The Bitcoin Group, the American original. For over the last 10 seconds, the sharpest Satoshi's, the best Bitcoin's, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Alex Sturk from Block Talk. Yo, yo, what's up? Toned Vays from Liberty Life Trail. Hey everyone. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network, moving on to issue one. Issue one, Bank of Canada, Bitcoin adoption, could stabilize price. The Bank of Canada published yet another research paper about Bitcoin, this time claiming that Bitcoin could become less volatile should adoption increase. This is a pretty common and believable thing. Alex Sturk, your thoughts on the Bank of Canada and their research into Bitcoin? Well, I think it's finally, we're hearing some rational thoughts from them. I mean, earlier this year, I think it was they sold off all their gold reservoirs. So, you know, Becky Canada's not really holding a whole lot of anything. It sounds like they maybe are secretly buying Bitcoin. Maybe they're going to go long on it. I know when I first got into Bitcoin over two years ago, I remember reading about the mint chip program, which was like a cryptocurrency thing that was scrapped. I don't know if they were trying to do some sort of centralized system or something to do with hardware. There wasn't a lot of detailed release, but I think the Bank of Canada's definitely involved in cryptocurrency. Like they're the monitoring closely. I wouldn't be surprised if the Canadian dollar is on a blockchain ledger at some point. But no, it's cool to see that once again, we're kind of leading the way in kind of how every country should be handling Bitcoin right now, and at least taking it seriously. I remember the mint chip project. It seemed at first that Canada might be the first to have a digital currency, but you're right, it cooled down and they backed off it. But it was very interesting for a while. Tones, your thoughts. All right. So, I only read the article. I didn't really read the paper itself. I mean, it's interesting. They're saying that as adoption picks up, the currency should stabilize. But what wasn't mentioned in the article, it's not that the adoption would stabilize the currency. It's additional value on chain. And that means is like a Bitcoin would need to be tens of thousands of dollars in order to have low-level stability. Like right now, if you're going out and using Bitcoin to buy your cups of coffee or using it at a grocery store, you probably aren't, but if you were, it's pretty volatile. I mean, you're going to become like a currency speculator and that's going to drive you a decision of one to go shopping at Trader Joe's or whatever. But when a Bitcoin is worth tens of thousands of dollars, then small purchases are completely unaffected by movements, fluctuations in the price. So that's what's really needed. That would be the biggest thing that's going to fluctuate it because the amount of money flying around the exchanges needs to decrease in percentage terms. Right? Like yes, there's a lot of currency trading, but the majority of money are being used to spend, let's say, the euro versus the dollar is significantly greater than the amount of trading that goes on in the euro versus the dollar. That's why currency trading is insanely leveraged at like 100 to 1. The reason is because currencies don't really move. The reason they don't move is because there's so much market cap in those currencies. So that's really what Bitcoin needs. And if that part wasn't mentioned in the paper, I mean, I don't think there are idiots that are doing this research for Bank of Canada. I think they should be fairly smart people and they should be realizing this. But the last thing they want to do is write a paper saying a Bitcoin would be $50,000 a coin. Because honestly, that's exactly what they're saying. They just don't want to say it that way. Good points, Tony. I thought the article was very basic and it made sense. If it was a larger market, it would move less. It would be less volatile. But what I really liked about the article is that the Bank of Canada, a serious and well gold list reputable institution is not just saying Bitcoin will die. Bitcoin will be dead. They're poshally something else. They're like, what if Bitcoin became huge, stability wouldn't be a problem. Price would stabilize. And this is what a lot of people have been asking for. They've been asking, why can't we have a stable Bitcoin? Why does the price move so much? And really it's this. The market is too small. If the market was big, it would move less. But I just think it's great to see a bank postulating about a positive future for Bitcoin and not blockchain or something else. Right. What would you to stay away from, like get a completely out of our heads, that like a bunch of people, whether it's 12 people, whether it's 100 people all over the world doesn't matter. Well, we need to, no matter how bad panics or you know, you'd worry a get, what we need to try and control ourselves as humans to say this bunch of people will be able to stabilize Bitcoin and they will know what's best. That's what we got to stay away from. That's kind of not exactly what Ethereum did, but it's kind of we the people, we asked you know what's best for Ethereum and now we have two Ethereum's. So this is the kind of thing we need to try and stay away from in case there are panics in the market. And on the gold part, if the bank of Canada sold their gold and used some of that money to buy Bitcoin, they may be the smartest federal reserve in the world if they did that. Because I still stand by the fact that gold isn't very old, that useful in the digital age. Gold lost all of its usefulness pretty much the day the internet became a thing and probably the day of metal detector became