#40 — The Bitcoin Group #40 - New York Regulation Week 2 - Ethereum Pre-Sale - Coinye - Ecuador

The Bitcoin Group, the American original, for over the last ten seconds, the sharpest Satoshi's the best bitcoins, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Chris Ellis from World Crypto Network. Hello. Megan Lourdes from Bitcoin, not bombs. Thanks for having me. First off, Atlas from anonymous Bitcoin book. Good to be here. Will Penguin from Join to Peaky? Hi, everybody. And I'm Thomas Hunt from Mad Bitcoins, moving on to issue one. New York Bitcoin regulation, week two. It's been a week since Super Nintendo Lossky first released New York State's draconian Bitcoin regulations. The 45-day minimum allowed by law review period has begun. Have you softened on the regulations? Or are they still the worst things since Bill Milk? Chris Ellis. Yeah, I haven't changed the way I feel about it one little bit, actually. Although I have been following this coin congress, which is the most ridiculous name ever for a Bitcoin meetup. And I was trolling earlier, James Robinson from RRE Ventures, who said apparently, you may not like banks, but you know that your money will be there tomorrow. And I just feel like people have such short-term memories. So I started tweeting out with the hashtag Cypress. I started tweeting out old news stories from 2007 when people were like, you know, bailing out the banks as if people had completely forgotten about that. So no, I mean, I don't really have much to report. Other than to say that I thought it was really interesting, the article that you're citing was by John Matonis of the Bitcoin Foundation, who goes on quite lengths to kind of have a go at the regulators, despite the fact that I thought that the Bitcoin Foundation was supposed to be pandering to the regulator's dorm. So I'm sorry, what was it? Educating them. And he even goes so far as to mention the electronic frontier foundations tour challenge, which is about encouraging people to set up tour exit nodes to increase the level of security and anonymity across the tour network. He goes on to mention a Miyataki and Dark Wallet, even though Miyataki on Reddit, on the Bitcoin subreddit recently started laying into my current one of the core Bitcoin developers. It was a whole kind of spat over circle. The startup that has not yet answered questions about what information that it will be tracking about its users and that really this is just a centralized version of Bitcoin. It's just PayPal all over again. So I find it very interesting. This is an interesting piece of politicking by the Bitcoin Foundation for them to be flip-flopping. And on the one hand, kind of on the back channels, having to go at people like Miyataki and trying to distance themselves from him. And then on the other hand, when they write an article in coin desks, they try to make it sound like, oh no, no, this is all cool and trendy. So we'll sort of make it look like we really insured. That's a good point on Congress, Chris. The friend of mine said he wasn't going to coin Congress because they didn't allow anarchists there. And I was also reminded of, we started reading Snowcrash this week for the World Crypto Book Club. And in Snowcrash, they, in just the first 20 pages or so, it talks about how the library of Congress merged with the Central Intelligence Agency and then they released a stock offering. And that no one really knew what the word congress meant anymore. So it didn't make any sense in the name. And then it was the second lord's. Yeah, my position on this hasn't really changed much. I think it's really negative in general. I think New York really jumped the gun on this. And I think it's really going to hurt them. I think it's going to probably backfire. And I thought article on coin desks was interesting by John. Even when it comes to the foundation, I still like to maintain the idea that, you know, the people who are writing that are part of the foundation are still individuals. I don't really think of it as like this monolithic group. I think you can still have some separation between the members of the Bitcoin foundation. And maybe what the Bitcoin foundation is doing is some of the board members, for example, or, you know, the people who were at the very top of it who were wanting to, you know, do these lobbying, lobbying the politicians and things like that. So, but other than that, yeah, I mean, I just think this is overall pretty bad news. Megan's right on the Bitcoin foundation not being united and being individuals. As we, as sure we all recall, Brock Pierce now has his own altcoin. And he's on the Bitcoin foundation board, the famous dollar backed real coin. Kristoff Atlas. Yeah, I think that this whole regulatory thing in New York, it's going to play out one of two ways. One is that this virus of bullish regulation blocking Bitcoin businesses from doing what they need to do, it doesn't spread to other states in which case the people that live within New York, the entrepreneurs and so forth, the ones that who do not flee will be disadvantaged. And that will be a sad story for New York. The other possibilities that it does spread to other places in which case they're going to be driving more and more of the markets into the underground. And I don't have any particular opinion about whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, but those are kind of the two ways that I see this playing out. And I think that there's this, you know, there's this, this kind of like fake appealing to the public to look to ask for their opinion. And this kind of going through the motions of like, okay, well, now we have 45 days by law to wait and solicit the advice of the public and then we'll just do whatever we feel like doing. And I think that's exactly what I expect to happen. They're not going to be, you know, soliciting expert opinion or anything like that. If they had done that, then the proposal wouldn't have looked so completely ridiculous in the first place. So yeah, don't try to nuzzle up to the regulators. Don't end up like Charlie Schram just go off and do your own thing. That would be my advice. And remember, Loskey's already done an AMA on Reddit. So they reached out to these people already and nothing changed. Will Penguin. Yeah, the PR stunts like AMAs or articles or even hearings or, you know, even proposals where you're given the minimum amount of days to discuss the contents as opposed to the maximum, which is 365. So there's a big difference there, you know. And I think the, it's pretty obvious to anyone who understands this technology that the proposal is completely untenable. However, if I were a regulator or some bureaucrat who stood to lose my entire purpose for work or being even due to a particular technology that, you know, black swans its way onto the scene, then I would want to set the bargaining as tightly as possible in my favor before negotiating from there. And that's what I think what they did, you know, regulators are essentially, as this technology grows up and mature, is going to be rendered inert, irrelevant, you know. And that's the nature of this technology. That's really what it brings. So we're going to move more and more closely to that. And these, these folks on some superficial level are afraid of that. And they're aware of that on some superficial level. They obviously don't deeply understand it. Otherwise they'd be trying to regulate aspects of this technology that go beyond the monetary use of this technology, which is something that, you know, their proposal explicitly does not talk about. It's only talks about the monetary uses of this technology, which tells me it's incredibly short-sighted and, you know, it'll, it's not going to go through in the incarnation it has at the moment. They'll be scaling back from there. But yeah, like Christophe said, they can essentially do whatever they want. They do have violence and use of force, the threat of force on their side. And it really is, I totally forgot what I was going to say. But I agreed with Christophe's point about it starting to look like the Civil War where the states are broken up into slave states and free states. And then to pick back up on Will's point, it is an existential threat for them. This is all or nothing for the regulators. This could be their entire world. So they do need to pay attention. They are certainly trying. And we could see a situation where other states start adopting similar laws to New York. And we have kind of a Confederacy Union type situation going on. Hopefully California will stay on the right track, having recently legalized cryptocurrencies. But we'll find out. Exit question, after 45 days, will they change anything? Will the final laws be unchanged? Chris Ellis, no. Megan Lawrence. I think they'll be unchanged. And I also think that they're not going to protect the people that they say they're going to protect in the future. Christophe Atlas. Amir Taki, who was referenced in John Matanis' article as a developer for Dark Wallet, he recently posted to the unsystem mailing list about this. And he compared Ben Losski to a kind of used car salesman who at first, you know, when you get the car, you always get ripped off, right? But at first they give you some outrageously high price. Then they go back to the, to talk to their sales manager, which just means they go around back at the building and have a smoke and come back. And then they give you a slightly lower thing. And they're like, oh, I'm getting such a good deal. So I guess he's sort of expecting that they're going to make it a little bit softer and less harsh on the Bitcoin related businesses there. You know, whether it changes or not, though, I think that it's time for redditors in the Bitcoin space to admit to a little bit of shame on their part. Basically, what they've been allowing Ben Losski to do is to astroturf in the reddit space, pretending that he is some kind of, some kind of forward thinking regulator that he's a friend of the people that he's soliciting feedback that he's this nice guy with a great hairline and suit. And