The Bitcoin Group, the American Original. From the last 10 seconds, the sharpest Satoshi's, the best Bitcoin's, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Tone Vays from Liberty Life Trail. Well, everyone. Time Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network, moving on to issue one. Issue one, the court says yes. A federal court ruled on Wednesday that the John Doe summons against Coinbase for all user data for the last three years will go forward. Early attempts to limit their request to high value accounts have been swept aside, but Coinbase says they will appeal this ruling. Is Bitcoin privacy over? Did it even exist in the first place? Update, Coinbase is also claiming that every Bitcoin sent from its site counts as a sale, meaning that you could owe taxes on the transaction, no matter its purpose or destination. Tone Vays, is this the end of Coinbase? I got an email from them this morning asking me to buy more cryptocurrency, but why would anyone purposely buy from such a honeypot again? They really running a business or were they just running an entrapment scam by selling Bitcoin users an asset that they could never properly hold and would eventually incur their financial downfall? I ask you, Tone Vays. Yes, to the second half of that. Okay, look guys. To me, I know to everyone this is like the story. I think this is a non-stalling because I said this last year, the year before, I've said this pretty much since the day I heard of Coinbase's existence. So this doesn't phase me one bit because I've never been considered opening an account on Coinbase. And if you did open an account on Coinbase, I don't think you should have the right to complain. So I mean, you should have known this. I mean, the existence like, oh, I didn't know. No, you should have known. So I'm glad that the core of appeals or whoever the federal judge or whoever was very quickly ruled that the John Doe was valid because the one, I mean, Coinbase cannot fight this. Coinbase knows. I mean, they're only saying this. I mean, again, as I said on this show a few weeks ago, if I was an investor in Coinbase, I would literally stand there in the boardroom and say, why the hell are you going to waste our money on lawyers? This is why you were KY seeing in the first place. This was so obvious from the IRS ruling. This ruling came in. Everyone became a criminal that did not pay their taxes. What it is worse is that the burden of maintaining these taxes is on the individual. It is not on Coinbase. Coinbase is viewed at the moment you take the Bitcoin off their site, even if you're transferring it to your own wallet, they consider it a sale is also completely valid. Again, people always people underestimate the maturity of financial brokers. They don't say in exchanges. You don't trade on the NASDAQ. You don't trade, well, you kind of, the stock trades on the NASDAQ, but you don't have access to the NASDAQ. Your broker has access to the NASDAQ. My broker is interactive brokers. It used to be options expressed. At one point it was each trade. It doesn't matter. So they do the accounting for you. They do all the accounting. Will you be able to just print out an entire list of all your trades? Also, they also give you a summary of how much money you made this year. This is how much of it was long term. Capital gains is how much of it is short term capital gains. They give it all to you because at the moment you sell that stock. It sold. Coinbase is doing exactly what it should do. Coinbase is doing exactly what you should have expected them to do. This is where you pay the difference. So people were making fun of me. I aren't you saving 15% on by using purse.io. And my answer to them was because it is difficult for me to replenish my Bitcoin supply. I have X amount of Bitcoins. I don't even have that many. If I use them at purse.io, saving 15%. I then have to go into the streets. I usually pay 5% to 10% premium on that Bitcoin. And you people at Coinbase were paying 1% to buy that Bitcoin. Alaphanet me for not doing it. And this is why I wasn't doing it. So this is what you get now because now you will have to pay that difference. You're going to pay it one way or the other. This is where markets are kind of efficient. So I mean, I also avoid it purse.io for other reasons. I mean, the same. Could go to circle and it could go to purse.io because they do have a record of the transactions or they should. If purse.io is smart. And the Jando Sapina can go to purse.io. And they can say how much Bitcoin was spent by user. And they can see if there was a high net worth user. Like for example, if you've ordered $20,000 worth of goods from Amazon and a calendar here. And they were all delivered to the same address. And they were all paid in Bitcoin. The IRS can now. I mean, again, if the same Jando Sapina goes to purse.io. The IRS can then show up at that address and say. You have the burden