The Bitcoin Group, the American original, for over the last ten seconds, the sharpest sitoshis, the best bitcoins, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Chris Ellis from the World Crypto Network. Hello. Megan Lawrence from Bitcoin Not Bombs. Thanks for having me. This is Tom, from Anonymous Bitcoin Book. Good to talk with you all. And I'm Tom as Hunt from Bad Bitcoin. Our top story tonight is, Imagine Metals to Stop Accepting Fiat Currency. No more fiat. After the end of 2016, a Maggie Metals will ask customers to convert their fiat into Bitcoin using an exchange on their site, calling the dollar a paper currency doomed to fail since it's uncoupling from gold in 1971. A Maggie is one of the first retailers to go Bitcoin only. But it'll not be the last. Chris Ellis, your thoughts. I thought this was absolutely brilliant. I know it's a bit of a marketing stunt and some other publications in the space of kind of misrepresent it by saying that they already stopped taking US dollars. But actually, I think this is a really good idea. And it kind of made me think that maybe more of us should do this. Now, I want to recommend this comment on the subreddit on our Bitcoin. It's a guy called, I'm not sure how you pronounce this name, it's RGHO Nomec. And he says that it's a total myth that you have to accept legal tender, at least in the United States. He says the law only states the creditors must accept legal tender as a payment for debt. And so I'm going to post this in the comments below. I'd love to know what other people think about it. But I think that more businesses should actually do this and raise more awarenesses to the absolute color policy of these paperback currencies. Megan Lord. So generally, I'm pro, the dollar is accepted here, Sin, and I'm pro people saying they're only going to take Bitcoin. But I'm a little bit skeptical about this. I'm not going to lie for a few reasons. And one of them being the Bitcoin, a mid-selling point for me about Bitcoin is that it's a voluntary currency. I don't want anyone telling me what I have to use to buy their product. So it kind of rubs me the wrong way. I mean, I'm going to have a pro cryptocurrency, pro Bitcoin. But I don't really like being told what I can and can't spend in the places that I'm spending my money. I also think that it's not the best move because you have to convert your money into Bitcoin through an exchange to either their running or maybe they're going to go through someone like Coinbase or BitPay or something like that. And I'm not generally pro exchange. This is only going to, if they do go through this plan, which I'm also skeptical about because 2016 is such a long prediction in the future. I'm a little bit skeptical because it would basically, they would have to collect a lot of client information if they're going to be their own exchange, especially if these regulations kind of go the way they do. And it's also bolstering this idea that we need an exchange. So yeah, I'm not, when I first heard I was a little enthusiastic, but I think this may not be the best choice for them. I think for individual merchants, it's a really good idea. And I think it's a lot easier for an individual to say that they're going to take Bitcoin only. I believe Dovey's doing that with shiny badges if I'm not mistaken. I might be mistaken about that. I think it's a lot easier for an individual, but I think it's a little bit harder for a company, especially with the regulations that they already have to interact with as far as being a bollyan business. So we kind of see the same things at Roberts and Roberts. There's a lot of right, you got to go through all these money laundering regulations. It's a huge hassle. And I'm not saying that, you know, obviously those regulations are horrible and all that. But I just don't really see this as a super great choice. And I don't know, and I'm kind of leaning more towards this maybe a bit of a publicity on just because it seems a little bit unrealistic to have that prediction so far in the future. But I do wish them luck. And I think it's great as far as getting support from the Bitcoin community. And from, I guess, an ideological perspective of definitely four businesses choosing to not use dollars anymore because I do think holding dollars is a political decision. I do question whether they're going to be changing those Bitcoins into dollars though when they have to buy back their inventory from these larger bollyan houses. I don't see the US meant, for example, taking Bitcoin anytime soon, even as far as 2016. I'm very skeptical of some of the other larger bollyan houses also taking Bitcoin too. So I think it's a good idea, but I think it may be a little bit unrealistic at the moment. The US Mint is going to be a hard supplier to convince to accept Bitcoin. Kristoff Atlas. Yeah, and that would be a bit silly for them to run their own exchange, which they force people to convert their dollars to Bitcoin to give to them that they then convert back to dollars to buy bollyan from other people. So yeah, I mean, I would say it seems like it's mostly to do with publicity. But I think it's also perhaps a small step in the direction of kind of closing the crypto loop, trying to keep the value in the crypto economy as long as possible. I think that's good. I like it when I see companies that are not accepting Bitcoin, but they're retaining Bitcoin. I actually care more about whether they're retaining the Bitcoin as opposed to whether they're just accepting it or whether they're refusing dollars, because obviously if they're just meeting, immediately selling it off, that doesn't do much good. And of course, people if they want to buy bollyan with dollars, it's not like they don't have a million other businesses they can go buy from. So I don't think that this in and of itself is going to have much of a fact. But what I would prefer to see from a mocky medalist is for them to say, yes, we keep this percentage of our Bitcoin at all times, or we're paying our employees in Bitcoin, or we're giving out their bonuses in Bitcoin. All stuff that overstock.com has talked about, and I'd like to see more companies participating in closing that crypto loop of the economy. I agree. It's probably mostly public relations, but there's also a little bit of a philosophy with it, where the owner seems to be in favor of sound money. They're a gold and silver company, and now they're only accepting sound bitcoins. So even if it doesn't work, you can see I'm trying to be first from a philosophical standpoint. And I respect that. Exit question, will a mocky's business increase or decrease because of this decision? Chris Ellis, probably decrease in the short term. Megan Lord. I would think it has a potential to decrease. The thing about people who are buying precious metals is a lot of them are very privacy concerned too, so they're not going to be wanting to give a whole lot of information to someone who would be running an exchange. Chris Ellis, yeah, well, they're not actually doing, they're promising to do something in 2016, which is a couple years away from now, year and a half at best. So I would expect it's not going to have any negative effect on their business in the next year and a half because they haven't actually done anything yet, and probably it will get them some positive publicity from Bitcoin holders. And