The Bitcoin Group, the American original. For over the last 10 seconds, the sharpest Satoshi's, the best Bitcoin's, the artist, cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Gabriel D. Vaan from Future Rent. Thanks for having me, panelists. Is there another one? Thomas from the world. All the way down to 1.91 Bitcoin's, or even lower to a current of around 0.88 Bitcoin's coin. As Kevin Zau, digital currency analyst, told CoinDesk, ZEC is still pure speculation at this point. Gabriel, divine, your thoughts on the Z crash. Well, I think it was completely predictable. The issuance model launched by the Zcash team was meant to garner a lot of interest in the beginning by severely restricting the supply. That's not that big of a deal, actually. I can understand. But with Bitcoin, for example, it has these tiers, whereas the most in the beginning, it goes down by half approximately every four years. The Zcash team took that 10,000 steps farther by having a ridiculously small reward in the beginning that rapidly inflates the monetary supply over a matter of days. I really can't think of another reason to do that other than marketing. It's a pretty cheap ploy. I think that anybody who, how can I put it? Anybody who invested in mining equipment in the beginning, anybody who actually traded and tried to buy Zcash to speculate on its value going up from the beginning got royally screwed by that. It was totally predictable. I was thinking about setting up a short, but I just thought, geez, I was a little conflicted. Is there a moral consideration there? First of all, I'm in the internet. I'm a pundit. If I'm going around saying, I'm short on it just now. That's a little bit effy. But in general, it's like, wow, it's totally stealing candy from a baby. As Vene Gupta says, these young males who are overwhelmed by testosterone and the risk tolerance that it supposedly induces. It's a question whether. Also, the lack of controls in the crypto space, it's quite random. You've got 13-year-olds, you know, speculating on these cryptocurrencies. So, setting up a short like that is really kind of definitely taking from the bag holders. But it is an easy trade. And anybody who is buying is a complete fool. This article was written two days ago and the price was 1.91 Bitcoin. I just checked the price now. It's 0.88, so it's gone down more than 50% in two days in addition to, you know, all of the time since then. So it's really, really obvious to see that this thing was just a big hype cycle. I'm pretty disappointed in Zuko, who is an old crypto head, cited in the original Bitcoin mailing list message from Satoshi, I believe. Not cited, but at least links to it, his work in cryptography. And I think that the technology behind ZCash and Zero Coin before it are important steps. I think launching an alternative cryptocurrency with this on the blockchain is maybe not that important. On the other hand, certainly, you know, those who say that altcoins make good test nets for Bitcoin could definitely make the point that something like ZCash would be an ideal candidate for a test net to test out anonymity privacy features for Bitcoin on a separate blockchain. On the other hand, you know, it's possibly just a way to enrich anybody involved with the project. You can really see people throwing away their reputations on the ZCash page. And you know, it's possible that ZCash and Monero, Dash, that these privacy-oriented altcoins could actually maintain relevance over the long term by staying one, two, three steps ahead of the Bitcoin code base in integrating privacy and fungibility and types of features into their coins. It's conceivable that these test net altcoins could maintain a little bit of value as experimental blockchains before these features are brought into Bitcoin, which is going to be naturally a larger and more conservative code base. So it's conceivable that there could be a little bit of value here. However, I think that it's quite minimal. It's basically looking at something halfway in between the Bitcoin test net whose coins have a value against the dollar. I think they're worth a cent or something. I mean, it's like hundreds of thousands of dollars to Bitcoin test net. It's a valuable resource to be able to test this and the miners are incentivized to securitize the Bitcoin test network so people can test out their apps. I think it was a wonderful thing. And so this is kind of almost an extension of that. And I really don't think any one of these is going to be worth all that much more than the Bitcoin test net long term. But conceivably, it could have a little bit of a use in that sense. Now I think the really question, real question here is, what was the point of this crowd sale? Was the point as Gabriel said, developers, or maybe the let's be reasonable? The point was to fund development of ZCash. This was to outfit a team presumably for multiple years to develop this cryptocurrency to find the mistakes and to fix them. Was the crowd sale a success at doing this? I don't think so. It hasn't really established a price for. It hasn't built upward. It's actually deflated like a balloon. If you look at the distribution, the ZCash team didn't pre-mind this. They didn't instamine it as far as I know, as far as I understand. They took something they're calling a Founders Reward. There's a 10% or 20% cut of every ZCash mind, which will be sent to the Founders addresses, which they even said were hard-coded, which I found like incredibly security problems. Nobody breaks that address in the future. But I guess you could have a patch. If you could have a patch that updates the Founders Reward, go ahead and set it to my address. Don't even bother