The Bitcoin Group, the American original. For over the last ten seconds, the sharpest Satoshi's the best Bitcoin's, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our guests, Bryce Weiner from Block Tech Financial. Pleasure as always, Thomas. Christoph Atlas from Anonymous Bitcoin Book. Good to be here with you guys today. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network. Moving on, issue one, Bitcoin sidechains unleashed. The Bitcoin sidechains white paper has arrived and through a two-way peg, the sidechains paper claims that it will be able to reuse the Bitcoin sequence to create all kinds of altcoins and other digital assets. In the AMA, they also claim that they could envelope Ethereum, perhaps counterparty, and most certainly Doge and Litecoin as well as all Lite, all altcoins. Is this the future made out of sidechains? Is it over for the altcoins? Bryce Weiner. Well, folks have been asking me about this a lot, and I got to tell you, first of all, no, it's not over for all coins. The cryptography is exactly the same between Bitcoin and altcoins. So when you talk about an implementation of sidechains, we can just take a fed implementation and put it on any altcoin we want. So that sort of mentality that this is going to somehow be a death knell of altcoins is really ridiculous. And there's really two things that are very disturbing about it. One of it is this blockchain minimalism where we don't need blockchains other than Bitcoin. And Peter Todd went on this amazing rant about sidechains. So beyond anything that Peter Todd has already said, I can add one thing that's almost in our yogurt at this point, and that there's a certain camp within those who are developing things for Bitcoin that are literally trying to create this one-world currency that people have been trying to get away from for the past 60-something years. So when you talk about, we don't need any blockchains other than Bitcoin. Well, then suddenly, you're talking about you're not going to be able to buy or sell anything without the mark, a QR code. So when this diversity and this ability to create new blockchains and to spread that hash power around instead of simply concentrating it on Bitcoin, it is part of the open source system that Satoshi Nakamoto envisioned. It's mentioned quite specifically in this white paper. So sidechains, great technology. I think that there's a lot of fun things we can do with it. But this hypermely over the death of all coins is a good premature. That is a good idea, Bryce. Lightcoin sidechain, a dogecoin sidechain, much like the Doge Party project, Mirror the Counter Party project. Christoph Atlas. Christoph Atlas. Yeah, so I think that sidechains do post some challenges for all coins in that there will be some added incentive to start bringing these currencies onto sidechains of the Bitcoin blockchain. There's numerous advantages associated with doing so. Although you can take any technology that's applied to Bitcoin and apply it to another alternative blockchain because it is open source and so forth, there are some powerful economic incentives or disincentives, I guess, against doing. So to do with the network effect of Bitcoin and liquidity and so forth. I'm definitely not predicting the end of all coins. I think that maybe all coins could even live happily on sidechain to that's where they want to be and they would still exist. For the end user, if I feel like a huge difference whether it's on a separate blockchain or a sidechain or whatever it is, they still have their units of currency. They have a specific market determined value and so forth. I think it's a bit pedantic to say whether they're better off on sidechains or on alternative chains that block chains at this point. We just don't know. We need to experiment with the technology and find out what's really interesting about the story though is you have this company block stream that is going to basically train right a lot of code, do a lot of designing and so forth and lobby to get compatibility with sidechains added to Bitcoin. It's not a small feat. It requires some non-trivial changes to Bitcoin. In general, it's getting more and more difficult every day to add stuff to Bitcoin. Do you have these investors who apparently have put several million dollars into this effort, thinking entirely on the idea that they are going to be able to successfully lobby to get this into Bitcoin? I am really curious, what was their risk analysis to make this determination that they felt that confident that all of their money is going to be riding on this thing that's yet to be determined? That's kind of impressive and mysterious to me at the same time and I'm really curious to see what happens with block stream in general. They could have a backup plan like Bryce is saying, going to Litecoin, going to Dogecoin, can you bring up a good point, Kristoff, that Dogecoin is now merged mind with Litecoin and I don't think that your average Doge user can tell the difference or really thinks about it that much. Maybe it won't matter if Doge is in a sidechain merged mind with Litecoin, part of Bitcoin. Bryce, did you want to follow up on the block stream idea? Well, it's not to spill the beans on what's coming up next, but for what Kristoff was saying, is that you're going to have a backup plan? You notice there's a few mining companies that are no longer offering their products to consumers and are now mining strictly for themselves. The backup plan could be number one, what's that money going to be spent for? Here, A, it buys themselves a bunch of mining equipment. For B, it's propaganda in marketing in order to get this forked into the code. It could be, it does destroy their argument of reusing Bitcoin and reusing Bitcoin's code if they go and launch an altcoin like sidecoin or something, but if they have to, and if they could get the miners, which apparently are now just for sale, it's not a bad plan, not a bad backup plan. Or there is more for sale than just the miners. We'll see, exit question, which altcoin will