The Bitcoin Group, the American original. For over the last 10 seconds, the sharpest Satoshi, the best bitcoins, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists. Theo Goodman from Hasse online. Good evening everyone. Gabriel Divine from Future Rent. Hey Bitcoin, hey, posterity. Kyle Torpy from Coin Journal. What's up? Toned Vays from Liberty Life Trail. Hey everyone, glad to be back in New York versus the freezing cold of Russia. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network, moving on to issue one. Issue one. Traders, over a three year period. The IRS has woken up to Bitcoin and it asks Coinbase for the identities of traders for the last three years, a blanket and wide reaching demand for data from the centralized Bitcoin exchange. Coinbase to their credit has announced that they will, quote unquote, protect customer privacy and in its current form, they will oppose the government's petition in court. Theo Goodman, is this the beginning of the end of Bitcoin? Will all Bitcoiners be exposed and dragged to tax trails by the IRS? That's the end of Bitcoin and all Bitcoiners will be dragged to the IRS and be tax. I mean, tax man is going to tax. It should be no surprise to anyone. Coinbase is based in the US. They have to follow the US regulations. Everything, no real big surprise there. Sounds pretty good so far what Coinbase said. They're going to protect privacy. How are they going to check? So we have in connection issues with Theo Gabriel, Devine, your thoughts on Coinbase and the IRS. I think this is an evidence of what I'm seeing. I have a friend of mine named John Ways has been talking about this for a number of years going from it. And they were, you know, we got some jumping in here on Theo's connection coming in from Frankfurt. It looks like the German authorities aren't too happy with Theo's rhetoric today. Yeah, I mean, this is totally predictable. The IRS is desperate to support the dying dollar paradigm. It's going to take a number of years yet perhaps. Yeah, maybe as little as 18 months, but probably a few more years. Tone certainly is bullish on equities. But yeah, I mean, I think it was inevitable. I'm a little surprised. We even know that the IRS even subpoenaed them, but I guess they got to keep it public since they're not a law enforcement group. They're just a tax collection agency. So I think it was inevitable. I think it's not going to help them. I also think that something else, I believe Tone has also said over the years, this is just all Tone's and Tara. I believe something else, Iris, Tone said, which is that the IRS and the entire United States tax paradigm is due for a major overhaul. And I have a feeling that we're going to see some of that happening over the Trump presidency if we actually see the inventory of the office. So I would say this is not a surprise. I'm sure Coinbase was only too pleased to do whatever the IRS asks and is not in any way fighting it. If you are going through one of these sites, you are giving up all your privacy for Bitcoin, not all, but I mean, you're giving up privacy for that element of your Bitcoin use and you can expect enough on your door. The price is still lower than it was in 2013 during the end of the year, during the big run up. So I would say there are a number of people who really don't have that much income to report from Bitcoin usage, but yeah, it's inevitable. They're going to keep chasing individuals and attempting to track them and it's a losing fight. And with the price going down, a lot of us have more losses than gains. Let's try Theo Goodman again. Theo, are you back with us? Back I think after the IRS and Coinbase has been jamming me, I've been trying to get back onto the internet. And I just wanted to say that I think that what you guys were saying when I was getting jammed is that it's no real big surprise. Coinbase has been following regulation from the beginning, doing their best to go to legal route in the US. So anytime that you have a financial business in the US, there are certain rules that you need to follow and if you're going to use them, you need to be aware of that. Now they're going to challenge what the IRS is saying in court right now, as they said, and protect the customer data as they said in their statement that sounds good so far. Let's keep watch and see how they act. This is a good test for them to see what Coinbase is doing. It's always a shame if something like that happens because a lot of people are referred to Coinbase. Hey, how do I get Bitcoins? Oh, just go to Coinbase. So hopefully there's nothing really horrible that comes out of this. But yeah, if you use Coinbase, then you're going in the direction of using something similar to a bank and just be aware of that. And hopefully most Bitcoins knew this. They knew this when they went to Coinbase. They knew to file their taxes. They knew if they were getting paid in Bitcoin, move them through Coinbase, keep records and pay taxes on all the gains and losses. So this is only really a problem for people who maybe bought Bitcoin early and suddenly made a lot of money and then don't know what happened to it or people that made a complete shit ton of money. Well, maybe a lot of people made a whole shit ton of money and then whoops ended it to this random address and played Bitcoin dice and lost it all. So then you can just say that you lost it all. That is very true. A lot of people lost their paper wallets, had Bitcoins damaged, didn't know how to use them. Certainly, why not suggesting this if it didn't happen, but if it did happen, the best defense is the truth. Kyle Torpy. Yeah, definitely agree with you and Gabe, when you're talking about a Coinbase user, shouldn't be trying to avoid taxes and everything like that. I mean, I'd also say if you're a Bitcoin user, you shouldn't be at this time, you really shouldn't be doing anything illegal. If you're very public about your Bitcoin use, especially like Gabe said, Trump might try to make an example out of you. We've seen the IRS go after specific groups of people in the past, like when they targeted the Republican groups under Obama. But I agree with saying that Coinbase always goes extra mile, too, which makes sense for them because they are a regulated company. So they're always going to have to go to the extra mile. They have a target on their back as well, just as Bitcoin user does who might be trying to avoid taxes. But yeah, if you're trying to do anything illegal, it's still very difficult to hide your transactions in Bitcoin, I would think so. Unless you really know what you're doing and you know how to tumble coins. It's just a very, I don't think there are many people that know how to use Bitcoin anonymously, even if you can do that, even though I'm sure, obviously a lot of people do it anyways, because they think they're being anonymous. That's obviously a huge part of the user base. It's like darknet markets and all. I understand that. But I'm not sure how anonymous these people actually are. They also don't know with Coinbase in general. I'm not sure what they're going to do to turn a profit is going to be. They're kind of pivoting to a brokerage now and the exchange, which kind of gives them incentive to pump all coins, which seems they're doing with Ethereum. So it'll be interesting to see what they do in general, too. I imagine they're going to end up having to do something like Poloniax, but Poloniax already kind of does what they probably should be doing a lot better. They have less KYC AMO. However, I don't know how long that will last. I agree, Kyle. It does seem like Coinbase is going down the road of Poloniax going after those lucrative trading fees. I know that I read on the internet that the fees during the first few hours of ZCash were just phenomenal. The exchanges, not ZCash, not the buyers or the sellers, but the exchanges were making money handover fist. Well, it's the same thing with Ethereum Classic, too. That's why Poloniax listed Ethereum Classic. They made a killing off that. However, it's always the people that are selling the shovels that made the money during the gold rush. Kyle is right. The IRS has been used for political purposes before. I forget the name, but during the W push administration, there's something like Operation Clamp Down, something like this, where they went after a bunch of businesses that they didn't like massages, adult services, things like this, businesses that usually used Cache, and they tried to cut them off from the credit system entirely. So, it has been done before, but reminder, this isn't Trump's IRS yet. Well, Trump has been elected. He hasn't taken official power until January 20th, and he will appoint a new Secretary Treasury and other IRS type posts. So we'll have to see what Trump's IRS is really like. Tony Vays, your thoughts on Coinbase and the IRS. Hey, man, I own a massage therapy office. What are you saying, Thomas? Some of them, they ain't so on the up and up. But, you know, I'm also just like Kyle, I'm supporting the hat. I didn't have it with me in Russia. I forgot to bring it with me. It would have been perfect to wear during our last weeks. You know, you're right there. It would have been perfect to wear during last week's Trump show. Okay, so a couple of things. So something interesting that Kyle just said. What Kyle said, well, if you're a criminal using Bitcoin, if you're using Bitcoin for criminal activity, and something just came into my head, you know what? The IRS ruled two years ago that if you use Bitcoin, you literally are a criminal because their laws are not compliable. They did not put in a buffer like they do on any other currency. Because right now in my house, there's like a dozen foreign currencies because every time I leave a country, I don't bother exchanging it all to dollars. I never know when I'm going to go back. And if I land a three o'clock in the morning, I like to have enough local cash on me for a cab. And if I lose, you know, 40, 50 bucks, so what? It's nothing in the world. If that currency devalues or I never go back, they didn't put this buffer in. And Bitcoin isn't that simple to keep track of. We don't have any software that keeps track of every penny of Bitcoin you spend. So what the IRS actually did, and I saw this the day the IRS made their statement. And I said, holy shit, they just made every Bitcoin person a criminal because there is no way any Bitcoin user will be able to account for every Satoshi of their Bitcoin. And I understand that it's petty. And I understand that the IRS isn't going to go after a guy who tried Bitcoin once. What's on Bitcoin $10 worth? Waited a month and then spend it all at Starbucks. I understand they're not