The Bitcoin Group, the American original, for over the last ten seconds, the sharpest satosis, the best bitcoins, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Bryce Weiner from BlockTech. How you doing? I'm Kristoff Atlis from Anonymous Bitcoin book. Hey everybody. Will Penguin from Topiki? Already. Victoria Van Eyck from Bitcoin Strategy Group. Hello. And I'm Thomas Hunt from Mad Bitcoin. Here today is Top Story. Issue 1, Satoshi Nakamoto's email hacked. At first we thought his amount, the account might have just expired. But when the hacker started forwarding old Satoshi messages to members of the Bitcoin community, we knew that the worst was true. The hackers have also released screen caps of Satoshi's inbox. And boy does he have a lot of spam. They also released a bill for an FPGA that was delivered to St. Louis. We're all hoping that it was a dead drop or Satoshi has since moved on. They say the hacker is in negotiation with Satoshi to keep it all private, which doesn't sound good. Price winner, your thoughts. You know, when all this came out with Newsweek, the community of Bitcoin users had basically said, you know what, it doesn't matter who Satoshi is because it's mathematics and we can all read the code. We know there's nothing hidden in there. So really whoever, the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto is really like a pop culture curiosity. And you know, these people could have simply thrown it out there who, what Satoshi's identity is. And they didn't, you know, a lot of that stuff was blacked out, although his name did leak. So you know, are they trying to blackmail him? Are they trying to help him out by trying to cover his trail? That's really kind of up in the air right now. I'm not really sure what, you know, where this is going to play out yet. Well, remember the main media fascination with Satoshi isn't so much the creator. It's those unknown bitcoins. All the early bitcoins that are mined in the media is just, you know, biting at the teeth. They're ready to find out what happened to those. So I think that's a lot of the mystery there too. Kristoff Atlus. I think this is an unfortunate development. But if there's some script kitty that can happen to the email account, we can kind of assume that various three letter agencies have also tacked to them to the account in the past because they're certainly more capable and have quite a bit more incentive to do so. It's important to keep in mind that anything that gets posted as a screen capture at a parent's group capture can just be a Photoshop job. So we don't know whether any of these emails that they're posting online are actually verified. But we do know that they have accessed the account. That's obvious. For me, the fear is, you know, not really that it's going to have some kind of hugely negative impact on Bitcoin because at this point Satoshi is quite irrelevant. He's not contributing to the code. He's not directing things behind the scenes. Even if he were co-wurst into whatever, you know, kind of negative thing that people would want to plot up for Bitcoin, it just wouldn't get very much traction because he's just a guy at this point. But I do think that he has made it very clear to the world that he prefers NOSPI known. And this hacker is certainly playing with fire because he could be unintentionally giving away this person's or group of people's identity. And that could have deadly consequences for that individual. And that's scary to think about. So I really hope that nothing comes of this. And if we continue to hear from Satoshi in the future, keep in mind the way that we identify Satoshi is not through his email address or him posting things online. Or his pseudonym or anything like that. He's got a PGP key. He's got the private keys to his Bitcoin addresses, which he can sign messages with. And that is the cryptographer's way of identifying yourself with the internet. Not these, you know, these basically ephemeral pseudonyms that we use in the form of email addresses. That's a good point, Christoph. That any of the agencies could have hacked or even just visited this free email supplier that Satoshi was using and easily gotten this information. So one would hope that Satoshi was playing a clean with his account and didn't have anything in there. It makes me think as well that I wonder if that message a little while ago earlier in the year saying that I'm not, I am not Sadorian Satoshi Nakamoto. It makes me think that it may not have been Satoshi himself who posted that. It wasn't cryptographically signed. And if I'm Satoshi, I'm keeping in mind that when I first launch Bitcoin, I'm not on anyone's radar, right? So I can be sending emails around and whatever and using these little, you know, like web-based email clients and all that stuff. But as soon as I get on the target list for these three-letter agencies, there's no way that I'm touching those email accounts ever again, basically, because it's so easy for the NSA or GCHQ or whoever to set up these little traps all over the internet, just waiting for someone to interact with that email address. In fact, it's probably very likely that the NSA knows exactly who the hacker is that accessed his email account because they probably triggered all manner of malicious JavaScript and stuff injected into his machine and all this crap, right? So if we really wanted to know who the hacker is, I guess they can claim Roger Verres bounty. But I'm Satoshi, seriously, like that is a way of touching the internet in a way that's just like there's going to be a million bear traps sitting around that email account. I just wouldn't touch them. Again, at this point, I would find other ways to post my messages that I felt more confident about. It didn't make a lot of sense at the time when Satoshi came out to defend Dorian. It was a really nice thing to do, but it wasn't entirely necessary. And from a spy craft perspective, coming back out after you'd already disappeared is such a big mistake. It only seems to happen in movies. And this isn't a movie. Will Penguin. Yeah, I think that was very well put by both Bryce and Kristoff. I don't have much to add there. I just think if Satoshi can remain anonymous as he clearly wishes, that would be a feat for all time. So perhaps it's a ticking clock for the reasons that were mentioned. Perhaps he's able to achieve this feat. That would be very, very cool, I think. That would lend a lot to the possibility that through incredible diligence and discipline, you can achieve relative anonymity on the open, broken web. That would be very neat as we begin to repair the web with this new technology as Bryce is up to. So that's my thought. I think it's an incredible feat. I'm rooting for him. It's like the usual suspects. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was making the world believe he didn't exist. Victoria. Yeah, so back to the Newsweek point from before. I really didn't like this. I don't like this either. We should be talking about ideas. First, not people. I don't like this man wants to stay private. It doesn't matter who he is. He's given us this gift. And I just, I don't like this at all. So I wrote an article of like three pages in Bitcoin magazine about this. So you can read that to get all my thoughts, but I'm not pleased with this. So. He does have all those Bitcoins though. There's no, there's no way the media can stop paying attention to someone who theoretically has access to all those Bitcoins. I'm hoping he didn't save them. That's my prediction. And that's also going to freak people out when they find out that he didn't save them. But I have it on good authority that the private keys are burned. I was going to, yeah, I mentioned this too. And like unavailable. Like you got rid of them. Yeah. That's what I think that's the smartest thing to do. It helps the currency and he did he she, however, they didn't know it was going to be this valuable and it went all crazy. So price. Just to respond a little bit to some of the other comments. In 1996, the NSA in conjunction with the with MIT posted a white paper which essentially outlined how Bitcoin operates. And the real difference between that white paper and what we have come to know as Bitcoin is the introduction of decentralization. And that's really the only major difference, couple of minor differences, but nothing really major. So I have long suspected that this is not something that came out of somebody's garage. That the blockchain itself is a construction of advanced cryptographic techniques of which there are a few people in the world who are greater experts than the NSA. So I have a strong suspicion that we're using that toy that was created by all those people who were supposed to hate. Now of course the fun thing is that it is just math and we can end its open source and we can employ it however we want. But that three-letter agency argument I think needs more support. If there's one thing that we know is true, we know there are nudge teams and we know that our media has been manipulated for pretty much the majority of the 21st century at the very least. So when there's the public perception that the NSA or the CIA is behind everything, that's almost like Dei-Russell's Mac and all these days. And I would like a little more evidence than God in the machine to say that this is something nefarious or something other than just a bunch of kids who manage to get into his account. Do you know we haven't talked about this on the show before as far as I remember with this idea that Bitcoin was invented by the NSA or some other aspect of the government. It's hard for me to believe that there would be someone working for the government who would have the ingenuity to come up with Bitcoin that would be so completely and not only just the technical understanding but the economic understanding behind Bitcoin as well, that would have such poor foresight to understand what effect