The Bitcoin Group, the American original, for over the last 10 seconds, the sharpest atoshis, the best Bitcoin, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Chris Ellis from the World Crypto Network. Hello. Chrisัะพff Ellis from Anonymous Bitcoin Book. Good to be here today. Anonymous from the World Crypto Network. Issue 1. Bitcoin Foundation to Focus on Core Development. The Bitcoin Foundation is pivoting this week, abandoning its old goals and focusing in on a single one. The Bitcoin Foundation is going to focus on core development, already employing one developer and soon to hire another. Chris Ellis, is this a good thing for Bitcoin? Well, it's marginally better than where we were beforehand. But I've noticed a lot, actually recently, a lot of these companies are struggling to maintain their relevance. I noticed that one name.io announced that they're going to be open sourcing their code, possibly in response to the blockchain ID project that I launched a couple of weeks ago. I think it's partly because people like Fred Wilson and other members of the aristocracy and I'm including John Matonis in that group. Let's just say the people that have are feeling the pinch a little bit because everyone, no matter what their status in life, is competing to stay relevant because we're all trying to keep a pace with the changing nature of the universe itself. I have noticed this a little bit and I did think it was a bit weird, particularly with a company that is working in open sourcing. I'm still talking about one name announcing that they're now open sourcing their code because I just assumed it already was open sourced. It kind of begs the question as to not in a philosophical sense as to why there wasn't open sourcing the first place. One of the things that I really liked was in the comments on the crypto coin news section and this is John Barrack who's host of Bitcoins and Gravy and I just like to read what he said. It's absolutely beautiful. He says, you feel pressure. You fear governments. You've been threatened. You bow to imperialists. You have the communication skills of a sixth grade at my apologies to sixth graders everywhere. You have the transparency of a syrup covered waffle with powdered sugar and a bright yellow part of rich creamy butter. You are the kind of men who praise atheism while completely ignoring a massive body of academic research and literature of comparative religions. He goes on like this for some time. In short gentlemen, and I use the term extremely loosely, you are unfit to rule. You are unfit to educate. You are unfit to be the good stewards of this great new technological advancement that has the potential to either cast a further into darkness, indebtedness, confusion and rage or to lead us to a better place where true equality, integrity and honesty rule are collective consciousness. And he just, I mean, this, check this comment out anyway. It's 10 times better than the actual article itself. The guy from Bitcoins and Gravy, I just thought he's summed up really, really well. I don't think this really matters. It's like, yeah, cool. That's good thing. It's the more development, but it kind of makes me wonder like with one name, why they weren't doing it in the first place. Well, but think about the Bitcoin foundation here. They've given up the community. Running the Bitcoin communities now up for grabs, running Bitcoin education up for grabs and the community though. What were they fucking doing? They were fucking like just going to lobbyists and like just being, you know, just like running the lobbyists, they ran out of money basically. They just ran out of money. They ran out of money. They ran out of money and they realized it was cheaper to pay core debt than it was to keep pandering to governments. That's all that happened. I heard they still have a budget of $180,000 a month. So I'm not sure they're out of money yet. And if they're going to pay two developers, that takes money. That's not sustainable though. Is it? That's not the most. That's not the most. I don't know. This is paid them a lot. They have a large endowment, I suppose. Kristoff, what are your thoughts? Yeah, I guess it's better for Bitcoin. I've been saying for months now that they should drop all the other BS and focus on the core developer. But then of course, when they do that, people's next obvious question will be, well, why are we paying them to pay the core developers? Isn't Bitcoin supposed to be about disintermediating middlemen? And they start to look a lot like middlemen at that point. So the next question is, why not cut the amount of that loop as well? That's a reasonable question. It's interesting that this comes after John Matanis leaves the Bitcoin foundation. Actually, when I saw Patrick Merck, their lead council being pushed to the forefront to lead the Bitcoin foundation, the last thing that I would have expected to hear from them is, well, we're taking all the lawyers out of the loop and we're going to be focusing on programming. It's unexpected to me and interesting. And I wonder what's going beyond the scenes exactly. I wonder if they only feel comfortable with removing the Bitcoin foundation as an interface with government because there's some other organization that has now went a step in and take on that role, whether that's, I don't even know the names of these organizations. I guess there's data and some other, there's that, the, I've got the women's. We're doing digital commerce, whatever, digital currencies. The CDC, which is a core center for disease control. Right. So I find it hard to believe that all of the moneyed interests that are going to be relying on having the ear of politicians are just going to step away from courting regulators. That doesn't make much sense to me. So I'm sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop on this issue. And after all that time they spent developing that new website with that girl facing away from us with a military backpack in the foreign country. All of that work and all those scrolling, scrolling with $2,000 and you could join us. And what do they get to developers? Kristoff's absolutely right. We could replace the entire Bitcoin foundation with a multi signature wallet. When you want to pay the developers, we agree, we paid them. They did good work. We're going to pay them again. What else do they do? They seem to have walked away from their entire field. Well, the middleman needs to get paid. I want to pick up on a point that Kristoff made, which is that why don't we just pay them directly. And I've already some months ago now, I'll put a question on the Bitcoin subreddit saying where is Gavin Andrews and Spitcoin address because he doesn't have one publicly. He does have one if you bury through the Git repo, you'll find that he does take tips for Git with tips or whatever it is, to commit. It's a bit like Change Tip, but for GitHub. And I had to go out of my way to find it. I find it incredibly ironic that the Chief Scientist of Bitcoin doesn't actually solicit funds in Bitcoin. And really, to me, yeah, of course, he might be a very smart guy and I do think of him as a rock star. But being clever doesn't mean that you can maybe look the other way now and again when you see middleman coming along wanting to take a cup of no justification. Exit question. Some such as mad bitcoins have proposed a dark Bitcoin foundation to support the ideas of anonymity and privacy. Would you support such a foundation? Chris Ellis. No, I think foundation is a pointless. I thought we made the right decision calling ourselves a network because that's what we are a network of people. It's not a foundation though. Chris Doth, Atlas. I'm a bit ambivalent about it. I post this question on Twitter, I think last week. And most people were saying they didn't think it made too much sense to have that, that there's something antithetical about having a centralized organization that's trying to promote decentralized principles. But there definitely are some efficiencies that are gained through having a degree of centralization or what I would more aptly call leadership. I think that even decentralized organizations do need leadership. And the projects that I've seen that do the absolute worst that are doomed to failure are the ones that don't have leaders where they try to treat everyone as complete equals and they take this kind of flat approach across the board to further in their goals. I think that's a recipe for disaster. So I accept that there are some individuals that are in the best position or they're in a better position than the average Bitcoin or to make informed decisions about how we should promote anonymity and so forth. This is all