The Bitcoin Group, the American original, for over the last 10 seconds, the sharpest satosis, the best bitcoins, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Chris Ellis, from At Mr. Chris Ellis on Twitter. Hello, everyone. Hey, good to be here. Christoph Atlis from anonymous bitcoinbook.com. I have checked my privilege at the door. And I'm Thomas Hunt from Bad Bitcoins, and we're also joined by Blake Anderson from At Bitcoin Blake on Twitter. Say hi, Blake. Definitely Julian Wilpayment are not happy that I'm hogging the spotlight with this interview. I'm not going to get the whole time. They don't get any turn at all. We're told that Julia and Wilpayment are also there. But moving on to issue one, issue one, New York unveils Bitcoin license rules. As expected, New York State is leading the way in Bitcoin regulation, with a goal of creating an exchange where users could never lose their own money, except through trading fees and losses. But at the same time, not having rules that are so burdensome or unwieldy that the technology can't develop. The last part is a direct quote from Super Nintendo Loskey. Has the NYDFS succeeded in their goals? Chris Ellis. Yeah, so we've been talking about this a lot already on the show we did this morning on Chris before coffee and also today as well and yesterday. So yeah, I've got a really good Reddit post up here that comes from Eliza. He says that the Bitcoin DRM is a bit licensed as essentially the same as DRM for your music. Just like DRM, makes it impossible, just plain, plain, painful to lendage to books music. This is a freedom that the atoms enjoy. But essentially, you take a technology and then you deliberately break it. The same way that we've seen with things like DNS. So I've exhausted all my opinions on what I think is absolutely that shit crazy and insane. But I will get some popcorn. I'll sit back. I'll watch it play out. I'd be really interested to see how other states respond to this and watch the world as it gets smaller and smaller and smaller and some of the smaller players on the planet actually use this as an opportunity. Megan Lord. And the same way that the money laundering regulations that were passed off through the financial crisis haven't really stopped all of those so-called bad things that you could be doing with money. These aren't going to stop people from losing money on Bitcoin or any of these other problems that it seeks to address. I think that this maybe seen as good for some Bitcoin businesses who are already pro-regulation and have been kind of waiting to see where the regulatory climate is going to go. But ultimately, I don't know that most Bitcoiners are really even going to follow them. New York is notorious for passing these ridiculous laws that don't stop any of the problems that they're trying to stop. And I think it's ridiculous. I think it's something that they're trying to control something that I think at some level they realize they can't control in the same way that they can semi-control the legacy banking system. I mean, people still get caught from money laundering things and some of these other regulations to their violations of regulations. But there are a lot of people who fall through the cracks even with that. And I think with Bitcoin it's going to be even more so. So I think this is really just something to kind of scare people with maybe. And I don't think there was any intention of it being an easy regulation that's going to be it's not going to stifle the technology. I don't think the regulation can stifle the technology anyway. But I don't view it as a very light touch. We're just going to make this peaceful so it can kind of grow and encourage the use of technology. But we need to protect people. It undermines a lot of the key parts of Bitcoin. And you need to be, it doesn't matter what industry or any of what investment you're in, you're going to lose sometimes. But there's no protection against that. And with Bitcoin it is still a feature that once you send those Bitcoin they can't be sent back. There doesn't need to be any central authority that I can alter that in any way. Unless it's very, this is very coin. Unless it's very coin. Very, very central. It's very central. Very centralized. So yeah, I mean, the regulations, I expected it to come out of New York. Honestly, I think they're going to be probably the most heavy handed when it comes to regulation. But I don't know that other people will necessarily follow that. It's just like the old poem, Humpty Dumpty, where all the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't put Humpty back together again. But they're sure going to try. Christoph, Atlas. Yeah, so someone posted the proposed bit licensing regulations on GitHub. So since it's on GitHub, of course I decided to fork it. And I'll just read from a little bit of my fork here. I shortened it down quite a bit. So definitions, license, license of relevant, no person shall with or without a license of pain from the super intended as provided in this part. Find yourself unable to download the latest version of various Bitcoin clients toward open bizarre or various other software projects that circumvent the legacy financial system. Persuant to section A, do whatever you want and let the market decide. So if you're interested in reading the rest of my little fork here, you can find that on my Twitter feed. What's the bit with the wake up in the morning, but thing? What was that? Oh, that was application fees. So if you want to apply for my license, you just wake up in the morning. And that's for sure. So there's no there's no. There's no. Especially with that. I do that anyway, Christoph. Yeah, so like really you've already you've already you're already licensed basically. Chris, I mean, I think you're good to go. Oh, so here's the funny thing. So like, I had to just imagine like Ben Moskey was like, he you know, type this all out or he had a secretary doing he was like, man, this is this is fucking brilliant. All right. So we're going to make sure that people keep their coins. So we're going to we're going to require people to have a security plan. They're going to have they're going to have to hire someone that's in charge of security. That's going to fix everything and and we'll make them submit some paperwork and they're going to have to do security testing. We're not going to give any special, you know, a specificity added to that, but they're going to have to do testing. And so like we'll just have it's too bad we didn't have this earlier like Mt. Gox never would have happened. And you know, we're just we're so fucking pro. I mean, I wish that the market could conceive of such an advanced plan for securing customer funds. I mean, what would they do without us? No, that's not what he thought. Like what he thought was, while I'm getting a lot of pressure to keep this legacy banking system going as long as possible, like draw this bullshit, this mountain of crap, this helium inflated shit bag, keep draw it out as long as possible so that the banksters can, you know, can can can build the the public for as much money as possible before it all explodes. And then they can, you know, right before the shit hits the fan, they'll all dump their money into gold. And and mining companies and, you know, all the other stuff that will that will fill that will fare so well when there's an economic collapse. And I think that's pretty much the modus operandi of people like Ben Mosky is they they served their their higher masters. I don't even know if they're in a doubt that they're really like in on this conspiracy. I think that they are their useful idiots to the people that are going to make a lot of money off of extending the lifespan of this legacy banking system as long as possible. And I don't think they even realize that's what makes them so persuasive, you know, that they think that they are somehow combating terrorism. And you know, that was another thing that I included in my my bit license regulations fork is I added into the definition section a definition