I'm sure that will be a good thing for them. And we'll just have to wait and see how it actually affects them in the long term. I would be curious to see at this point, out of the people that purchase Boolean, how many of them are down with Bitcoin. Certainly the precious metal markets are quite a lot larger than the Bitcoin markets, but that is mostly people trading paper contracts for precious metals. The people who actually understand the importance of not having third parties involved in the transactions, not having risk that's associated with someone else, going good on their IOUs to you. Those are the people that are actually buying the Boolean. And I would suspect that they would be more ideologically prepared to accept something like Bitcoin, which is in many ways a kind of improvement on gold, the kind of digital gold. And I think that it would be really interesting to see how what percentage of those people would be willing to purchase and operate with the coin at this point. And it might also spread awareness. They might have not just heard of Bitcoin, and then when they go there, they're forced to use it, and they find out it's not that bad. Moving on, issue two. Coinbase demonstrates the pitfalls of regulatory compliance. According to Reddit, Coinbase is closing user accounts if they send money to Satoshi Bet, a popular online gambling website. Some would say all Coinbase is trying to do is uphold the law, but others would say they've gone too far, sneaking into users' accounts and judging them by what they spend their money on. Megan Lorde, do you agree? So this is the problem you have when you're trusting other people with your money, and when you sign up for Coinbase, it says clearly that they don't support any kind of gambling that you're not supposed to be using the account for gambling funds. So when you sign up for them, you're agreeing to that contract, and it may not be a fair contract, you may not agree with it ideologically, and I'm certainly not opposed to gambling, but if you sign up for it, you're stuck with it. If you plan to use Coinbase as a service, I don't agree that they're doing that, but this is also on Coinbase too for falling under these regulations. They're trying to be as compliant as possible, and unfortunately that's been put off a lot of people who were using Bitcoin for other things that Coinbase is prohibited by law from engaging in. So I think if they continue to really try to be compliant with regulations, it's going to hinder them in a lot of other ways too, and I think you're going to gradually see people moving away from Coinbase, maybe for some other reasons also, but unfortunately that's the side effect of trying to be super compliant with these regulations. Christoph Adless. So in the coming months, one of my focuses is going to be on trying to improve Bitcoin privacy, because I've been hammering at this away for a while now, but it really hasn't changed. Bitcoin privacy still kind of sucks. You have to jump through all these hoops and do, use a lot of different tools and a lot of, go through a lot of the technical challenges to anonymize your Bitcoins, but the way that most people are using Bitcoin is not very private at all. This is one of the reasons why I'm so interested in privacy centric all coins, such as dark coin, the crypto note, all coins, X11 coin, or I guess it's called Xcurrency now, all that stuff, that's why I'm interested in it, because there are examples of cryptocurrencies that have an improvement in the model of Bitcoin when it comes to private transactions. How is that relevant to this coinbase? Well, the first question that comes up to me is, how the fuck does Coinbase know where I got my Bitcoins from? How do they know it came from a gambling site? That must mean that they're doing some analysis of my prior transactions in order to obtain this information. That probably is due to some combination of a lack of privacy practices on the part of the gambling site. It may be that maybe they need to publish these addresses in a semi-public or very public fashion because of the design of the way that the Bitcoin gambling works. I don't know, I've never used one of these websites, but obviously they are tipping Coinbase off on which what Bitcoins are coming out of this gambling ecosystem. And from my perspective, I'm a big believer in people's right and privilege to financial privacy. And this is not something that I think Coinbase should be capable of doing. I think it's very important that a company like Coinbase that wants to continue to grow and their model is based on regulatory compliance. If you give them the opportunity to do this kind of analysis to say, OK, well, look, we can tell that there's this bill that you handed us. It was stamped by the casino. The law prevents us from allowing you to hand us this dollar bill and do business with you. So as long as that we continue to stamp these Bitcoins with all of the signatures of what we're doing with them, these companies are going to have to say no to them. They're going to have to put boundaries and violations on a violated privacy and all this other stuff so long as that is their business model. And that's the business model for companies like Coinbase, BitPay, et cetera, for the foreseeable future. So the only responsible response of this is to improve the technology, make it so that it's not possible for them to hand this information over or to say no to our Bitcoins based on where they're coming from because they simply don't know that. And so I think this is something really, really important for the Bitcoin ecosystem to focus on and to improve and something that I'll be focusing on for sure in the coming months. I agree, Christophe. It sounds like a technical fix might solve this problem. If the gambling websites are exposing their QR codes and Coinbase is writing them down, all they have to do is change software so you have to log in before you get the QR code, gives you a custom one each time. I don't know. I imagine they'll be able to work around this pretty quickly. Chris Ellis, your thoughts. Yeah, I agree with all of the above. And everything's been said so far. I'd also point out that actually this is quite a common clause in most online businesses. I think Facebook and Google both have similar anti-gambling clauses, you're not allowed to appetize on Google. For example, if you're like a gambling site, things like that. So this isn't really to do with the US regulation, which is what the Reddit article they were citing mostly was concerned within the comments and that's what that article is reporting on. So I wouldn't say that's a little bit of a stretch. And again, it could just be the tip of the iceberg with these gambling websites. I know they're going to draw the line or they're going to say porn to no good next or online this, online that, other things that you buy. I imagine Coinbase transactions were used with the Silk Road. I'm sure researchers could figure that out and expose Coinbase for their hypocrisy. But at least we know now that they're covering the taint of these addresses, right? The Coinbase has now exposed the fact that this is part of regular business practice. And they've definitely exposed a clear comparison now between them and blockchain.info, which leads us to our exit question. Do you prefer Coinbase style wallets where they