going to go after that guy and arrest them. But I really upset me that this person is now technically a criminal by the IRS's definition. And go back to that book three felonies a day. They just made every Bitcoin, every Bitcoin user a criminal. Now there are degrees. Obviously Coinbase will probably try to fight it in a way that while we'll only give you the high users, you know, the high turnover users. And that's, and I guess that's what you have to accept. I mean, the IRS will also start making examples of people that constantly use Bitcoin. But the whole idea that every person that uses Bitcoin is now at legally at risk is problematic for me personally. I saw this coming from day one. I've been a guest Coinbase from day one. I said a lot about things about them over the years. And it's not even there fault, right? They're catering to investors. Now on the flip side of the equation, I'm about to play devil's advocate. If I was an investor in Coinbase, if I'm a VC in Coinbase, well, I'm already pissed that they're in San Francisco bleeding a lot of money. There's no reason for them to be there. But why are they going to fight this? They're doing KYC for a reason. In fact, they're doing KYC more than anybody else for the sole purpose of identifying people and IRS is in. If I'm an investor in Coinbase, I'm on the phone with them right now saying, why the hell are you going to fight this? Why are you going to waste more of our money? I mean, Coinbase is definitely going to go down. Anyway, why are you going to bleed our money on lawyers fighting it? You have to turn over all the data. This is why you're collecting KYC information. So it makes absolutely no sense financially for Coinbase to try and fight this order. Turn over the data. I mean, this is what the users of Coinbase should have expected by signing up for Coinbase. I mean, this is what you get. I can also mention I tweeted out the other day. This is also the same exact reason why I personally have never used purse.io and Thomas. You and I had this discussion in San Francisco over a cup of coffee, where I specifically told you, it's almost impossible for you to convince me to buy from purse.io. It's easy for you to speak freely now, not in a shinoa long or worth there. I said, I will never use purse.io because the same exact IRS liability exists. Because when you use purse.io, you give up your address. I mean, you can give them a fake name, but it's hard for you to give a fake address. You know, your widgets have to be delivered somewhere. And there will be a record under a subpoena that will identify you as a Bitcoin user. So I've always recommended to everyone, don't use Bitcoin in connection with your legal name. Even if you're not using Bitcoin for anything like, you know, drugs or prostitution or anything like that, you're a deep, you're de facto breaking the law because the law is very, very bad. So let's talk about what we're really talking about here. Is this a failure of coin bases business model, the business model of we sell you Bitcoins, and we hold the Bitcoins for you? Is this just a never ending honey pot tone? What do you think? I don't think it's a failure. I mean, it's hard to say if it's a failure, the business model. I think it's a, I don't think it's a, it's a real model for Bitcoin. It's a, it was a business model for them. I mean, they made a hundred million dollars on it from DC money. They're slowly going to die out. They're not going to make it anywhere because this isn't how Bitcoin was meant to be used. So I, you know, way it's a, it, in a way it's a failure in a way it's not right? I mean, you can't blame if you come up with an idea and someone wants to give you a hundred million dollars. Is it really a failure? No, I mean, the business might be stupid, but it's hard to call you a failure when someone's going to give you a hundred million dollars for an idea. Now, I've always said that coin base is a bridge business. It's something that we need in the short term, but in the long term, once we're over this bridge. Like many of us thought, what am I still here? Yeah, we missed a little bit. I want to repeat that. I don't know, coin base is a bridge business and we're going to walk over it and then burn the bridge behind her faster than we thought. Yeah, divine your thoughts. Yeah, you know, I think that's a good point that it's a bridge company. I, as all exchanges are, you know, it's at a certain point, there's going to be so much momentum interior to the Bitcoin ecosystem that. The bridge points will rapidly lose validity, but I think we're at least eight years away from that, optimistically, probably more like 20. So I think that there's definitely a place for coin base in the market. I don't agree that holding money on their site is one of the features that they consider to be among their array that they offer people. They say specifically, we're not a wallet. Don't keep your money here. Just use us to onboard people into Bitcoin or to send it. But remember now, there is some confusion with coin base and g-dacks. For g-dacks, it's a trading platform. They almost certainly want you to hold your funds on their buy and sell and it's like you're supposed to trust them, but you're not supposed to trust them. Meanwhile, they're probably going to give all your records over the IRS. So it just, it doesn't look good all around. No, I agree with that. And I think that the pivot into g-dacks was extremely late and ineffectual. I don't believe that they're doing that much volume. I have a feeling that coin base was a little early to the market, which was a big boom to the Bitcoin ecosystem, but a big, what, let's see, opposite of a boom curse for the, for its investors, possibly. I don't, I wonder how much runway they actually have and how long the business lasts on the other hand. So I don't see a major uptake in Bitcoin over the next two years that could save all of these companies. The opposite of a boom is a bust. And when you look at g-dacks, you keep seeing them seeing the second run that they didn't get the a thing in classic money, they didn't get the auger money. They're just, they're behind. No, I didn't say boom. I said, boom, and the opposite of boom is curse. We'll see, we'll look it up. Kyle Torpe, your thoughts on coin bases, a bad business model or just bad right now. I don't really agree with them being a bridge to the Bitcoin ecosystem. I think there are people can use coin base to be a speculator or they want to hold Bitcoin, but I think at the real Bitcoin user who's trying to get certain features out of Bitcoin as a payment system is probably using local Bitcoins at this point. I know I just talked about how people don't know how to use Bitcoin anonymously, but I think they know not to use coin based for the most part. It's probably that step where you upload your ID that tipped them off. Yeah. I'm going to jump right back in for one quick second. I've been record I have never connected my government ID, my, even my phone number to any Bitcoin activity, like nothing. I from the from day one. And granted I wasn't an early, early adopter, but I saw this from the beginning. I'm like, nothing. I mean, they got I will if someone can cut if the government or anyone can connect any of my Bitcoin activity, which is actually not that much to anything other than like anonymous email addresses that may or may not be mine. I will be impressed because I can't think of anything I've ever used Bitcoin that connected it to my real name. This is why I've never bought playing tickets with it. I never bought from from purse that I owe. I mean, I'll buy a gift card. I mean, that's kind of that's anonymous enough. But that's it. Never used a hosted wallets that know your name. Nothing. That's how I recommend it to anyone that is in contact with me. That's how I always try to convince them to use it only used exchanges that the only identification was an email address where again could be anonymous. Yeah, it's a little different from the guy from a so called to that sold Bitcoin on condescendant bought a Tesla. Right. Tongues going to be the only one of us on the outside while the rest of us will be repeating Hunter S Thompson phase that many fine books have been written in prison. Theo Goodman, your thoughts on coin basis, their business model just wrong or were you using a honey pot? No, their business model isn't wrong. So far, I mean, it hasn't they're not bankrupt. It still exists. People are using it. I have no idea how much money they're really making. So I can't say comment on if their business model is wrong. So far as Gdax is concerned, that business model is wrong until they add leverage 10 X minimum and more shit coins. Other than that, they're not going to get any liquidity and that project is just done because nobody wants to use an exchange ask any Bitcoin trader. They want leverage degenerate amounts of leverage and degenerate amounts of shit coins. And if you don't have that, then why should I use you and your exchange is going to have no liquidity and nobody is going to want to go there. And until you change that, that business model is over. Now coin base itself, that part of the business might have some kind of use. I don't know the exact numbers, like I said, but yeah, maybe, yeah, basically anyone that's doing something that is there, totally 100% fine with registering everything with the IRS, their profits and losses and doing everything like that. And coin base is great for you. That's perfect. And that's what it's made for. So if you want to do anything like that, then that's the place to go. So it's definitely not broken. Just depends on who wants to use it. It's kind of Bitcoin light. Let's move on to issue two issue two Bitcoin price surge. The price of Bitcoin continued to surge this week with reports of Chinese demand now being joined by Indian demand with both economies attempting to crack down on their citizens ability to move money. The Chinese with capital controls, the Indians by literally removing large denominations of cash to present their, prevent their citizens from storing large and moving large amounts of wealth. Gabriel divine with these stunning developments could Bitcoin be really taking a good Bitcoin be your what to the moon. Missed most of your question now. So I'll have trouble answering ask again. Let's say we'll try to an India be enough to take Bitcoin to the moon. I'm going to say China and India not alone. No, but we've also got the rest of the world. And a lot of other things. I think we are definitely still toward the beginning of this bull run. I'm looking at the last having in November, which is exactly four years ago, if almost exactly as I believe it