The Bitcoin Group, the American original. For over the last 10 seconds, the sharpest Satoshi's, the best bitcoins, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists. Blake Anderson from Blake Anderson Facebook. Greetings everybody, thanks for having me. Marshall Hainer from Trees.delivery. Hey, what's up everyone? Tony Vays from Brave New Coent live in his car. Hey everyone, on my way to speak at Carnegie Mellon University. Will Penguin from AirBits. Hey everybody. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network who didn't update his script of who's going to be on the show today. So I just winked at there. Moving on to issue one. Issue one, Barclays is getting into Bitcoin with Goldman back circle. The Bitcoin company that famously doesn't want to list the word Bitcoin on their homepage and doesn't want to talk about it. Scored a major partnership this week partnering with the British mega bank Barclays. And receiving an e-money license from the queen herself. The banks have come to Bitcoin. But will Bitcoin come to the banks? Blake Anderson. Yeah, I mean Bitcoin, we have our collective bowl of gruel. And it's empty and we're really hungry. So our only hope is to go into gravel to these banks. So we should probably write a collective letter begging for their mercies so that our technology can work really at all. And that's where they only hope. No, I mean, there's a reason that the banks are so anti Bitcoin when you really talk to the executives on a one-on-one level. They're against it because it's antithetical to the value proposition, which they're trying to sell to nation states. So when you can't implement the entire full stack of value, and you'll actually compete with other currencies in a way that is competitive and they're not interested in that. And so I think that it's interesting the case of a circle where they're going to try to get value propositions out of it by admittedly not implementing full stack, and by trying to not mention the term Bitcoin to see how much value they can turn out of just using it on the fringes. But I don't know if they really have a solid lead on exactly how they're going to do that. Marshall Hainer. Kind of echoing Blake's sentiments. I think that there's so much interest in the Bitcoin space to try and raise venture capital and be the first PayPal Bitcoin or some sort of Bitcoin bank or something like that. There's a million different, I won't say a million, but there's at least several thousand entrepreneurs in this space from around the world that will just jump at the chance to do anything and pervert the original intentions of Bitcoin, which is to be a system that's off the rails. So you have companies like R3CEV. They've invested a lot of time and money, and they're working together with the banks, but they're creating something that's not Bitcoin. Why would the banks foster Bitcoin when it's in their worst interest? It's much better for them to create their own ledger system, and they're going to build their own technology. Circle is just kind of like a lot of Silicon Valley tech companies. I think they're a great company, but I think like a lot of companies, they're riding the wave of buzzwords and different things like that. You point it out, they removed Bitcoin, but I think the majority of their business right now is still selling Bitcoin. Remember, it was always Satoshi's Nakamoto's dream to make another PayPal. Tone Vaze. Can you guys see Meritay? Do I have 76? Can you guys see Meritay? Yep, go on. All right, so I don't know. I just find a lot of things strange with this story in general, especially the fact that Circle is merging with the UK bank. I see UK as the most bipolar country in the world right now. They want to be the center of finance, and then they want to track everybody for tax evasion. It's just weird. They want to be the center of technology, and then they want to ban encryption. Now, one of their banks is actually, may actually be embracing Bitcoin, and it's Circle. I'm not a big fan of Circle. I'm the first conference I ever went to on her Jeremy O'Layer speak, and he said something like the central bank should have a say in where Bitcoin monitor the system goes. I actually heard him say it on Meritay. So I'm really not sure what it means. It's a little different. I guess I kind of like it, or have to understand what Bitcoin is. But I don't know. I'm not too excited over it, like some people are, and Bitcoin will just do what it does. I don't think this is going to make any difference when we are another. Will payment. So when I think of Circle, I think of a financial technology company that's looking to make legacy finance compatible with Bitcoin and vice versa. It seems that there have been a number of business development executions by Circle over the past year and a half or more that leave many. They rub a lot of hardcore Bitcoiners the wrong way. After a year and a half of the whole fintech world trying to divorce themselves from the term Bitcoin and separate Bitcoin from the blockchain and all these things, I'm not surprised to see the language that we are in this press release coming out of Circle and Barclays, calling it even in quotes. I think it's a social payments app or something they're calling it and really avoiding Bitcoin in a very aggressive way. But yeah, all these technologies in these companies that seek to make anything compatible with Bitcoin and vice versa, that's a good thing. We're ultimately going to have a system that's compatible with legacy finance, kind of a parallel system and there will be parts where those systems merge together. That's all going to be a good thing. I do still firmly, I'm firmly in sconce in the anti-fragility camp of Bitcoin and I believe no amount of this level of propaganda anyway will dissuade Bitcoin's users from enjoying the use cases that are their favorites. Consequently, I think there's a lot of good that can come from getting the seal of approval from the queen and getting the seal of approval from these other arbitrary authorities who essentially are saying they want to play ball and see what happens. So it's a net positive. I think it's a good point, Will, that the banks didn't partner with Ethereum or blockchain. They partnered with Bitcoin once again. Like Andrea said, Bitcoin will be here. Bitcoin survives. Exit question, the banks will absorb Bitcoin or Bitcoin will absorb the banks. Lake Anderson. I think it's interesting to think of Chris DeRose with saying he's talking about vacuums of stupid and what's going to vacuum the stupid out of Bitcoin and he said that the term blockchain and trying to divorce that. It was a really big competitor for the biggest vacuum of stupid people that are only using blockchain without thinking of how that chain is really going to connect in the full stack. So I think that people that want to put their fingers in the Chinese finger trap of Bitcoin without fully understanding the value proposition of what's associated accomplished are going to be very, very unhappy in the future about having done that. Marshall Hayder. I don't know if it will be Bitcoin that will be the king coin, I guess, in the future. Like the coin that everybody goes through like they do now, maybe Bitcoin is version one, but cryptocurrency will take over the banks and the finance system and you have all these apps. What we're trying to do right now in the development space is trying to build apps to make it easy for people to use this. So flash forward like 10, 15 years, maybe it's a theory or maybe it's a bunch of different nation state controlled coins and Bitcoin is still around as like this ultra valuable, ultra rare coin. It's really hard to tell, but it's kind of silly to remove the focus on, you know, it's the blockchain, it's the blockchain. Bitcoin was the first one. It's still the number you can't get into any other cryptocurrency without Bitcoin. I mean, I guess there's local lightcoins.com or some you might be able to find somebody who used Bitcoin to buy some other altcoins to sell to you. But yeah, in the future, it'll definitely be crypto notes. I also think there's always going to be a place for some sort of like banking institution where they have their own private ledgers and this kind of thing, especially for credit and stuff like that. But cash is going to get slowly sucked out as people realize that their dollars are just evaluating. And countries like Argentina or Venezuela are different places where they've experienced crazy cash devaluation. Africa, it makes a lot of sense. But it's still hard to convince anybody that this is something that you should use when you've been scammed like five different ways and you're kind of entrained, you've been taught from birth to trust the government. So now you don't trust the government, but you also don't trust anyone, especially not some person on the computer who maybe you've been scammed on the computer before, you know, like it's just, it's hard to, it looks so sketchy from the outside looking in like, oh, you know, Mt. Gauk, Silk Road, all this stuff, I lost all my Bitcoin, so my God, it looks really sketchy. So I understand, but it's, you know, give it, give it 10 years, let people build on it and do stuff. I think the other problem that people need to get over too is, you know, the idea of quantitative easing and value, I think once people realize that the dollar was