The Bitcoin Group, the American original. For over the last ten seconds, the sharpest citotis, the best Bitcoin, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Gabriel Devon, from Future Rant. I'm still muted. Tones from Brave New Corn. Always a lot to be back. We owe good money from HASS online. Hello everyone, thanks for watching. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network. We'd like to welcome our viewers both on bitcoin.com and on the World Crypto Network. Moving on to issue one. Issue one, altcoins have returned. Ethereum continued to skyrocket this week surpassing Litecoin. Now out of nowhere, the forgotten Dogecoin is surging. Rising more than 50% at an incredible rally. What is happening? Our altcoins back, Gabriel Devon. Thank you so much for having me. My mic was off. It's on now and I have to say that I'm pretty sure that the rise in the ether token is due to the R3 announcement which we're going to get you later. Dogecoin is just somewhere to put your wealth while bitcoin is falling and you don't trust Viot. I really can't think of another reason why anybody would bid up Dogecoin. Tones. Oh man, I have no explanation for Dogecoin. I've been fairly critical of altcoins and other projects in general. I had to remember calling back when I was in a debate with Jackson Palmer. This is back before he quit his own Dogecoin. I think at one point I said, and this is why you created a nightmare that doesn't die known as Doge and not something like Darkcoin because we had philosophical issues on a privacy. I can't explain Doge. But then again, I'm trying to look up the price now. I'm going to go from what penny to a penny and a half. What was the, oh God. Okay. So yeah, I went from 30 Satoshi's to 100 Satoshi's and I don't know the current price. I'm sorry guys, that's irrelevant to me. It's like, I can't deal with that. To me this is nonsense. This is like someone, it's like you're outside of New York. It's in Celsius. It's like half a degree and then someone says the temperature is going to double tomorrow. Again, right. To me this means absolutely nothing. Either, oh wait, before you get to ether. So Dashcoin also had a huge rally. I think it hit like $5. I think it's back down to like four and change. So throughout the last year and a half, I have been very, very critical of all altcoins except one. The only one I was, I wouldn't say optimistic, but the only one I was not critical about was Dash, formally dark coin. That's the only one that I give a chance of success. It's the only one that I own besides Bitcoin. I own a few. It's the only one. I have liked it almost from the beginning because they're doing something right because they understand what cryptocurrency is unlike almost any of the other ones. I guess Monero is in the same boat. Every time I talk about Dash, the Monero people jump down my back. So Monero is in a similar boat. I'm just partial to Dash. It's been there longer. I know it. I'm not going to learn any other altcoin. So Dash is the only one that I kind of like. Is it going to succeed? I'm not sure, but it's the one I think has a small chance. Ethereum. Oh man. I've been saying that thing is a disaster from day one. I don't know if we're going to talk about Ethereum later in detail or we're just talking about the price. I was surprised. I went back over $1. I'm surprised it went over $2. I think that thing is going to end in tears. The price of the Ethereum token. That's all I'm going to say. I remember when Aurora Coin hit $100. So some of us have been watching these altcoins for a while as well. It's not a new paradigm. If we talk about Ethereum later, I'll get more into it. It's a temporary hype, all trader based because the majority of Ethereum is held by the Ethereum co-founders. I'm just speculating like everybody else on the price of Ethereum. That's all I'll say. Theo, good man. I think that we're seeing one of the use cases for altcoins. They're really good betting chips. They're a speculation medium. It's like penny stocks in a way. They're highly speculative. Like time described, they go from one cent to two cents. That's double. That's a big move. Of course, because of cryptocurrency, you have all those extra zeros that you can add. It makes it pretty convenient for that. Just a brief look. Currently Dogecoin is number five on CoinMarketCap. I believe that's a pretty good move for them. Ethereum is three. Ripple is actually up 10%. That's also an altcoin, but it's a little different. Actually, I think that it's just people made some profits on the Bitcoin volatility in the past few months. The rise to 500 and the way down and everything else. It was just a matter of time before we saw some really big pumps in the altcoins. You also saw in the altcoins from the technical side, and I'll miss all the charts, really long periods of consolidation. Somebody was buying down there over time. I don't know when they're going to cash out. I think that you see a lot of altcoins going up. You see a lot more interest because Ethereum is leading the interest right now in the altcoin world. Exit question. If there could be only one, which altcoin would you choose? Gabriel. Well, if there could be only one, well, I'm going to mention two. I'm interested in the Maitsave project. I think that has a lot of potential. It's still in development, and I've actually been mixing it up on the forums over there. Pretty interesting project. I don't think they quite nailed down some of the extremely important parameters of the farming program and stuff, but I do think that it could be an interesting investment to get the pre-tokens, which are called Maitsave Coin, available on, forgot the exchange. But our dash is also really interesting to me, too. I think for the reasons Tony lucidated. Tony Vays. I'm going to stick with dash, and I want to eliminate any token that has oracles, that means when the main creator of that token gets arrested, everything goes to hell. Automatically count that out. Anything that doesn't have privacy built in, count that out. The only thing that's left is pretty much dash. Theo, good man. If I had to choose one altcoin, it's the question. I guess I just say like coin. It doesn't have all these cool features. A lot of the, you get a lot of people, I'm not against other altcoins necessarily. I think people like humans like choice and there are always will be choices. How many choices will survive in the long run? I don't know. But I'm not against dark or monero or all those ideas. It's just that coin spin around. It's got nice hash rate. It's a little faster than Bitcoin. It's worked for a long time. Sounds good to me. The correct answer is dark coin or dash coin or monero or the new zero cash, zero coin project. Whatever you want to call it, mixing in privacy is the new feature. But once