of terrorism, which is a violent act or series of acts that are intended to create fear, perpetrated for religious, political or ideological goals. And of course, almost everything that the US government does that state governments do that local governments do could be categorized under terrorism itself. So they're not combating terrorism. They're not helping to keep customer funds secure. I saw no mention of the many invented security measures for protecting customer funds in this proposed regulation. They're already way behind what the market has come up with. And they're always going to be behind because they have no incentive to actually protect customer funds. This is just a way for them to get a cut of what's going to go on in New York. I think that will work for a little while just because New York has been like the capital, you know, of financial crap. I don't think that it will continue to be that way because there's just no way they're going to be able to spread this kind of regulatory capture evenly over the entire planet. Eventually, people will find these little pockets of less regulation. Eventually, we will get to the point where we don't even need to interface with the banking system. We will just stay in the crypto economy. At that point, they can't do anything whatsoever other than going after specific individuals. They can't cast a wide net and require people to do a certain way in a particular geographic area. At that point, it's game over for them really. So it's a delaying tactic and they're going to succeed at that. Isn't it cute that he just posted this to Reddit as if he gives a flying fuck about what Reddit has to say about his proposed regulations? The next day that was at the top of Reddit was, hey, Ben Lovsky, we don't give a shit about your proposed regulations. Why don't you go take them and stuff them up their ass and see if we can see if we care. I think that's what Reddit has to say by and large about these regulations. The fact that he would post this to some popular website for comment is just completely silly. They're going to ignore any kind of feedback that they get that would actually be constructive. Exit question. Will other states copy and paste New York's laws? Is this beginning of an end to an incredible period of Bitcoin freedom? Chris Ellis? Well, I don't know, but if you want to put Ben Lovsky in violation of his own regulations, why don't you send him a $1 donation via change ship right now on Twitter? There you go. I hope he does all the relevant pay for work in order to comply with that, because apparently change ship would be in violation of the New York regulations. So, you know, don't fund all those terrorists with change ship now, will you? Megan Lord. No, no. So, like New York is notorious for coming up with these crazy draconian laws trying to regulate every aspect of your life, whether it's like a ban on the size of soda you can have, or any of these other ridiculous things that have come up. And maybe California has followed in some ways, some similar regulations and laws that are really ridiculous. But the rest of the country is pretty much said, no, that's even too extreme for us. I think the US is becoming less of this kind of model. It's not really a model if it culture. There's so many differences between each state that I don't think they're going to follow suit. And I think it's important to remember that we actually have the advantage here, like Christophe said, they're writing this law not really even I don't think they have a firm grasp of the technology. I don't think they have a deep understanding of it. And I think this is going to be a case where, you know, how you have these regulations that are passed. You have these very, very wealthy people who are able to always fund the loopholes and benefit them. I mean, you have corporations who don't pay any kind of taxes. You have all of these loopholes that, you know, if you're in the know and you have enough money, you can find and exploit for your own benefit. Well, we're the ones who have the loopholes now. We actually understand the technology. Even if you do pass these regulations, there's going to be so many ways around. I mean, I know they're expecting a lot of people to comply. And yeah, maybe some of these larger exchanges are something they will comply. But I don't think your average person is in, like Christophe said, would change ship. Are they even going to follow their own regulations? Are they even going to follow their own laws? Because they don't already. So why, you know, I don't expect them to follow this one either. And I think Bitcoin, Bitcoiners are clever enough to find a lot of ways around it. If it does become more widespread, if, if, you know, this translates to like, you know, on a national level or something like that. But at the moment, I think a lot of states are going to be holding out and not jumping the gun and waiting to see where this technology goes. There's so many stories every, you know, every week we hear about these new businesses who are getting involved in Bitcoin. And, you know, it's not stopping them, you know, that there are regulations or aren't regulations. It's not necessarily stopping them. So I think you're to see a lot more states kind of waiting and seeing. And I think New York, I mean, it was definitely expected. But I think they're really shooting themselves in the foot with this because I think what it comes out to is the Bitcoiners understand the technology better than the regulators. And they're going to go around it. Kristoff Atlas. So all of these regulations around finances, always and forever are based on collecting taxes. To make sure that they are able to collect taxes and that there's enough taxes collected to fulfill their budget requirements and so forth. So right now, there are going to be some states that think that they can kind of, you know, cuddle up to Bitcoin businesses and draw more into their economy. And for a little while, people will continue to pay their taxes on Bitcoin related businesses. And that will all be fine with them. And those states will compete with places like New York. But in the long run, I think there's going to be a tipping point where there will be no state that will be able to actually financially benefit off of supporting Bitcoin related businesses or Bitcoin related activity because fundamentally Bitcoin competes with their business plan. Their business plan revolves around collecting taxes, making sure that they're able to track finances and and keep people from evading taxes and also to borrow, borrow, and then borrow some more. And you can't do that with Bitcoin as long as people are not willing to accept Bitcoin IOUs. You can't you can't issue, you know, government bonds based on on Bitcoin. So there's going to be a tipping point, you know, regardless where the states start out, they're eventually going to become quite unfriendly towards Bitcoin. And I think that in the long run, people things will get more and more adversarial. You'll see more fake stories about Bitcoin and terrorism. They'll start hearing more about systemic risk with respect to Bitcoin and how it's it's undermining these critical aspects of the economy, which really can be interpreted as undermining the financial security of banksters and people that work for the government. And eventually, all states will become quite adversarial towards Bitcoin. There's no happy medium between states and Bitcoin as far as I can see. Moving on, issue two, choose your own story, Bitcoin and business. Bitcoin business is booming at cheap air where they've sold more than $1.5 million in flights, hotels, and even train bookings at cheapair.com. Not if, but when, not now, but soon. The deck is stacked and e-commerce in general is preparing to go the full Bitcoin with Japanese super giant Rakuten, perhaps leading the way. And in lighter news, Bitcoin search results fixing. Did a mining company really just buy Buttcoin.org to transform a negative article to turn a piece of shit into a piece of sexy? And boom, just