The Bitcoin Group, the American original, for over the last ten seconds, the sharpest sitoshis, the best bitcoins, the hardest cryptocurrency talk, we'd like to welcome our panelists. Will Pangman from Topiki? Hey there. Christoph Atlas from Anonymous Bitcoin Book. Hey everybody. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network. Moving on. Issue 1. Raul Paul. Global macro fund investor and current author of the Global macro investor newsletter says that Bitcoin could be worth $100,000 or even a million dollars a coin. And suddenly a large Bitcoin rally appeared, driving the price all the way up to $453 before a sudden decline to $393, with a current price being somewhere in between. Are we out of the Bitcoin downtrend? Is Bitcoin back? Will Pangman. It certainly feels like that a little bit. Although I don't think the rise this time has been steady or stable enough to give me full confidence that we're out of the bear trend. Historically, this is a time of year that the price would be going up if you look in recent years. So perhaps so. It's funny. These predictions, you know, people can run all kinds of mathematical models and predict a million dollars a Bitcoin and things like that. And certainly that might be in our future. You know, take it down the line or maybe sooner. I think it's, you know, it's indicative that there's lots of confidence coming in to investing in the mainstream space, especially with Lossky doing a keynote at 2020. And regardless of what he said or how inane it was, that still can have the effect of producing confidence in the market and a lot of the people who've been, you know, on the sidelines for a while. So and that's good. More liquidity is good. The price always goes up in November. Good enough for me. Kristoff atlas. Quite impossible to say what's going to happen next, but it's a positive sign. I'm seeing quite a few analysts indicating that they feel this is a bullish event. And I think I would tend to agree with them, but we really don't know. I think the main thing that we learned from this year is that the market can really be swung very substantially by relatively small investors in the big picture. Regardless of what the news is or what the indicators seem to be. So I think we need to remain humble at this point about what the price is going to be. Exit question. Force prediction. Next week's price. Will Pangman. Well, I'd like to predict something over $420. It seems to be like the resistance level right now. And I'd be more confident about the, you know, the market turn, the trend turning if we were still a 420 at the moment. So 425 next week. Kristoff atlas. I'm going to guess it's going to be somewhere around the current levels just under the 400 mark. I'm not aware of any big events that are sort of coming down the line that would give it a good bump. The answer is $500 Bitcoin to the moon. Issued to change tip goes viral. So little tip on that could change tip is just everywhere this week with its tipping Tuesday promotion raising more than $10,000 for the Royal Lifeboat Society in England. And some say it's ability to allow seamless micro tipping on Reddit. Could Reddit, Twitter and YouTube comments could bring Bitcoin tipping mainstream? Kristoff atlas. Your thoughts on change tip. I think there is huge potential for change tip or something like it, whether it's going to be a single entity or a basket of entities, huge potential on YouTube. One of my secret little hobbies is occasionally watching people that produced Minecraft content for YouTube, right? And my favorite guy that produces that content, his name is Captain Sparkles. It's a very silly name, but he actually lives in a really sweet condo that he owns and is probably a millionaire. But he does some streaming over Twitch TV as well. One of the things going on Twitch is you can do these subscriptions to the channel that gives you special options, like special content that lets you interact in the chat room as you're watching these people play video games. And you can only subscribe if you give them like five bucks or whatever. And there's a whole variety, like 60 different payment processors or something like that that you can go through. And I think Bitcoin, maybe one of them at this point via like BitPay or something like that. But eventually Twitch is going to integrate Bitcoin directly into their feed. So I think that, I think this guy is, he's an interesting example because he came out of this history of doing the YouTube stuff, made a ton of money off of it, but clearly is thinking forward and seeing like, man, there's something really wrong with this model that I can get millions and millions of millions of people coming to my channel and making just fractions of a cent per person and ad block. And like there's a lot of problems with that model. So what he's sort of looking down the line is like if I can get a lot of my viewers just to give me a small amount of money, get them interested in interacting with my channel with my brand, that's a huge potential source of income. But it's always been problematic to make that happen with the legacy banking system. So I think that Bitcoin, huge potential there where you can give someone anywhere between fractions of a cent and tens of dollars on a monthly basis that's just huge potential for content producers. What's neat about Change Tip is you could tip Captain Sparkles right in the YouTube comments. But what