of proof to show us that you paid taxes on this 20,000 dollars worth of Bitcoin purchases. Those bitcoins and when did you get them? So this is of course. I thought the IRS ruling was absolutely terrible. And the moment that IRS ruling came in, I basically said the use of Bitcoin. In America is basically criminal unless you keep your own IRS records to prove that you're not a criminal. And even then you're basically going to be working. You're basically going to be proving that you are not a tax evader against people that don't understand Bitcoin. So again, this is more of a reason why I've been that people were making fun of me. Oh, how come you don't use Bitcoin to buy your plane tickets? How come you don't use Bitcoin to buy this and that? And Thomas, you and I have had private discussions about this when I was in San Francisco and I explained this. And this is the reason why you were right then. And your point of view has been correct using Bitcoin through Coinbase is not the same as using Bitcoin through local Bitcoins where you meet a person face to face. You trade the cash for the Bitcoins. It's always been a more trackable, more auditable option. I assume most people like myself who bought Bitcoin through Coinbase have paid taxes on them and will continue to pay taxes and are doing their best to deal with what seems like very draconian and or wellian regulations as the confusion as a, you know, an honest person attempting to pay the tax. Unsure of what to do. Right. And I understand that. And again, like people are like, oh, just pay your taxes. No, it's not that freaking easy because how do you pay taxes on something that they don't understand. I mean, they understand it to a minor extent. And they're misclassification of this as a commodity instead of a currency has led to this situation. If it's a currency and it's money and it flows around, you pay the taxes when you take money in or out of the system, which makes sense to me when you're moving money around in the system like from wall to wall from checking to savings. You don't need to pay taxes on it. At least that's if it were currency. Correct. Now, now what coin base should have done is, but again, coin base, I mean, coin base is going down either way. Now, don't you think you were saying earlier, you would have fought against them fighting this as a shareholder. But don't you think they're looking at their customers and they're saying a lot of our customers are libertarians cyberpunk anarchists. A lot of our brand bitcoins brand is being anonymous or semi anonymous. Don't you think they're trying to protect that by fighting this? No, I think that's hypocritical. If they really cared about their libertarian customers, they wouldn't have started a KYC company. No, I think that's very hypocritical. I think what if anything, coin base took advantage of those libertarians selling them something that they couldn't offer. I mean, basically, they were selling them snake oil. I mean, obviously, what's the worst case scenario here? The worst case scenario, you're a libertarian cyberpunk bitcoin or you bought Bitcoin early. You moved it to coin base, sold it for a bunch of cash and then didn't pay the taxes on it. Presumably, you would owe back taxes penalties. Is that the basic worst case? I mean, I don't know. No, I mean, look, they're going to go after the big fish first. They're going to go after the high volume users. I mean, look, this is going to be a nightmare. I mean, well, but again, right there are going to hire a company like chain analysis or elliptic or whoever is tracking all these addresses. I mean, and also, look, all you coin base users, you're the reason why I'm scared to use my Bitcoin as an American citizen. Because I don't want to be, you know, I don't want to be mapped into this, into this web of interconnected people. So, look, everyone is fighting for Bitcoin to be legitimized. But it's hard to do when the laws are clearly saying that it's not, it's not openly legit as a currency. It's only legit as an investment. So, if you, if you're not using Bitcoin, the way the government says you should use it, you're basically putting, in my opinion, you're putting, you know, your peers at risk. So, I mean, there is another side to this where civil disobedience, people continuing to use Bitcoin eventually could change the status quo. We had a similar situation, perhaps, with downloading people downloaded music, they downloaded movies. They seemingly refused to stop regardless of the punishment or the penalties. And now our society is in attempt, normalize downloading. It's pretty much okay. Most people pay for content when they can. But if you can't get it, people take alternative resources. Is this, is it a civil disobedience? I mean, the smart people went and started using a tour, right? I mean, the system went to be decentralized. Now, Bitcoin started out as decentralized, but then