The Bitcoin Group It's a fond farewell to John McLaughlin of the McLaughlin Group. Inspiration for this show. Owner of a 34-year hosting streak uninterrupted that will never be topped. He brought political debate to the masses. He inspired the cable news pundits and their endless, violent, yelling debate style. He was always there to tell people they were wrong. And he taught me and a lot of other people a lot about politics and a lot about looking at the different sides of issues, listening to other people's voices, and also yelling at them and shouting them down. So we salute you, John McLaughlin, dead at 89. An incredible run, an incredible show. The Bitcoin Group, the American original. Over the last 10 seconds, the sharpest Satoshi's, the best Bitcoin's, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists. Theo Goodman from Hasse online. Good evening, everyone. Toned Vaves from Liberty Life Trail. Good evening, everyone. Jeffrey Jones, the vortex from the Bitcoin News Show. Thanks for having me. Now I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network, moving on to issue one. Issue one, NSA hacked. A group calling themselves the shadow brokers is putting a massive amount of NSA data up for auction. After dumping a bunch of hacking tools and exploits allegedly belonging to an NSA group, it was reported that the current high bidder is only $998,998,371 Bitcoin short of the 1 million Bitcoin price. The high bidder is needed to see the files, but the high bid is only 1.5 Bitcoin. Question Theo Goodman, would you recommend a friend bid in the auction for the NSA data? Well, if they have some spare Bitcoin, then it's worth a gamble to put in the bid. I think that if I understand correctly, the headline is not exactly right and it's a little confusing. If you are the high bidder after the auction is over, the files will be released. You don't have to bid a million bitcoins to get it. If you have some spare bitcoins, then throw a little out there and then you'll be the first to get the data. Also there's a little speculation that maybe if there's not a lot of bid, or on the other hand, the other strategy could be, don't bid, and then they have to release some more to get enticed more people to bid more. Maybe there's a little game on there. I'm not sure what I would recommend a friend to do. It kind of reminds me of Mr. Robot or something like that show, like something out of that, hackers holding something and alluding to Bitcoin a lot. Let's see what happens and maybe there's not a lot of interest and then suddenly they release some more interesting little details. Perhaps the lack of interest is due to their decision to publicly release the files if you pay. Imagine if you could just buy the files and get all the exploits yourself. That sounds like a much better to you. Tone, vase. I don't know, like this story isn't really that high up on my radar. It just seemed silly from the start. Maybe I'm taking things to literally. Obviously it's a publicity stunt, but if you really think about it, first of all, no one has a million bitcoins. Going out to get this million bitcoins is probably not... I'm basically entertaining the idea that this is really up to sale. Who the hell is going to go out there to acquire a million coins? I think it's easier to re-hack and get those files again, then going out to acquiring a million bitcoins. After that, how is this auction actually working? Who is going to hold on to that multi-sig? I mean, the legal liability is insane, right? Who's going to buy it? I bet you even Russia and China, who probably could come up as a country and get a million bitcoins, why would they be public about buying these files? That's like an open declaration of war against the United States government. Anyone openly buying these things is basically declaring war against the US government. This is why leaf government documents don't really... All you can do is give them away. All you can do is send them to WikiLeaks, right? Someone with a distributed server that can publish them, and then you can't even request monetary gains for it because then it looks even worse. So you're supposed to just do it as a public service. This is why the story... It's just silly to me. It's not real. The guy that bid one and a half bitcoins on it, did it as a joke. I mean, the last thing he wants to do is be the winning bid because he's going to have all the liability, right? And now, I mean, he better be one hell of a hacker to basically run and hide the rest of his life just for winning this auction and being the cause of publicly showing what's in those files, assuming there is even anything there. And even a worst case scenario than that, and that's not the worst case scenario, he gets these files emailed to him and now he's holding the bag. And he better be one hell of a hacker, so no one knows who he is. I mean, the whole idea just seems silly. If you're smart enough to hack and have some incriminating data in a country, your only option is to somehow get this encrypted file to WikiLeaks so that they can publish it under the distributed server or something similar to that. There's really no other course of action. This could be the most dangerous 1.5 bitcoin ever spent in history. So imagine putting out a joke bid like this and then being hell legally responsible for the release of these files. The hackers should almost do it on the joke value of it alone. Jeffrey Jones. Jeffrey Jones. Yeah, so this is, I guess, unlike Tony, I find this story