that's, that couldn't be farther from the truth. And so it's time for reddit to stop giving him a podium and treat him like the, you know, the, the unelected official that he is. It seems unfortunate. They're probably going to have to wait until it goes through when they get burnt before they can act that way. They're going to have to wait. Will Pangman. Yeah. To echo what Christoph is saying there, you know, that's, that's what Bruce Fenton suggests in a really eloquent blog on the Fenton report and his personal blog site. I encourage you to check it out and also his recent talk from Chicago is buzzing around YouTube right now too. So and that's a great talk too about this very subject. So lots of inspiration there. If you're wondering what you can do, just sitting behind your computer, there's a lot you can do. So check that out and take some of that advice. But yeah, I mean, if Chris is right and they don't, and nothing changes, then they will be blacklisting themselves and quite quickly. I don't see that as a penalty they want to take on. That would be, you know, completely and obviously counter to what Ben Loskey has been saying all along. It's just, I mean, politicians are disingenuous bureaucrats as well. But to be so much so would get you outed and that's not a risk they're willing to bear. So there will be some scaling back like a mere suggests. But in the end, yeah, there's, there's a lot we can do between now and then and certainly Bitcoin is the opt out technology. It allows us to opt out from these regulations. It's just going to be some more work and coding, you know, to screen out New York State IP addresses or whatever you have to do. But, you know, people will vote with their feet, so to speak, on this and we'll stop doing business with New York State IP addresses. I got to agree with the panel. The changes will be small and mostly cosmetic. It'll be mostly the same law even after 45 days. Moving on, issue two, Ethereum raised more than $4.5 million this week pre-selling ether, the coin that may one day allow you to make a smart contract and much, much more. They've saying they're saying they've raised more than 6,500 Bitcoin so far and they might have sold a few, which many are saying cause the recent price drop. Megan Lourdes, your thoughts on Ethereum. So I had a lot of enthusiasm for Ethereum just kind of hearing about its potential in the last few months. But I started kind of looking into it more and when they were saying that ether was for sale, I was reading through the website and I noticed they have a lot of like legal cover your asset. We kind of discussed this on Twitter a bit and Brian Sovereign pointed this out to the, you know, one of the things that says is that Genesis Block may or may not be released. Like I mean, you know, this may or may not happen. Which I understand is I think it's, you know, legal. They're obviously being very careful, legally with what they're doing, which is a good thing. But I'm kind of going to hold off for a while. I kind of want to wait and see what happens with things and I guess I just have to be skeptical about it. When I see a lot of enthusiasm behind a project, I sometimes get caught up in it but then I also find myself stepping back and trying to reevaluate. And with Bitcoin, I think that kind of burned me on a personal level. When I first heard about it, I was maybe almost too skeptical against it. And obviously I didn't, you know, jump in as soon as I probably should have. But with this one, I kind of, I think I'm just going to wait it out and see. I still need to do a little more research on it. You know, I think Vitalik is great. I've talked with him on a few occasions and you know, some of the other developers too. I think they're really awesome people. I think they have their heads in the right spot. But I just kind of have to be a bit hesitant for now about it. Kristoff, Atlas. Yeah, Ethereum is very interesting. And it's interesting that Megan brought up Bitcoin, right? Because I think that's the example that's all in our minds. If you invested $1,000 at Bitcoin at the right time and held on to it, then you're fucking king now, right? And so people are thinking like, okay, Ethereum, this is like my next big chance. That's what they're looking to do here by speculating in Ether. I looked at the blockchain and they have a half the amount of Bitcoin that they've accrued so far. The average amount of Bitcoin that's being spent is about three Bitcoins. I saw a lot of transactions that were right around one Bitcoin. People said, yeah, $1,000, that's a nice, big, round number. And so what the heck, I've got a bunch of other Bitcoins and they as well, through one at this speculative opportunity. And sort of my advice to people is be careful about the comparison between Bitcoin and Ethereum. First of all, it's a little bit like buying casino chips for a casino that actually hasn't been built yet. It doesn't exist yet. And as Megan pointed out, if they have this legal CYA language about, well, the blockchain may never be launched, et cetera. So I would definitely have some caution around that. I think if you're not investing because you really, really understand the fundamental technology, how difficult it's going to be for other people to launch competing versions of Ethereum, giving that it is an open source piece of software. If you're not familiar with some of the criticisms and challenges that have come up for the Ethereum team based on their economic analysis as opposed to their cryptographic analysis and understanding, I think they're much better cryptographers than economists by a long shot. And you need to do both in order for our coin to be successful in the long term. So if you're not doing that, then you really should only be buying Ether if you consider it to be a donation that could potentially be rewarding to you in the future, but you shouldn't be banking on that. It's not like investing in some kind of really safe asset. And there's no clear indication that it is going to be the next Bitcoin in terms of speculations. That's a great point on the casino, Christoph, because I'm not even sure what the Ether coins are. Like, are they a contract of peace? Are they a hundred contracts of peace? Are they a thousand contracts of coin? Like, how many contracts am I going to need? And again, there's other things other than contracts I know. I don't know any of those things yet because it hasn't been built yet. So it's really hard to invest. Will, Penguin. Yeah, I agree with pretty much everything Christoph said that was a lot of my thoughts as well. The fundraising has been pretty impressive early on. I think in 12 hours, they raised three quarters of a million. That's incredibly impressive. So there's demand in the market for technology that can do what Ethereum hopes or claims it wants to do. Again, I've been a big fan since the very earliest days in December of learning about this project and watching it very closely all along. It's kind of been a bit of a roller coaster ride. Like Megan was talking about. And I'm going to wait until there's a blockchain. I'm going to wait until there's some code I can play with. And then maybe we'll buy some ethers. And I'll happily take the, if I want to play with it, I'm going to pay to use it. So I'll happily take the reduced rate or the increased rate at that point. So yeah, I don't think it's a good idea to invest too much money into things that aren't there yet. Chris Ellis. I think the only reason you should be buying ethers right now is if you're a programmer and you actually plan on writing a contract that will therefore rely on your code running. I think it's never a good idea to buy something when everyone else is. And it looks like a lot of people are just buying speculation. If the area may put way too much time in engines publicizing their products before they've actually got the rubber hit in the road and actually writing it, they should have left this until October until two months away until the release because six months until it's released. I mean, they're saying winter of this coming winter. So it could be February next year. Is an absolute eternity in this face. People crazy to spend bitcoins on something that far ahead. So no, I think it was very good that Christoph went through the blockchain. Three bitcoins on average is far too high. People are going crazy. They're they're overspending because they're desperate and they're living on a open a prayer. We'll just have to wait and see. Exit question. Ethereum buy, sell or wait. Megan Lord. Why don't have very many Bitcoin to spend at the moment too. So I'm hoping to see a little bit of a price increase with Bitcoin. And then I also have to look more into Ethereum just in general. So yeah, I'm waiting like the other panelist said, I'd like to see some more information coming out about the progress of the project too saying that it's going to be released in winter. It's just so vague. And yeah, I just get I just get a kind of not the best feeling about it, I guess. Christoph Atlas. Yeah, well, you can't sell once you buy the Ethereum. They're tied to your Ethereum account right. So you'd have to somehow get someone to trust that you can transfer your Ethereum account to them or whatever. I'm not calling it a buy right now and keep in mind that as the Bitcoin price fluctuates for the remainder of the year, they're trying to put this early buy in pressure. And to people by saying like, well, if you do in the first 14 days and you get a special price and then it goes up 30% after that. But we don't know what's going to happen to the Bitcoin price in the meantime. So these are all relative. And even if you're speculated, definitely do your homework on that. Don't get the used car salesman pressure into buying Ethereum right now because you're panic-spect. You're going to lose 30% of your future value, if you don't. Will, Pankman. I'm buying the idea, buy Vitalix Vision, buy even the leadership so far, guiding the project even though there's no product just yet. I'm going to wait on throwing any hard digital