again, this feature could very well be rolled into Bitcoin once the feature is tested and completed. Altcoins are a workshop. They've become a marketplace and I'm not sure the value of any of these tokens. I just know the value of the ideas and privacy is a good idea. Moving on to issue two, issue two, Bitcoin classic, Bitcoin core, Bitcoin unlimited, mad Bitcoin. The hernia is over and Bitcoin core is suddenly communicating, opening up a Slack channel in a Twitter account. But there's still competing projects in Bitcoin classic, Bitcoin unlimited and maybe more. Tone Vays, when will this madness end? I think this madness is just starting. It's just beginning. It's going to get worse. This is you're watching the early stages of political parties. I'm not a fan of this at all. The Bitcoin core now has to go get, create a website. They have to go get a Twitter account. All of this just so they can lobby against the stupidity of developers that have called Bitcoin dead. I find this incredibly frustrating. I think the good developer should be developing, not doing media control. I think I went off on my current and a little of Gavin and Dresan. The last time we did this, I can tack on to it, but I don't even think it's necessary. It's just the beginning. I think it's going to get worse. Let these people develop. They got us this far for the, I don't know, two or three thousand people that actually use Bitcoin. It's working just fine for them. It's very frustrating. A few of us, me and a few other people will literally call out people in the Bitcoin space and we tell them you're not a Bitcoin user. I will admit, I am not a Bitcoin user. There's maybe once a month, I use Bitcoin. That's it. Other than that, I'm not a Bitcoin user. Most people aren't. Most of the people are not Bitcoin users. They don't realize it. For Bitcoin users, this is just completely unnecessary. I don't like it, but it is what it is. I'm not here to tell others what to do. I just provide my opinion. I don't want to skip to the plug early, but I did use Bitcoin three times last week on purse.io. Theo Goodman. I'm going to definitely agree with Tony in the sense that it's about developers or groups of developers having to do PR and media and marketing. That's what. Actually, if you take a step back and look at the proposals, XT, classic, or whatever unlimited, etc., actually unlimited didn't have that great of a media offensive, I would say, but let's just say classic and XT. If you just take the technicals away, they totally kicked ass in PR. They had all these media channels going on fire and they had all these things. They were really good at that. For that, it's great. That's not development and that's not really where the argument should be taken place. We're seeing that, of course, we have to do that too. I do like the Slack channel. I have been in there a little bit. There are a lot of people in there. They do have different channels. I think that's a good idea. You can just meet people like, oh, this is some person you've heard of and they just happen to be hanging out there and you can just watch the conversation or participate. I think that's a good way to start some kind of dialogue. Now it is the internet, so everyone has to kind of chill out a little bit and not go in there and just flame or whatever. They have like a room water cooler so you can go there and make jokes and stuff. Any communication is good communication. Gabriel, Devon. This whole classic thing is a complete boom doggo. I'm taking a look at their site right now. First of all, the code of conduct, Link is now broken. Are they that embarrassed about it? I think they should be actually. This is a document that they have borrowed from the Linux development system or community. Can you guys still hear me? Yep. We can still hear you. We just can't see you. I don't know why. I don't know why that is. Anyways, maybe I should turn off my Bitcoin node, eating up on my bandwidth. These guys are borrowing the Linux code of conduct, which talks about transexuals and how we can't be mean to anybody and it's all this political garbage that actually has nothing at all to do with creating a technical system. Even though there's human beings involved and even though there's economics involved, the basis of Bitcoin is software, mathematics, statistics, data architecture, information. This whole classic thing is a distraction. It's not real open source development. It's just a dog and pony show for people to glom onto that are threatened by Bitcoin. It's very transparent. I really love the idea that I read recently. I'm trying to recall the author. I believe a CEO of a mining company or an exchange who had suggested to do a prediction market. Very interesting. Now there, you've got people with skin in the game making a prediction about which hard fork is going to do what? You could make tokens and have them exchange. You could do this on essentialize exchange or of course on one of the upcoming decentralized prediction market infrastructures or ecosystems that are coming down the pike. That's going to give us a lot better information. Having these meaningless polls on this website with no skin in the game, it's completely subject to social engineering. This is totally meaningless crap. It's something for people to attack Bitcoin to set up and try to persuade people through propaganda to glom onto their idea instead of the ideas of the experienced experts in the space who are actually writing the software, doing full requests to get a day to day. This is a complete bullshit, classic, unlimited, except for Matt Bitcoin, all of it is complete bullshit. Don't believe the hype. People fall for this bullshit, listen to the developers who actually have dozens and dozens or hundreds of poll requests in the Bitcoin codebase. Not idiots like my current who have connections to GCHQ in their past and of course Google who is well known, five eyes collaborator. These people are just government shills trying to fight a decentralized system that's burgeoning up from the grassroots and they feel threatened. The good thing about this discussion in my opinion is they're not actually making any progress. The people actually putting their hard earned labor and fiat into the Bitcoin ecosystem are not taken in by this. Only the most superficial speculators will fall for this bullshit. People who are actually putting down their cash do the research and they understand this is actually threat. But if they actually want to do a hard fork, great. It's going to be really interesting to see who attacks who in that ecosystem because the people who with skin in the game have a feeling are going to, everybody with Bitcoin of course is going to end up with tokens on both forks and the people on core and who believe in core are going to sell their