Bitcoin is going to have on their future job. It just doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever that you would have this team of NSA people that are like, yeah, let's come up with an invention that's going to remove the device that allows us to be employed by the US government. It just that idea kind of baffles me when people say that it's NSA coin and you know shop 256 and blah blah blah. It doesn't seem plausible to me and I think that Bitcoin would look quite different if it was invented by some aspect of the government and put out there into the population. Well, remember Christophe that the internet was also created by the government and I don't think they necessarily knew it was absolutely not created by the government. There were there's arpanets slash darkened this was like a prototype that the government came up with with their researchers. It never would have gone anywhere if you left that up to the government. It would have stayed a pathetic little. I think there's something to do to serve someone's laboratory somewhere what allowed the internet to be on their basis and send their information back and forth. I think the military would have their own internet anyway you shake it. Now they can just use the actual internet. It would be extremely expensive for them to try to do that on their own but no. I mean, the internet is the whole lot. The internet is the creation of the free market and private companies actually taking this idea that's arpan of the internet and turning it into something useful that's useful to a variety of consumers and businesses and so on. That are the idea that it's kind of like this NASA space launch kind of model of the government inventing really useful things completely on its own and going to the moon and stuff like that. I think that the moon landing it's about the only example that we can come up with. That was at a time when they had just relatively recently created NASA. They had a lot of scientists that are now that were coming out of the free market that were still had this private market mindset. NASA has now accomplished very little in the decade since because it's such a firmly government institution. That's exactly what the military is. The military has been around for decades. NSA has been around for decades and I don't think they're capable of coming up with something like Bitcoin. I don't think that if they were they would want to put themselves out of work. Let me interject. I recently read the MIT paper that Bryce referred to just to bring it back to Satoshi for a second. In looking through the history of the Cipherpunk movement and then reading these old papers that come from high level institutions and government, academia and government working together, what you see is two tracks. I think this is the same sort of activity that's going on in the two examples or analogies that you gave Christophe, the internet and let's say NASA for example. There's two tracks. There's the private ingenuity that you were referring to and then there's also the watchers per se who are keeping an eye on all of this private ingenuity and they're involved too. There was definitely an interplay between the NSA and MIT and institutional computer scientists throughout the 80s and 90s and the Cipherpunks as well. They were kind of competing and kind of piggybacking off of each other's innovations. The Cipherpunks had a clear ideology that we're all familiar with and understand and then the state is using it for its political and economic opportunity advantages. That's clear too. That's kind of what's going on. To Bryce's point, certainly that paper talks about all kinds of things that look very familiar to Bitcoin but along with the one thing Bryce mentioned that it doesn't include, the other thing it doesn't include a talk of is the blockchain at all. It doesn't include that concept. Maybe that's certainly an earlier concept. The 96, I think that paper came out. It's probably written 94 and 95 and look, that's huge. That's huge. That is the thing that I think Christophe's referring to which is this really dangerous thing for the powers that shouldn't be for example. That is an incontrovertible history timeline that gets stronger, the older it gets, the longer it goes, things happen, the more incontrovertibly provable they are. It's okay. At this point, I need to interrupt because for 60 years, since the 50s in post-World War 2 and in the Korean War, we've had folks like the John Burke Society at OWL. The entire group. If you want to talk conspiracy theorists, these are the people who have been, they invented conspiracy theory quite frankly. They have been warning of a one-world currency for decades, a global currency that will level the playing field and people, libertarians and conservatives have railed against that in American society for decades. That along comes Bitcoin, which is inserted into the public consciousness through a grassroots open source effort, through a grassroots open source effort and everybody accepts it at face value because, oh boy, now we're in control. However, the question asked is, maybe the perceptions of what's been going on inside these three letter agencies all this time isn't exactly accurate. Maybe the confirmation bias that has gone on in regard to one-world currencies, maybe it's all just backwards. Maybe we just simply got it wrong. Seeing how Bitcoin has come into proliferation and what it has done, and we know that the roots of this exist within the government, just like DARPA did, I'd be really hard pressed for a major technological advancement in the last time for someone to produce a major technological advancement in the past 100 years that didn't originate from military spending, from the transistor, at Bell Labs, to DARPA, the internet, to Wi-Fi, to all of that power. These are good examples. And I think what comes out of this is you have people who leave the posts where they received grants, let's say, from the state to create these things for a state program. They leave these posts, they enter private enterprise, and they experience like not being owned, and they want to create great brain power. They start creating in the free market. Are they taken forever because of their previous information? Are they taken? And then you have InQTel on the other side, which everybody knows is a CIA incubator for technology on the internet. So what sort of emerges as a picture of intelligence services potentially at war with each other? Where on one half you have this group, which has given these technologies and released them into the public, and another group which is actively seeking to control the effects and consequences of what the other side did. My last comment to that would just be, I kind of hope that there is that descent going on within. That's my hope. It's only us from the outside internet. They're a monolithic agency. They're clearly different agencies. They can't be as well-coordinate as we just imagine they are. So I think that's a really good point by price. The thing they all have in common is that they all get paid by the US dollar. None of these agencies that their current size are possible without the US dollar, without this petro dollar. They can't exist. If we have a world that's run on Bitcoin, the NSA looks like a shadow of its current self. That's an economic reality. So I don't understand the idea that Bitcoin is NSA coin. Sure, maybe they wrote some white papers and stuff that were relevant to the technology. Maybe Satoshi read their white paper and improved upon it. That all seems plausible. Yes, there are scientists that do useful stuff that happen to work for the government. But ultimately, these things, when they become useful to the market, that is an action that is created by the market itself and is divorced from this kind of research. And keep in mind, the majority of the research that is being performed and being paid by the government is complete circle jerk waste of time nonsense. I mean, people studying the meeting have its butterflies and writings free and just all kinds of... That's how that 96 MIT NSA paper reads. If you understand Bitcoin, if you're Bitcoin literate and you read this paper, it reads that way. And it's funny that you make that comparison, Christophe. That's how it's the voice, the writing voice. It's really obvious. All right, moving on. Exit question. Given that we could still authenticate messages from Satoshi if they were signed with his PGP key, will we hear from Satoshi Nakamoto again? Bryce? Well, you know, Christophe, what up at great point? But you know, that I am not Dori Nakamoto statement is now suddenly suspect. However, actually looked at the PTP foundation page and the original post by Satoshi on Bitcoin does not have his PGP key of it. So he didn't even sign his original message on PTP forms. So unless and until we get that cryptographic evidence that the individual, that anyone at all, you know, you can't prove a negative. So there's no way to say that the keys have been destroyed. We must always assume that those keys still exist, you know, in perpetuity. That being said, until there is some signing of his identity to prove that he is, you know, connected to the historical entity that is known as Satoshi Nakamoto, it's just out there in the wind. And with the lack of signing and the leaving this email account open, not deleting this email. We're seeing many signs of the alleged red pirate Roberts where we expect them to do everything right, but it's so hard to do everything right. Everyone slips up somewhere, maybe even Satoshi. And gosh, wouldn't it be terrible if our heroes turned out to be just human beings like the rest of us? It would be, I prefer if the hyperintelligent space alien sent to save us. Christophe Atlas. Oh, we good here for Satoshi. If I put myself in his place or their place or her place, it would be difficult to just create this thing, see