can see what's in your account and who you're sending money to or blockchain style where they can't? Megan Lords. Oh, of course, blockchain style. I mean, it goes against the whole premise of being your own bank when you're letting other people go through your transactions and you're giving up all of your privacy. I mean, people just need to stop using Coinbase as far as I'm concerned. And especially any other exchanges who are saying that they want to comply with regulations because a lot of them, I wouldn't be surprised if they were taking further steps to invade your privacy just to be compliant with regulations that haven't happened yet too. I mean, I really am distrustful of Coinbase. Kristoff, Atlas. Yeah, much more about the private solutions whenever possible. I do use BitPay and Coinbase for particular use cases, but try to avoid them as much as possible. And you have to wonder too, for if you don't require them to catch the money out immediately, if you don't immediately need to convert to dollars or vice versa, then it's not clear what people are getting out of using a company like Coinbase to hold their wallets. They give up their privacy and a good percentage of the time someone hacks into their account and empties out the wallet anyway. So to steal Blake's catchphrase for a moment, what would you people say you're doing here exactly? It's the worst of all worlds for those kind of situations. And their new vault system is not a very great improvement, either. All it is is you'd have to hack two email accounts instead of one. So again, hackers, that's two email accounts instead of one, very difficult. Chris Ellis. Yeah, which is exactly how the credit card companies do it where they have to keep adding a new factor now, you've got to put the three digits on the back of the card as well as put in your name and address. And that's all they're trying to do. They're just trying to make the wall just a little bit taller. And all it does is eliminates maybe two or three percent of the criminals, because most of the better ones just keep going after it. The question was like, yeah, it's plainly obvious. Now I wouldn't use it because all you're doing is trading convenience for security. It reminds me of the music man. Moving on to issue three, B-T-E-R hacked. 50 million next stolen. Update on last week's story. B-T-E-R didn't attempt to find the hacker. They attempted to pay them. B-T-E-R sent off 100 bitcoins to the hacker, but the hacker wanted 110. The hacker responded coily. The deal is off. Good night. Since then, next is tried to hard fork the blockchain to remove the stolen coins, but less than 5% of users have switched over to the updated blockchain. Sounds like a real mess. Christoph Atlas, your thoughts. Oh man, they really screwed the pooch on this one, huh? Wow, so they have no, they don't get the next, they don't get the bitcoins back. Someone I saw some comments on this article, and I thought someone pointed something, you know, a good which is, why would you just send them the whole 100 bitcoins all at once? Wouldn't it be like, okay, I send you 10, you send me X number of next back, and we keep doing that back and forth, so that, you know, what kind of integrity do you expect out of someone that just stole from you and all of your customers? You know, like, what is the guarantee that they're going to do good on their promise? That's, that's a real problem for people that entangle themselves in this kind of situation, and the only solution for an exchange like this is to do their damn homework to secure the funds in the first place, so like this, this type of situation cannot happen. That's really what the focus should be on, and not these ridiculous things they're trying to do after the fact, after the fact, it's too late, forget about rolling back the blockchain or buying them off or hunting them down or all this other stuff. I mean, they, you know, this exchange is going to do what they can do, but the rest of the exchanges should be looking at them thinking like, oh crap, we really need to prepare for this type of eventuality and prevent it from happening in the first place. And as ridiculous as it is to send 100 bitcoins at one time, if they wanted 110 from a contract perspective, they should have sent them 110. They should have sent them an obvious out where they could say you didn't send us what we wanted, so we're not going to do what you wanted. They didn't fulfill the contract. Chris Ellis, your thoughts. Yeah, again, these exchanges are the worst thing about this whole industry, and I don't know when we're going to learn our lesson. I really don't, I thought the best resource I could find to wait through the mess was this Reddit post. I know we seem to be reporting from Reddit full-time now. I don't know why we just don't make everything about Reddit from now on, but this seems to have the most insight on it that I was able to discern. There was a whole kind of clusterfuck. That's the address where the guy got his, you know, his stolen NXT 2. And then there was like a clusterfuck on the NXT forum. And bear in mind, it wasn't even there for, and to that credit, they didn't go with what very coin did with a very, very rollback and a very, very dishonest way of running a coin. So they kind of at least did the right thing as a coin. They did as much as they could. But yeah, the whole thing just seemed like a real mess to me. I didn't really, I found it hard to follow the story because I just kept hearing lots of different things from lots of different quarters. So all of the customers got their money back. Is that right on the exchange? That's what I've just heard when I've been reading through that. That BT said that they were going to pay everyone back. So they're the ones that have taken the hit. Because if that's true, then that's the best outcome. That's the lesson to take away from this. And ETR takes a double hit. They lose the 100 bitcoins and all the NXT and then they're paying back customers. Maybe even a triple hit. And that is the way it is. And it is incredibly ironic that NXT already has a decentralized exchange built in and that's part of their model. But again, it's a centralized exchange, a central location fixed forrification where it was hacked. Megan Lawrence. So this is the problem with exchanges and it looks like they really need to beef up their security practices and be extremely careful. And I keep seeing conflicting reports. Like it says at the top of this Quentin Telegraph article, all but roughly $8.3 million next have been returned to BTR. So it says presumably things to undisclosed negotiations. But I'm having a hard time verifying this story. If that's the case, then that's really interesting. That's the sentence on the subreddit that I'm going to post in the comments now. That seems to bring some clarity. Apparently they had some leverage because they had some IP addresses and stuff about the hacker. That might have been a previous story before they had the deal. And then when the deal fell apart, I'm not sure they got the coins back. It's unclear. Right. That's what I'd like to see is a little more clarity and general in this situation because yeah, it doesn't seem like the news has been updated for a couple of days now. So yeah, I mean, just a really, really dangerous situation, really, really horrible too for next coin. And it's