you're talking about might be something more like Patreon where people could subscribe at a couple dollars a month and really give Captain Sparkles the kind of income that you can plan upon. You can really buy groceries when you make a couple hundred dollars a month rather than a five dollar tip every now and then. Will, what do you think? Yeah, I love Change Tips in Stay One. I was really excited when I read on Reddit that someone had acquired the Bitcoin tip bot. I was excited to learn what that was. A few weeks later, Change Tip launched. And I remember we were on the show for three weeks in a row at least or something mentioning Change Tip. I know I mentioned them a number of times in some earlier shows. I've been a huge fan of what they're doing. And they scored some huge talent with Victoria Van Eyck coming on board to build their community. I mean, she is already hitting home runs in her first two weeks on the job, which is way to go, Victoria. Change Tip is not really innovation, quote-unquote. I was having this argument with some people in a Skype chat earlier this week. They were saying that Change Tip isn't really a Bitcoin startup. It could have been any kind of microtransaction tipping mechanism. But the reason Bitcoin is to, well, Bitcoin put the idea in most people's heads that this was possible. People weren't really spending the money to take risks and innovate in the micropayments area as much because it wasn't possible prior to Bitcoin. So Bitcoin puts it in the conversation. But also Bitcoin uniquely, it has this unknown, so the regulatory uncertainty is working to the advantage of Change Tip in a great way. I think they're parlaying that pretty well. They're able to do thing. They wouldn't be able to get credit card companies to sign on with their model more than likely. It'd be very difficult, lots of red tape, bureaucracies, and so on. And Bitcoin, there is no one there to say you can't use it, or you maybe need a permission or blah, blah, blah. So again, why Bitcoin powers innovation, even though Change Tip's internal model may not be quote-unquote true innovation, they're definitely a great vehicle for increasing acceptance of Bitcoin globally, showing people, like in less than 15 second elevator pitch, the value proposition that Bitcoin can bring, and enabling improvements to actually show their effectiveness, such that many legacy players will now probably spend money trying to keep up. And that's good. If they have to compete with what Bitcoin startups are doing, that's good. We'll bring up a good point about Change Tip's internal model. Remember, Change Tip's not on a blockchain. We have no idea what's going on there, just as we had no idea what was going on inside Mount Gox. Their cold storage could be secure in a safe deposit box, or it could be under some guy's cat. And remember, from the other side, that Change Tip is a hot wallet. So if you're keeping more than $20 in there, it might not be there when you come back. They don't have to a factor authentication on their logins. They don't have to factor authentication on their withdrawals. So if you have more than $20 in there, I'd be careful because the next time Twitter's back, the next time Google Plus or however you logged into Change Tip and created your account, they're going to get right into your account as well. Exit question, would you rather have a Bitcoin tip or a Change Tip tip? Kristoff, Atlas. I guess between the two of Bitcoin tip, but I'm happy to get tips wherever I can possibly get them. By the way, I think you made a great point about making sure that you're careful about how much you keep in your wallet and keep in mind that the value keeps changing every day. So every time there's a little jump in the price, all of a sudden the $19 that you thought had adequate security is now $48. Now you, the price doubled and you didn't necessarily double your security. So keep that in mind. And that's also a good point if you're collecting donations as well. If you're holding on to maybe $5, $10 in donations in a few years, that could be a significant amount of donations. So put the security on anyway. Will Pangman. Yeah, I'd accept either one with as much pleasure and gratitude. But yeah, I wanted to bring up something about the security. I think Change Tip is really trying to go for the masses, mass acceptance. They don't need to create a new login for Change Tip. They just use an existing social profile. And hopefully, more than likely the security there is shoddy. Most people don't use two factor on Facebook and Google like they should. But fun line is there will be other startups that come into the space. And Change Tip is nimble enough to learn, for example, I hope to Peaky can provide a tiered login. So that nubes can log in with just a password. And people who want more security and encryption where we can't read your data, they can log in with much more stringing credentials and they have to have the responsibility of managing. And we're experimenting with making this user friendly at Peaky. So if we can get it right, maybe other startups can take something of our model of gamifying and making it easier to use higher levels of encryption for login on their products. So that's what hopefully will happen with Change Tip down the road too. I don't think it's too big a deal if you follow Chris Dobbs advice, Thomas's advice, don't leave more than $20, $25 in your Change Tip