it blow up like crazy and turn into something that clearly exceeded Satoshi's expectations in terms of how fast things were going to move. It would be very difficult to resist the temptation to comment on that and keep it to yourself. But on the other hand, I think that he's demonstrated some real wisdom by playing his character. He's keeping his cards close to his chest, so to speak, and trying to stay on the download because I do think he would get a lot of really negative attention by outing himself. And so it's possible, but I'd like to think that he'll just walk away from it and move on to other stuff. I've often think that it reminds me of the Prometheus story where Prometheus was chained to a rock after giving mankind fire. Except in this situation, they haven't been able to find Prometheus to chain him to a rock yet. It's going really good this time. Will Pangman. Yeah, I think the rock is his forced solitude, you know, self-enforced kind of, self-imposed, but that's kind of the rock he's chained to. That's a good analogy. Yeah, like I indicated earlier, I'm really rooting for someone to show that with incredible diligence and discipline, you can achieve relative anonymity on the open-broken web. So like if he can stay private and maybe only communicate one more time with us from a machine that connects to an internet by satellite and he throws the hardware overboard after that and rides off into the sunset, that'd be cool. And we never hear from him again. We get a nice final message. This is, you know, the point was brought up about dread pirate rovers and eventually even these visionary creators slipping up, you know, hopefully not with Satoshi. Well, and that's a really great point. We don't know how important anonymity was to Satoshi. It's assumed in the actions that were taken, you know, just dropping off the face of the planet. But a lot of the mythos and assumptions behind Satoshi's motivations, we really don't know what those were. And leaving this email account open, you know, was it carelessness or do we just place a lot more on Satoshi's need for privacy than initially assumed? But that kind of stuff is really just open up in the air and until the guy comes forward, I mean, you know, it's fun to think about, but I don't know how much of it can really be proven as true. It does seem like the bigger Bitcoin gets, the more reason there is for Satoshi to stay private. So maybe at the beginning he didn't think that much about it, but now it's obviously a big issue. Victoria. Will we hear from him again? We'll definitely keep hearing about him all the time, which isn't bad because it keeps Bitcoin in the news and every time Bitcoin is mentioned, it's awesome. So I hope we hear from him. If we doubt the media is going to be awful bored. Issue 2. Apple Pay takes credit cards to a whole mother level. Apple computer has done it again. As they revolutionize the music industry with iTunes, they're now seeking to revolutionize the credit card industry with Apple Pay. Apple Pay tokenizes the credit cards and makes them more secure. But they've also started an advertising campaign to kill off the old plastic cards. Is the enemy of my enemy, my friend, Kristoff Atlus? Yeah, it's interesting. So as we develop this financial tax somewhere on the internet, what we're seeing is there's a whole stack of product you can call it and think of them as protocols. We've had this concept in networking for a long time. And I think that Apple Pay and Bitcoin are two different parts of the stack. If Apple wants to in the future, they can integrate Bitcoin into Apple Pay. I don't think it competes with it. The other day someone asked me, do you think that Apple Pay is the Bitcoin killer? I said, well, do you think that credit cards are the yen killer? I don't think so because they're two different parts of the stack. I think that I would not be surprised whatsoever if Apple Pay integrates Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency in the future. But keep in mind that things like Apple Pay, PayPal, they're all middlemen and they're things that the decentralized finance community is working to eliminate. And that I think that the market tends to naturally try to eliminate in the long run to get rid of these fees and these wallet holders and so forth. And so in the long term, I think that there is a bit of competition there, but it's more in terms of Bitcoin as a threat to Apple Pay and not so much the other way around. Will Pangman. Oh, sorry about that. So yeah, I think token cards, Apple is saying that this is something new. This is like over a decade old. This happens. This is how lots of card payments happen. This is how Uber, for example, has charged people for over a year. And it's interesting. About the card killing agenda, like Christophe said, there are two different parts of the stack, Bitcoin or dollars and the cards or whatever it may be. It's funny. You see these gimmicks come out. Apple Pay has some cool elements. I'll separate that for a second. But gimmicks like coin, this card that combines all your cards and connects to an app. People think this is cool. It solves a real problem of having a lot of cards in your pocket. Half the population or probably the majority of the retail shopping population is women. And they have purses. They don't care about too many cards. This is not a real problem, people. It's a cool sharper image on steroids kind of thing. Whatever. It's like Sky Mall on steroids. Sky Mall is exactly what I was thinking. And Apple Pay in some respects is doing this too. There are a couple things. Like Wi-Fi calling. They've been advertising. That's weak sauce. There's a couple things that are weak about it. Yeah, if they can do touchless payments, I read an article. They're working with brain tree of PayPal. And also another payments company. But basically two companies who've been linked to Bitcoin, Apple's working with to achieve this one touch payment type of interfacing. I mean, who knows? Maybe they're starting to realize that cross platform extensibility is a good thing again. And maybe they're going to open up to that more. So I'm encouraged. But yeah, card killing is not the issue. They're trumpeting innovations that are art real. So their marketing is like really playing on the dumb, which is unfortunate. So we'll see. We'll see how people take to this. NFC is another thing. Like NFC has been around for a long time. Android used it for a long time. It's never really caught on. But maybe this could be NFC's killer app kind of thing. Just like QR codes have been, you know, the killer app for QR code so far has been Bitcoin addresses. There's not a really better use case that has been used in mass, you know. So anyway, we'll see how it catches on. But I'm more excited about the brain tree PayPal Bitcoin news by far. That's a good point. Well, what if Apple comes out with Apple pay for Android? That sounds clever. Victoria, your thoughts. Well, I love this. I just think this is really exciting because it gets people used to the idea of money on your phone. And I don't know why we're not doing this already. I mean, I guess we're doing it now. But just the fact that when I go to Starbucks, all I bring is my phone. And I want to do that everywhere. And it gets people talking about Bitcoin again because they ask, whoa, was Apple Pay going to kill a Bitcoin when I'm talking about Bitcoin again? I just love it. Yeah, I'm excited. Bryce, I had a couple thoughts on this. Number one, Apple with, I think this is a great, Apple Pay is an excellent entry point for crypto into the Apple ecosystem. And the reason for this is, of course, the touch ID. You can, through the API, you can actually generate private keys based on your fingerprints. So your Apple, your iOS wallet is you. I mean, biometrically attached to you. That sort of technology doesn't exist. NFC, I agree with Will. I think Apple was probably the last holdout for this mass acceptance of the technology. You know, you see the gas stations. You can pay at the pump with NFC. You can pay at the groceries and NFC. And I think Apple being one of the largest, most visible, most market maker of mobile device manufacturers adopting it. It's a done deal. We're going to see NFC everywhere in the next six months. Absolutely. We're showing a lot to get companies to adopt that. They're rolling it out with several large corporations to make sure that it's there when you want to use it. And while in, and this is also Apple not leading for a change, because NFC has been established by all of these other players like Samsung, which is like a dirty word around Apple. So now Apple has to conform to whatever standards have already been set by their competitors. So there's not much opportunity for that wall garden that Apple is so comfortable with instituting with all their systems. All that being said, I have a criticism of the Bitcoin community and of the developers in general in regard to Apple pay and some of the, and the mobile, the focus on mobile. Mobile doesn't help people that can't afford phones. Mobile doesn't help people that we all got a bommophones and all that. What I would really like to see is more focus in development on non-electronic means of accessing the blockchain and transferring funds. There are some genuine opportunities for ingenuity and genius to come forth and really provide services to the unbanked that are completely withheld from them by technological barriers. If you want to talk about the 6.5 billion, Bitcoin cannot help people that do not have access to electricity and internet, not without a significant upfront cost. And Apple pay is great and the adoption and the moving of crypto to mobile is fantastic. At that point, it's still just a 1% or so. And once we get off of smartphones and once we get off of the addiction to the internet for the use of crypto and it's tough, don't get me wrong and it's not easy. It's like nobody's