like that, this is not the right link. Dell accepts Bitcoin. Dell has just thrown their hands into the ring. What's the most exciting story? Megan Lord. They're all really exciting stories. I really like the cheap air story that they're doing so well. This is an example of a company who's thriving since taking Bitcoin. And I want to hear more stories like that because you hear a lot of times these businesses will start accepting Bitcoin. But you don't really hear a lot of follow up of what happened after they took Bitcoin. Was it good for their business? Did it impact it at all? And I'd really like to see follow up in general without. But so I think that's great that there's been evidence that it's really helped their business. I think it's a great way for a lot of Bitcoiners to do a lot of traveling. So I think it's an obvious choice that you should be able to buy your tickets with Bitcoin. And I mean, maybe this is idealistic. When I think of flying in Bitcoin, I'd like to see a company similar to Uber, but with planes, totally Bitcoin funded. I think that would be really cool. And like I said, that's probably a little idealistic, but wouldn't it be awesome if we could get Bitcoin into completely circumvent the TSA? Because I don't fly. I drive a lot of places. I mean, I'm driven across the country even to get to places. And I have changed my mind on that. I will fly if I have to now. But the whole experience is such an uncomfortable experience for me that I don't really want to have to go through that. So I'd like to see even smaller, you know, private I'm sorry, private pilots taking Bitcoin kind of expanding to that. But just the fact that you can buy tickets from some of these other places with Bitcoin, I think it's a good step in the right direction. Christoff Atlas. Yeah, that's a cheap error. The notches success they've had, it makes sense. You definitely, when you go to these different conferences, you see people, you meet people from all over the world and you know, people in the Bitcoin space, it certainly do travel quite a bit. And so I'm not surprised whatsoever to see that they're finding a lot of success there. I think it is true that there is going to be a diminishing returns in terms of, you know, being a company that's an early adopter of Bitcoin when the when the flood of Bitcoin accepting businesses kind of takes place and it's going to be somewhat unremarkable in that regard. But yeah, I think that's fantastic. And I certainly, I'm really noticing recently how convenient it is to purchase stuff with Bitcoin without having to convert it to fiat and go through that whole series of hoops that really does just make the whole, if you're a person that has a lot of Bitcoin, it makes your life a lot easier when you can just go directly through Bitcoin. Chris Ellis. So I'm looking forward to you coming to the UK. When are you doing that? You're going to fly on cheap ads on or what? Well, cheap ads. I was having a contest on Twitter where you can tweet them and they'll give you a plane ticket to London. So I tweeted and I got favorited by cheap air and followed by them. So I guess I can't contest, you know, you're in the race. You're in the lottery. So did you want me to take you to one of the really exclusive high class Bitcoin events that we often hold just for like bankers and regulators? I mean, it'll only cost you $2,000 a ticket. I have to wear suits like this, get a top item. Everyone wears a top hat there. I'll fit in quite well. And a bow tie as well. Big bow tie. Yeah. Actually, we do have the Scottish Bitcoin conference coming up soon. Someone's trying to see if they can get me to speak there and stuff. So maybe we can go up to that. So I definitely think that is the story of the week. Cheap air. Everyone chooses cheap air. No love for Dell. Moving on to issue three. Let's see. I was going to do an exit question. Ah, whatever. Very coin. Hacked. Mid-pal had too much very coin in their hot wallet and got hacked hard. The problem is the exchange lost more than 30% of the available very coin on the market and very coin is proof of stake. There could now very easily be a 51% attack. It was then that the very devs decided to fork the very blockchain and return the very coins to mint pal. Did the very coin devs do the right thing? Is very coin decentralized? Is this idea coming to Bitcoin soon? Christoff Atlas. I don't know that I would say that this action shows that it's centralized. Really, I mean, there are very coin developers and there are main developers of each of the coins that are out there. Certainly if people want to jump ship, they can always not go with the fork or they can create their own fork and try to create their own alternate, very coin development team and maybe that will happen sometime in the next few months where people, if there are enough people that who are upset about this fork and this rollback take in place, then maybe they will choose a new designated very coin team. I think eventually we're going to have to see that with some all coins. It's going to have to happen in the future if we keep saying to people that it's anyone can contribute to Bitcoin. There isn't like a core team. We have to see that happen at least once. I think that would be very positive in a lot of ways and maybe put the fear of God into the Bitcoin developers a little bit who can be slow poke sometime and not take a lot of not take a lot of risk with the the features that they add to Bitcoin. I think it does set kind of it's just kind of a precedent that makes people and investors nervous if you can just roll back the coin and the majority of people go with that. I think that makes people nervous. In the end, it probably was reasonable. We're talking about restoring millions dollars worth of stolen very coin as opposed to in the process rolling back $4,000 worth of very coin transactions, $4,000 less than the millions. It also points out something very interesting about the proof of stake mechanism because people have been saying about proof of stake for quite a while now that it's 51% proof. If you want it to get 51% of the the the varic coins or the pier coins or the next coins, well then you're just going to have to buy them through the exchange and the exchange race is going to go through the roof and you'll never yield it's going to go to infinity. You'll go completely broke before you ever get 2%. This kind of pie in the sky stuff when it comes to proof of stake. That's that's silly. That's not how you would do it. You would spend much less than that amount of money hacking people, social engineering attacks, all that kind of stuff. The human elements, the security weaknesses that we all have are really the the weak point of any coin whether it's proof of stake or proof of work. Finally, it's sad to see how in many ways the open above the board kind of marketplaces like Mintpal are behind the marketplaces. They should have a lot more coins in cold storage and they said yes, we did have our bitcoins and our like coins in cold storage. The other thing that should really have is multi-signature escrow mechanisms to prevent the thefts taking place or voting pools between different exchanges. Really at this point we ought to be interacting on decentralized peer-to-peer exchanges. Why are we still going with these old centralized website pieces of crap? It's a little bit confounding to me that we haven't really broken through on the decentralized marketplace front. I just can't happen soon enough. We need to move away from these old dinosaurs who pat themselves on the back for adding the latest crap coin to their exchange. I think that's an example of innovation. Very good points, Christoph. Chris Ellis. Yeah, I mean, I know most of that and I would add that the problem with the nothing at stake problem with you have to prove for stake coins is the unlike Bitcoin. You don't have to expand energy over time in order to secure the network, which means that you don't even have to do any of this sophisticated stuff that Christoph mentioned. You can just