people at Coinbase decided to centralize it. So, it's actually kind of like the other way around. So, it's more going to, I mean, it'll probably go back to this decentralized way. My guess is, the IRS will probably come out and put people at ease. And, you know, telling them that, you know, there'll be like up to 200, up to 500 dollars, like a reasonable amount that people don't have to worry about it. Also, the mistake that Coinbase did is they basically turned their service into an exchange. If Coinbase, to this kind of model, you know, kind of takes time to buy, kind of takes time to sell, like basically Coinbase, if Coinbase would have made it a little more difficult, like the trading this stuff. If Coinbase was more open about the past situation, which they should have known, and they should have like provided people at here and like my broker does, you know, gives me a history of the trades and the history and if Coinbase would have like sent people monthly statements of their Bitcoin usage through Coinbase and their capital gains, not percentage wise, but the amounts, right? So, based on that, they could have, they can use even their own freaking index of prices. They know what the damn prices are. They know when you moved coins in and out of Coinbase. All Coinbase has to do with provide people with monthly statements and here and statement of this is your tax liability. I don't know if they did that. I've never used Coinbase. I've never watched. And I think this refers back to the question as to whether or not this wasn't a business or unfortunately whether or not if this was a business that sold in a way defective products Bitcoin that to use is financial peril and that they could have maybe taken care of their customers rather than what it feels like now where you may have only moved a few thousand dollars through Coinbase. You maybe didn't make, you know, maybe even lost money on Bitcoin, but you still move money, any move money out. But now you're in this total fear because of the company not taking care of you or is it your own responsibility? There's a definite argument. I agree with you and you know what and everyone I know all the libertarians hate regulations, but you know what I am very happy that my broker is regulated and forced to send me a year and statement. How much I mean I they traded I've literally made 20 trades per day. There's no way in hell. If you had to pay the tax on each time the the stock went in and the stock went out and the stock went and the points on all of this, it's it's mad. No, no, no, no, no, I do, right? But the thing is regulation forces that broker this up for me and then sent me on one piece of paper. How much money I made or lost through this. I mean, it's also easy for me to tell if I just basically kept track, but there's also transaction fees, right? Like I can make or lose, right? Let's say I made $10,000 in trading this year in profit, but I really made $25,000, but I traded so much that 15,000 of it was come. And this is possible by the way, you know, you can make $10,000 and pay $100,000 in commission. You actually made $110,000, but $100,000 of it was commission. This is very, very possible and you trade it off. So, and these things actually happen to some I mean, look, if I make $100,000 in one year trading, I don't care if I had to pay $100,000 in commission. I kind of care. I mean, this is why you go with the cheap broker to kind of minimize that, but I'm not doing this math myself. And even if I was doing this math myself, they will let me export an Excel spreadsheet with this stuff and then it's easy for me to do the math, but the regulation forces them to keep track of this for me. Now, there was no regulatory enforcement on coin desk to provide this tax information to their users. The moment that tax authority came up with their regulation. Oh, Thomas, by the way, Ian is on full screen. I don't know if you knew that and it's just like his face. I don't know if that's how it's being recorded or not, just a heads up. I don't think I think it's going out fine, but we'll check with the comments. Now I see you. And, and I think you're in control of who, who's on the big screen. And to have immediately taken the initiative. And at the minimum, send out a yearly statement of the user's tax liability that they can now hand over a page to the accountant and say, it's possible. I think they have some kind of a statement generator, but I don't think it's 100% like a lever tax or Bitcoin tax thing that I've heard about. But yeah, I do agree they could have taken the responsibility and given that kind of information to their customers really tried to protect their customers, especially for all ones. I mean, not just that. But because look, we're all freaking lazy. Well, I keep saying to myself, I'm going to keep track of my, I mean, I'm talking about trading, right? I'm talking about like legal