wallet. $20, $25 is good, you can throw people $5 tips and that's always great. So just keep conscious of security, watch dark news and pay attention to World CryptoNet. We're going to be helping nubes get better at this. And the nice part about those tips is you can throw them out and if the people don't accept them, you get the tip back. Much like with Coinbase's email system where you can email someone a tip and if they want to set up an account, it'll do that for them. But yeah, keep less than $20 in there, watch out for the hacks and we'll see how it goes. And also I want to say that like Ernest Hancock said on Freedom's Phoenix, part of Bitcoin tipping is anonymous tipping. And with Change Tip, your tips are not anonymous. They know that you're sending the tip, they know that you're receiving the tip. That's why I prefer the Bitcoin tip. You could get it through a stealth address, you could get it from a stealth address. Maybe you don't even know how much it is. It sounds really advantageous to me. Did you know the Bitcoin Group is broadcast on the World Crypto Network and you can subscribe on YouTube as simple as clicking a button. Could anything be more easy? The Bitcoin Group on the World Crypto Network. Subscribe today. And remember, you can ask questions now. Now is a good time to ask questions so they come up later when I check questions. Q3 Bitcoin Under Your Skin. A Dutchman who owns Bitcoin ATMs, the self-proclaimed Mr. Bitcoin, has just had surgery to install NFC communications chips in his hands. He can now save private keys to his hands as well as business cards and emergency contact information. Is this the type of body modification you look forward to? Will. What type of body modification would you want? I was thinking about this when I read the script earlier. This is a tough question. I think human growth hormone is the only body mod I would want or something similar. Nothing implantable for sure, unless it was going to make me taller or bigger or stronger or whatever time. So like a giant whole conversion of will. Yes, exactly. Yeah, not angry though. Yeah, that's making that unencryptable. No lack of multi-sig makes holding that. Christoph's Atlas, what kind of powers would you want? That's a good question. There's this freaky implantation that they've been doing for a little while. People get magnets in their fingers and stuff. It basically gives you a new sense that humans haven't had before. It gives you the sense of magnetism. You can perceive magnetic fields with this. I wouldn't want to be the guy going through the airport scanner with that particular implantation. But yeah, I think in the future, this is going to be more and more routine. We generally won't see it coming and we won't be aware of the degree to which we're becoming Android's people close to me are type 1 diabetics. They have insulin pumps. Just the general definition of Android can be very broad to people with glasses in some sense are Android's in some sense as well. As far as Bitcoin goes, I don't really anticipate that there will be Bitcoin specific implement implantations or other augmentations to your body. I think it's going to stay fairly generic so that when we need implantable computing devices, when those are ready to go, which they're not quite yet, I think that's what we'll see rather than something Bitcoin specific. It's a fun story. Even the eye watch and the Samsung gear are already Android implementations. A friend of mine has one. It only turns on when you flip it towards you. It plays all of his little notifications. He can talk to it like Dick Tracy. It's really, and that's the Apple one's not even out yet. Let's see what they do. If I had to choose, I'd probably go for something like in the diamond age. They had these little nanites that were injected into his muscles and they would twitch the muscles every once in a while. It was like you were working out all the time so you had huge muscles everywhere. It's probably something like that, not very invasive, just huge muscles. What are you going to say, Christophe? I was going to say the new Apple watch, I guess, it has a little thing on the bottom that goes against your wrist and it can move. They have these silly apps. You could hold someone's hand or give them a hug or a virtual hug. I don't know, some weird stuff like that. There is this idea that you can get feedback to your body from the internet. Of course, that's perfectly in line philosophically with Bitcoin. If Bitcoin is the internet of money or whatever, then I think that yeah, starting to bring internet sensory data into our bodies, it makes a whole lot of sense to me. Television, smell of vision. Moving on, issue four, counter party, copies Ethereum. A new article from the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies claims that perhaps the reason for the recent Bitcoin price rise is the work of the counterparty team who recently ported Ethereum's Turin Complete Scripting Language to run on Bitcoin. Is this the reason for the price rise? Does this news excite you? First off, Atlas. I don't really know enough about Ethereum yet to have a good sense about how relevant or important this news is. I guess it's cool that it's on the Bitcoin blockchain. I did see a counter story today that Ethereum was saying that they had implemented counter party on Ethereum with like 350 lines of their language. I forgot what the language is called. It's