always steadily sliding, they'll start to see more value in Bitcoin. But it takes a huge jump in Bitcoin for it to, for anyone to be interested. Like, I went to a bar, like a couple of weeks ago and the bartender at start to ask me about Bitcoin because I had like a Bitcoin sticker on or something and she's like, ah, I'm not interested in Bitcoin and I was like, well, it was, it was about a penny in 2009 and today it's about $400 a little more and she's like, oh, I'll take, I'll take some bitcoins for drinks. There it is. And remember, if they won't accept your Bitcoin, just try offering them more. Oh, you won't take $10 or about 20. How about 40? You know, just give them money and then eventually, yeah, they'll try it. Toad Vays. By the fault Bitcoin will observe, absorb the banks because it can't possibly be the other way around. The banks will never be able to control Bitcoin, so by default it wins. No, I don't. I don't think it will be back in the same way. Banks will still be there. They'll just be more of a consulting role and a lending role. Do you think it'll be key to the audience, right? I hope not, but it's possible. But they might be able to recommend a good key custodian for you. No rules. Thanks a lot, anyway. Will, Penguin. Yeah, Bitcoin can't be controlled by a single party despite what you may have heard and various contentious debates going on. So yeah, it's definitely not going to be banks absorbing Bitcoin. Although I think we'll see a trend where it appears that Bitcoin is being absorbed by banks before it ultimately absorbs the banks itself. So you might see more of the encroachment by banks on the Bitcoin system and as a route to them trying to get their hands around this technology and still maintain their incumbent status. So yeah, we're going to see Bitcoin exist as its own thing and maybe that means it absorbs much of what banking does. But it certainly will just continue to exist and won't be absorbed itself. I think we can agree. We've all seen the movie Alien and Bitcoin is a little bit more than indigestion. Bitcoin will absorb the banks. Moving on to issue two. Decentralized Bitcoin market. Open Bizarre is now live. Open Bizarre released version 1.0 of their application which allows users to buy and sell items using Bitcoin. The startup received $1 million in funding from Andres and Horowitz and Union Square Ventures but began life as a hackathon project known only as Dark Market. Is Open Bizarre everything that you wanted it to be? I have a lot of friends in the community that are involved in the project and that kind of thing. I wouldn't say anything like it's terrible or I hate it or anything but it's interesting because I think a lot of the hype around Open Bizarre came from Amir creating this dark markets idea. I think the majority of the hype behind this project fell behind this. It's going to turn into the Silk Road but now they can't stop it. No one can stop it. Satoshi's kingdom. Then somewhere along the line it got perverted into this. It's going to be like quasi legal stuff and it's going to be milk and almonds and everyone get excited. I think there's so much anarchist and libertarian rhetoric in Bitcoin that people just started to kind of circle directing around this idea and then it just never really, I don't know. It's exciting for me but I still would rather shop. I think it's going to have a long way to go before it gets to something really awesome. I still enjoy shopping on purse because I feel like it's more curated and I can access everything. Of course I went out on there and I started browsing through the listings and every couple days I'm checking it out. I think it's really cool. The tech is really cool. Don't get me wrong. I think that it will, at some point, serve a purpose. It's probably going to end up in someone forking it and making something else cool with it. It's cool tech. It's definitely a very cool idea but it's going to take people a while to learn that they have to download the client to run the store. That's a new kind of shop that's never been done before. Tone vase. All right. So I will be, I will be a little critical and not really critical. I'm just going to point out some facts that people don't like to admit. I know everyone is going crazy over open bizarre. I personally am not. The idea of a decentralized market is pretty good. However, you've got to realize what, but where's the problem? But what solution are you providing and what is the problem? I was just at a conference and I'm like, you were, every presentation was decentralizing the internet and how they're going to do it. So when it comes to open bizarre, what, the problem, the biggest problem was, I was going to say, payments. You needed a decentralized payment system and we have that. That's good for you. But now they want to decentralize the marketplace and that's going to be incredibly difficult for multiple reasons. For starters, you do have to download a client which is just an annoyance. That's not the big problem. Here's the problem. They're basically rebuilding eBay and Amazon and those companies have a lot of weight. So the problem you run into, okay, I'm sorry. Let me back up. First of all, open bizarre is not decentralized. It may not be decentralized for years because they are censoring the hell out of it because I went on there the first day of launch and trust me, you don't want to see the kind of things that were up there that were immediately taken down and they were mostly there just for people shits and giggles to see that they could. They weren't actually selling or providing that stuff. They were just doing that just to mess with the system. And that's what's going to happen. The biggest problem with the decentralized market is that why someone make the risk of selling legit goods in a market where there's a possibility of the sale of illegitimate goods. Just like someone selling, I don't know, dolls on the sole code. It makes no sense. So open bizarre needs to realize that if they are building a decentralized market, the only sellers on there that are willing to take that kind of risk and need that kind of market is selling things that the government would consider elicit. And if that's the market, then why would regular people start selling their stuff? They are, until that elicit stuff becomes more legal, kind of like marijuana and eventually all drugs will be legal and then some of the other things. So this is like a second prisoner still I'm not going to say. Do you really want to risk something out of principle? And most people aren't. At least not people with anything to sell legitimate to selling quantities. So they need to literally rebuild Google search engine. They need to literally rebuild algorithms so that people know how to find their stuff. It's like they sell the stuff. You'll magically be able to sell everything. How? They have to be able to find you. So these guys start to be some amazing engineers in order to rebuild what eBay and Google have already built. In addition, what are they really saving? Is Amazon such a horrible middleman? Is eBay such a horrible middleman? Yeah, they do take a fee, but then your fee is doubled because of taxes and all this and other regulations and stuff. You cut back on the regulation, the Amazon and eBay fee becomes way more reasonable. In fact, if you cut back on the regulation from Amazon and eBay, I bet you their fees would get cut in half if not just cut by 75 percent because one of the reasons why their fee is so freaking big is so that they also comply with regulation because they probably got sued left and right. And these are just challenges that most people aren't even thinking about. I think keep going, but I guess I'll stop there. I'll get the idea. Just realize that when you build a market like this, you either have to embrace the dark side of the web or you don't do it. It's a simple stuff and I don't think they're ready to embrace the dark side of the web. So you're thinking they're trying to straddle too much and they've pulled their growth? I don't think it's going to amount to anything. Honestly, I don't think it's going to work and then maybe in like three or four years or so, they're going to be able to open to the product that has been sold their time and there won't be such a investment of $60 right now that will work. It's like I always say, hedge.com from 2000 succeeded its Amazon. It was just too early and too niche and I think they'll be around two or three of open bizarre. I don't think they'll ever get to network effect. I think it's a good point that you bring up tone that on the internet people will attack your project just to attack your project. As Microsoft learned with their recent chatbot, you really have to be flexible and ready to deal with this onslaught and we'll see if they are. Will Penguin. Yeah, well I'm definitely very excited about Open Bizarre. It certainly stands a chance at becoming the coveted Bitcoin Killer app. There are some issues with it that I think our user experience issues overall that I'll bring up. But before I do that and maybe address some of the other points the panelists made, I want to quickly tell a story. Two of the Airbid's co-founders were in Toronto at the Hackathon where Amir Taki and our two co-founders and one other person built dark markets. Dark market. And they won the Hackathon with that in Toronto in 2014. It's really