classic. Just like the people who can classic may sell their core, but I think we're going to see just like with the XT hard fork attempt where they had a hard deadline, which is, I don't know how smart that was, but if they really wanted to attack it, they tried to keep it open ended. It was an obvious failure. I think we're going to see the same thing. If there's a classic fork, you're going to see all the core believers selling off their classic and just getting more Bitcoin and you're going to see one fork with or and die and one fork win. I have a feeling it's going to be the more secure one. Of course, the Bitcoin block size debate, it's a real debate because I think it's more of a propaganda social engineering attack. That debate is about centralization and security and censorship resistance. When it comes down to push a shove or get out of the way, you're going to see what really happens when the money's on the line. I'll jump in here for a second. Let's do something. I couldn't agree with you more. This is an under one that's usually saying all that on this channel. This is great. I also don't want us all to get into groupthink. One of these days, Thomas, trying to get someone from Ethereum or three or somebody with the opposite opinion in here. Here's what I find the most frustrating. Gabriel said people with the most experience, people who have been there in Longest, so here's what bothers me. Mike Hurden and Gavin have been programming on the Bitcoin course since 2009. They were there in the very, very beginning. I find that incredibly frustrating because their viewpoints stand in the complete country and the prediction of what privacy and security mean. I don't think they care about privacy. This is what frustrates me to no end. These guys were helping take Bitcoin to what it was a year ago close to today. They were there. They should understand what privacy is, but they don't. I don't want to spute contradictions like all these new people are coming in and trying to hijack it. No, they've been there from the beginning. I am actually thankful that Bitcoin has not yet been hijacked because these are the guys that were helping program it from 2009. I'm happy that they're out or eventually will be out. I don't think they're propaganda campaigns going to work. I just don't. I think Bitcoin core will prevail. I don't think people will switch. I think the whole block size is completely overblown. It can easily be moved to two megabytes when it needs to be. It doesn't even need to be there yet. The blocks are full. What are we going to do? The blocks are full. What are we going to do? They're really worth it. A lot of people are panicking. They were really full, but I don't know where those transactions are coming from because I really doubt. It's tinfoil hat style, but I really doubt they're from new users or it's because Bitcoin is really popular. It is really easy to send Bitcoin back and forth to yourself. It's not that expensive. If I wanted to make a point and say, hey, the blocks are full. There's a bunch of stuff going on here. It wouldn't be that hard for me to do. I don't have any proof that's happening, but the timing of these blocks being full is pretty interesting, don't you think? Of course it was a coordinated attack to fill up the blocks. If you needed to get your transaction done, you paid ten cents to do it. I know. Here's where I don't want to keep being invited to the show, but I'm about to talk about Purse.io. Look, Purse.io is great. You can use Bitcoin. You can save on Amazon. Purse.io can still do almost do that without Bitcoin. If it opens up outside of Bitcoin, they're not going to be able to have that big of a discount. The reason why they're able to do that discount is because of Bitcoin. As the Bitcoin community grows, that discount will shrink. It's just basic economics. Those are some of the users of Bitcoin. Those are not the users of Bitcoin that make it matter. I'm still on record for saying Bitcoin has a killer app that hasn't even been realized yet. It's the only killer app it has. Movements of significant amount of value, cross-borders, almost instantly and almost free. If you have to pay a few dollars to do it, it's fine. We're talking thousands of now hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some guy buying a cup of coffee, some guy buying a speaker through Purse.io on Amazon, a guy buying Starbucks, or a guy buying target gift cards. That's not the innovation. We have payments. The banking system can do instant payments. The problem is not instant payments. The problem is government interference in those payments. Government payments can be checked. Clearing can be instant. It's regulation that is keeping it from doing so. The fact that grandma still needs to use her paper checks. Payments can be instant. It's all computers. It's all digital. That is not our problem. We'll get to our three sub later. That's the thing. Bitcoin is for right now. Bitcoin's only real function is for instant permissionless value transfer and value that matters. Not for a dollar for a cup of coffee. I'll end it on that. I think question. Do you want to go more gave? Yeah. I just wanted to say I think you brought up a couple of really good points. One is you talked about the Gavin and Jason and Mark Mykern being involved since early on. It's important to take their comments seriously because of that. Of course, Mykern is responsible for an accidental heart fork and hardly has any pull requests. But Andrews and that guy has actually been there since the beginning. I think that your disappointment is a little bit surprising. Government moles have been burrowing into open source projects since the 80s and 90s and they've been in Linux since the beginning, inserting as much confusing, strange backdoors as they could get away with. The same thing has been happening since Bitcoin in the very center. You don't think that NSA operas were on that cryptography mailing list in 2008 when he released the white paper. They've been on top of this stuff since the beginning doing whatever they can. That's the thing about open source though. Whatever they can do is only what they can get away with and what other eyeballs can catch. These guys are going to continue to do that. I agree with you that this is only the beginning of the social engineering attacks that the Bitcoin ecosystem is going to experience. It's a matter of vigilance and listening to what these people are saying. Obviously, Andrews and Mykern don't believe that privacy and security are important for Bitcoin because either someone showed up with a trungeon and said we're going to smash your kids heads in or they said if you go along with us, we'll give you a job at our three. Whatever whether carrot or stick, these people are going to attempt to crush the thing that