done it yet. But it is possible. And I'd like to see more investment in that area. That's an excellent point, Bryce. One more thing. As all English majors know, the Apple represents man's fall from grace. The poisoned Apple in Snow White and forbidden knowledge. Do you think that the credit card industry knows that they've made a fostering bargain? What will they do when Apple pay accepts Bitcoin? Kristoff. I don't know. But I think that the credit card companies, they'll be fine. They'll find ways to continue acting as these ugly little middlemen that collect fees and annoy us all. But I do think this does impact two other really important industries. It's bad news for PRL because people won't be handing over their credit cards and IDs any longer. And touchless payment. And it's also, you know, it's going to impact all kinds of stuff like that. And I think that the ramifications will be pretty interesting when we see it all come to close. Yeah, wallet manufacturers won't have slots for credit cards anymore. What will they have? I mean, what will you do? Just stuff business card in there? Good for the companies that make screens too because more people put taking their phone out of their wallet, dropping it and breaking the screen. And money is one of the dirtiest things that we touch. So it's great to get rid of that. Although if it reduces our access to disease, we might not build up antibodies. We might go the other way. So we'll see how that goes. We can still lend books to each other, perhaps. Will, your thoughts. Yeah. So cards, card issuers. You know, these are divisions of companies like MasterCard and Visa, but there are other companies do some banks or card issuers. Card issuers stand to gain a great deal if people can real time load, you know, a smart debit card or a smart credit card with whatever asset they want, which is coming. I mean, Bitcoin is just one, but one rail, but Ripple really looks like it might be or possibly stellar. Who knows? These are the things that banks will probably embrace. If they embrace crypto at all, they will probably embrace these things and use them to load funds onto cards. And you know, this will be all full of KYC and all of that as well. But what I think what you'll see is instant settlements will be a huge convenience that not only these institutions will really enjoy, but also, of course, the consumer. I mean, how much do we all not want to go, you know, wait in line at banks and want to like real time load money when we need to know more trips to the ATM, you just like open your phone and boom, you go, I mean, like that's going to be cool. That if that's the direction things go. Victoria, your thoughts? Yeah, I don't know. I don't really know what to say about this one. We'll see when it happens. Bryce, what do you think? A couple things. The cars have believe it or not, some distinct advantages over crypto. I know that's really unpopular, but you know, I had a conversation with on Twitter with Radnar, as the nice name begins with an A, former global strategy officer for PayPal, he quit in a big kerfuffle on Twitter, he got drunk and called somebody in name. So, but I had a little car and I said, you know, crypto could do everything that credit cards do, but do it faster and cheaper. And he says, yeah, but I don't get my SPG points. Okay, fair enough. However, crypto could make the cost of running that SPG network about 10% of what it actually is. So it's not exactly a winner there. The other thing that credit cards do is, and nobody likes this either, there's this humongous, you know what, let me start that over. Bitcoiners, buy and large, do not understand economics. I'm just going to go ahead and say that right now. And that lack of understanding has led to a lot of misperceptions about how easily things like credit cards are going to fall. And when you have things like bank interchange rates for credit and debt that are a part of the web of finance that create the money that the entire world spends, you know, we're still in a minority. Those systems still have to be chipped away at and they live, you know, and they exist deep within the economic structure of the society in which we live. And we are barely getting the message across to even retail banking. So when you talk about the money that moves between banks, we're not even anywhere near that yet. And until we get close to influencing that flow of funds, credit cards are going to be around for a long time. Moving on, quite a lot is happening at the World Crypto Network. Try out hosting your own show with the beta show. Feel the rush with Bitcoin rush and get the scoop from Midas Marty while enjoying your dark news. We've got it all at worldcrypto-network.com and all we're missing is you. Join the world crypto network today. Issue 3. PayPal makes their move for Bitcoin. The day after Apple's announcement, PayPal was very busy, releasing an unwatchable video with hundreds of faces, quickly scrolling by, that mentioned the word Bitcoin was just their warm up. By lunchtime on Tuesday, the CEO of BrainTree, PayPal's R&D Futurist Unit, has announced that PayPal will be using Bitcoin with NFC to compete with a yet unannounced Apple Pay. PayPal and Bitcoin, great partnership or the greatest partnership ever, will, Penguin. Yeah, I mean, this is huge. This is really tapping into everyday use cases, usability. I think Bitcoin software builders, all kinds of companies have a long way to go with UX UI before they can catch up to an integration like this could become, right? And you see this from some people, like Coinbase for all of their issues, is very easy to use, very, very easy to use for new people. And Zappo looks good. I haven't tested, dug around too much in it, but looks good as a wallet, very easy to use, familiar to like the newer banking interfaces, which are kind of what people are familiar with, is what you need for kind of mass acceptance of this kind of technology. So there's other companies doing some cool things too, and I'm excited for Topeeke to add to the tool set here too. I think we're going to have a really nice UX UI to go along with what I'm talking about here, but this is still what's missing, along with the messaging, Embrace was kind of talking about a little bit about that. I think maybe what he, correct me from wrong, but some of what I think you're hinting at with the economic criticism of most Bitcoiners. And I would, when I think of most Bitcoiners, I'd just go look through the comment section of the top 20 posts on our Bitcoin or something, you know. And you're right. And if you look at that, then it's pretty clear there's a weak, the economics is a weakness of the majority of the people there. So yeah, I guess what I'm saying is Bitcoin has to be easier for everyone to use, so that something like this where people could pay for Uber and Airbnb with Bitcoin because they use brain treat, a process transactions, where people can buy things on eBay with Bitcoin and not just be like a Bitcoiner, like they can go there, say, oh, Bitcoin's 5% cheaper. How do I buy Bitcoin? Boom. You know? So that's what we're looking for from interfaces and kind of like on-ramps, on-ramps, off-ramps, which again, we might not see any of this until the NYDFS and other regulations come out. Basically in my opinion, like I know the proposed regulations are very untenable. That's obvious. But the point is, as soon as there's an answer, people will move forward and we can see some of this stuff roll out and actually get into consumer's hands, you know, my mother's hands, right? Victoria, your thought. So I love this. I think this is really awesome. I think it was going to happen, obviously, just like Bitcoin being integrated with Uber and Airbnb is going to happen, obviously. So no, I'm really excited about this too. Once again, to look at said before, it keeps Bitcoin in the news. People asking about Bitcoin, people who aren't in it now, who are scared of it because of what it's typically tied to, which is like so grow to these to understand, will not be talking about PayPal and Bitcoin because it seems more legitimate. So I'm excited for that. Price, your thoughts. I thought the video was really weird, like everybody else did. It was the message. You know, you understand that PayPal is a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay. And a few months ago, Carla Kim and Mark Andreson had this Mount Olympus Pistons contest over spinning PayPal off of eBay. And of course, that didn't go through. And now you see this really strange video where they talk about the future of mobile payments and I am my money and all that kind of crazy stuff and they kind of throw the word in Bitcoin in there once or twice. To me, that kind of seemed like floating a balloon, like flying a flag just to see what the reaction was to PayPal saying the word Bitcoin and not being negative about it. And because there really was no message in that video, there was no, you know, the same one you've, and this is a major, you know, multi-million, the multi-billion dollar company making this really crazy, not very well thought out sort of video, which mentions a vanguard technology. And by the way, eBay, you know, eBay stock price dumped on the Apple Pay announcement. But Bitcoin went up. So, you know, I kind of thought that there might be a little bit in that dump on eBay. I think there might have been a little bit of negative sentiments left over from the whole car like hand battle because that was, that was like a war almost over eBay. See, I thought it would have been a really good idea if they spun PayPal off because then eBay could just take Bitcoin directly and they wouldn't need PayPal and they'd look like geniuses. Obviously, anyone that invests would PayPal would get destroyed. Well, and now you see that the larger picture that emerges where there, you know, people don't really like to talk about it very much because remittance