survive? Pick one, Bryce Weiner. Well, all things being considered, I'm going to go ahead and say, direct. Why it is on algorithm other than Bitcoin? It is stewarded by myself and block tech and is currently merged mine. So when side chains come along, we're already ready for it. We can just roll right into that ecosystem. Kristoff, Atlas. Perhaps some of the more special, like I see the ones that are most resistant to that movement being the ones that are most specialized, something like a name coin or something on those lines, but then again, why should it in coin go into a side chain? I can't create a good argument against that at this point. I'm not sure if it will survive on its own, but those coin continues to merge and change and whatever is necessary, those coins seems to do. And that might help them survive. Moving on, issue two. K and C minor just got rid of all the customers. K and C minor isn't going to deal with returns, rebate, shipping, or even answering the phone because they're getting rid of all the customers, instead mining for themselves. In an abandoned helicopter hangar, in the Arctic Circle, they're founding their first large scale mine, with more to come online soon. And of course, they're selling stock. Kristoff, Atlas, your thoughts about K and C going it alone? The hanger and stuff makes it sound like there's cobra commanders behind this plan or something. It's a little bit intense. Yeah, I like to compare Bitcoin mining with gold mining. I think it's a really interesting comparison because there are all these ways in which they are similar. What's different, of course, is that gold mining at this point, they're not making the kind of advances at the same rate that Bitcoin mining is. A month from now or a year from now or whatever, we're not going to be doubling our gold production because of some new breakthrough in that stuff. It doesn't follow Moore's law or anything like that. It's a very, very linear, slow progress. At least we can get up into those asteroids or something like that. In the gold mining era, the people that were making the most money were not people that were trying to mine a bunch of gold and then sit on it and hoard the gold. It was the people that were selling the equipment. We've been talking about that parallel to Bitcoin mining for a while now that the people that are really making this money off of Bitcoin mining are the people that are selling the shovels and the picks. Then it's a little bit confusing to see one of these companies stop doing that. They were like, we're not going to sell the shovels anymore. That was just too profitable. We're going to get a new plan now. If you go back and look at, for example, how much capital depreciation takes place between when the miners are ready to start mining Bitcoin's, the physical devices, when they arrive to a customer and they get all set up and ready to go and stuff like that, it's a substantial amount of time. It can take a couple of weeks. Sometimes it's shipping from around the world and there's all kinds of subtleties in terms of, does it beat the expectations of the hash rate and the temperature manage? There's all kinds of stuff. There is a substantial, because it's getting better so quickly at this point, if you can hold onto the devices, it really does make a huge difference. I can see the logic behind it. I'm curious to see where this goes. It does make you feel a little bit uneasy about the centralization of Bitcoin mining. It definitely seems like a good idea. Given the butterfly labs revelations, it seems more honest what KNC is doing. We're not going to take this on a test net. We're not going to take a week and ship this to you so that you can put it into your dirty dog and festive home with a bad air and no air conditioning and no fire security and all these other things that a proper server room or even a proper helicopter hanger I assume would have. It does make a lot of sense, but yes, Christoph, it does bring a centralization problems. Bryce, what do you think? Well, I station zebra commentary aside. When you talk about the centralization issues and you compare it with what we're just talking about with side chains, suddenly now it's centralization on top of centralization because side chain merge mine coins can now be merged with on this equipment. Technically speaking, from a technical perspective, you could only merge mine with Bitcoin, you know, SHA 256D. You could only merge mine about six coins together before you simply can't. And that's the extent of the amount of proof of work applications before the timings are wrong and you start to work and block solids. So that being said, now there's going to be a market for side chains and who's going to mine what? And you're going to have these private mines that are set up and they're not open to the public and nobody cares except for the fact that they're going to be mining money that nobody else can make. And we have this. The one problem of all economics that Bitcoin never, you know, all the problems of economics that Bitcoin attempts to address, the one it has never attempted to address is the distribution problem, the quality of distribution. And like, you know, the number one Satoshi wallet is the living testimony to that. It is the shining star of centralization. And a lot of the things that have happened since then are just, well, Satoshi did it so we can do it too. And I think, can't see minor again to an extent is just being honest. However, it is a de facto admission that they've been mining with their consumers equipment and I hope to see it as you see for rise their assets for it. I've heard a lot of people need to dust their can see minor equipment after it arrives new from the factory. But we'll see how that goes. Exit question, yes or no. And you know what that means. Yes or no, will Bitcoin become centralized, Christoph atlas? Wow, that's an emotionally challenging question. Right now, I would say the evidence suggests to be yes. Like I don't have a good explanation of how it doesn't take place. If