cool to see someone pick up that project. They rename it Open Bizarre but they continue to build on the library that Amir created for Bitcoin called Live Bitcoin. And to my knowledge, the only two companies currently building on Live Bitcoin, that implementation of Bitcoin, are Airbid's and Open Bizarre. And I certainly see some ways that Airbid's and Open Bizarre can join forces, let's say. But yeah, the things that I would like to point out as issues with Open Bizarre, not whether it saves people money because it clearly does that. I mean, everybody's mentioning eBay and Amazon but nobody's mentioning Alibaba and the bulk goods sellers in China who use Alibaba and they get crushed with feeds. So that's a huge advantage right there that Open Bizarre would provide bulk goods sellers in China. Access to a global market, they can accept Bitcoin, Bitcoin's popular in China. It makes a lot of sense there and I think it makes sense in the West too for a number of reasons. You know, trying to sell a good to a certain country where they can purchase it but you can't sell it. And Bizarre is your answer, trying to sell goods that you're not allowed to sell in your country. That's another story that I think future implementations of Open Bizarre or other projects might address for people and beyond the dark web even. Just to address some of the usability things, I wonder what happens to a person, Thomas, you mentioned they have to download a desktop application and make that their store. What happens when somebody's cat spills their coffee on their keyboard and their computer is shot and you have 100 products up there? You know, a bigger problem will be if someone doesn't like your store and they get your IP address and they start dosing you, how do you get your store back on to sell your cat t-shirts? I don't know. Yeah, well, and that brings up another point. You're going to need to be able to synchronize your store on multiple devices. There's other things too that I think OB-1 can come into opportunities that we've opened here with our criticisms and solve them with their own maybe licenseful implementation of Open Bizarre. For example, there's a lot of ideas and ways this could shake out. I certainly see multiple forks of Open Bizarre probably at least two within this year, OB and then something else. We'll see that, I think. Yeah, it's flooding with users. The products are getting up there and getting listed. I see people who are buying stuff. It appears that they need to work on how they're going to advertise store locations or store addresses and stuff. But I'm really excited. This makes Bitcoin make sense for a lot of people out there. Right now, the killer app for Bitcoin is buy sell on exchanges, trading, day trading or trading in general. That's the killer app for Bitcoin. Speculation. Commerce has always been a promise of Bitcoin, global commerce. Here we are. Here we have the first test of a use case for global commerce with Bitcoin that's certainly more legitimate, let's say, than darknet markets. I'm really thrilled to see where it goes. I think some of these usability problems sink and back up of store and other things. These will get solved. I think hopefully we see China flood into Open Bizarre. That would be really great. There are a lot of problems, but there are also a lot of solutions. Blake Anderson. Well, as a basically market anarchist in my view, anything that's going to develop the ability of people to engage in free markets globally is like, what is there to be more excited about than that? That's an awesome development that economics and technology are going to have babies. Those babies are going to be super end-caption. It's going to be fantastic. I like Open Bizarre a lot, also because they don't have a pump and dump scam associated with them. You don't have to be like, I love the project, but this huge scam that they stayed with. At least Open Bizarre Coin, we would have been all set. How can I use this market without a coin? I don't understand. I'm so glad they didn't do that. I don't have to sit here and be like, you know, waste all this time trying to distract from the value proposition of, you know, free the market, free the world. It's not perfect right now. It's, you know, we're going to go in an open source direction and have lots of people use it, run into all kinds of problems, or problems, and then work together to make it better and better and better. That's a great way to develop software, and I'm just, I couldn't be more excited. That's a great question. I just want to jump back in there for a second. You know what? This is like the one time you're driving, and the last thing you want to see is the speed limit constantly going up, and I'm like, crap. Now I'm like going seven kilometers, and I'm like, crap, stuff about the crappy. Anyway, so some of the things that Will said, those are just small technological issues. I don't think it's going to do with the problem, but I did just pick up another major problem and shipping atrium. I mean, that's a risk. I don't know if the football bizarre is going to store shipping atrium is internally, but I don't know, but there is a risk there, right? I mean, users of football bizarre could be discovered by their shipping atrium. I don't know what the solution to that is. I don't know if that atrium is being stored, but that's how you could be able to do discovery as a fifth-point user and have a 10-week-lead record of what was what? Yeah, one way that that issue can be mitigated is with something like Amazon Lockers on a more global or generic scale. And there are services like that in other countries where you don't have a PO box or you don't have a shipping address. There's no address for your slum or something, and you need to go pick it up at a kind of private post office with a bunch of lockers. So that's one way that that could be mitigated, which I think is a great parallel service that OB-1 could maybe provide for the world. I just think there's just a lot of legal risk there, but it's sure as dictionals. So I mean, again, there is open bizarre and then there is open bizarre for the first world. So we'll see how these things interact with each other. In the first world, I mostly need to ask, and sometimes UK from the previous question. Only sometimes for the UK. Exactly. Because you know enough. I got it. Exit question, should Amazon and eBay be quaking their digital booties? Yes or no? Marshall Hader? I don't think so. No. Tone Vays. I don't think so either. All they have to do is accept Bitcoin as payment and push back on some of the regulations and taxes and they'll be way back in business. I need to find. Will payment. Despite the lobbying power of large companies like Amazon and eBay, yeah, some simple regulations that may change based on some surprise, black swan event or some emergency or some other tragedy or just circumstance could really put the clamps down on those businesses and make them pretty, you know, unable to function as a business anymore pretty quickly. However, open bizarre is resistant to those types of things. So that is one vote for the open bizarre camp, but I don't think Amazon and eBay need to worry anytime soon. However, what is the lifespan of a tech company? I mean, some of the longer ones are only what, 20 to 30 years old. So we'll see by the time a decentralized, but by the time a marketplace becomes truly decentralized and more events happen in the world that I think we'll see more choke points before we see more floodgates open. Open bizarre has its place for the world. How long does a tech company last? I don't know, Microsoft just seems to keep going and going. Blake Anderson. Well, it's a good question because on its face, it's like absolutely not. These are hypermassive giants, but in the long term, a trend towards decentralization implemented in the whole stack of monetary policy to use is going to be able to subvert a lot of the regulatory capture that these huge giants have worked so hard to get. So in the long term, I mean, yeah, it's not a good trend for these people that have tried to legislate their competition out of business because all that money that they spent and then now all that overhead that they have, they have to continue to go through when people can completely subvert those channels of regulation, which are not tenable anyway. That's not good for them. So it's an interesting question. I think the real question here is whether or not Amazon or eBay can compete with open bizarre and I don't think they have to and I don't think they want to and I don't think they will or need to. Moving on. Go to the panel in case I lose you all cold back. Now we get to do Schrodinger's tone again, be like his tone alive and weller is erect. Under the mountains of where hold on to you. Oh tunnel vision. But remember, you don't need to download anything or run your own server to buy and sell with Bitcoin at purse.io. Sign up today to create your own marketplace and sell your own stuff for Bitcoin. This counts on Amazon too at purse.io. Issue 3 Craig Wright reportedly set to prove that he is Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. Craig Wright is back again claiming that he will perform a cryptographic miracle sometime between April 7th and April 14th. Mr Wright claims that he is Satoshi Nakamoto but as was revealed in an exclusive tweet on April 1st, that position