probably a move point. It's hard to imagine that we could get any significant funding for such a thing. So I guess it's all pie under the sky. Well, you never know until you ask. And what I'm going to say here is just that the developers hired by the Bitcoin Foundation are not going to care about our ideas of anonymity and privacy. We're going to be working on receipts, chargebacks, tracking systems, probably the large number of transactions problem, which is a legitimate problem. But unless we say what we want from Bitcoin and unless we somehow get some funding behind it, maybe it just goes to a multi-signature wallet. Maybe it's a foundation and website name only. But still, there needs to be a way to fund people like Cody Wilson, Amir Taki, other developers who are doing this work. And it could be public. Remember, we need to, it is an oxymoron. We do need to build bridges so that we can get to a decentralized world so that we could never need those bridges again. But you see that we need those bridges in the first step. It's very confusing. And that's why a lot of these companies are coming along right now. And they seem to be duplicating Bitcoin's functions. And you say, why do we even need a tip bot when I can just send Bitcoin to Bitcoin? It works better and it's more secure and it's more anonymous and all of those things. But it's just this bridges to decentralization that we're working on. But we'll move on to the next issue. Come on, Google. Issue 2, Dejavu, all over again. The US marshals are back with another tranche of Silk Road bitcoins. This time, they've got 50,000 bitcoins available to the highest bidder. Jim Draper, winner of all the previous auctions, is said to be interested. Last time they auctions Silk Road bitcoins, the price went down. What will happen this time? Kristoff, Atlas. Well, I think it had a pretty short term effect on the price. And I would expect that to be the case again this time around. Especially since they're doing it in this kind of auction fashion as opposed to a big sell wall on BitStamp or something like that. That would be a entirely different story. Hearing a story like this, I always experienced a degree of ambivalence because the libertarian perspective on this, I'm not going to say that it's definitely absolutely the only way that you can look at this. But I'll throw it out there. Libertarian perspective was on this. There was a very large sum of Bitcoin stolen from people using a particular website from an individual that's now being held in custody. And so the libertarian perspective would sort of look at this the same way that you would look like if Demophia went around stealing cars and then reselling them on used cars lots. You feel kind of uncomfortable with people that bought those cars because we know that they're stolen. In fact, the legal system would deal with that kind of scenario rather harshly. If you know that you're buying a stolen car, then you have a degree of involvement in the commission of the crime. So yeah, this is a tough story to hear. And one hand, I think it's good that the big coins are being liberated back into the Bitcoin ecosystem. And I'm sure that the people who are buying them are all sorts of noble and so forth. But on the other hand, you could say that the FBI is essentially the largest Bitcoin thief in the world having stolen hundreds of thousands, maybe a million Bitcoins by now. I don't even know. But a very, very large amount, amounts that probably stagger the other thefts that have taken place so far. And it does seem worse that this group of criminals is publicly auctioning their stolen Bitcoin time and time again. None of the other hackers have the audacity to do that. Chris Ellis. Well, he hasn't even been indicted yet. Sorry, he hasn't even been convicted yet. He's only been indicted. So I don't have a lot to add really to what Chris is saying except to say that I think he's been a bit too generous to the FBI. They have stolen those coins because we haven't had a verdict and I thought we had the presumption to innocence. So, yeah, I think they just want the money. I just think they're being greedy. I think it's mostly, I said before, I'll say it again. I think the government felt like they were being made to look stupid because some hacker comes along and dissolves the war on drugs. And it was, what is it now? $26 billion. They flush down the toilet and try to stop drugs getting into America in spite of the fact that more than 60% of people when asked in surveys admit to doing drugs in America. So it just doesn't make any sense there. They're approached and make any sense. And then suddenly this guy comes along and just pretty much takes out all the violence out of the trade overnight. It made them look silly. And I think it was just a financial decision. I think you had some career politicians and some career civil servants or whatever your equivalent is in America who just saw an opportunity to get a promotion and they thought they could do that by catching this guy who had millions of dollars worth of bitcoins that they could then get that then go back to the public purse. So I mean, is that where they go? The bitcoins go to the public purse. I think that you'll be held for depending on the verdict. Oh, okay. I see. I didn't realize that. Okay. So why are they selling them then? The government has made an investment decision for Mr. Albright. They're basically saying that the bitcoins are assets, not money, so they need to convert them into money. And then once they're money, they'll hold them. And then if he's found not guilty, he'll get the money back, but not his investment. So if he had bought yachts or cars or whatever, they would be selling them for the value of those cars at the time of his arrest. I think that's what's coming. Right. Okay. Now, the interesting thing about this is, let's say, Hibba, authentically, that he was exonerated and not found guilty. What happens to the money then? In a justice system, what would happen would be the money would be given back to him. I don't think that's possible, though. I think that they're going to hold on to it. I think they will turn it into the, I mean, I'm not expecting him to get a not guilty verdict, unfortunately, but I'll just say hypothetically. I don't think they get the money back to him. I think they would turn it into a civil asset forfeiture, like one of the largest civil asset forfeiture cases of all time. I think they would come up with these complicated legal arguments about, you know, well, if you claim this money as yours, then you're confessing to something and we're going to be able to retry you under a slightly different, definitely. He definitely brought it from criminal action. They can't allow him to profit from criminal action. So if that's where this money came from in any way, then they're going to say that it's the government's money. Go ahead, Kristen, I'll start. Yeah. I quite agree with you. So I think any of the funds associated with the Silk Road pretty much going to be locked into the government funds. As far as I can tell from the stories that are read about civil asset civil forfeiture, they will be used to buy all kinds of fancy toys for the law enforcement personnel and it will not go to benefit the public in any shape or form. Exit question, forced prediction, the winner of the second Silk Road auction, Kristoff Atlas, a mystery Chinese investor. Chris Ellis. Who was that drape guy? Number one, the first one he's in for the second. Is that you're Rick? Yeah, I think he'll get it again. Chris is right. Draper wins again. It's the best story if one person keeps buying them all. It seems like either he's crazy or the rest of us are crazy. If multiple companies were buying it, it would seem more like, oh yeah, Bitcoin's a good thing. Of course, they're buying it. No, it's just one insane billionaire bought it all. As long as that keep happening, it's a great story. Moving on, actually, we've got to add in the middle with no cover. Did you know you can ask questions to the Bitcoin group at any time during the live broadcast? Simply click on the overlaid questions icon on the YouTube video. Log in to Google Plus and you'll be all set. Your questions on the Bitcoin group. What could be simpler than that? Issue three, Reddit CEO. Seeing as many, but as critical of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies has resigned. The new CEO is Alexis Ohanian, one of the founders of the site. Ohanian is said to be a proponent of Bitcoin with a new leader. What will Reddit do? Will they make their own crypto or just adopt Bitcoin? What will Reddit look like with native tipping? Chris Ellis. Well, I don't know too much about the