just one of those things. Like you really, really have to be careful with these exchanges. And I do think like giving the hacker 100 Bitcoin before any kind of agreement or bill of it out of things was a poor choice. After something after a huge hack like this, people might not be thinking logically about these things. They might just be in a panic to try to, you know, restore these coins to their rightful owners. So it's just watch out. Be extremely careful out there. Exit question. What can we learn from this mess? Christoph Atlas. Keep your keep your stuff off exchanges as much as possible unless you're actively trading those funds. And the exchanges need to step up to the play and, you know, figure out whatever is necessary to do a cold storage or cold storage analog in the case of NXT. And, you know, do the stuff that we've known about for a year or two now in terms of securing customer funds. There's little excuse at this point. Chris, Alice. Yeah, that we should stop keeping our funds on these centralized scams. Someone in our comments Roger Moore is saying that the thief came back 43 million at NXT. It's not bad. Megan, Lord. Yeah, I think Chris and Christoph said the same thing. I'm going to say don't trust these exchanges because it's rare that you're, I mean, it's that that anywhere returned is astonishing to me, honestly. I mean, usually once it's gone, it's gone. So yeah, don't let the fact that any were returned somehow, you know, give you faith in exchanges of any kind. That's not the case when these hacks happen. So don't trust the changes. Moving on issue four. New York extends comment period for bit license proposal. 45 days was not enough for the New York Department of Financial Services to regulate the truly unregulatable cryptocurrency, saying that the New York can't risk getting Bitcoin regulation wrong. Super Nintendo, Loskey, he of the quad monitors, impressive, but still running the default Windows XP rolling green hills background depressing is dead is still dedicated to being the first and thus wrong. Will another 45 days help? Will they suddenly understand that circles Jeremy Alair and many other Bitcoin business owners were not kidding when they said they would ban all customers from New York, Loskey laughed, but do they really want that to happen? Christoff atlas. Yeah, so this is more astroturfing. It's more fainting interests on the on the behalf of the regulators. Oh, we're just getting all these wonderful ideas and we're reading them very carefully. We've got a team staffed around the clock that's going through each letter and putting them categorizing them carefully, piled by pile based on the feedback that we're getting. I'm imagining probably a giant pile that's got the category called trash can. But yeah, so I think that they're posturing about whether they're getting feedback from the community or not. To me, I just don't care about this. I don't care about the words in that I don't believe it whatsoever. But I think that the language that we use to talk about the story is very interesting. And right now I'm seeing that Bitcoin news outlets are allowing people like Benjamin Loskey to set the narrative and to choose the language that we're using. I think that is very unfortunate. They keep quoting him saying, oh, we need to make sure that we're going to get this right. We need to approach this that we're not going to stifle innovation. These are ridiculous statements. The relationship between regulation and innovation has been well understood by economists for a long, long time. Fairly Mr. Benjamin Loskey has not bothered to read any of these texts. I'm still going to keep saying this. I've been saying this for a while now. Benjamin Loskey is partially personally responsible for the mouthgocks catastrophe because he created a regime uncertainty in the state of New York where there are many entrepreneurs, many investors, many people already with deep experience and knowledge in the finance sector who could have launched competing Bitcoin exchanges in the state of New York but did not do so because of the regime uncertainty that was created by the organization that Mr. Loskey is the head of. He is therefore partially responsible for the lack of competent competitors with mouth-empty-ox before they collapse and they expose their lack of experience and capability. That's one thing. The idea that he's going to stifle innovation or that he's going to slow down the rate of progress, it's not a hypothetical. This is something that's already been taking place in the state of New York for years. I've talked to many new entrepreneurs who have told me personally, yeah, I was going to do this thing. I've been living in New York City and I'm stalling my plans or I'm changing my game plan or I'm waiting until I can move out of the state before I actually launch my business because they're concerned about the regulatory uncertainty there. As for them, getting it right, this is something that cannot be done by government regulators. They can't get it right. They're pretending that they're going to regulate stuff that hasn't even been invented yet. That is a completely insane thing to propose. Where is there and their proposed regulations? Where is the mention of distributed autonomous organizations? How are those going to be classified? Zero mention of DAOs. How are they going to deal with computers that are handling funds, trading them all over the world where there are no human beings involved? How are they going to deal with driverless cars that are accepting payments and funneling those around? There's no mention of these concepts that are extremely important. I'm working on a review of the Darkcoin code now. How do you deal when the cryptocurrency that people are using, the software automatically has people's funds mixed together. They don't actually need to click any buttons. They don't need to direct the software just by a virtue of using the currency. It's mixing the funds in an untraceable way. How do they, how do the regulations deal with that? Also not mentioned in the proposal. The idea that they're going to be able to do this is just completely ridiculous. I mean, I'm getting the image of a 15-year-old Benjamin Losski, who, you know, he decided that he was the official soccer referee for the state of New York. And then he walks up to these kids. They're playing basketball, right? He's like, hey, I'm going to be the referee here. I'm the official soccer referee for the state of New York. And they're like, well, we're playing basketball. It doesn't matter. It's got a ball. It's close enough. I'm the guy. And then they start playing. And then he's like, off sides. You get a free kick, you know, a penalty shot. And they're like, what, dude, what the hell are you talking about? This doesn't apply to what we're doing now. You don't understand what we're doing. If you've only ever played soccer before, there's no way for you to understand what we're doing. And this situation is infinitely worse than that, as completely ridiculous as that situation would be. Basketball would be a much different game if you couldn't use your hands. Chris Ellis. They want the monopoly on enforcement. We had this conversation with Megan on her show, crypto-convose, you have to encourage you to check it out. So this is where Bitcoins regulation lies. It's called