interesting. I think that we're going to see the takeaway from this is that we're going to see competing currencies applying each other's technology on their blockchain because they're so malleable in many ways. Counter parties, a great example of how we think that the Bitcoin protocol is ossifying and freezing in place, which is true in many ways, but then you can just build stuff on top of that. It's going to be really interesting to see how these currencies end up competing with each other, given that they can copy a lot of what the others are bringing to the table. We also saw in the last week or two there was some proposal of a merger between two crypto currencies, which I think is really interesting news. There was Darkcoin and Shadow Cash. Some people from Darkcoin were allegedly proposing to the Shadow Cash developers to basically merge their coin. They would turn all of the Shadow Cash into Darkcoin and focus on building up the combined product together and it got shot down. I think that we're going to see some really weird and interesting competition and cooperation between currencies. Will, Penguin. Yeah, if I'm not mistaken, I know the news, the way it came out, the couple articles were like, oh yeah, counter parties beating Ethereum and stuff like this. For my understanding, what counter party used was Vitalik's own Pythereum implementation. That's what I understand. It's kind of a nod to Vitalik and a nod to Ethereum. For all the reasons that people could think of, it's a good thing. Whether it had an impact on the Bitcoin price, I doubt. I know CounterPart XCP went up in Value Good Deal and Bitcoin had a nice little bump. And, simultaneously, it doesn't seem like there could be any single fact. First thing I thought of was, oh, it's been about seven business days in 2020. Maybe all the people who got warmed up to Bitcoin got their Exchange accounts funded. I mean, you could come out with any reason like that. So yeah, it's definitely a good thing. The interoperability and extensibility of all these technologies, all the experimentation should give people, I mean, I think when people hear Counter Party and the news over and over with Nadeechi with this implementation of Ethereum with all kinds of things that they're in the news again today. I haven't had a chance to look closely at the article, but another update, upgrade they're doing. So yeah, that could be another reason. People are very bullish on Counter Party. I'm very bullish on Counter Party because they have the support of someone like Patrick Burr and I mean, pretty much lots of resources to do great things, you know, in the security for a long time to do that. So go ahead. Good on both of them. The rumor I heard about the Bitcoin price rise is that there was a billion dollar whale rolling around on OK coin. So maybe they bought a lot and then they sold a lot. Maybe they're just testing out this market, having some fun. You never know. Moving on to questions and answers. There's still a chance to submit your question, but your chance is running out. We only have one question right here. From Infinite Radio, it says, have you guys heard of the Litturne as an Indiegogo project link? It says the outer net cube satellite sounds like the next big step in crypto, especially anonymous coins. Has anyone heard of projects like this going on? I'll put the link. Do you guys heard of this project? No. It sounds like it's a, well, the link doesn't work, but it sounds like it's a cube satellite project but for an alt coin, which I think is a very interesting idea. I'd heard recently that the Mexican cartels had put up their own cell phone towers so that they had their own separate encrypted cell phone network. So I could clearly see a future where a large enough gangsters would have their own satellite cube cryptocurrency network. I think it's a little far off right now, but I very much enjoy Jeff Garza's presentation in DC about the CubeSat satellite project. He had them, they fit into the launchers. They can put them up like all the other satellites and that would broadcast the Bitcoin blockchain to Africa, to the entire world, like a radio broadcast. And you could just tune in and you could do your transactions and everything. If you guys heard anything about that? No, the only space related Bitcoin story is just that they're putting the nodes in space that's what I keep hearing, but this other stuff's new. Nodes in space. See, we don't have any other questions. Does anyone else have a question? We're running out of time. We're just going to move on to predictions or story of the week. Did you guys prepare a prediction or a story of the week? Don't everyone jump on it at once. Well, Penguin. It's up for grabs, okay. Let's see, my story of the week, I think my story of the week, I don't want to steal Christoph's thunder, but I'm really interested in projects like the likes of which Christoph has been pumping out and of course Chris Ellis. The kind of low tech or just the helpful tools that aren't really major breakthroughs, but they're really neat, little helpful tools that almost anyone can experiment with to requires a little bit of a learning curve, not too much of a learning curve, so actually the barriers low. And I really like it. I'm talking about Torban and I don't want to take any thunder away from Christoph, but I was glad to see that. I was glad to see that CoinDesk picked it up. Normally this is not the kind