story, so I can't comment on why the CEO resigned, but to your last point, I think change tips should be worried because they've already announced Reddit have already said that they're intending on doing a cryptocurrency I thought. So when they do, I think change tips could see themselves outmaneuvered. I definitely think they should do it. I think it would be really good for Reddit, actually, and the Bitcoin. I think it would be a win-win all round because Reddit is really... Sorry, I mean, the Bitcoin community is really taken to Reddit, and that Bitcoin subreddit is just this beautiful, naturally emergent news source that we pretty much use all the time on the World Crypto Network, and we've been reporting directly from there as if Reddit were the frontline. So I think it would be very cool. I think other people in other subreddits would really appreciate it as well. Even if they're not in Bitcoin already, I think they would love it once they find out about its power. So yeah, more strength to them. Change tip is in a very tricky position, requiring APIs to access Reddit, Twitter, and Google plus YouTube comments. If any of those services adopt their own tipping platform, YouTube has a tip jar. If any of those services decide that these strange tipping messages are spam, or perhaps they just want to compete against them directly, hold on to your hats. Can I just come in one thing there? So you're right. So the strategy of all these startups is that usually they want to get bought out by someone. So I don't think that is the case that they were changed it because we're kind of friends with them. And you know, we raised a lot of our money through change tips. So obviously we're very grateful for them and I've raised over $300 on Twitter alone. So I don't know. I'll be interesting to see. And if anyone has any ideas about how changed tip can strategize, I think it would be helpful to the Bitcoin community as a whole if we do help them survive. So that they don't feel tempted to just sell out to one of these companies and you know, just sell off the IP or something that would be kind of lame, I think. Kristoff Atlas. Yeah, Reddit, obviously going to have some kind of cryptocurrency plugged in there. I think it will be Bitcoin. A while ago someone started red coin. And I think part of the intention for that was they were trying to like charm reddits into integrating red coin into reddit based just based on the fact that they named it after Reddit. And they didn't didn't work out so far. Another tipping bots that do red coin. But so I'm interested in this idea of a change tip getting kind of squeezed out by these services re-implementing the tip systems on their own. I think that's possible. But the comparison that I would make between change tip tip and disc and another company is a discuss. It's a a platform that allows you to leave comments on different websites, blogs and stuff like that. Right. And the interesting thing about discuss is any website can easily implement their own discussion system. They can code it up on their own. If they're on a web like a WordPress platform, they can pick another plugin. There's all kinds of ways to do. And so there's a lot of comments and yet lots of people still use discuss like I was just on the let's talk Bitcoin website recently. They use discuss for all of their comments. A lot of cryptocurrency websites are using discuss. Now the difference for tipping is that if these companies re-implement tipping on their own, then they can take a little fee percentage off of it. But the tips are already generally so small that they start taking fees off of that and end. That kind of stuff. Then the tipping is just going to become less useful like the higher the fee is. The less people are going to want to use it. So sort of what I would expect to see actually is some places are going to re-implement some places are going to prefer to use something like a change tip where all the workers are even done for them. The ones that are competing with change tip, they will set their own fees and they'll start competing with change tip. And perhaps that will drive down some of the fees in the same way that we saw with coin base and a bit pay. They obviously drove each other's fees down pretty quickly. And don't forget the elephant in the room coin base announced their own tipping tool this week for websites. You can put a little box up. Someone can tip you with a single click with their coin base account. And again this goes back to a bit of the confusion with change tip. You have to have bitcoins to use change tip. If you had coin base and they had a tipping bot, you could set up your accounts and tip right from there. You can also send out emails on coin base. The tips will be returned similar to change tips, Twitter tips. It seems all coin base would have to do is write a couple of APIs for Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and then there'd suddenly be competition. The article also revealed that change tip is using coin bases API as well. So there's a lot of API reliance there. And I'm sure a lot of you recall a few years ago there were several independent programs on Twitter like Twitter pick, several independent Twitter browsers on your iOS program. They're all gone now. Twitter wiped them all out by changing their API. So you have to be very careful when you're using another company's API because it's only provided for your convenience. And when the company decides it's inconvenient, they don't want to compete with you anymore. We've seen what happens. It's just history now. Because the idea is that they could easily swap out the coin base API for another Bitcoin API. So at least they have that going for them. Which is nice. Which is nice. Issue 4. Pirate Party Founder Rick Falkvinds warns the copyright monopoly wars are about to repeat, but much, much worse. Arguing in Torrent Freak that the copyright wars were just a warm up, Falkvinds makes a convincing case that the existing institutions will not adapt well to a relevance and that they will fight. Christoph Atlas, have we witnessed the first volley? Have the Bitcoin wars begun? Yeah, it's certainly a possibility. Copyright has not died in the way that lots of people were predicting, at least not with the same kind of rapidity that people have been predicting. Bit Torrent, the progression from all the way from the early file-assuring systems to Bit Torrent today has been huge. It's been quick, but it hasn't completely eliminated intellectual property stuff. And it's still the case that especially the United States into a lesser degree in other countries, there are billions and billions of dollars being made by corporations purely based on this intellectual property system that we still have despite the prevalence of Bit Torrent, the ability to leak information from corporate websites and stuff like that. There's been these cipher punk people that have been saying for ages that as soon as these systems come online, people are going to start leaking information all over the place, information just wants to be free and so forth. And that hasn't been the case yet. I'm not even sure that it's necessarily trending that way. They can maybe be trending just to a new equilibrium point. And so I think we may see parallels with that in the Bitcoin space as well. Chris Ellis. It's all about control. They just want control, but they're not willing to work. You know, one of the ways you can identify a parasite is their lack of creativity. They're not creative. In fact, they've made most of their living for the last 3000 years since the beginning of information science itself. Just making money out of taking the value away from the artist that produce it. And I'm going to talk about it a bit more later on, but I was at this open source science conference in Ren France called Fossa. And there were lots of people there that were talking about this over dinner. And these were very high, you know, high achieving academics, physicists and computer scientists, biologists, geneticists, you know, from all over the world. These were very intelligent, apolitical people like they're not political. They're just intelligent. And they they were just talking about how in France at the moment there's all these debates over the copyright and stuff. You know, I'm working at the moment on my GitHub. That's why I'm not doing the video so much. I've got to conserve my energy and I'm I've come up some really good ideas on how people can be paid for for their contributions that they make to civilization. And you know, I'm optimistic about a lot of the other ideas that I'm hearing. I think we really do need to. There's no day car said there's no problem