a thing. That's also when gold lost a lot of its usefulness. I think this moves well into the exit question. Which country and or country's banks have been the most progressive towards Bitcoin? Alex Sturk. I would definitely say the Bank of Canada like well, Canadian banking and really comprised of like about three different banks that are highly regulated by the government. So that's why we survived the 2008 crash pretty well. And then I'm actually just reading a story here about a Vancouver blockchain startup, Chain Tech Limited. They're partnering with Visa to work with a couple of banking companies to actually do some settlement stuff. And that's kind of with when you look at the R3 agreement with Ethereum, a lot of those are Canadian banks that are signed on to the R3 agreement there. So you're seeing a lot of blockchain technology representatives in these companies now. Like I know it was February when I was handed a business card from TD, one of the largest three banks in Canada for a blockchain consultant. So I think they're like Bank of Canada or like Canadian banking as miles ahead of the rest of the world in terms of adopting this protocol and this type of technology, whether it's Bitcoin or whether it is Ethereum or some other chain. Tony Vays. I'm going to take this in a slightly different direction. I don't think that Bank of Canada or Bank of England are interested in Bitcoin. They're just more interested in how to better control the KYC AMO thing. If I had to pick a bank, I would go with China actually because they made a big announcement telling their banks to stay to hell away from it and they completely left it alone. And I like that. So I'm going to, my answer would be China. I'm sticking with Alex Bank of Canada. They might not have taken any action but from all their papers, the Mint Pal experimentation or the Mint chips, sorry. They just seem very progressive. They seem very forward leaning and that's not that much of a surprise. Canada has been a pretty decent close to the US on a lot of things but more progressive in a lot of ways. Let's move on to issue two. Issue two. Crisis torn Venezuelans up for dash and Bitcoin. As everyone knows, Venezuela is experiencing a currency crisis with inflation pushing the price of their currency down constantly while more and more currencies being printed. In fact, if you get paid in Venezuela, most people will convert their currency immediately into hard goods such as food and toilet paper. But they are buying Bitcoin. Reports from Bitcoin exchanges in Venezuela show that Bitcoin trading is an all-time high on local bitcoins. And newcomer Dash, aka Darkcoin, is keeping up as the Venezuelans learn about anonymity and cryptocurrency. Tones, your thoughts on Venezuela and Bitcoin. Oh man, this was great. I read that article. It was extremely weird to me. Things did not make sense at all. It just didn't make sense. I don't even know where to begin. It wasn't a point telegraph article. I should have looked at the road. It's so weird. I would like to start with, so the article says that Venezuela is experiencing a 40% yearly inflation. That should be unbelievably good for anyone holding steam. Just a little jab in there. That is amazing. It's only 40% a year. That is absolutely nothing. But a serious note when it comes to their currency problem. So Bitcoin makes sense. US dollars probably make a lot more sense. Things like unperishable food and toilet paper also make a lot of sense just like the US dollars. The dash part makes absolutely no sense to me. I don't understand where that's coming from. The only thing I can think of is whoever is selling on the dash and the Bitcoin, if it's the same person, that person has to be making money on the spread or he's taking a page out of the, or if you listen to my comments a week or two ago, where I suspected that the dark net markets loaded up on Monero and then decided to accept Monero knowing that they will make money while they're making money. This could be a case of that where whoever decided to sell it loaded up on some dash and is now trying to pull it off on the Venezuelans. That makes absolutely no sense to me. The statement of additional anonymity makes no sense to me. Bitcoin is very anonymous, especially for the use cases in Venezuela. Also, the article said that whoever is selling them Bitcoin and dash is like KYC and AML does KYC and AML checks, which again makes, is absolutely absurd in Venezuela. We're talking about Venezuela. One of the reasons why they're volume on local Bitcoins is bigger than the US is because I bet you they're charging like a 30% premium on the price of a Bitcoin. What's the point of AML KYC? A great business right now is literally to go down to Venezuela and sell it through local Bitcoins. Of course, I wouldn't advise that to anyone that doesn't have advanced military training and has some friends there to load up on some protection ammunition and maybe a bodyguard team. If you're selling Bitcoin out there at like a 30% premium, which you should be able to get, it's probably you can probably afford a set of bodyguards and still make a profit. There's so many things in there that just don't add up. I like the idea, but someone's screwing somebody over there. The way the article was written, that I can almost promise you. Excellent points, Tony. It very well could have been just as easily could have been Doge as Dash. It just tell them it's more secure. They really don't have the resources to tell the difference. Alex Sturk, go ahead. So I guess it was almost two years ago in the fall. I went to Peru, not to generalize all of South America together, but one thing I noticed in most of the cities I was there is there's a lot of foreign exchange, not just places, like a legit business, but