of story they pick up and the Christoph's getting recognition for this. So Kudos Christoph, and I'm interested to hear more about it. We do have one more question going back to questions. It says, random question, what if the next Bitcoin hard fork is bad for miners and they decide not to support it? I think this is a good question because a lot of the major developers now work for the Bitcoin Foundation and the Bitcoin Foundation as we know as an industry group designed to protect their industry. So they certainly have certain biases that we may see illustrated in their changes or nonchanges to the code. Christoph, what do you think? Would the miners split off for their own blockchain? No, I don't think so. I don't think that the Bitcoin developers would try to push something out like that that's going to be so controversial with the majority of miners. They were pretty hard to get some community consensus behind these changes to the Bitcoin protocol before they pushed them out. So in the next couple of years, I'm not really seeing the possibility for something like this to happen. It just doesn't make too much sense to try to kind of like split forces that way. It would really have such a negative effect on Bitcoin, on the price, on general productivity that I don't think it's going to happen. So what do you think? I think we won't see any hard forks in the near future. We'd be hearing about them already and they'd be scheduled for a year from now or something. I mean, that's just my suspicion based on how these discussions and debates go. They're all intelligently, hotly, heavily discussed topics on the various forums and hard forks are not in our near future as I can tell. And Bitcoin is beautiful because people act in their own best interests and those best interests are also aligned with the best interests of the growth of the technology or the poll, the concept, the collective, if you will. That's very unique. I think that is really the jewel that's at the heart of the invention. If you're going to align personal interests, individual interests with those that are better for that. And then what people have claimed to do, whether genuinely or not, throughout social organization, the history of civilization. So it's a really, really cool thing to observe. And if you can think of Bitcoin's growth and acceptance in those terms, I think it's fun to watch and it's really eye-opening about the rest of society. Good response. I think we've got a follow-up question here from Eric. Eric writes, why does anyone take the Bitcoin foundation seriously? I think this is a good question because it's simple and I think it's important. I think the first reason is that as far as we know, they have a budget of hundreds of thousands of dollars, perhaps $200,000 a month. So they're rolling a lot of coin. The second reason they have important people like Patrick Merck, Bitcoin lawyer who's now in charge and Jin Young England, their communications director. So they've hired an important staff, presumably with their $200,000 a month, and they continue to generate this money. So until another foundation rises up, generating similar incomes to employ a similar staff, this is pretty much the closest we've got to Bitcoin incorporated. As far as what kind of a job they've done speaking for Bitcoin, they're very questionable and checkered past with board members like Mt. Gox's Mark Carpeles or BitInstance Charlie Schram and new board members like Brock Pierce and perhaps Cody Wilson in the near future. There's a lot of questionable activities and a lot of when did they know about the Mt. Gox collapse and what happened to their coins type questions that we'd all like to know. But it's still, it's that momentum, it's that having the big name and having a large endowment. I think it definitely, there's a reason to pay attention to them. Will, what do you think? Yeah, they're as relevant as any of these groups that are doing similar work, whether it's data or the digital chamber of commerce or coin center. And all of them, look, say what you will, whether they need to exist or not, I mean, I know these, we get mired in the debate of full blown energy versus change from within for lack of a better term. And the bottom line is Bitcoin exists in parallel to the existing system. And some of us hope that it will replace it and some of us don't hope that it will replace it. They hope it will remain in parallel or maybe get folded into the existing system. And the point is none of those things will happen, all of those things will happen. And they, they're, there does exist a state and it's bureaucracies. And you have to step into their sandbox from time to time or some people have to, some advocates have to think it's their duty, think it's their common, and it may be for some of them. So what I'd like to see, I've said this before, I'd like to see that maybe not formal coordination, not formal coordination between the two camps, if you will, but maybe a recognition that each camp can benefit the other by being a distraction at any given moment. And that that could work to the advantage of everyone involved in Bitcoin as a whole. I'd like to see a sit down like the Paris summit with the economist side and the libertarian side fight it out. Let's see how they do. Kristoff, do we need large centralized organizations like the Bitcoin foundation? I mean, obviously this is a bridge that we need temporarily and