money at it though. Chris Ellis. That's a good point. A lot of people have mentioned that the team behind this are really smart. And being smart is no indication of being right or being a morally decent person. So I'm going to say no. I'm not buying. But again, this is much like made safe where I thought the idea was great, but I didn't buy into the pre-sale because I don't understand how to evaluate that kind of a thing. And Christoph makes a good point about being non-transferable. That's a big issue. If you decide that you need that money that you put in the Bitcoin that's in the Ethereum coin, you can't get that back out. It's stuck there until this product comes out or some kind of market forms. It's a very confusing and strange, very early investment to buy. This makes a good point as well that if everyone else is buying it, you're just a lemming joining them. Moving on, issue three. Kanye West sues Coignay Altcoin into oblivion. In a move that many are calling Kanye West's Napster Metallica moment, Kanye and his gang of lawyers have successfully killed Coignay. Is it a good thing that an artist can kill an open-source project that shares a sound alike of his name? Christoph Atlas. Well, this is why we need the Kanye Nakamoto. This is why you adopt your pseudonym when you launch your Joe Coignan because you don't want to get sued. I think that's maybe one of the chief lessons here is that even though we're transitioning into this new crypto economy, we're still stuck in this legacy system and with all of its baggage and so you need to change your adrisals whenever possible. Will Pangman. This is just too good, right? He's done this so many times before walking out of award shows, numerous award shows. If he didn't win the award, he's done it time and time again. He's gone after people who've used his likeness and a number of things prior to just Coignay or Coignay West Coign and all the iterations that it had. I'm sure that he can probably go after it because it shares his likeness and whatever. But this must be what Brave the World means when she describes a basic Bitcoin bitch. That's got to be Kanye West in this case. He definitely doesn't get it. Yes, Ellis. So it's not dead and the coin is still going. You can't shut down a distributed blockchain. But here is a copy of some of the paperwork that the founders were sent. And I don't know if it's coming up on your screen very well because even on mine it looks pretty small. But it's basically this line here on section 35 where it says, as a result of Mr. West's extensive sales, advertising and promotional efforts and his consistent production of high quality goods and services. The Kanye West mark is famous and has garnered goodwill of incalculable value. The Kanye West mark is recognized and relied upon by a consuming public as indicating one source, Mr. West. And then here in section 51, it's like the infringing website features coins that will resemble Mr. West wearing his signature shutter shade sunglasses below the Coignay mark. And further, Mr. West will suffer irreparable harm because of the use of Coignay West, Coignay or Kanye or Coimax dilutes their disincentivizes. I'm sorry, distinctiveness of the famous Coignay West mark. This is all about protection and control. He wants to own it. And I used to work in the film industry and I was constantly surrounded by these egos. I mean, the egos were actually bigger than the people. The egos would arrive on set before the celebrity would get there. It was like a weird time dilation thing going on. And what happens is they start off their careers. These celebrities is kind of humble and kiss us and they're constantly trying to suck up. And then after a while, they start to get a little bit of luxury and people start bringing them coffee and they get used to it. And it's like they're getting locked in each time they're being led into a trap door and they just progressively become more and more of an asshole to the point where if they get demoted or if they have to draw fly economy premium class or something like that, they start throwing these hissy fits. And I was on set with someone very famous that I'm not allowed to say their name because I signed a contract saying I was never allowed to say anything bad about that whole estate ever again. But this person turns up at this film suit, surrounded by an unsurrageable people. This celebrity is a really, really nice person. I've met them and I've worked with him quite a lot. But they are a mega star, like an international mega star. And I was told that like every minute of this person's time was worth something like $30,000 US dollars. So we had to photograph this person on stage. And their lawyers and their people were kicking the producer, like pushing them and saying, we've got to go, we've got to go. It's always they've got to get a flight. They've got to get a flight. And so they're surrounded by yes people that end up inflating that person. Sometimes the person themselves are a decent, okay people. And maybe that is a bit spoiled and a bit up themselves. But a lot of the time they end up building this micro economy and this people around them that need that person to be famous in order to have their jobs maintained. And so they often I don't know if this is true about coignets, but I certainly saw a lot of celebrities would end up, you know, you're not even dealing with the person anymore. You're dealing with all the people around them that need that person to be big and famous in order for their salaries to get paid. So there might be an element of that here with the lawyers. I'm going to let you finish Tom, but I found the best Kanye West generator today while researching the story. And I think it goes to Chris's point or to the legal documents to show the value of Kanye West. So what I'm going to use is my response is just it's called give me more Kanye fiddance. So I'm going to just going to read some quotes from the man himself. I'm like a vessel and God has chosen me to be the voice and the connector. My music isn't just music. It's medicine. And these are real quotes, by the way. Don't ask me what I think the best song of my last year was because my opinion is the same as most of America's. It was gold digger. Everything. I'm not made me everything. I'm not made me everything I am in my humble opinion. That's a prophetic statement. Gandhi would have said something like that. Okay, I think we do one more. Okay, no, let's see. Oh, this is great. When I think of competition, it's like I try to create against the past. I think about Michelangelo and Picasso, you know, the pyramids. So I just want to take this opportunity to make fun of Kanye West because this is great. And Kanye, you know, I don't know what was going through their minds when, you know, they were creating this coin. I don't know if it was just a joke, but I hope they don't lose too much, you know, money fighting this giant egomaniac. So that's all I'm going to say about that. Michelangelo, Picasso, the pyramids. Yeah, that's good stuff. Moving on, World Crypto Network now has its own Reddit. That's right. Check out the brand new World Crypto Network Reddit where we're planning to decentralize the world by making World Crypto Network into a decent, into a distributed autonomous organization. We're going to need your help at reddit.com slash r slash world crypto network. Moving on issue four, grab bag, choose your own story. Ecuador, who famously uses the US dollar as its national currency, is going the other way with Bitcoin, banning it and planning to create a government run digital currency. The Mt. Gawks story just won't die as Mt. Gawks trustees leave the door open to a revival of the failed Bitcoin exchange. And Jackson Palmer, the Dogecoin creator who famously left, but didn't leave his cryptocurrency, gave an interview to coin telegraph where he said that Doge is all about fun. And when it gets too serious about legal issues or people getting rich off crypto, he says peace out and moves on to something worth his time. Will Penguin choose your own story? I had a good one and it just slipped my mind. It's not one of the options. So can I pass and go last? All right, Chris, choose your own story. Right, I'm going to go with the decentralized world initiative. That was a really good suggestion by you Tom. Of course, it's the most important thing that's going on in the world right now is this idea to start getting open source hardware and air dropping it on regions of the world that are in dire need of innovation and financial support. And it turns out we didn't even know this. That we actually do have viewers as far field as Thailand, Nepal, Borneo, South America, Venezuela, places like that people who do manage to watch us here on the world crypto network. And quite a number of people have been commenting on this thread, which is on a world crypto network. And so I just laid out a basic template. I did a lot of research. I read through a lot of Nix Arbos old posts on the smart contracts. I watched through some videos of BitShares and people like that, posed the DAC. And what I noticed is no one's actually doing it yet, not properly. I've yet to really come up with a good definition of what a distributed autonomous organization really is and what it should look like. I only see a lot of talk. So I say we can do it right now. We can do it right now with Bitcoin Armory, while it was open source Bitcoin client. So it can run as in an offline mode in a lightweight. But I would prefer it if the people that got involved with all sort of run full notes. It's also a very good idea because we'd be breaking the ground when we actually come up with this. We'll probably be running into some problems. We'll be making a lot of those discoveries. We're already good people with good reputations. We've been doing these videos for a year now. So I think we've built up a lot of good will. And we're noticing a lot of people coming out of the woodwork here in this thread tom. A lot of people coming out saying, look, I've been watching your shows for ages. I think this is a