already belongs to Mad Bitcoins who provided proof via a verifiable public key. Tones, your thoughts on the latest claim to Mad Bitcoins or should I say Satoshi's throw. Oh man honestly I'm really tired of the story already. I mean the first time I heard of Craig Wright was on the famous panel when he was on the panel with Trace Smer and Edmund Boy from the Treasury and Nick Zabo. I was there alive in the audience without panel. Yeah you and I were all there. Oh yeah, all of us were there except for Marshall. Yeah, I was there. What was there? Marshall. So I'm kind of tired of the story. I do not believe that he is Satoshi Nakamoto. If anything he was probably a very early adopter. He was probably red-to-white paper even before Bitcoin was released. He probably mined a lot of Bitcoins early in the day so perhaps some of those early addresses that people think are Satoshi might actually be his. But just the way he was arrogant about it and I don't know it just makes absolutely no sense. I don't think it can be if it is him or probably be a little bit disappointed. I'll probably be a little bit disappointed if it is him. I don't know. I don't know what else to say other than just and who cares. Who even cares. I know he's telling that he wants a Nobel Prize. So even if he gets it, he'll be like 80 years old. Like he gives things out like 20 to 30 years after whatever they did has really proven itself. I don't know. I think the Austrian tax authority will get him this time. I mean, I just thought it was so ironic that it was the tax authority that rated his house the next day. That's just like the irony for the things that I write because I think that that's the tax authority. It's like the most dangerous agents we have in the world. I don't know how people say that. That was the way and that he wanted to be calling for attention to try to get help with his tax evasion issues. I think we'll get enough later today. I'll leave it on that. Will payment. Yeah. It's really interesting. It was funny when he was on that panel and Craig Wright was on the panel that Ton was referring to. He was mentioning things in very cryptic way, like really suggestively holding back, but not really that he was maybe Satoshi. It was really... That was disingenuous for me. That was like, please, please buddy. I know what you're trying to plant here and I don't think I'm going to buy it. But yeah, I agree. I'd be disappointed if Satoshi turned out to be anyone other than a time traveler, to be honest. Why? Why? He's very courageous. He must know something about Satoshi or about those early days of Bitcoin to give him the gold arrogance as Ton put it to suggest that he might be Satoshi and that maybe the real Satoshi won't prove him wrong. He must feel like he knows something to make this really, really big, bad bet that could be incredibly embarrassing if it goes against him. That does give me some curiosity about the whole situation. I know he had a lot of people convinced, including the two journalists who published the stories and a couple acquaintances of mine who worked with him prior to that panel in assembling that panel. He had them pretty convinced by that time, but yeah, it'll be incredible if he can perform the feat he says he's going to perform to verify that he really is Satoshi. It'll be pretty unbelievable still because as Gavin and Dresan pointed out, there will be, there still would be the opportunity for a scammer, attacker, or hacker or someone to gain control of any of those addresses somehow, some way. It might be that Craig Wright has control of those. We'll see. It's very interesting. I wonder what he really actually knows and this is a big, big bluff to make if he's really bluffing. Hey, hey, well, can I just throw a conspiracy theory out there? I should just aim into my head. What if the Australian tax authority really did get him and he struck a deal that he will get Satoshi out of fighting by becoming the public Satoshi. So that Satoshi has to come out and prove himself and then the tax authorities will get him. Don't do it, Satoshi. It's a bad move. Just say no. I do remember that panel and I was there as well. I remember talking to Dr. Joseph Selerino. I think he was from the University of Chicago. What he was looking for during that panel were some follow-up questions. It's really unfortunate we weren't able to get them at that time because as you know, Dr. Wright has pretty much disappeared. We can't ask him these questions now. He was talking about an incredible supercomputer rig that he was using to simulate the Bitcoin network. Of course, the question that Dr. Joe wanted answered was how the simulation goes, especially vis-a-vis scaling. If we had such a supercomputer, it would be a great way to test different scaling solutions. It's unfortunate we've lost that opportunity. It's also unfortunate we don't know the real details but allegedly and according to what I've read, he took very large grants from the Australian government to work on artificial intelligence and large-scale AI servers type things. It's very unclear if he took this money and bought the servers or if he just took this money. We don't really know. He may have other tax issues. It doesn't seem like he's Satoshi but we'll see about this cryptographic miracle. Blake Anderson. Yeah, I mean, I was there as well and I was at the conversation with Dr. Selerino and Matt Bickoyne. I didn't behave myself very well during the conversation. You guys were talking about, is he Satoshi or not? I was like, hey, let's listen to Alan Watts. I got this three hour Alan Watts. I think we were also hanging with Nick Scabo, who's also rumored to be Satoshi. It's very much a room full of Satoshi. So I was saying we might have lost the three hours of Alan Watts. It's really entertaining but I don't think you're going to come up with a mathematical solution to anything. It's probably going to be a lot of really good motivational stuff at Big Mac comparison. Yeah, I mean, as soon as you start to be a masquerading around, it's something that you're not. Just taking what you say with a grain of salt is, I don't know, maybe not enough. When he was implying that he was Satoshi, I don't know. I've gone and I've spoken to defense. These are still really early. I'm Big Macoyne defense. What I feel like doing when I'm speaking to an event is talking for a portion of it and then really getting feedback from the audience and having everybody try to give ideas which are going to help our movements instead of masquerading as Satoshi himself and then trying to say that I ran an experiment but the results apparently aren't meaningful enough to mention. I was just very, very turned off by the whole thing and I think that even if he can spend some of the things that should belong to Satoshi, then my first conclusion would be that he'd somehow hacked into those. It still wouldn't be that he is Satoshi. So paint me deeply skeptical here. I think we can say without a doubt that the real Satoshi would have shown up to the Las Vegas conference and maybe the real Satoshi did, Marshal Hayter. I think that he's a scammer. He's probably fake. A lot of people in the community think the same thing. The real Satoshi, what's the incentive for coming forward in improving that you're the real Satoshi? No one's going to pay you a lot of money. You're going to be under a lot of public scrutiny. Reporters are going to come to your house over and over. I'd also like to point out it's not very hard to trick reporters into thinking one thing or the other. You just go on to, I think it's like share on FB and type, not just kidding, but like you just make a fake news article and send it and you'll get a few reporters to believe you. For a scammer like Craig, I don't think it's very hard. I think this guy is addicted to the spotlight and he also may have some tax problems or other things that he'd like to kind of get in front of the public and get some public. Maybe someone will help him or people will be distracted from what's going on. I don't think he's going to prove anything. If he was, he could just do it whenever he wants. I think he's just fake. Remember that the last time we had a Satoshi, all he got was a free lunch. Next question. Satoshi Nakamoto is tone based. He might not be able to unmute himself. It looks like he's... Is that a question? Is that a yes or no? That's a question. We like it. I don't even think it's one person. I think it's like one lead person with maybe a couple of people, but that's a lot of trust. I don't know. I don't want to know. I hope the world never knows. I hope it's like one of the greatest mysteries we have in the world and it has to with finance and money. I think it's great. I think the smartest thing Satoshi ever did was just to convince the world. He didn't exist if anyone wants to name the movie in the comments. So, no, Penguin. Satoshi Nakamoto is dot, dot, dot. A mystery. Blake Anderson. It's BP Cooper as Marshall Hainer just said in chat, which is very, very funny. No, I mean, who is Satoshi? It's interesting. It's like, I guess the question is like, why do people care who Satoshi is and beyond like... You made something that went up in money and then we're going to go asking for lots of money. That wouldn't be as remarkable as like what is Satoshi do? Satoshi are the group people that are Satoshi invented digital scarcity. They made it so scarcity can be digitized and that's a big deal. To say that's a big deal is probably the biggest understatement that I could possibly make. That's why it matters who Satoshi is. I have no idea who he is and I hope that it remains a mystery. The DV Cooper, of course, was the famous bank robber who when asked, why do you rob banks? He said, that's where the money is. Marshall Hainer. Was that a question? Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? Is it you? I... Okay, I'm going to cryptographically prove some things tomorrow for everyone just to clear out the air about who Satoshi really is. And I'll tell you one thing. You know who knows who he is. It's Martin Screly. He knows the answer. He holds the keys. Yeah, he was talking to him the other day right? I saw it on Twitter. He helped him get the money back from Kanye. Well, we need to get him on next week because apparently he has all the answers. Moving on to issue four. Issue four, Panama paper scandal shows how Bitcoin could stop corruption. The Panama papers exploded onto the scene this week with more than 400 reporters working together to analyze terabytes of leaked data that led to the unraveling of an international money laundering scheme as prime ministers, corporations, athletes, celebrities and others transferred their money through Panama to avoid taxes. Could this all have been avoided if they had just used Bitcoin or would it never have happened in the first place? I ask you, will payment? I don't know. The question's a tough one. I don't even think I want to answer the question. It's more important to me that what Bitcoin provides is not the ability to prevent people from concealing the assets that they own and avoiding taxes in their local jurisdiction. What Bitcoin would do is doing and will do is it provides for financial inclusion in a radical way. The devices, financial instruments, the tools, resources and systems that were once only available to the Uber rich, the top few thousand richest people in the world are now available ultimately to everyone. We've got some building to do, but they're available. They will become available to everyone. This is democratizing the access to a robust, sophisticated financial system. If that means that it also includes the ability to hide your assets or conceal what you own and protect it from people who might like to take it from you, there's lots of reasons. It's great, very moral ethical reasons to have a shell corporation. Among those are not to fund terrorism and so on, of course. For example, some of them might be to your company is going to get sued and you believe unjustly. You have a shell corporation to protect some of your companies at IP or assets, protected from a predatory expaus to seeking to acquire some or all or half of it. There's lots of really good reasons to be able to give donations to certain controversial groups that your customer base might not like to see that you've done, for example. Now, there might be some ethical issues in some of these. Lots of gray area, but basically what these people did, I don't see it as, apparently, a lot of it was legal. A lot of what they did was moving their assets legally offshore. Now, I'm sure that's not true of 100% of this millions of dollars. You're going to be able to change the laws. Is the time to change the laws and make moving money offshore even more illegal than it already clearly is? Read a tax it more than we already do and for longer than seven years after somebody's completely gone. That's the concern here, right? That's what the reaction to this Panama paper thing has been. It's way got to crack down on these special privileged people who are getting away with not paying taxes like little old me. Like I said at the beginning of my answer, what Bitcoin means is not trackability and traceability for the Uber rich and their assets and preventing them from concealing what they own and should be taxed for. But rather financial inclusion so that everyone could have access to the kinds of legal strategies and financial strategies that protected assets for some of these people in these leaks. Now, I really hope some of the other panelists, I'm going to let it go, but I really want some of the other panelists to address or discuss why they're so few. It's not any American individuals in this document at all. And it seems that the people that they've gone after the most are the three most recently murdered and deposed dictators in the Middle East and Putin. What's up? It's a good question, Will Blake Anderson. Oh, the Panama papers. Well the Panama papers, this has happened to me before. I think something and having the origin of information be like, oh, wow, look at these crimes. These people are terrible. This happened to me in 2012 with Joseph Coney. When I was like, we got to go and take out Coney every single problem in the entire world because of this guy. And this new Panama paper kind of seems like a constructed narrative to make us believe that all of the bad things happen because the people that are enemies of George Soros of Aintaxes, which I think is like, you know, is a Vaining Tax Station good? No, is a Vaining Taxation when you're a really small country and it makes a big difference is that good? No, but at the same time, the people that were implicated and the people that were not paints a picture of these certain people were enemies of basically the financial elite. Most especially, I think this comes out with the PM of Iceland. Did he do bad things? Yeah, but were those things bad compared to what most leaders do? Not really. And what did Iceland do that pissed everybody off recently? They actually changed their financial system after they collapsed and gave everybody the middle finger. Everybody said, okay, well, you're going to go down in flames and they were re-bounding. They were doing well. Everybody knows that the Icelandic people have a predisposition to be very upset about economic malfeasance and the low and behold, there's some kind of a complex implication that makes it so that he's having a really hard time. Also when I've looked into the ties to Putin and other people, they are so loose and sloppy that the journalism is disgusting. It's absolutely disgusting journalism. If I can start to find out some actual material evidence that says that Putin's childhood friend gave him money or there was some actual benefit there, the associations are so loose that it's irresponsible. As far as funding Assad and the barrel bombs going off directly with money that went through the Panama paper and stuff like that, that hasn't been corroborated to my knowledge at all. The people that got money that were related to Assad were again with the looses connections that I can possibly imagine. It seemed like a limited hangout to smear certain people. They decided what do people look at and what are people interested in talking about these days. They're interested in leaks. Let's paint this around some kind of a leak tap history so that everybody pays attention to the dirt that we want to be known about. Are they corrupt? Yeah, but they're like the fringe corrupt. The lightweight corrupted are hung out so that the heavy corruption can still remain hidden. I think that it's very sad because I was very excited. There has been some good to come out of this story already. I haven't read the article but I saw it come by in my notifications. Iceland is now possibly going to the pirate party because no one trusts their government. So pirate party groups good game as they have just the right attitude for this kind of situation. Marshall, we got that Viking blood. We get test tea. Go ahead Marshall. I think it's funny because the internet has created this different, almost sort of like a lynch mob mentality when this stuff comes out and WikiLeaks has gained a lot of notoriety because of this. So it's really interesting to see the tweet from them a couple days ago. US government funded PANWA Payers' attack story on Putin via USAID. Some good journalists but no model for integrity. It's basically saying what happens with this release is that it's just the government's way of trying to get people outraged over, as Blake said, wealthy elites not paying their taxes. With the advent of Bitcoin and other technologies and stuff like that, I hate to say it but it could only get worse. These things could only happen more and more. So the question is what really happened here and how is it going to change, how are we going to, is it important that what these people did supposedly wrong? I think the one good thing that's going to come out of it echoing what Blake said is that people are really starting to question their government more, which I think was an inadvertent effect that the US government wasn't expecting from putting this out there. It's only happening on this kind of micro scale in Iceland. But I think that the more and more people see these things and then realize that they're manufactured events, we're going to become more and more distrusting of the government. So I think it was a bad move on the government's part to kind of do this because in the end it's just going to blow up in their face in the sense that people are, okay, well why wouldn't the government just bust them and do it like they normally do it versus putting it out through this subversive media attempt at gaining control of the media and getting