was toward the middle of November in 2012, the last happening. At that that we didn't have as much of a spike. Although let me think we went from three to $12 over the previous year. So that was a big that is kind of similar wasn't quite as sudden as what we saw in June now. But afterward we saw continuing build up and doubling doubling doubling and then a massive spike six months later than the having which was April 2013. So we are actually now only four months after the having I wouldn't be surprised if we do see another massive spike in January February March, some time like that. There's also some market movements in the wider world that could affect it and things are really, really volatile now. Bitcoin's volatility seems to be it is trapping, but it's been heading steadily down for a long time and it continues to have steadily down even in the face of a bull on like this where we're seeing a lot of volatility recently mostly upward over the weeks and months. But the volatility of the current season, which are huge markets much much bigger than Bitcoin, a thousand times bigger literally or more. We're seeing volatility that is reaching up to about the same point as Bitcoin to fiat volatility, which is just incredible. That means these markets are absolutely surging and collapsing. We're seeing flash crashes in the markets. I think we're going to see a lot of problems as authorities attempt to seize control and seize visibility of financial systems around the world. They are showing that they're desperate. Modi has shown that India's government is desperate to track and control its populace just by the sloppiness and sheer lack of respect for the populace by creating, by announcing this ban on large notes and then integrating it right away and making it such a short deadline. To trade in your notes, that is an absolute slap in the face to the populace. It's straight up stealing the wealth of a billion people and putting it into the hands of the bank's central bank and allowing the government to access to that wealth. It's a straight up wealth transfer, which is absolutely devastating for a populace for whom there's widespread poverty. Despite their great advances in the last 20 years, there's so much poverty that it's just, I mean, I don't slap in the face of anything we come close. This was probably going to, and it's already directly caused, if you do not invest with stampede or banks and such, but I believe that the government has killed probably thousands or tens of thousands of people just for lack of access to medicine or food, shelter, things like that. That these desperate and poor people might get the knock on effects of this cash ban are just incredible. So there's a lot of things going on. There's banking industry collapses. I mean, if the governments of the world overreact central banking assholes of the world overreact to the situation of lack of banking liquidity, lack of monetary liquidity and flood the system and accidentally flip things over into a high inflation or hyper-improved financial system. In a situation where high-perplacian situation, a lot of that money is going to go into Bitcoin. I think we're going to see a massive bull run. 2017 is going to be a huge year for Bitcoin. Let's do this year, too. It may seem contemporary pullbacks during this time, but I think we got months of bull run today. There was a very short time period for the Indian people to gather their money and turn it in, especially if you think about if you had a relative who perhaps hit money in their house, you had an inheritance coming, you just found some of it. Yeah, it's going to get me year. Yeah, it's six months at the very least, but more like two years. You announce it, you say we're doing this, blah, blah, blah. Here's our plan. Okay. You can start at this day and then you've got 18 months. This is ridiculous. They actually gave them two months. Yeah, two months is awful. Two months. Two months. Yeah. But they only gave them three days to start after the announcement. It's not like they were talking about it for months and preparing every day. It was three days and then, oh my god, I had to do this within two months. I mean, that is ridiculous. That is just, and it shows, wow, these assholes are really desperate. They are, they're backstarts the wall. They can see the numbers. They can see the banking industries collapsing. You can see this happening. They're getting so desperate to bail in everybody and try to control everybody. They're going to work. There's too many. It's too late. Too much information out there with the internet, too many alternatives with Bitcoin, all current and even just metal. And that's from India, which as we know is the world's largest democracy, Kyle Torpe, your thoughts on India and Bitcoin. Yeah, I agree with Gabe with anything. Any time the government makes laws that hurt Bitcoin's competitors are going to be good for Bitcoin. So anything that makes online payment systems less private and less censorship resistant is going to be good for Bitcoin anytime they ban cash is going to be good for Bitcoin. I actually wrote an article about that for Nasdaq earlier in the year, as far as the anyone wants to read that as far as the short term price changes, I usually don't try to predict where the price is going over the short term. I did talk to there's a new mining pool in India that I talked to the message me while I was still on vacation that I talked to when I got back called GB miners. And right now they have three to four percent of the network cash rate. But the mining equipment is still based in China because the guy who's mining equipment it is, he just kind of funded this mining pool in India and now they're building it out. So I don't there's not really any mining in India. I might at least have this pool. So maybe they're trying to build out that community. They're also positive on Bitcoin unlimited, but they're I saw the guy from via BTC said that they're definitely switching to Bitcoin unlimited, but that's not actually true. They just they're still thinking about it. Another thing on the price is that I think a hard fork, they're the potential of a hard fork is impact on the price in some way because a lot of the investors that view Bitcoin as digital gold view a hard fork as very detrimental to the long term value of the long term, the view of hard fork is a bad thing for the long term by the way of Bitcoin as digital gold. Because you're splitting the network effect, you're splitting basically the holdings. Obviously you get the holdings on two different chains, but now it's not the rules are changed on one of the chains. So there's something else brought up in the the need of a company report a few months ago and during the conference call they had a few days ago. So I think that's something to watch in terms of the effect on the price, whether it's segregated witness gets activated or if a hard fork happens or the potential of a hard fork is still there. I'd love to see how it plays out. I do agree, Kyle, a hard fork would be very detrimental to the Bitcoin price and cause questions over Bitcoin's viability tone, vase, your thoughts on Bitcoin in India. I'm going to go with the story in Italy first, that was one of the articles you had like Italy's bail in. I think that is way more significant to the price of Bitcoin than what is happening in India. And I'm going to talk about why that is in a minute because look the Europeans are used to digital money. So for them to get really pissed off at the banks and get out of that system and get on to Bitcoin, this is where I have been saying for years, I've been saying Greek banks were going to shut down and watch Bitcoin hit the spotlight and that happened. Ever since Greece I've been talking about Italy, that's the next financial system to crash because that's financial system is actually very, very relevant. So when the Italians get really sick of that bail in, because Europeans have money, people in India most of them are very poor, like we mentioned, yes it's a lot of people but they're generally poor. Also, all these rumors out of Europe are coming out saying they want to get rid of the $500 note. Now getting rid of the $500 note is way more significant than the 500 rupee note because the 500 rupee note maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe might not know this but it's worth about 750 US or like $8 US. That's what we're talking about here, a 500 rupee note is worth about eight bucks but a 500 euro note is actually worth something. So the elimination of that note can help drive Bitcoin adoption in a big way and now there's talking to US about getting rid of the $100 bill and even the $50 bill. So that would be a huge driver in the Bitcoin. So that to me is a big driver and I'll talk about India because there's so much they're not saying and the way I first heard the story I said, holy shit, they're getting rid of the $1000 rupee and the 500 rupee. Then I saw how valuable they actually are and I'm like, oh my god, why are they doing this? Then I'm reading that these bills, the 500 and the 1000 rupee notes, they represent 86% of all outstanding cash and Indian societies are basically cash based. They're not used as cash, they're not set up for credit cards, they're not set up for digital for digital means of payment. So I'm like, this is insane. So if people are going to walk around with like 100 rupee notes that becomes the lowest bill, they're canceling these notes but that's not what they're doing. They're canceling the notes but you can exchange them. They're going to have a brand new 500 rupee note and this is important and they're getting rid of the 1000 rupee note but they're replacing it with a 2000 rupee note. So this is why you're seeing these videos of people in India running around in circles bank to bank to bank because the bank limited people, they said you can turn in all your paper rupees into digital money in your bank and then you can withdraw it later and stuff or you have it digitally. But if you're going to exchange you know 2000 rupee notes for a brand new 2000 rupee note, they put a first put a limit of 4000 rupees, then they raised it to 4500 rupee and then they realized they didn't have enough of the new cash of the brand new 500 and 2000 rupee to exchange for people. So they lowered this limit to 2000 per bank per person. Now what happened after that was they don't really have a very good digital system. So they can't track how many times people came in and did this. So then they started putting like those markers on people's hands under a black light so that the people can't go then go to a different bank with another 2000 in rupees to exchange