the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal. If Nintendo Lawski wants to, he can come over to GitHub and you can have his say directly if he wants some proposals. He could also, if he wanted to, frequent the source forage Bitcoin developer mailing list. And he could have some say in here. But instead, he just trolls us from the sidelines with his PR stunts. So right now, there's some confusion as to whether or not Bitstamp are not allowing certain people to withdraw funds. I want to just make clear here that apparently for most people, Bitcoin withdraws from Bitstamp are absolutely fine. But it turns out that a few people have noticed that they're not allowing it to certain Bitcoin companies in which the banks themselves, they're trying to put the money into, have objections to Bitcoin businesses. So the irony here is that a Bitcoin business, Bitstamp, is refusing withdrawals to Bitcoin businesses, whose banks disagree with Bitcoin. And this is currently an unfolding event. It's also being commented on this post here. If you look this up, it's stamped over draws for Bitcoin related companies on the service discussion on Bitcoin talk forum. And it looks like, yeah, it's nice to look at a few people. But look at how all these people are coming together, right? It's not just, it's on Twitter. It's on the Bitcoin talk forum. And it's also obviously on Apple, I love it, subreddit, right? So you've just got lots of people in the last six hours, eight hours, 11 hours, 12 hours, look at all these posts, right? Coming together, saying, oh, I've got this problem. Did anyone else have this problem? Then someone else said, yeah, I've got that problem too. Then they're comparing notes. They are the police officers. What these regulators would like is they would like a monopoly on evidence control. They want the evidence in their forewars so that they can decide how the crime took place. So that they can tell the story about how it's committed. Now we're all the police. Everyone can take part in the discovery process. So yeah, I think this is absolutely nonsense. That's a great point, Chris. The only reason we know what happened inside of empty Gox is because the database was leaked and then because of that, Willy and Marcus report, which was an independent thing, so I just did because they were interested because they analyzed the data. And that's what we're going to hear from the official authorities about what happened for another two years. Exactly. We've already figured it out. There is an incredible manipulation going on. And all it took was the internet standing up to find out what was going on. Look at what's happening in Ferguson right now. Look at the demands the police and our wonder to reveal information really, really quickly because the public do a better job of investigating than the police themselves do. Even they found that witness that was on Twitter. He live tweeted the entire shooting and just pointed by the point. Now we have that as another thing that they have to argue against more evidence. And that was all time stamped into Twitter like Bitcoin at times. Yeah. Made in lords. Well, gee, how kind of Ben Loskey to give us more time. We can obviously trust him now. I mean, he's shown such care and creating these regulations and such concern for Bitcoin businesses and the individuals who want to use it. I mean, obviously, this guy's on our side. You know, but I mean, what does it matter if it's 45 days or 10 days or whatever? I mean, they want to control what they want to control and they don't need any input. And they're not looking at any input. Like Chris said, they could easily engage with the community if they really wanted to. They actually cared what we think, but they don't give a shit what we think because they don't have to care about what we think. So I think it's really important to keep in mind that these people are not your friends. They are the enemy. And like Chris said, if you're allowing them to shake the narrative, then that's what they're, that's the part of their control plan too. That's part of, you know, with them trying to play this as if they're in some like nice middle ground. Like, oh no, we just want to help you. We just want to act in concern. It's all an act. These people don't give a shit. They just don't care. I mean, that Bitcoin publications are even considering him as some kind of ally or something or even larger, some of the larger Bitcoin businesses is astounding. I mean, this is someone who's worth in the banking industry for so long and has ties to just really, I mean, look at this. It's really, really a sort of thing. So, yeah, this person is not on our side and these regulations. I mean, anyone who's read them, I think it clearly shows how little they understand Bitcoin just by the way the regulations are written. And some of the appeals that people have been making are actually pretty good. I did get an email of the digital, digital chamber of commerce, I believe. I mean, I think they're not, you know, I'm beginning their updates and they said, oh, you know, this is the letter we sent to Ben Loskey. And they were making some excellent points, you know, like these other things aren't regulated and they shouldn't be regulated either, talking about like Google Wallet and things like that. And basically saying a lot of the same things over say, like, you know, it's clear that you're not really understanding this technology and you're trying to over regulate things that they don't even exist yet. And it's insanity and to say that somehow Ben Loskey is showing some kind of concern for the community by extending this commenting period is just insane. I mean, it doesn't matter how long they extend the commenting period, they're going to end up doing what they want to do. And it's not help you or me or anyone else. Yeah, he's really slimy. I love that point. He's just being a real slime ball. It's called the Delphi technique. You should look that up. It's a technique where you sort of pretend to be empathetic. So it's like, I'm on your side. I'm listening to your concerns. I feel your pain, but actually it's just a PR something and it's grotesque. Right. And they've been doing this as long as politicians have been around. I mean, that's that's what they're paid to do. They're paid to distort things and lie to you and make you seem like they're your friend anyway. But, but look, he's not a politician. He's a public servant, just like this guy that I'm showing here. He was the Iraqi minister propaganda. And we all remember that during the original invasion of Iraq, these this guy was shown all over American TV and people took him very seriously. And they they they understood that he was empathizing with the Iraqi people and that he was completely relating the complete and utter truth because he was at the head of providing information about the the military conflict. So why would he ever lie about it? We should have, you know, we should applaud Benjamin Loskey for representing the the honest truth about his concerns about Bitcoin, right? Relation just in the way that we celebrated this man as a true truth, truth teller. Very good exit question given other 45 days of review, the New York regulations will be unchanged or exactly the same Chris Ellis. Don't give a fuck. Megan lords. Yeah, second that they might make some tweaks or something, but it ultimately