once the future is completely controlled by Bitcoin, we could burn down this bridge. But right now it seems pretty valuable. What do you think, Kristoff? I think you start to see some of the value, whether it's good or negative of the Bitcoin foundation, when you contrast Bitcoin with something like next, right? So next is this altcoin, although they will get very mad if you call it an altcoin because it's not a fork of Bitcoin, but it's an alternative cryptocurrency. And there's no leader to next, right? There's a guy that invented it, but he kind of stepped away from the community. And there's not even like really a next foundation. There's no president of next. So if you want to interview someone about next, it's actually pretty hard. You have to track this list of 50 people and you start asking them, which of you should I be interviewing? And they're like, well, I'm like one of the people that does the media sometimes, but I'm also a progurant. And it's very confusing for people to interface with. So the Bitcoin foundation is what the rest of the world is very comfortable with. They want a CEO. They want to see the guy who they can talk to, who they can blame things on, who they can raise up when and celebrate when there is some kind of success that goes on. Bitcoin foundation is not that whatsoever. It's not the party that's responsible for Bitcoin or that represents it, but that's what people are looking for. And I think that's why it has lasted because we're coming from a society that's very much in favor of and comfortable with these very centralized kind of organizations. So maybe that will change in the future. Well one more point on that. Yeah, I just picking up on what Christoph is saying. It's important to think about, we were very in love with this concept of decentralization and Bitcoin teaching us lessons about it and its value and stuff. But let's not think that, let's not confuse that all centralization is bad. That's not true. There is some centralization that's good and there is such a thing as legitimate authority. It's really up to the proclaimed authority to convince others that they are a legitimate authority. And so if others decide that, then they are. That doesn't necessarily make them legitimate as what the point is, there are some efficiencies come from some centralization to some degree. And there are some things where we're seeing with Bitcoin obviously. Settlement for example is very efficient in Bitcoin because it's decentralized and things like that. So it's not a trueism that centralization is automatically bad and there are times when that's useful. We've got a follow up question from Eric. He says, what if the current government decides to adopt what the foundation has to say about Bitcoin into law? I think this ties in well with what I was saying earlier. We might even need a dark Bitcoin foundation because the current Bitcoin foundation is not going to support our ideas about anonymity or perhaps protection of consumers. There's going to be disagreements here and there and that might actually show up into the code or into the law. What do you guys think about that? I want to say quickly, there's lessons that we still have to teach, help people, you know, convey to people about privacy and that it's not default suspicious. Wanting privacy or preserving one's privacy is not a suspicious activity. The whole argument about, well, what do you have to hide? I mean, Jennifer Lawrence has some things to hide. Apparently Kim Kardashian does not, but people have things that they rightly want to keep private. These are different ways that we can dress to the world, see the value in this where they may not currently because of a very aggressive, heavy propaganda campaign about the fact that people should not hide anything or be presumed guilty for wanting to hide things. We have just more work to do to show people how Bitcoin as a technology or the blockchain itself and related ideas can show the way to end to end encryption is a good thing and putting the responsibility of security back in the hands of the user and making that an easy process, bringing up people who don't know how to use encryption to learn it and so on and so on. We mentioned that early in the show. It's important that we teach people the value of privacy and remind them of this and help them unlearn some of the propagandaistic thinking that the alarmism around terrorism and all these other things in society, hackers going to getcha and all this stuff. We need to correct this with just facts. That's our work. Kristoff, your thoughts? I think that it would be regardless of what the foundation does or what the government would pass into law. It would be difficult to completely wipe out this element of, I guess you could say, libertarians amongst the Bitcoin community who just, they're not going to go along with that. They want to do their own thing. I think in the worst case scenario, they would simply just move over to any blockchain and there wouldn't be too much that other people could do about that. Well said, we've got one more question. He says, what do you guys think about the takedown of Silk Road 2.0 and what implications do you think this has from the anonymous aspect of Tor? I don't think it has that large implications for Tor. It seemed like there was an inside man inside Silk Road 2.0 already. Then there was a, when they had a large theft, he started to actually work