them. So anyway, so this is the cluster fuck that's going on over there right and everyone is rushing and everyone has these notes. So the impression that I originally got from the story was that they're eliminating these bills because of all the black market. But if they're replacing them by new bills that are even bigger, this is a one time cancellation of the currency to basically take the current illegal market or basically they think that people have too much cash. It's a one time thing but going forward, they just made it 50% easier for black market to the business because they're providing them with a 2000 rupee note. So what the hell are they really solving other than this is a major power trip by Modi, whoever they're the prime minister, whoever he is. Basically, it's like basically he's running an ant farm and he's standing above or he like threw something down and like watching the ants running around as a temporary power trip because that's basically what this is. This isn't changing anything. Now on a grander scale and by the way, the reason why I know some of this information is because like I actually did some investigative German journalism. I called up Sunny Ray from Unokoi and I had a little chat with him about an hour and a half ago. I'm like, hey, what the hell's going on? I mean, I think Unokoi is great. They're doing a great thing. Keep doing what you're doing guys. I'm a little worried that you're going to get unwanted attention from the government and they do KYC. So the few people that I know there, I really like you guys. Keep doing what you're doing. Just be careful. Just be careful and don't get yourselves in trouble. One last note as far as the global currency and economics goes. This is why the US dollar is king and will be king and why all these people that have been saying the dollar will die are so wrong and will continue to be wrong. Every the dollar is the only currency in the world that has never been canceled. Anytime the US issues a new bill, the $10,000 bill was canceled a long time ago. The US has never canceled its death. It's bonds are still good. Old bonds are still good. You find a dollar bill from the late 1800s. It's still good. It's worth more because of its collector value, but it's still good as legal tender. The euro, everyone's like the euro is going to replace the dollar. The euro has a history of 20 years, not even. And before that, all of those European currencies, they're all canceled. They no longer exist. Britain continuously cancels old currencies. If you find an old like like British pound from like a hundred years ago, it's useless. It's only a collectible. It is no longer legal tender. So what's going to wait and say what about $500,000 bill? Yeah, those were canceled. That was a long, long time ago. And this is the real problem. Those were canceled, but you could, but you could have turned them in at the time. Right. There weren't like it was definitely longer than two months. That's for sure. Yeah, I know those were canceled a long, long time ago, but in general, the US, like, especially from the bad perspective, they don't, they, those paper is still good. And that's very important. And this is why the US dollar is trusted globally. But when they start canceling large denominations, that's when you have to worry because then they're pushing people into the digital currency. But what's happening in India, it makes absolutely no sense. Yeah, they're going to, they're going to, they're causing this big problem, temporary problem. But afterwards, unless they're going to start producing these 500 rupees and 2000 rupees at a very, very low rate so that it's hard to get your hands on them. Then they're doing something, but people have to keep in mind that they're not just canceling them. You can convert them to a new looking bill. And I don't know why I don't think the black market in India is all that big relatively speaking and a global scale. This makes absolutely no sense to me, but, but anyway, I hope that, hey, if it's good for one or a coin, I'm happy. They're doing good things over there. It does sound like they're just taking money from the cash holders, hoping that you won't see the announcement, you won't be able to trade your funds in and you'll be stuck with worthless money, which is just atrocious. It seems irresponsible. Let's move on to the exit question. Oh, I forgot the deal. Theo, Theo, are you back with us? Sorry, Theo. I'm here. All right. Bitcoin and India. What do you think? Bitcoin and India. I think that I just cooked Indian food today and that's great. I think that, yeah, there's a lot of people in India, of course, we know that now we know the low down about the bills and all that. And we'll see how that works out if their digital system will work or if they're actually trying to limit cash at all. It seems like they're not really. They're just reorganizing it in a real inefficient way right now. Definitely agree about Europe. I don't know for sure in the other European countries, but in Germany, I don't realize it. Not the one that's going to collapse first. Really used a lot. Cash is still used by a lot of people. A lot of people pay things and cash. Yeah, you can pay with credit card or debit card at a lot of places. But then on the other hand, there's a lot of small businesses that just accept cash and that's it. So cash is still really important in Europe. I think that if they start limiting the 500, well, then that's the slippery slope. What's the next step? What are you going to get rid of the 100? That would be crazy because hundreds are used a lot. And 500 are there is some research, but it's used more than you think. I think that that is actually a little bit more interesting than all this confusion with the RIPI and all this stuff. But yeah, let's see. Maybe just through all of this chaos in India, whether it's, you know, has anything behind it. People do hear about Bitcoin and maybe they think it's interesting. Hey, then they can divide it up how they want. They don't need to worry about 100, 200,000 RIPI note. You can divide it up into 0.10.01.01.01.01.01.01. Or whatever much you want. Then you don't have to worry about all that stuff. And, you know, since it's, you know, since people in India understand the concept of cash, then, you know, it should be easy enough to understand why Bitcoin is digital cash. Excellent points. The also wanted to circle back to Tom's point that Italy is something to watch as well. We kind of avoided it in the question, but Italy is out there exit question really quick. We're running behind on time. The price next week higher or lower Gabriel Divaan. Exactly the same. It will be one Bitcoin coin per Bitcoin. Kyle Torpy. Higher tone. Vays. I think this will blow over. I'm going to go with lower. The old goodman. The price of Pepe cash will be higher. The price will be higher. Moving on to issue three. Issue three Bitcoin is unsustainable. The Bitcoin doubt brigade is back in force this week. This time at motherboard and online site created by vice. The motherboard author claims that due to his math, Bitcoin simply takes too much electricity to mine and is unsustainable. Kyle Torpy, your thoughts on this stunning development from motherboard. I think that article is actually from last year, I'm not sure. Bitcoin is not unsustainable. It's not wasteful, I should say. Because all the mining power in the world goes to secure the Bitcoin network, which people obviously find valuable, which is why people use it. I'm not sure if there's anything else to say about that. I noticed an article did site Jorge Stolfie, which I found to be interesting since he's an avid but corner. I don't know. There might be a, I don't know if people mine with renewable energy. If there's a obvious reason that they don't do that, that I don't see. I mean, there are a lot of things that are bad for the environment and we still do them. And Bitcoin is just another one. And I don't think it's one that will be taken away unless governments figure out a way to do that. There's also the idea that new technologies making Bitcoin mining faster, more efficient, better asic chips, better hardware, better electricity generation. These will all come along as well. But we do have to thank tone for last year's article. Your thoughts on Bitcoin still being unsustainable. Yeah, that's not bad on that. But however, however, ironically, yesterday someone reached out to me to like proofreading, give my opinion, open almost identical article that should be published this week in one of the crypto publications. So we like literally beating the latest stories. Yeah, that article to have the new math, the new math. Yeah, they yeah, they'll have the new math, but it's still ridiculous. But I actually did find that article to be insane. They could have at least got a comment from someone that likes Bitcoin. Besides, besides our favorite professor from Brazil, who's not a fan of Bitcoin. The other frequent commenter in our article was Emma Goodsier, who is in love with the theorem, which is completely insane. I feel sorry for anyone coming out of Cornell, trying to learn about the crypto space. But I've said that many, many times already. But look, the idea that Bitcoin mining is unsustainable, like it may sound. It may sound interesting, right? I mean, the new math that I've read, it's like, oh, you can. People like 1.0 million people can have electricity for like a month. That's how much Bitcoin, you know, wasting a day. It's not wasteful. It's not wasteful at all. It provides a very important function. And that function is censorship resistant value transfer. If the government is not happy about it, they can easily remove Bitcoin from existence. All that government has to do is treat money as property and eliminate all KYC AML laws on money. And then there will be no need for Bitcoin. I'm sorry guys. I don't want to use Bitcoin. I don't, I kind of do. It's great that Bitcoin being finite. People need to understand the following. Bitcoin being finite at 21 million Bitcoin. And Bitcoin having the properties that it does are completely, they're two completely independent things, right? Bitcoin could have had infinite inflation. And it still could have had these properties of permissionless value transfer, which would have made Bitcoin very, very useful as a, as a value transfer. Right. There is also store value. They're two completely independent things. Now Bitcoin is one in the same, which is why someone like me, and I would say almost everybody on this show, who barely ever uses Bitcoin, I guess you Thomas more than than the rest of us. But I all Kyle gets paid in Bitcoin to him as well. But we're, we're