doesn't matter. They're going to write what they want to write. It's going to be terrible no matter what. We seem to have lost Christ off, but I'll assume he'll say that it was unchanged as well. Moving on to question and answers. There's still a chance to put your question in, but probably not a lot of time. So type quickly. We only have one question so far from the comments. It says, how many of you agree with Max Kaiser saying that Bitcoin will go to a million dollars a coin someday. Chris Ellis. Yeah, we had this question on Megan from the same guy. Yeah, I just think all these price targets. What do you want to look up? You want to look up anchor and adjustment, I think in yeah, anchoring adjustment heuristic in social psychology. Sometimes just known as anchoring. It's also used in behavioral economics. It's basically if I, for example, if I say to you 20 and then two minutes later, I say, what's the population of Nigeria? You are more than 50% likely to say 20 million simply because I got you ready with the 20 in your head. It's totally arbitrary. So the reason is is because your mind automatically favors things in short term memory over things in long term memory. What to do me stirring people at Max Kaiser are trying to do is they've already got a large stock of Bitcoin investment that they put in themselves. They need that price to go up. They see that they're influential. So if they keep pumping these numbers out into the mainstream, they can get you to make all kinds of forecasts and predictions in your own head, where you think you will buy by 45 bitcoins now and it gets to a million dollars. I'll start selling it around 700,000, you know, but really you're just being played because no one can predict the future. So the only honest answer anyone can say is nobody knows. Megan Lord. Yeah, I'm not a big fan of predictions. I mean, I would love it. Don't give me wrong. A Bitcoin with two million dollars. That would be awesome. I mean, I'm sure everyone's hoping for that, but it's not realistic. We don't really know. I mean, people have been doing the same thing with precious metals forever. I mean, people have been saying, oh, gold's going to go through the roof or silver's going to go through the roof. And, you know, if this and this and this happens, you know, then it absolutely has to happen. And, you know, it's you can't tell. You can't tell. We get these calls at the office all the time. Well, what is, you know, what is silver going to do? What's gold going to do? It's like we can predict the future. We wouldn't be working, you know, like we, you know, we wouldn't we wouldn't be in that business. So the same goes for Bitcoin as far as I've concerned. I mean, I think there's obvious value and blockchain technology. I think in the long run, you're going to see a lot of people adopted and it's going to be used for a lot of different things, but to put a price on it is unrealistic. Christ off, Adless. Yeah, I think that price prediction and the kind of short to midterm based on technical analysis. Some of that is fine. I actually find towards Amistar's predictions or his observations about technical analysis and how the market is performing. I actually find that to be quite helpful. Obviously they're they're not guarantees or they're not they're just sort of like identifying sticking points in the charts. But as for what Bitcoin's going to be worth in the future, it could be worth $1 million per Bitcoin. Really, that's not the critical question that you want to answer though, because it's it's lacking context, right? So if the dollar hyperinflates and you can buy a cup of coffee for a million dollars, well, at a million dollars per Bitcoin, that doesn't really do you anything, then you can get a few cups of coffee with your Bitcoins, right? So you really want to not look at what the price is going to be denominated in, you know, dollars, but perhaps in a basket of goods or come up with some larger economic context for answering this question. It's not about the dollar amount. It's about how is Bitcoin going to interface with society and with the future of finance. I think it's going to interface in a very big way. I think it's going to have a very large market cap relative to other assets, but as for saying it's a million dollars or two million dollars or $10,000, that to me is not really meaningful information in and of itself. I agree with Chris. If Bitcoin is going to a million dollars, I'm going to sell around 890,000. Got a plan plan ahead off to that Litecoin thing. So we've got a couple more questions and Dras writes, as I understand it, you cannot have any association with DAOs under the New York regulation. Have you guys heard this? Chris? Yep, that's right. You can't do a lot of things with it. And I was going to save it for my news, but I'll just say it now because it old segue a bit better, I think. So, well, so the US, the USA is a federated Republic, right? And it's a federated Republic that's based on Rome. And the idea of Rome is that you had an empire without borders. And now the US is finally getting its dream because it's got these hypersonic drones that can get anywhere in the world within one hour. And so you can just be playing some computer games out there in the Pentagon. And you can just be shooting people, some poor brown people in other countries, because they've got some ideas like they want to invade your country or kill some people. So you can just go in there on that pretense and start killing people anywhere in the world. And it's the same thing with these regulations that they just kind of you can sort of depersonalize people when they're just numbers on a screen. And it's about the US trying to be as pervasive as possible. They want to be everywhere. If you're a Roman, wherever you went in the world, you were in Rome and you were subject to Rome's laws. And I think the US is trying to create the same kind of domination of the world. It almost seems like their future proofing New York state to make sure that the future doesn't break out in New York state. That's really going to work out well for the people that live there. Well, they want it to be a template for other other countries. They want everyone just to copy this law. They want their laws everywhere. What one of the comments that that Benjamin Lasky made in regards to this whole extending the deadline thing that was just particularly infuriating, right? It was like, well, oh, there was all these people that thought like we were going to have to approve every line of code that they write in that program or just going to be subject to this and we were really surprised. And we went back and read it and we were like, yeah, I guess you could kind of see how you could read it that way. But that's not what we meant. And they're treating it as if like, oh, it's like this honest mistake, but no, like no big deal. Like that's not what we mean. You know, don't don't don't read what we've wrote. Just read what we just read what we mean, right? This is infuriating because every day an uncountable number of people are crushed under the totality of the state by the vagueness of language and the sheer amount of languages out there. There have been law professors who are entirely on the, you know, the side of the state who point out that there is not a single person under the, above the age of 18, the