Though 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, Ian D. Martino, from Coin Journal. Ton Vays from Liberty Life Trail. Hello, everyone. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network, moving on to issue one. Issue one. Last week on the Bitcoin Group, we told you about the importance of Mr. Robot. This week, Mr. Robot is featured in the Wall Street Journal, who describes it as dragging Bitcoin into its dystopian nightmare. The CEO of Evil Core justifying the creation of E-Coin and massive loans in E-Coin, which they just printed, literally out of thin air, says very dramatically in the key scene. Hard cash is fading rapidly, and Bitcoin is spreading. And if Bitcoin takes over, we are all in a world of hell. Ian D. Martino, should we use the corporate controlled E-Coin or the wild and free Bitcoin? Follow up question, is Bitcoin about to take Hollywood by storm with both Mr. Robot and start up leading the way for a general Hollywoodization of Bitcoin with dozens of shows and movies getting on board? Yeah. You know, and Mr. Robot, E-Coin is like this nefarious, crazy thing. And you know, it makes for good TV drama, but it's not exactly realistic. I think there will be attempts, and I think there already have been attempts to make like coins that are down with the man, or down with the government, or whatever. And people in the government probably do find that appealing, and you know, they probably hope, oh, this can be the replacement for Bitcoin, but you know, they may have find some success, and they may actually be a positive towards the crypto revolution when everything's said and done, but they won't ever replace Bitcoin, because hackers and developers in Cypher punks are never going to use corporate coin or a government coin or whatever you want to call it. You know, in real life, we have the DLTs and ripple and stuff, but there's not like some nefarious guy behind it, like there is Mr. Robot, you know, like, oh, we're going to get everyone on our coin, and it's going to destroy Bitcoin, and then the government's going to be able to watch everything. It's, I think, a little bit more nuanced than that, but if I'm at an individual level, should we use it? Nah, let's say I use Bitcoin. He does set it up nicely though. With Bitcoin, we won't have any control. They control the ledger. They control the miner. What you want is a good old fashioned American company running the coin for you. Boy, is it just the best setup ever? Yeah, I mean, and that's really the point too, though, that there's always going to be people who need something that's hidden, but about the Hollywoodization of Bitcoin, you know, I think that's great. The internet had that movie with Angelina Jolie, that hackers, and now we have Mr. Robot. Classic movie. We have Mr. Robot and startup, and we just need like a cool shitty line, like hack the Gibson, and we'll be right on our way to mainstream acceptance, man. I'd like to see a sitcom next. Something kind of like Silicon Valley, a little more hackery, involving Bitcoin. Unfortunately, they'd have to throw in the drug dealing plot or the gangster plot to put a little pressure on the nerds. But still, some kind of a like big bang theory meets hackers with Bitcoin. Ton Ves, what do you think? Are you ready for my sitcom? Oh, no, that's actually a great ITM, man. That would be awesome. Like Vitalik will definitely be a character in there. You know, throw in Jackson Paul. I tell you, I'm not sleeping on somebody's couch. Only having a tuftle bag full of stuff. And then next episode, they're like, oh, by the way, that guy just designed a billion dollar currency. Yeah, Mr. One Duffel bag guys. So it's rights itself. Rights itself. Oh, by the way, you're worth animal ads, boys. He's a very funny guy. Good character. No, a crypto sitcom will actually would write itself. I mean, it's a... I would like to see a mad Bitcoin's like character making videos with the goggles out. It can't track me out. Yeah, it would be a competing. It would be like, we're going up against startup, which is the kind of the gangster side of cryptocurrencies. It's going to go up against the doge side of cryptocurrency, which is a sitcom all on its own. Did it come from Jackson and me and Vitalik living in a house? And throwing a random guy who's not in the crypto could be the guy. How about a prison drama? We can have not all the right. And Josh Garza and they can all just be trying to survive and flip, flip cigarettes for pay coin. Yep. They could get out and suddenly be millionaires. But they still live together. Still roommates. I'm Mr. Robot, which still keeps getting better and better and better. All right, so let me let me address the Hollywood part first. I think it's going to be more normalized. I think some of the directors and some of the people involved don't know more about what Bitcoin is. So they're not going to be using it as stupidly as they have in the past. It's a lot easier to get some real research done. People to ask. So it will definitely be part of it. All the futuristic movies will probably have it. If not Bitcoin then something like Bitcoin. So I do see this as the future. And going back to Mr. Robot, I have not gone further than I think I've seen six episodes of the current season. We talked about Mr. Robot for a while last on this on the show last week. I haven't had a chance to watch any more episodes. I've seen a few more episodes of startup. Still gets a thumbs up from me. Mr. Robot, not so much, but I will finish while I'm doing this. I'm not a robot, not so much, but I will finish watching the season. Hopefully soon. I did see that clip of the CEO of E-Corp proposing yet. So again, I'm not a big fan of Mr. Robot, but in this case, you have the CEO of E-Corp, who is basically, you know, Jamie Diamond and Lloyd Langfine combined. He runs the only financial company in America. And he's trying to convince what looks like to be either the Treasury Secretary or the Fed. The Fed doesn't actually create any money. It's kind of... I think the guy is the White House staff. He seems like an important character, but not an elected official. So here's the pitch is everything. I mean, we've covered this on the... Every freaking month. Another country wants to create a Bitcoin competitor. This is it, right? The governments want this. The guy he's trying to convince, it should be very easy to convince. I think he did a very good job convincing him because the CEO of E-Corp is absolutely correct. It's in government's best interest to create a digital version of Bitcoin for the government. It's in the government. It's not an hour best interest, but it's in the government's best interest because the government wants to eliminate cash. Physical cash is a thorn in their ass. They don't want physical cash. We are all money loongers. And honestly, if there was no physical cash, you know, in a way, you wouldn't be arrested for walking around with $1,000 in your pocket, right? So it may actually, you know, or all those stories, I mean, what's his name? An HBO from last night to night, our last week... To my deliver. ...general of a right. He had that whole thing about civil forfeiture where people's money constantly gets confiscated, even if that's money is legitimately that person's. All of these things will be eliminated because then the government won't be able to confiscate cash. So in a way, it's good it'll keep cops from being road pirates, right? There are good things that come with eliminating cash. Now, I would... I think we'll still take a bribe in Bitcoin. It's not unreasonable. Ah, but you see, this is the thing, right? Bitcoin is the digital replacement of cash. Bitcoin, I've came to the realization that Bitcoin will not replace the financial system. I've always had one worry. Now I have two. So, but anyway, so this is what they want. That's where we're going to go. Unfortunately for him, the US dollar is the last currency that's going to go fully digital because US physical dollars are absorbed and used all over the world. No one really uses Euros outside of Europe, but US dollars are used everywhere. You go to South America, you go to Asia, you can use your dollars there. Okay? So there will be so much pressure from the entire world against this that it's very unlikely to happen in the US. In Europe, absolutely. Europe will probably once the euro collapses, there will no longer be a physical version of the euro. Whatever is going to replace the euro in Europe is going to be fully 100% digital because that it does three things. I always said it. It allows them to, it prevents people from hoarding cash. It forces everyone to use the banking system. It allows them to make any monetary policy that they like, including negative interest rates, and charge you if you don't actually