it does, I'm not too concerned because I think a lot of the value that comes from Bitcoin is about it's the fact that it's decentralized and there are, there's no people voting on whether transactions go through and so forth. And so if it loses that value, then people will just move to a new blockchain, a new coin and we'll move on with our lives. I don't think it will be the worst thing in the world. And remember the main problem isn't that it's decentralized, it's that someone else can take it out once it becomes decentralized. Bryce Weiner. Still muted. There we are. You know, will Bitcoin become centralized? Yes, it will become centralized. Is that a bad thing? That's a lot of you look at it. I mean, if you're going for Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, and you're kind of like, you're really doing well, okay, yeah, that's a bad thing because then you'll lose half of the libertarian arguments and all that. But if you're one of these folks like Kristall, I think, based on his comments, you know, changing the world is really the important part and fixing all of the problems with society is the important part. And we know that blockchain technology offers for the first time a lot of that, an opportunity to do that. And so, you know, if it becomes centralized, that probably means there's a lot of money that will come into it because suddenly there's something, there's kind of a structure within the ecosystem that is familiar to, to, to Fiat institutions and we'll see a bit more money flow in there. And what's that money is in that blockchain ecosystem? It's ours. It doesn't leave. And we know that's pretty much the truth, too. So, you know, the Bitcoin hasn't retained while the price might be going down, if you look at the overall market cap, some of that is floating back into altcoins. And it's not all simply venting from the market all at once. So, there's a little bit of a, a little bit of a, a back and forth. And I think that centralization really is just market forces. And if we are going to compete with Visa and their incredible transaction network that does millions of transactions per second, we might need a centralized infrastructure. I'm not sure that we're going to get millions of transactions a second in some guys garage or even in a series of garages. Moving on, issue three, MIT students can predict the future, but still not get a date. A complicated computer program written by MIT researchers can somehow take 200 million data points from the past. All the data from the present for two seconds and predict the price of Bitcoin, 10 seconds in the future. They traded more than 2,000 times and ended with profits of more than 89%. Price winner has MIT invented that machine from the movie Pi. Can our future really be predicted so easily? I'm just going to do something really funny. And I actually demonstrated this in public. I've actually taught people in fact how to do that. You do not need an advanced computer software package. You can put it at the price of Bitcoin with relative accuracy of 15 minute windows. There are day traders who are doing this right now. This is, and in fact, it was last Friday, I think, it was about a week and a half ago. Or maybe not even two weeks ago. I was looking for bear whale and the track, the bear whale and kind of stalking bear whale back to his hole. And when I noticed certain patterns in the markets and quite frankly, I'll just go ahead and tell a tale out of school. You can take the Euro, USD and BTC USD and you can watch those markets in one minute ticker windows and you will actually see a pattern of convergence within 15 minutes. You can just trade that all day long. And we have 2000 trades, I think probably at this point we're telling you about five times more than that. And this is not even an automated system here. But in fact, somebody somewhere has actually automated this series of arbitrage or this triangle or arbitrage. And they've been running this. And you can see the charts. They've been running this about two quarters now. And it has completely dominated the price patterns of the Bitcoin markets. So MIT is a little bit behind the curve on this one, I guess. Kristoff Atlas. I'm confused by people that publish papers and talk about predicting the price and why they're not just walking around it at a suit of gold and sitting on giant bags of money with dollar signs. And I don't know, I'm a little bit skeptical about this stuff. I'm sure that people will continue to find information advantages inside or trading, technological, new, algorithm, so forth. I'm sure that Bitcoin trading is still in its infancy, especially when it comes to high frequency trading and comparing that to the stock markets. Because if you're already good at it, why not do it? And they much larger market than in Bitcoin. Yeah, sure. That makes sense to me. But is it something that's sustainable, though? Like as soon as you put the information out there, if it can propagate, then it ceases to be useful because everyone takes it into account. And they apply it and now the pattern is no longer there, right? This is the whole thing about markets is that everyone's got pretty similar information and then there's a few outliers and then there's all the schmucks that are getting taken for a ride. And it's a little bit like Bitcoin investing right now reminds me a bit of professional poker players online, right? There's these guys. They sit at home. They're really great at poker. And basically their living is taking money from the schmucks that are playing as immature as poker online who think that they're, they can put their sunglasses on and read like a book about it and they're going to figure it out. So there's this wealth transfer from the idiots or the people that are just doing it for fun to the real professionals. And yeah, that's certainly a component of trading and it probably always will be. Now, I'm going to take this stuff. You know what, you're absolutely right. And quite frankly, I could not agree more that poker game