leave a load of passive buy orders on an exchange or just have a bot running for a few months to a year depending on how urgently you want to attack this network and you can just very slowly accumulate those coins over lots and lots of wallets. Once you've got those coins, that's it. You've got the control. With Bitcoin in order to attack the network, you've got to keep expanding energy. You've got to do it undetected for six blocks in a row. You've got to be lucky enough to get six blocks in a row and also pull off a sustained attack and actually have that money that be yours forever. Christoph, people would not notice that there was a reduction in the coins that are in circulation. A reduction in the coins of what, sorry, which one? That are available on exchange. If someone is buying up 50% of the coins, where people not notice that there's been this huge reduction of coins available in terms of the volume. The thing is, most people use these coins to trade anyway. I don't know. It would be interesting, but we've seen bigger scams than this before and nobody's noticed. As I know, it would depend on how good some people in the trollbox run bots that just all they do are monitor the BTC-APIs and some of those guys are really, really smart when they pull it off and they come in with some predictions that are really quite bang on because they're able to see stuff like that, but I don't think the layperson would. Yeah, well, and I just do the other thing that occurs to me now, is you can just sell yourself the coins and make it look like there's more coins in circulation than there actually is. Yeah, I mean, this is, this is, lots of scenario similar to this has been put forward on Bitcoin talk aimed at, obviously, Sonny King, who invented the proof of stake in Peercoin. But a bit more intelligently, perhaps, what Sonny did was make Peercoin half through proof of work half through the stake so that you didn't just have this what they call forging, which is basically a pre-mind, but they call it a forging. I don't care what you call it, you've just typed some numbers, okay, into a program and just said, they're valuable now. And whereas what Sonny decided to do is have the Peercoins be backed by the energy in the tie, the opportunity cost of the individual's mining and then after that would be proof of stake so that you couldn't just have this kind of free rider problem. And also the founders have got all kinds of power. I mean, anyway, that's not how very, the very centralized very coin managed to pull this stunt off. What the very centralized very coin did was they forks the code and then just told everyone like, fiat, let it be, that this is the new client. And of course, what are you going to do in a situation like that? If you've already got your coins in a wallet, you're not going to go, oh, I disagree with the lead developer, the only people that can keep this coin sustained and going, you're going to go with whatever they say. Because if you don't, your coin is dead and then you lose your investment. So you weren't really being given a choice as an average user. There aren't very many people in the world that can code these cryptocurrencies. When you lose your developer, you're pretty much dead. Yeah, realistically, it would only happen if there were like factions within the development team, I think, right, that would split off from the other developers. That certainly happened with the crypto-data technology originally. They just had Bitcoin and part of those developers, they didn't fork Bitcoin. What they did was they didn't fork the blockchain. They forked the code into a new coin called Monero and they started working on their own projects because they disagreed with some stuff that was going on with Bitcoin. So that type of thing can happen, but that's a bit different from disagreements of where what's going to happen with a particular blockchain. Yeah, I think what they've done is they've traded their reputation in the short term for the long term. They traded their reputation for the sake of £4,000 or whatever it was, $4,000 worth of Bitcoin. I think most of these blockchains are only going to survive if their founders and their supporters can live with a lot of the things that went on on their blockchain. I mean, a lot of, you know, Litecoin has been an absolute travesty. They got Max Kaiser to pump the price up quite shamelessly to $50 and it almost got there at 49. It's now collapsed all the way down to $8. I mean, it's an embarrassment. They should be ashamed of themselves. Shame on you having all that talent and, you know, Charles Lee always goes on about how it was a fair launch and, you know, how he's a proper developer and those other altcoins that are run by amateurs. And then he just resorts to cheap PR stunts and just gets a TV celebrity to back his coin because he saw them, he saw him do it with Bill Still and Quartcoin. It's just really cheap shit like that. Now look, at least they didn't fork the code. At least they didn't shortchange anyone, start rolling back a block. Do you even know what a blockchain is? The whole point of it is that it's irreversible, that it's one way only. So at least they didn't do that. But I think that the blockchains that survive are the ones that keep that promise that they made at their launch was, you know, whatever comes that way, like feather coins attack loads of times. But we never started rolling back the blockchain, telling people, yeah, sorry about that everyone. We're just going to take you out. Sorry you're going to lose some money, but these guys, you know, it's no. The fact is whatever happened to happen, then you just dealt with it and you learned to love the uncertainty and you just patched it and you learned as quickly as you could. And that was the best way, I think the best way to run a coin is to maintain that promise you made at day zero. Very much. Megan Lord. So exchanges should never have that much power over over the blockchain. I mean, so this was good for the people who were hacked and who lost a lot of money. I mean, Matt Pal, that's a huge amount of Bitcoin to lose. But like Chris said, this is a matter of, you know, we need to decentralize the exchanges. You're going to go, I mean, what happens, you know, if this happens again with like with another coin, I mean, this could, I'm wondering if this could have even happened, you know, with the Mt. Gox situation, you have a huge exchange that has a lot of coin on it. And all of a sudden, you know, it turns out someone isn't properly doing security and they lose all of that. Should we have just, you know, forked it back then? Should we have like gone back and like, or tried to change it in some way? I just think it kind of undermines the whole premise. And while it was good for the exchange, obviously, they got their coins back. I mean, it was really the exchange that was at fault. They weren't, you know, practicing proper security measures to secure their coins. So, and I know I'm not as informed as about Veracoin as some of the other panelists probably, but it seems like just a really bad idea. And let's all think for a moment about the hacker. You've just completed this hack, this very big hack. And all of a sudden, all of your Veracoin are taken from you. And your very big hack turns out to be very much nothing. Very sad. Very sad, Christophe. Very sad. I think maybe this is the time for there to be a boycott of Mintpal until they up their game. The fact that someone can execute a SQL injection attack, which is a type of attack that goes back to like the 90s, 80s, I don't know, that's really very old stuff. I mean, this, you know, in my previous job, this was like something that I would do, you know, several times per day, testing machines. I mean, it's like a very rote, simple type of attack that attackers have really refined quite a bit over, you know, a decade or so. So, you know, a time for them to up their game. And, you know, people should believe Mintpal for better exchanges that do a better job of security until they up their game and