use the money. It eliminates, you know, runs a bank run because there's no ATM machines to withdraw any cash, because there's no cash. And more importantly, it makes sure that all of us pay our taxes because we're all money launders and we're no longer, basically they think they'll have full control. They don't realize that by them, this is the great, this is the best thing they can do. The best thing the government can do to have a price of a Bitcoin be over $10,000, $20,000, whatever is to create E-Coin. If that's the, it's actually the opposite. If they think they're going to compete with Bitcoin, they're not. If the government wants to compete with Bitcoin, they have to go to the Asian. They have to put more cash in circulation and they have to escape that cash less often. That would compete with Bitcoin. Them going fully digital and eliminating cash would allow Bitcoin price to literally get out of control. It might actually be so bad that it'll be so much pressure on the Bitcoin blockchain that it might actually grind things to a halt. Because there'll be so much demand for Bitcoin, I'm actually nervous that the Bitcoin ecosystem is like Satoshi was worried that if we can leaks accept Bitcoin, it might be too much for the for the young cryptocurrency. That's my worry right now. If the government got rid of cash and went fully E-Coin, I don't think the Bitcoin ecosystem is capable of sustaining that kind of volume and that kind of pressure on its usefulness. And the other coins are all complete jokes. So don't, however comments, this is why Monero is good as is just completely insane. But I'll get to that probably later on. So I mean, this makes total sense. I mean, that it makes total sense. Now the idea of creating that in E-Coin out of finair, that also makes perfect sense. I'm sorry guys, gold standard does not work. A society on Bitcoin will not work. You need credit. You need, you absolutely need credit. Like for example, if Bitcoin is the backbone of the society, your economy will not scale. I don't care if the libertarians get mad at me. Your economy will not scale. You need the ability to create loans. Even at a fractional reserve of 10 to 1, this is absolutely a must. The only thing that's bad in the creation of money out of finair at a 10 to 1 ratio is when the government gets its hands on that money. I have no problem with banks creating money. Right now the banks create money. The private banks create money, not the central bank. The banks create money by loaning this money out. They haven't really done much loaning. They just take all that money and put it back at the Fed and collect a quarter of a percent interest. I'm billions of dollars making a lot of money at no risk. That's not how the system is supposed to function. The base create money, the banks, and that's what E-Corp is trying to do. And I have no problem with this. They assess risk. Someone comes to them and says, I want to borrow money. They say, what do you want to borrow money for? Okay, so there's two reasons you want to borrow money. Well, maybe three if you put college debt into that. Again, discussion for another day. College debt is atrocious. College is supposed to be 100 times cheaper than it currently is. And it will actually the prices should collapse in a year now. It's just government keeps getting the way of them actually collapsing. Two reasons to borrow money. One is to buy a house or to improve your standards of living. And two is to improve your business. You're borrowing money to create a business to create jobs to grow an economy. Or the other one is for housing purposes. So, those loans for business are excellent. The bank decides what the risk is. And the idea is you borrow money. You create a business. You create jobs. That creates that scales an economy up. It makes everybody richer. And then the person is able to pay this money back with interest. When you borrow money in a housing related situation, you are not improving the economy around you. Yes, a few housing construction jobs are made. We are basically pushing spending from the future into the now. Those are neutral loans. The loans you want to stay away from are loans to government. Because the government doesn't make any money. The government only takes money from working people. And then where the hell is that interest coming from? I mean, the government only, the government spending only hurts society in my opinion. And then actually expanded. I believe it should all be done in a private sector. So, what he's. The ability to track everything, which is exactly what the government wants. So, all of that makes perfect sense. I mean, that. But is the real problem here that the E coin has been created completely out of thin air. And that when the government grants them the ability to create loans in that. And to essentially print their own money. This private corporation is suddenly taking over official roles of the government. And has been allowed to print this money out of thin air. It has no value. No, but that's. But now they're letting it out as though it has. No, Thomas, that's what I'm trying to explain. That's our current system right now. Yeah, the federal reserve is the private systems or private corporation. No, no, federal. Same principle work. Guys, federal reserve doesn't actually print any money. It's it's it's quasi doing that. Created by the banks by your credit card. Ian, you create money also. Wait and Thomas, when you go to a store and you use your credit card, that money is created out of thin air. Are actually creating it. The store immediately gets paid from you swiping a credit card. Not money is in chance for a person to person. The credit card visa just creates this money. It literally gets created out of thin air. The banks and the private institutions are actually creating the money when a bank loans you money for a house on the bank loans you money for a business when the bank loans you money for. For student loans, they're creating this money out of thin air. That is our current financial system. When we say the Fed is creating money, the Fed is buying up debt in order to put liquidity into the financial system. The treasury actually kind of authorizes this right. So the Fed is yes, the Fed prints money, but the Fed prints money in order to buy the bonds to hand this money to the bank so that the bank has more money to lend out to businesses. But the bank isn't doing that. The bank's been putting all this money back at the Fed and just just Google Federal Reserve access reserves since 2009 that the banks took all that money and they put it back at the Fed and they collect the interest and they keep that interest. So when you're describing this our current system, it's actually a much better system. You want the private system to create money. God, if Congress got to create money, holy crap, they were just printed for their friends. At least there's a little accountability in the private sector creating money and handing it to their friends for loans. There is some accountability that people can go to jail. If Congress creates money for whatever the hell they like, which they somewhat do with all of the government agencies, there's no accountability there. No one's responsible for that. The problem that we have now is that these private banks have been bribing these politicians. So that needs to end. But the idea of private banks creating money, that's how it's supposed to be. That's normal. That's normal for an economy. That's how our system was designed. Banks get to create money. And if they do an irresponsible job of it, these banks are supposed to collapse and these loans are supposed to default. What happened in 2008 was that they got bailed out instead of having accountability. That's the problem. The problem is in banks creating this money and creating these toxic assets. The problem is not holding them accountable for doing so. Moving on to the next question. One last thing. If I like, here's where this is, I just explained the part that makes sense. Here's the part that doesn't make sense and will be really short. If E-Corp thinks that they got hacked from these guys and it was bad before, imagine if they are the only controllers of their own cryptocurrency that is not decentralized. It would be hacked a lot easier by the same people after than before. That is something that I believe might be missed in that. What the guy should say is, wait, so you guys just got hacked and lost everything. Now you want to go completely digital running it on your own servers. That could be the scene from next week's episode. Elliott Haxen takes all the money. The E-Coin guy looks at his zero account. Much like the startup people, people looking at zero accounts and wishing the money could come back. No, no, no, no, no, no, just