absolutely exists and that people, you know, if you want to play, if you want to play, don't ever play with more than you're willing to lose and because the sharks are coming. And just because the, if you have a formula today, it doesn't mean it's going to work tomorrow. And just because someone knows something today doesn't mean it's going to be valid tomorrow. And a lot of people have been really panning about, you know, the price fluctuations. You can't take advantage of them. Stay out. Another great part of the poker analogy, Christoph, is that many of the poker sites were shut down. Much like the Bitcoin exchanges, one day your full tilt poker, the next day your mount gocks. We don't know what's going to happen with these exchanges and they didn't know what was going to happen with their poker sites. Exit question, without the help of an MIT computer, predict the price of Bitcoin on Christmas, first prediction, price weiner, what have you got? Okay, so everybody's wondering where to help second market. You know, Barry, where's second market? We would like to all high frequency trade Bitcoin, please. I have you, we've got my Forex terminals and everything all set up. I'm just missing you, Barry. So beyond that, I'm not sure. You know, right now we've been making jokes that Bitcoin is bleeding out like every other altcoin in existence with poor economics. So with a 425 bar and any sort of pump or anything like that, I'm just going to say it's going to hit the floor 300 or less. If it goes higher than that, second market came online and there's all kinds of HFTs going on to increase the velocity and whatnot. All out of this stuff happens. Depression, Christoph atlas. So they're going to be $451, which is what my random number generator app just came up with or it's going to be chosen and sorry, $1231. The correct answer is $525. Issue 4, Staples, Hacked, Apple Pay released with double spending feature. Apple Pay stumbled out of the gate this week with double charging customers, but I'm sure this problem can be easily fixed. Many merchants are refusing it because it doesn't work with their data mining royalty programs and the need to buy new cash registers. Meanwhile, another credit card hack. This time perhaps at Staples. Christoph atlas, your thoughts on Apple Pay, Bitcoin and Staples. I still think that Apple Pay is going to be a useful thing to Bitcoin and that it's introducing mobile payments to consumers. I think that mobile payments will continue to be a thing for a while in Bitcoin and with other kinds of money. I think that's quite helpful. Is it the kind of revolution that Bitcoin is? No, but most people don't get that. They're still looking at Bitcoin as a payment mechanism and I guess to them, if they're just looking at the payment mechanism, then maybe Bitcoin doesn't look as exciting compared to something like Apple Pay, which is already pretty much working with the exception of these speed bumps that they're going to hit during the introductory phase. Price, weener. Well, you've got to say one could ask where the $180 billion Bitcoin went that were generated in lines, but we all like to gloss over those little things. These are just bumps in the road ironing out the program. Now, the fact that Apple made it such a pain in the ass in order to get these charges reversed is something else. That's just terrible customer service and some lawyer somewhere needed to be told to shut up and Apple should have just simply assumed liability. Now when it comes to the Staples hack, it's a little different. The financial before any of these, before even Tariffin, which was the first of these major financial institution breaches this year, before Tariffin, maybe not a week or so, and you can look this up. The front page of the financial time is warned of upcoming cyber attacks. How do they know? How do they know what was going to happen? Because a week later it was Tariffin. And every month since then, at least once a month, we've had one more fantastically, just outrageous breach of security that has resulted in the loss of funds and more importantly, the loss of customer data. So now you've got, have you heard any at Staples and Target? Maybe you have. If you have, there's a good chance that now we can begin to build profiles of your spending habits across most of all. What you also trade on JP Morgan, imagine the guy who's in the middle of all three of these breaches. You know everything there is to know about that guy. You can look at what you tell probably what he had to eat or what kind of pencils he likes to buy or what kind of crappy Chinese made clothes he likes to wear. So this sort of thing, I think, is a very much in orchestrated events. And I'm not sure, obviously, I'm not sure who's behind it, but whoever it is is making out literally like a bandit. I mean, this is like Bonnie and Clyde robbing banks 100 years ago. And now that they're just dealing here with technology instead of a gun. That's a good point, Bryce. It's not just the credit card numbers that were stolen. It's the personal information. And in some cases, especially aligning that across multiple companies, that could be more valuable than the credit card information, which will all be changed in fixed anyway. So exit question. Apple pay on a scale of innovation from one to 10, one meaning an insignificant nothing with 10 meeting absolute metaphysical perfection. Christoph Atlas, Apple pay is a three. Three, Bryce. I'm going to give it a four. Wow, you guys are mean. I'm thinking more like a six or seven. It's going to crush the credit cards like iTunes did. It's pretty big deal. Yeah, but it, but maybe except it still has to compete with PayPal, which also now accepts Bitcoin. So if they can get beyond that home, you know, more power to them, but they got quite a hill of climb just in having a chapter of ecosystem. Well, see, they had the advantage before with iTunes, but you're right, they didn't have a competing iTunes product as PayPal can clearly offer them. Moving on to questions and answers. We're just