with those official addresses. Let's get to the chase there. But did this crowd sale succeed? I don't think so. I don't think that the early people got to get in and get out. I don't think that a lot of people bought it early and sold. I think a lot of people lost money on this crowd sale, create a lot of unhappiness in the community. At the same time, hype wise, it was fantastic. We have the economist, we have the Wall Street Journal, CNBC, these other large, outlets coming out saying, ZCash could be the future. ZCash could be better than Bitcoin. ZCash could be worth more than Bitcoin, all the usual talking points that they love to say Bitcoin is not good enough of that whole track record of eight years of hanging around not crashing. But crashing in price, but not in a software crash. But I don't think the ZCash marketing hit succeed. I think they lost a lot of people lost money. What do you think gave anything more on ZCash? Yeah, actually, a couple of things you mentioned there are very interesting. I completely agree that the marketing side was very successful, but the actual content was a big flop. I mean, you've already found some nasty bugs. That's okay. I mean, after you launch, Bitcoin had terrible bugs in the beginning, but of course, Bitcoin did not have a marketing push behind it. So it's not a one-to-one comparison. You mentioned the founders reward. I specifically called that out when I glanced at the white paper, which undoubtedly is full of real math and bunch of stuff that's over my head. And, you know, Zuko, doing, I'm assuming real research and real science to create these privacy features. But when I got to the list that's literally in the white paper of founders' addresses to which mining rewards will be shunted every block, definitely raised some alarm bells. And of course, the community is responding to that with a push toward ZCash classic. Of course, this idea of the classic fork, which, you know, it doesn't necessarily have to be anything before the original, just as Bitcoin classic showed, which, you know, it would be a fork off of the current Bitcoin, which they claimed the reason they called the classic was that they claimed that it was the original vision for Bitcoin, which is, you know, I would say a gray zone. But with ZCash, I mean, hey, you know, you take this idea, just throw up a new chain, anybody who wants those privacy features can go to that. And the miners will make more, possibly, depending on the exchange rate. So it's very, very attractive for miners. And I'd also like to bring in Ethereum into this conversation. Everybody's favorite, Alacoin. Ethereum, as many have described over the years, really built its mining infrastructure on the back of Bitcoin history, wherein the Bitcoin miners went through the phases of CPU mining in the very, very beginning with just weak computer CPUs. Then they started using GPU graphic cards to do the mining. And then finally, they had custom created ASIC chips to do mining. Now during that process, the mining farms that were based on graphics processing basically had to write off all of their hardware that they had bought for that phase because it became useless in the face of custom created hardware that specifically created to be very efficient for Bitcoin mining. And they just had all these GPU cards sitting around doing nothing. So when these Alcoins spun up with ASIC resistant mining algorithms, a mix use mining algorithms, they were stoked. They said, great, we can put all this old hardware that we can't sell for even part of what we paid for it and make a profit on this stuff and sell all the Alcoins that we mined for Bitcoin. Maybe hold them if we think we're speculating, but not really. None of them are going to be worth anything. We're just utilizing our old hardware in order to make more Bitcoin, make more profits. And the Zcash mining situation, which very much apparently lends itself to GPU mining, was a perfect case for Ethereum miners who had been using GPU mining rigs for months and months to shunt off some of their power into a more profitable GPU mining. And since Zcash's launch, I believe the Ethereum hash rate has plunged something like 40%. Somebody can hop in on the chat if I'm wrong about that, but it's crashed very suddenly since the Zcash launch. And this is the type of thing you can expect with these Alcoins fighting it out. And the miners really only care about Bitcoin, which is still the only truly used cryptocurrency that has an actual use case, has an actual pedigree. I think that's a great point, Gabe, on Zcash Classic. Zcash, I've heard that Ethereum Classic was just adopted by BTCC. Therefore going, the Ethereum chain, they're going with the Ethereum Classic or the original chain. We could see the same kind of thing here where Zcash Classic and possible to say could be very popular with miners as they get more returns. Still, if the crowd sale worked, if the Zcash team got enough funding, if they got enough hype to get enough funding, maybe it worked anyway. It's probably still a success, even though a lot of people lost money. And it's not really value wise looking at the coin of the future right now. It's also a good point that everyone was, indeed, selling their Zcash back to Bitcoin. Moving on to the exit question. Exit question, Zcash price next week, up or down, Gabriel, D'Von. Looking at the issuance model, I think the obvious direction is down. I do believe that Zcash will hit a floor, a speculation floor at some point. I don't know when that is. I'd have to look a little closer, find some really shallow point in the curve where it starts to even out. And I would assume that the floor of the price will be