fork it like after the Dow. Just print some more money. It will be E-Coin classic. Which would be better. A currency controlled by E-Corp, as the CEO says, a regular corporation or a currency controlled by an unregulated corporation that only calls itself federal. E-Martina. Well, preferably I've neither. I prefer really we'd all be on Bitcoin. But if you have to pick between two, I definitely go with Corporation Coin over Federal Reserve or government coin. The first digital currency DigiCash was essentially Corporation Coin. They're working on developing partnerships with banks. There were rumors that Microsoft 98 was supposed to come with a DigiCash wallet at one point. But I couldn't really confirm that when I was looking through the old sources. So, you know, DigiCash almost worked and it probably would have been better than the credit cards that we had at the time. So I have to pick one I'm going with DigiCash or Corp Coin. Turn this. Yeah, I'm going to go with Corp Coin also. So hopefully that will be the future. Bitcoin is like the gold style underlying layer. There will be these E-Corp's or like these giant banks that have the ability or the trust to hand out loans. And then they can kind of scale so they can actually create their coin out of finair. But and they're able to loan in that coin as long as you know they're lending responsibly and this money is like I explained earlier. That wouldn't that that's the only way to grow your economy. It's not going to I mean you need leverage. You need leverage in the system. It just can't get out of control. And when it does you have to let the free market, you know, sort out the pieces. Moving on to issue two. Ripple raises 55 million dollars. Ripple the so called Bitcoin for banks raised 55 million dollars from a variety of investors including Accenture, Thailand's commercial bank and even CK. Ripple now claims to have tons of runway and their CEO even said they may never have to raise again. Tom Bay is what's going on here has E coin just been fully funded is ripple going to take Bitcoin down. Well, it definitely hasn't been fully funded trust me. They'll be they'll be seeking more funding. Ripple is just it's insane. It's completely insane. I mean Ripple I never really called out Ripple. I'm not sure if it's a scam or not. It's just stupid. But the stupidity of Ripple is that it's a free floating exchange rate currency. Why is this needed? Why does a I don't understand. I don't understand the concept of ripple the token. Look, I understand the concept of ripple. I don't understand ripple the token. I don't understand why ripple isn't tether. I just don't get it. I don't understand why ripple isn't there like a ripple dollar and then a ripple euro and then they just exchange between each other. Ripple claims that it's a way to move value from one trusted entity to another. But where is the problem with current fiat currencies by doing that? All they're trying to do is speed up the movement of value from one trusted institution to another. Why put it through a process of a speculative token? It just it just makes no sense at all. I mean the whole thing is completely retarded to me. So I ignore ripple anytime someone asked me about ripple. My reply is ripple still alive. It's a question I always say. It's one of those projects that can't seem to die kind of like those. But it's just I don't know what's keeping it alive. It just makes no logical sense of having a speculative token involved. None at all. So it's but then if they didn't have a token, there'll be another R3 or I don't know or all the other you know hyper ledger and all the other. I don't understand why ripple is needed if they have inter ledger to do it. Why don't they just have inter ledger? Why don't I don't know it's a way to raise money and it's a way to pay people to do nonsense. So it's I don't know. You got to print your own token because they all want to be rich. Of course. It is. It's easiest way in D Martino. Your thoughts on ripple. Yeah, I mean, they. I didn't really get ripple at first. I remember when I first was doing research into it. I was like, well, it's pre mine. So just skip by it. But when you think about it, not so much as a cryptocurrency is more of a digital token digital coin or whatever, I think it. Could be helpful to have like a Bitcoin for the banks because. It coins biggest problem, I think, is still on ramps and getting from Bitcoin to Fiat. And if there is some sort of crypto coin or whatever. That was accepted by the banks that the banks were all on board with. Well, it's really easy to go from ripple to Bitcoin and Bitcoin and back. So if they can fill out that niche, then I think it's a good thing. As to what tone said about not really getting the point. I don't know why they think it's better than a shared ledger or whatever and why they have this speculative coin in their out. I think it's weird that I have a speculative coin when like the whole supplies controlled by one corporation. But you know, I'm not a banker and I'm not the one invest in $55 million in it. So if someone's invested $55 million into ripple, then you know, they see some use keys for it. The market is going to decide if that if they're just wasting their money or you know, if it will actually be something useful by the population at large. But it's still. I mean, it's not a negative thing. But $55 million into research and distribute ledger technology that can only be in that positive at the end of the day. Whether or not it catches on is a different issue, I think. Well, I'm going to comment on a couple of things that well, one is it frustrates me that 55 million is going there. Yeah, you know, wallet companies like my celium and air bits, you know, are desperate for even, you know, $100,000. And something like this isn't helping Bitcoin at all. But something that could be useful for Bitcoin like wallets, which is probably the most important industry decides mining. It can't get any funding. But, but Ian, I don't really agree with that, right? A couple of things that you said because the on ramping of Bitcoin, that's not a technological problem. That's a regulatory problem. And when you say it's easier to go from ripple to Bitcoin, no, it's not. It's easier to go from ripple to Bitcoin if you already have ripple, but if you don't have ripple, right? The only way to get ripple is through Bitcoin, which isn't really helping, you know, Bitcoin on ramping. That's the point if they become a if it's a bank's Bitcoin, then you could probably presumably easily get ripple through your bank, which could easily transfer to Bitcoin. But you already have cash in your bank, right? I guess, but right now you can just use circle, right? So you can just, you know, have access to your bank account. It's no different, right? I mean, if you think the bank will give you more money in ripple, knowing for a while that you can just take it to Poloniacs and put it through a mixer, I mean, that's not going to make sense, right? I mean, then circle immediately filed paperwork saying, hey, how is that different from people using ACH and just taking my rather bank account is the same thing. But in order to acquire ripple, you have to be like a gateway, right? So like a bank is a gateway. So I don't see, I mean, I don't see them being, you know, that's silly about it, right? I mean, if you can go and get ripple from your bank, how's the different going to get Bitcoin from your bank, right? I mean, they're not that dumb over at the banks or at the regulator's office, right? If they know this ripple can like be, can just be moved through shapeshift. I mean, who are they fooling? They know, they're not that dumb over there. There might be slow, but they're not that dumb. Well, yeah, but if they have their coin, then presumably they're thinking that they can, you know, if they have ripple, they may be able to track you better through ripple than Bitcoin, you buy a bunch of ripple and it just disappears into the coin thing and that maybe raises some red flags or something like that. I mean, let's say I'm not saying it's a great idea, but I'm saying that it's a... But you're also trying to try and out. It's not like it's ever going to replace Bitcoin. You know, there's so many different things that Bitcoin does better. You know, no one's going to use ripple to gamble or buy a foreign site or whatever. They probably won't even use it like digital gold bugs. I won't even use it because it's too controlled by corporations. So it doesn't have that like on their line base value that Bitcoin has, but it's still having banks working with distributed ledgers being interested. I think that's good news and we should look at get worse in the mouth. You know, $55 million doesn't work out. It's just $55 million the banks. One