is the number one hot topic right now on Wall Street and in a global business because everybody knows that that mobile payments are increasing on a global scale and almost, you know, an almost exponential rate every month, not even annually, monthly, increasing an exponential rate, parabolic like the Bitcoin price, you know, back last year. And there is so much infrastructure to be built that, you know, we're just, we're just rushing forward through it and there's so much money to be made in building this infrastructure that battles over PayPal. I think we're going to see, you know, struggles like this. Well, you know, there was some, there was some rumors I heard about BitPay having similar sorts of structure, similar sort of struggles. So there's no, you know, who knows where this is going to end up in next year, the plaintiff, you know, the Bitcoin remittance space we could all be using PayPal. It's very possible. Christoph, Atlas. Yeah, what a completely terrible video. It had all the charm of a ransom note. It was pretty much unwatchable for most of the people that I heard from about it. Just very, very strange. But it didn't give me a sense of confidence of like, ah, PayPal and Bitcoin, they're married now. It was kind of like a dirty secret note passed between two cheating couples, you know, or something like that. It was just, it was really quite odd. I'm glad to see that there may be some, you know, a significant player that's throwing their way behind Bitcoin. And you know, as usual, I'm a bit ambivalent about it. On one hand, I don't care terribly about the interface between the banking system and Bitcoin, but on the other hand, the more that it gets genuinely integrated, the more that potentially Bitcoin can kind of replace the existing banking system. And I think that ultimately is what's valuable. Exit question, when will PayPal realize that anyone can write a Bitcoin app with NFC to compete with them, offering lower or no fees? Will it be before or after they blow their advertising budget promoting Bitcoin? Will Pangman? Well, this was the first thought that I had when I heard the Brain Tree and PayPal announcement and watched the video, you know. I got excited, I tweeted and emailed it out a little bit, but then I started to think, there have been a proliferation in the last four or five, six months of Block Explorer API developer type Bitcoin companies, one of which just got acquired by Coinbase that's Blocker. Another, just integrated the DOJ API and that's block.io, that's an exciting one. Gem, Gem is another one. They used to go by a different name. I can't recall what the name was at this point, but Gem has pivoted and called himself Gem and they're doing this now and they were very much like the sizzle of TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco last week. There's another one, two blocks cipher, which also allows you to query the blockchain to see if your unconfirmed transaction will confirm quicker or get picked up quicker in the next block. Microsoft was that PayPal could really make money to answer your question, Christophe, maybe by being a Bitcoin Block Explorer API developer and provide software as a service for all of these applications that plug into PayPal to use essentially their wallet with US dollars in the banking system currently, that will all still exist for some amount of time who knows. But if they're serious about it and grading Bitcoin, I can't think of a better, more competitive play if they're serious about lowering fees and serious about mobile payments and all this kinds of stuff. If they're serious about embracing what this technology can do, there's been a lot of these block explorer companies and I see more on the horizon, maybe PayPal is the next. Victoria, your thoughts? I think they probably already realized this that someone could compete with them eventually, but you're competing with PayPal. So you have to also build that brand, right, and market yourself as well. If you're cheaper, you could just say, where the cheaper PayPal, and there's your brand right there. Well, that's Bitcoin though. I just be big. But that's taking some time to do, right? So anyway, so the answer from my point of view would be, they're going to market this and blow their advertising budget. They already know what's going to happen, but I think that they see Bitcoin. They're starting to understand Bitcoin now. Bitcoin capital B, not small B. And yeah, so let's see how it goes. Bryce, your thoughts? As I was sitting here, I just kind of flipped over to Twitter for a moment. And an image came across my feed that said, Apple, keeping your money is safe as your most intimate moments. So just to harken back to that for a second. I think that there's an opportunity here building between Apple Pay and PayPal to be the first one to see who's going to give in to Bitcoin and get us to love them more than the other guy. And I think that by the end of the year, there's going to be a real courtship to see who can implement the best Bitcoin solutions in order to get our money from us more than the other guy. I'm just fine with that. Kristoff Atlus. I think Will's software as a service idea is pretty interesting. It's certainly true right now that one of the major services offered by PayPal is to these kind of web developers that are looking for a way to interstate between customers and e-carts and all this kind of stuff I've done programming with PayPal's API. I can attest that. They're sort of at the top of the game as far as this API type stuff can go. I can see them creating Bitcoin-related APIs in the future and being competitive in that space. I think that would probably be a relatively small market compared to what PayPal is focusing on right now. Maybe that's what the remnants of PayPal look like in the future. I don't know. Moving on, issue four, overstock and Coinbase go international. Bitcoin is spreading all over the globe thanks to the hard work of Bitcoin companies everywhere. Overstock once again fulfills their promise while Coinbase continues to expand to fight the mighty BitPay. What country should they focus on? Where will the Bitcoin break out next? Victoria Van Eyck. So I know Bryce will probably have some comments about this. I'm really excited about the Remittance aspect. I'm sending money back and forth. So I would like to see them focus more on places like India, but in terms of merchant services and wallets, I don't know. I think just continuing to focus on our markets. I'd like, hey guys, come to Canada. I don't need to have a team in Canada yet. BitPay? We can't even attach our bank account to Coinbase yet. So how about I say Canada? That's what I'm going to settle on. Canada, the forgotten state. Are we joined by Blake Anderson? Are you with us, Blake? Absolutely. I'm glad to be here. Thanks so much. All right, go ahead. What do you think of Oversaw and Coinbase going internationally? I think it's really good news. I think that bringing as many people as possible into the Bitcoin space is really good because that's what Bitcoin is supposed to do with something that's all inclusive. You don't need to have a special fancy hat or a shiny badge or special jurisdiction. It's just for everyone. It's really great to see the utility of these different merchants and services spreading out everywhere. I think it's really good. It does help our argument when we say Bitcoin's international and these companies actually go international. That makes us look good. Absolutely. Price, your thoughts. All right. I lost my... I was distracted for a moment. What was the topic? Coinbase. Oversaw going international and maybe what country they should focus on or what should they do next? I would. I think they should proceed like as Victoria suggested throughout North America. Canada has absolutely terrible prices for goods and services in their country as a result of what they've done with their economy. They pay it up to 25% to 30% in some instances more than people 10 miles away south of the border in the United States pay for the exact same goods. Target, I think, was just introduced in Canada with these big promises of lowering prices and stopping this inequality. That never happened because, of course, they couldn't without losing billions of dollars because the amount of money that these companies make and the arbitrage between the Canadian dollar and the US dollar is almost more than the money that they make selling the goods and services in the first place. So, when Bitcoin comes to Canada, it's going to have enormous and long reaching effects throughout their economy. And I think that's why Canada has taken the stance that they have in being one of the first countries to actually put forth a bit of regulation as far as how this should be handled in commercial applications for just that reason. If Canada specifically, it'll have major impact and we're not sure if it's going to be positive or negative. Your vote for Bitcoin Canada, Christoph, your thoughts. Well, I'm generally focused on the long game which is that these borders, the restrictions on whether you can sell stuff here or there or on the other side of this line or on the other end of that beach. They don't really matter. I just finished watching a speech by Andreas that he put out. Sometimes this past year, it was really good and he was talking about how when you have the internet of money, when money becomes borderless, things change drastically. And so, right now, we're talking a lot about how Bitcoin can interface with the existing system. Can I get this entry point here? Oh no, we're playing whack-a-mole. It gets shut down here, then it enters over there. Now overstock, it's international, but then there's this ban in China. And really what I think is, it's important to keep in the big picture in mind, which is eventually where we're heading is a place in history where these distinctions really don't matter, where