United States, that couldn't be indicted for some serious federal crime, just because the total number of laws that are out there are as uncountable. You can always go out there and find some obscure piece of text that's written on some piece of paper that has been, you know, that's rich law that you can, you can apply on someone if they get on your bad side and you're the guy with the gun. That's that applies to every single person in the United States. I can only imagine that it's worse in the vast majority of countries in the world. And this is just another stack of paper for someone to go in and find some little technicality or some, some little, some little interpretation of some vague language to say, oh, well, you know what, I had, you know, five years ago when I wrote this law, I had no fucking clue what a distributed ton of this organization was, but I don't like you and you did something with these DAOs. And so, hey, guess what? You broke the law, so say aye. And this is what ultimately this regulations are about. And you can be assured that their intentions are just golden too. I mean, in another problem you're going to see, you know, when these regulations and really get shoved through is, you know, what's going to happen when the court start interpreting things creatively. And we're already seeing this with Ross Olberg's case and several others. I mean, there have been so many other legal precedents that have been set that have been extremely destructive to your individual freedom. And Chris, I was quite visually good. I think there's a book out there called Three Fellennies a Day. And I'm kind of, you know, some essays and some about it. Basically, there's so many laws in the books right now. You're committing probably about Three Fellennies a day without even really knowing it. So it's something you keep in mind when people said they're ought to be a law about X is, you know, there's already quite a few laws out there. Some of them aren't always enforced and most of them are selectively enforced. Also, especially bad was the end of the article where Losky's quote said, we'll just have to take it a day at a time. So love alcoholism going on here in our Bitcoin regulation. Our next question from SilverMiner, how low the dollar can go is a better question. Yes, again, it's a question. Because it's zero. If you're reading a book like Snowcrash, you see an example of what Chris is talking about with this hyperinflation. The go to historical example is the wheelbarrow full of dorshmarks that would buy a loaf of bread. And in Snowcrash, she's talking about giving like $10.5 billion. And she doesn't have any bills smaller than billion dollar bills. And they're still mad at her for bringing in those worthless billion dollar bills. They can't trade them into other currencies fast enough. And again, they'll be used for fires and starting fires, all the other things, wall papering rooms. Paper currency has a lot of legacy value as we saw with the Deutschmark. Well, that's the intrinsic value of the coin, right? Is paper papering up with the walls and using it to wipe your ass? It's like a greeting card. Its value is sentimental. It's what you hold it as. Have you ever seen any of those Zimbabwe and Trillion dollar notes? Not in real life, but I've seen pictures of them. Yeah, apparently tourists actually pay good money just to have souvenir copies that are above and beyond what they're actually worth just because they like to have a new one. I actually have some Zimbabwe notes in my desk. And a trillion errands of Zimbabwe. Just waiting for that exchange rate to turn. You know what this might end up being like? You know how nowadays to pay a bill by post actually costs you more. You get discounts to pay online. I think that's how it could be in about five years. It might actually cost you more to transact in dollars. Companies might go really want to pay in dollars. I've got to use the legacy banking system. Someone's actually got to sit at a bank and process this manually to forget it. And especially if you're paying through the mail, the amount of dollars you send, the value could go down while you send it to. You're going to have to set all dollars to pay off the bill. This is a perpetual problem. You know Thomas, I could sit on those Zimbabwe notes, starting to feel a little bit like a dogecoin holder right now. That's the guy with a doge should have back around usually. Well, I'm into that. I just haven't, haven't put it up on the wall yet after since after I moved, but it's still here. There's a bearish on doge. Poor doge still live in our hearts. We've got a couple more comments. Dan says that he's trying to get his felony count over three a day. So he's got to keep working on that. You have to be really enterprising to have that level of felonies. And I'm not sure what's over mine. Same. He says that Mugaby is Yellen's mentor. Mugaby. Mugaby. I don't know. But Janet Yellen is the new fed chair. So there you go. I would have that mean. The copy is the president of Zimbabwe, the prime minister, one of the two. I've heard that before, but I didn't know he was related to Yellen. No, he isn't what he's saying is that my dog is giving her advice. Oh, she's a way Homer. All right. So we're out of questions. We're moving on to predictions or story of the week. Chris Ellis, do you have a prediction or story of the week? Kind of gave it a little earlier. I do. Actually, I've got one and a half stories. I just wanted to make sure that everyone was still following Ross or brisk case. We've had an update today, which is that the prosecution have added three new charges to the charge seat. I'll basically whittle it down. His defense is basically saying the reason they're trying to add more charges is to ensure that they get at least one conviction. Like when you get in front of a jury and a jury sees lots of charges, they assume you must be guilty. I think you wouldn't have that many charges. So please check that out. This for the first time, I'd also like to report that coin desk is actually a trippie to the source. This is after they came and put some criticism for not doing that before. So this article originates from the Guardian, but I actually I did feel that coin desk did a good job in this case. So the main story is the Gartner hype cycle. And somebody pointed this out to me on Twitter. So I kind of looked into it. And so if anyone doesn't know the Gartner, Gartner are like a consultancy firm that advise businesses on the next big thing. And they have this thing called a hype cycle, which starts off with like a really sort of early stage, like bio 3D printing connected homes, bioacoustic sensing. So it's a very, very early innovation. You then that technology then reaches a peak of inflated expectations like a hype. It then goes through a trough of dissolution. And then over the next few years or so, it becomes slope in lightning. And eventually it just becomes normal, right? And we just accept it. So this is Gartner's published. They publish this every August. And they try to advise people on what what the next big thing is going to be when you should invest or this kind of thing. And this year, cryptocurrencies appears just before the trough of dissolution and everybody. So Bitcoin has had its day. It's over the hill. And now it's going to go through a long period. It's blue, which