get some new technology in there. It can't just be like, well, we patched the SQL injection vulnerability. So now you're good. And, oh, now we're going to do cold storage for Bitcoin, Litecoin and Veracoin. Well, what about the other 50 coins that you have going on? You know, like they can do better than this. Adding new coins in a hurry was always a recipe for disaster. Did you know you can ask your own questions to the world crypto network shows like the Bitcoin group? Click on the YouTube window right now if you're on a desktop. Sometimes it even works on the application now on the iPhone, et cetera. And you can ask your questions now in the Q&A. Moving on, issue four. And now local Bitcoins, which is pretty much illegal now in New York state. Ooh, low blow. In San Francisco this weekend, Tatiana Marose is having a concert at the Bitcoin Meetup at 20 Mission. In Chicago, they're having the Bitcoin Chicago Convention and a free Bitcoin beginner's workshop both both days. And in Thailand, Bitcoin Bangkok is meeting up Saturday, July 19th at 3 p.m. Also in Cleveland, the North American Bitcoin car giveaways in town, July 19th and 20th. When a brand new Kia Soul or $10,000 in Bitcoin, talk about selling your Soul. Which event will you be attending? Or is there another local Bitcoin Meetup you'd like to mention? Chris Ellis. Yeah, I go to London one all the time. But I can't go to any of those because they're all in America. So yeah, I think there is one next week. I forget which day it is. I wasn't prepared for this question, but it features Max Keiser, Simon Dixon from Banks' Future in the UK. So it's like some day next week, I will be going to that one. Megan Lord. So we still have to plan our next Bitcoin Meetup in Pensacola. We hope to have one. I hopefully at the end of this month, we have to see. It does kind of change. We don't have as consistent a Meetup as we'd like to just because it's very hit or miss. In the beginning, there was a lot of enthusiasm. And then in the last couple we've had, there hasn't been as many people kind of showing up. But I think that says more about just kind of Pensacola in general. It people tend to be a little hesitant towards technology and a little bit. I think more, I guess conservative with their money in general here. But yeah, and right now something I'm working on with Jason King is the Coins in the Kingdom Conference, which will be in Disney. That's October 4th and 5th. We got a couple months to prepare for this one. So I'm really looking forward to that as far as another conference event. I think it's going to be really, really awesome. So very cool. Kristoff Atlas. Well, since you, Megan, if you have a couple months to plan, I'm assuming that Jason, the next thing he'll be doing is like swimming across Atlantic and then the Pacific. And that he'll be wrapping that up around October 3rd. If I understand his modus at part and I correctly. I don't know that he's dedicated to anything like that yet. We've been super focused on this. This is not going to be the same as Bitcoin in the beltway. Like we have a larger team of people involved and we're getting things delegated. I think a little bit better with this one. So yeah. Cool. Yeah. So am I local meet-up with me on a weekly basis? And of course, the attendance sort of depends on the price and all that good stuff. But the last meet-up that we had, it was pretty cool. There was a guy that lives in the area who thinks this was one of his first times at the meet-up, but he actually works at Coinbase. So we were asking him some questions about their KYC or CEYA depending on how you want to phrase it. Practices. And we had a crypto economist that was visiting from Europe who had from out of town. So you really meet some pretty interesting people at these meet-up sometimes and have some interesting conversations. I'm not going to any events in the near future. I've been hired by the Darkcoin community to do some work for them and I have some other consulting gigs that I'm just, aside from the Bitcoin group and Dark News, I'm just in my dark little room for the next couple of weeks, plucking away the keyboard. Moving on to questions and answers. Our first question is from Theo. If so many very coin were at Mint Pal, that means that a lot of people were day trading it and not staking it. Was Mint Pal staking the coins in the meantime in the hot wallet? Who do you think had access to the beta API at Mint Pal? Maybe the devs. A lot of very good questions there. We don't really know what happened inside Mint Pal. It seems like they might have been staking the coins. There's no other reason not to have them in cold storage other than just negligence. If they just are kind of lazy and they're not really following a good checklist, which you would really worry if you're that was your kind of business and your job was to keep track of people's digital money and you weren't following a checklist and you didn't really have good security guidelines. Christoph, your thoughts on this? Yeah. This is a challenge for all of the proof of stake coins. I know I've been talking to a lot of different proof of stake developers who are working hard on this. Next, Black coin, developers are working on these type of problems. If you have a proof of stake coin, the easiest way to do the staking thing is to have your coins on an online wallet at which point they are very susceptible hacking. They have a giant bull's eye over their value. The question is how can you do cold storage and have the coin do what it's supposed to do with this being paid dividends. Why do you want the coins? You can get paid these staking dividends. That's the whole idea behind people buying these coins. There's been this balance between the security and actually getting paid your dividends. It's a hard technical problem that all these coins are going to have to solve. I'm guessing, though, that someone will come up with a really good solution and then it will just be pushed out to the other proof of stake coins and then the issue will be addressed. But even if, Paul, I assume that if they were staking, they were doing it above the table. I hope they weren't just staking with people's coins and they're not telling about that and keeping the staking profits. I assume that it would be obvious on the blockchain. But yeah, so there are some... Paul follow up from Tuck Femen. He says it's his understanding that no exchange collects the proof of stake on coins. It would be bad business. That's not saying it didn't happen, but it would be a death nail for the exchange if it were made public and it's all public. So you have to assume if you're getting a dividend for your coins, it's in a blockchain or a ledger and that it could be looked at by an expert. There certainly are some exchanges that collect the dividends, but then they pay that out to the individual stake holders that use the exchange, which in and of itself is still a security issue until that that's solved by the developers how to keep this in cold storage and be able to receive stake payouts at the same time. While we're talking altcoins, we've got another question for Christoph. Fork the law. Sorry if this is off topic, but what are your thoughts on cloak coin? Co coin is interesting. I started taking a look at it a little bit last week and I haven't fully wrapped my head around the idea of cloak coin, but they're definitely doing some... It's kind of a privacy-centric coin and they're doing some interesting things with exchanges and trying to do it in a more decentralized period of year, kind of exchange for obtaining cloak coin for other cryptocurrencies. It's another proof of stake coin from what I understand, but they've made it so the nodes themselves are the ones that verify the transactions because that's what proof of stake is about. They're including the privacy technology into that verification of transactions. I don't understand fully how it works, but I like what I like about it, I guess, is that it's a new innovative approach to trying to take care of the privacy stuff