we will be able to trade freely with people all over the world. And that can't be stopped. And I think that's really powerful. So when you see overstocking to this space, it's sort of a prey-lude to this ultimate place that we will arrive where they're acknowledging, look, look, we're taking Bitcoin. And if you want to buy something from us from the US and you want to flee the next day to Beijing, you can buy stuff from us there too. And we're perfectly fine with that. And no one can stop us. Real Pagman. So I'm just going to carry along with the theme and use the geographical version, region known as Mexico, because this North America thing seems to be going pretty well. Mexico has a really successful new exchange, gaining more volume every day. Mexico looks pretty cool. I know they've been working on it for months, so the guys who are building it are serious. I know they've switched trading engines and before launching, like two or three different times to make sure that they had a good engine. Yeah, so let's, I think all the 7-Elevens or something like that down there take Bitcoin already. I mean, they have lots of Bitcoin penetration and a coinbase would do really well down in Mexico, I think. And they have great food moving on to your questions and our answers. You still have a chance to get your question in. Doesn't look like we have any questions yet, which I'm very surprised by. Oh no, it's just the new Google. Things load slower now. So you have to be more patient, which I'm definitely not. Our first question is from Theo. What if Satoshi is an alien? I think this is a good question. We should go around the horn. Blake. Satoshi and alien. I'm not sure that he's not an alien, therefore aliens. So I think that it's probably to do with the whole like Mars situation where Mars used to have an atmosphere and they got hit by a big asteroid and they came over here and built a Merkabub with the pyramids and then that's how life was seeded. And then Satoshi was probably frozen and then launched in some kind of a long elliptical orbit, along with that planet, whatever it's called, becomes along every so often. And then that's probably what happened, therefore his email got hacked and probably what happened. Maybe the real question isn't, is Satoshi an alien? It's what color alien he is. Bryce, your thoughts. I'm kind of leaning towards Blake's Neburu theory. I think that every 6,000 years, another Bitcoin will be invented and we'll destroy the world. Yeah, I don't have any evidence for aliens, but I think he would be kind of like the most realistic alien. Something that really sucks about sci-fi usually is that you get these stupid, status liberals that write this stuff. They're good authors, but their ability to think about what the future is going to be like is really fucking limited. So the aliens are always like take us to your leader when clearly a race that's advanced enough to travel the stars, travel faster than light and open up wormholes and shit. They would have outgrown the leader stuff by then, right? So it's kind of absurd. So hypothetically, if you were an alien race that wanted to nudge the human race into some kind of more productive direction, you wanted to speed up the rate of progress and get to the point where they can trade on a peaceful basis and not try to nuk the crap out of you. Yeah, why not invent a wonderful new censorship-resistant form of money that starts to chip away at the state? I think that would be a wonderful way of getting the ball rolling and could be done in a subtle fashion. So perhaps for Christoph, the aliens are secretly libertarian. Will, what kind of alien do you think Satoshi is? Okay, so this past week I had the awesome fortune of being in the Bay Area out west and hanging out with Bryce and Victoria. And I missed Tom. I'm pissed. I missed you, Tom. It was a busy couple days. But I met a couple weird people in California go figure. And this is coming from someone who just moved to Florida. So I know we're talking a lot about geographical regions with fictitious boundary lines. But what I'm getting at is one of these guys was saying the most mind-blowing stuff about Bitcoin, very smart guy. I'm not going to say the name. But super smart guy. And I was like, just like this is one of the smarter people. And I've met a lot of smart people that week. I met Bryce for the first time that week. But anyway, two hours we talked. And like the third hour somewhere in the middle, he told me that he was a time architect. And that he was from the year 2044, me too. And he... You saw John Titer and San Francisco and you didn't introduce me, you'd take. Yeah, it was a trip because this guy was lucid. Anyway, so does time travel exist and are these things aliens? I don't know, maybe only in California are they aliens. Oh, and things got complicated there. Time travel too. Victoria. Is Satoshi an alien? Yeah, for sure. This is a great question. I don't know if you guys have seen what's that series about aliens? I don't know. I don't know. Anyway, I watched that like 20 of those episodes and I'm just convinced that aliens have brought us like all these amazing technologies. So that makes sense. Firefly? No, it's like ancient aliens. Oh, yeah, with the guys' face. Yeah, history. Yeah. All right, moving on to our next question. This one's for Bryce. Last time Bryce was on, he offered to explain why Litecoin was in the situation it is in now. But everyone ignored him. Bryce now give an answer. So here you go, Bryce, you get the floor. Tell us about Litecoin. Okay. So, why is the Litecoin price going through the floor? The reason is because nobody is holding onto it. There's no way with Bitcoin, there was a certain amount of hope that Bitcoin would become what it has turned into. That it would fulfill its use case of changing the world, spreading blockchain technology and A6 and blah, blah, blah. Litecoin, not so much. When the A6 for Litecoin came out, Litecoin was originally launched with the features of GPU resistance that we wouldn't see A6 for ages and ages and ages. But it turns out that Moore's Law doesn't care what Bitcoin talk says. And in half the time that it took for Bitcoin A6 to show up, script A6 showed up. And earlier this year, we're just going to call it Spade of Spade. K&C, minds with their own crap. We all know this. All A6 mining companies, mine with their own products before they ship them to customers. It's really hard to make. Right. They have to test. Right. Well, they give you the coins that they mine with your equipment. But that's okay. We'll just skip past all that. That's being the case. People bought all these script A6s and they want to make money on them. They want to get that return on investment. The only way to do that, unfortunately, is to dump the coins. What this says from a market perspective is that there is no faith in the long-term viability of Litecoin. There's no reason for these miners that have put out these thousands of dollars, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars in investment in these A6s to retain the Litecoins their mining because nobody thinks that anything good is going to come from it. So now Litecoin is sort of in this position where there are the hook, I mean, the Litecoin community is on the hook for millions of dollars of investment up and down, you know, the industry in supporting Litecoin on an, I mean, it's an absolute dog. The price has done nothing but decline the entire year. And that is app, and you can see that the price goes down almost at an exactly inversely proportional rate to the hash rate going up. So the more people mining Litecoin, the more people dumping Litecoin. You know, if someone is, at first I thought someone was kind of like quietly acquiring Litecoin. Boy, if they are, they're pissed off because they're already losing money. So I don't, you know, I really don't know. I thought that there might be a Litecoin pump by the end of the year. I still think that that's a definite possibility because quite frankly, if people aren't made happy with their miners, like they were made happy with their Bitcoin miners, I don't think we're going to sell many script acicliners anymore because there's just no money in it. The Cambrian explosion of the alt market is over. I mean, we've all, you know, in the markets, we've all pretty much agreed that this is just done. So, and script fell out of fashion, you know, like around January or February when script N and X11, X13 and X99,200, you know, whatever the hell they have now. These GPU resistant algoos came on the scene, and script just became another also ran. It's sort of wedged between Bitcoin's popularity and the desire for GPU farms that invested a million dollars in these GPUs that they cannot resell. Then they have to ROI, and most of them still have it. So, I don't know. The future for Litecoin isn't necessarily as definite as I thought it was three or four months ago. The market is not tightened up, and that's a bit concerning. And if it doesn't tighten up in the next six to eight weeks, it could very well just drop through the floor and never come back. Now, you mentioned that Litecoin is a real dog. What do you think about the Doe's coin merged mining with Litecoin? Could that save the day? The power of the Doe's coin? I don't know if it can save the day. I think it's going to be better for Doe's coin than Litecoin. I think Doe's coin added a counter-party protocol, and I think that that was absolutely brilliant. Of all of the counter-party options that have ever been released, the Doe's party is absolutely the most cost effective. So, if you want to utilize all of the functions of counter-party for smart contracts, for asset representations, Doe's is actually the best choice because normal people can use it. And it puts that technology in the accessibility of regular people. Not to mention you get to burn Doe's every time you do it, so that helps