last comment on that would be, and this could be a big problem. I don't know what... Again, I don't know what ripple is doing. I just realized if what you say is true, that could be a huge liability for ripple, right? Because then they could become like steam it, right? Because if now, if it's so easy to get ripple from your bank and people are doing that in order to get their hands on Bitcoin, everyone's going to go and buy all this ripple and immediately exchange it for Bitcoin, right? So this allows the current holders of ripple to exit scam. Meanwhile, putting a lot of pressure on the price of ripple and then it's going to go perpetually down even further. So it will be like, where's the demand for ripple coming from other than those that pre-mind ripple, if there's disability to just buy it from a bank and convert it into Bitcoin. So again, I don't see that happening. I don't see the banks selling ripple to the average person. And if they do it, it could be huge ramifications for the founders of ripple. If it feels a niche that Bitcoin can't fill right now, maybe it helps a remittance corridor because you have banks on two sides of the country. Now, members of those banks can easily send money where is before they would have had to go to the Western Union. Everyone thinks that Bitcoin is going to be the big star in that, but it's really hard in a third world country to switch your Bitcoin for cash. This goes to them, why do how have a speculative token just build a corridor bank to bank? They have these corridors. I agree that it's weird to have a speculative token built into it, but I think that's why they're still in the research phase. I think they'll probably like, well, Ripple is kind of cool. Let us do some experiment and things, but let's just go make our own thing now or something. That's probably going to happen. But and also research. Then back to we two, three weeks ago, we covered a story where one of the founders of ripple declared that the blockchain is dead. And it's really is Bitcoin that was innovative and he bounced. I don't know. Ripple is just insane. I don't understand why anyone would want to put money into it. Ripple has had a lot of drama, even from its beginning, like, I mean, stellar, stellar or whatever it's called, which is like ripple. Maybe this will maybe this will allow for Matthew Malin to finally get out. I know he was a big investor in ripple. Well, let's all remember $55 million sounds like a lot of money to normal people. It's certainly a lot of money for a startup, but it's not a lot of money for a bank. If a bank was really going to use this, if they were really going to replace their back end with ripple in any significant way, we were talking about hundreds, maybe even thousands of millions of dollars, you know, a billion dollars, 1.2 billion. I know. I know. I know. Thomas Thomas. Thomas, just but again, just think about what you're saying, but I mean, you work at Perth. Do you want the end of Perth to be a speculative token? I mean, maybe you do, but I be because you might be able to get rich on it. But for a bank that is like regulated, I mean, I don't think they want that. I mean, why would you back it? It's eco and it's eco and our evolve. You have to evolve or die. And I think the banks are starting to get that fever and they're starting to get that. What are we going to be? What's our master plan? Does our CEO have eco and in his back pocket? Like what are we going to do next year? That's exactly right. I think if they try to, I think it's going to be more of a bank to bank thing, maybe, you know, allowing banks to like, hey, you can invest in a, you know, gold and silver with us now because more easily, I don't know. But I don't think it's going to be like they're going to be offering ripple to their customers. But I think you're right. They're going to find out that it's not a good alternative to Bitcoin. It's not going to stem the crypto tide. If that's what they're shooting for, it's definitely not going to work. Just remember the music industry, remember the movie industry, remember newspapers and think about what the internet did to them. We're coming banks. We're coming. Moving on to the next issue. Check out Bitcoin guidebook by Ian D Martino, the new book about Bitcoin, how to obtain, invest and spend the world's first decentralized cryptocurrency. Also, you can buy it at purse.io for 5% off Amazon. That's cheap. Issue 3, Paul, non Bitcoin blockchains disrespectful to Satoshi says Paul Stortz. Paul Stortz, the creator of hive mind, a decentralized prediction market, this time on the Bitcoin blockchain via sidechains. Paul out the altcoins this week saying that he doesn't understand the people who don't build on Bitcoin. Saying that Bitcoin was always obvious. Stortz goes even further saying that reinventing the blockchain is like adding a fifth wheel to a car and is disrespectful to his associate Nakamoto. Ian D Martino, is he right? No, he's not right at all. And tell you why we got to stop with this lionization of Satoshi. Building idols out of men is one of the most dangerous things you can do in a community. He left us for a reason. He was the leader of us essentially and he left because he didn't want his opinions to decide which direction we're going. If he wanted us to do things based off of what he thought and he would have stuck around and told us what he thought about everything. He left because he needs Bitcoin to grow up on its own. You know, like any good parent you let your kid leave the house and become an adult. You don't just dictate every little decision. Now, as far as whether or not we should have these other blockchains. I mean, where else are we going to have crazy kind of stupid and really full-hardy experiments like the Dow? Are we going to put that on the Bitcoin blockchain? I'd rather have these altcoins out there and doing it because I love the crazy experimentation and cryptocurrency. But you know, things like his prediction market. That's great. That stuff really excites me. But people are going to have dumb ideas too. They're going to have good ideas that are implemented badly. We don't need every single one of them to be on the Bitcoin blockchain messing up investor goodwill and using up space and all our blocks. Let Ethereum do some things that are crazy and end up costing people a bunch of money. Let new coins that come out, let next let all these different things experiment crazily. And we'll just Bitcoin can just be like the secure one that kind of that innovates, but innovates with like professionalism. And doesn't you know, I mean, can't say Bitcoin doesn't cost people money and scams and failures and stuff, but a little bit more secure than just investing in all it's all the time. And as far as this fifth wheel comment, I mean, this just goes right into that. If you're going to put a fifth wheel on a car, you should probably build some prototypes first right before you get the consumer model. Well, Bitcoin is the closest thing we have to consumer cryptocurrency. You will ask me about like digital sees. I don't tell them about the theory. I don't tell them about like coin or ripple. I don't know about Bitcoin. Because that's the one that they can get into without you know, the network shutting down without the whole thing just end up being a giant scam. It's the safe one that relatively safe one that it's relatively easy to use that first time crypto buyers should definitely start with and should probably just stay with because that's what I've done is just all my investments are in Bitcoin not in all coins. But I mean, that's allowing short of it. We need to be able to experiment on different blockchains and we shouldn't be so worried about what Satoshi thinks because that's just going to lead us to this future where people are arguing doing the same thing with the core developers now. People saying well, that's not what Gavin Anderson thought and we don't we don't need any of that Satoshi if you even was one person was just one person, you know, it was just a man you it's valuable like everyone else. So we need to definitely definitely stop acting like Satoshi is some sort of God. He was a person and he left us for a reason and that's because he didn't want to influence all of our decisions. Or the point is certainly an unforgiving blockchain to build on they're not going to roll it back because you made a mistake even if it's a hundred million dollar mistake like we've seen recently on some all coins. Tom Vays your thoughts on this statement. Well, you know, you have some very, very good points. I will say that I agree with Paul Paul Stortz. I agree with him other than the comment that Ian had the most problem with, which is the Satoshi comment, right. So I don't agree with that part with Paul Stortz