and I want to see a whole lot of different ideas and the approaches thrown out into the market for competition and see which one becomes the victor. I think that's fantastic. I have the only new coin I'm interested in is pump and dump coin and I'm going to buy during the pump and I'm going to sell during the dump. It's going to go great. So we've got another question from Rhett Kahn. He writes, I've often wondered why the telecoms in collusion with the banksters don't just effectively choke internet packet traffic devoted to cryptocurrency transactions, generation, etc. And it seems to me this is the same issue with Bitcoin. They can't start sorry with BitTorrent. They can't stop BitTorrent from going across the network. They can't stop Bitcoin. If they did, like if it went through a certain port and they blocked the port, the people would just route around it, create a random port thing that would go through it. They'll develop a new tool they'll solve this problem. Christophe, thoughts on that? Thanks, they certainly can try to do that kind of thing through technologies like DePacket Inspection and so forth and they've done that definitely with BitTorrent and other technologies to varying degrees of success. Keep in mind, anytime that you start fucking around with how packets get around on the internet, stuff starts breaking unintentionally. You have false positives and so forth. Even though the banksters and the heads of state and so forth have tremendous control over the banking system, they're still relying on the market to actually do all of the profitable, useful stuff that actually generates wealth that they can leach off of. The same question you could say, why wouldn't they just turn off the internet or turn off power to a given area to teach them a lesson or whatever? Well, because it would create an economic devastation that would affect the rulers as well. Any broadly affecting changes that you try to implement, there's always the chance and the likelihood that some kind of side effect is going to happen that's going to negatively impact the people that are trying to use this play. Like the sad way that all those rich people died in Jurassic Park. Tony P. writes, is this just a Bitcoin foundation trying to lock up the market for themselves or is it US government backed all the way? He hasn't been keeping up this week. Just about the regulations in general, I'd assume. What do you guys think? I think the Bitcoin foundation certainly supports the views of its members and its members are mostly businesses and I think a lot of businesses probably want this kind of regulation. They want it to be laid out. They want to know what boxes to fill out and they're more comfortable in this old legacy solution. Obviously, these type of laws would have made Satoshi Nakamoto a criminal. He would have created his own coin which is against the law. He would have started mining it, transmitting it, owning it, holding it, whatever else he did with it. Obviously, against the law, against the law. So if you live in New York state right now and you're some kind of software kid, it's time to move. If you're the next Thomas Edison Henry Ford, any kind of these entrepreneurs, you have ideas for Bitcoin, it's time to move. It's very sad for New York state. It's a nice state. It's near a lot of other nice states but it's still time to move. I don't think anyone's going to stay there. Except for the regulation type crowd and they can try this. And then what will happen is an open source solution will develop on the outside that will be superior and it will come in and it will crush this state-sponsored halfway, regulated halfway Bitcoin thing because it's going to be weaker. I think this is definitely a New York centric kind of thing. I mean, I expect it to maybe happen on a broader level but this is very typical of New York to try to crush something with regulations. In a very, I would say premature type of opposed to what other states might do who maybe have the same kind of intentions but that's where so much money is concentrated. I mean, it's a financial capital of the world. So there's a lot of incentive to try to make things harder on other people to try to basically squelch for money out of them. And in comparison, California just legalized cryptocurrencies. So I'd like to see which approach has a better effect. Where the business is going to end up? Are they going to end up in California or New York? I like Thomas's point. I don't know about the legal technicalities and whether Satoshi would have been a criminal but I'm just going to assume for the moment that's accurate. So in philosophy, it's this idea of like a self-defeating statement is quite important because this is a way that you can easily dismiss outrageous claims. And so New York Department of Financial Services, their statement is, okay, we're going to protect customers Bitcoin funds. We're going to make Bitcoin better by passing a series of rules that would have made a criminal out of the man that invented it. That is a self-defeating statement. It's a self-contradicting statement. It's a self-exploiting statement that makes no sense. I think that it's very important for us to point this out when these type of statements are made. Well, and it's beautiful too because it goes back to the myths. We've talked before about Prometheus and how he was chained to a rock and that eagle came back every day and ate his liver and every day his liver would grow back and that that's the kind of punishment that they needed for Prometheus for what he did bringing fire to the people. And we're seeing it again. We saw it with Jesus Christ. They nailed him to a tree. It was very clear like what they do with new ideas. And that's why you don't see Satoshi Nakamoto. He, she, them. You don't see them around much, right? We haven't heard from them in a while. They kind of dropped this incredible idea on this. A lot of people didn't think it would work. A lot of people dismissed it right away. I'm one of them too. But eventually you just keep looking at this implicitly. The idea and it comes around. You're like, can we really get everyone to agree to use this system, which is something I didn't believe in the beginning? And now we've got these companies. It's easy to use. It works on your phone. Everyone has a smartphone, something that was kind of unbelievable five years ago, 10 years ago. We didn't have smartphones. This is still a star trek kind of technology. Everyone has a smartphone. So of course, they're going to use this digital money that just sends around. It's completely natural extension of where we're going, like the way people listen to digital music. But we're going a little off the topic here. We've got one more question on what's been happening at MULA.IO. I actually don't know what's going on there. The last I heard was the, the little back and forth with the founder of Dogecoin. MULA didn't want ultra pro, the plastic screen protector company to make Dogecoin or Doge the meme a copyright of theirs. But they had bought rights to the original picture of Doge the dog. So in a lot of ways, they had a good case for copyrighting Doge the meme. But remember Doge the meme is separate from Doge the coin. And there is a discussion between the two founders of that company and the founder of Dogecoin. Chris, do you have a follow up on this? Yeah, yeah. So it's the MULA have now launched their exchange, like the version two of their exchange, which allows for Fiat deposits. And I think Twits has kind of been a light with some rejoicing that you can now buy your rolled back Ferry coin with some old-fashioned Fiat currency. They make it quite clear on their blog post that if you don't get yourself verified with your government ID, you don't get any coins. Like no verification, no ability to withdraw. So I haven't liked been I did notice it. It came up on my on my Twit-a-Feed the other day that they had launched it. It seems to be gone off without too many hitches. I only noticed a few things saying, oh, we've got a few bucks here and