outraged? I also think an important lesson here is that we should pay our IT people more. There was more than two terabytes of data leaked and as anyone knows only an IT person could leak two terabytes of data. So clearly there was some not well paid IT people who had access to too much information, just like Snowden, just like Chelsea Manning, we're seeing the situation repeat over and over again. So pay your IT people. The very least the IT people let the people in or bring a USB drive in your outcar, they don't pay me for anything. For the black access, there you go. Remember, Chelsea Manning, famously snuck in blank CDs and pretended to be listening to Lady Gaga even going so much to pop his head with the beat. Tone Vades. All right, so I'm going to address some of the questions that are well posted at the beginning. But I also want to agree with Will and I want to agree with Blake. So I really agree with you Will when you step on Bitcoin is going to level the playing deal. And I agree with that because now the small players have the same, if not better, access advantages. Like the rich boys have over in Panama. And now I'm going to address Blake's point and wealth questions. Why is Snowden American? There's a couple of reasons. The biggest reason is probably the fact that Americans have a way of concealing their private assets in the States before they move them offshore. So the most likely scenario is that they've already incorporated several states in the US like Wyoming, like Nevada, like some of the other ones with nameless LLCs. And then those are all fees are getting the money. And then that money is being held in Panama. So even if you get the name of the LLC and upholding it, you don't really know which people are behind it. So I think that has a lot to do with the fact that you're not going to get a lot of American name out of it. Now to address the fact why I wrote these, why is Putin being the name, then Iceland, and all the people basically we don't care about, right? I don't think anyone in Russia is surprised. The Putin is hiding money in Panama. I don't even know why he's hiding money in Panama. It's not even Putin. It's the Russian. It's the Russian associations. It's the Putin itself, it's the loose associations. Right. And even if it was Putin, nobody would care. Trust me, Russians are not going to lie it in over for Russia because Putin is hiding money. I mean, that's completely crazy. That's like, anyway. So one of the reasons is that the media in general is very, very lucky. And they're not going to out their own leftist politicians. Now they will out the rich. And this is where I'm about to go on a little rant because I got very pissed at that Bitcoin.com article because I know Roger Fair doesn't want to even ice a rip. But that article did because it once again pained to picture that the masses are paying everything. But if it wasn't for these greedy mega rich who aren't paying the fair share, everything would be good. And I completely disagree with that. I think the mega rich, as long as he earns he or she, as long as they earn their money fairly in the free market, capital market, I think it's their patriotic duty to pay the least amount of taxes as possible because they would know what to do with that money better than the government that takes it from them. So to me, the perfect utopian unicorns running around the system is when private citizens have full anonymity and full privacy and only pay taxes voluntarily. But if you decide to work for the public sector, if you are a public service, if you are a government agency, or if you are a corporation that somehow is dependent on government, which is many corporations, then your assets and your financials are open to the public, to everyone where any developer can use the blockchain, the Bitcoin blockchain. I can't believe I have to specify now, to validate where the money is going. So my perfect tax system is a voluntary system where people contribute taxes through something like Bitcoin, through a public blockchain, when they get to allocate their voluntary tax contributions, like people allocate the 401k plans, I wanted to go to education, I wanted to go to defense, I wanted to go to, you know, Bob and I rack, wherever you want it, what is the government's job? I want to, I want to publicize the money, but anybody can order, where is this public money is going. And if you are a private citizen, whether you are a mega rich or a super poor, you have the same rights when it comes to your money, no favor to them. I hate the phrase not pay their fair share, I honestly hate it. That's a Bucco5. Oh, by the way, one more thing I actually wrote about this like two weeks ago on my blog, I have a post and a coin, a telegraph ran with it as well, the seven uses of Bitcoin, and this specific use was number six out of seven. Exactly like this, and I talked about it, and this was before the Panama Paper got leaked, this was out. And what OpenPosaro is doing is actually not one of my seven uses for Bitcoin, but that's just the either a media article I explained why. If not my blog, Liberty Life Trail, there's a blog group. Exit question, now that we have Bitcoin, will this lead to more or less tax evasion in the future? Will, Penguin. Tax evasion, tax emancipation. I know, you want to say all taxation is theft, libertarian. No, I was giving the, yeah that means that means viral. But Bitcoin is going to lead to more people setting up anonymous boards for their shell companies in Nevada. Or Lake Anderson. Yeah, I mean Bitcoin is a completely fundamental, separate monetary provision system. I mean, yeah, it's so fundamental that it's going to absolutely separate the hell out of taxes and it's hilarious. Marshall Hader. I think when you think about Bitcoin as digital cash and sort of like saying, will cash aid tax evasion. Yes, absolutely. Will a monetary instrument enable someone to evade taxes? Yeah, if you can buy bars of gold and bury them in your backyard, yes, you can avoid taxes. Can you buy Bitcoins and store them on a USB drive? Same thing. Yes, you can use instruments of money to avoid taxes. To what extent, I think it might not be the best way to avoid taxes if you're trying to hide money. Then buying Bitcoin is probably a red flag for the IRS. But if you put it onto a brain wallet and memorize it, at least you can take it to jail with you. You can come back out with the money maybe. I don't know. I think that there's this libertarian wet dream idea of what tone is talking about. Not to negate that because I think it's really cool. But it still is kind of like the sci-fi idea that we could pay our taxes onto this blockchain. If something like that did come along, I think it could provide better transparency. Because at least you could look on this ledger and you could see, okay, this is what the school board is spending their money on or so forth or so forth. That could be really cool. But we're so far away from it. Maybe the first step might be using that as some sort of public accountability tool for officials in office and account holders and treasurers. But to say that they're going to use Bitcoin is really a huge leap. It would probably be some sort of colored coin or time stamping or something like that. Ultimately, the public ledger, Blake was talking earlier about how it's the digital scarcity is one of the really killer inventions of Bitcoin. Also I think this immutable public ledger is also very powerful and the idea that you could put something on there and everybody can see it and guarantee that it works. But then at the same time, I think we have a long way to go because the understanding of what this technology is is very thin. So look at Craig Wright. He can fake a PGP signature, all these different things. Not to say that you can fake these blockchain signatures, but you can definitely, if you can walk the walk and talk the talk, you can scam people. That's just the reality. I think it's going to take a long time before we can get to this place that these utopian society where we don't pay taxes, but the blockchain, it's automatically, it just comes out of your payment or something like, out of your salary. I don't know. There's definitely a long way to go is what I'm saying. And I think at this point, it feels like it's not that far away, though. I mean, for example, you mentioned paying taxes on, forget the whole bit Congress and voting on the blockchain and voting whatever, forget all that. And just crowdfund every government program. And just Kickstarter, go fund me, IndieGoGo, they're wildly successful. There's more things like equity crowdfunding coming out and new laws being passed for businesses in America to do equity crowdfunding, much more easily on small scale. I mean, nobody's talking about crowdfunding all these government programs, which crowdfunding is definitely a bigger success than any government program, right? So it seems like there's a disagreement. It seems like the disagreement is the two campuses saying we need more fundamental changes to change anything. And then this Marshall's camp, which says, yeah, but that's not going to happen. So let's do the technology to try to affect as much as we can. And I think maybe both are partially right. We've seen the technology to maybe a government created a proof of work coin within the taxation that is already in the monetary supply, which was