trading, right? Like, look, my trader account is registered, right? So I have to pay taxes on it. And I keep telling myself every month, I'm going to take a look at what I have. And I get lazy. And then like the year ends and I'm like, I should really take a look at how much I made and I get lazy. And then all of a sudden I realized, holy crap, you know, taxes are doing about two weeks. Who is busy and I'm scrambling and I'm like, is this how much the exchange telling me I made or lost? Fine, I'm just going to give this piece of paper to my accountant because I trust my broker to get it right now coin base should have taken the initiative and done exactly the same thing. The problem is that a lot of these people, a lot of these Bitcoin traders, a lot of these old coin traders, people using Bitcoin. A lot of these people, they have never traded in real life. They have no idea what the what capital gains taxes even are. For a lot of these big coiners, the idea of this is this will be their first introduction in their lives to what capital gains taxes are. They have absolutely no clue. So coin base, putting this responsibility. I think it's ridiculous, especially if they want to be treated professionally and responsibly as a right as a regulated entity. And this really is a young community. If you think back to Mt. Gox, I think about the stories I heard of waitresses who invested a few hundred dollars in Bitcoin, then suddenly their account was worth a hundred thousand dollars. And sadly, these waitresses just left their funds in there. They lost all their money. Hopefully they got back some back in the bankruptcy restoration. But yeah, you have to manage your money differently when it's a larger amount. If you sold a hundred thousand dollars worth of Bitcoin through Coinbase, I imagine you're getting a phone call. If you sold a few thousand, I mean, certainly it's unfortunate. You want to try to account for that on your taxes as best you can. But the actual accounting of it keeping it true actually truth to the record project, it's impossible. I don't think it's possible for normal person. Maybe with a software. I agree. And that was one of the things that I did not personally want to deal with. Like there's some things that. And your time is worth money. And how much effort you spent this worth money. And one of the things I didn't want to deal with, even if I use Coinbase, even if I told my accountant how much capital, even if I did spend the time tracking all of my, by the way, Coinbase isn't the same. I mean, if I were, if I was anyone here. And again, do you want to spend the time if you are a purse that I owe user, are you going to take the time at a small chance, small chance that they will get the same subpoena, which would be a little trickier for them to achieve right. If you're a circle user, if you use circle and Coinbase, if you used what do you call them a bit for next, I mean any KYC to exchange any of them, right, are you going to take spend all this time tracking your Bitcoin, because I get the damn data. I mean, again, Brave New Coin, they go a little plug, you can go to them and get the historical data of how much each Bitcoin was at every hour, at every day, right. But are you going to take spend your own time and effort doing this as a defensive measure in case the IRS calls you, have you been doing it and bring it to your accountant. But I suppose you are so diligent, which I knew I wasn't going to be. I mean, I know where, what I am and not going to do, which is one of the reason why I stayed away from all the Bitcoin. If you are the kind of person that crossed every, you know, that crossed every T and dotted every I and complied with the IRS statements and told your accountant, look, you don't need to know what Bitcoin is, but please write down that I made $8,000 in an investment. And then the IRS calls you and says, did you pay capital gains and you say, yes, I did. Awesome. And now you're trying to prove something that you understand and they don't and you're going to sit there and argue, you can spend God knows how much time. When you know that you're right, but you're trying to explain it to people that don't may not see it the way you do. They may not see. And then you're standing into another address, how do you prove a negative like you can't prove a negative and when it comes to Bitcoin and anonymous Bitcoin addresses. You're going to be in court or in front of the IRS. Now, this is a very like, you know, I'm fairly risk averse. It's probably not going to happen to the average person. But in case it does, you're going to stand there and you're going to spend an entire day at the IRS building ripping your hair out trying to explain to them how and why you actually you're like the one guy that complied with all the taxes. And you're going to like sit there going, but I paid it and then you try to explain to them that you actually did. Like, this