very, very, very interesting because first let me encourage everybody to go check out the tweets from Edward Snowden on this particular hack. He actually had a whole nice little tweet storm kind of explaining a little bit of the background of it. And so a couple things to say. First thing is, this happens all the time. So there are governments hacking each other all the time using these types of files. However, what is new about this, right, whatever it said, is that they are publicly both declaring that they hacked and publicly actually asking for a ransom. So this is kind of unprecedented territory here. Now, as Tony pointed out as well, a million bitcoins, nobody has a million bitcoins. So what that tells me is that this was more for a, basically, to send a message. This was to send a message to the world that some hacking group now has both hacked the NSA and has their files, the files that they use on a daily basis. These are really like most important files. And in fact, the Cisco CEO, I forget if it's the CEO or the CFTO, one of the high level executives actually put out a blog detailing a couple of the different, using a couple of the different packs on their hardware. So that was really interesting to see. It has been confirmed that these are real files, that these files actually do damage. And I don't think that anybody can dispute that now at this point. Now, what's going to be come of this? It's going to be really interesting to see how this is going to play out. If somebody's actually going to, what I've heard is the WickedLeaks also has a Christine quote unquote, Christine copy of these files as well and will release them in due course. So I'm not sure if we even have to wait for somebody to pay a million bitcoins for this to see this actually come to fruition. So really interesting to see, I'm really actually excited about this story because this kind of brings to light the hacking and espionage that is going on between governments on all of the cyber attack and cyber terrors and the things that are going on. So it's kind of shots fired, in my opinion, across the bow because they are declaring that they have hacked the NSA and they know nobody will ever pay a million bitcoins. So great publicity, great stuff. Exit question, what will the final price of the shadow brokers NSA auction be? 1.5 Bitcoin, 1,000 Bitcoin or 1 million bitcoins? You're good. I'm going to go with 1,000 Bitcoin. Tone vase. No, I don't think it's going to get that high. I mean, maybe someone as a joke will put up a maximum of like five bitcoins, but I wouldn't go higher than five. But wait, quick question. Is someone actually putting this bitcoins somewhere or they're just like sending a message saying, I am willing to pay five bitcoins? Like it's not an escrow. The person can just say I was just kidding. Who's holding onto this bitcoin right now? I don't think there's an escrow. I think you just say, I'll give you three bitcoins and now I'm a bitter. Oops. I mean, there's absolutely no finality to this. It's just silly. I'm thinking the complete opposite view of Warthex here on the relevance of the story. I am now the high biter on the auction by saying three. Oh, no. Somebody will say it. Oh, the question. Okay. So no one will pay more than I would say three bitcoins. But someone will write in there. I'll pay 10,000 bitcoins. You can write anything. You're not legally liable to pay. So this is just one more silliness of adding Bitcoin into this equation. If you can't trust hackers and thieves, who can you trust? Jeffrey Jones. Yeah, it's not going to get very high. There's just nobody's going to put their Bitcoin or want their Bitcoin. They really do anything with this publicly. It's kind of too public at this point. So it's not going to get very high at all. A couple of Bitcoin tops. Trick question. The answer is zero. They were a C-0 bitcoins because it's not about the ransom. This is most likely a Russian group hacking American group, then releasing their tools to cut off their arms in revenge for America hacking Russia back after the DNC hacked like vortex said countries are hacking each other all the time. We the normal people have no idea this is going on, but it very much is moving on to issue two. Ethereum and blockchain of liars and thieves. The Robin Hood group, aka R-H-G, securely drain the Dow of leftover funds and promise to keep it safe until after the hard fork. Instead of giving the Dow investors their Ethereum classic tokens, they withdrew from the Dow and attempted to dump the ETHC on several exchanges in what looks like a coordinated effort to dump the ETC price. Members of the Ethereum Foundation appear to be part of this white hat hacker group. Can the Ethereum Foundation ever be trusted again? Was Robin Hood Group making a noble attempt to stop the Dow hackers or a backhanded rogue action vested in self interest? Your thoughts, tone phase. All right, so I have a serious issue with that picture that you put up there. You see how it says that it's a 12-minute read? That's complete nonsense. I'm trying to read this thing for like 45 minutes. All right. Thanks, well, Panda. Now having said that, the article is brilliant. It's great. I did not know this prior to like a few hours ago, but it makes total sense that they would collude and they would try to crash the price of Ether because that's what they are. That's what they did. That's what they tried to do by forking Ether to begin with. I've been starting to get like frustrated with all this Ethereum