really good idea. I just want to get involved. And I think the beauty of it is is that we don't really have an agenda. Like we're not pushing a coin. We're not here to make the price of anything go up. We're just here to try and be decent decent people. We're not trying to protect the world crypto network mark or the calculable value of the world crypto network logo. We're not control freaks. And what I've suggested is we have a combination of a voting and what's called sortition so that the person in charge of the funds, the custodian, is randomly selected from I'm suggesting seven people. And then that way any would be psychopath or control freak who's self deselected at the door because a control freak wants control now by definition they don't want to leave it to chance. So please get involved and have your say I'm also proposing and maybe we can answer this right now. We should have a town hall star meeting on YouTube where people get to turn up like basically a mega thread like this like all the stuff we do already with a Q&A at the end of this show. We should do that in like a really big way and do some do some build up do like two weeks of build up on Twitter. We tweet it out every day gets many people around the world to know about it. Maybe this could be like a pilot of our conference something like that two weeks time you guys around. Yeah, we still need to work on the virtual Bitcoin conference that had a virtual crypto conference. Let's make this one like a pilot of that. Let's try doing it for like I don't know six hours or something. We don't all have to be here for the full six hours but I want to make sure that every time zone gets involved because you know we need to almost invent a world crypto network time zone. Maybe we need to like have the Bitcoin clock embedded on our website. So we actually tell the time by block height. That's what we do. And so like our shows will start being like block height 3,120 whatever you know. No, that's probably not a good idea. No, it actually is a genius idea. Let's just get off the Gregorian calendar and go by block. I down. I don't want to dominate. I don't want to. The meeting start 30 minutes ago or oh shoot I was going off of this this particular chain but then it got orphaned and. All right guys. Well, there was a fork. There was a store. Astronomers use side. Deer real time. The way astronomers get around it is by using side. Deer real time where they measure the earth's rotation by the most distant star in the sky. But anyway, we can we can discuss all of that. But yeah, I do suggest we get as many of the stakeholders involved as possible so that everyone gets their views expressed. Everyone here and anybody who wants to get involved, please download Bitcoin Armory at BitcoinArmory.com. Download your copy even if you don't have a full node like a Satoshi wallet running in the background doesn't matter. It still works offline. You can still generate a public address. Send me or we'll put it on Reddit. Your full raw key. And then we can start making multi-sig wallets between it between ourselves and starting a project straight away just in like a beta fashion. Megan Lord. Some really excited about the World Crypto DAO. That's really awesome. So I'm really looking forward to seeing how that develops. I will comment on some of the other stories. I don't know that I can pick one kind of story. The Mt. Gox one I think is the most insane though. I just really, that seems like such a bad idea. I mean, that's like a polingly bad. I mean, that's like trusting Bernie Madoff with their money again or I mean Mt. Gox with their Bitcoin again. It just doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to me. I don't know. I think that's bad. And then also the Ecuador story is kind of interesting. I think that's pretty unfortunate also. I've always viewed Bitcoin as a way for other people to get off of the dollar as a world reserve currency. And this kind of seems like it's, yeah, they're kind of going in the opposite direction. So I'm wondering if maybe they're, maybe they might be developing their own currency of some kind. Maybe another digital type currency or something. Maybe we just don't know about it, but that's just kind of speculation. And I don't know that that's the best move for Ecuador right now. Well, they've said they're trying to develop their own currency, but it just won't work with any of our existing cryptocurrencies. And we don't know how good their programmers are or any of those other things. The Mt. Gox story, it's just very sad. These people lost their money in a corrupt business. And their idea to get their money back is to keep this corrupt business running and we could get some fees off of that. And everyone would come back to this corrupt business and give them their money again and their trust, which seems madness. And just the general idea that, yeah, after the made-off scandal, we could have just reopened his business, put up some more big fake loans and tried to re-inflate the whole thing. They did kind of do that after the mortgage scandal. So I guess it's just Mt. Gox was too small, so they were able to fail. Right, right. But yeah, Christoph, Atlas. Well, I think Ecuador being interested in highly centralized digital currencies is good news for some. So when circle goes under Jeremy, Alair, he could try to relaunch the business in Ecuador, perhaps. And I think that would be another second chance for him. All right. Will Payman, are you back with a story? Yeah, I'm back. So I'm going to go off the map and talk about the St. Petersburg Bitcoin Bowl. So the day after Christmas in Tampa, well, St. Petersburg, Florida, a tropical field where the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, that's a baseball team, where they play. That's where the bowl game will be. And I know BitPay is already on the ground here because I'm in the Tampa area right now. And I was at the Tampa Meetup last night and it was great fun. Lots of really active people in the space, lots of men and women at this meetup. So that was cool. And everybody's really interested in getting merchant adoption off in St. Petersburg, which is a town that is ripe for Bitcoin adoption among merchants. There's lots of small artisan shops. It's a really great town. And it's a big city, but it has this town feel. And it's going to be really neat if they can get a fully realized Bitcoin ecosystem off and running leading up to the holiday season, which will, there's all kinds of incentives and ad opportunities. I know that ESPN and BitPay are working closely together on lots of Bitcoin branding opportunities and ad placement opportunities. So this is really interesting. I mean, I think they saw the power of what Bitcoin could do when a new human behavior burst onto the scene on college game day last year with the kid who held up the sign, hey, mom sent money and had a Bitcoin logo and his public key QR code. And people sent him like 24 grand in the course of the day just by freezing their DVRs and sending him Bitcoins through the internet from all over. So that's exciting to me. I don't know how long I'll stay in Florida, but it's hard to leave. It's so beautiful here. And I know Megan can speak to this. I don't know if I'll be leaving all as abruptly as I thought I was, but I'd like to stick around and help merchant adoption take off. I had a lot of success and a lot of fun with that and Wisconsin and love to do that down here or place that's ripe for it. Moving on to questions and answers. There's still a chance if you want to get your question in and we might answer it. The first question is from SilverMiner. How much either do you need to execute a contract? No one knows. Great investment. I've seen it time and time again. If the developers aren't upfront and active, the coin fails. Too vague at the moment for sure. And he or she's got a good point here that a lot of the other altcoins next, black coin, dark coin have just went ahead and launched. They didn't have to do a pre-sale like Ethereum or Made Safecoin. They just directly launched. And a lot of people are probably questioning why Ethereum can't just wait a couple months and launch. I have some ideas on that and this is total money. I think they need money but I think also there's a big reason for the sort of empty promise. The disclaimer is kind of because of the shady legal standing of what they're really trying to do. I mean, think about what they're trying to do. If you understand what Ethereum seeks to accomplish and the kind of disruption that that will cause, this is what Ben Loskey is afraid of with Bitcoin and only superficially so. They still don't realize that Bitcoin is an absolute existential threat to them. They just see it as a threat. It's a 6 billion market cap or so and they just see it as some really big nuisance. Ethereum is much, much more of a nuisance for this whole, as I like to say, the powers that shouldn't be. I think there's some FEC, SEC kind of like issues that they don't know. Nothing's clear and so they're not going to commit to actually launching anything yet until that's more clear for them, even though they're in Switzerland. Until we're all in Switzerland. The Timmy B. writes, wouldn't it be better if there was more than one type of bit license? For example, a standard one under Loskey's turn, an open license where the only term is that you have to tell people that you don't have a standard license. I mean, go ahead, Megan. Sorry, comment to that. Bitcoin op-arms will be issuing bit licenses for those who are interested. Pretty much say the opposite of the bit license of New York, which is that you don't need a license, but working on making some of those for people who are interested. I think it goes a lot with the comment I was saying. I saw one of those on Facebook. It was a very expansive bit license. I was granted a lot of rights after that. Chris, off you have thoughts? Yeah, I mean, I think that does make quite a bit of sense. It's a very broad brush that they're attempting to paint with. And frankly, they're attempting to take every