low. And then we're going to actually stick to it in a way that made a lot more sense than our current monetary policy. Maybe that would be some kind of compromise, which is fundamental enough that would make lots of big changes, but not so much highly interventionist governments involved in every layer of commerce that is like, well, that's not tentable either. I think that it's a very interesting discussion to try to figure out where do those two camps meet and what does the future really look like? Tone, thanks. Hey, Marshall, will you describe this at the very end where your taxes are automatically taken out to the blockchain? You just described capitalism. So you might want to rethink that one. But what was the question again? Oh, what were our last tax evasion? OK. So my overall stance, which does not change, new technology does not create additional criminal. So I will stick to that. And again, it's borderline whether a tax evasion is a criminal because I don't think taxes should be for a tax attribute. But anyway, putting that aside. So what I think is going to happen is I think the percentage will shift. I think there will be less tax evasion in the traditional form. And some of that business is going to move on to things like Bitcoin. However, I think overall tax evasion will probably come down even though governments are ramping up more taxes, so it should go up. I think overall criminality goes down over time on these statistics through this. And I just think the percentages would shift. I think there will be a ramping increase in people using Bitcoin to hide their assets. But that would be at the expense of not doing it through traditional means. So that's kind of my complicated answer to that question. Tongue got very close. It's a trick question. Tax evasion will stay the same after all, stealers got a steal. Moving on to predictions or story of the week. Blake Anderson, are you ready with a prediction or a story of the week? My prediction is that we will eventually experience a similar level of embarrassment about the Panama Papers as we did with Coney 2012. If we haven't already, I've already felt pretty embarrassed about it. So be prepared for that feeling to wash over to you as you read through it more deeply. Marshal Hayner. So while we were in the show, I happened to stumble on Reddit and see that shapeshift recently got hacked and they're hot wallet got exposed. I guess some minor coins were lost. But actually, whenever I see the word hack at the top of the top of Reddit on our Bitcoin, I'm like, I have my popcorn ready. I'm really excited because there's been so many awesome stories in Bitcoin. It seems like the Wild Wild West. It's very exciting to watch and see all of the money getting stolen by all of these cyber criminals. I don't know. Maybe I'm just really desensitized. But I think that it's exciting because it's an exciting time to watch all of this stuff going on and see the very early Bitcoin exchanges that started with stuff like Mt. Coct and you have Cripsy. And it's questionable whether or not these people, it was an inside job. In most cases, it was probably an inside job. But I have to commend Eric Voorhees. I've always liked his work. I think it's always really awesome. He's taken this different approach the way that he built shapeshift. And it didn't actually have a giant hot wallet or ability for anyone to really steal a lot of money. When they took money, it was this little interim wallet that was changing coins. So yes, they may have lost a thousand bucks or a couple thousand bucks. But at the end of the day, this different model is definitely succeeding. And I think it's really cool because shapeshift, I see, is kind of like version one. And then version two is more like blocks and change blocks and chains decentralized exchange. Or there was another one called Mercury Exchange. Pretty soon, I think it's going to be cool to see something like OpenBizarre, but for cryptocurrencies and the swaps are atomic. So I think we're coming into a new era of engineering and the way that we structure our Bitcoin exchanges and these kind of financial services. It's really cool to see it get hacked and only lose a Bitcoin or two. So you're excited to see that they weren't socially engineered into sending Bitcoin to accounts massively multiple times before they figured out that something bad had happened. Yeah, I'm excited at both. I'm excited when I see the word hacked at the top of our Bitcoin because it's always like some juicy gossip. But then I'm also excited to see that no one lost any money. And we can start to move into some new age of, you know, because it's really bad PR for Bitcoin when you keep seeing all this stuff, cryptocurrency hack, this site hack. I think that we should just be moving into decentralized exchanges that it'd be cool to see. I mentioned people mentioned OpenBizarre being forked. I think that could potentially be a killer fork for OpenBizarre. Items right now on there are kind of like, you know, virtual avatar and almond milk and like items that are like, I'm only excited to buy because I'm a libertarian and this idea is really cool. But cryptocurrency to buy digital currency on a digital decentralized marketplace. On there is a killer app. I think it's an excellent point, Marshall, that shapeshift was protected by their business plan, which was not to hold user funds. They take the funds, they change them for coins, they send them back out. You know, why are people so critical of other people's business plans? Well, because, you know, they, they, they should have looked at what Eric did first before they just built something and expected nobody to criticize it. When you see something this elegant, you really have to recognize it. And just a little teaser, there should be a new article about the cryptocurrency hack coming up soon in coinjournal.net from E&D Martino. Good stuff. Tom Vays, go ahead. All right. So, I'm doing neither a prediction nor a story of the week. I'm doing more of a warning. So, this is what happens to people that criticize altcoin, holy shit. So, every now and then, you guys ask me an altcoin question, and I answer it. I remember like a month ago, I kind of spoke positively about dashed and positively in the, like, the smallest, minimalist kind of way. And everybody from the dashed community, not everybody, was hyping it up, how the whole love dashed. Then, last week, I criticized dashed and holy shit that I ended up with a shit storm. So, I mean, it's a religion to these people. Like, I know Bitcoin is a religion for some of us, and this is probably how we were back in the day. But, wow. I mean, they actually think that this is a Bitcoin replacement that's almost there. Like, tomorrow, it will, like, their altcoin is going to take over the world. It's, wow. So, anyway, I'm not going to talk about it too much. I tweeted out my reasons for saying what I said about dash. I'm not questioning the technology of dash. I'm not questioning what they're doing. I think it's great. It's a great test that maybe Bitcoin will screw up. And if it doesn't take the entire world of cryptocurrencies with it, maybe there'll be a winner. But trying to guess this winner ahead of time is literally impossible. It's impossible. And now, I guess, it's the variance ahead of the game, but everyone knows how critical I am of that project. Dash is there, and I was trying to be there. But they're so far away. Like, anyway, I just remember when you criticize altcoin project, even if you criticize them, get ready because their believers are relentless. I can tell you that. Who else can you piss off? Who has a big enough following that to be back like red coin? Who else can be? Who can be crap on here? And the crazy thing is, I have never liked Wineryl. I have never spoken positively about Wineryl. Everything I've ever said about Wineryl was, I don't care about Wineryl. But now that I kind of was a little critical about dash, everyone is like, oh, that's because I'm now a Wineryl supporter. I mean, it's crazy that conclusions are being blocked. I'm not going to get on my crowd sales. No, I'm not going to. No, don't go there. Anyway, we could buy a VR token that doesn't work with Oculus Rift. Oh, well. Where can I sign up? Give me a shit ton of those. I'm launching a crowd sale for my crowd sales next week if anyone wants to get on my crowd sales. I want crowd sale token for crowd sales is really the future right there. The derivatives are my entire portfolio. And bottom line. I know I just made things worse for myself with every old community there is. But at this point, I don't care. I really got this off this week with like a million tweets back and forth. Prove it. Well, I can tell you its own from personal experience. All I did was tweet an article that was critical of Ethereum. I wanted people to discuss it. I think it's good to be critical. Some things are right. Some things are wrong. But we linked to them. And yeah, I had a Twitter explosion. People attacking me going after my character, going after Blake's character, going after pro tips character, an open source project with 500 users paid for by donations to the community. It's really strange. Well, let me ask you guys, were bitcoins ever this critical to other people in the critical security? I know we were critical. Your phone's ringing. It's probably going to be. I don't think that we were