threatens their power structure. So don't be surprised. Just do your thing and put your money in crypto. Moving on, exit question. Yes or no, having a vigorous debate and many options while terrifying in the short term will be good for Bitcoin in the long term. Theo or Tom Vase, sorry. That's a tough yes or no. I'm going to go with no. I don't think it's good for Bitcoin. Theo Goodman. Yes. Gabriel D. Vine. It's not only good for Bitcoin, it's the only way forward for open source and it's very healthy. Anti-fragile. The more they attack us, the stronger we become. What doesn't kill us only makes us stronger. Special thanks to purse.io where you can save 30% on Amazon just for spending Bitcoins. You don't have to understand Bitcoin. You just put up your wish list, your Bitcoin and your discount and that's it. I bought new gloves, a book about chess and a case of oatmeal just this week. You can buy anything at purse.io. Moving on to issue three. Bitcoin classic and the scourge of democracy. This is not the right article. This is better. Overreaching and trying to solve too many problems at the same time bore its ugly head once more in the echoes of the Bitcoin XT disaster as Bitcoin's classics plan to vote on block size. Suddenly expand it and do the idea that everything in the protocol could be voted on, including the 21 million coin limit. Theo Goodman, should everything be voted on? Why can't we just solve one problem at a time? No, everything shouldn't be voted on. Especially things like the limit of how many coins will be produced overall. Look, Bitcoin, the reason it has value, one reason it has value is because it can't be changed very easily. Not that it can be changed because someone gets really emotional and gets enough people behind them. That's the reason that it, one of the reasons it has value because it can't be changed really easy because it's not a democracy. It's consensus. That's very different. That's a trade-off also. Some people just have to accept that. There's a trade-off between being able to change a lot and being really flexible and being really sturdy and something that I can count on for a long time. That's just part of the trade-off. I think the whole voting thing on everything is ridiculous. If they were really going to do that, they should start off with 51 megabyte blocks to match the 51% that you need to vote on anything. At least it's artistic project that has 51 as the theme. Then I could accept it as an art project. It's Bitcoin classic. Why don't they go with Bitcoin classic? It's kind of like Coke classic. Why don't they go with New Bitcoin like New Coke? That was maybe an FDHMX headroom. That would be cooler too. Max headroom was talking about voting and number 51 and how important it is. I think that would have been a better marketing route and would have been cooler. Probably the next thing will be New Bitcoin now and it'll have its own little thing. I think that consensus is the way to go. Not majority is just the final say. That's why Bitcoin is what Bitcoin is because it doesn't work like that. Beyond the look out for New Bitcoin. Bitcoin clear and of course Bitcoin zero soon in the future. Just to define some terms, consensus is usually about 90% 9 out of 10. As Theo said, democracy is 51 to 49. If you win by the narrowest of margins, you're now correct. Gabriel D. Vine. Yeah, that's really good points. We've been over some of these issues before. Democracy lives somewhere halfway-ish between tyranny, authoritarian on one side and anarchy or leaderlessness on the other side. And consensus is of course slightly more organization than anarchy but not a whole lot. That makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Many people in the world are misused in their mindset and they need other people to tell them what the truth is. Rather than an exploratory and assertive mindset that allows their mind to go out into the world and to judge for themselves based on their own moral compass. Right and wrong. I think this is a really wonderful transformation in our society where we're developing these techniques of consensus in the open source world because it's an opt-in philosophy. It's an opt-in structure where you can't force the tyranny of the many over the few. And I think it's a great thing, open source because if you don't like it, you don't have to use it. Go fork your own coin and try to make something else. Or use an altcoin whose philosophy you prefer or use ripple or use fiat or use giero sticks. And I think that this article, a lot of the coin does content I've been seeing for many months but especially just recently when they were bought by the Digital Currency Group very silver, very suspect. A lot of fallacies. The previous article, there was a some guy from a mining equipment company, Matt, something from Block C. He says in a day where Google offers gigabyte fiber for $80 a month, the argument that a two megabyte block might be too big doesn't really make sense. Well, Complating Raw bandwidth service with decentralized consensus equilibrium is a massive false cause fallacy. And the actual like, you know, technical block size issues about security and mining centralization causing, you know, a risk to the integrity of the network. These type of fallacies are so subtle that anybody that's not really well versed in the space is going to get taken in by them. And I think we are seeing the final decline of coin desk as a medium for good information in the Bitcoin space with its latest acquisitions kind of sad. Tone vase. Oh, wow. So let's see. So in that tweet that you showed, it was a, it mentioned, I was a Jonathan Tumen, I forgot his first name. It was one of the core developers of the Bitcoin Classic project. Yeah, I mean, there's two Tumen brothers that one of them I heard speak in Hong Kong, I heard about the Bitcoin, I did not like, I mean, his presentation was useful from a data perspective, but I did not like his conclusions at all. And I'm not a big fan of them. There's also an interview with Michael Tumen, his brother that just aired on the latest episode of Bitcoin Uncensored. So you can find that on SoundCloud, which is very interesting. Definitely you should hear that. Look, everything is probably going to be voted on. It's unfortunate. That's where we're headed. I mean, if Bitcoin succeeds, everything is going to be up for grabs anyway. I mean, the later it happens, the better, the 21 million Bitcoin as much as I never wanted to change. And I've actually argued, I've been in arguments where I conceded that if we can algorithmically raise that limit to account for burned Bitcoins, I would be okay with it. So basically the idea is, it started out with 21 billion Bitcoins, but it's pretty obvious that by now we're probably, I'm guessing, 500,000 to a million have been lost because