going to start off right at the top here. Jamie asks, what are the group's thoughts on the cryptocurrency lawsuit and are the other altcoin exchanges at risk? As some of you know, cryptocurrency received a lawsuit yesterday. I haven't gotten through much of it, but personally, yes, I would transfer my money out of cryptocurrency. Bryce, what do you think about the cryptocurrency lawsuit? I think whoever that works just stole my story. This is huge. Project investors incorporated in Florida has been a mainstay of not only the markets, but also a lot of the marketing of Bitcoin and the alt space. It is so far as even speaking inside, Bitcoins and sharing the stage with the likes of Mark Anderson earlier this year. So I, you know, I got to say, this is pretty damning stuff. Some of us, not so shocked, but by the same token, this is, you know, with Mint Palmula and now with this cryptocurrency thing, which I think is probably been keyed off by someone actually figured out they were going to get an SEC letter too. And you know, there's a couple of other folks that are shaking in their boots waiting for the SEC to come bother them too. So I think that this is going to be the next wave of stuff. This is our turn instead of China. And we're going to have this wave of shutting down of bad actors beginning with butterfly labs and continuing all the way through until it just falls down like a set of dominoes. Kristoff Atlas. Can we just please have some decentralized exchanges for the love of God? I'm so sick of one empty gocks after another. It's just the same boring story over and over again. That's the interesting complexity of cryptocurrencies. We have to build all these centralized bridges so that we can get to this decentralized future where we won't need all those bridges, but we still have to build them. So it's been confusing to everyone. Next question. Is there a group of, I would say this word wrong, let me see, machoistic investors, corporate contractors, Bitcoin, Purist, deliberately causing chaos, volatility, dis-runt, distrust in an effort to bring down the Altcoin market. Is there a, what they call it in Fight Club project chaos, project mayhem, something like that? Is there one of those? Bryce, is there one? Are you the leader? Well, to bring down Bitcoin, no, there's no, there's no, there's no, there's no, not Altcoin, but there could be groups on both sides. I would be asking me if on the leader, I would be like, you know, Altcoin is trying to build up Bitcoin. Well, maybe, you know, there is no car kill. But beyond that, I don't really think that there's an organized effort. I think what there are is a lot of pump groups that originated from the Bitcoin pump groups from late 2013 and who have moved, since moved their money into the Alt market and have been running a number of scams and pump and dump schemes throughout the Alt market. And that's actually what folks have been seeing. And we've actually identified maybe about three or four of them. We know who they are at this point. They like to show off and brag. So eventually, you know, everybody knows who everybody is. And you know, I keep a respectful distance because like I'm a personality in a name in the space, I'm running a business. But you know, when you look across the bar and you see that guy sitting over there in the corner and you know who he is, he knows who he is, we just kind of give each other a nod and keep doing our thing. I like the government's sort that kind of shit out. That's not my job. Kristoff Atlas, is there a project mayhem for Altcoin? There's certainly a lot of, there are some significant parties that are very skeptical about the future of Altcoins. I think that's the Nakamoto Institute is one of the organizations that kind of spearheads that skepticism, but they're not doing anything. They're not doing anything to bring about the end of Altcoins that are doing against it. As for investor, no, I think it's mostly the Altcoin. When Altcoins go down, I think it's mostly, you know, the Altcoin team that's to blame for it and not big coiners. I think they're employing themselves. I think the scammers and the pumped dumpers and so far are the ones that really give Altcoins a bad name and just drain wealth from people who are somewhat productive and honest to scammers. It's an unfortunate tendency, but I don't, the career right now, I don't really see any way to stop it from happening. There's also a limited number of stories. We can only have a story like new Altcoins coming up, new Altcoins going down, new anonymous coins going up, new anonymous coins going down. The next story is side chains, Ethereum, whatever it is, killing Altcoins. Then not killing Altcoins. Then Altcoins coming back and not killing them back and forth. Don't you think Bryce, there's only a limited number of things to talk about? Except, and one of the things that we already, we saw this today and I spoke a little bit, I tweeted a little bit about it. There was actually a study released on the anonymity of Bitcoin when utilized in conjunction with the TOR network. What happens is because of the nature of the TOR network, it makes it less private to use Bitcoin through TOR than it is to just simply use Bitcoin. One of the currencies that we still are a razor exists purely within the TOR network. It does not have any of those issues. It's only crossing between that boundary between the ClearNet and the Deep Web that allows it is that being able to pinpoint where you cross that boundary, that enables the identification of the transactions that happened within TOR. This is just brand new stuff. This was just published like a couple days ago. There is something that Altcoins can do that Bitcoin can't do. That's just a simple fact to the matter. There's probably a relatively limited number of Bitcoin transactions going on through TOR. If you just track them all, you'd be well closer to alleged criminal activity because they're using TOR. In the theory being is if everybody uses TOR and if everybody uses stealth addresses and