there, but I think it's going pretty well. And they are a British British company. Very cool. Good to hear about it. And they're a British company, but I thought they're based in Saratisco. That's what I've seen them around. The Alan Green guy, whatever his name is, he's definitely British. And then also on the Twitter, people are telling me that the potcoin marketplace is open at potcoin.com slash shop. So that sounds pretty cool. So I just thought I'd mention that. And what else is going on out there? Bitcoin Arc Gallery says, dude, you're getting a Dell. And that might be very true. I think a lot of us need to look into Dell's. See how well it runs, Tails Linux, how well it runs, other kinds of Linux. I used to have a Dell a long time ago that ran Kabuntu really well. And I use that for a couple of years. But yeah, now that you can buy Dell's directly with Bitcoin, which yes, yes, you could buy a Dell using the gyft.com app. But now you can buy it directly. The company itself is accepting it directly. This is a big step. Like gift is a great middleman. And we appreciate them. But when Amazon accepts it directly, it's going to be a big step. So are we doing our own stories? Are you ready for predictions or a story of the week? It sounds like Chris is really ready this week. Yeah, I'm very ready. Well, I want to talk about what we've been talking about the last few days, you know, you've been following it. So yeah, I've been putting together some designs for the Bitcoin tour. That's not what we're going to call it in the end at the Bitcoin tour. We're probably going to call it, I don't know, something like decentralized the globe or decentralized the world. And coming up with some ideas, not just as to like how it would work, but also how it would be governed. So one of the proposals is to come up with like an elite seven people that actually control these donations, addresses for like each town city. So every village in town in the world will be listed on a database. We'll have some way of like crowdsourcing the bandwidth in those local areas. We'll have to go out to a lot of the forums on the internet to try and get people from these local areas. We've already done, by the way, a reason I know this will kind of work in an optimistic is we already did something similar at Feathercoin. And it was fairly straightforward. It just took a little bit of the coding wasn't, you know, straightforward because you had to integrate with the Google eight maps API, but eventually we did get it working. So in order to kind of, you know, if we are going to raise lots of money, and of course we will, right, because you're a very, very generous you guys at home, we are going to need a proper accountability mechanism. And what I propose is like, you know, this kind of random selection of leadership where you have like an elite seven who are voted for by you, the audience members, you get to vote for like Tom or Megan or whatever. We're all then assigned multi-part backups of a Bitcoin armory wallet like this one. It's just a demo one, okay. And you've got seven of these. And then we all go away with our paper backups. And the person who is in charge of the World Crypto Network for any period of time, let's say every 100,000 blocks on the Bitcoin blockchain or every three months is selected by random on a Bitcoin nonce on the nonce of the block that we agree on. And we get people to vote on at home. So the first number in the Bitcoin nonce that's between one and seven will then be selected. And if you are like, let's say it comes up with number three and then you are number three, you are number three, that backup, you get the full Bitcoin wallet and you are able to designate multi-sig accounts for various members of the crypto network. You're basically responsible for all of the money. Now, if you start to go rogue and other people on the elite group don't like you, it takes five out of seven of them to get together and then reboot the take the blockchain off of you, take your wallet off of you and then they can start kind of running it themselves. So you've got a kind of interesting social experiment going on. I would pose this as an experiment, but I think it would be very interesting to see. And the plan would be going out to all these different villages. We'd be going from the bottom up. Okay. So we'll be looking at companies like that are independent, that are family owned, that are particularly in regions of the world that will benefit the most from what we're going to give them. We're going to give them open source. Obviously Linux distributed old laptops, which will have Linux tails, it will probably have Linux Mint Ubuntu, whatever, and it will have a copy already downloaded bootstrapped copy of the Bitcoin blockchain so they can run a full node. This will also help in the furthering of the decentralization of Bitcoin network. We can of course take feather coin nodes out there. We can take any coin we like. We can go in with open source ATM, like the sky hook that Carl Drake has been working on. We can go with stickers, like Bitcoin accepted here. And essentially what would happen then is that the people in that local area would have access to the world crypto network forum which we'd set up. And then any technical questions they can come, maybe we can set up a Skype channel as well with a like a free line number. And the idea eventually is for not for us just to go out there and like airdrop Bitcoin on them, but also to get feedback for various companies. So companies like blockchain.info, we could actually do usability studies. I study UX design. We can start to get feedback on their products and services from those people. So the Bitcoin can learn about them as well as them learning about Bitcoin. And eventually the idea would be that we would basically just do ourselves out of existence. We would educate everyone so that we didn't ever have to do that again. That would be the goal. So any questions, Kristoff, you strike me as somebody who would want to be one of these elites. Yeah, same. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. See, he's power hungry, mate. He's power hungry. But the thing is the thing is no psychopath wants to take part in this game, right? Because you don't know if you're going to be selected because it all come. What I love about it is it's selected by the Bitcoin blockchain itself, the actual number in the nonse of that predetermined block that the audience. So it's part democracy, but it's also part aristocracy, aristocracy in the original way that the Greeks meant it. Like so it's not like, you know, like a monarchy. But like, yeah, you're there for a reason because you're willing and able to do that job. But you don't, you don't have a way of gaming the system. Right. So you don't get to manipulate the voters or try playing the message because you don't know, no psychopath would want to take part in this because the psychopath wants power now. They don't want to leave it to chance. And don't get too excited about having no leader. Let's go back to fleshing out the idea of what the Bitcoin tour or what the Bitcoin road show would be. In advance, your town would have a Bitcoin meetup. You try to get as many people as you can to your meetup. Then you'd get together a list of small businesses in your area that you think might take Bitcoin. It would be even better if you knew these people. If you went in and talked with them, they were your brother and sister already, that kind of thing. Then we get all this information in advance, get this all set up, get all of our people together. We roll into town with like a schedule. On Monday, we have an introductory meeting. We all meet here on Tuesday. We have an educational meeting on Wednesday. All of our people are going to these businesses, talking to them individually about their needs and helping them get set up with the right Bitcoin company. Maybe it's coin base, maybe it's blockchain. Hopefully we'll be able to offer all of these options to them and let them make their own decision. And again, this