stuff because in the beginning Ethereum was just one scam. It was the Scammyist ICO in history, in my opinion. In the short, to highlight, a lot of people thought the project would never come out. They collected money far before it ever came out. There's a lot of questions early on that we can't even see today. Right. In the beginning, it was kind of simple. They just ran an entrance scam. But now all these issues, all these like, you see, it's hard for me to call them completely illegal. They're obviously completely illegal, but we're living in the world of crypto. So legality is very, very murky. But again, these people want to be public. They want to be superstars. They want to be rock stars. They want to be adored by fans when they go to DEF CON. They will pay for this because they will all be arrested. This is another indication of complete market manipulation. I shouldn't even be upset about this because Ethereum is totally useless. It has no use cases. It will never have use cases other than people trading it. It's representing a Bitcoin test net so that people know how dangerous hard works are and how stupid proof of stake is when they eventually go to proof of stake. God, I hope they go to proof of stake sooner than later because then Ethereum was put into two or four, sorry, into three or four. But it's a great post. Of course, they tried to stake all that Ethereum classic and crash it on the exchanges. Some of the exchanges were smart and they didn't let them do it. Other exchanges that I've never heard of didn't really care. Those exchanges probably shouldn't care. If these people want to attack their base, they're only loyal base, then it's their choice. But they will be liable for it. The community is showing it with whale pandas article. It must have been a lot of work put into it, getting all those pictures, all old posts, saving those. Hindsight is very, very difficult. There is so much whitewashing in the Bitcoin community. You go back to even posts from a few weeks ago and all of a sudden they're gone. Things have been edited. I mean, I've been a public person in the space for probably going on three years now. I didn't just jump on the scene. I was there for at least a full year after getting into Bitcoin, not saying a word. Then, even before I got into Bitcoin, I was paying attention to the industry before I started being vocal. Now I'm being more vocal as I gain more experience into what we're actually dealing with. I've had so many people whitewashing, you can go back to anything I said two or three years ago and I will stand by it. If I made a mistake back then, I will say I made a mistake. The only thing I've ever corrected on the internet was spelling mistakes because anyone who has ever read anything by me should know on the word Speller in history. The only time you see an edit next to something I've ever said online was to just fix spelling and grammar mistakes. It was never to fix content or to remove content. It's so frustrating. Internet should do a better job of holding onto that history. Obviously, that's the last thing we should never expect from Ethereum. Excellent, Poisson. Remember, you can read the full article by WhalePanda. The link is in the description below. As soon as the show is done rendering, it will appear there. Jeffrey Jones, your thoughts. Let's give a round of applause to WhalePanda. As Tony said, this is very difficult. He's very difficult to lock down all these posts, put all this together. WhalePanda actually follows this stuff pretty vigorously. He very much has kept held on to all this information throughout as it has happened. Also, let's congratulate WhalePanda again because he just had a kid. We have a baby panda. And baby panda, of course, as we all know, are absolute cute. Cute as hell. So, with that aside, I also encourage people to follow WhalePanda because he is very, very, very up on this stuff. When it comes to the altcoins, this is what he does. He trades them and he tweets about them. And in my opinion, so far, has been very, very honest with his findings and very, very thorough with his findings. So, that's really good information. Now, this article is absolutely brilliant. Nothing, singing the guys' praises so much, but this article too is brilliant, much like his tweets. Very much outlining the entire story of what happened from the beginning to the end of the whole Ethereum Classic story. You know, we kind of know the saga at this point. It's absolutely, an absolute mess. Ethereum splitting into Ethereum Classic and now Ethereum Classic going out on its own. So, there's really nothing that we can expect. We have no idea what's going to happen now at this point. There could be so many outcomes as Tone said. They could go ahead and start splitting, you know, to go proof of stake and then it's split into a couple other forks. So, it's really, really scary at this point. I can't advise anybody to hold Ethereum or Ethereum Classic. This group has always been very critical of Ethereum and rightly so, as we saw with the blow-up and explosion of the Dow and then people subsequently distancing themselves from the Dow. So, Ethereum is bad news. It's not fun. It's not good. I really think that, like Tone says, some of these people are going to definitely go to jail at some point. So, very thorough article. I encourage everybody to read it if they want the whole story on Ethereum and definitely follow WhalePanda for updates. I believe this group was the original Dow deniers. Theo Goodman. So, I