the long-term economics of that coin, which could desperately need it. A long time ago, I was very anti-counter-party because I didn't like that they destroyed coins. As a coin dev, we put a lot of time and effort into fine-tuning the economics of these networks so they will perform as we expect them to perform 5, 10, 15, 5, 500 years from now. So, when you burn coins, you destroy that delicate balance of economics. We don't really know what Bitcoin is going to do in the long term because counter-party is on the blockchain. In this instance, I kind of agree with Jeff Garza. Get it to F off. But in the case of Doe's excellent, excellent, excellent application. If anything, I think that might be the one technology that saves that coin in the long term. This blends well with our next question, which is really more of a comment. Chad says, Bryce has a cool Doe's German Shepherd's rock. There you go, Bryce. A little compliment. Thank you. And now the next question, I'm not sure of, he says, I haven't heard of this the first time I heard of it, super net. What does everyone think? It raised 4,800 Bitcoin in a week and is a hell of a vision. So obviously, 4,800 Bitcoins incredible. And it's even more incredible that I've never heard of it. Have you guys heard of super net, Victoria? Just looked at that now. I'm just speaking about now. Yeah, okay. I'll go ahead and throw this out there. Peter Todd, if you were around, he's probably heard of it. It's a product of some of the folks that worked on an alternative blockchain implementation in the alt market. And what super net was intended to do was, oh, I'm saying it, the super net was intended to do was sort of create a counterparty-ish network based on some APIs that can be inserted into the code base of a coin wallet. And essentially, the big dream was of a decentralized exchange. However, there's serious issue with it. In World Number One, it's all pump-and-dump scam coins. Basically, there is not a single legitimate coin that's offered to be a part of the super net network. And if folks want to take issue with that, that's fine. I'm a professional and I'm going to become a registered investment advisor. So if you don't like my advice, it just means I just picked on your favorite coin. But beyond that, I couldn't tell anybody to invest in it at all. It's a terrible idea. It's actually worse. It's probably the worst implementation of a distributed exchange format that I've ever seen to date. So good news for counterparty then. Well, you know, counterparty doesn't... Well, the thing that this does, this is not counter-party, doesn't really compete because counterparty itself doesn't work across blockchains. And the entire thrust of super net was that developers insert this into their wallet code and it enabled these blockchains to talk to each other. However, this service has not been vetted by anybody yet. So now you're making this like, you know, gray ooze of blockchains that are just sort of like melding together with their value. And if one of these blockchains, we have already seen that crypto node has terrible, hideous design flaws that cause the blockchain to do terrible things. And so we're now going to integrate all these coins together. This is a recipe for disaster. I would not recommend that anyone invest in that network at all. Can you talk some more about the issues that you have with crypto node design? Crypto node. I think Peter Todd would probably be better at that to speak to that more than I would. I kind of backed out of that whole kerfuffle because it was just turning into a quagmire. And God love him for taking some money and trying to sort that crap out. What the essentially, my issue with crypto node was intended to be a self-healing blockchain, which was great, like all our peer coin was central, but without central, I just checked pointing. And what ended up happening was someone attacked the network, took advantage of a flaw in the mempool and inserted a bunch of transactions that caused the blockchain to fork. Well, once the blockchain forked, there were two forks operating. And because of how crypto node was designed, suddenly anyone who tried to send a transaction to crypto node, it ended up in both forks. So I was making jokes like the most interesting man in the world. I don't know as double spend, but when I do, it's on two forks at once. I have no idea how this is going to be resolved, or how these blockchains are going to be, or even if they even have. I mean, at that point, I simply stop looking at it because in order to win that consensus vote as to which blockchain is accurate, I have no idea how they're going to do that. All right, moving on to the next question. Loading, loading, loading. It may have been discussed catching up on episodes, but does anyone have an opinion on BitShare's X elaborate on its concept maybe? Well, no, I was pointing to Bryce. For Bryce, back to Bryce again, you're getting the Andreas treatment today. I don't know how this is going to be resolved, or how these blocks. Bryce is a time traveler. I just heard what he was saying a few moments ago, said again, I think we have incontrovertible proof that he's an alien. So BitShare's X, you know, props to yet another smart contract developer who managed to raise $15 million from the Bitcoin community at this point, or not $15, excuse me, $5 million from the Bitcoin community. At this point, this kind of thing is not impressive. We all see the Bitcoin days. Destroy goes up. This is not crowdfunding. These are whales using Bitcoins. They've sat on for years in order to pay for this stuff. That being said, BitShare's X is fundamentally flawed from an economic standpoint. I'm not the only person who said this. Several economists have also come out and said this, and it's very simple. The example that BitShare's X uses is BitUSD, which is apparently supposed to be a one-to-one peg with the US dollar inside the BitShare's X economy. However, if the price of BitShare's X, all of the things inside of this big BitShare's X bubble, like here's BitUSD inside the bubble, all of these things rise and fall based on the price of BitShare's X. And in order for the, you know, if BitShare's X goes down, BitUSD has to go up in order to maintain that one-to-one peg, and there's no mechanism within BitShare's to indicate what the rate of increase of assets should be added to BitUSD to make it the same as a dollar. Basically, long, complex economic nonsense. Long and short of it is, the price of everything inside BitShare's is related to the price of one BitShare. And if that price goes down, the entire ecosystem goes down. So, like if I have, and if you go to develop a product on in the BitShare's ecosystem, and you're going to spend $5 million developing this product, your competition can take $250,000 and drop the price of BitShare's X so far that your product will absolutely lose money before you've even written a single line of code. So, is this the argument that I've heard of where you have, you know, your, your, your bit, basically your pegged unit, and then you have a pegged unit worth of gasoline. And then that amount of gasoline will go up and down, and then people are like, well, how are you going to actually have the stored gasoline going up and down, and by what measure and how much is it going to go up and down, is that kind of a similar criticism what you're talking about, the kind of layman's version of it? Even beyond that, I mean, that there's two issues. Number one, yes, that issue. So, if you have the price of gas, which fluctuates against the dollar, and then you have BitShare's X, which fluctuates against Bitcoin, and Bitcoin fluctuates against the price of the dollar. So, you have this, this translation of arbitrage between these three assets, and, and it's the, in that translation, BitShare's X loses value, because the most volatile asset in that chain is in fact, BitShare's X. There's no reason to use it. There's a higher risk of losing money in those transactions than actually just using the US dollar. So, it's like using a Pogo stick to get better balance than your car. Exactly. When, when really, you should probably just go get a turn up and get the damn thing fixed. Very good. Moving on to our last question today. Tony P writes, and this is a little of the support for the NSA coin discussion we had earlier. He says, Bitcoin started out as the greatest social experiment in society today. How can you be sure it's not just a test to see how much hashing unknown algorithm data they could outsource, instead of spending money on supercomputers? This could be a brilliant move by the government. So, it's got you there, Bryce. I hadn't thought of that yet. I mean, at any point along the progress of this technology, which certainly through 2009, 2010 was just, you know, a spec. It's still kind of a spec, but back then it was just, you know, a nothing. At any point, it could have gained the attention or, you know, the utility proposition for the powers that shouldn't be that they might do something like that in my opinion. Very well could be. And now, moving on to predictions or a story of the week. I'm sure everyone is prepared with a prediction or a story of the week. That's why we're going to Blake Anderson. First, are you ready, Blake? Well, my prediction is that having new payment systems that come out and try to mimic the Bitcoin token system are going to be hacked eventually, because what you have is you have fungibility. Tokens are fungible. One's just as good as the other, but the the block chain, the hash rate, that is not a fungible thing. Like, so things that are saying, well, you know, our network and payment system is fungible with the Bitcoin system. And it's like, no, it's not. That's like saying, you know, we have, you know, Jerry Rice and his prime. And we're just going to, you know, substitute him with another player. And it's going to be just as good. We're