mostly using Bitcoin for speculation. And the reason we're able to do this is because of its finite, because of its finite limits. Now people that actually use Bitcoin for things like gambling, that's Tio. So Tio is a real user of Bitcoin. I mean, to him, that's the property that's more important. It's great that all of us have a chance to be rich because of the finite amount of Bitcoin. But that doesn't stop it from being very, very useful because the government doesn't let us use our regular currency to do these things. If the government lets us use the regular currency to do these things, most of us would be just using dollars. We would like speculate on Bitcoin, but to a much smaller degree. Anyway, I'm getting off topic a little bit quickly get back on the topic. Look, I am actually encouraged because of all of this, first of all, of all of this electricity is going into Bitcoin mining. It's not like it would have been going anywhere else. It's not like this electricity is going to create a utopia for some village in Africa that never had electricity. Either it's being created to mine Bitcoin or it's not being used at all. As an example, I'm sure there are plenty of homeless people all around us. When our houses are empty, we're not exactly letting them in to use our electricity and accept the comfort in our house. Our house is just being wasted empty because that's how we would rather have it. If this electricity isn't being used for Bitcoin, it's not like it would have been diverted somewhere else. Let's start there. Second, I believe it's mining for Bitcoin that's going to revolutionize the way we use technology. If there really is a drive to efficient renewable energy using direct sun energy, using geothermal energy, this drive for this energy is going to come from mining Bitcoin. If 90% of world's energy is being used to secure Bitcoin, then that would be great. That means that the little scraps, that means a big Bitcoin mine will only have to, they will give up one or two percent of the electricity that they revolutionized in creating and give it to basically power their entire zip code or almost their entire nation. If Bitcoin gets to that kind of level of energy creation, so I can actually see this being very, very positive for the world and not negative just from the innovation that it can create if that kind of made sense because and I don't buy into the fear mongering. Oh, mining for Bitcoin is going to ruin the world. Well, if everybody dies, there was the point of mining for Bitcoin, right? I mean, it's where you're going to spend that Bitcoin. So I basically see a lot of innovation coming from this Bitcoin mining. I don't know what anyone else thinks of that. If I could add something to that when you're talking about power, not getting, not getting used unless it's mine for Bitcoin, there's a lot of, a lot of the mining centers in China. The, they're built around like ghost towns that had power, like generators built into them with power grids and then no one moved to the town. So it literally is like areas where they're going to generate power and no one moved there. And now they use it to mine Bitcoin. There's also sources in China like the three gorges, dam, which generates hydroelectric power sources and Iceland, where there's geothermal power and they don't have to use air conditioning to cool their data centers. There are other options and alternatives. Theo Goodman, your thoughts on Bitcoin being unsustainable. Well, I think the ironic thing is that this is coming from the publication motherboard. Sustainable. I don't think so, especially if they're publishing articles like this. Second of all, people are just not getting it. P O W. Proof of waste. O S proof of security. Like I said on the Dow episode. That. All right, Gabriel, T. Vaughn. Now this article is a typical surface skating pseudo journalist, the bullshit. I agree with several of tones points except for one. He mentioned the K.O.I.C. as being the sine qua known of Bitcoin usage and utility in the world. I disagree with that. I think even in a situation where the government relaxes, governments around the world relax their stance on tracking transactional activity of the popular. The sheer novelty of a digital asset that is representation of proof of work. A digital representation of the labor and physical electricity spent in order to create a digital asset. In my opinion, would be enough to support speculative use for store value and also for, I mean, in a similar way to Golden Silver. But with the added benefit of being able to move it around, I think that that is enough to support the Bitcoin ecosystem. I don't also need K.O.I.C. just to make it something that could exist and have supporters and have money behind the money. The main flaw with this article is the false equivalents. So you can see in the call out in the middle, that makes Bitcoin about 5,33 times more energy intensive for transaction than Visa. Well, yes, that's absolutely true at the time this article was written. However, it neglects to mention that Visa and Bitcoin are not even close to the same thing. They may seem the same on the surface, but Bitcoin is doing more than 5,000 times as much stuff. The value of Bitcoin is more than 5,000 times what the value that Visa offers to people. Or that's what the market is saying. In other words, Bitcoin, first of all, is not moving transactions around. It's far, far harder of a transaction. It's a cash type transaction. It's immutable. You can't go in. It would cost hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars to go in and try to reverse the transaction. It's nearly impossible to prevent a determined person or even hacker, but even just a regular person, any business, it's trivial to reverse these transactions. Bitcoin is easily more than 5,000 times more dependable of the transaction than Visa, first of all. Second of all, Bitcoin is an issuance mechanism. Visa uses the current banking fractional reserve model for its units, for its tokens, in other words. That is a completely different model and many people value that model far more than the exchange rate would tell you against dollars. The value of that is huge. That's more than 5,000 times more valuable than a dollar. A dollar of Bitcoin is more than 5,000 times more valuable than a dollar because it's a future value of Bitcoin. 150th of a Bitcoin is far more valuable on a futures market than a dollar. A dollar is guaranteed to lose value and a Bitcoin is extremely likely to be gained on it. So you've got a situation where it's only 5,000 times more expensive and yet offers probably millions of times more value. So that's a very false equivalence there. The other false equivalence mention was M-Pesa, which has similar situation to Bitcoin. It's like, oh, we got this M-Pesa thing, so why do we need Bitcoin? It's skipping over the massive benefits that come from having a non-state currency that is backed by labor, cryptographic and provable labor and electricity expenditure. And I will also just mention that the climate hysteria that lies behind the motivation of this article is really too bad. I think that anybody who scratches the surface on the climate change rhetoric in the political sphere right now, we'll see that there is a huge amount of political pressure to create a link between human action and climate change. And so many geologists, so many climate scientists are looking at the sun, the lactic energy, a lot of things that are outside the mainstream model of physics and science, which doesn't even claim to know the unified field theory. And we're all guessing, and the UN is out there pushing extremely authoritarian laws in response to absolutely fallible prediction models that have not shown that they're in any way accurate. And we look at the 90s predictions of both ice caps being melted. I mean, it's just ridiculous. I understand that there may be a connection, but to base, it blinds people. They get so scared. Oh, my God, I watched this documentary by a politician, you know, Gore. And now I think the world's going to end because we have cars. And really, the proof is a lot less stable than many people state, and we can't let things blind us to that. Now, of course, burning coal isn't great, and this is up to air. It's horrible for people. It's very bad for your health and other bad things for the environment, of course. And, you know, like Thomas pointed out, we should be definitely heading toward sustainable practices for all energy uses. And I believe we are, in fact, this decade right now, we're in the middle of the crossover point over to solar and, you know, every other type of sustainable energy, not to mention hidden technologies that we make this in the years ahead. So that's my thoughts about this article. All right, anyone more to add on the environmental side of Bitcoin, otherwise we're going to move on to issue four. I was going to say something real, I'm not going to get into the whole, you know, climate change thing. I've already, you know, got my ass in trouble on the show many times. Well, we need to do it as a topic and then, and then me and me and Gabriel can really get into it. So just want to again, people, a lot of people are concerned what happens to minding up to 21 million big coins. Have all been mind. Where's the incentive and the best answer I give to people at that point, if Bitcoin is still alive and kicking and successful, there should be enough major players invested in Bitcoin in a way that they will be willing to waste millions of dollars a year to keep their core business and tax. For example, if let's say Amazon actually starts accepting Bitcoin and Bitcoin is popular enough that most of their. Most of their sales are in Bitcoin because Bitcoin has suddenly become a mainstream vehicle for payment. And now there's no more mining rewards and miners are bailing out. Well, if Amazon is making billions a year in Bitcoin generated sales, why wouldn't they waste millions of year mining yet to make sure that it's stable. And hopefully they will be competing with Google for the same reasons and other companies like even today. The most profitable Bitcoin company right now to date is probably crypto locker. If anyone has an incentive to keep Bitcoin mining going and making Bitcoin as stable as possible is the people behind crypto locker so they can continue to hijack our computers and demand ransom payment right. And the same thing would go for Alphabet and a lot of these other companies. I mean, if they're making in dollars a year, why wouldn't they spend, you know, 20, 30, even 40% of their profits mining Bitcoin just to maintain stability. So so again, I don't worry too much about