want to give a shout out to WhalePanda that was really good, really good article. This is a lot of good evidence or at least tweets of people that you can read it notes. So, everything is timestamp. So, you can just make your own picture as you want. And I think that it shouldn't be called the Robinhood group. It should be called the Stalinhood group because they just took the, they just took the Dow. It was supposed to be that they were like, okay, well, if you have Ethereum, then you get Ethereum Classic too. So, that's like a bonus. And since everything was locked by the Stalinhood group in the child Dow or however you do it, then they were supposed to get that out and everyone was supposed to be able to change back to Ethereum and get their Ethereum Classic. But that was all, didn't really work out correctly and the Stalinhood group was able to get the Ethereum Classic and do what they wanted with it. And of course, they thought they were noble dictators and decided, oh, what we want to do with it is not give it back to the rightful owners, but we're going to do something for the community and we're going to do a coordinated dump. But it didn't work. So, what are you going to do now? Oh shit. You know, it's really, really complicated. And with things like this, I mean, you already had the whole Dow problem and then the fork after it. And yeah, so I've got some pounds, everything. And if members of the Ethereum Foundation were involved in it, then that makes… Okay. So, if I'm building a… Let's say I am building a project on Ethereum and I have an upcoming IPO that I need to do. Well, I'm probably shitting Bricks because who is going to invest? I guess they're going to find someone, but who's going to invest in a project built on Ethereum now after all of this? I just put so many question marks. I mean, who? And it's not just like random people that are participating in this. The Ethereum foundation seems to be involved in this whole thing. So it should ring. A lot of alarm should go off. Hey, what's going on? Let's take another look. So if you're a project, maybe you can do your project on some other platform. And you really have to do it on Ethereum. I guess you do if someone gave you money to do research to do it on Ethereum before, then you probably want to do it on Ethereum. So there you go. But OK, I just want to comment really quick on the proof of stake thing. I have a new theory. It will never go to proof of stake. It's just a scare tactic so people don't build A6 to say, oh, we're going to go to proof of stake one day. And then nobody will ever build A6. No, no, no. Theo, that is so funny. Because for the last year, I've been the one that kept saying Ethereum will never, ever go to proof of stake. Yeah, and now, as of this week or last week or sometimes definitely this month, I have now totally flip flop. And now I am saying that they are going to proof of stake because of the Dow and the hard for it. They now have no choice. And the reason they're going to go to proof of stake is so that the Ethereum foundation and the Talek aren't code monkeys for Ethereum Classic. They now have to do something so drastic that their code base completely splits for all Ethereum Classic. Otherwise, they're a testnet for Ethereum Classic. Right. OK. Go, Theo. I like that theory too. It's just that since it's been done once or twice or I don't know how many times, then that's the thing. With proof of stake, even if you have distributed proof of stake plus 5,000 super smart proof of stake, if someone hacks something, centralize an exchange or a Dow or an app or whatever, they've got a bunch of staking power, then you've got to fork again, maybe. And then you've got another problem. But they've already proved that this isn't the problem. So maybe. Yeah. Yeah, sure. OK. Maybe that's it. Once they've switched to proof of stake, they can't roll back anymore. If there's another Dow, after they've gone proof of stake, they're screwed. I don't see any way out of it. And that's the whole impetus for shutting down the Dow was someone would have too much control in the future proof of stake system. But if it happens again, you can't roll it back. I think that's it. I know. I disagree with you. I disagree with you, Theo. Between the geniuses of Vitalik and that Cornell, whoever guy, they'll come up with some other bullshit to fork it again. And I get their points back. Trust me, I have no doubt in my mind. Just like Vitalik makes up words in all his articles, he'll make up another way to fork this code after it goes to proof of stake. I have full confidence in his ability to do that. I did think of one other potential upside while Theo was speaking that perhaps this new red or Robin Hood group hack in this Ethereum classic story. Maybe this would be a good fodder for another Bryce, what are they called, Bruce Wanker video. I do love that. Good Sierra, Professor Good Sierra. Sorry. I didn't mean to purposely forget his name. His name is complicated. He just wasn't coming out of mouth. It's tough to pronounce. Here's what we call him, the professor. But it works. But yeah, no, they'll definitely come up with the way. Yeah, so Theo and I have flipped on that issue of what are they going to go proof of stake in that. Exit question. I've asked this before, but I'll ask it again. How many Ethereum will there be in six months? One, two, three, or four, or more? Let's start with tone vase. It's a really hard call between three and four. I'm going to go with three. Jeffrey