kind of business that hasn't even been invented yet that is not even a twinkle in the eye of Ben Loskey and put it into one category. It's just mind-boggling. The idea that you would take this approach to trying to get businesses to do right by their customers is just a completely crazy idea, but it just doesn't seem crazy to us because we're inundated with people that do this all over the world. And remember, Loskey lives in a world where the banks have never ripped people off. They've never done the subprime mortgage scandal. The savings and loan crisis never happen. None of these existing systems have ever ripped off their customers. It's only this newcomer, this strange new Bitcoin that can rip people off. The old system is totally safe. Well, if you can imagine that Ben Loskey actually fancies himself as some kind of like a gun slinger, sheriff in town against the banks because he held a couple banks their feet lightly to the fire over some money laundering stuff. So in his megalomaniac mine, he actually thinks that he can actually keep these bankers under his thumb and it's a crazy thought. I'd like to see a list of his favorite films. I'm predicting all Clint Eastwood films, Dirty Harry, Pale, Rider, that kind of stuff. The Man Alone comes into the town of fixed things up. I remember George W. Bush, his favorite movie was a Clint Eastwood type, a Western film, Silverado or something like that. But we've got some more questions. The cyborg.org says, I agree with Mr. Chris Ellis, a great base to start. Let me know how I can help. So the first thing we'd say on helping is definitely a sign up for the World Crypto Network Reddit at Reddit.com slash r slash World Crypto Network. We're going to discuss everything on there. As usual, we're going to try to be as open and transparent as possible with these ideas. So if something does develop, you'll hear about it there or it'll even be suggested, discussed and developed there. So very open. Let's see. SilverMider asks, what do you think about the new pros and cons of the new gold-backed coins, INN coin and goldfish? Well, this is the first time hearing them. I'm sure they're still real coin or there was a gold coin that was coming out of Las Vegas, something from people that actually own vaults full of gold. That's not like a good idea of the vault business. You've already got the gold there. These other people, the obvious question is, where are they holding the gold and can we count it? Can we look at it on a video camera? If we can't, what are you really buying? Forget that. The real question is, can you prevent it from being stolen or confiscated? The answer is no. You can't prevent it from being stolen or confiscated 100% without any risk. That's what's needed for some idea like this to survive. I understand why people try to do these projects. They have it in their head that something digital just has to be backed by something tangible, physical. They don't understand the cryptography clearly that what Satoshi gave us was hard digital money. Cryptographically proven money. That's good enough and that's way better than having something in the physical space. That's the reason Bitcoin has all the incredible superpowers as traits that it has. It's sad that these gold back, I mean, don't these people, I don't want to be so hard on them because I understand why people do this. But, e-gold, liberty reserve, liberty dollar, there's like five other examples you could list. All they need to do is decapitate the business and it's over. If you want to start a business, you want that billion dollar market cap, you want that billion dollars worth of valuation eventually if you're a startup and you know what happens when you get this billion dollar valuation with a business attached to gold that's trying to do digital money in whatever way. All of these examples I just listed, they know what happens. When they do a billion dollars worth of business, that's what happens. So this is what we're seeing. First they laugh at you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you. We're in the fight you stage now. And you're going to get, if you get that billion, you're going to get the fight you and Bitcoin's at six billion. And we're seeing how robust the system is. And I understand why people do these all coins, but trying to protect this, whatever resource that you're backing your currency with from confiscation is a fool's errand. Yeah, and to add on to Will's point, this is what he said. This happened with Bernard Von Nothouse and a bunch of people who have tried to start there on alternative currencies that are backed by silver or gold. All it takes is them finding out where you're holding yourself or a gold and confiscating it. And then there's also the trust issues. You have to trust this third party to be doing their books correctly and being honest with you that this is actually backed by what they say it's backed by and that they're able to even secure it. So Bitcoin solves a lot of these problems. And this is a step backwards to do that. And I understand why some people would want that. I mean, I understand where a lot of these people are coming from. I work at a brokerage firm. Whenever I try to talk to someone about Bitcoin who are already very much in the golden silver, you get these same kind of arguments and stuff like that. So I understand it's very hard for them to shift their mindset. It's very, very difficult. So I understand where they're coming from. But Bitcoin has solved a lot of these problems so far as far as trusted than having a physical location where something can be confiscated. So I view it as a step backwards. Exactly. I mean, this is like you need violence to secure a hoard of resources and a vault. You need the threat of violence. You need heavy physical security and that requires the threat of force. And Bitcoin frees us from that problem. So yeah, we're like used to physical security as human beings for 20,000 or more years. But now, and we're very new to digital security or net security, but this is the future, right? And people just haven't grasped yet. They think it's a cool way to do shopping or payments. It's much, much more than that people. It frees us from this violence, all these strategies of violence that were necessary in our ancestry. Well, it's like a Christoph said in his speech, the current system is, exists on proof of violence, the POV. And as Tim says in the comments, I buy Bitcoin because it isn't gold. So exactly, you've got to differentiate. If you want to buy gold, buy gold. Don't buy chips for gold just because they're Bitcoin chips. And you think you have both in a good portfolio, you should have diversity. So good portfolio should have both. Yep. And it's hard to get into a new altcoin these days. They all seem to be pump and dumps. Even if they're not intentionally that way, someone from the outside comes in, pumps it and dumps it because they want to make money and it's an open and free, unregulated market. Also all of the coins seem to be running in these themes, these kind of sequel coins. But Dark Coin does really good so that everyone wants to be anonymous. Dark Coin does really good. Everyone wants to beat the Asics. We all just the same ideas over and over again. So it's really, I mean, the all coin space is the marketplace, the laboratory of democracy. But that doesn't mean that you have to invest your money in the laboratory. We can just let these experiments go on. We don't necessarily have to be involved to properly test them. Enough other people will test them and unfortunately, probably lose their money. Or maybe make a lot of money. Yeah, that said. Yeah, if you want to buy a gold. Anyone who wants to support the world crypto network with their altcoin and have us help get them out there, I mean, I think that's a good idea. That's one way I would dip my toes in. If I could lend my, if I believed in the ideas behind the project and there was some symbiosis there, I'd pimp some altcoins just to help them bootstrap their network because that's the biggest hurdle to overcome. And let's see more of these experiments have a chance of reaching maturity. That's what I'd like to see. Megan? Good. Yeah, and you're better off just buying gold. If you want a gold back currency, I don't know why you would need that extra level in there. Just buy the gold. And this is for the same reason we advise against buying the paper gold contracts and paper silver contracts too. I mean, you're not holding it physically in your hand. So yeah, it just seems like an unnecessary layer to add on top of a gold investment or if you're into cryptocurrency to add that as a feature of a cryptocurrency, it's unnecessary. And it really does seem the only people who really would need to buy a gold coin or people who are going to buy like a vault worth of gold. If you're buying a reasonable, normal amount of gold, you can put it under your bed, put it in a safe, put it in a safe to box box, whatever the normal safeguards are with gold. You're probably not buying that much space wise that you would need a whole crypto coin and all these things to keep track of it. We've got another comment from cyborg.org. He says, crypto will outlast anything from Kanye. In the end, those tactics leave a bad taste in people's mouths weak on his part. And I agree. We've also got a great comment from the same guy. He'd like to hear some comments on Perianne Boring's comments at the National or North American Bitcoin conference on the next 18 months will determine the fate of Bitcoin. And the commenter says that he can't believe that anyone could truly predict the Bitcoin environment. But it seems that she's mainly talking about regulations and I think she's also trying to focus us. She's trying to get us into a zone where over the next 18 months, if you're interested in Bitcoin and you've ever wanted to write your senator, this is your time. If you're interested in Bitcoin, you ever wanted to write law-ski, try to change his mind, or maybe just write open letters, be more public with your correspondence, try to reach a larger