with the government because he was in trouble because of the large theft and it doesn't seem like Tor is really at fault. Christoph, what do you think about Silk Road 2.0? Well, I'm not necessarily convinced. This was part of the federal investigation that they dubbed Operation Anonymous. I'm not totally convinced that everything that happened specifically with the Silk Road 2.0 website and properly encapsulates everything that was going on in Operation Anonymous. We have some court documents suggesting that with the 2.0 stuff, it was just bad operational security. This guy who was a pretty techie living in San Francisco, pulled a Silk Road 1.0 and just didn't do what he needed to do to hide his identity and keep it unlinked from the rest of the website. They had their insider, their snitch or whatever. At the same time, they did take down hundreds of different hidden services all at once. They didn't take all of them down or even the majority of them down. It wouldn't seem likely that this was due to some bug in Tor that could just be applied to all hidden services. There has been some evidence that there are some potential issues with Tor. Around the time that this take down went on, there was a hidden service operator who said, hey look, I got this weird traffic on my hidden service. What do you guys think? The more the people looked at it, they said, this looks a lot like one of the attacks that we're aware of as being theoretically possible against hidden services in Tor. It's a design flaw. It's difficult to pull off, but it's possible that this happened with Operation Anomas. It is important to keep in mind that Tor is not a magic. It's not magical. It's not a silver bullet for privacy. There are flaws. If you are going to take the risk of operating something like a Silk Road 2.0, you have to be extremely thorough. You can't simply lean on Tor. It's a serious operation. I really think I'm starting to wonder whether we're going to really ever see a truly competent administration team for one of these websites before it just becomes completely decentralized. We go to Open Bizarre or the next marketplace or whatever it is. I think that's definitely a possibility because they're not too far off at this point. I think the classic piece of advice is right there in the movie hackers. You're not going to hack a federal bank over state lines from your house. Are you? Are you? That apparently just keeps happening. People keep doing these things from their home because they think they're safe by Tor. From a local library is Ross Olbrecht, famously did. Don't be too mean. We also have to remember that the major advantage for this in the feds is that they took down a lot of large-scale dealers. There were some buss in Europe that went along with this. There are large-scale drug dealer buss. This is just more law and order from the feds. Well, what do you think about this? Yeah. What I was going to bring up is they're taking out some of their biggest competition in Europe. I mean, the smarter folks are getting on these more ethical, less risky in terms of physical violence, at least, marketplaces to do their business. And they're having lots of success with that. There's dozens of these. There was one a little over a year ago, pretty much. One main one. Now there's so many. And it's funny to not see these people admit that what they're doing is actually encouraging more of this, more of the same activity. They're encouraging people to try to get it right. As Christoph said, I'm not sure we'll see some administration team competently effectively run one of these marketplaces before they're made irrelevant by Open Bazaar. But it would look something like this. Everyone is brother and sisters. For example, some famous families in the history of last couple hundred years, let's say, of finance. But they'd be very, very closely related. They'd worked together, known each other, trust each other. Then they'd come together. They'd talk about their plan. They'd study a business plan together in private, but physically together, and communicate all of their mitigating risk strategies that they're putting in place. And what to do is things go bad. And then they'd stop knowing each other and they'd go and start this up and they'd have all their contingents. And maybe if they did everything right offline before they got online to run this, maybe they could do it. I think Open Bazaar will be here sooner than something like that can happen. And remember, criminals aren't that smart or that organized. Otherwise they would have learned from the Zao Tong song where he says, maybe next time you won't be on our shores. Well, maybe next time, again, you still won't be on our shores. We've got a couple of follow-ups from Eric. He says, how much of the takedown had to do with Tor itself as opposed to just fun put out by the feds to give Tor users the impression that they de-anonymized it? This is the underlying question he'd had the whole time. And remember, it's a lot easier to make it look like Tor failed or some other system failed, but remember, we're not talking about the best of system administrators and they're not starting out under the best of conditions. And unless everything's perfect, it's really hard to be totally anonymous from the start. Allegedly, one of the ways they caught the original dread pirate Roberts was help forums where he was looking for help on how to set up an anonymous website