that's so hard that can't be fixed with thinking. A lot of the failures that we've made throughout history have just been a failure of thinking because people weren't ready to go back to first principles throughout everything they knew and actually think, you know, long and hard about it. So I think this is all about control. I think Rick is right. Broadly speaking and we should be ready for this war because these parasites won't go down without fight. I agree. The old system is inflexible. It's similar to D.A. agents who made their careers busting marijuana dealers. They don't know what to do anymore. Marijuana has been made legal recreationally. It's medicinal legal yet at the same time they still have these awards on their walls for busting these dangerous pot dealers who threatened America. And they're not going to adapt. They're not going to change their minds. We're just going to have to wait until they die off. This is a generational issue and there's I think Falcvin's right there. There's going to be a war. There's going to be a larger confrontation than the copyright wars. And people already thought that was a pretty big confrontation. So get ready. Exit question. Who will win the Bitcoin wars? Christoph Atlas. Oh man, that's really tough to say at this point. I think that Bitcoin is a very, very strong contender. But there's still quite a lot of room for people to kind of sweep the legs on Bitcoin to put our focus on to corporate interests and away from decentralization drifting us away from our principles and making Bitcoin more cumbersome just a little bit, a little bit more tedious. Each day with new regulations, a kind of slow death. That's a possibility. I think that nothing is decided yet. And it is up to people like you and me and Chris to fight that and to push the the core principles of Bitcoin forward. Chris Ellis. I think it's a question who's going to win. I think the universal win in the end. If we don't adapt, we'll die. And I think that this is more a case of about how ugly it's going to be. Like how violent does this need to be this transition. So they're going to lose and either going to go quietly and the good honest people of this world are going to be rewarded for their work. Or it's going to get ugly and it won't be something else. It will do the other thing. The answer is Bitcoin will win moving on to questions and answers. Our first question is from psycho ward, the Las Vegas rapper. He says, why are cryptocurrency user interfaces still so cumbersome to use? Things like importing private keys, having to download big blockchain files, having to copy and paste keys. Why are they all simple and user friendly now? When will it be? I think this is a really good question. No, no, he's bang on the money. He's absolutely bang on. And I talked about it at length in the talk. We don't have enough developers in the space. That's the short answer. The longer answer is that it's going to be a bit of both. It's going to have to be both the education of the of the lay user, the lay person who's just I'm afraid going to have to learn what a private key is. Otherwise, if you just obscure all that way through nice pretty user interfaces, all that happens is they don't realize the complexity and then they end up making mistakes and losing their funds. You're also disempowering them as well because then if they don't know how the software works under the hood, the software kind of controls them and you end up trading security for convenience. So you've got to come halfway and what we need more of our what are called user experience experts use UX as UX designers. And I studied it for two years part time of, you know, self learning style. And we need more people like that. You have a camera on your laptop and you can actually video the person as they're using your software and it shows you both screens. So you get picture in picture and then you ask them loads of questions about like would you recommend this to a friend and what's the part what what one thing would you do to improve it. All these kind of questions about how easy it was to use and all that kind of thing. So you actually get honest feedback and then you feed that directly back to the developer. There's also another project called cucumber, which is in Ruby, which allows you to put plain text objectives. And instructions into a kind of pseudo code, which then directly come from the product owner and the user and that gets sent direct to the developer. So the developer actually has that appear in that get repo and they can actually start to code, you know, the pseudo code into their actual code. And then that gets fed back to the other stakeholder and the stakeholder says, did you do it or did you not do it. No, this is what I meant. Do you see what I mean. So look up cucumber. It's really, really good way of interfacing between developers and and then Jesus and Bitcoin is that in space because right now it's got far too many appetizers and marketers. I think Chris makes a good point here that the user experience designers are not working on these apps yet. It's mainly programmers writing them and then programmers doing the interface. And what's strange is this is happening even at the largest and seemingly most well funded companies in Bitcoin blockchain.info just released a new incredibly minimal version of their iOS wallet, which I support. I support minimalism, but there's just not any usability in the app. If you look at the how do you scan a QR code, you look at the system. It used to have a little camera inside of the box. Now they move the camera to the upper right hand corner completely out of the screen. You don't even look at it. How do you guess to scan it? How do you guess camera? I don't know. You have to guess these things. So they're very 1.0. They could be fixed very easily. The design is there. You can tell what it should be. Blockchain got a little closer this time when you go to the wallet section. It automatically shows you a little picture of the QR code. That's really convenient. Most of the time you have to click go into the QR code. It's a little confusing how you get into the set the amount set a dollar amount for the QR code. It's still it's just not easy enough. Other wallets are different, but they still have similar problems. I think it's just a disconnect between programmers and designers perhaps. It's not just that. This is the other problem. Look at where they put their money into these fake fucking Twitter box. So this is Panda coins. Remember those people that trolled us that time in the comments saying how it was such a great community driven coin. And I was basically telling them that there was some confusion there because there was a panda coin and then there was a copy of a panda coin. We were talking about the wall-long copy of the panda. I forget how they could tell the difference. Oh, fuck me. I'm fed up with all these fucking bullshit projects. These are scams. Look at these accounts. So clearly these are fake accounts. Obviously these are fake accounts. They're operated. She's basically she, what am I saying? It it. It's a bot. It's not even a she even I'm falling for it. They just take pictures off of the web on other social media profiles. They flip the images or they do something to them so you can't find them easily on Google image search. And then they just spam you and they fucking like get you to follow them like they're even like getting respectable people to follow and look at all she's all it is doing. It's just tipping people in this fucking panda coin. This worthless piece of shit coin. And I fed up with it. And I said because they keep following me. All these fake accounts keep following me. It's a waste of my time because I have to go through and report them all as spam bots. And what I'm calling everyone to do is could you please report panda coin as spam like as a nuisance account like this one panda coin. And any because they haven't responded. I said could you please stop being a dick when selling your wares because you're polluting the internet when you update this when you put this stuff up there. These are computer controlled accounts and all they're doing is spamming out worthless crappy cryptocurrencies that people are undermines the whole project and it's not real content. You're not putting authentic stuff up there and we need less of this kind of bullshit and more proper development. Well remember there's lots of get rich quick scammers in this industry because they heard that other people got rich quick and they want to get rich quick too. So if it takes spamming if it takes any of those things they're obviously willing to do that to get rich quick. Let's move on to