audience. This is the time. So Bitcoin's going to be presumably badly regulated. Then it's going to survive these regulations. Then they're going to have to change them. Of course, it would be a lot easier if we could just regulate it properly and reasonably on the first try. And then try to change those regulations. And you know what would be really, really good? If we distribute the blockchain all over the world, so it gets harder and harder to fork the damn thing without consensus from more stakeholders, that would be a great idea. You don't think that we should start refunding transactions like Vericoin? Yeah, well that's the whole point. You can't do that because it wouldn't be centralised enough. Megan? To, it's comments about Perian. She's in DC. I think she probably has a lot of insider knowledge of what the DC and the regulation crowd is thinking on this. She's also launching, if I'm not mistaken, I believe she's launching her own lobbying group to kind of get on the positive side of the regulators. That's not the tactic that I prefer to do, but I think Perian probably means in the next 18 months will kind of determine the future. I think she's going to be strongly working on these efforts to kind of build these bridges and try to hopefully not have the regulators come down to harshly on Bitcoin. Like I said, it's not a strategy that I like to be bothered, but she obviously has a better understanding of the environment in DC and how to talk to people about Bitcoin too. I think that's really what you said, Thomas. I think that's really what she's talking about when she says the fate of Bitcoin. From a regulatory stance, Bitcoin is going to survive no matter what regulations are put on it. It's not the fate of Bitcoin. It's the fate of let's say the United States, you know, firemen. It's illegal. Exactly. Whether we all have to leave the country immediately or whether we can hang on for a few more years pretty much. You can come study with me. The last part of that little phrase, you know, where that stage we're at, you know, first ignore you then they love it you then they fight you. Then you win. Then you win. It's going to win. Bitcoin's going to win. You know, these regulations are untenable. You can't enforce them even if they tried. They're just going to scare people out of using it. Might make the work that we are all doing a little harder. But again, there are point, there are needs in the market right now for point groups or point men, point people like Perian and heard digital chamber of commerce and the foundation and whatever. If they can do anything effectively, they can distract these folks enough with attempts to agree on regulation while, you know, unsystem develops. Their projects while dark coin and their teams develop their projects while next gets going more with their projects while more projects hit the ground while Ethereum hits the ground. And you know, that's some kind of like way that these two camps can work together without even knowing it maybe. I think maybe they should know it and they should maybe kind of quietly coordinate. Yeah, it's a diversity of tactics kind of thing. You know, you hope that, you know, there are people working kind of outside the system and there are people trying to do the inside. You kind of hope that the people trying to work with regulators are doing what Will says where they're trying to stave them off and give other people more time. We'll see what happens though. I have a slightly different point of view, which is that I suspect this woman is trying to build up confidence and her ability and fear within people in the Bitcoin space that if they don't fork over some money to her that somehow they'll be worse off down the road. So I think it's a play for, you know, to scare people into giving her money so that she can go down the capital hill and do whatever she's going to do. Keep in mind though that lobbyists ultimately there's no contract, there's no responsibility. There's no culpability. So she can be taking money from people in the Bitcoin space. She can be taking money from politicians on the other side or a bank or whoever. And ultimately lobbyists are susceptible to whoever the buy highest bidder is. And I have a hard time believing that at this point the Bitcoiners can be the highest bidder. I just don't think they simply have generated enough wealth at this point to think that the legacy banking system has quite a leg up in that circumstance. So I don't pay much attention to such people. If I were a wealthy Bitcoin investor I would consider funding someone with the requisite experience to put out some form letters that could be easily signed digitally or emailed quickly digitally by all of these keyboard warriors we have in the Bitcoin community. If they could do that something, you know, do something as a template, that a template for action that allows people to quickly and easily opt in if their ideals align. There'd be 100,000, 200,000 or more signies of such a thing. And, you know, efforts like that. Again, one thing they can do is they can show that the attempt to have a public dialogue was made on the part of the community and the theater on the part of the establishment per se is much more obvious in that case if they totally disregard it. And so that can be to the advantage. I mean, this is why more and more people are opting for live YouTube channel shows instead of cable these days because this is what's meeting their needs. You know, they're finding the quality content somewhere and they're starting to see through the BS. So, the efforts like that do have the effect of instilling confidence into people who are willing to jump over the fence, you know, into the camp of like truth seeking or just having good solid doubt. Christoph brings up a good point that lobbying is like advertising. There is really no way to know if you're successful or not. And to Megan's point, she has started her own group. She approached the Bitcoin Foundation, but they told her to kind of do her own thing. And unfortunately, it's called the Chamber of Digital Commerce or CDC, which we all know as Center for Disease Control. So I don't know why they can do that. I want to make a remark about this idea of political action. And I find that people who support the idea of a political action of campaigns or mailing lists or whatever it is, they continue to move the bar whenever you criticize a particular goal of it. So, you know, either you're actually trying to convince the people that are making the laws or you're trying to put pressure on them so that they know that the constituents in their particular area are going to possibly vote them out of office or something like that. There simply is not enough people who give a damn about Bitcoin to vote anyone out of office over Bitcoin. It's, there's not enough people. And, you know, frankly, by the time we have enough people that care that much about Bitcoin, I don't know that it would be any any longer useful to try and petition those kind of politicians. So I don't really understand the purpose of that. In terms of building awareness, I just I don't really don't understand the the goal of using the political arena as a place to try and gather awareness when there are lots of other places that you can try to do that. I completely agree. It's it's a multi pronged strategy. The reason that in that it's it's important to function in that arena as well. If people are willing to do that, you know, is because you you can change minds and also it's not just it's not empty. There's a brain drain that will happen if you know, there's just no way to have any voice anymore. The bright you and you all of us know that the brightest minds in the world are working on projects around this space and they're not going to, you know, work in the US if they can't. They're going to continue to work on these projects and they'll go elsewhere. And this will be much more obvious than it has been in the previous decade and a half when we've seen unprecedented brain drain from the US already. And to your point about your analogy about people starting their own YouTube shows and people switching from cable, the legacy political system is very much like cable in this instance and Bitcoin is like people doing their own thing on YouTube channels. You know, and that's I understand, you know, the kind of political action stuff, but the people who are doing the real heavy lifting with some of these experiments, because I mean it comes out, I mean Bitcoin can change the way we even think about political systems and how we organize societies. So that's what I'm really interested in. I'd rather see those people focus their efforts on some of the philosophical sides of things kind of, you know, developing that side. I just think that's more productive because wherever the laws go, the people who are going to be doing the heavy lifting and, you know, being, you know, the ground breakers in this field, they could live anywhere. They, I mean, they're going to know ahead of time where to move if the US comes down hard on it. And I think their time would be better spent doing that. Yeah. And there's just something that's just so icky to me about even working with these regulators in the first place. Like I said, I understand the diversity of tactics thing. Obviously, people have more experience in that field. But ultimately, I think anytime you try to work with a system that's so entrenched in keeping its own power alive, you know, you're going to lose playing their own game. You have to work outside of it. The last thing the point I want to make is not, it's not my favorite strategy at all. And it's not the one I personally choose to use on, on, almost, you know, every basis. But I do see a role if it's going to make a template for action and make it much more easy for people to opt in and act. And whether, whether or not they're typically politically active is not important. The important part is how easy is it for them to sign their name on, you know, on something that's loud. Getting loud is good. And if you can get loud