will all be produced as a television show as well. In the beginning, we interview the people. They say, we don't know about Bitcoin. We're not accepting it. We're a little wary of it, perhaps. In the end, we interview the same people. They say, we learned about Bitcoin. We understand it now. And we accept it. This is a transformation where every town we do this in, we do another show. We do another interview. We do all of these little events over again. And eventually, like Chris is saying, yeah, we'd like to open source this idea of going town to town, doing events. We'd like to open source all of the handouts about what Bitcoin is, about how to use it. We'd like to get feedback and work together with people on Google Docs, on improving these type of documents, improving the meetups, having the whole system for this. Because basically, we're going to have to build this once, get everyone convinced on Bitcoin, all switch over. And then we're not really going to have much use for this educational bridge system. We might try to use it for other projects. But this is pretty much what we need to do for Bitcoin. And we should roll into town on Teslas. Chris says that we should get free Teslas from the Elton Musk, whatever his name is, the Tesla Tesla Musk. You got to get his name right. You know, I know, but how would you name it? I'm never going to stop watching this. Look at this. Get your on the bus. Look at that on the bus, Chris. So I would say to your comment, it's open source right now. If you think you can do it better than us, I'd please encourage you to do it. But I don't see anyone right now actually implementing a distributed autonomous corporation. I see lots of chat about it. And I hear all these kind of words and I see all this gesturing, I don't see anyone doing it. Well, I can do this right now, motherfucker. I can actually send you these sheets of paper. I can scan them, probably, and encrypt them. But so we can do this right now. And I think that it's desperately needed. And there are leaders. There are leaders. It's just so you don't know whether you're going to be selected for the job, right? Because that's left down to the blockchain. And we can use more people if you're an organizer, if you're a talker, if you're a backstage person, whatever you're supposed to start, we could use you on the team at developer. We need Linux people to do Linux distributions that include the bit address, that include the blockchain stuff like this. Chris is talking about technical things. Yeah, we're going to have to go to their forums. We're going to have to go to like the Linux Mint forums, which are pretty active. Obviously, you bungee that goes without saying. And Tails, because apparently, Tails haven't been too receptive. Christophe. Tails, the guy that developers there haven't been too receptive, putting bit of trust in the why not? No. Like, how hard is it to do anyway? How hard is it to make your own district? You can do it, surely, Christophe? It's not hard to bit time consuming, but that's something that many people are technically capable of. Well, okay. So if you're watching this and you know how to make a Linux distribution, why don't you just tell us what you need? Maybe you could do it for free. But if not the real problem is, Chris, is that the obvious thing to do would be to make a Linux distribution with a version of bit address that was altered. So we have to really examine who's going to, that's why you'd want one of these trusted teams where you could be like, oh, well, they double checked it and they put the stuff in normally. No, sorry, but wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, no, you don't. So what you do is you put it up on GitHub and then people can inspect it and then what you can do is make a torrent file of it and then lots of people can download it and they can all check it. That's what you do. All right, well, let's make sure to get it inspected because it would be really easy. This goes up on GitHub, like we solved this problem decades ago. Yeah, yeah, well, let's solve it again. Let's see, Megan, do you have a prediction for us? Oh, man, that's hard to follow, but I do have a prediction, actually. So I had the pleasure of using Uber for the first time when I was in DC and it was really awesome. So I signed up for Uber and I've been getting their email updates and I got one today that said, they're doing this ice cream program where you can go in and say, hey, I want some ice cream and an Uber driver will come deliver ice cream to you. So first of all, how cool is that? That's just a great idea. Ice cream on demand. Uber just keeps getting better and better. So I want to, I'm going to say that since they're already doing their subversive thing with the taxi companies and people are trying to stop them and stuff, but they're going at it anyway. And even the driver coming up, I gotta say, even the driver coming up in DC was very like, they have to be very secretive about it because if they're caught, they can be fined and all of these things. So like it was a very cool kind of experience. It's like, where's my car? Like, oh, he's over there yet to like sneak in kind of. It was really cool. But, but yeah, so they're really innovative. I want to see them taking Bitcoin. So I'm going to say Uber, maybe lift to these companies that are out there already being a little subversive with the monopolies that are in play. There you'd be taking Bitcoin. Christ off atlas. Yeah, it would be really easy for them to do the Bitcoin thing too. Just the drivers already have their own devices. They just be just included in the driver version of the app and do our code and it'd be super easy. Yeah, my prediction. So I think that there will be more government organizations that are going to try to do things like this bit license plan. They're going to start putting some shackles on the citizens that live in their particular areas. It sucks for people that live in New York because mostly what will happen is businesses, especially those that are outside of the United States, just not going to want to do, not going to want to have customers inside of New York. It will be too much risk. That's already happened in general for a period of time with the United States in general. There were companies that were like, sorry, we don't really want to have US customers anymore because there's too many damn laws that will be subject to. So I think that will spread to some degree. And the next thing that I expect to happen is that I think they're going to try and push what has often been in terms sort of like the Govcoin idea. So companies like Coin Validation, they're working on their tracking technologies and all this stuff. So you're going to have a kind of blessed approved list of companies that will be fully KYC, NYDFS compliance, and all of their coins will be carefully tracked and all that other kind of stuff. And they won't be allowed to do business with any of the other non-blessed companies. And we'll see this kind of split in the Bitcoin space. And then we'll see which ideas more powerful is the idea that there will be a small incremental improvement to what we currently have. And we'll have a PayPal 2.0 called Bitcoin with all the companies you know finding success because they can attract the grandmands of the world or is a more powerful idea that we you know throw the whole chess board over and start over with a decentralized currency where there are no trusted entities. And as inconvenient as it is, people simply find a way to work around these systems and not bother to try and interface with these blessed companies that work for the states. I hope for the latter, but of course we'll just have to wait and see how it plays out. Exit lecture. Don't keep your Bitcoin all in one stack. That makes you a big target. And when you get robbed, they'll steal all your Bitcoin at one time. Have separate wallets. Have separate accounts. Keep your Bitcoin safe on paper. The more you know, the less you get robbed from. We're out of time. Until next time. Bye. Bye.