which was the first cryptocurrency to come out. This was one of the most advanced privacy centric all coins to come out. In fact, it's in some respects not even an all coin because it's not simply a fork of the Bitcoin project. There's a lot of speculation about who may have invented Bitcoin or a crypto note. We don't exactly know. It probably was a team of cryptographers. They may have been working on a Bitcoin previously. Satoshi himself may have even worked on on Bitcoin. We really don't know. But what we do know about the project is that it's actually the, what they brought to the table beyond just what Bitcoin did, what they were able to achieve by incorporating new cryptographic elements like ring signatures into crypto note. It was a remarkable breakthrough, like a significant advancement on the template of Bitcoin. And so what this tells us is that there is not just a single Satoshi out there. There are dozens or hundreds or thousands of Satoshi's out there all with incredibly gifted minds and brilliant ideas and a desire to reboot humanities attempts to free themselves. That whatever happened on this day in 1776, we recognize that this is a failed experiment. And we're ready to move on to new areas. We don't need a free state project. We don't need a libertarian in Congress. We don't need to take over some abandoned state elsewhere and create and capistan there. The future includes everyone. And it does through technology, a technology that's freely available to everyone that was just to participate. And no one will be left behind in this new evolution of humanity. I think that's very important. It's not merely about providing freedom to yourself, or to your family, or to your friends, but this is a kind of revolution that is going to sweep the entire world almost simultaneously. I mean, it is simultaneously, if you look at the overarching scope of history, of human history, it's going to take place in a flash in the long history of humanity. And I think we're really going to get something done this time. I think that we're really going to achieve something and 300 years from now, they won't be looking back at July 4th and saying, well, crypto notes and bike coin were invented on this day a few hundred years ago, but well, that never panned out to be very much. This whole cryptocurrency thing, we thought it would be, we had such high expectations for it, and it turned out to be always, because it's not a contradiction in terms unlike the idea of a minimalist state. And so I have incredibly high expectations and hopes for what we're going to accomplish in this cryptocurrency space. I think it's going to be amazing. And I certainly won't live long enough to see everything that will come to fruition as a result of this, but I really think that I will see a lot of change in my lifetime as a result. Very inspiring speech, Christoph. It's also the same Independence Day where Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum saved us from those space aliens. They uploaded a computer virus. The aliens were also running Macintosh, Blake Anderson, Story of the Week or Prediction. Well, I was just going to talk a little bit about CryptoBiz Magazine. They had their second issue that came out. I got a early copy of it and I looked at it and it's really, really great. It's that digital magazine CryptoBizMag. You can find it on Google. I wrote an article for their first issue. I didn't have time to write one for their second article or for their second issue, but it's a really good magazine and it's got a lot of money and effort and time for them to the quality and doesn't have a lot of us percolation yet. So tell your friends and it's a really cool digital magazine. I think anyone that follows me on Twitter, Bitcoin Blake, I think it is, it's a free subscription to the magazine. So they tweeted that at me today and I reached we did it so that's pretty cool. I'm good friends with Nathan Woznak, who's the VP of CryptoBiz. He's a really good guy. So I talk to him almost every day. Also, Chicago's coming up and I'm a backup speaker and I think that people almost always pull out in my topic is gonna be what was Satoshi thinking about when he wrote the white paper, what was Satoshi's goal in 2008, what was happening geopolitically and why did he write it and what kind of feature sets that he decided to incorporate and why and what would have been the negative progress represented by maybe different choices. So I'm pretty excited to get a chance to talk about that in Chicago if nobody pulls out that anything called, maybe turn it into an article and pretty stoked about that. Davi Barker. So I have kind of a story end of prediction and what it is is we sort of gave birth to a meme in Washington DC and that meme is titled Such Oz Much Wow. And what it is is so maybe you guys have heard this before. The original Wizard of Oz is allegedly an allegory for precious metal where the Golden Brick Road is the road to prosperity and the Emerald City is green like a green backed currency and there's nothing behind the curtain. And so what we're doing is we're writing a Wizard of Oz for the crypto millennium in which it is an allegory for Bitcoin and so Dorothy is an old woman. She's running for governor and her new dog Doge discovers the Ruby slippers, choose them to pieces and lands himself in Oz unexpectedly and of course Oz is in ill repair and whatnot. So what's interesting about this is that nobody is claiming to own it. We've all sort of contributed little pieces of it. I've started typing up people's handwritten notes and I'm putting it on my Facebook wall. I'm probably going to put it on to Bitcoin not bombs as page. But my prediction is that this story, this meme is going to explode and we're going to lose control of it. And maybe we'll write it as a short story, maybe we'll publish it somewhere, but because there's no author, because it's open source, because it's not copyrighted, it's going to go viral. And we're going to see people making little YouTube animations of Doge and Oz and we're going to see people making little video game adaptations and we're going to see big Hollywood productions of Doge in Oz. And we won't see a penny for it because we didn't copyright it. But I think that we will have as powerful of an effect on the culture as the original Wizard of Oz has had. And that's prediction and a story. So now moving on to my prediction. Zero tolerance of cryptocurrency on exchanges week has started out slow, but I can now confirm that all of my bitcoins are safely secured on bit-encrypted paper wallets. Step by step instructions and videos on the way. We will not stop until your bitcoins are stored in paper wallets. Own your own keys, store your bitcoins on paper today and tweet about it. And we are serious. We will go to the Chicago Convention if you guys like to throw down about $450 to get some airfare. I guess that's around 0.70.8 in the Bitcoin range these days. So check that out as well. Chicago's not far away just a couple of weeks. But now we're out of time. Until next time. Bye, bye.