the next question. The Denver Bitcoin Center is here. They have six members watching the show live. You guys are awesome. Well you guys are awesome too. Let's see we've got another question from Eric Eric writes why would why would any of these native services represent anything more than the competition for change tip. Well I would say a lot of the problem is like Twitter YouTube they actually control the playing ground when they they have the right to publish or not publish an API they have the right to update it or not update it to change it. And if they decide that their tip bot which YouTube does have a tip jar I haven't investigated it very much you can use your credit card. I believe you do get charged very small fees so it's not like you can give me a dime and I would get a dime. It's more like you could give me a couple bucks and I'd get a dollar 80 you know so. But if they don't see that it's getting enough traction like Twitter did with their picture service and you can go back and read about TwitPick and how Twitter used to integrate it and now they don't integrate it and now they straight up killed it and all those images are going to be taken off the internet. So this has happened before Microsoft's done it if you can't compete with them if you can't buy them you just cheat. This is the computer industry you guys any comment on that stay muted all right let's keep going. Denver Bitcoin Center asks wouldn't a decentralized system of copyright give permanent ownership of a logo or name. It's an interesting idea I mean decentralized I think it's questionable because you're obviously going to see people trading ownership like Mickey Mouse was traded from the fathers to the sons to the fathers to the sons. I think that's going to keep happening even if you had a like a blockchain of copyrights. I don't know that that's going to solve the system. I mean the original remember the original copyright system was put into place to protect music publishers from the scourge of the automatic playing piano which was going to wipe out all music as we knew it. So we had to protect the rights of these publishers who are going to publish these sheets that fed into the player to piano to make it play music which we're going to eliminate all musicians everywhere as I'm sure you know no one plays piano anymore. We have player pianos and lobbies of every hotel every fancy hotel they never have a human obviously you've seen this you've been to piano bars. Thank goodness because if they hadn't put that protection in place two centuries later we wouldn't have Kesha. The world would have been saved from Kesha. No, it's not true that smile contracts do or decentralized contracts do that because what you would essentially do is put creative comments into so creative comments into the code. We discussed this at the last Ethereum hackathon that I videoed from about two months ago maybe by now or six weeks. We actually did one of the code is they actually coded my suggestion about using the blockchain ID as a way of receiving funds for the work that you did and what you would do is just put a time limit on it. So you were to say either I need to earn this amount for once I've done this work. This is how much work I did. I need to make this much amount and then after that it's free for everyone to use or you could just put a year a year limit on it and then you don't earn any money after that. So you were just nuance in because that smart contracts once you've done that that would be hard coded and then a minor on the you it would be at the whims of the minor on the network it would be enforced by them eventually and of course the your your Bitcoin address would be embedded into the contract as well. So that would be nice and you could just get your coins directly every time it was used automatically. People keep telling me that we should do half a video and then have people pay to see the other half of the video because that's what the talent. But I know that logic we should get one of those scrawly scrawly websites and account time and do some crowdfunding right now you're totally thinking about this in the wrong way in my opinion I've been through this quite a lot and I think that you're still used that still aggressive people are still paying each other because out of necessity rather than free will you want this to be a completely voluntary system or world where people pay. Other because they want each other to exist because they love each other not because they have to not because you're using passive aggressive signals like well I might give you but I'm not going to give it to you like you know I definitely like up selling I think there is definitely a value add for sort of velvet road treatment and like if I if it cost me something then I charge you more. But I think holding back on the articles does come across a little bit manipulative to me even me banging on about it on Twitter actually I don't particularly enjoy doing but again it's just something that you're doing out of necessity and it's like right actually need to eat today. So kind of need some fucking money but eventually I see a world where people pay each other voluntarily because they actually want to see that exist and that's why you're paying someone you're paying something they did you pay in them presumably because you want them to keep you going. Because you want them to keep existing in the future what they're going to do take the money go in a time machine and make it like it never happened and you know that doesn't happen. So I think you pay it that off to the universe you pay off your energy cost because energy like this electricity in this house isn't mine or it's not my you know belongs to a family member but it's it wouldn't be mine even if it was mine if you see what I mean because it comes from a common resource right that's not someone else's energy in the future because those fossil fuels aren't just going to grow back and go. It's going to grow back at the same rate that we're burning them so it's a common resource so I'm just burning a common resource now let's say the world runs out of energy and we've only got 15 years left no amount of money is going to save you at this point money is not time it can't just invent new fossil fuels so you can have all the money you like and great you've got a world full of money but you've got no natural resources to draw on so we have to think about this in a completely new way. Moving on next question really more of a comment so let's give it a try says from our Bitcoin originally zero hedge the G 20 announcement in Brisbane on November 16th will formalize a bail in for large scale depositors. Let's see so that having money having money in the bank interesting I haven't heard of that I guess it was a couple weeks ago. You're confusing something you're thinking that your balance exists it doesn't it's not balanced we all know this called fractional reserve banking your balance is actually referred to as a liability it's a liability because there's a chance that everyone could turn up to the ATM and ask for their money back straight away and the banks know and everyone knows that if they did that the whole thing would have to close that's not even a secret it's not conspiratorial to say they run fractional reserve lending banks particularly in the UK. No to lend up to 30 times what they haven't deposit and it's a scam what do you call it when you tell someone one thing and actually something else is true it's called fraud that lying to you about the money in your account they always were it was always just a function of time. Next question from Eric Russo he says I still say the whole reason they pull these busts is to get more Bitcoin to throw the price off on the public exchanges it does seem that way but in a lot also in another way it's not going to be a big deal. It seems like the government is legitimizing Bitcoin by seizing it and selling it clearly it's a valuable asset clearly it's not just a math formula if this was some kind of science project that Mr. Olvide had on his computer we would ignore it we put it to the side and after the trial if things went well he his science project would be returned to him but instead they've said this science project is of incredible value we have to split it up into parts and sell it to the highest bidder as soon as possible because if you're held guilty we're going to keep all this money and do whatever we want. I think it's enhancing the value. Chris? Yeah it's so interesting the relationship that Bitcoin has to governments because there's always people that are trying to lobby the government for leniency and it's almost like they want to pretend that if