on that's not what Satoshi that's respectful to Satoshi. I don't care about that right. I don't care if it's this was just a Toshie or not. So I disagree with Paul on that part, but on everything else I agree with with Paul. Now I will go as far as I believe Satoshi invented the blockchain. And to me the blockchain is following Satoshi's work, which is proof of work to me. That's a blockchain proof of work is a blockchain. If you are not proof of work, you are not a blockchain to me, right. So to me calling yourself a blockchain when you're not a proof of work model to me. Well, that I would call that disrespectful to Satoshi, but not to him personally, this respectful to the idea of what he created in a blockchain, right in a blockchain. So to me that's, but that's definitions that's not their suspecting person, right. So I don't like put him above is like a deity or whatever. I just credit him with the creation of the blockchain, the creation of the proof of work algorithm that gave us Bitcoin. I believe you can't have multiple blockchains, but they have to be like this decentralized consensus style proof of work that are burning energy for security. If you don't have this model, you are not a blockchain. Next, you are not a blockchain. What do you call them? My art is these days. Steve. You are not a blockchain, right. You are proof of stake. You are not a blockchain. Ethereum. You are blockchain for now. Soon to be proof of stake, a.k.a. not a blockchain. So I find, so in that regard, yes, maybe I believe you're disrespectful to the invention that he created. Now, as far as these old coins, see, this is the dilemma, right? If you create to me, I don't mind, and he calls them testnet scams, so Paul does. I like Paul. I see him at events. I talk to him all the time. We have very, very similar views and a lot of things. And so to me, if you create a blockchain, which is a proof of work, and I'll use light coin as an example, you create a Bitcoin competitor that has a fair launch or anyone that's interested in mining it from the first block, or let's go second block, right? So to see mine, the first block, he needed to test it, maybe he mined the second block. But after that, it was fair game for anyone that knew about it or anyone that was interested in it. Of course, there was very few and far between of those people back then. In today's world, if you want to create an old coin that is a Bitcoin competitor, like light coin, that's fine. I don't have a problem with that. It's a good testnet. It's a good testing environment. It needs to be fair so that you are not the only one being rich from creating the sold coin. This is why Charlie Lee has a job and he's not out there selling light coin all day, right? Jackson Palmer, I believe, is in the same boat when he started Dogecoin and some other people are like that. These are legitimate projects. I believe Monero has had some, I don't remember the history and the start of Monero. I believe it had a little bit of a shadiness onto its launch, but the shady people that the launch, supposedly don't quote me on this. I believe they're now gone and the people that are now programming Monero are doing it as science. So I'm okay with that. Dash is in a slightly different boat. There was a lot of shadiness in the creation of Dash and that shadiness remains to this day with those people having the majority of Dash. They also created these master nodes as a proof of, to me, master nodes are proof of stake. Dash is 40% proof of stake because that allows those shady people that created the Dash with a competitive advantage, an unfair advantage to creating Dash from themselves. They got together and said, hey, how can we have a way to have more Dash just for having Dash and boom, the idea of master nodes came out. So I'm not a fan of Dash. So Paul Storz is very frustrated with a lot of these alternatives. I am as well. And some of these alternatives are a lot more fair than others like Litecoin and I guess Doge. And some of these are just there for the creators of these alternatives to get rich. And yes, they might be creating something like an Ethereum, but that is second hand to the masterminds of Ethereum to get rich. And I have a problem with this and Paul has a problem with this and I believe these people are scammers. And so this is why sometimes Paul and I go a little out of hand with our ranting about these things, calling them flat out scans. So I take the same position as him more or less. Yeah, there's definitely most altcoins are scans, like 90% of them. But I don't think that should stop someone who does know how to code, who is a good developer from just trying out crazy shit. Man, this is the internet. Do whatever you want to do. You want to make some sort of new algorithm or some sort of new consensus protocol. Just go do it, man. Don't let your dreams be dreams. No thing like. But yeah, most of it is scam. But dogecoin actually kind of, I mean, I don't want to get sued or something. But dogecoin definitely started out shady itself. It's mining rewards were all front loaded so that it would only last a couple of years. It was only because of the invention of merge mining with Litecoin that saved it. Because it was all designed to block rewards early on were gigantic. And so early adopters definitely got. So the got an advantage. So there's a little bit of a Ponzi type situation there. But yeah, it was also a joke. So it's kind of cool. You know, it wasn't, they weren't telling people that it was a good investment. They were like, hey, look, this crazy dog. So. Well, that was just like a joke that like worked out. It was always a joke. It was never put your life savings in this. It becomes worrying. Like I like Paul's term. The test net, like the test net term. I wish more people would use that and I should say, hey, this is a coin when they're going to release like Ian saying he's encouraging the new ideas. Do all the new ideas you want. But call him a test net. Don't be like, this is a coin and then get one of those pumping, pumping, pumping, scrolling, scrolling web pages that says how you're going to change finance forever and everyone should invest their life savings. That's when it gets a little worrisome. But then again, Ethereum went up. So you know, what do we know? Everything pumps, everything pumps before it dumps, right? Yeah, but what you're speaking to too is like just because things are in the crypto world doesn't mean like normal red flags for scamming don't apply. You know, if some guy was just sent you an email saying, I got this full proof system that's going to make it so you get 300 percent returns in six months, send me money and it wasn't a crypto involved. You know, you'd be like, oh, it's Nigerian Prince type thing. But then you know, people say, oh, there's this new coin and it's going to change everything and look at these investors we got then, you know, you got to start worrying bigger investors are fake and in crypto bigger red flags, right? I mean, if you if you send an Nigerian Prince money, you know, through your bank, you can probably get that money back if you act fast enough, right? Through through the bank, right? So there's a lot more red flags in the crypto space. Also, no, no, no, it's going to sue you. Try to trust me in the space, right? They can't sue you. But what you said about those, I don't have as much of a problem with that because you even said, you know, it was meant to last for two years. That's a that's an insane amount of time, especially in in the world of current world where people understand crypto much better. I mean, you can say the same thing about Bitcoin, right? It was front loaded by a time, by the time all of us on this channel found out about Bitcoin, the money reward was already like cut in half, right? Well, not found out about it, but you know, got involved in it. The mining reward was already about to be cut in half. So you can also say that was preloaded as well. I don't have a problem with that. Something like steam it, I have a problem with because the mining and steam it only lasted about a month and by the time, you know, more than a hundred people heard about steam it, it the mining no longer existed and it was all proof of stake from that point on. So I mean, that's the kind of scam that really, really bothers me. It's a straight up scam. There's no other way to say it. It's it's it's it is what it is. So no, I don't mind people programming on other projects, but again, if if they're pointless to just exit scam and get Bitcoin, this needs to be, you know, these people need to be hold accountable somehow, right? I mean, stop trusting them. Stop trusting Dan Laramar. I hear he scammed everybody with bit shares. Now if he's on steam it, when steam it employs, he's going to do another