there. But I have a feeling it has another long leg down from here. Well, it's certainly speculation. We have no information. There exists currently no use for Zcash. Based upon this information, the price will go down. Moving on to issue two. Issue two, Bitcoin tanks on report that China is considering a crackdown. The cryptocurrency Bitcoin hit a low of 787 after seeing the heights of 740 and 745. Just look at the price of Bitcoin in this chart from Bloomberg. It's been up and down fighting for the 700 barrier with a four month high of 743 on Thursday. There is worry that Chinese authorities think that investors are using Bitcoin to illegally move money out of the country. Gabriel D. Vaughn, I ask you, is China cracking down? And if China crack down, would it really do anything anyway? No and no. The story about China cracking down on Bitcoin capital outflows has been popping up every six months, if not more. So far, it has not been backed up with a shred of evidence. And what I think very well might have gone on since ZeroHedge was the only source for this information. And it's spuriously claimed as source at Bloomberg for it. Although there's no content on the Bloomberg site about this. So that means maybe somebody is pretending that they're talking to a Bloomberg reporter behind the scenes. Something like that. I think it's pretty obvious what we're seeing here is market manipulation. I have a feeling somebody set up a short and wanted to make a quick profit and had a connection to ZeroHedge and floated this completely false and erroneous story. We've gotten repeated word out of China from Bitcoin figures there that there's no word of that at all happening in the media over there. And I was very skeptical. I was like, oh, really Bloomberg went for it. When looking for evidence to support this claim and there was nothing at all. So I'm going to say that this is completely bogus. It's total BS. The sell-off might not have even been from this. But if it was, I have a feeling that that was a manipulation ploy through the media. And if anybody has any automated bots to try to trick them, that type of thing. I think we're seeing raw manipulation. However, I do think on the technicals, we were due for a correction after the very steep shoot, nearing the four-month highs or five-month highs, four-month. So I think it's perfectly healthy from a technical analysis point of view and perfectly fine. But I do have a feeling that that was very possibly market manipulation. I agree. And I watched some of the tone veys show this week. You guys should all check it out on ToneVays YouTube channel. Tone is down at the Latin American Bitcoin conference today. Otherwise, I'm sure you'd be joining us. But Tone was very excited. Basically he said, based on the huge rise of Bitcoin, what we really needed was a correction back to the state. It was only 80. It may have been caused by the news. It may be a natural correction. But Tone's opinion, and again, these are all just speculation, was that if we retracted to 650, we would shoot up to 1100 and something crazy after that. That we really are on a crazy updraft. But there is a little of correction that has to be taken out of the system. These Chinese articles keep coming along. It kind of reminded me of an Alice in Wonderland, when she's drinking this and eating that and getting big and growing smaller. We needed to drink a little of this. We needed to go down a little bit. But we're going to keep eating that cookie. We're going to keep getting bigger and bigger. I think Bitcoin continues. Every time this story comes out, that first of all, they take the Chinese all as one people. They believe middle class, the low class, the high class are all doing the same things. We know that's not true. They're doing different things. It is as much as we'd like to believe it very unlikely that the middle or lower class is up trying to are using Bitcoin now. We are probably seeing more wealthy people using it to hedge their funds, wealthy people who move their money out of the country using it. Even then, we don't know if the Chinese exchanges are actually used by Chinese people or just privacy conscious Americans and Europeans who are using TOR and other networks to trade on the Chinese market. Another couple of other factors in this situation with the prices, BitFinex, which was hacked a few months ago is an absolute change. I've seen a graphic that swings this at BitFinex shows. BitFinex down, crash, BitFinex down, crash, oh, I hate that graphic, I shake my fist at it. Yeah, it's just a shit show. They're completely incompetent losers over there. The outage is at BitFinex timed perfectly with the drops in Bitcoin. It's very conceivable that we could be seeing actually a combined effort to win some gains on a short possible hacks of Bitcoin to shut it down. Little DDoS here, little behind the scenes there, little throw a little fake stuff out at zero-edge, throw them some fake things from a TOR email account and whatever. But I think in a bigger picture, it's kind of interesting that we're seeing this media coverage in marketwatch.com. I'm not sure what kind of pedigree this site has, but I will say that the reporting was very sloppy. He didn't, this guy Joseph Adonalfi is obviously a total idiot. He didn't even look into this stuff. And according to Bloomberg, he says, according to Bloomberg, Chinese authority believe XYZ. I don't see a LinkedIn article there. So he's basically just going off the rumor too and not doing any research. Dude, you're not helping. You're hurting the situation with your idiotic fake reporting. Quit your job and go become a garbage man or something. Do more for society. A lot of