what's going to happen in the future. What worries me is not getting segred through because of stupid people. Don't forget about Silk Road 572. They'll be down to put in a lot of money to keep Bitcoin running or maybe Silk Road 672. Don't forget you have to mine because of the speed of light. It's getting faster. Let's move on to issue four running out of time issue four Gavin regrets. None it with Satoshi himself Gavin and Reese in his back in the news again, voicing regret for his role in the Satoshi games in which he supported the claim of now generally disproved Craig Wright. Gavin claims he no longer cares who Satoshi is and that he's not looking for him. Should we be looking for Satoshi Nakamoto and is it time to forgive Gavin for his role in the Craig Wright scandal? I ask you tone phase. Oh man, so so this actually I look I. Gavin personally convinced me that Craig Wright was Satoshi right so there was like a week window and I think we did a show that like I about record as saying that I'm leading towards Craig Wright being Satoshi and that happened because the week before I happen to be in the same room with Gavin and Jason. And he managed to actually convince me that I should have been listening so this is bad so this is like it. I fall for this too. I always want there to be a Satoshi. I'm always excited every time somebody said to she. Like I'm like sitting there in the room next to it was me. I forgot I think it was me Roger there and somebody else and Gavin. This is around the same time that Roger very convinced you of bigger blocks. I think you need to be careful. These person of person meetings tone. Oh, I know no no no that one that one. That one happened in in the job that happened like six months later. No no this one. We had about 20 shots and there's a lot of beers around the table and pretty soon I believed in big blocks too. I think I saw your name on the list of people that have approved the message of bigger blocks. I'll be careful what you say. No, I'm just joking. I didn't see it. I didn't see it. But it could be if you're not careful at one of those events where you have 20 shots and start talking about bigger blocks. Oh, but it was like for maybe a week, not even so that that was one like my like my stupidity hit a level and then it's like I'm like holy shit. What am I doing? So so that so no this was during the consensus in New York, the conference. And Gavin was so convinced and then he was like no, I he showed me something and he couldn't even like say it because you didn't want to you know disclose too much information. So anyway, so that was like my personal anecdote on this topic other than that, it didn't really make much sense. Gavin, you know what? It all ended kind of good because this this insanity like the other core devs immediately saw through the nonsense that Gavin is off his rocker and this gave him a good reason to remove his admin credentials to the Bitcoin core code, which I believe is a good thing. I was starting to already see Gavin is being a little dangerous for Bitcoin development, especially of his classic and extition and against and his whole stance. I don't find his views on privacy very, very good. So it all ended. I guess in a good way. Gavin shouldn't have bought into it and after he bought into it, he shouldn't have tried to convince others to buy into it. But but yes, that's my only comment on the subject other than that. I'm kind of glad that he's that he doesn't have commit privileges anymore. He probably was a good thing to get rid of Gavin's commit privileges, but I want to throw my support behind team Gavin. He was in a very unique place to prove who Satoshi was because he corresponded with him. And I think this also put him in a very unique place to be taken advantage by a comment like Craig Wright Gavin, you know, he just he he was trapped. He didn't know what to do. He was played. He wasn't expecting this. It's not his fault. He should be accepted back in a Bitcoin, but we shouldn't give him his keys back to Theo Goodman, your thoughts on Gavin and Bitcoin. Yeah, that's that's, you know, nice that Gavin said, Hey, you know, I messed up. I really regret it. And you know, I'd like to move on from there. I think that's that's cool and, you know, good for him. And maybe Gavin, you can get back to developing cool stuff. You know, do some contribute to GitHub, get some pull requests and, you know, let's get this thing going. And instead of talking about who Satoshi and, you know, what electric server I was using on what year that connected to this thing in London and all this stuff. So, you know, just just get on that. And if you're bored developing Bitcoin, then, you know, you're free to come over to the rare Pepe blockchain trader channel over in telegram. And we're always looking for developers that want to contribute to the repair Pepe landscape and ecosystem. So Gavin, you're invited and hope to see you there soon. Now this, of course, Gavin apologizing reminds me of the time that Roger Vera apologized for vouching for Mt. Cox. Oh, low blow. That was just mean Gabriel D. Von. Well, I've made my opinion about Gavin pretty clear on the show that I'll reiterate my opinion, which is that the CIA drafted Gavin, when he went to meet with them in 2010, doing it once. And at that point, they convinced and or forced, thrived, coerced black now, whatever you want to call it, kill your kids. Maybe you like your kids, you like having kids, you like them to be alive. I call them, just do this. So this the further this poll question that they say requested. So Gavin, however, I don't believe that he, I don't believe that he was really into that. Nobody likes getting towards like that. So after going all hard with Bitcoin classic and XT to the wishes of the Spooks, he wanted to burn his reputation. And that was why he decided to go and act as if Craig Wright was telling the truth and that he was definitely into it because he knew that without any cryptographic proof, there was no way it was true. And so he went out way out on the line. And so he could burn his reputation so that he wouldn't ruin Bitcoin, which is a project he genuinely was interested in in the beginning. He just wasn't a libertarian and had no idea that the three letter agencies were actually just working for the elite. And the last thing they wanted was the freedom of creating technology, who's completely naive before that he ain't anymore. And now that he's already blown his reputation and nobody thinks he knows anything and he's a complete fucking idiot. Now he's like, well, shit, I got a I got a backtrack, a little or else I won't have a career here. So I think he's just basically doing his due diligence to try to re-save himself in the space so that he's not thought to be a complete idiot. So he's making sure a little bit of contrition and try to gain some sympathetic years after he completely burned his reputation. Now that's a theory. What would you say Thomas? It doesn't go through the first time I'm not going to repeat it every time it's lost. It's in the ether. Yeah, so I think either outcome that Gavin blogged about on his site there is probably bad for a minute. It might actually be worse if Craig Wright is Satoshi because that means he didn't care about ruining Gavin's reputation, ruining the reputation of the biggest proponent or biggest technical proponent of a hard fork to increase the block size. So it might actually be better for him if Craig Wright is not Satoshi, but yeah, either way it's not good for him. But it seems like Gavin has been wrong about quite a few things over the past year or so and this was just another example. I mean, he definitely should be allowed to contribute to Bitcoin. But he's his his Oracle status as I would say on Bitcoin and censored is definitely declined a little bit over the past year or so. I mean, he was wrong after the Ethereum hard fork and saying how it proved how he was right about a hard fork leading to one chain and then Ethereum classic popped up after it was allowed to be traded on an exchange. You attacked me on Twitter for some reason and then everyone that he was attacking me on behalf of came to my defense. So, yeah, it's pretty much all I have to say about that. Excellent, let's move on to the exit question exit questions Satoshi Nakamoto is a single person or a team tone vase. I'm gonna I'm gonna lean with a team at this point, but I mean there was one there will be one leader of the team, but I'm sure he had a couple of trusted people, but I don't really know. I don't want to know. I hope nobody ever knows and to just comment real quick on what Gabriel said to conspiratorial for me. I'm an Occam's razor guy. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one and I would go with. Gavin just you know, he just didn't think it through and jumped to conclusions like a lot of us doing a lot of things. He got excited. He wanted there to be a Satoshi Theo Goodman is Satoshi a person or a team. Satoshi is just like Santa Claus. Now I'm just joking. I think that a Satoshi is probably a team that had contact with extra terrestrial beings that are the color green and that is why the emergence of rep at Bay has stormed the blockchain and is slowly taking over the crypto sphere and is fueling scaling. Gabriel, Devon. I was just going to say team would be dumb, but San Fran says that I'm Satoshi and John Smith says that Tony Satoshi so maybe it could be one of us individuals. If not, then a team because only he and I are smart enough to come up with Kyle Torpe. I have no idea. Maybe I guess a team would probably be more believable since there's so many different topics that someone has to know about that go into Bitcoin to learn to try to understand it but let alone to create it. No, I can't change my answer. Go ahead. I'm going to go with one person. It's been eight years. If it was a team, shit would have leaked by now. I mean, you can't keep secrets. I mean, if you like it. If a team commits a murder, I mean, they know it never lasts. It's just don't tell anybody. So it's probably one person. If it was a team. We would have had a lot more information about the origins of Bitcoin by now. If the only reason why we don't, there's no way you can get multiple people to keep their mouth shut. Or an individual person to keep the mouth shut themselves. I'm going to agree with Tony's first answer. I think it started off as an individual. Then it became a team. I'm also going to agree with Theo's answer space and valiance aliens were involved. But on my information, the space aliens are pink moving on to issue six issue six. I think so Swedish central bank considers Bitcoin. The I forgot to ask how it's pronounced