I personally know people that would send 10,000, 20,000 to like random places back in 2009 and they're gone. So I would be okay with some kind of an algorithmic way to try and maintain a 21 million Bitcoin encirculation. This way you're not raising the circulation. And I've been in some furious arguments and I'm a hardcore Bitcoin guy. So I can hold the argument. I mean, I'm not for this, but I would be okay with that method. I'm not really going to be okay with increasing the size, but you know what? Bitcoin is going to have a major problem in the future. Like everyone, again, these are hardcore gold bugs that might have switched to Bitcoin, some of them are still Bitcoin. People don't forget how important credit is to an economy. And unfortunately, there's not enough people that really understand economics involved in the Bitcoin space or in any space in general. Credit is incredibly important. Your economy needs to scale. A gold standard will not work. You need credit. Fractional reserve lending is not inherently evil. It is really not. If you, again, I've had these debates, I've had these arguments. It's really hard to explain this in libertarian chat. I don't know. Evil if you're the banks. It's great if you're the banks. I know. If even if you're the bank, it's fine. They're not. They're not necessarily profiting from straight up fractures. But again, this is a long discussion. We can spend an entire day on this. Fractional reserve in itself is not evil. The problem happens when money is created and you know it has absolutely no purpose to help an economy. Like I don't consider any government spending as beneficial to an economy. I consider all government spending as hurting the economy. So when you start from that perspective, you think of fractional reserve lending as I want to open a business. I have a good idea. I need money. I would love for the bank to have a fractional reserve to lend me money to open my business. Now if the bank thinks my business is stupid, they're not going to lend me the money. If the bank thinks my business is a good idea, great. Let them create it out of finair because if my business succeeds, I'm helping the economy in the private sector. We can talk about banks creating money out of finair to give to their friends for businesses. Again, that's the area of corruption that is completely different animal. But in itself, fractional reserve can be good. So Bitcoin is going to have a serious, if Bitcoin succeeds as being a serious player in the currency space, it's going to have a major problem creating credit. It needs credit in order to scale economies. Which is why I don't consider Bitcoin a good currency or a currency at all. I consider Bitcoin a medium of exchange, whether you hold it long term, if you're going to hold it long term, the only reason to hold it long term is if you want your savings to be censor, I guess confiscation resistant, then you hold it long term. If you want Bitcoin to be a censorship resistant transfer, then you simply use it as a medium of exchange and then go back to your local currency. Hopefully, your local currency isn't Argentine peso or Venezuelan or probably even the euro very, very soon. So hopefully, your local currency is stable. And then Bitcoin is your medium of exchange, cross-border censorship resistant. Those are its properties. Those are the properties of the new asset class. If you're not utilizing these properties, then you're not utilizing the new asset class known as Bitcoin, and you can do everything just like you did in 2008 before Bitcoin existed, nothing changed. But as far as things being voted on, I would like to see fungibility solve first. I mean, to me, that's the most important feature. Fungibility creates those two properties I just mentioned, especially the value transfer censorship resistant value transfer. You solve fungibility first. You solve scalability second. And block size is not scalability. Block size is just more transactions a second. There's a temporary solution. I don't see the people rushing into Bitcoin to buy things like Starbucks coffee. So I just don't see the urgency here just yet. There is a waving of problems. And then you solve them one at a time. And sooner or later, the 21 million coins will come into question. Hopefully there will be some kind of... If it comes into question, I would like to see it resolved with an algorithm that covers burnt coins first. And then later on, if future smart economists don't create some kind of a scalability feature for similar diffractional reserve in order for credit to create credit and for economies to scale using Bitcoin, then that 21 million cap may just be in jeopardy. Exit question, how big should the blocks be? Two, four, six, eight, ten, or scaling like the difficulty? Theo Goodman. Yeah, I'm in favor of a dynamic block size limit. Now it is a block size limit. So everyone just I always like to remind people it's just the limit. Doesn't mean that you have to fill up the blocks or the miners will. But anyway, yeah, I'm in favor of the dynamic size limit. There are a few proposals that have proposed that. Now a lot of technical people told me, yeah, that's really cool. That in some ways, that's even harder to implement than increasing and kind of opens up a Pandora's box in some ways. However, I think that's a good long term fix or solution to the whole thing. And if it's done in a fair way, then that's okay. Now the thing is with the dynamic blocks, then you have the chance that miners might somehow gain the system in order to get some kind of advantage. And if you don't have it like that, and we have just, okay, let's do it to two, let's do it to three, then people try to gain the system with propaganda in order to get their way. So either way, you have people, the humans try to gain things. That's just how it is. But yeah, I like it that I like it if it's hard coded in and that's kind of like the difficulty. I see that as a good way to do it. And it's also a good way because it's set in stone and that's just it. And then let's move on. Gabriel, D. Vaughn. Short term, I would say, smaller than one megabyte block size limit to catch the mining centralization, nip it in the bud. Long term, I am for no block size limit. I think that a new equilibrium needs to be created with a sort of systemic engineering. This would be sort of a new functionality that we will, I think we should find during the next 120 years or so. We need to find a dynamic solution where it's not a limit at all. And the size of the blocks is merely determined by economic factors in ecosystem. Tone, Vaze. I mean, I would be okay with the dynamic, but I would also be okay with a jump to two megabytes. I'm not against the jump to two megabytes. I'm just against the way it has been brought about to the general public, basically