everybody uses privacy solutions, then there is no way to find any of them that's not using them as worse. That's what we need. We need to fill up all the honeypots, get all the data in there together. Let's move on to the next question. What are your thoughts on tree chains opposed to side chains, especially with centralization issues? I'm not that familiar with tree chains. What do you guys know about tree chains? Red anything yet? Go ahead, Bryce. Go. I was just going to say, I haven't had the opportunity to talk to Peter about it specifically to answer some questions I might have. However, the one thing that all of these solutions had in common is a cryptographic linkage to Bitcoin itself. Through that linkage, there is an attempted chance for a value. However, when certain portions of the network become dependent on Bitcoin, there's an interesting effect that may or may not happen. It's purely theoretical. In regard to the value of the chain, does it then act as a derivative or does it have a value independent of Bitcoin because it possessed it at one time? It does some market experiments with different trading pairs and then adding other kinds to see if it retains that original value. Over time, what happens is the value of the coin is eventually determined by the most commonly traded pair. If you have something that you are going to cryptographically tie to Bitcoin via a smart contract, either that be with tree chains or with side chains, what we've already seen so far in the markets is that it becomes a defective derivative, which means if I get leverage on BitFinex for $5 million, I can now not only short Bitcoin into the floor, but I can short everything attached to Bitcoin into the floor. Then the price of the entire ecosystem goes down all at once. I think that's the number one danger that we're looking at with all of these different solutions. All of our eggs in one basket, Christophe, your thoughts. This is a complicated area, not an area of expertise for me. I will say that the ask me anything on Reddit thread about the side chains stuff they did sort of address this question. Basically, what they were saying was pre-chain side chains, they sound similar, the names are similar, and the idea for tree chains, which seem to primarily come from people like Peter Todd, they were sort of born out of some criticisms of side chains. In people's minds, they're linked somehow, but really, they are two unrelated kinds of ideas. You could do one or the other. You could do both. They could both coexist happily. That's not a matter of choosing one or the other. As for the value of these currencies or these tokens or whatever you want to talk about, that would exist in these side chains, another thing that they brought up in the AMA, which I thought was quite helpful, was talking about what is this two-way peg idea I mean. What they said was, here's how you can think about it. Let's say you have Bitcoin, you have a side chain with a token called sidecoin. Basically, all of the Bitcoin that are allocated to the side chain, the total amount of that is worth whatever that amount of Bitcoin is. Let's just say it's five Bitcoins at $300. That's about $1,500 total. The side chain developers, they get to choose how that entire pie, the $1,500 pie, is divided up. It could be that there's a one-to-one ratio and they swap in between, in which case, they're very carefully pegs to the value of Bitcoin or it could be something different. They said, imagine if it's a lot of coin where you buy the Bitcoin into the lot of coin side chain, and then every week or so, all of the value goes to the winner of the lottery, in which case, one person gets the whole pie that represents a lot of coin for that week. The size of the pie doesn't change at all. I don't really see unless these side chains get really quite massive. They're not going to impact the value of Bitcoin a whole lot in my estimation. There's going to be a lot of latitude for the side chain developers to determine how does the pie get divided up basically. I think that's a very helpful way of understanding what's going to be the relationship between the side chain value and the Bitcoin value. Excellent comments on side chains and tree chains. We've got another comment. I think this goes back to the credit card issue. He says, it's been so helpful that these companies that experience breaches offer extra added fraud protection policies for the price of a cup of coffee, so caring. It really does seem like the credit cards seem to have this problem over and over again, this insecure system where if somebody gets your little string of numbers, they can call anyone up on the phone and buy anything they want in the world with that little string of numbers or go to the gas station and buy gas for every car in the lot for your little string of numbers. This just keeps happening over and over again. They can't seem to upgrade their system from the string of numbers protection system. So it's been just... I'm not sure if they're a private key, it's really just a string of numbers. It's just two or three times longer than a credit card number. We don't have to give out the private key when we send the money. The money setting system is different. Right, with Bitcoin, it's a key pair, whereas with the credit cards, it's just a symmetric key, basically, that we're just giving out to everyone. Don't worry about jumping on me now, but the concept is still the same. If someone steals your wallet, then they have your credit cards. If someone steals your laptop, then they have your private keys, which is why we... Every time I use my credit card, I'd be giving someone my wallet. You know, and this is why we enable people to recruit their private keys. And I think that wallet makers, wallet producers, app-driving or whatever they call, wallet software producers, should take a lot of care in fixing some of the problems of the Satoshi client where you cannot operate the client without encrypting your password, without encrypting your private key. Using... I have