also corner stores. Just guys standing on the corner were a little badge that they have money to exchange. They're there to do pesos or soles to US Dollar. US Dollar is very well established in South America. That's why I guess the deflation is so strong with these. It's because it's versus the US Dollar. I did find one guy who had a Bitcoin badge on him and I asked him quickly what's the rate. It was even at that time a very sizable premium to give him Bitcoin for the local currency. You can see that they are probably valuing in a lot higher regards than even the US Dollar because it is so liquid. As for the article mentioning Dash, I really have a hard time believing that right now. There's a precedent being set for Dash there, but I don't think you can rule Dash out as not being in some use case like this. There could be more legitimate establishments starting to form. Maybe a local credit union is working with the Dash people. Hence why you're hearing about AMLKYC. In terms of Dash as an organization, I look at a local company and Vancouver, a bandbex or consulting firm and they've done work for Bitcoin and then also Ethereum and in fact them and Dash. The people that I've met from that company, they don't associate themselves with shady projects. Monero I feel is not up to snuff to be considered a valid store of value. Good for trades and whatnot. The technology is there. It's definitely good that way. We're not seeing a gooey wall at even from them. There is no Monero Foundation where you're going to get official software from. Now you have something like Zero Cash coming out. Basically, the amount of buzz going on for it is putting pressure on all of these other anonymous cryptocurrencies to really step their game up in their publicity. You see Monero saying, we're going to be on all the darknet markets. Maybe now this is just Dash. Maybe it's a paid puff piece and they're like, we're in South America, wherever you are. You have to look at both sides of the coin. Are they trying to capture more market before they know they're going to lose it or this new competitor comes out? Or is there some legitimacy to them forming partnerships before this competitor comes out? It's definitely something to consider. I think South America stands to gain some of the biggest value here in terms of accepting Bitcoin. Excellent points Alex. I definitely don't see any reason for them to accept Dash. It's not like they're going to go spend their money on the Venezuelan Silk Road. These are mainly people trying to save currency. The idea being you can't save money in Venezuelan currency because the price is constantly going down. If you could transfer to Bitcoin, even though it's volatile, you could stick it under your bookcase, put it under your mattress, save your money for a brighter day when things aren't so bad in Venezuela. Yeah, I'll just drop that here for a second. Yeah, I agree with you Alex. When you travel, do you do meet people on the street that will exchange money for you? They do it in public places. I've done it all the time. The US dollar has always gotten me through everything. Ironically, the only place, and you guys should be laughing. I laughed. The only place that they did not accept my $100 US bill was at a bank in Mexico. They turned me down. They said, we don't accept US dollars. That was actually kind of hilarious. But other than that, everywhere you go, and the thing is the more I guess developed the country, the more they want nice, crisp, fresh dollar bills, I've literally ended up in a situation where there's the tiniest little pair on a $20 bill, and no one is taking it for me. So that is something people will learn if you travel enough that your bills have to be pretty crisp in some of these places. I thought I would give you guys a little background, but now it's time to take the show on the road. Hope my own signal holds up. We'll figure it out. That's what I want myself on. All right, we'll see how it goes. We'll hang on, see if Tom can make it. Moving on to the next topic. Shop at purse.io. Ever wonder how people are buying Bitcoin in other countries? Do you hear stories about them paying 30% on local Bitcoins and think maybe they could spend that on purse.io, and I could get something cheap. That's how it works at purse.io, where you submit your wish list, your Bitcoin, and your discount. What else comes along? Buys your wish list. You let us know when you get your stuff. We release the Bitcoin to them. Bitcoin and escrow saving money at purse.io. Moving on to issue three, Bitcoin exchange, BTC-E, and Bitcoin talk. Hacked. Bitcoin exchange, BTC-E, and Bitcoin talk were hacked this month with both of their databases and passwords being downloaded. Surprisingly, nothing happened because they both used unique and difficult hashing algorithms to secure their passwords. This means that the hackers have the passwords, but they can't read them because they can't crack them. Alex, your thoughts on these? Hacks that are really non-hacks. Yeah, you, the password manager, individual password to every site, because just because these two guys were very diligent in the security they use, sometimes a site might use password hashes, and maybe it's only a single one for the entire site. So that means if one person has a really weak password, they managed to crack the hash for that password. They can then apply that hash and algorithm to all the other hashes to figure out exactly what's going on. So I wouldn't be using the same password for any exchange, so that's pretty I'm sure. You should definitely be using something randomly generated. As for the risks involved of continuing to use them, BTC has got its own risk beyond passwords. Bitcoin talk, I think it's a great form, great source of information. It's