journalism does kind of roll once the story gets going. They just copy and paste the other story, put the quotes in, rewrite a couple paragraphs, change the headline and it's out. So I'm sure it's out. We're not seeking. We're not seeking guys just desk filling. Well, I think as we see some transformation in the economy, as we see things like the Brave Browser and the Yours social network, things that are running on Bitcoin, Bitcoin tends to be really bad for fraudsters. Well, let's not say around the board. I mean, there's obviously a lot of fraud that is also enabled by Bitcoin. But certain things like the ad model on the internet for a content production, having a payment system that's native to the internet, I think it might help with finding quality reporting instead of clickbait. We may see in the future. So we're not worried about China and we think the Bitcoin price will be fine leading into the exit question, the very predictable. The Bitcoin price next week, up or down, Gabriel D. Vynne. Even it's going to be exactly one Bitcoin as Chris Ellis said. Exactly one Bitcoin, but we're slightly more. I'm going to continue on this uptrend prediction. My prediction was wrong. I just like to point out that I predicted 70, teen for today and it's currently about 695, something like that. I had like 800 or something. So I'm sure I'm fine. It's important not to keep track of those predictions. Going on to issue three, Venezuelans are turning to Bitcoin as the Boulevard crumbles. The Venezuelan Boulevard has reached that beautiful point of acclimation only known to the German Deutschmark that it's now being weighed in piles of cash. Don't even bother looking at the values. Just weigh it or burn it. Look at the black market rate for the Venezuelan Boulevard versus the dollar. Ooh, that's a jagged drop at the end. People in Venezuela are finally waking up to Bitcoin as one of these other charts here it is shows us the weekly volume trading on local Bitcoins with the Bitcoin through the roof. Is this another Cypress situation? Will an entire country suddenly adopt the Bitcoin? Gabriel D. Vynne. I'm going to say no and no again. You know, this type of reporting is just, it's very click bait yet. It's not balanced. This is not a balanced article on courts. And yes, the inflation is crazy in Venezuela. Although I've been seeing some interesting reports floating around on my Twitter timeline our Twitter feed that the inflation rate in Venezuela was actually reported extremely inaccurately, wildly inaccurate. All throughout the mainstream media, just some idiot source who put together a percentage was quoted by all the mainstream sites. Once again, without any actual research into the real data, claiming hyperinflation when actually the inflation, they were claiming things like 6,000 percent and in the thousands of percent annual, when actually it was more like 55 or 60 percent, which is really terrible inflation, but it's 100x difference there. So, it's a really bad situation down there. The economy has already collapsed over the summer. It was just a disaster. The poor people down there are really suffering. Anybody who had any wealth moved it out of Bolivar's last year or the year before or is holding it, has been holding on to them for as short a time as possible and getting rid of them as fast as possible. And the Bitcoin volume, yes, it's going up exponentially. But you'll notice that it's still around 300 Bitcoin a week, which is a couple hundred grand. That's a little bit of activity. Nothing to write home about. That's how networks start. When you get to 1% in a percentage situation in a network, that's halfway to 100%. So remember that 200,000 bucks a week doesn't sound like a lot now, but if things keep growing exponentially like that, it starts to become pretty noticeable. So, that is something to keep an eye on. I think they're exaggerating a bit in this article. But certainly a place like Venice, Waila, Brazil, any place with high inflation, Turkey, Egypt, the list is growing slowly, but I have a feeling that we're going to see that list growing much more quickly next year. And I do have a feeling some quote unquote developed countries are going to be seeing crazy inflation, possibly double digits next year as well. And that's when I think we're going to start seeing tipping points where the volume really goes through the roof worldwide of Bitcoin. But it is still exponential, very steep. And I think that's the exact right point to focus on. Developed country versus developing country. Venice, Waila, for as much as we would like it to be Cyprus, the April 2013 Bitcoin event which caused the price to move from $30 or so coin to $250 a coin, attracting myself and many others to the Bitcoin wagon after that incredible success. The Cyprus situation was unique. Cyprus, as many of you know, is an island in the Mediterranean near Greece. And Cyprus was used as a tax haven. A lot of large gamblers, gangsters, princes, kings, whatever you want to call them, were moving their money through Cyprus. Cyprus had declared that they were going to put a tax on that money to try to fix their government and save their country. The gangsters, gamblers, whoever they are, didn't like this and started moving their money out through Bitcoin. So you have a completely different group of people. You have an international savvy group that's used to moving their money around. And then you have, sadly, the poor people of Venezuela. I wish that the poor people of Venezuela could back their money up into Bitcoin. But I'm afraid this is similar to the Greek situation we were talking to Andreas. And Andreas, as much as he had loved for his home country. And