Bitcoin was not censorship proof it wouldn't be immediately shut down. If one of the properties was Bitcoin was just that it could be shut down easily do you think that there's any possibility that all of these governments all of the place would not just be scrambling to shut this stuff down they wouldn't even let a guy in the United States start circulating like a gold or silver based currency and they came up with some BS about how he used the word dollar in it and how that was going to be shut down easily. So it's going to be a very interesting thing to do and how that was going to copyright infring on the US dollar some ridiculous nonsense. No they would absolutely love to kill Bitcoin it's like the government is this lion and Bitcoin is the hunter with a rifle right and we're all trying to pretend as if if the rifle wasn't there they'd still be good charms. Roll it around on the ground and having a good time and the lion would let him go for a little ride or whatever that's what the lion wants you to think so that you you relax and you you know take your eye off of him for a few moments so you can pounce. So yeah I think that the government I don't know if the the busts are necessarily the best way for them to accomplish undermining Bitcoin but they definitely it is part of their desire to undermine these marketplaces that very much make them very nervous to see their their livestock kind of taking their attention away from the stock markets and from the the openly highly taxed ways that you can exchange goods and services. They start looking at some free market alternative that makes them very very nervous. I think that Christoph and and Falkvinger right here it's not just that Bitcoin the currency is a problem that's been put to the side it's these markets that are the problem he created this open market anyone could sell anything he made a lot of money on it clearly by capitalist standards he's a great capitalist but he did it illegally he did it against the government they're going to take it from but they can't take it from the market. They can't stop the Bitcoin so they've already moved on leaving the Bitcoin alone now they're trying to stop the markets once the markets get decentralized they're going to try to stop the people who are decentralizing the markets this fight continues and it keeps getting worse for them I don't see how they're going to turn this around I don't see how they could even properly strategize to win and see a condition where Bitcoin goes away and their status quo continues I just don't see that maybe they have better prognosticators and thinkers and we do they are going to do that. We've also got a great comment from Eric he says consider it this way the government can't mine because that would make the difficulty go up they can't buy it because that would cause the price to rise so the only way they can get Bitcoin is stealing it from users. Of course they are making the fatal mistake of then selling it back to get dollars again which as we all know because of inflation and the massive printing of money that goes on at all times are essentially worthless so it's big questionable what the government's doing we've got a couple more questions the Denver Bitcoin Center says Barry Silver and his syndicate not sure what that's in relation to when they bid for the Silk Road coins Barry Silver has been soliciting people to join with him. So I want to give him to create a combined bid for the bitcoins. That's a good point I heard about that but I forgot his name so I meant to mention that so thanks for bringing that up Denver Bitcoin Group's excellent point. We've got a couple more questions from Eric will try to go through these he says to me all these groups all these groups do like the Bitcoin Foundation is make promises to regulators and VCs that they have no authority to make and that the Bitcoin community would probably disregard anyway. He's right on there the Bitcoin Foundation is it only a name it doesn't have the right to speak for you or for me it speaks as a business group for businesses that are giving it money as well as individuals who have given it money and it seems to that's why I warned about the anonymity and that it'll be business focused Bitcoin because they that's their record that's who they say officially on their charter that they exist to serve these businesses who have paid them and that's fine that's what they say publicly. Oh we've got one more. Comey says my feeling is if you want to make an adaptation or a creation for Bitcoin that you write it if people like it they'll implement it and pay you for having made it. I think that's a great point and a lot of people need to remember that Satoshi wrote that white paper and that was a really great public exploration of his ideas and that really helped and led to inspiring a lot of people getting a lot of software development a lot of marketing and other ideas all come from that original. Putting down your ideas on paper sharing your ideas with the world seeing what the world thinks of them and it takes a lot of guts to do that like the Satoshi team we clearly they're working on software as well clearly they're very smart but still putting your information out there putting all of your ideas out there not hiding anything open sourcing everything open source if you have crap code and you open source it people are going to be like wow you have crap code against the getting and it's confusing and that's what open source does to all of your ideas. And that's why it's the way to go is to put it out there and see how it goes and take it to be strong enough to accept what people say about right is. Got another comment from Eric he says the central banks actively trade on public markets to retain the perceived value of the Federal Reserve note in silver gold oil and other commodities but they can't do it with Bitcoin. That's why he suggested they're stealing it for that purpose to control the market or attempt to control market I've heard lots of people say that these other markets are controlled but I don't I don't know it specifically but any other comments Christoff or Chris yeah it's going to go ahead Chris I was going to say Eric's a good guy look forward to hearing more comments from him saying he's coming out a lot of good comments go ahead. Yeah I was going to say with regard to these these this idea of a comparing Bitcoin to commodities and in price manipulation I certainly agree that the options to governments to undermine the price of Bitcoin which is going to be an important strategy for them in the future. Their options are pretty limited and seizing a large amount of Bitcoins and using that as a leverage to manipulate the price I think is is going to be an effective and important strategy for them moving forward but they just haven't been exhibiting that strategy yet because the last time I sold off a bunch of coins it was in a private deal these kind of back back room auctions it didn't bump the price in any significant way they're not showing any impact. Not showing any interest in changing from the way that they sold off the last series coins from Silk Road versus this time around so you know if they want to do that right that price manipulation I think there's definitely the room to make that happen but they just haven't been doing it the right way yet so I'm not sure they've caught wind of that strategy or just they haven't then I'll feel sufficiently threatened by Bitcoin yet to start worrying about trying to manipulate the price. One more question from psycho ward he says so how many years will it be until crypto currency is as simple to use as swiping a debit card as simple to set up and transfer money into a bank account and that non technical people aren't at risk of accidentally losing their coins. So complex questions really hard when you think Kristoff yeah I'm going to say somewhere in the ballpark of five years. It's important to remember that even the companies that in the Bitcoin space are the largest let's say you're blockchain or coin base I think they may be the two the two largest hosted wallets at this point. There's still relatively small startup companies they look huge compared to other small companies but they're new startups right so there's this whole progression from the very start of your company to. I'm not sure in your software and so just now they're starting to get very serious about hiring full time security professionals they're just starting now to get very serious about hiring user experience professionals and all that stuff they've been doing their best to to make a facsimile of those efforts up to today with people doing working on that stuff sort of part time. But