in all these arenas, that's great. And if she feels she has expertise to rally enough, you know, insider support or whatever, games she knows how to play there, great. And then if, again, if there's no template for action, if they produce nothing, that's easy for all of us to jump on board and monkey pile, then it's kind of a waste. And maybe, you know, change from within is not the goal though. It's not like, I don't think why I would sign anything if they created some template. It would, it would not be because I see change from within. It would be to be loud so that more people feel more confident to join us. And going back to Christoph's point, there is a large media contention or whatever in DC. So she might be able to reach the media through her activism in DC, which is, she wrote for Forbes and stuff. It's different than the LA media. It's different from the New York media. There's a definite DC media that covers politics that she'll presumably be getting her work out to. Yeah, but there are all pirates on the shoulders of pirates. So I don't, you know, sorry guys, but you'll just say you're basically playing by that rules and the rules are rigged. The whole, the game isn't there to make this strategy that you're discussing work. Sorry, I've been a bit quiet, but I've just the whole way up to spin shung that my head. Well, you're lucky. It's not meant for us. It's not meant for us. For the moment, you don't have to go through them at all. You don't have to, you just take direct action. Don't even go through them. Yeah. Yeah, there's people like you and there's all of us are very motivated. And so we know how to take direct action. And I think that's why all of us are good at making, like kind of making other people more confident, you know, and that's what's needed. There aren't that many people who have as much gusto all the time. And some of them are capable of doing so and seeing an easy way to gain some early confidence and some more courage to, you know, build momentum to do more self-starting action. I want to see that too. I don't prefer the route of Washington whatsoever. I prefer the route above, over underneath, around, you know, within, you know, without whatever, you know, like that's better. But you can encourage people who first think of acting with the state level. You know, they're like, oh, I'm going to write my congressman. I'm going to vote. And you can give them a way of seeing that that process is defunct by, you know, again, making it easier for them to be proactive. And then they can quickly learn what we've all learned, which is change from within is not possible. And it's just about rallying a group of critical mass to opt out and exit. And, you know, what's the one wants to come up with a campaign, you know, male campaign, then she can come up with the website and the template. It would cost her a couple hundred bucks or whatever. And she can take it out of her own pocket if she thinks that's a good approach. But I'm offended by the idea that she would ask people to put their funds into her project appealing to the government that's going to be ultimately undermined by this new digital currency instead of putting their funds into more efforts, efforts that I think have much better potential. That would be my criticism here, not that, you know, if she wants to do that, then go on, you know, go on her own path. That's fine to me. Just don't ask for people's money for that. And there's no easy way to go about this side. There are even if you were to put together a list and, you know, make it easy for people that I don't know like it making something easier and convenient for something like that that's going to be ineffective anyway. I just, I don't know, like I just can't get behind that. I don't think the politics is the easy route at all. I don't think activism in general is easy. There's nothing easy about real activism, whether you're inside the system or outside the system. You're bustin' your ass and stressing yourself out anyway. You guys will be doing it, you know, not working with these really horrible, morally bankrupt people as far as I'm concerned. And even like saying, okay, we'll sign this letter and to put pressure on it. The easy kind of activism is usually not worth doing in my experience. It doesn't get results. And I think political activism, not to down any of my friends and political activism, but I really think that is kind of the easy, safe route to take. But easy routes tend to be less effective. All right, moving on. We got just a couple more questions. Silver minor writes, can the powers that be kill Ethereum before it gets off the ground if they find it threatening, i.e. strangle it in the crib? And I think that's part of what the crowdsource sale does to Ethereum is it now it's much harder to kill. Now it's like four million dollars worth of company to kill, whereas before they kind of had nothing. What do you guys think? Or does it mean that the four million dollars of support for this idea that's represented by Ethereum is now sitting in a single account tied to a company that's registered in Switzerland and so forth? I mean, this really goes back to the idea of do you launch a currency as a Satoshi or do you launch it as a Vitalik? Clearly the Satoshi model has worked out. The Vitalik model at times has not worked out. I mean, it didn't work out for the coinye people, obviously. Now there are currencies a lot less serious and momentous than Ethereum is, but that doesn't necessarily count towards the favor of Ethereum being launched before it is censored. Yeah, I wonder who has the private keys to that wallet? I'm going to find out. It is a multi-sig wallet. You can say that for sure. There was some rumors and speculation that the Bitcoin price drop was due to a large sell of the Ethereum Bitcoin. I don't know any. I heard that, but I don't understand that theory because I think that's ridiculous. I haven't spent any of the funds that they've received at their fixed Bitcoin address, so they would have had to say, like, oh, well, now we have a bunch in this address, so we're going to spend it from a bunch of other Bitcoins that we had. I'm not sure that there's evidence of that, but... It could just be market sentiment as well with this kind of... There's a belief that Ethereum might be the Bitcoin and Bitcoin might be my space, but no one really knows that. It's a lot of speculation. Yeah. I mean, I was trying not to say this because I really do believe in the project and I'm going to be supporting it. However, I can. When they have a product, I'll pay some amount to play with it. But I do think that doing the crowd sale before they have a product is a sign of weakness in the project in a way, kind of maybe. And I don't know anything, but this maybe is my thought. Having the money raised makes it easier to kill, not harder to kill. And it's just interesting that it would go down this way, just kind of surprise crowd sale before more developments happen. So they do have a good community around this project. They do have lots of brain power on this project. But again, it's not something that gave me all that much confidence when I saw the surprise crowd sale and how quickly everybody piled up. I do like, you know, one thing I do like about this model though is like, let's say they had just done crowdfunding or whatever and they still have a bunch of big coins sitting around. At least this way, it's something extra that they can give to their backers in the sense right? Like not only will they get the fact that Ethereum will eventually work probably, but also they can get some extra value out of how to like speculating on these ethers. So even if ethers drop to 1% of their current value, that's still 1% more than they would have if they were simply do it in the money. And I think that's nice. And I'm certainly sympathetic, you know, as one of the not yet Bitcoin rich, I can certainly sympathize with the idea that you need some money to pay your damn bills while you're working on this stuff. Like it's not that easy to just snap your fingers and make big coins up here into your accounts. It would be nice if we could have a crowd sale and raise $4.2 million in a couple of days. That'd be nice. Let's move on to the last question. This is a pretty good question. It's too parter. He says, who is prepared to move to the first company? Sorry. Who's prepared to move to the first country that adopts Bitcoin as its primary currency? Take a guess. Which country might it be? Germany? I'll just go down the line. Chris, are you ready to move? Hawaii. It's going to secede from the union. It's going to be, it's going to be its own country. It's nice and hot there. And yeah, I'm just going to go there and I'm going to be watching World War III. The cold war between the Western Russia. I'm just going to be watching that on TV and sorry to all the people that were left behind. But what? What are you shaking here? It's football. Hawaii is a military base. It's a military. No, it's going to secede from the union. It's going to become, it's going to happen after the thing. Is there going to be like round up all the tourists? And now this is a military base because it's a strategic significance. It's why they attacked it in Pearl Harbor. Like it has, it has a whole lot of work in the locker. And it's going to be on in Hawaii. Yeah. But they rely a lot on imports too. So I don't know that they would be the first one in the country. It's going to be fun. Fine, chilly. I like it. Very nice there. They've got all the seasons. They've got hot in the North, cold in the South. You can walk across it in 15 minutes or something stupid. Plus the inventors of the delicious dish that includes various meats and beans and so forth. Yeah. And hardly any kidnathes. That's great. Megan, are you ready to move? Am I ready to move? I don't know. Wow, chilly sounds nice. But well, I don't know that I would want to move to any state that says Bitcoin is going to be the official currency because I'm even for competition with Bitcoin. And I know a lot of these other altcoins