he believed that certainly the Greeks could adopt Bitcoin and they could get it and they could do this. The infrastructure wasn't there. The ATMs aren't there. The businesses that accept Bitcoin aren't there. It's just not really useful as a cash. It's more like somewhere you can save your money. Certainly it presents it. Prevents it from being destroyed if you hold onto your private key or memorizing it or that one of those options send it away. But it's just not useful for them yet. Now, if a developed country or something like Italy, Ireland, it's not on the radar, but let's say Japan, somewhere that has technological minded people, smart phone penetration. This is a country where Bitcoin could take off, not only be used as a backup of currency, but actually used as currency in a real-world way, which is solving the problem that Venezuela is facing where you can't buy anything because you have to have a wheelbarrow full of bull of bars, etc. Gabriel, do you find any other thoughts on Venezuela and Bitcoin? I think you made some really great points there, especially bringing this idea of Bitcoin as a payment network for first world countries where people are used to using apps like Venmo to move money around. It's not foreign cons. It's not going to be a foreign concept, say next year, 2018, when millennials pick up their phone and they're like, oh, it's a Bitcoin wallet. There's a balance, and then I send it around. And the great thing I just like to mention is, of course, as I completely agree, we're not really using other than for darknet purposes. We're not really using Bitcoin as a species yet for payments per se very much. A little bit here and there. It's kind of starting. But now that we have these off-chain capabilities coming down the pike with segregated witness lightning network, they're going to be coming just in time to handle a massive upsurge in transaction volume that will be necessary if people start to not just use Bitcoin as a way to pull out wealth from the fiat system and then inject it back in when it's needed again, like now, but instead just skip the whole fiat thing entirely and let it collapse and just transact directly in Bitcoin. I think by the time that's necessary, the tech will have just caught up to the need. That's the way we have to do it. If you build it, they will come. When I'm reminded of one more reference to an old movie, it's kind of a classic movie. I think the round called Must Be Crazy. In this movie, an airplane flies over a small African country and a coq bottle falls out of the airplane. You may think it's normal, but to them, they've never seen anything machined like a coq bottle. Everything's so shiny, all the corners are perfect. You have to imagine that Bitcoin is like this coq bottle. They could fall out of the sky to these people and they would be impressed by it's shininess and they would be confused how did you make it and they would ask a lot of questions. In the end, it's not going to be useful to them. They don't have the infrastructure to make more coq, to fill up the bottles, to refill them, to recycle them, to refill them again. None of that infrastructure is there. You gave them the coq bottle and they're not going to go much further than that. Don't have an exit question on this one. Let's move on to issue four. Issue four, the local issue. New York's Bitcoin hub dreams fade with licensing backlog. As we've covered exhaustically on this show, New York financial services director, Super Nintendo Loskey passed a very ambitious Bitcoin law in New York City demanding licenses and funds from the Bitcoin businesses if they wish to operate in New York. Many Bitcoin businesses such as shapeshift said no and simply blocked IPs coming from New York. Creating a strange situation where the world's financial capital is excluded from the world's future money. And now we've found out that because of Loskey abandoning the state to start his own consulting company, there's a huge backlog of licenses at the state of New York and regulation has done as many libertarians predicted and slow in the path of progress. Gabriel D. Vod, does the state got a state? Was this inevitable or is this Loskey's fault? Well, that's the false dichotomy. It's both, of course. It was very inevitable, extremely easy to see coming very easy to predict. We all did it here on the show and it's also Loskey's fault because he spearheaded the initiative. I just like to point out that this article on CNBC is absolute tripe. Let's see, it was released at 4.25am, Eastern time. That's interesting on the morning of Halloween. And I would just, you know, it's just absolutely chock full of ridiculous double speak, total status bullshit. It's completely ignoring the obvious issues with regulatory paradigms in general. It does not use the softening helper verbs that you would need to actually use in order to, you know, create an accurate article. You should be saying things like claimed might could have. You know, I've been doing a little filling in proofreading for a project and for some articles online and I, they're scientific articles and I'm finding myself really adding a lot of these words in because, you know, these are not facts. These are opinions held by various people. In the case of the science articles, they're generally researchers and scientists, but nevertheless, there's no such thing as perfect knowledge. So you can't just take it for granted and use these hard verbs. So this article is just absolute crap. It's by the Reuters staff, which of course Reuters is a CIA, you know, property. It's total cabal, B.S. It has no real reporting going on. So I'd like to just point out a couple of quotes from the