reeks bank. The central bank of Sweden is launching a project to determine the viability of a banked back digital currency and is considering issuing an e. Corona and electronic version of the Swedish currency, the Corona within the next two years. Theo Goodman is the Swedish central bank light years ahead of their time? Or are they making a mistake by attempting to print their own digital currency? Or is the whole crypto world light years ahead of the Swedish national bank because there was already a shit coin called the e. Corona and it's already dead. So, you know, maybe that goes to show I pumped it. I pumped it myself. I'm pretty sure that something like that would be some form of a private blockchain and wouldn't be mined by the public. So, if they want to do that and that's fine, maybe it's a funny experiment for them to fool around with. I'm not 100% sure what benefits they really get from it. But if they're able to find some kind of benefit from it, then great. One benefit might just be as simple that they can add the word blockchain all over these business proposals. And if it's a publicly traded company, then people can buy the stock and it goes up and there's all this perception that they're the most high tech and innovative bank in all of Europe because they have this thing called the e. Corona on this blockchain thing and nobody really knows what it is, but it works cool. It sounds good and it's the future. Every Swedish citizen will be required to have a e. Corona minor in their house and it will also help with home heating, Gabriel, D. Von. You know, I think that central banks, governments around the world can see the righting on the wall. They want to track and control everything. You want to consolidate their power. They want to prevent people from doing anything at all out of the sight of governments. And they want to control the money supply so as to enrich themselves and their closest buttons. Farther you are from the point of money creation, the less you benefit from it. At a certain point, at a certain distance from the money creation, you start to hurt from it. It's not that far. Just, you know, the immediate buddies of the central banks, the banks, the bank executives, the government contractors. As soon as you get a little bit farther than that, the impact of new money creation is neutral. And then for everybody else, for all those other billions in the world, money creation is incredibly destructive of individual wealth. So this is just another step for them to try to control with even tighter iron grip. The problem for governments is the internet. They should never have allowed this big system to have been built because it's completely, once you lose the power of narrative, once you lose the power of strict propaganda, not pieces, saying your every word into the ears of the populace and your message becomes diluted with three thinkers, anybody, individuals, anyone who doesn't agree with the government line. They've lost their grip and it's too late. None, this is my prediction, not for the show, which is for this subject. Just for issue six, none of the electronic currencies being researched and proposed now by government central banks around the world and independent central banks around the world will catch on. None of them will see any update update because it's too easy for everyone to learn how they're being fucked over. None of them will succeed and Bitcoin will come out on top of the moon. Top date. But all the consultants who pitched them will be paid. We've got a good comment from the chat. Chris says it's like the banks are playing checkers and the Bitcoiners have been playing chess for years. Kyle Torpe. Yeah, I'm not really sure what the difference will be compared to how the system works right now or the e-crona has e on the front. But they talk about it like it's going to be a digital currency, but I don't think it's going to be a bear asset at all. I don't, I don't think they would allow that. Maybe you'd be able to kind of like withdraw digital cash from your bank account, kind of like you would withdraw physical cash at a physical ATM. But it kind of goes back to what I was talking about with one of the other topics where these are kind of online systems, as long as they don't online payment systems, as long as they don't allow the kind of properties that people get out of Bitcoin, then it's not really going to be a threat to Bitcoin at all. It's probably just going to be a more efficient and cheaper version of what we already have. I don't think it's going to be anything resembling Bitcoin at all. Yeah, it's not going to it's more kind of like a blockchain hype where it's it's not actually a blockchain. It could be a convenience thing for Swedish banking customers. You could hold both corona and e-crona, although that becomes very confusing if they have different values for each of the two tokens. Why wouldn't you just hold all of your corona in one account and it wouldn't matter if it's e-crona or corona? It gets very confusing. Yeah, I'm sure I can do that. Go to the couch, I'm sorry. Yeah, I'm just not sure if they'll actually do that and allow people to have some type of digital cash that's backed by a government because it would have to be have to be fungible, it would have to be an anonymous, it would have to be censured, ship resistant. It really has to be an anonymous if the corona, if the Swedish bank had something like Venmo, you could send money to anybody in Sweden. It would be very useful at the same time. It could be very tracked. People don't seem to care. Yeah, but what I'm saying is that there'd be pretty much what we have right now. There wouldn't be much of it. But it would be on my phone. It would be on my phone. It would have that. The difference between the coin is that it's a better asset. It would be useful if it made you less depressed in the winter. Maybe we could have some sunshine. Actually, the happy cash is probably the best option. Actually, these has little figures that are making you happy. Tones, your thoughts on Sweden and the e-crona excitement. Normally, this is where I bash all of these central governments because we do the story all the time. The only one who is, but I actually like this one. If you read this Ft story and you read the quotes from the officials of the central bank, they seem to actually understand what Bitcoin is. They seem to understand a lot better than anyone that works for R3. They seem to understand that a lot better than them for starters or anyone that even thought about programming on Ethereum, not to mention actually program that Ethereum. They seem to understand cryptocurrencies way better than any of those people. So they actually talk about the idea. I mean, I agree with you, Kyle. They're probably not going to create a better asset as a digital asset from the central bank. But at least the Swedish central bank acknowledges the fact that this better asset is useful and they're thinking about it. The person actually says in that article, we don't think cash will actually be eliminated because of the better asset property. You don't use the word better asset, but we all know what that means. But we want to get rid of this, you know, relic of physical paper in our digital society. We shouldn't be walking around with a wallet, carry, carry piece of paper. We're all going to have a side note. Can we get rid of coins first? Indians get rid of the big bills, Europe's getting rid of the 500. Can we get rid of coins pennies? Can we get useless? They know anything you can't pay for them. They're not legal tender. Let's get rid of coins before we get rid of bills. How about that? Just side coins. I like how we should make some larger values dollar coins. There's a year one year. I agree with you. They got rid of the half. They got rid of the half penny when it was way more valuable than the current penny is today. But no, I agree with you. But so, so the, so the, nor the Europeans that they have pretty good technology and they didn't want to get rid of this physical paper because it's useless. And they're trying to understand this balance of well, we don't really want to provide a better digital asset sanctioned by the central bank. But we also like we kind of want to track everyone, but we know that people aren't going to be very happy with that. They're going to be fully acknowledging this concept and they're at a bit of a conundrum. So there's another reason why they want to do this. They actually want to give people the option to store their money. Bank without interest paid on that money because when you get interest paid on your money, you are becoming, you become liable for other debts for the banks and the debts since we're talking about bailings in Italy. Not to mention, you know, this money gets lent out. So the central bank wants to give their people an option of them holding their money digitally without 80 liabilities. But then we can talk about the liabilities of a central bank printing money. But again, they're different than the private banks liability of the bank going under and providing insurance and not money and all that stuff. But I applaud the Swedish central bank for at least thinking about providing their population with a better asset, which is a hell of a lot more than I can say for all these other central banks like the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England and and and or I'm sure I haven't heard anything like this coming out of the US federal reserve. So I applaud them. I recommend reading the article, keep an eye on the Swedish Corona. It's probably not going to happen, but I like that they understand. Moving on to the exit question, which country central bank will issue their own version of Bitcoin first Sweden, Japan or the UK feel good. Wrong the answer is United States of America Fedcoin. Oh, trick question Gabriel D. Von. I really don't know. I'm going to go if I don't know on that one. Kyle Torpe. I don't know, but whoever does it first would probably be smart to be the first one to do it. I think it would make their currency more valuable and useful, but I could be wrong in that. I'm not sure I'd want to be the first. I might want to be the second after the first has lots of problems I could learn from. I think it's definitely not going to be the US because the US physical dollars are too important globally. No other paper currencies important globally other than the US dollars. So it definitely can't be the US. But I'm going to go with a very small country like a city state kind of country like Singapore or Lichtenstein. But hey, keep keep an eye on the Swedes. They might be up to something there. I mean, they first have