turning into a mandatory problem and blaming XT for not doing anything. Look, the guys programming XT, the core, they're smart. They know all this, they understand it. And then people are like, oh, what is the problem? It's just one line of code change. Yes, it probably is one line of code change. And when it's necessary, it can easily be done. So I'm okay with either a jump to two, preferably with a soft fork like it's segregated with witnesses proposing or eventually going to a dynamic or one day going to no limit when we have fungibility, right? I mean, it's again, there's bigger problems that the core is working on and the general public just doesn't understand it. Moving on, issue four, Ethereum and R3. Did Mike Hurn break up with Bitcoin to get into bed with Ethereum? Because R3 has announced a digital ledger space experiment with Ethereum and Microsoft's zero blockchain. Ethereum's prices, oh, oh, oh, tone veys. You're, let's see, Gabriel, who's first here? Back to the beginning, Gabriel Devon, your thoughts on the R3 IBM Microsoft Ethereum Galaxy. Yeah, the whole private blockchain space. I'm not really convinced that it's going to have as amazing of an effect on society and it's going to just change everything like that Blithe master's girl says. By the way, did she create the financial instruments that led to the last collapse? Yes, she did create some of them. So I think that to this day, the internet conversation or analogy in regards to the private blockchain is still very accurate. I think it has a lot of validity in the conversation. And just on a specific level, 625 giga hash per second, that is the current hash rate of the Ethereum network. That is just over 1,500 of the hash rate of Bitcoin. So roughly speaking, players in the blockchain project, like in one like R3s, can only securely trade assets that don't exceed the cost of the attack on the network. So you'll only be able to trade up to the market cap of Ethereum, which is what a few million dollars. That's not going to have much effect on their business model. And then you're talking about using colored coins on Ethereum. Well, each token is actually worth a billion dollars. Well, if you're actually trading billion dollar colored coins, that means that it's very much worthwhile to drop 20, 30, 40 grand on bribing this guy in the office, getting that guy, getting that private key. Boom. Send your colored coin over to some other wallet or some other bank where you have another friend. And then, boom, you get that colored coin and then you cash it out for a billion and you got it in gold in your vault in Namibia. So these type of systems, the attack vectors, are just proliferate. It's really fun to make projects like this and do it with your friend banks. Even if they're competitors, it's like, oh, this is so cool. Look how fast we're trading all this. As soon as it goes live, then we'll see for real what really happens behind the scenes. And it should be pretty interesting to see how difficult they are to actually secure without a value token behind the transactions. Tones. I got a correct one thing, Gabriel, that you said. It sounded great except you're not going to convert it to gold. You're going to convert it to Bitcoin, which is going to be worth a lot more than five. Thank you. That was definitely my bad. Oh, man. Where do I start? I mean, I've been critical of R3 from almost the beginning. I've been critical of Ethereum from almost the beginning. I find this really confusing, right? Because isn't the point of R3 to create a tokenless blockchain? It's like, we're going to do a better Bitcoin without the Bitcoin. And now they're joining with another speculative token, which is infinitely more insecure. And people to this day complain that Bitcoin is concentrated in the hands of early adopters. How many co-founders of Ethereum were there? I can name five of the top on my head. And I don't even follow Ethereum, right? There was Vitalik, there was Gavin Wood, there was Anthony Deloreo, there was Joe Lubin. I think some guy named Amir, and the only reason I know is because he's at every conference talking about how he was the co-founder of Ethereum. So those are the five that I personally have met at some point in my life. I got to know how many more there are. The whole thing had a crowd sale. I'm still waiting for the SEC to drop the hammer on them. I think all of these guys are getting subpoena. I think all these guys are probably getting arrested. Same goes for several other projects. I'm sorry, it just makes no sense to me that R3 is getting involved. They're probably going to fork it. They're probably going to have their own, like, a version of Ethereum, just like Stellar, Split from Ripple, and some of the other ones. The whole point of private blockchains, I find completely ridiculous. There is no innovation in a private blockchains. None. People don't see the inner, I don't know how many times they can say this to people. Innovation is the censorship, resistant, value transfer of Bitcoin. If my current gets his way and removes that functionality, there is no innovation. We will need another Bitcoin type of project. Maybe it'll be Dash. I hope it's Dash, because, like I said, it's the only other token that I have. There's no innovation in a private blockchains. None. And Ethereum, again, their whole thing is, is Ethereum a smart contract? The world is so far away from smart contracts. It's ridiculous. The only reason why Bitcoin works is because, again, censorship, resistance, and value transfer. Your contract has to be valid in a court of law. And, till the court system agrees that whatever smart contract you created is valid, it's irrelevant. Because a judge will soon send you to jail as the receiver of a smart contract. So whatever the smart contract authorizes you to do, I find all of these projects either ridiculous or 10 to 20 years ahead of their time. And there's nothing wrong with being ahead of your time. It just, I just don't think it's going to work. We have to have a complete overhaul of the court system, complete overhaul of the financial system. Before we can talk about things like smart contracts. And again, the joining of these two companies makes no sense to me. Yes, it's the hype that took Ether all the way up. All I've got to say to people is all those co-founders of Ethereum have now moved on to other projects. The only one that's left is Vitalik. Ethereum did have a pre-mind. They had a crowd sale. I don't even know how much Ether these co-founders have. I'm sure they're very happy right now that it went up. But guess what? One of them starts, when the price starts to go down and one of them starts selling, they will all start selling. And I just think it'll end in tears. Don't forget everyone. Aurora Coin was once $100.00 a coin. Okay, I