article. The phrase, this is the first line of the article, New York's financial regulator had sites set on becoming a global hub for innovations like Bitcoin when it adopted trailblazing virtual currency rules last year. Well, you know, that is... It did is blazing trail, they were the first. Yeah, that is actually accurate. They blazed a trail. Whether they had sites set on becoming a global hub for innovations is totally arguable. I think that they were trying to keep them out because they're a threat to Wall Street, quite the opposite. So that's something that you might have said claimed to have sites set. For example, in any case, totally ridiculous. They also described Loskey as a quote, early advocate of virtual currencies when other regulators were still skeptical. When the reality is quite the opposite, obviously, this bit license is completely limiting and really has complete overreach in addition to clear risks for consumers, adopting the bit license and dangerous consumers. It's a classic example of how regulation is intended for corporations to maintain monopoly. It's intended for the companies who pay the bribes to the government and regulators and provide lucrative jobs to previous regulators like Loskey who went straight into the private sector after making this, you know, drawing up this regulation. As Eric Vore, he's pointed out in this article, you mentioned that his company, ShapeShift, which does exchange between Bitcoin and Altcoins automatically, a very cool product. He says Bitcoin, bit license, forces companies to quote, extract personal private information from users. And not only that, from the owners of the companies too, which is really, really honoris, and a cost five grand. 500 pages. So it's cost, you got to pay five grand a front, then you got to pay all your lawyers who just, of course, love regulation because they keep them in armani suits. The other mention that I want to make from this article is this little gem for companies, a stamp of approval from a tough regulator offered a chance to win over customers who remain dubious about the product. Well, no, no, that doesn't really work. I really don't think consumers trust New York regulators to tell them what companies are trusted with Bitcoin. I think that's something that worked 20, 30, 50, 100 years ago, maybe, with these licenses. But nowadays, anybody who has the wherewithal to educate themselves about such a sophisticated technological product as Bitcoin is going to be, if anything, a license is going to make them skeptical, like, wait a minute, they pay all those lawyers to get this license from the state. Hmm, what are they hiding? I'd rather go with a company like ShapeShift that's in Switzerland that doesn't deal with this at all. I can trust them because they're going to be able to use proper cryptographic security protocols and business practices in order to run a business that won't get hacked to in order to run a business that doesn't put their customers at risk. This is exactly the opposite. This author, who is not named, the staff of Reuters doesn't give a shit about that. They are shielding for their masters who pay their bills on Wall Street and trying to frame this totally restrictive and what's the word I'm using, Thomas? What's the word I'm thinking of? It's a restrictive and it's really authoritarian surveillance state style regulation. Of course, pushed all the businesses out of New York, which they completely ignore. In fact, state exactly the opposite by quoting Jerry Brito, who are Brito, whatever it is, he's the coin center guy. He's the guy who goes and tries to advocate on behalf of Bitcoin in Washington, which of course is just going to backfire and it has been backfire in the whole time. We don't need people like him. We need more cryptographers. We need more crypto economists like Blake Anderson. We need people to go and help these companies. We need more developers like Christoph Atlas. I disagree with him on some of his opinions on things. He's very, very informed. He's a very intelligent, security-minded programmer. We need people like that in the world. We don't need idiots to form a bridge between authoritarian governments who are directly threatened by Bitcoin and crypto anarchists. Forget it. This is the quote he says. I think it's going to be rare that companies say, we're not going to do business in New York. I don't think it's been rare. I don't think it's been rare. It's common. I think what we've seen here is a paradigm shift. What we've seen is a system previously which had people like Loskey to protect the consumers. Consumers kept their money in accounts. They kept their information in accounts and they kept their everything in the accounts. Someone like Loskey would come through to make sure those accounts were okay and they're going to take care of you. I think if we want to look at the good side of Loskey, that's what he is. He's trying to be a protector to people who are not good with their money, not good at sniffing out scams, not doing research. Also, at some cases, it's a black box. I can't look through the interface and see if things are being secured on the back end without someone to look through that code or have any kind of standards or encryption or testing. There's no way for me as a consumer to be protected. I think that's what Loskey's really about. I taped his speech a few years ago at the Money 2020 conference and I can tell you that from his own words, the Mt. Gox collapse was his JFK assassination. It was his 9-11. He was sitting there with the Japanese regulators and he said, I've heard this morning of the Mt. Gox collapse. I would do anything to help you. I'll sign my