no idea who even would use one of these networks without an encrypted private key. It's beyond me. I think that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have a huge advantage in terms of security and signature. Addresses rolling out. They have three big websites that are very easy to use that give you multi-signature capability. And with the credit card system, they had something kind of like multi-signature in the sense that you would authorize a transaction or whoever has a credit card number. And then there would be the credit card company who would have a fraud detection system with that would also sign off on things. And if they didn't like what they were seeing, and they would cease to sign off on these transactions, it's just not a very good sign. It's a very difficult to identify fraud in these ways. And so I think multi-signature is a much stronger approach. And I've said this before on the show, but I'm going to say it again because I think it's important to keep in mind. When we have these credit cards, if someone uses our card and you know what we did in authorize or whatever, I've personally like every time that's happened to me, they just said, oh, don't worry about it. We're going to take care of it. Here we'll send you a new card. No big deal, right? Even if it's like hundreds or thousands of dollars. And the reason is because they're making out like freaking bandits as these middlemen that are taking fees off of every transaction, sizeable fees to say the least. And so that's what pays for this convenience that we have. It's a hidden charge that we don't see. It just means that versions have to up there, you know, that how expensive things are. And it's kind of a hidden tax on the credit card user. So I'll be very glad to see that go away as a segue into cryptocurrencies. Justice wants to add and he says credit cards are not a proper analogy for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is digital cash, not a credit card replacement. So that is probably a better analogy. We've also got a question like you guys are talking about multi-sig wallets. He asks, are there any multi-sig wallets that you generate your own key? Most provide you with the key. How do you know they're not saved even unintentionally? I've only really used co-pay and really only limited in a limited fashion. It seems okay. I'm not sure. They have the original key. So what do you think, Kristoff, totally insecure? Yeah, it's not ideal to say the least. It would be better to have something more like the blockchain.info thing where things are at least generated all in your browser. I haven't looked at the internals of some of these websites to see whether it's being done client side or server side or whatever. Obviously, server side is a much weaker kind of approach. But keep in mind with client side wallets like Bitcoin Core and so forth. You can still do multi-sig. You can generate your own private keys. It's a little bit less user-friendly to say the least. But it's something that's in there right now. So if you just think you have to open up the console in Bitcoin Core to actually make this happen, but you can do it. No one can use the command line. No one can use console. Come on. Bryce, your thoughts? Well, the one thing that is truly revolutionary, I think, in regard to wallet technology and is really underused right now is hierarchical deterministic wallets. I think those are pure genius. That system allows for, for instance, like CoinKite. I know they use hierarchical. They're called HD wallets because that's like 15 syllables or once. I know that they use HD wallets. And what their catastrophe plan is in the event of the catastrophic failure of their system, because they provide a merchant remittance service. And in a catastrophic failure of their service, they are able to publish a key which will enable user and they just put them in, not they've said. We're going to put it on our Twitter feed. And all of the users of their system can take that key plus their key and that will make their private key and give them access to all of their funds and takes CoinKite right out of the equation completely. So what you're doing is you are giving them what these HD wallets allow is for third parties to have permission to hold your Bitcoin, to hold your coins because you are taking the advantage of a greater service that they are providing. However, that is always still in your control. You can still have a private key. You still have access and recourse to those funds. And I think HD wallets are probably going to, you know, in conjunction with Multicin, that is what is required for business using the blockchain. Things are getting incredibly complicated. Multi layers upon layers upon layers. What the one thing that HD wallets really allow for is within the ecosystem, you have zero confirmation transactions with 100% of your charity of funds. You can actually resolve those transactions without going through the blockchain or miners because it happens within the HD wallets train itself. All right. We've got one more question from SilverMiner and this one's pretty much news to me and might be news to you guys as well. He says, have you seen this three part presentation from early adopter Carl Gray, who states that JP Morgan is actively trading Bitcoin and has been for a while now. Any opinions on this? Do you reckon that they are trying to corner the market? This is the first time hearing of this price. Have you heard anything about JP Morgan trading Bitcoin or perhaps Carl Gray? He knew what I wouldn't be able to say what I haven't had not heard. However, I can say for absolute fact that for the past four months we've seen a dramatic match between the EuroBFUSD market and the USDBT scheme market. That's a two separate Forex market. In order to take advantage of it that you have to have something like a Bloomberg terminal or access to both markets at the same time. Outside of maybe blockchain, Pantera, Capital and a few other folks, I'm wondering who it is that might have access