just not something that I've used thoroughly. I think I do have an account, but I've never made a post. This is the call for decentralized versions of these two components to come out sooner rather than later. We need a good forum software on a network like MadeSafe or we need exchanges. I guess to plug MadeSafe again, there's two projects that are going to be solving both these. They're safe exchange coin and then there's Project DeCorum, which are going to solve the forum post and the exchanges on this new Net 2.0 and then everything is encrypted locally. It's not even your password that's going in. It's your connection. It's just all encrypted. I wouldn't be too worried, but you never know. I think the fact that the emails have been taken now is just means there's going to be more fishy emails going out. So you know, I don't open any attachments, regardless of what they are. They have to be on the lookout for any random link. There goes tone. This is a good time for a public service announcement. You should have two FA on all of your Bitcoin exchanges. You should have two FA on your Gmail. If you don't know what two FA is, you should Google it right now and figure it out because otherwise you're going to get hacked. Toned Vage are thoughts on these hacks. All right. I am back online because I guess I guess it couldn't handle it in the elevator and in the doorway. So, yeah, so this is where I'm going to get yelled at by especially you Thomas because I still can't get myself to. Sorry. Let's try this. I still can't get myself to start using a password manager. I just I can't do it. I stopped my own passwords, but however, I am fully aware that these things will get hacked. It's just it's just the way it is. And I'm happy that I have neither accounts. So I'm not in to worry about. And it's also great that these guys took privacy and accounts very, very seriously and considering BTC. I know even those who these guys are and they manage to get it right. Same thing with the Bitcoin blog site, but that one is Bitcoin, Bitcoin talk, but that one again, I. That one there was no money at stake there, right? It's just people's passwords were a bit at stake, but no money was actually at stake. So the one point I was going to say is I was actually surprised that there were 500,000 accounts at BTC. That is way more traders at BTC than I would have expected. It really, really is. Up plus I got a train coming by. Excellent points, Tony, but you've really got a switch to using a password manager. I agree from far away, I didn't like the idea of putting all my passwords in one box. If that box gets hacked, I know I'm doomed. But the reality is my passwords are so much better now. My passwords are C64, F9, G7, F8. I have no idea. I could never remember that for a day. Yet they're all different and they're all impossible. All my accounts are stronger, but yes, I do have one central long box with a lot of codes in it, but I do have two of them on all my good accounts. So you really password manager. I think it's a good combination of security and convenience. So I'd recommend it. But for some sites, I have my generic login that I use the same one for everyone because I don't really care if they get it in one and they're going to get all these other random things that I have to read this article. I need a career in account. So I make a generic one. I think I'm on. I seem to have lost someone. Anyway, another thing I was going to hold on. Sorry. Password manager, still awesome. Two of a, still necessary. Yeah. Another thing I was going to say was as far as the accounts, this goes to show you that companies like BTC that know they are dealing with money. They are taking passwords very, very seriously. And this goes back to my previous statements when we talked about the LinkedIn hack is that people are going to start thinking about security in a way they've never thought about it before because now internet security matters because you can actually lose something for real. You can actually lose value. And BTC is taking it very, very seriously. They still want to stay anonymous, but they are taking it very seriously in that they know that people are going to lose value. And so because of that, they were able to provide real security, which is a bit surprising because all the other exchanges in the Bitcoin space have not taken security seriously. That's why they've all been hacked. And BTC, I think they had a breach as well a long time ago, but they seem to be doing okay now. But yeah, good for BTC. They are one of the exchanges I've always kind of been supporting. I probably didn't have an account with them. I didn't have an account with them, but I used a fake email and everything was fake. I didn't even have that access to that email anymore anyway. So I know I have nothing to worry about. But hey, those are our trading on it. You're money safe. You're on with a decent team. Good on BTC-E. Let's move on to predictions or story of the week. Alex, are you ready with a prediction or a story of the week? Prediction. Geez, I think Bitcoin will finally break out to an upward trend. Maybe hit 680 and then we'll see a little bit of a retrace. Maybe a little accumulation, kind of a holding pattern. We'll shake out and then yeah, that's my prediction for it, I guess. I don't really have a story of the week though. I guess I mentioned it earlier that Vancouver company, blockchain technology, which is now the first blockchain company that's traded on the Canadian stock market. Really big news there. Really always dangerous Bitcoin price prediction. Tone Vays. All right, so I guess I don't know if I can call it the story of the week, but it definitely made me laugh towards this week. This is where the world should realize that Mr. David