teams. I've got guys. We've been looking at this for months and the Japanese regulators looked back at him and they said, what is Mt. Gox? And Loskey, the whole world just melted and everything became clear and he was the one to protect the Bitcoiners and to protect the consumers from people like Carpellers who started out good, but then things became too complicated and who knows what happened. Something went wrong. The cold storage got placed under the cat and the hot storage was placed on the internet. Who knows what they did wrong? You don't know. We didn't have regulations. So that was his initial belief. But I come here not to bury him, but to praise him. Loskey acted as a capitalist. Loskey, from an outsider perspective, invaded the state, set up new laws that only he understood then exited the state to advise companies on those laws. Let us certainly praise him as an example. Morally, by our system, Loskey made more money because of what he did. Let us celebrate Loskey. Exit question. Wait a second. I'm not going to let that pass. That's ridiculous, Thomas. That's not capitalism. That's what they call crony capitalism, which is really just plutocracy. It's not real capitalism. He didn't create any value with that. He created a business model for himself. That's mafia. That's not capitalism. Fat capitalism is not what you know. It's who you know. Right. So he's a perfect example of the revolving door of government policy and how people enrich themselves. We're seeing that now in the upcoming election with the Clinton Foundation and how they use this front of a charitable organization in order to shunt money into their own pockets and trade political favors for cash. I think it's a really important point that you brought up, which is this paradigm shift. This old style thinking that you can slap regulation on something and you're going to protect people has always been faulty and it's always caused corruption. But it wasn't as visible because all the systems were bureaucracies. All the systems were pyramids. All the systems were paper and filing cabinets that you could easily forge. All the systems were credit card numbers that are your private and public key at the same time. Now that we're seeing a new system being built on free open source software and as Richard what's his last name? The famous computer scientist is fond of it. Richard Stallman, thank you. Yes. As he's fond of pointing out I'm pretty sure this quote is from him. Free open source software is not just to meant that people don't charge for it. It's also free is in freedom. If you're building a system with freedom at the basis as you say paradigm, if the paradigm is freedom from the ground up. So you have a free open source operating system, free open source networking protocols. You're creating these networks and if you try to slap a seeing eye at the top of the pyramid on top of the network, the rest of the network just laughs because you have no control. This is not your pyramid bro. You can try to look at us all you want. You can't do nothing. And so what we're seeing is this attempt to slap on bureaucracy onto a network and it completely fails. And in fact, it's so transparent that it's exactly the opposite as Eric Voorhees pointed out. It directly endangers the companies involved and the users involved instead of helping them. I think you're right. I think we really need to unpack Voorhees example here. What he's really saying is in the old system with the all seeing eye, the more information you had, the more safe you were. That was the old system. The new system you have, the more information you have, the less safe you are. For me as a customer of shapeshift, let's say I roll in there, I trade some Bitcoin for some Litecoin, I am safer, the less information they keep. If they log my IP for 24 hours for some reason, then delete it. I'm safer when they delete it. If they log my transaction for two weeks for some reason and then empty out the transactions, I'm safer. In the alternative, what law ski, what the old system is doing, they're saying, no, no, don't just leave those transactions out there. Link them to an account. Link them to a name. Link them to a social security number. The more links they put in, the less safe I am when that transaction inevitably gets hacked. That's really what we're doing is we're shifting to a situation where physical access, you're relatively safe. You can have a file cabinet in a back room of a locked office inside a locked government building with a military surrounding it and with the exception of Tom Cruise hanging from the ceiling, sliding into the room, you're fine. But now the problem is everything's connected to the internet and some kid in Hong Kong can slide through the ceiling. Four more kids from China can run in and three kids from Russia and two kids from America and one guy working for the CIA. They can all have your information and you don't even know they're having a whole party with your information. It's just too difficult. It's just the more information you add. That's why it's so interesting to see someone like Voorhees who's really as much as he's riding a line between legality and illegality, he is pushing the envelope of an account-free system which is actually safer. Any more thing more on the Bitcoin backlog in New York? I think he covered it really well there. All right. We're going to move on to prediction week. As usual, I've predicted and prepared nothing. Gabriel D. Vine. Are you ready with a prediction or a story of the week? Don't steal my story of the week. It's really obvious. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Okay, I'll go with a prediction then. I have been following this guy Cliff High. He's been exploding in popularity recently. He was on the Greg Hunters, USA Watchdog Show on YouTube last week. And this is a guy Cliff High with one F. He's on Twitter. He has a longstanding piece of software. He's been developing for 20 years, which does a linguistic analysis on the internet and makes predictions based on that. He kind of reads them and I feel like he kind of puts his own spin on it, which is relatively opinionated. But there is a lot of data that he gets that's genuine from his huge sweep so the internet. And according to his data, this is now, this is more Cliff High's prediction than mine. According to his data, he's expecting Bitcoin to shoot up to just over a thousand or a thousand ish and then go back to 888 and bounce around in there around that range for a while before shooting into above 10,000, I believe next year, late in the year at some point. So that is Cliff High's prediction of the week. I like any prediction that has Bitcoin going to above 10,000. I just hope I can still hold on to a couple of about that. My story of the week is just a simple congratulations to the Chicago Cubs, breaking 108 years of frutility. Truly, one of the greatest world series game sevens that I have ever seen back and forth and back and forth and just struggling to get back into the series after a three-one decline. They're masterful victory over the giants. They really earned it this year. I mean, I've always kind of rooted for the Cubs, but then this year they got a little Yankees. It was hard to root for them at points. They were so overpowering, so good. But then to come back from three-one and much respect to the Indians as well, really put on a good series. I think they've got a good team should be back in there soon. Gabe, any thoughts on the baseball? Absolutely. You go. I think, I definitely, first of all, 108 is the number of stitches on the American baseball. Secondly, I'd like to point out that back to the future two, wonderful movie, one of the best sequels ever made. Predicted Cubs win in 2015. They were very close to one year off. They also predicted that Miami would have a team by this time, which I believe it's now the Miami Marlins and not the four of Marlins anymore, right? It's been changed. It's the Miami Marlins. Yeah, yeah, correct. So they were right about that as well. And then I'd also like to point out that because the Cubs who weren't even in a world series for 71 years, won the World Series, all bets are off. Any weird off-chance thing that you could possibly think of is now completely on the table. We're talking about Bitcoin, Goin Mainstream. We're talking about Green Park, Jill Stein winning the president's ship in the US. All bets are off. Anything can happen now. I want that to be positive and I want that to be taken for positive. You can live your dreams and everything. Uh-oh. Oh, no. I can't hear you. That means that an orange-haired gentleman will take the election on Tuesday. I don't know if it broke out for you or for me. I think that's you. Yeah, wait, what are you saying? I want my dreams to come true. What are we saying? Yeah, we want our good dreams to come true. We don't want our bad ones to come true. This orange-haired gentleman could take the office on Tuesday. There's no good, there's no good outcome in all politics. And I'd like to give a shout out to the ever-eager Christopher Gilear in the chat who pointed out Loskey saying, I'm from the government and I'm here to help. And I think he is, but that's a good note to close on. Everyone should vote on Tuesday if you haven't already voted. And if you have it, there's this great system in California, vote by mail. You can do what's called a permanent absentee ballot. They just send you your ballot in the mail and you just fill it out when you want to. If you want to look up something on the internet, think about things. You do it. You vote at home. Vote by mail. Sign up for vote by mail. You can fill out a new registration card, check that box. Permanent absentee ballot. There's voting boxes. They call them postal boxes all over the place. And this incredible new vote by mail system. The state of Oregon has switched to vote by mail entirely, but the backwards country of the United States can't seem to get it together. Our voting systems are a nightmare. Don't get me started on the tabulators. They've stolen elections before. They could do it again. They didn't 2004. But let's just move on to a happy, happy Tuesday. Well, wait a second. Wait a second. I'd like to point out that everyone in the United States who's listening, it's not mandatory to vote. So I encourage you to make up your own mind, whether you want to participate in this system of supposed democracy. I want you to make up your own mind, do your own research, make sure that you are making up your own mind and looking at the evidence yourself and making up your own mind. For example, in several other countries like Australia, it is mandatory. They'll find you. They'll put you in prison if you don't vote. So exercise your right to choose whether to vote or not. I want to be the only show that says don't vote. If you're not smart, don't vote. If you have a red vote. I don't believe we live in a democracy. I don't believe in some of the tenets of democracy. And I think that we're in a situation where there's widespread voter fraud in this country. So I'm not participating in order to boycott this current system until things get better. I'm going to do nothing until things get better. Oh, we're out of time. There's no one. I'm on the show, aren't I? This is much better. I'm not doing anything. Oh, we're out of time. Until next time. Bye. Bye.