mean, Litecoin was 50, but Aurora Coin was 100. And it was there for about a day. If anyone remembers what Aurora Coin was, if not, go ahead and Google it. If you can find it, even if it exists on Google. So there you go. I'll end it there. Go ahead to you. Yeah, good. All right. Well, I'm not even sure what the question was at this point. But that's a good idea. Are there three in Ether? Are there three in Ether? Yeah, well, I really doubt that R3 is going to use Ether, the blockchain of Ether. It might use Ether, the programming technology, to do whatever private, blockchain-y kind of things they want to do. Like, it's cool little thingies they're building. But I really doubt they're going to use anything that they don't have control over. That's just not in the nature of these businesses, which is fine. That's just their business. You know what I mean? That's not a risk they're willing to take. So I just don't see that. So I don't really know. I mean, I guess theoretically they could. I don't know about the whole smart contract. Of course, if you live somewhere and there's someone that has the monopoly of violence where you are, then what good is the smart contract going to do you? Well, it could do something if you're with, if you have the party already agrees with you. That's about it. I mean, I don't know. I can see what you mean with that, definitely. I don't know what it sounds cool. R3. Ethereum sounds cool. Let's do it. Everyone's doing it. We're all doing private blockchains. We don't want to have the word Bitcoin. Ethereum, they're pretty good at marketing. They don't know how to manage money, because they totally squander their IPO money. But it sounds cool. Let's do it. We want to get on the hype train. Let's destroy Bitcoin and replace it with Ethereum, even though we're using a private chain. And let's move on from there. That's it. I think that's the main idea. Let me jump in there for a second. I think it's just hype on top of hype. I mean, they'll have more in the announcement. Maybe they'll find 10 more banks. I just want to give one quick example. I just remembered how this conversation of a smart contract that makes sense to me. And I was at San Diego Bitcoin conference in December. And I was starting to a guy from the financial side of one of the car companies. I don't remember which one, but even if I did, I wouldn't say. So they were talking about like loaning some kind of car loans, like a new type of car loan, and they were going to utilize the blockchain. And what they would do is they would give like discounted loans to like some people that have bet credit, whatever. They were going to get into lending space. And the company had bid in its name. So I talked to the guy and I'm like, so what does this have to do with Bitcoin because you have bid in your name? And then he's like, oh, they're actually unrelated. But what they were going to do was they were going to put the VIN number of the car or something like some kind of info of the car. They were going to hash it into the blockchain because the blockchain is now a notary service, right? So a fact and other companies think, which is also kind of ridiculous. And so you just proved that the loan was made things like that. And they were going to put some kind of a device in the car that had GPS device that keeps track of the car. So basically if the loan isn't paid on time, you know where the car is and you can shut the car off. And then also if the car is stolen, they know where the car is and they can go get the car in case the loan isn't paid. But they were going to utilize the blockchain in some way and they were talking about smart contracts. And I'm like, well, this makes absolutely no sense to me. Like, do you not trust your own database? Why are you going to hash the information of the loan in the car into the blockchain? It means you don't trust yourself in your own database to keep records. Yeah, but it sounds cool. It sounds cool, right? So here's where I explained that a guy, right? So here's what a smart contract is, right? This is how you add privacy with a smart contract. And this doesn't exist right now, but it couldn't the future. This is what I'm looking forward to. Some person that can't get a loan because they have back credit, goes to this company and gets a loan. They go and buy their car, but they're providing the loan. The company puts a tracker in the car so they can get the car back in case it's stolen, in case you don't pay, they have a remote way to shut off the car, but they can also track you. However, nobody likes to be tracked. I don't like being tracked. People don't like being tracked. So the way you have to set up your system is, yes, the car has a tracking system in the car. But the company that put the tracking system in that gave you the loan has absolutely no access to the tracker until one of these three conditions was met. One, the tracker is somebody messed with the tracker. Two, a loan payment didn't show up. Or three, the guy reports the car stolen. One of those three conditions, a smart contract, activates the ability for the company that gave the loan to now track the car and go after the person. Unless one of those three conditions is met, the known is actually tracking you. The tracker is there, but nobody can see it. This also prevents the government from coming to the company that gave the loan and put the tracker in the car. With the subpoena saying, hey, we want to know where this guy is, the answer is, well, we don't know. We don't have access to the tracker. You can go find this guy, make him not pay a bill, or you can go steal his car, and then we'll have access to track it. So that is my example of a smart contract that adds security and prevents spying in a network. I hope someone is working on this. But yeah, other than that, we have the technology. The innovation is censorship resistance. If you don't use it, then you're not really innovating. Exit question. Obviously, the world crypto network was incredibly wrong on Ethereum. The project is clearly delivered a major return and appears to have serious merit. Force prediction. Yes or no? Will it continue? Theo Goodman. I'm sorry I was talking to our viewers in the live chat, so I got a little distracted. Can you please repeat the question? Will Ethereum success continue? Well, it depends on what you define as success. So we already talked about the value of the token, ETH. Who knows? It could have a real, there's still a lot more pump in it as far as I'm concerned in the short term. If I just take a brief look at the chart, I don't see any signs that it should go down in the short term. As far as the programming language, I think that has a future for sure. It seems to be really interesting and they've made it not more complicated, but tried to break it down a