with Tor. It's embarrassing and it may or may not be true, but it is something they say happened. What do you think? Yeah, just op-sec. I don't think it was as much Tor. Of course, it could have been behind the scenes and then they do parallel construction of some other thing to make a case because they can't illegally bust somebody. But it's not Tor. It was bad op-sec. I mean, there's lots of great conferences that talk about national security and things like this and it's understandable for even the intermediate computer user. You may not be able to do the same things, but it's pretty fascinating when you think about what actually constitutes good op-sec. And from the looks of it, so many of these operators on any of the websites, whether the marketplaces or otherwise, just fail. I mean, all the online scammers in the clear web, clearly fail at a really great op-sec. I mean, some of them have gotten away with some things, but imagine they try it again and they get busted down the line. You know, op-sec. Tom Clancy books. Read about it. Kristoff, what do you think? Yeah. I think I don't want to pick on the guys that have been picked up so far. They're not, I'm not calling them stupid or anything whatsoever like that. But clearly, if what is alleged about them is actually true, then they had some real challenges in terms of operational security. And I think what we're seeing here is essentially the done and cruuer effect. If you are the kind of person who has the skillset, the knowledge, who would be able to run one of these marketplaces and really do it in an operationalist care way, you realize that there is a pretty decent chance that you're still going to get napped and you spend the rest of your life in prison in a very dark, hungry, uncomfortable place. So people who have those kind of skills, they're going to do the risk assessment and realize, well, there's two ways for them to make money. They can do stuff above board. They can, you know, make plenty of money that way. Or they could go work for the CIA or the Defense Department as a contractor, whatever, apply some of those same skills. They can be 100% confident that they will absolutely never go to jail, just, you know, whatever it is that they do and they will still be very well paid for it. So I think that's essentially what we're seeing. It's just as well to run a dark market for the CIA as it is to actually run a dark market. I think that's a good point. And Eric sounds like he would agree with you. His last question, comment, follow up is, I think the Fed runs dark net marketplaces, waits until someone has millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin and then bust them so they have more Bitcoin to sell on the public exchanges. That could be very true, especially Silk Road 2.0 famously paid their users back. It was a very bizarre period and they could have just had some kind of clock waiting for a large dealer or a large seller or large buyer to come through. We also had one more question about how to ask questions and to ask questions, there's a little box that on the screen that says, if you'd like to ask your question, you click on that. It takes you, I think it takes you through a Google plus login. You probably have to have a Google plus account or something like that to get to it, but that loads like a YouTube screen, questions on the side. You can just ask your question right there. But we're running out of time. So we're going to move on to Kristoff, your prediction or story of the week. Yeah, so my story of the week was ISIS, the Islamic State. I guess they're IS now. I don't know. I can't keep up with their acronym, but they have declared that they're going to have their own currency. It's going to be a not just a gold, not even just a Pesor's Medal, backed currency. It's literally going to be gold coins and silver coins and copper coins. What's incredible about this to me, first of all, there was this guy that worked for some think tank in Washington, some jack off, who is like, yeah, this is one of the best funded groups that we've seen so far. And the level of the lack of introspection that some of these people have is just astounding. The similarities between the US government, frankly, and ISIS, there's a lot of similarities. They have their own currency now. I'm sure they will intend to enforce that with violence. They make most of their money off of oil profits and taxation. They really look similar in a whole lot of ways. People are complaining about, oh, they treat their prisoners really poorly. Meanwhile, the US is basically the prison planet, the biggest per capita prison population in the history of mankind. So it's crazy. So now, ISIS, the much-loved terrorist organization, which is essentially just a government now. Let's be frank about that. They don't want to call it a government because it makes the other governments look bad. But now, they have, they're going to have a precious middle-based currency, which means that they are now more honest than the Federal Reserve of the United States. It sometimes truth is just stranger than fiction. Very crazy. Very crazy. My prediction is that a lot of startups are going on right now in the Bitcoin industry, but no one's really starting up in Bitcoin media. Bitcoin media will be the next area for the startups to get interested in, and they should buy right now while it's still cheap. We're out of time. Until next time, bye-bye.