Jones. Yeah, I can't argue with that. Three is about right. It's going to be three or four, but I'll say three. Theo, good. I'm going to say two. Depends on what you're calling a different Ethereum. But I'm just going to say it's going to be something that's called Ethereum and something that's called Ethereum Classic. And those are going to be the two. Yeah, I think the name, I think, once ETH, goes to proof of stake. I think that the people from ETH are going to want to stay on ETH but proof of work. I think they'll call it ETW. So I want to point it now. Ethereum work. So what about ETHS? ETHSS. S. What does that mean? Ethereum Ethereum stake. No, no, no, no, because remember, Vitalik wants to keep the ETH, right? So no matter how stupid his ideas are, he's going to keep the ETH logo, even though eventually it's going to be resembling Dogecoin or whatever. He'll still call it ETH, right? So I think ETH will stay with Vitalik, no matter how far it deviates from the original idea of Ethereum. And everything else will just pick up different acronyms. I'm going to agree with the panel here. There will be three Ethereum's, three Ethereum's. Moving on. Shop at purse.io to save 15% off Amazon. Every time you spend Bitcoin, just copy and paste your wish list, deposit your Bitcoin, and save money. It's just that easy. You can buy anything at purse.io. Give it a try today. Issue three. Mainstream media declares Bitcoin dead again. This time, quoting a guy who works at Ripple. Bloomberg news was added again claiming that Bitcoin is a bubble about to burst. Quoting a source who works at Ripple. And conveniently suggests Ripple as a worthwhile Bitcoin alternative. Jeffrey Jones is Bitcoin dead. Should we change the name of this group to the Ripple group? My God. Yeah, so I'll have to be honest. I looked at this article and I just kind of wanted to get the TLDR, so I went to the bottom. And of course, the paragraph first thing it says is the guy recommends Ripple and works for Ripple. So I've been criticizing Ripple since day one. I think this whole group has been criticizing Ripple since day one. And my opinion, Ripple is definitely a bank scam. It is definitely a network of IOUs that can be taken from you at any moment. They want to claim it's open source. They want to claim that they're faster than Bitcoin, that they're open source like Bitcoin, except they're not. This is absolutely absolutely ridiculous. This is the original guy moved on. The original founder moved on to another coin. And now he's with that. And that's not doing well either, surprise, surprise. So yeah, I don't really don't care for the creator of Ripple and the creator for his other coin. It's escaping me right now. I forget the name of it, but it's a single syllable. As a stellar. Stellar. It's two silver. Yes, stellar. And yeah, that is even, in my opinion, worse than Ripple. This guy is bad news. None of his projects have ever worked out. And his past is really not great either. So I encourage people to look into that. Bitcoin is, you know, this is, I think we're going to look back and see that there is going, that there was a bunch of competition for Bitcoin. Ripple might have been one of the ones, you know, one of the actual ones that actually attempted to get close to competing with it because they did sign a bunch of bank deals and things like that. But again, most of these banks are going to be out of business. Most of these deals are going to be worthless. And the coin itself is going to tank because it is worthless when Bitcoin finally starts scaling up on layer two technology. So, yeah, bad news. Ripple, I really, really, really dislike Ripple. I can't say enough bad things about him. It is worth noting that Jed McCaylon, founder of Mt. Gox, was also the founder of Ripple and Stellar. And like Jeffrey Jones noted, he does seem to move from project to project without finishing them. He doesn't stay in one place. He is not a completion guy. He is a starter. Theo Goodman. I can't, if you read the article, I kind of agree with a lot of points this guy makes. Because he says that blockchains are hard to work with. They're, you know, and that everybody has to agree in order to change something and that's such a pain in the ass. And he doesn't like that and he says it should be like the internet. And that's fine. He great. He figured out that it's, you know, and he's something with proof of work is not for him. And he's right. This man a database. Get this man a database. And that's where he is, where he is, where that's where he's at, he's at Ripple. And I don't think Ripple was ever, I don't even think Ripple was built as a competition to Bitcoin at all. You know, the first time, you know, you, I don't even know if BitStamp still has Ripple, but it used to. I mean, it was supposed to be a way to get USD value around a place. And I think that other means like Tether, which is probably wrecked to right now, you know, we're kind of invented in order to get USD value around. So Ripple was never, ever invented to be a currency, right? It was only supposed to be a kind of a go between currencies. Right. And so basically, it was ACH times a thousand. The ability for banks to move money. And that was it. I don't think it was really even targeted at the direct consumers. So you got it right, Thomas and Jeffrey Jones. You know, and ACH times a thousand. I like that. But what happened was because it was centralized, then if somebody used it that they didn't like, then they came in knocking and