to get out of the sinking ship known as the euro. But I mean, they're not on the euro. So that's good. But they're in the euro zone and there is a Europe. So they're not in the euro zone, but they're in the anyway. They have to like cut the cord like a great Britain. So they can start making their own laws and. And then and then maybe maybe they'll give us something. You know, when when your digital when your e-croners are at a bank, they are KYC. When your e-croners, you know, move back into the central bank under your account, but maybe you can have like branches that are that they'll give you a better asset, which would be great. But the problem with the better asset is then who's responsible for the security of the asset. It's like a chicken and ex situation, right? If the if the if the Swedish central bank then gives you a better asset, who's responsible for when you get hacked? You know, is the central bank responsible for when you get hacked? I mean, look, the the only solution is to get some. You know, people that believe in, you know, property rights and aren't, you know, social moralists. And into the and you know, to making laws or more like eliminating laws on voluntary contracts. And then they will get somewhere with the government currency. In a surprising move of the United Kingdom, who recently exited the European Union and never, ever linked the pound to the euro will create an electronic version of the pound. Many people want to call it the e pound, but we prefer to call it the pound e. The United Kingdom will be giving their people a pound e in the future. Let's move on to predictions or story of the week is we're running out of time. Theo Goodman, are you ready with a prediction or a story of the week? That's a big no from Theo. We might have lost the game real divine. Are you still with us? Do you have a prediction or oh, wait, wait, Theo? I have a quick prediction. I have a quick prediction. Go ahead, Theo. Are you ready? Yeah. My prediction is that the Ethereum blockchain will fork one more time in 2016. Holy once. Gabriel, divine. Yeah, I think more like six. I also think that you're wrong about the name of the UK digital currency. I think it's going to be called the lining. My story of the week is the recent news, I believe it was yesterday, oh, I did it before, that the Google and Facebook advertising businesses, which are the largest cyber advertising possible, the largest advertising concerns in the entire world will be taking steps to remove support from so called. Fake news sites. This is absolutely transparent move by the mainstream propaganda press around the west to prevent alternative voices like ours from being heard on the world stage. Trump's win was due in large part to these alternative news sources and the people that support the mainstream narrative, which is there to keep elite groups in power. They're absolutely flabbergasted and super angry that their toy was taken away that they lost their grip on world power and that they lost control over the narrative. This is a totally transparent attempt at, now I won't call it freedom of speech because these aren't, you know, they're private companies. But this is an absolutely transparent attempt to control the narrative and this is after the New York Times implicitly admitted lying to the world for years. So they said, we're going to try to be a bit more accurate in our reporting, meaning that you haven't been for the foreseeable past for decades, if not forever. That means that you've been lying to us and you're completely failing in our job unlike the illustrious Kyle Torpey, one of the only real journalists in the world. So, you know, this is just a travesty. It's going to hurt so many independent reporters, people that are trying to find out what the truth is and let other people know for their own good and for the good of the world. And it's a real clarion call to the crypto ecosystem to work as hard as we possibly can to create decentralized alternatives to the currently centralized technological space that is in control of the content creation right now. I don't necessarily agree with Chris Ellis that the advertising paradigm itself is totally flawed and unsalvageable. I think we can have a decentralized advertising paradigm that doesn't skew the motivations, the incentivization of journalism in the interable ways. I think there are ways to create advertising paradigms that allow people to find new products, new services through advertising while still keeping the integrity of journalism live. And I think it has to do with the centralized and entire process from the ground up. If that's not possible, that's fine. And we'll move to a cash based content system where you pay 32 Satoshi's to see to read an article or whatever it is. But right now, she is real broke and this is white a shot over the valve. This is the volley that needs to light a fire under all of our asses in the crypto space to create those alternatives. This is high time now. Bitcoin's been around for eight years almost and it's time for us to really get going and building this alternative system on top of a more fair basis. We've also seen a similar control on YouTube where a con now being forced to be more. Journalism things people don't want to talk about, etc, etc are now having their videos demonetized. So this is happening across the board on multiple platforms. Twitter has been banning various voices from usually from the conservative side of the spectrum. I don't really, you know, I'm not left or right, but we really need to decentralize a term to Twitter asap. And I think it's not that hard of a technological problem to solve the advertising might be a bit of a longer road. And as much as Twitter is kind of attempting to do the right thing by limiting harassment and limiting those voices that they think may be causing the harassment by doing this. They're actually hurting their entire brand and their product. Twitter kind of had an internet feeling to it like we were having a discussion on the real old internet where you get trolled you get attacked and you keep stating your opinion because it's the internet you're not going to stop. Modern internet sites are being changed into perhaps safe spaces and other terms that the new people would find more comfortable than the old internet that we all thought was fine. Kyle Torby your prediction or a story of the week. Yeah, it's hard to find that bounce between a moderation and censorship. You can just ask our Bitcoin. But I think I'll go on a lighter note and point out the story is someone just posted in the coin dojo about the slocket guys coming back with a new Dow that they're putting together. And apparently it's going to be a doubt for charitable donations. It should have been the first time although all they ended up making was a charitable donation to that hacker he did. Just like the Clinton foundation. This is great. It's going to be just like the charitable donation. Clinton's global initiative should talk to slocket. Very good. Thanks, Kyle. All right, Tom Vays a prediction or a story of the week. Oh, man. So, yeah, so all my stories of the weekend that I'm being used as a as real stories, including the ones from like a year ago apparently. But all right. So now I'm just going to go ask the Bitcoin price rises this time around. I don't believe it's going to lift all boats like it's happened in the past. I think that I think the next big wave of Bitcoin price rise is actually going to cause a lot of these rats to jump ship. And back from all these people that were telling us that a theory of is the future and monero is the future and dashes the future. When their user base switches back to Bitcoin, I think we hit a low. And we are tweeting one Bitcoin. Bitcoin. 10,000 of market cap fell down to 75%. Turn around. Then we are back to 85%. I believe that one is going to increase going forward. I think the world is saturated. The Z cash nonsense. I'm so upset I missed the two weeks ago. I couldn't join you guys talk more about Z cash, but. And so so I do think it's going in that direction and I want to close out. I just want to give one more shout out to our. I have a few of them. Some of them I interact with Twitter, Sunny, Abanand, Harish, Chadwick, the co founders, Manisha, and I'm sure there's others that I haven't interacted with yet. Keep doing what you're doing. We need India. We need that continent. I tried to get the people on it as more technology goes your way. Huge shout out to them once again to close the show. Good stuff, Tom. Nice to hear good stuff from India in the Unicorn. Sorry. But just I was reading the chat here. And of course the non Bitcoiners were learned what network effect truly means. I didn't really have a story of week or prediction, but I thought of one doing the show things I would like to eliminate phone books and coins under a quarter. I'd like to eliminate the penny, the dime, the nickel, all of them, maybe even the quarter I still like it for video games. There's a lot of legacy machines that still use quarters. Then we could have maybe a larger coin, maybe a $2 coin, $5 coin. You could put Trump's picture on there if you want. If he can get rid of the penny, I'll put his picture on a coin. He's a president, it's legitimate. But yeah, that's what I want. No more phone books, no more small change. And that's good enough for me. I've had enough of these phones. You can't get rid of the you can't create a one and two dollar coins. I mean, I always wondered, like how do people tip strippers in Canada? Right? Because they don't have dollar Canadian bills. They only have coins. They can't pouch. I'll put the coin in a pound. $1 bills, man. You're getting it all wrong. It's all about rare, pippaing and rare pippaicad. I don't know any strippers that take rare pippa. It's because you haven't been going to the stripper joint. The thing is, is that I think that a way with do with pennies and nickels and all that. Well, first we put them in a big machine and then we melt them down and that will be it. They'd be gone. And then we're just in in in Europe. You have one euro, two euro. We also have one euro cent and two euro cent. So it can get really absurd. Two cent coins. See, that's backwards. We don't need that. I'll eliminate that too right now. But anyway, we're running out of time. Thanks to everyone who joined us. We had about a hundred viewers watching us live, which is really great. So we put it out there in advance. We had a link you guys could go to. Thanks to everybody who's in the chat. I see a lot of great action going on down there. And thanks to everybody for being on the show. But we're out of time. So until next week. Bye. Bye.