Seaman is crazy. I believe last time this was the chance I took to talk about when a Gultar being a crazy, now we have David Seaman breaking it and that's our latest crazy of Bitcoin. I wonder if the choppers are still circling this house. If the government has turned off his all of his accounts, that is just, I had a huge laugh out of it. Please take a look. If people were following his ideas in the space, I strongly advise you to reconsider and take a look at what he's been talking about lately. There you go. That's my story of the week. It's been very sad to see Seaman's breakdown. We did have a disagreement. I posted a link about a story, a critical of Ethereum. He became very upset at me, but still I hope that he will get help for whatever's problem these ailing and whatever's going on. It's personally, I don't know. Moving on to my story of the week. Story of the week. YouTube is now pre-sensoring videos. What does that mean? That means that YouTube has instituted a new monetization policy where if your video is not advertiser friendly or if your video contains sensitive topics such as politics, etc. They will now beforehand not allow you to be monetized, essentially blocking your ability to be monetized, which seems like a small thing, but really a monetizable video is a video that can be re-created, a video that can pay its creators, a video that can continue and spiral and grow. You can really build something. A lot of major creators, even people like Philip DeFranco, the young Turks and some other channels have had their videos demonetized mysteriously without warning. Apparently, what's changed this week is YouTube is now warning people, but this is a huge red light for the internet. We all need to stop. Think about what's going on here. Think about what we're losing. Think about what YouTube is going to be like in the future. When there's no more criticism, there's no more politics, there's no more sensitive subjects. There's certainly no more profanity because advertisers can't stand dirty words. But this is a major issue and we all need to take stock. Even though YouTube is a private company, everyone expressing themselves as a public issue and it's an issue of what kind of YouTube we're going to have in the future. If it's a wild and free sprawling YouTube, like the current YouTube, where if it's a tightly controlled corporate videos, only YouTube, like they seem to have in their plans. Let me, can't come with that real quick. As long as you agree with me. If I'm not wrong, I wasn't going to, yeah, of course. If I recall correctly, because I've only had like, I think one video that I was contacted by YouTube asking me if I was interested in monetizing it. And I said, yeah, sure monetize it. And then I got an email back from them saying, Dave, reviewed the video and they determined it was, had a little too much adult content for them. So I think they've always had a similar policy. It's just, I guess, now they're doing it preemptively instead of, uh, did, failed to preco, gets X number of views. Full of the preco did. He did, he did contact them and what they said is that three or four months ago, they started enforcing this policy. The only thing that's changed recently is they're actually informing people that demonetization that there's a reason why they demonetized. So it's gotten a little more in your face. But it just seems like it's becoming more pervasive and it's spreading. So yeah, I think H3H3 has a really good video on it explaining how he had videos, I guess, over a year ago where he just realized he wasn't making any money on it. But then he realized that it was like after talking with the YouTube guys, uh, it was based on the tags. I think for advertised advertisers, they actually have like an opt in or sort of thing for what they want to advertise on, like if a video covers certain topics, which maybe you're rather taboo, then they can, you know, they would have to opt in to say, yeah, I want to monetize on top of that video. I think what's changed now is yet now they're contacting people, but they've also expanded that net. Like now you can't talk about something like a tag like disaster or, you know, even politics, which to me sounds crazy. But like this is preventing the guys who do a lot of like, you know, the daily news brief from getting monetized. So I think they kind of overstep their boundaries in terms of like what they're automatically classifying as, you know, unadvertisable data or videos. So yeah, this just goes to show like why there are so many projects in the space that are doing, you know, media hosting and different monetization. They're basically going after YouTube's audience in a new way with the technology. So there's a lot of cool ones to check out. Agreed. YouTube has gone way too far. It's too much. I was finding that I heard that YouTube actually operates on a loss though. I'm sure it does, but there's a reason. And what I was going to say is this is also up to the advertisers. I know this is unlikely, but I'd like the advertisers to step up as well and say we like a broad range of topics on YouTube. Some of us don't mind advertising on adult shows or profanity shows or political discussions about disasters. Some of us are forward thinking advertisers and understand that people appreciate that content and part of advertising is supporting things that you appreciate. So I really think that both sides should be up in arms here because YouTube is getting thinner. YouTube is getting more corporate. YouTube is going to be less interesting because of these rules. And they need to make a decision on that. I'm not sure that's the YouTube they want in the future. They've really thought this through. But I think we're about out of time. Until next time. Bye. Bye. Sayonara.