somebody got in big trouble. So that's, you know, just shows that, you know, what can happen in this environment. And anyway, as far as the article is, what was the title? It says, block chain is bust. And I guess I agree with that, but it's not the same block chain that they're talking about. They're talking about, you know, Bitcoin blockchain. And he even goes in these blockchains like Ethereum, everybody has to agree to change something. And it's so annoying. It's a real pain in that. Well, then you're at home with Ripple. Good stuff. Tones. All right. So, oh man, Theo beat me through it. So I'm actually with you, Theo. I love the article. I mean, the headline, I like the headline, blockchain is dead because there's only one blockchain that matters and that's Bitcoin. And I'm at all these conferences and all I try to explain to these people. There is a blockchain, which is the innovation of Sadocia Nakamoto with the proof of work algorithm. If you are not using the proof of work algorithm, then you have a database. If you are using a proof of work algorithm that is not Bitcoin, how much security do you expect to get out of it? So I think the article is great. I think he realized that he's been working on a database. And he also realized that the problem is not technological. The problem is regulatory and Ripple faced regulatory issues of their own independent of the banking system. When they got nailed for like a $75 million fine, which I kind of thought was a little ridiculous, but they're learning. And they learned that ACH can be Ripple times a thousand in speed. The only thing that's stopping ACH from doing it, and it stopped it from doing it back in 1999, was regulation. It wasn't technology. The ACH and Swift, they had plenty of technology to give us instant irreversible payments away before Satoshi even thought about making Bitcoin. The reason why it hasn't happened was for regulatory reasons. And Ripple was not and is not going to change any of that. So he's finally come to this realization. And the fact that Bitcoin is so hard to work with is a feature of Bitcoin that is not a bug. And he considers that to be a bug. As for being critical of Ripple, unlike you Warthax, I was never critical of Ripple. And the reason I was never critical of Ripple is probably because I got into my scam-busting phase a little bit too late. And Ripple was no longer relevant. When I, like I said, I was in this space since 2013. I did my first speaking appearance in 2014. But a time Ripple came, but a time was time to be critical. Ripple was basically too late. So there's probably no record of me being critical of Ripple. But how'd I been in the Bitcoin space earlier? I'm sure I would have been because it just made no sense from the start and it doesn't. And I mean, look, Ripple was the bit shares before bit shares and bit shares just be the Ethereum to it. And bit shares is the Ethereum before Ethereum. They're all the same. They're all going to end like Ripple. Eventually, they'll learn and they'll realize that there will only be one blockchain by Satoche and Archimodo's definition of a blockchain. It may not be Bitcoin, but there will be one. And my money is in Bitcoin and my money is on Bitcoin. But I could be wrong there, but there will be one. I just saw real quick. I have to say this blockchain nonsense, madness, has to end. And I think that this is what he's outlining is that this has now kind of come to a height peak. And people are realizing that there is only one blockchain and at least the smart people are. And I have a coworker at work and a coworker just started reading this new blockchain book. I forget the name of it now, but it just came out in July and he's talking about blockchain, this blockchain. That blockchain came before Bitcoin and all these things. And I kept trying to tell them, look, there was no definition of blockchain before Satoche and Archimodo. And Satoche and Archimodo's blockchain includes the proof of work algorithm. And if it doesn't have proof of work, then it's not a freaking secure blockchain people. So. So, Warthex, your friend is not going to listen to you because you did not write a book. You did not write a useless book with a name from some guy who wrote a prior useless book. I think it's William. I don't know who's real Dave because I only hear him by the Dave that Bitcoin-attentant calls him. And I'm sure that's the blockchain book. And the reason why your friend is going to listen to him is because he wrote a book. He understands nothing about blockchain. I do have to be critical of something you just said. You just said smart guys like him are getting out of the blockchain space. No, it's idiots like him that got into the blockchain space to begin with that gave us this nightmare of a blockchain, which is a database with multiple admins. So, no, I'm not going to go as easy on these people. As you just said. I think this all goes well into the exit question. Exit question, how many blockchains are there? Jeffrey Jones. There is only one blockchain in production that is actually secure and that is Bitcoin. Theo Goodman. Oh, there are lots of blockchains. There's Bitcoin, blockchain. There's Litecoin. There's Dogecoin. There's a blockchain under my bed. Everyone's got a blockchain. That's why I keep all my stuff. Tone vase. Oh, man. So there are actually many blockchains, right? If you have a proof of work mining structure, you are technically a blockchain. So Ethereum, as much as it hurts me to say it, Ethereum is