little bit. So that's pretty cool now as far as their blockchain, a future, I have no idea. Gabriel D. Von. I'm not convinced that the inexperienced developers in charge of Ethereum have what it takes to get the project moving forward in general. I agree with Theo that some of the work they've done so far seems valuable, but it could easily be taken up by counterparty. They've forked it in a weekend. And I've always found extremely suspect their supposed roadmap toward a mysterious and net-blast proof of stake future that I think is pure vaporware. So I think what we're looking at is an altcoin with an alternative blockchain that's always going to play second fiddle to the most secure network Bitcoin. Not that bullish on the long-term Ethereum and Ether that token. Tone Vaze. Oh man, every time I'm critical of the price of Ether, it feels like it doubles within a week or two. I am bearish on Ethereum the project. I am still bearish on Ethereum the token. I don't know. I've been in several Vitalik mine, I don't even notice. I've been in several debates with Vitalik over what privacy means. Again, I don't like oracles in my project. I'm not a developer. It's been 10 years since I coded. Again, people are going to say, look at the tech, look at the tech. And I look at the economics of the situation and it doesn't seem right to me. Maybe two more years, maybe a year, I don't know. I, like I said, I keep saying, I think it's going to end in tears. I think the Ethereum project is going to end in tears. The project may succeed, but I don't know if that means the token has value. Moving on to predictions. Our story of the week, Gabriel, Devon, are you ready with a prediction or a story of the week? I am going to address something that Tone talked about for my story of the week. People with a certain banking, I agree, would work perfectly. There's no problems with it when you're dealing with a society of human beings who act totally logically and completely honorably. I think that if you've got a society where people are completely honorable and never commit a crime or lie, rational reserve banking has a bright future. Tone Vays. Oh man, I don't know if that was... That was like passive-aggressive right there. You're never going to have that kind of society. To me, the biggest liars are in government. They're the ones that profit the most from fractalers or banking, so they just need to stop that part of it. Oh yeah, yeah. Government's too. Government's will work perfectly if you have a society for people who only tell the truth and act honorable. So my story of the week, it's a little... It's a story of the week to me. I find it very disappointing. So macro media, the company that puts on inside Bitcoin conference has... Is no more. They liquidated the company. I know some people like inside Bitcoin conferences, some don't like it. I personally really like inside Bitcoin conferences because they brought a lot of new people to the events. Most of the other conferences I go to are all four by Bitcoin people, four Bitcoin people, and that's not how you grow a community. So I was a huge participant in almost every single inside Bitcoin conference. I was happy to be a speaker. I was always interacting with the audience. There was always a lot of new people there. I think the most amount of new wallets have been stole was at these conferences. So to me, that's a story of the month that there will be no more inside Bitcoin conferences. I find that very disappointing. You need conferences that tailor to the general public and not to within the Bitcoin community. Good point, Tom. Theo, good one. Oh, I've got a double whammy this week and I'm going to do story of the week and a prediction ladies and gentlemen. So actually my story of the week hot off the presses is payment processor to stop working with daily fantasy sports clients. Vantive. So this is an ongoing topic of there being more regulation coming into the fantasy sports industry. And now one of the payment processors is basically long story short. Like no, we're not going to, if you're a customer wanting to fund your fantasy games, we're not going to work with you anymore. So that's one down. It's a big one. We're part of the Vantive. Vantive. Let me get the V8 and TIV. Vantive. So I don't know him either, but apparently it's a real big one for draft kings. So I think that's a pretty big deal. And I think we're seeing it's right in front of us a big use case for Bitcoin. It's already, Bitcoin is already used for sports gambling widely, but it's not really used in the fantasy area. In the fantasy area, we're going to go into that just real quickly. What they did is they kind of used a small loophole in the law because it's not gambling officially fantasy. It's a skill game. So that's how that's legal now. And of course over time, the authorities are like, well, we make a lot of taxes on all this. I don't know, these Las Vegas guys are kind of lobbying us and we're under a lot of pressure now. So I think that's going to come to an end eventually. So eventually that's going to come to an end. It looks like now, I don't know how long it'll take. It'll take one year or five years or 10 years. I don't know. But it's clear right in front of us what one of the easy answers is is that draft kings, if you're watching, just start accepting Bitcoin and bam. OK, that doesn't solve the legal issue of it being legal or not. If it's a game of skill or not, but you probably have enough money and enough lawyers to deal with that part. But it will definitely in the meantime deal with your payment processing problems because you're not going to stop people paying Bitcoin into the fantasy football or fantasy whatever to play. So that's my story of the week. I think that's really interesting and I think that's going to continue. My prediction of the week doesn't mean it's going to happen until next week is that we're going to see more rage quits in Bitcoin. Oh, that's a rage quits. Theo, I love it because I mean, this is an example of regulatory arbitrage meeting regulatory payment arbitrage. Exactly. It's crazy. I love it. I absolutely love it. I mean, little draft kings have all year to figure it out because football season is over and it starts back up again when September, something like that. So yeah. And hell, someone can just build no fork draft kings for Bitcoin, right? It's right there. And now a prediction, what goes up must come down. Sometimes you think you've got it all in the bag, but you counted your chickens before they hatched. Be lean. Don't waste money. Don't get a big head. Remember your community. Don't shit where you eat or live. Don't shit where you live or eat. Never get involved in a land war in Asia. And as Sunsou said, never fight a battle you can't win. Oh, we're out of time. Until next time. Bye.