one until he's actually stopped. There are people stop, you know, believing in these guys. They just they they were once their once their scam runs out of steam, they're just going to start another scam. I think he's going to be in jail, but that's just my opinion. He is not going to follow that one up. Let's move on to issue four. Are you on? Yeah, I'll just give it. Let let let let the cards lie where they will. Issue four iOS 10 Apple released a new version of their mobile operating system this week. iOS 10. One of the major features is an upgraded messaging app that is now much more than just text and photo messaging. The new app features stickers, scribbling and plugins. Plugins, which includes games, gifis and thanks to circle, the ability to send Bitcoin to anyone in the world. Tom Vays, circle in iOS 10 Messenger, a big deal or nothing at all. I'm not sure. I I I don't know. This story got me, right. I I I don't think it's bad. I don't think it's all that great. It's incredibly easy to use and what I look for is if you have your account set to USD and someone sends you Bitcoin, it converts into USD. If you have your account set to Euros and someone sends you dollars or Euros, it converts them to your desired currency. Could be a big deal. So what this story is telling me is that unlike Coinbase, which is a complete cluster, I try not to curse in the show, but I guess I have to. Unlike Coinbase, which is a complete cluster, it looks like Circle actually knows what they're doing. Instead of their CEO, you know, constantly being wrong about where Bitcoin needs to be, Circle is just saying, hey, we're just going to use Bitcoin. We're not going to care about the block size, we're going to let people that actually know what they're doing, deal with that issue. We're going to stick to money transmission. And that's what Circle is doing. Circle also realized that, hey, we're not going to survive doing just Bitcoin. We need to be the new PayPal and not just move Bitcoin around, move all currencies around. So it looks like Circle really knows what they're doing. I mean, I was, I've been very critical of Jeremy Lair for years, probably because the first time I ever heard him speak, he said something very stupid and I never let him forget it. He stood on stage and said that central banks should have a stay in a direction of Bitcoin. I thought that was a very inappropriate statement at a Bitcoin event. And he hasn't been saying anything like that. What he's been doing is he's been building a legitimate company that utilizes Bitcoin to the best of its abilities. I am also not an Apple user. I had a Mac, I didn't like it. Back to Windows, I've never had an iPhone in my life. I've always been Android. I had an iPad, iPad 1, which like the high, like the $800 one, you know, with the maximum storage and all the stuff which became a paperweight two years ago when all the apps needed the latest Apple operating system on the iPad, but the memory in that iPad couldn't support the new operating system. So my iPad is now an $800 iPad is now a paperweight and I've been very critical of Apple for that. I've been critical of Apple in general. They're very close source. So I'm not sure what this means. I mean, it's great that you can send Bitcoin person to person, but Apple knows who you are. You'll probably be sending you as the person to person. I mean, I, again, I don't see that much of a need unless, especially if circle is getting into cross-border payments. If you can pay your friend in, I don't know, in I'm trying not to use a country that is on the US, you know, flagless. If you're trying to pay a person in Australia through iMessenger and you want to, you know, send dollars and you want them to receive Australian dollars, circle will just convert it for you, right? I'm not sure how circle works. I've never used circle. E and UU circle, you'll have more to say on that. Will circle be able to just convert? Also, I'm assuming I either need an account with circle or I need iMessage to connect to my bank account and then circle connects to that. Again, and if both people are connected with circle, the one part I didn't like in the article when it says we're using the blockchain. But if I'm using iMessage and I have a circle account and I'm sending a payment to UThomas through circle, even if you're in Australia and you have a circle account, I'm not really using the blockchain, right? I'm just using circle. It's going internally. So it's just another payment system where Bitcoin is an option. I mean, it's nice, but there's nothing revolutionary about it. I don't know. Maybe I'm missing something. Go for it. Ian. It is just another way of moving Bitcoin around through a secondary system. I do think side point that given the new developments in iMessage, I think we'll see a release of iMessage for the Android platform. I think they want to compete with Snapchat and they're going to have to be multi-platform to do it. I was also impressed by what tone said. The CEO of circle had to write an impressive zero medium articles to create this software. He had to write zero tweets. I was really impressed at what they could do with all those non-tweets and all those non-medium articles. Whereas I used to have a really neutral view of Coinbase. The more he tweets, the more he writes medium articles, the worse it gets. Coinbase needs to essentially be quiet and do what circles doing. Write great software like this. Be there on the first day. Have all the articles set up. This was an impressive press rollout as well. They went day and day with the Apple Keynote. They had all the Bitcoin magazine type people ready to go with articles. I thought it went really well and it's an interesting new software. Ian, what do you think about circle Bitcoin? Yeah, I kind of had the same same thought as tone did. I do use circle all the time. How I get paid for my articles, the selling Bitcoin on circle. I always got a slightly better price on circle than on Coinbase. They also get less hassle on circle because I know a lot of the dark net market guys from some of the interviews I've heard already and spoken to. When they're in a pinch and they need to quickly get some coins, they tend to go to circle because there's less questions asked. I don't know because I don't frequent dark markets. I research them whenever I wrote my book. I'll leave it at that and how I conducted that research. I never got any trouble with them, but I think part of the thing is that I'm only selling Bitcoin. I think a lot of people run into regulatory issues when they're buying Bitcoin. They just see me selling a couple of hundred dollars worth of Bitcoin every week. They don't just have your money going into the bank or whatever. I know some people have complained about they put in the circle note for that bet and then they got in their circle account flag. I don't know if that's true. That was circle that's just not smart. Definitely. That's where. I'm going to say he was joking when he did it. But anyways, I do think it can't, as far as it being a big deal, it's sort of like, your favorite sports football team gets back up linebacker. You might know a lot about it and it might seem like a big deal to you, but to someone who does a pay attention to your team is not a big deal. I think it shows how ahead of the curve circle is that they're already on this while Coinbase is not. They always do seem to be a little bit ahead of Coinbase. A lot of things. They've had that switch at the dollar, switch at the euros feature on their website for a while. That's pretty cool. If you want to hold up Bitcoin, hold down to your rent and Bitcoin, but not have it drop out on you. I don't think there's going to be the killer app that's going to push people into the mainstream. I don't know how it's going to be. If it's just for settling in dinner bill, if it's going to be that much better than Apple Pay or PayPal or something like that, I think it's good for circle, but it's not going to be the killer app. We need something that fixes the on-ramp issue or really solves a problem and isn't just something piggybacking off or something else. Maybe if there's a local Bitcoin's Uber app where you can get someone to show up to your house in 20 minutes and trade you Bitcoin for cash, probably run into some regulatory issues, but something like that maybe you can buy my cereal. I remember Telegram got a Bitcoin app and everyone's like, oh, this is it. Telegram's so popular. It passes by with a little blip over a million. It really depends on whether or not people use this. If you use this to reach more people through your iMessages, maybe it's a big deal. There's been other ways to send Bitcoin on Facebook, Twitter and Reddit and other services and none of these really caught on. None of these