in the next five years I would say five years from now those top tier companies the ones that are the best funded, especially the rounds of funding that they've had recently in the millions of dollars that's going to give them a lot of room to to hire dedicated professionals that are not just like guys who are kind of good at it but then they're really excited about Bitcoin we're talking about people that have been you know seasonally doing this stuff for 10 years and they may give not so much of a crap about Bitcoin but they're really really good at that aspect of their job. So I think we'll see that in the next few years. Let's hope they do learn from the lessons of Mt. Gox and actually hire other programmers when you get the money remember Mt. Gox had a pile of money never hired programmers that we know of Carpella's continued to control the keys and the entire project regardless of his level of skill regardless of the amount of money that was being pumped into their system nothing changed much like we were talking about last week with the investment if your investment doubles if your investment goes up 10 times. If your company doubles or goes up 10 times you need better security you need better designers you need better everything. I'm a whole list don't forget holiday retreats you need those as well. I know anything about that we're moving on to predictions or a story of the week Chris Ellis are you ready with a prediction or a story of the week. Am I you bet I am so I just want to quickly tell everyone to make sure they check out Jason King's response to Ben Dawnberg's open questions about the transparency at Sean's outpost you asked Jason a lot of very hard questions and I have to give credit to Jason he's given a very very lengthy reply quite hard felt to actually in parts because you know Ben is basically like my hero now he's he's going after any anything in the Bitcoin world. He's going to be in space that looks like a whiff of corruption he's asking hard questions he's telling truth to power and he's telling it early and I think we need more people like this and just to be clear absolutely clear is that you know these are just questions these are not accusations they're not you know it just like look can you just clear some things up because you know we haven't got all of the bitcoins accounted for that you said that you've raised there were some questions over the use of the trailer that Jason got given for his across country run that it was apparently still being used by Jason and his wife in a kind of a personal capacity but Jason has addressed that issue here and then Ben as well I'll tweet I just tweeted this article out now just to tweet this one out and this is essentially Ben's response to Jason so I think you should check that out because I think it was high time that what did you know what Ben's doing lots more people need to be doing as well and asking these people and of course Jason is a friend of us a friend of ours on the network and we you know I think he's like us to be reporting on this I think he'd like us to be holding him accountable to and I think he mentions that quite through you know throughout his response so that was just a quick one also I hope everyone was following the feminist hacker barbie hashtag on Twitter I found it very empowering and also incredibly funny because it turns out the makers of barbie thought it was a good idea to write a comic book where barbie is a in quotes computer engineer and yet she doesn't know a fucking thing about code and she has to rely on these two jobs Brian and whatever to do all the hard work for it because she accidentally like hacks one of their computers and of course it was Taylor Swift who came up with the best in my opinion the best remake of the whole thing where she just turned barbie into this awesome fucking coder and computer engineer and I love this beautiful philosophical insight at the end where she says know that computers and phones are built to let you do things not stop you from doing things that are unsafe think think of it kind of like a car without ever just beautiful beautiful beautiful stuff and we need this to be more you know more in the mainstream and I think that's what Taylor's doing she's using her leverage as a as the number one pop star in the world right now to get the message out there about info sec okay and I know that she's sort of claiming publicly that it's not her but actually I think this is actually her okay it's a double bluff because she can't have her manager knowing about this she can't have her label knowing about this will be bad news all right now just you know because no no think about this think about this right because she said like in post-sector Taylor Swift in post-sector has said Taylor Swift has never been hacked she never had a new pictures hacks because she's been air gaps our whole life that's why she doesn't get her new pictures hacks she keeps the one-and-air gap device so anyway just to quickly tell you that I had a great time in red France where I was at the Fossa 2014 conference I had no idea so many very very very very smart people were going there's like physicist and biologist and geneticists and oh my god it's like yeah in Rio it's like this big French research institute and they paid for me to go out there and I got onto one of these types of planes which maybe feel like the Beatles always feel like that when I go on these trips and yeah it's really really cool and yeah I had a little Magdalene you know as you do when you travel with Air France I had a hot dog as well which isn't very French but you know it was like cheap and I didn't know if my food was being paid for at the time so I just you know got it and oh that was all my retweeing so yeah you can check out my talk it's called first principles it's pinned to the top of my Twitter it got very very good response in fact I think everyone forgot to clap at the end because I think there are a little bit shocked and stunts here what I said it was kind of a bit weird but it was it was lots and lots of questions and then we had a debate afterwards so I open source the whole damn thing basically not only is the audio up on soundcloud I've also got all the slides available it's all open source all you've got to do is attribute it to me you're free to take all of the material and reuse it remake it remix it you're also free to fork the whole project you can see a timeline in my get history of all my mistakes you can see earlier versions of the presentation I didn't I didn't push this I didn't publish this to the site until I was ready until the morning of the day of the presentation because I've said I'm going to spoil the surprise but you can see all the timestamps that I was tweeting out you didn't know what they were I was just like tweeting out these random hashes well that's what they were they were my commitment to you that I was working on this in the background and that you could see that I was doing something but you couldn't see what it was so like I'd be making comments about what I was doing I've included I've been including I've been measuring all of my time using rescue time which is this this software that tracks everything that you do on your laptop and then I've been cryptographically signing that and then putting that in the blockchain and I've been tracking my calories and I've been tracking all my energy usage on my laptop so that I can calculate the net number of electrons innovated in the making of the work so that's electrons that have been innovated because in physics you have this notion of the electron volt you have a measurement of energy called the electron volt which was like an upgrade from from the jewel because what it does is it measures the equivalent amount of energy to move an electron through a potential difference of one volt and it's basically describing energy as movement which in my opinion is a much better way of understanding energy because then it applies to everything it applies to life and inanimate objects it applies across the universe so you can just get your calorie intake you can look at your expenditure just weigh yourself at least once a day and then calculate the difference and you can work out how much energy deficit you're you're running and you can directly compare that to your laptop you can see how energy efficient your body is compared compared to a machine so once I've calculated all that up the idea is and I haven't done this yet because the calculations are quite complicated but I've got all the data I just need to compute it the idea is that every project that you do if this works is you would calculate your deficit to the universe right this is how much I