aren't really ready for it. Yeah, I don't really at the level that Bitcoin is. And of course, I want to see Bitcoin adopted on a much broader scale. But I don't like the idea of there being an official, a government declaring an official currency of anything, even if it's something I like. So yeah, I mean, I plan on moving out of Florida eventually. But I don't know that I would necessarily jump on the first plan out to whoever declares that they're Bitcoin's going to be their national currency. Kristoff Atlas, Bitcoin Topia for you. There we go. It wasn't like me mute for a second. So I like TV shows that are kind of like apocalyptic survival type stuff, like the walking dead and all that. There was this really cool show that ended far before it should have called Jericho, where there was some kind of terrible event that happened. One of the things that happened as a result of the United States, people went by power outages for months and stuff like that. Texas is heated from the union. So I rather like the idea that Texas would secede from the union. They would keep their part of the military and be like, sorry, you can't have it back. If you want to come get it, you can come try. And one day I'll be living in the Lone Star state using cryptocurrencies. But we'll see. Will Pagman. I am ready to move. Yeah, I don't know if I'll be moving to any country that wants to have an official currency as a cryptocurrency. But there are lots of countries that are friendly to cryptocurrency that I'm totally happy to move to. So yeah, I'm very mobile right now. Don't know where we'll be ending up. Maybe New Hampshire, maybe still in Florida, maybe in the Lone Star state with Kristoff, maybe in California, and when it turns into five states or six states or whatever they're going to do. And that'll be a fun experiment if that happens. But I like the thought of the future being more decentralized and seven billion states. That would be cool. Well, my question for you is, are you as mobile as Jason King? Because that guy ran across the United States. I am not that mobile. I don't know if anyone's that mobile. I have a toddler and a dog weighing me down. So I know Jason did it with a family too. That is just a feet and a half. He had children and a dog and a wife. His doge must have really tied him by the end of it. And he used to be at every Bitcoin convention too. He's really traveling. He's really getting around. He had some energy in DC. I got to play with crypto a bit. It is very bitey. Is it doge? Is it? Yeah. The shoe. Yeah. Don't tell anyone this, but I suspect that Jason may have been cheating because he would be running in California one day and then he'd be in Chicago the next day. There's no way that he ran that fast. Come on, Jason. Be honest. He did take a couple days break in April. I think he was in Texas or West Texas at the time. He was in Toronto. I saw him there. But yeah, dude ran 5,000 kilometers like holy crap. Part of it he could have ridden the back of that doge. It's very rideable. So I'm going to answer the question too. I'm not prepared to move until they ban Bitcoin. For me it's more if they have to take a negative action on the place where I'm living now to get me to move to some new place that might be better. I agree with the panelists. If Bitcoin is the official currency, it sounds a little shady, a little suspicious. Maybe they want to draw in a bunch of rich Bitcoiners and then all of a sudden declare that you can't own Bitcoin here. A bit of a honey pot. Not that that matter much for me. They not get that much. But yeah, it's just very unclear yet. And especially if you're going to move into a new country and be all like Mr. Bitcoin and you're kind of putting a big sign on yourself. So I think it's going to go the other way where Bitcoin gets accepted everywhere and it just kind of bubbles up from the underground out of all these countries and then pretty soon we can go wherever we want and it doesn't much matter. And it's a feature that you can choose Bitcoin. It's completely voluntary. No one's forcing you to use it. And you can choose Dogecoin or Litecoin. And Dogecoin and any other coins. Moving on to predictions or story of the week. Chris Ellis, are you ready with a prediction or a story of the week? I thought we did the story of the week. No, we don't have any questions. That was just grab bags. There's too many new stories now. There's so many stories like we can't cover them all. Like it's impossible. Come back to me. All right, it's Megan Lourdes. Somebody said they're ready on the chat. Says right here. I have a prediction. Yeah, whoever had that just kept by I don't know. I don't know what I'm. I got nothing. Chris Dough prediction or story of the week, maybe just a plug who cares. I just wanted to say to the Darkcoin community, I'm doing this code review for them for the dark send. It's like, all of Darkcoin is open source, except for the software that handles their coin joint transactions called DarkSund. And their developer reached out to me a little while ago and said, hey, would you like to kind of do a preview of the code? We're not going to put it out yet, but we'd love to have someone take a look at it. And so I volunteered to do that. And I asked people, would you send me a few Darkcoins to help me fund this project? So I can spend a little bit more time on it rather than just the odd hour here and there. And people were hugely, hugely supportive and generous with that whole project. So I'm really appreciative of everyone's generosity on that. I just received some code. It's not the final code for the next release candidate, but I get some preview code from Evan for DarkSund today. So I'll be starting that project pretty shortly and figuring out what's the best way to kind of report the results to the community because I want to be as accountable to the community as possible for this project. So I just really wanted to thank everyone for their support on that and I love them though they'll be working very hard on it. Will, Penguin. That's great news, Kristoff. I'm really glad to hear that they reached out to you and they've chosen you to do that. And they chose the right guy for sure. So that'll be awesome to, when those results come out, I'll be interested. My prediction is that the World Crypto Network will have a DAO up and running before Ethereum has its first. And that's not to say I don't believe in the project. I root for Ethereum. I totally love the white paper of Vitalik. I trust the leadership all around that team. So yeah, go Ethereum, but I do think we're going to beat them to the DAO game. Chris Ellis, are you ready? Yeah. So this is a hash wash. This is where I watch the hash rate of Bitcoin. I tend to follow it a couple of times a day and I like to see what's going on. As you can see, we had a massive drop off for 148 pet hashes crashing all the way down to the previous low that we had in the last difficulty period where it only went up by 3%. You can actually see just how distinguishable that last difficulty adjustment that we had two weeks ago. So the latest difficulty adjustment that happened just as we were coming on air was only 8%. But look at that drop in the hash rate. As a percentage of the overall hash rate, I believe that's one of the biggest drops we've ever had, which to me is really, really suspect. Now I've invited somebody from SexyO to do an interview with us. I have some questions. In particular, I want to know what all of this KYC features they've started to install. I do have a SexyO account that I've been playing around with since I started reporting on it. I thought I'd try and use it. And now I'm being told that I can't change my email address unless I provide IDET personally, I dense private information like my name and address. It doesn't say that I have to upload documents, although it does keep pestering me everywhere on the site to do that so that I can trade in dollars and gig-a-hash. So I'm a little bit worried that now the largest Bitcoin mining pool is now asking for people's government ID. I find that really, really, really disturbing. So yeah, I would like to get someone on the show from SexyO to talk about it. And I'm slightly bothered and also maybe someone can tell me, I was trying to look for a way of setting up an email address without giving away any personal information. And I have to say, apart from HoshMail, which is terrible because it doesn't take Bitcoin, it only takes fear. You have to do it with your credit card. So that's right out. All these other places like Gmail now forces you to give your mobile phone number. So it would be really, really good. Okay, we've had a suggestion start mail. So I'll go check that out. But yeah, if you've got your favorite anonymous email company, I'd like to know about that for Pro-Ton mail comes out because those guys in Switzerland still haven't released their product chat. So send me your ideas. Very good. And now a prediction. Jackson Palmer is right about one thing. Six months is an eternity in crypto. After the 45 wait for regulation period is over, who knows what Bitcoin will look like. Nothing moves faster than Bitcoin these days. Except Bitcoin. We're out of time. Hey, wait a second. I have a story of the way he called out. I totally had a brain fart. Guys, I'm launching my own show on the world of crypto network next week on Wednesday. It will be called crypto combos. I'll pretty much be doing kind of the interviews I've been doing, maybe a little bit longer and more in depth. So definitely check that out. My first guest is going to be Jeffrey Tucker. So a lot of the veterans and anarchists are familiar with his work. He's very, very enthusiastic about Bitcoin and just has really positive energy. Real pain men will be on there too. The following week and I'll be interviewing Chris and probably the other panelists again at some point too. So check those out. It's going to be a weekly show every Wednesday at 6 o'clock central time. Very cool. Check it out on the worldcryptoneetwork.com. But we're out of time. Until next time. Bye. Bye. Bye.