ever critical to the point of ignoring tenable information. I think that if I ever saw anybody that was, I would hopefully have been like, dude, like you can't show down people with rational logical arguments. That's not cool. If anything, with Bitcoin, it always like we were critical of Fiat and we were critical of the existing system, which is of course a huge million pound gorilla stomping around doing whatever it wants. It doesn't matter what we say. But when the altcoins came up, I mean, we kind of, people get tired of being scammed all the time. People get tired of watching their friends make money, lose money. So we kind of built this thick skin towards altcoins where they're a scam until proven otherwise. I think this kind of attitude pisses off the altcoins because they're more like, this is the world's greatest altcoin until proven otherwise. It's hard for us who have been in this game for a couple of years now to have that kind of beautiful naivete. To go ahead. Yeah, no, I got cut off. The problem we're doing is on your phone is that people call you and they kind of screw everything up. They're just paying up on people. But no, but that's not saying like we're big coiners ever like this insane to other people in the crypto space. We were like you said to the Sia people and then I think the Bitcoin community is a whole kind of embraced altcoins at first just like you said Thomas. But how we've, we've most of us have gone through it. We've seen it all and we're starting to tour all this out and now when you criticize an altcoin they're treating Bitcoiners like Bitcoiners used to treat fiat people. It's kind of interesting actually. It's just dynamic. And the thing is they're most of these people. They move for one project to another. It's probably not something the altcoiners want to hear but I've always kind of believed that Bitcoin could steal any good feature that they come up with. Not even really steal but more like just take it from one open source project to another and improve both projects by contributing code. I'm sure you know that there's, we also know for sure that there's a destabilization effort going on among the Bitcoin and crypto community. So this is known moderators of subreddits are co-opting those subreddits and facilitating this destabilization of the community. It's not really, it's pretty brazen and obvious. So I don't know who you're talking to or who's hammering on you, Tone but I'm sure some of them are just trying to drum up controversy to foment more destabilization among the community. That's got to be part of the noise because a lot of it's completely irrational as you rightly point out. Well, it brings up a good point about the possible double agents being paid. There was that interesting article on our Bitcoin about the automatic voting or automatic down voting of ideas. It was more related to Bitcoin classic but there may be double agents out there. We have no way of knowing. Marshall Hainer, you were in the Bitcoin probably before all of us. Marshall, do you have anything to say on this where people always so critical of altcoins? Yeah. So in the beginning, in the very early days, the very first altcoins, some of the very first ones, there was a guy, a couple people on the Bitcoin talked forums that would go in and they controlled such a large percentage of hashing power that they would just fork all the coins and then steal the funds and liquidate as quickly as they possibly could. Barbecue coin was one of these very early altcoins. And it was funny. I don't actually how to use. You could use that like a barbecue shop in Kansas City. It was like legit coin. Yeah. Come on there. Hi, it started as a joke and he was pissed. He was like, stop forking my joke coin. It's just a joke. But I think that there's so much money in Bitcoin at this point that everybody wants a piece of the pie. Everybody wants to create a coin. And I guess a good analog to this is I'm working in the legal cannabis industry. And I get a lot of investors asking me about, what does your company do with Bitcoin and how does it involve? Well, for us it's very interesting because we have a real problem that we're solving. We're taking the cash, we're taking the money out of cash for the spend-series and digitizing it into Bitcoin. A lot of times they get asked the question, well, what about cannabis coin? What about potcoin? And it's just another coin, it's just another chain for people to come on. But these developers didn't actually solve anything. They just said, here's a branded coin. It's like Dogecoin. But Dogecoin solved something because it made it fun and people were learning about it. It wasn't an attempt to grab cash and that's why I did well. And there was the power of the meme and online tipping and all this stuff. These other ones that come in and just slap their name on something, you better have a real value. And Blake points out none of these have any real value yet. Even Ethereum, it's just this kind of experimental thing. It could have some value. But I've come around on it. I used to be the same way as Blake. I think that there could be, it's gotten a lot further than I ever thought it would. And that's kind of where I was at with Bitcoin. I sold a lot of my early bitcoins at $20 because I thought from 2008, 2009, this is as big as it's going to get. It's never again going to get beyond $20. So it exceeded my initial expectations. Anything that exceeds my expectations, I start to look at. And that's really very, it's actually like none of the altcoins. But Ethereum definitely exceeded my expectations. And Dogecoin exceeded my expectations. And so I think it's the ones that you never really expect. And the ones that are in front of your face and like Dash and some of these other ones and I'll probably get some hate messages for this too. They're not really necessarily solving any problems. People would say, okay, we're solving the problem of anonymity. But the cost to get in and out, it's still an experiment at this point. There's money flowing in, but it's mostly speculative money. I think that altcoins will always serve a purpose of lighting a fire underneath Bitcoin's ass. And hopefully that's enough to see it grow into something bigger. But the coins that we have right now, nothing, the top 10, none of them do anything. Really? That's Bitcoin. If I could just jump in for just one second, Marshall said a lot of things that I agree with a lot. I'm not going to say anything about Doge, but I am going to say about Ethereum. Ethereum is a token and Bitcoin is like a coin. And what does that mean? Why do people use those two different words? Is there any reason for it at all? Well, Ethereum is a token which powers a smart contract system, which is not live yet. So the scientific value of this could be infinite. It could be the most valuable thing ever invented. But conflating that with the token value is I think we're more people draw the line. And that's where I draw the line. And I don't mean to ever come off as anti-Athierem. I didn't want Marshall to think that I'm anti-Athierem or anybody else. Agreed. The tools may have more value than the token. Moving on to Will Penguin, Story of the Week, or Prediction. Yeah, I have a story of the week. It's actually a video that was posted by, oh, the CEO of Consensus, the Ethereum startup in New York, based in New York City. One of their employees is Vene Gupta, who is a cypher punk from way back in the day. And he gives this presentation. I'm not sure what the event is. I'll put it right here in the show chat here so that Thomas can put it in the video description on YouTube later. It's this great presentation of Vene Gupta does to help people who are outside of technology or technology computing and computers are a peripheral thing for them. They need to use technology at work otherwise they don't think about it much. But they're interested in where the future is headed. This presentation is great for people who have an interest in Bitcoin and blockchains, specifically Ethereum probably, because that's a project Vene Gupta works on. It's a great way to give people a primer on the relevance of blockchain innovation to their life and in a historical context and a literary context in technology history. So I really want to just impress people to watch that. It's a fantastic thing to share with your intellectual friends who haven't dabbled or become interested or seen the relevancy for this profound new technological innovation in their own life. It's a great way to warm them up to it and it's a really wonderful presentation with lots of deep thoughts in it. And the final thing I'd like to say is anyone who wants to get some free Bitcoin, download your Airbus wallet and take some money. All right, very good. And now I didn't have time to write a prediction. So here's a story of the week. Congratulations to UC Berkeley, who won the first annual blockchain madness put on by the College Crypto Network or the Blockchain Education Network. They defeated George Attack in a contest of Bitcoin, sorry, blockchain, trivia, a real battle of the wills, yes, a game of wits, not for knitwits. Congratulations to them and all the teams who participated. Learn more about generation blockchain at blockchainebu.org. The children are our future, right? Correct? R-R? How can that be right? Oh, we're out of time. Until next time. Bye, bye. Bye, bye.