technically still a blockchain only because there was enough old Bitcoin equipment laying around that now got put to use in order to mine Ethereum. So like Litecoin is a blockchain. And I think Doge is proof of work. So I mean, that's a blockchain. So those are blockchains. Now, the most important blockchain that is light years ahead of the rest is the Bitcoin blockchain. The second most important blockchain, which is way, way behind it, is the Bitcoin test net blockchain. And after that, you have the rest of them, which will start dropping like flies in due time. So yeah, real quick. So which are also Bitcoin tests by the way, and just not as useful as the actual Bitcoin test net. All right, sorry. Go ahead. Yeah, so just to reiterate, yes, there's multiple blockchains. But in my opinion, there is only one viable blockchain that is global, that is secure, that has proof of work. That is Bitcoin. Yes, we have Ethereum. Yes, we have Litecoin. But what the hell are you going to do on that? No, you're going to develop for the world's most secure, the world's most innovative, public blockchain. That's big way. And here's what they're learning. There is no money in blockchain. You can just utilize it to the best of your ability, and it will probably be inefficient, and it will probably not very cost effective, unless it needs to be for your business. And 90% of the businesses do not need a blockchain period, not to mention the Bitcoin blockchain. Maybe we'll get there one day when it's widely accepted. But for now, do you really need a blockchain? Because you probably just need a database and your friends to agree with you. There are many blockchains, but really, there can be only one. Moving on to predictions or a story of the week. Theo Goodman, do you have a prediction or a story of the week? Yes, I do. As a matter of fact, breaking about 10 hours ago, UK gaming authority, I think I've mispronounced the authority there, but anyway, basically the regulators in UK said that all the legal gambling places can use Bitcoin now. They view it as a form of cash, and it's totally legal for all the gambling places in UK to take Bitcoin. So like Ladbrooks or whatever, big place. They are allowed, if they have an official gaming license, they're allowed to use Bitcoin. Now, it doesn't mean they still have to do KYC and money laundering things sometimes, as according to the license, but they are allowed to do Bitcoin stuff. So what does that mean? Well, probably means that just more people are going to be exposed to Bitcoin slowly, because maybe some people are like, hey, what is that? Or is it cheaper? Or maybe it'll be cheaper for some of the places to use it because of chargebacks and stuff. I don't know exactly, but that just came out like about eight or 10 hours ago, and that's pretty interesting. Wow, that's actually really cool, and pretty good news. Oh, question. Sorry, I might have missed the... Did you say this is like law out of the UK, or law out of the EU? No, no, UK gaming authority, I forgot. Oh, UK, OK, oh yes, so is it. So this is once again, that a nut cases that think that Brexit was bad. This is why Brexit is good, because UK can make their own freaking laws that are independent of the EU block, Jesus. I don't know how many times I have to explain that to people. All right, so I don't really have... What we'll see now is Brexit even happens. Hold on. Oh, it's definitely not going to happen. That was just a token vote. But the idea is there. I mean, this is the reason why you wanted to happen. It's definitely not happening. That's crazy talk. But so I don't have a prediction, but I mean, we predict stuff enough on the show. I do have a, I guess, a story, not sure about the story of the week. I went pretty hard at the Neh Gupta on Twitter, because you have these people that they might have done something to make them famous in some other industry. I mean, Blifemasters is one of these people. And then they come here to their Bitcoin space. And the first thing they do is join a scam organization or create one. And they all of a sudden think they're the experts. And this is becoming very, very frustrating, and it should become more and more apparent. That was a complete... He wrote a self-serving article. That was absolutely brutal. I think it was like the one of the worst articles I've read in the space this year. And it's just frustrating. It's just pitching a theorem and trying to explain to the world how what's holding the world back from becoming rich is the middleman taking 7%. These fat middleman taking 7%. And then he goes on in the article to explain how all these decentralized organizations are going to need a legal structure and insurance and away and auditors and auditors on top of auditors. Basically, he wrote an even longer middleman structure than we currently have. Yet that is supposed to make everybody rich by saving them 7% on their transactions. It's just really frustrating to read these articles. So I don't recommend people read it, but I recommend people be aware of when other prominent people that did something important in other parts of the industry come to Bitcoin or come to the blockchain and tell you how it is. Be very, very skeptical. And if you have been in this space for over a year, preferably over two years, you know a lot more than they do. Jeffrey Jones, a prediction or a story of the week. So I don't really guess I have a prediction other than the entire private blockchain industry is going to fall and fail on its face. Let's