to all of that and be able to create that match to the amount of swing in the markets to literally match the flow between those two Forex. So I think the proof is out there. I'm not going to say that I'm pretty sure that that's true. Definitely one of the ways that the banks could co-opt Bitcoin would be by owning a large portion of it. I think it would be difficult keeping it quiet all of those things. But if they pulled it off, that would change things. Kristoff, any thoughts? I think that in many places in government and really at this point, JP Morgan Chase is not all that different from the government. The game plan is just to stall and delay. People have a sense that things are coming to a head, maybe not a tremendous dramatic collapse, but deflate some huge changes, some huge shifts. I think there's this stalling tactic going on in the US government, in European governments, Japan, China to some extent. If I'm JP Morgan Chase and I'm thinking, oh, there's a 1% chance that Bitcoin is going to become a problem for us in the future, be really competitive with US dollar, disintermediate banks and so forth. Probably what I would do is I try to figure out some kind of formula where I can make a little bit of money off of Bitcoin or not lose too much money off of Bitcoin and continue keep messing with the price. Really try to jack up the volatility and just keep people on their feet constantly because that's going to lay the amount of capital that goes into Bitcoin, investors, where maybe you continually push out and fund journalism that emphasizes the volatility of Bitcoin and the fact that it's not backed by blah, blah, blah. Every once in a while I'll catch a bug in my apartment and what I do is I put it in a little, I don't want to squish on my put them outside. I get a little plastic cup and if they're not bug that can fly and I'll just shake the cup as I'm walking to the door so that I can put it outside and as I'm shaking the cup the bug just cannot climb up the side of this little cup. It's trying really, really hard to get the hell out of this cup and stay in the house, but I keep shaking it and it's off balance and it just can't get up the walls of that cup. And so that's what I'd be doing if I was JP Morgan and had all this money and I try to figure out a formula of that and just keep nailing Bitcoin in that way and I think there's a real possibility that's a taking place. I can't say for sure, but it seems very plausible. Good point, good metaphor. Moving on to predictions or story of the week. Bryce, I know they stole your story earlier but you want to just recap it one more time. Here you go. Yeah, Cripsy is going to see their main court. This lawyer is, in fact, I checked the guy out, the guy is totally legit. Case is legit. Complaints to every legit. There's a laundry list of stuff and I think what we're going to see, we might actually see with the beginning of legal precedent for how to approach these things, which is ultimately, you know, in lieu of regulation or existing law, legal precedent is law of land. So if this actually gets to court and gets some sort of a resolution, this could be, you know, this could make a lot of stuff with Ben Loskey or all this stuff, just stuff kind of move. It always seemed risky that Cripsy was in Florida. They always had so many coins and then they sold a crypto stocks equity on crypto stocks. It's always been a lot of, and eventually did actually release USD trading like they said they're going to. It's always been a lot of clouds and confusion over the hundreds and hundreds of alt coins you could buy on Cripsy. Kristoff, Atlas, your prediction or story of the week. Yeah, my story of the week, it's a little bit on the old side, but kind of new to me, a week or two ago, might have been a couple of weeks at this point. There was this talk about, you know, overstock came out and they said they're going to be using the, the counter party platform that they're trying to build up this infrastructure for kind of a decentralized stock market exchange type thingy. So I listened to Patrick Burns speech. There's a recording on the Let's Talk Bitcoin podcast feed. And I thought it was a really interesting speech and presentation. I am really curious to see where this story goes. And to me, it's new in a number of ways, but what's really captivated me about the story is there's going to be this incredible clash in this story between a vision of decentralized finance and the status quo. But for the first time, it's going to be someone with some serious pockets and some, you know, not a small amount of influence. I know Patrick Burns, he probably doesn't have the ear of 100 senators or anything like that in the same way that let's say JP Morgan Chase does. But, you know, he has, you know, they have some serious money to put behind this idea. And they're going to be working really hard to make it legally compliant. That's completely their goal. And so it's kind of fascinating to see, to me, to see like, can this happen? It seems like the most significant things that have happened so far, I've either in the Bitcoin space and decentralizing things, I've just ignored the law. They try to keep things on the down low. There was not a lot of funding behind these projects. And so I want to see what happens when Patrick Burns with his overstock money bags and his reputation and so forth goes head to head with these Wall Streets, potentially organized criminals that want to keep the status quo. It's going to be quite a fight. I don't know how it will shake out, but it will be certainly interesting. Battle of the Titans should be a good one. Our condolences and deepest thoughts go out to our neighbors to the North, Canada. Living in the United States, you see these events so often on the news, you just become callous and jaded. It's truly sad other than the senseless loss of life and the end of innocence is to see that in reacting to this nightmare, Canada is becoming less like themselves and more like us. We're out of time. Until next time. Bye bye.