going to, you know, make football contracts. And that's, you know, that's ass and I. So I think that, you know, some of these new technologies that are coming out and saying that they're just as good as Bitcoin, that their token system is really awesome. Be skeptical. My prediction is that they're going to be hacked, and that your eye cloud nude photos are going to be gone. I hadn't even thought of hacking Apple Pay yet. I could buy anything I want. Woo-hoo. Bryce Weiner, your prediction or story of the week. I'm a story of the week. Spent three days in San Francisco with Victoria and Will and Devon Reed, the CEO of Block Tech and a bunch of other, probably some of the most brilliant folks I've met in my life. And boy, what a fantastic set of conversations we had this past week. It was, it was very eye opening on a lot of fronts. And I think that going forward, I think there's going to be a lot of stuff that came out of this past week that most people won't even realize. Kristoff Atmos, your prediction. I have a story of the week. So I just published a paper on Dark Coins Dark Send technology. And I think it's pretty approachable. I tried to write it so that's not just like a super academic, but your average crypto enthusiasts can probably work their way through it. It has some nice diagrams in it and stuff like that. So if you're interested in that, check it out. And the Dark Coin developer Evan Duffield did post like a response blog post to that. And it seems to be on top of, you know, understanding all the weaknesses and what not that I identified in the paper. And I think they have a pretty good, kind of road map moving forward for improving Dark Coin and improving the level of privacy for it. I think that also this analysis will be helpful for just understanding coin joint implementations in the future because Dark Coin is primarily kind of an a complex implementation of the coin joint protocol proposed by Greg Gray Maxwell and others. So check that out. If you're interested, you can find a link to it on my blog, which is at blog.anonymousbitcoinbook.com. Chris doc, can I harass you for a second and just ask you how does the coin joint and things like that compare to like a teleport technology that's being talked about a little bit with what is it Bitcoin Dark? So I don't fully understand Bitcoin technology yet, but it's just at a high level. It's kind of like an off chain approach to privacy. So you're going to be able to send your coins to other people, but it won't be written to the blockchain right away. And that's one of the things that that helps it be anonymous for Bitcoin Dark. Bitcoin Dark would also potentially be compatible with other crypto currencies, which is interesting. I suspect that it may be less robust than something like coin joint, but I'll hold off my judgment on that until I fully wrap my head around it. Whereas something like Dark Coin, everything is happening on the blockchain. You're still getting all the security, the blockchain, and all that good stuff, but it's trying to... Well, I'm actually trying to accountability. I mean, coin joint ruins the accountability of the blockchain. Oh, sure. Yeah, which is... It's an optional thing, right? But you get to, if you want to, have that privacy. And I think that's for any cryptocurrency, in order for it to be useful as money, unless it has kind of like a niche use, I think it absolutely has to have that privacy option. To me, otherwise, it's just not that useful. I think it will be shut down by governments around the world. Then it's not going to be a good... So, so Dark Coin, I'm not going to say that it's like the pinnacle technology for privacy. It's competing with a whole lot of other potential designs. And it's really gratifying to see these all coins working on the stuff, because Bitcoin has done jack shit when it comes to privacy. In the last year, it's been terrible. A $50,000 to make Dark Wallet, which has been done like six or seven times over in the Alt Market already for free, but sorry. Not exactly free, but anyway. So, I mean, the Dark Wallet I'm looking forward to Dark Wallets. I'm sure it will be useful in the Bitcoin space. The $50,000 that they raised was not very much for several developers. Those guys eat out of cans and live in homeless shelters or whatever it is that they do. But so... It's not for ideal- I have the criticism of Dark Wallet. I want to see a lot of people coming up with innovative ideas, competing with each other to move the ball forward on this, because we can not... We absolutely cannot count on, for example, the programmers that are being funded by the Bitcoin Foundation to do this work for us. They're not interested. It's not a priority for them. And with the exception of Peter Todd, who is helping some of these different projects out, which is great. But this is not code that's being written to Bitcoin Core code right now. It's not going to happen in the near future. And so I think that this activity in the altcoin space, regardless of what your opinion is of altcoins in general, is very, very important. Yeah, it's a good test in that research space. I definitely agree with that sentiment. Will Pangman, your prediction or a story of the week? So, I kind of want to highlight this interesting development out of Bryce's company. Friend of mine, Ryan Taylor is working on it as well. It's called Alexandria. Maybe that's not the complete name for Give Me Bryce. But it's basically kind of what I alluded to earlier. I've really been fascinated by kind of the social... the psychosocial implications of what Bitcoin can teach, you know, individuals and groups. And one thing is like I was alluding to earlier, it's this history timeline that's stronger the older it gets. And that's wonderful. And we have the ability now with the tool to record all kinds of information. I mean the proof of existence and notary and all these kinds of things. But what about library? So this is something that's happening. And the story of the week that I want to highlight. And I'll put the link in the chat and please post it to the show notes. I'm sure you will, Tom. But it's a CNBC story. The headline is the death of the classroom as we know it. And so the only thing missing from this story is really, you know, it talks about crowdfunding and some of the startups that are disrupting education. And thank you to them. The only thing missing is talk of how the blockchain would apply to this kind of disruption. And I'm interested in working on projects like this. I have talked with some interesting historians who I really want to put in touch with you, Bryce, and Ryan and whoever else in your team is working on this project and help however I might be able to. But this is interesting, right? So the death of the classroom, we all know that you can with the internet learn so much stuff for free. I mean, there was a comment earlier about what you can acquire for free, you know, compared to what people might raise money for or go into debt for. So this is huge. I want to see more of this. I'm really grateful that there are academics who are kind of rebelling or bucking the system. They're going off and becoming entrepreneurs, which is completely awesome. And they're creating curriculum that's free open source. All these things like, you know, so much educational material out there. I've read a statistic if you listen to like 120 hours of a podcast on a particular topic, you know, any set of podcasts on one particular topic, that's the equivalent of a PhD degree in that subject, essentially. So of course, you have to, you know, use critical thinking and make sure that you're vetting your sources and you're looking for primary source material wherever possible. This is where a project like price and block tech are doing is super exciting because primary source material will be easy at access forever all time, which is great. So yeah, I get super thrilled about this stuff because I don't plan on, you know, I regret spending the amount of some, the sum of money I spent to go to school. I love being there and my friends and the extracurricular activities, but everything about the classes was completely unfulfilling and un-stimulating and I learned so much more in the past two years than the prior seven since college. And I learned a whole lot more in the prior seven than I did in the previous 12 of school. So it's, this is the way we need to move in the future and blockchain technology is a huge part of it. Victoria, your prediction or story of the week? A couple thoughts. So story of the week for me is clearly this PayPal brain tree thing and Apple Pay. I mean, that's hands down for me the biggest thing that happened this week. Well, I actually met someone at, so I'm in California. I got to go see a couple of new startups out of Boost Vc in San Mateo. That's really cool block cybers there. Definitely check them out. But well, there's a startup there. They just started, but you're going to be interested if you're interested in this like school curriculum style thing. He's using blockchain technology to work on that. But I'll hook you up with him too. He's on Twitter, but I'll send you an email. Prediction is that this PayPal Apple thing, getting people using my on their phones is going to pay the way up for Bitcoin. We're going to see Uber, Airbnb, jumping on board soon. Lots more business getting interested. And yeah, that's my prediction. Excellent. Sounds a lot like my prediction, which is the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Apple may seem like a competitor, but they're doing the hard work of getting rid of plastic credit cards with the help of their mighty marketing department. They'll create a world where the only way to pay is Apple versus PayPal. And before long, people will learn that you can use Bitcoin without PayPal. And you don't have to pay any fees. Uh oh, PayPal. But we're out of time. Until next time. Bye. Bye.