means they're not expecting cryptocurrencies to be part of the plateau of productivity for another five to 10 years. But then I kind of did some digging. And I realized that cryptocurrencies weren't present on the previous year. And they weren't present on the year before that either. So this is actually the first time Gartner have even acknowledged it despite the fact that Bitcoin was invented in 2009 and was in developed in 2008. So this just goes to show that these people know absolutely nothing. Also, I'd like to draw your attention to the fact that this this article here is mostly bullshit. And if you read it, it just feels it just reads like some really old school blog and they're clearly out of touch. It takes it takes part in what they call a post nexus stage roadmap that focuses on the convergence of people, business and things. So that's just a load of bullshit. And it's just a load of buzzwords and they don't really mean anything. And so my prediction is that people will continue to make bullshit predictions because the future is fundamentally unknowable. It's infotainment. Yeah. Lord, do you have a prediction or a story of the week? Well, that's the little bit Chris. I'm selling on my Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. I'm out. But yes, I wanted to make an announcement. One of my favorite sources of news. I've been reading anti-war.com since I was like 15. So like a really long time now, they are excellent on foreign policy. They're doing the hard, dirty, horrifying work that no one wants to do when it comes to war. But pit someone has to do with all these with the growing warfare state and all that. And they really bust their ass. Angela Keaton is a good friend of mine. They're doing a fundraiser. Here's a link to that. I'll put it in the chat for you. They're doing the fundraiser and Bitcoin donations to anti-war.com will be matched up to a total of $10,000 in Bitcoin. So please support them. I can't talk about how awesome they are enough. Excellent, excellent source of news on foreign policy. They're all over the place too. I mean, they're recovering wars, covert wars, over wars. I mean, a lot of people think that there's just a few major wars going on here in certain parts of the world. But there's sort of, there's such a wide variety. And it's a very depressing thing to think about. But they are really putting the hard work in and really bust their asses. Like I said, one of my favorite sources of news. Please support them. They've been taking Bitcoin. They were one of the very first, I think they were actually the very first nonprofit. I'm sorry. Create was the first nonprofit. They were around the same time started taking Bitcoin though. They've been very supportive early on. So please, please help them out. They could really use the donations right now. So it's off at this. Yeah, so it's interesting seeing this chart of the progression of technologies. Now I've heard of this technology. It's about a hundred years old. And it's a system in which you have a currency that's controlled by a very small group of people. They continue to inflate with the supply of more and more of this currency at Infanitum. And they basically get the value derived from the future productivity of the unborn. And it's used to start wars. And I would like to know where fiat currencies lie on this little graph they have here. Is it in the slough of disillusionment or where on that line does the fiat currency thing hold up? Come on. Because it certainly is a technology. And I think I rather disappointing one as far as humanity goes. But anyway, so the story of the week for me, when you want to look at how well governments are doing, how well regulated are so doing in terms of serving the people, in terms of serving the interests in terms of greasing the wheels of innovation and so forth. What you do is you do not look at the words of the regulators or the government people. You look at how human beings are responding to their actions. And one of the very important measurements of this is the underground economy, which is untouched, which is cash under the table kind of stuff. And it can span the spectrum from illegal drugs and guns to just babysitting and contractor work and all this kind of stuff. And what we found in the United States, based on the latest economic analysis that from 2009 to 2012, that economy doubled in size. So over the course of four years, the U.S. Underground Economy, Untax, doubled in size. Let me see if I can just pull up real quick what the size of that was. Underground economy, doubles. Yeah, so it's now went from a $1 trillion economy to a $2 trillion economy from 2009 to 2012, just in the United States, which is highly regulated and highly controlled. Capital controls and tariffs and all that kind of stuff. And I think that we can expect to see more and more of this growth in the future. Who knows what it is in 2014. We haven't done the economic studies for that yet. But I think we'll see more and more of this growth, as I've mentioned many times before, already more than half of the world's workers are involved in the global underground economy. And by 2012, by 2020, we'll see at least two thirds of the workers involved. And I think that cryptocurrencies are going to be a huge part of that future. And we're just going to see more and more of that growth as the iron, in the iron glove of the state tries to squeeze the people that they're supposedly serving harder and harder. And we slip through their hands and join the dark economy. Excellent prediction. Chris Ellis, one more thing to say. Yeah, I wanted to thank Stephangoulos on Twitter for buying me this cider. Thank you very much. Shined it up buying it. I've been enjoying it whilst we've been having this show. I'd also like to say a big thank you to someone who just donated a Bitcoin whilst we're on air to me as well. That's very kind. I actually know who it is, but I'm not going to say in case they don't want me to. Thank you. That's very kind. Very cool. And now moving on to my prediction. I got made. Sorry. I just had one more thing. Sorry, interrupt to the anti-warthomping. By the way, the reason they started one more thing. So, so the reason I wanted to clarify the reason anti-warthomps started taking Bitcoin was because they found out they were being spied on by the FBI and the FBI was trying to get a lot of their information and attacking their donors even. And they scared off a lot of donors and they switched over to Bitcoin so that no one could stop their donations. And as far as I know, they're still being spied on. So they really need your help because this is not some conspiracy theory where someone's sitting with a tinfoil hat. Like, oh, the government's out to get me. No. The government is actually out to get anti-warthomps. Go ahead and donate through the QR code right now on your screen at antiwar.com-fordslash-bittcoin. Moving on to my prediction, Camp Bitcoin is no more long-lived Camp Dogecoin. Dogecoin. Dogecoin. Dogecoin. Dogecoin. Dogecoin. Meet Mad Bittcoins at Camp Dogecoin at 815 and E Street every day at 4pm. We'll be joining up with Tom and Gary's decentralized dance party to spread the spirit of cryptocurrency to all burners because Dogecoin is about fun and Bitcoin is about money. But you can't have one without the other. Up, we're out of time. Until next time. Bye-bye.