owe the universe for having got this far there's a new bit coin address and a new feather coin address whatever for every project that you do and then at the very least the public have to pay the debt off to the universe because that was everyone's energy that you just used and if you're going off and you're keep trying to do something and you're no good at it then people need to sit you down and go okay do you need to stop doing these presentations because actually not very good at it but um this is actually part of the larger idea that I have been talking about for a while which is where people declare upfront what they believe in and what they want to pay for so you say to someone like what what do you what do you believe in what you want to pay for front loader wallet ahead of time and then it automatically takes the money out as you start perusing the internet it notice that you spend 20 minutes on a page and notice there was a bit coin address that we're using this protocol and it says okay well you used it um so if it's okay with you i'm going to send these bitcoins and maybe you've got like 24 hours to councilor or something and then automatically goes there but what's good is that you're front loading this process ahead of time you're saying I believe in open source projects or I want to I want to help young musicians or I want to help out you know youtubers like Tom or you know people like this and then it says right i'm going to hold you accountable and then you can actually get people to compete with each other on how generous they can be it's not even generous i mean you're essentially just paying people for their time but you're doing it in a way that allows them to become the person they want to be like help me become the person that i want to be remembered as because often when we make purchases we're actually incorporating those products into our identity we're actually having that become part of our being like I wear that phone and I you know I want to associate with that brand so I think this could be a totally new way of doing it and again like all of my open source projects it's the learning exercise and it's an experiment and i'm just going to do it i'm not abstracting anything there's no in computer science you know the notion of abstraction um it's just just use what works right now we're not assuming anything we're using tools that already available and yes it's a bit painful yes it's a bit slow but where hackers were early adopters and we love all that shit so thanks to everyone for your support um at the conference and if you want me to speak uh at your conference and you want to pay for me i'm more than happy to do that because eating is fun i've been eating i've eaten over 8,000 calories in the last three days i've got so much fucking energy right now it's unbelievable i'm like buzzing my body's like yes nutrients yes it's really good so i'm probably going to make some videos over the weekend if my if my body keeps going and i want to do i want to do i want to do the talk more because it was really good and people really liked it and more i do it the better it'll get as well so thank you to everyone thank you to everyone who sent me all the money that was really cool i really appreciate that my body is very grateful to you Chris makes a good point about job applications being backwards it seems like it would be more clear if you could define what you want to do why you want to do it how it helps people and then if people agree with that project they could fund you i found it my old job i started off doing kind of technical support data entry and it grew into a whole technical support databases whatever your problem is type job and it really it fit me well because it to you know i created the job the job didn't exist i went in there i said you have all these problems you need someone technical like me who can communicate with you all these things right now having the same problem where i could get a job but what i really want is to create a job where it would be about videos about communicating about Bitcoin and about honesty and where i could continue doing the honest things i've been doing but supporting a company at the same time if that's even possible these kind of ideas in the future is really what we're going to with this open identity open reputation you know put yourself out there publicly a lot of this work here could be considered a resume clearly this is things we can do we're proving to you we can do them we want to do them we want to keep doing them that's what the world is going to be people like that people who can do things showing you they can do them and if you like those things they do music entertainment journalism whatever it happens to be you support them and that's your part in it that the fans have a much greater part in creating this world and you know Gandhi see that the world you want to create be the change you want to see in the world that's becoming literally true because of what computers can do in reducing this complexity Christoff you might go ahead yeah i was just going to say i think that as that decentralization takes place our lives are going to become quite a bit richer right a more more diverse more interesting so just as an example think about all of the artists that you can find on the pyrepe or Spotify or something like that this vast library of things contrasts that with just listening to a pop station radio you'll hear the same damn five music tracks over and over again if you listen to that station you will not get a lot of diversity there you'll get a lot of the same kind of stuff the most part and so if we so that's a that's the old model right which is we give all of our money to a few corporations they give a bit of their money to a few artists and that's how we get the music and content that we absorb funneled to us is through these centralized institutions they have a lot of the money and a lot of the the power to choose who we are exposed to but in the decentralized model we get to choose among a you know a vast array of different people that are offering content to us and it's much more meritocratic as well i think because then we can really invest in what we what we surely enjoy and what we get value out of as opposed to the way that it happens now which is we don't really get to always choose what we're investing our value into a lot of that is chosen for us so i think that will be a very good thing so my story of the week i'm excited so two things about like all coins right so i was watching this um this this talk that uh two guys from the Nakamoto Institute did recently Daniel Kraywitz and Michael Goldstein and uh Daniel Kraywitz is uh at Daniel Kraywitz on Twitter and Michael Goldstein is at Bitstein and they were talking about all coins and they they have this theory which i think is is very interesting compelling in a lot of ways that all coins are simply as an investment as as a store of value are not viable in the future that they they are all going to sort of trend towards zero because of the network effect of Bitcoin and there's lots of nuances to that debate but they they had this discussion so i very much i recommend that you look them on by tweeted it recently and i can tweeted out again at the end of the show i think if you have if you're interested in getting some really interesting well-fought out educated perspectives on Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency economy i definitely do that now that being said um i am not necessarily convinced that all all coins are are doomed in fact i'm uh working with a new uh or i'm working for the first time within all coin that's relatively new uh just recently so a Bitcoin dark and the whole project is tied into supernet and the telepathy slash teleport technology and all that good stuff i'm going to be doing some work for them to review the privacy technology of their coins it's tied into next it's it's tied into all kinds of stuff so i'm very excited about that and uh i definitely would recommend that people look into this this technology and keep an eye out for the the white papers that i'll be publishing on that topic i think it'll be very interesting very good stuff moving on prediction Bitcoin is consolidating circles are tightening companies are starting to invest in the Bitcoin community people are starting to be bought millionaires and billionaires are starting to appear not just from outside Bitcoin but from within who's on our side who really supports us who's not just using us and wasting our time who really supports Bitcoin and who's just looking for a quick buck no one really knows but we'll try to find out up out of time until next time bye bye