really took off. Early adopters used them for the first couple weeks, sent them to their friends, tried to get celebrities on board or whatever it didn't really pan out. This might be another one of those. Yeah, no. So I thought Apple Pay kind of died, which is why they're probably, Apple is probably now more open to third party money transmitters. I read about a British guy who spends money on his watch all the time. Maybe it's better in England, not sure. I think I'm not like in Apple too. I'll never forgive them for, I'm an Android user and a PC user, but I'll never forgive them for the, not when I first started going to Bitcoin, but within six months or a year when they were just taking every Bitcoin off of the store. Now I see wallet companies will publish the iOS first. I used to write about Android games and apps and stuff. I always hate it being a second-class citizen with app companies and it's disappointing to see. I mean, I get why I do that to business decision, but I wish there'd be more loyalty to Android and Google. Yeah, this is never too tough. You know, wallets and was always fair to Bitcoin. Yeah, no, I agree with that. I mean, I guess that I was never, I've never had an iPhone. So that problem never affected me, but I don't remember those days in 2013 when there were like YouTube videos, people like taking their sniper rifles and like shooting up their iPhones in order to protest that the wall is being dropped. And you're right, they are really like some wallet companies are releasing on iOS. It's like every time I talk about my favorite wallets, which were air bits and my helium, people are like, oh, bread wallet, bread wallet, and I'm like, I don't know bread wallet. I don't trust bread wallet. I don't know it. And then finally like six months ago, I'm like, all right, fine. Let me check out bread wallet. I spent like 10 minutes looking for the goddamn app. I'm like, where the hell is bread wallet? And then I find out it doesn't even exist on Android. I'm like, but then why are you telling me that the bread wallets good? I mean, there's no way I can possibly test it out. I'm not a, I'm not an Apple supporter. I'm not a big fan of Apple. But anyway, but oh, one more thing on Circle, I think where Circle had the big advantage is that it didn't nickel and dime people for small transactions. Like the stupidity of Coinbase was that they treated a high volume user the same as a small user. So if you only want to buy like 50 or $100 worth of Bitcoin, they put you through the same AMLKYC procedure as someone that was trying to buy like $3,000 worth of Bitcoin. And Circle said, you know what, we're not going to do that. We're going to have one set of standards for small transactions and one set of standards for large transactions. Again, I'm just speculating, I've never used either of them because I know that when people need to buy Bitcoin and small transactions, they tend to prefer Circle because it's faster, they get a better rate and they have a lot less overhead to deal with and they don't have get these emails saying, hey, what are you going to use this for just like, you know, 60 bucks worth of Bitcoin? Now, that's been my impression, but I've never used either one. I prefer peer-repear systems. Yeah, go ahead, Ian. There is like a, I think it might be like $600 or somewhere around there where you know, the regulation ramps up. Right. You know, just, you know, the government doesn't care if you buy under $1,000 worth of Bitcoin, but then when you get that, that might add your numbers. So then Circle and Coinbase. So yeah, I definitely agree with you on that that they make it a little easier to get into initially. I do think that spoiler alert, Coinbase is definitely working on a similar system and I wouldn't be surprised if in a week or two we see Coinbase on iBesage as well. They have to catch up. They have to catch up. Yeah, but by the time they come out with that Circle, they have a chat bot that sells you Bitcoin and you just, it's time for Coinbase to use all that money and hire some programmers and catch up. I don't know what they're doing otherwise. No, they're wasting their money and sending their CEOs to, you know, argue against the block size. It's, now, it sounds like Circle Circle is actually spending their time doing work and Coinbase is wasting their time playing politics. Moving on to the exit question. Circle, Venmo or PayPal. Who will win in the future? In D Martina. Well, we definitely got to hope that it's Circle, right? It's the claim people. Venmo, PayPal has kind of gotten on board a little bit, but circles, you know, people can hate on because it's regulated or, you know, but it has KML and KYC and AML laws, but someone's got to fill that role and they've been filling it pretty well. It's, it works, you know, I don't know. They're not perfect. Like there's a little tiny things about their app I don't like, but I mean, come on, man, PayPal or Venmo, you have a big circle there. Tones. I have no idea what Venmo is, but I so I'm going to ignore the existence of Venmo. I'm going to take Circle versus PayPal. I think Circle is way ahead technologically. So I think they do have an advantage to go after PayPal. The problem that they're going to run into is that PayPal is owned by eBay and eBay will protect their investment, right? So, yeah. They have split off from eBay, they're their own company now. Ah, yeah, but they're still, that's true, but do you foresee a future where eBay, you know, kind of starts ignoring PayPal and it starts accepting Circle as their payment processor? If eBay took Bitcoin directly, it would be a major threat to PayPal, but I do have a, I do have an answer to this question. Surprise trick question. PayPal owns Venmo. PayPal accepts Bitcoin and PayPal wins. Moving on to predictions or a story of the week in D Martino, are you ready with a prediction or a story of the week? No, have, um, have Tom go first, I guess. I don't know your story. You can go with that. Just tell him where they can get the book. Yeah, sure. You can get book on Amazon over stock.com, walmart.com. It's all about, I mean, most people listening to this probably aren't going to learn too much as far as how to use Bitcoin. So, you know, it's called Bitcoin Godbook. It's sort of for beginners, but I have a lot of stuff on the history they might find interesting. I have an entire section dedicated to scams, which, you know, I wish I could update that. I had some new ones, but, you know, we got, we got Gal miners and Paycoin. We got Mt. Gox. We got a mint pile. A lot of different scams to talk about in there. I got history of digital currencies. So going all the way back to Digi Cash, you know, B money, Ego, all that stuff's covered. So if you're interested in to crypto history, I got stuff from the original Cypher punk mailing list. We got quotes in there from it. So, yeah, if you're interested, check it out and you can get it through Perse. If you want to use Bitcoin or overstock.com, take the Bitcoin to. And if you want it signed, you can just send it to me, and hit me up on Twitter or else any of my home address and just don't come. And you've got to figure out people watching this show. They have a whole bookshelf full of Bitcoin books. They want to get this one so they have the complete set. You want to go next year, and you're interested in an opolis mastering Bitcoin and your book of Satoshi and maybe that blockchain book. And there's a lot of good ones out there. So check it out. Where can they, where can they check it out? Like Bitcoin guidebook.com or something like that? No, I haven't set up a website. I need to get working on, but all right. Well, they just they just have to buy it on purse.io. Perse.io. Another plug for where I work. Yeah. All right. Tom Vays, your prediction or story of the week? All right. I'm going to do both. I'll try and make this quick. So my story of the week is, oh, God, I can't really tell I'm saying this. R3, getting more money. I mean, I guess they're not as silly as Ripple because they don't have their own internal token. But that's another just complete. Oh, they should have printed R3 coin. They missed a step there. They should have printed a coin. Oh, boy, they could have peaked. They couldn't pay in Peter Todd and that coin. Just been like, here's the garbage. There you go. Go away. R3 is a, I think R3 is a complete joke. I think they're nonsense. I don't think they know what they're doing at all. Like, honestly, I don't think they know what they're doing. I don't see them lasting. I don't know what they're trying to sell to banks. I think banks have finally realized that, wait a minute, we don't want to show our transactions to everybody. Are they trying to speed up settlement? They're not. I mean, I heard the representatives