see. So my story would be this happened either Wednesday or Thursday, I believe. But in America here, as people may or may not know, we have we imprison more people per capita than anybody else on the planet. And there's a couple of reasons for that. Mostly due to the war of drugs and the privatization of the prison system looks like we are now ending the era of private prisons. We just announced that we are now going to cancel and not renew any further contracts. And the private prison, the three main companies in the private prison industry, all their stock fell by 58% in one day on that news. So we know that the news is pretty legitimate as we can see that their stocks are falling. So this is an actual, this is a big win for America. And I'm really, really proud that we finally are doing this. This is really awesome. We are officially going to end the private prison system. So that is epic and awesome news. That's great. Whoa, OK, can I comment on that real quick? Yeah, I'm just curious to that. I'm live out. I mean, between Theo's news and vortex news, I'm learning a lot from the show. This is great. That is good news. I would not have bet on that. I mean, if I was running a hedge fund, I probably would have been invested. I probably would have, I mean, my morals are usually ahead of my financial gain, which is why I don't have much money these days. And I'm vitaminately budding heads with steam it because I missed out on a lot of money as everybody who watches this show certainly knows. So my morals are probably a little bit higher, but I can see how hedge funds were loading up on the private prison industry to the gills. Now, I do like it now, but I'm also not to be kind of government, right? I mean, obviously, we all hate the giant prison system. So I'm all for, sorry, deprivatizing prisons, but I'm still for private contractors to run those public prisons. So I'm still anti-union. I'm still anti-fed government jobs. However, there needs to be competition based on pretty much ethics of which private companies will be running those prisons like the lunchroom, even though I guess prisoners mostly run that themselves, but like the guards, you can privatize the guards while keeping the prison system public. As long as you have the good laws and regulations that those guards will face even stricter penalties, then the prisoners that they assist while working in those prisons, right? So you can set up a good structure. You can't privatize the labor in those prisons, so they're not government employees, unionized and stuff. You just have to do it carefully. And hopefully some states will get that right. I mean, certainly this is a classic disadvantage, but I do think the problem with private prisons and private police is they both now have an incentive for there to be more criminals. So if they change the laws and now there's more criminals, they make more money if they change the repeat offender laws, et cetera, now there's more criminals, they make more money. It just seems like the criminalization of society. No, no, no, no, Thomas, that doesn't change with public, right? I mean, if you have a public union of prison guards, their goal is also to have more prisoners, right? Well, let me say this to the actual contracts that these private prisons had. They a mandate that they have that the government keep these prisons 80 to 100% full for the contract. Now, when you're talking about the federal prisons that aren't private, they have nothing like that that says they have to be 80% full. There's nothing like that. So I honestly don't see that. No, no, no, that's the parts I'm happy that go away. But I'm just saying that if the labor, if the prison guards and the janitors assuming they're not the prisoners themselves, I mean, I don't know if it's a prison. We can ask some of our friends. Now, they're, again, not a prison in this space. Well, whether they have to do labor inside those prisons, and I'm sure enough people watched, what do you call it, oranges and you black. So you get this idea that prisoners do all of the work inside of it, and the only labor is prison guards. And then, but so if the only labor is prison guards, I would like to see competition from the private industry to be those guards. And it's the government's job to minimize the number of prisoners and optimize the number of prisoners. And if they need more guards, they inform the private industry. We don't need this many guards. And then the private industry lays off those guards. This avoids the insane unionization that will keep those guards in there forever. So I mean, I'm all for having those prisons be public, but privatizing the labor inside of them just so that there is the separation of power to optimize the situation. Moving on to the end of the show. I don't have a prediction this week, but I do want to give a shout out to the Netflix TV show Stranger Things. I'm a couple of weeks behind, but if you haven't seen it, it's a great mix of several kind of 80s movies, ET, Stand By Me, Stephen King, David Lynch. Other people have written in X-Files, Super 8, Donnie Darko, John Carpenter. A lot of those influences mixed together into a really great show, certainly in the serial style cliffhangers at the beginning and events of the episodes. But a nice series, a second season coming sooner than later. And it's on Netflix who want to check it out between that and Mr. Robot really enjoying TV right now. But we're about out of time. So until next time, bye, bye. Bye, bye. Bye, bye.