talking about the problem of solving back office in three-day settlement. And then I spoke to the, I think the CEO or the founder. And then he's like, no, where'd you get this idea? And I'm like, oh, because you are people are going to conferences and talking about it. I don't think R3 knows what they're doing. I think it's insanity. I don't think there is an update in settlement times. I've just been told this morning that ACH is now going to take one day. One day ACH. I don't understand why ACH takes a day. ACH can be instant. If they want it to be, it's a regulatory problem. I've said this on this show over a year ago and I'll say it again. Three-day settlement is not a technological problem. It's a regulatory problem. The moment they want the problem to go away, it could have gone away with 1995-1950. It doesn't need the blockchain. It doesn't need Bitcoin. I was told this morning that the the Natcha or something, Natcha, something like that, regulatory agency has a countdown on their page and they are counting down to one day ACH, perhaps as a argument against Bitcoin. That's fine. You think Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency could compete with Swift or something like that? Well, again, compete with Swift in what way? Bitcoin transactions are pretty much instant. Bitcoin transactions are within seconds and settlement takes 10 minutes. Un average. I know the blocks are a little full. Let's say settlement takes one hour. I think everyone will agree that settlement on Bitcoin happens within the hour but your notification of a transaction happens within seconds. Swift can give you settlement in seconds. It's a trusted system. If you go and trust the party to trust the party, Swift can give you instant settlement. Bitcoin can't compete with that. What Bitcoin does is it creates borderless, permissionless transactions and Swift can't compete with that. They're not competing with they're not like in direct competition. Swift and all these internal systems, it's regulation that prevents instant settlement, not technology and Bitcoin allows quicker settlement but that can easily be resolved with a regulatory drop. Swift cannot compete with Bitcoin for permissionless payments. It's just not designed for that. No bank care. I don't think they're in competition. I just think they're different. Bitcoin beats all these systems in both settlement and permissionless but there's nothing stopping these banking systems from just crushing Bitcoin on settlement time. They just don't want to or regulations preventing them. I know China and Russia proposed Swift alternatively because Swift is notoriously insecure and loses like I believe billions maybe just hundreds of millions of dollars but I was just wondering if you thought yeah but if but if those costs are passed on to the consumer why would the banks care? Well the banks don't really care. They passed the costs on to the consumer. Like in Europe right now the banks are starting to charge people negative interest because the central banks are starting to charge them negative interest. So the costs get passed on to the consumer. Also when it comes to these like the late settlement system whoever has the money for an extended amount of time can then use it, can use that money, can lend it out again. So these are all regulatory problems. They're not technological problems. The technological advancement and Bitcoin is being permissionless and the banking system has not hinted that the does the direction they're playing to go. They're like digging their heels and to go in the opposite direction to need more permission in order to send payments but as far as settlement and finality they can speed that up. That's regulation. That's not technology. Their CTOs and their tech departments are way better programmers than what we have in the than what R3 has. That's just a joke. So anyway that was my story of the week is just a nonsense with R3. My prediction is that I mean we've now seen Monero go back down to $9 from 15. And I said that back when we were talking about Monero as it was hitting like 5-7 bucks I said look I don't know where the bubble is going to end but when the bubble ends it's going to fall 90% like everything else falls 90% only in the case of Monero and all these other anonymous coins. I think that bubble bubble is going to pop. I think this is a hype cycle. I think the hype cycle is going to move to another you know fresh hype cycle. These anonymous coins are not really all that useful. Look it's nice that the darknet markets are now accepting Monero but no one uses Monero. No one uses Monero. I mean first you need Monero ATM machines. They need Monero on ramps. Why would someone use Monero? This is all hype. This is all traders. This is all speculation. And this bubble is going to go down and I think the crest of this bubble is going to come with a zero cash. I have not looked into zero cash much but it's already hit way too many you know orange hinting on red scam flags for me. I'm not calling it a scam yet. I have not looked into it but all of my little flags are like flags. It can be logically very sound but it does have a large pre-mind. The pre-mind it's just every look I have not looked into decash. I haven't read their paper. I know they just did some kind of an audit on their code which is nice but Satoshi did an audit on this code a shitload of times because I'm sure there was more than one person looking at it. He ordered his white paper. I know several times by sending it out, chaining a lot of words, making sure that it's perfect before releasing it. Nobody orders these white papers these days. So it's nice that they're doing these things but just every time I hear Zuko speak it's just like I raise an eyebrow. Every time I hear him speak and he's everywhere. He's doing the complete tour to all his all these events, pitching his product. This just feels a theory amish to me. There's just so much hype, so much money. They already have a team of like 12 people. All of these people need to get paid. They're raising money. They need to pre-mind so they can pay all these developers. Look, that's not how you create new technology. You create new technology like what happened with Bitcoin. It's a bunch of people putting their heart into it, believing in something and hoping there will be a payout. You don't get the payout first and then develop it. I need to look into it some more. Maybe I will. Maybe I won't because no one is compensating me for looking into this stuff and scam busting. But it's just already raising so many flags in my head. It's just by hearing people talk about it. And I think they're going to be on path to that. I usually put a new thing right before my mount stupid graph. I've been thinking about putting one coin in there, but I think it's unnecessary. One coin is such an obvious Ponzi that no one in the current Bitcoin crypto space is going to be involved in it. It's just insanely obvious. There's no reason to add them to my mount stupid chart. But I think one truth coin comes out. I'll take a look at it. I think the steam it will implode by then. And I'm waiting for my for my next prediction. And I think all of these anonymous coins will implode because I don't think they're necessary. Bitcoin is doing the job just fine. It's anonymous enough. And I think there will be this push to create more anonymity as a layer on top right into the wallet. And if there was a bigger need for an anonymity, which may come and the developers will put it anonymity into the protocol, which I'm still not sure I want. I would rather have Bitcoin kind of stay as it is, just scale to handle more transactions. But I think anonymity should be a layer on top because my goal is to get some government nation to put their tax revenue and tax spending through the Bitcoin blockchain onto the protocol after it can handle the volume so that you can't obfuscate those government transactions. But then if the government is using a wallet that is a layer on top that gives it an anonymity, that would be a red flag. What are you hiding? But users should be using those layers on top for their anonymity. So I think my prediction is the Anon Altcoin bubble will be coming to an end. Very good. And now a story of the week. Very much looking forward to tomorrow's party called blowing off steam, a crypto pollusa. Started by our good friend Jackson Palmer who saw that we wrote a post on steam and made some money. And so he wrote a post on steam and he made some money. And Jackson's donating all the money he made to this party, which should be fantastic. Send me a DM if you're in the San Francisco area we can get you an invite. It should be great fun tomorrow at 20 mission blowing off steam, a crypto pollusa. Oh, we're out of time. Until next time. Bye. Bye.