is a very frustrating position. You're going to be like, hell, I wish I took the illegal route. It's like what I, I mean, even way before Bitcoin, when I was like explaining things to people, they were like, oh, you're a pioneer. And I shouldn't probably announce this. The last time I paid for a song was last century or last millennial. I mean, I haven't paid for. Last time I paid for a song was probably 1997. Okay. I don't have time to download anymore. I haven't had time in a while, but that's not different. People ask me, well, why are you pirating this? That you know, my answer has been for a decade. It's just easier. It was just easier for me. Like the moment iTunes restricted the playing of a song to five iTunes account. And I barely remembered my iTunes password to the store this year. I have the MP3. I store the MP3. It's on my thumb drive. I DJ. I can plug the damn thing into any computer. I can just play it. I'm at home. I'm going to forget my damn password. I got for the computer crashes. I don't like using clouds. I don't like using other people servers. I'm sorry. Pirating music is just easier. All they have to do is make it easier. And I don't have to, I'm cheap. I might have stolen pirating. And that system made the change. Music is different now iTunes music Spotify music, these subscription services. They let you download them to your phones. You can use them even if you're not connected to the internet. Even this week we saw Netflix at long last. Let people download videos only kind of Netflix originals and TV shows right now. But you can tell those to those to your phone. Go to the gym. Go on a train or an airplane where you don't have internet access and still access that content, which is what the pirated content has been able to do for years. So they've just now maybe 16 20 years later finally caught up to what a original pirated or DRM free file. I guess they did. I don't know. Like now I'm out of an age. I mean, they still charge. I can't get my webcam to work. It's working on a camera. Just now we're going to cool hang out. So do about that. So go hang out. It's been like crashing for me left the right Tuesdays. I don't know what the hell. I just got my very first blue screen of death on Windows 10 from it. I'm trying to use that. I'm sure. Nice. Well, we're live. So we're going to keep going in. But we're talking about coin base and the IRS decision. What do you think of coin base in the IRS? Tone's pretty much said they should have to give it up. They're going to give it out. They KYC for this purpose. Everyone should have known. But the incredible burden placed upon Bitcoin users to track the price of Bitcoin every time they buy they sell, they move their funds around. What do you think of this? Ian? Well, I mean coin base did say that they're going to fight in court. So, you know, I want to give them credit for. You know, not just everyone acts like they're the patches or the pets of the authorities or something. But, you know, they're going to fight it in court. So I think that's very encouraging. But, but to Tone's point, I mean, when you use coin base, you got to expect that those coins are going to be tracked by some sort of authority figure. So, I mean, it was unexpected, but it's not like a complete surprise. This happened. I hope Coinbase does fight it in court because I do think it's a violation of privacy to just have this over sweeping subpoena that's going to affect every single coin base user. You know, like how often do you see FBI asks for a bank's information on every single one of their customers? So especially with Wells Farger, they would have had to ask for three or four times the number of accounts. So, you know, I want to be definitely paying attention to the case and hoping that Coinbase wins. I hope they fight it as hard as they can. And I think the Bitcoin community should get behind them. You know, I'm on it terribly or anything because they got plenty of money, but, you know, just give them some moral support and and fighting this attack really on our privacy. Obviously, you know, so many users use Coinbase that it should really be seen as an attack on Bitcoin users in general. I mean, how long will it be till we get a spin for a circle and so many others? What I really like though, as may have seen Brian Hoffman had nice tweet about this or he's just saying game on Coinbase and IRS. This is what's going to cause us to make more things that allow us to get around the authorities and it's going to make it much harder for them. The harder they try to squeeze and cramp down the more we're going to slip through their fingers. And more technology is going to be built. You know, they just went after Coinbase and or Coinbase customers in a responsible way, you know, targeted users that they suspected to be criminals. And that would be one thing, but since they're going to be doing this oversweep in isolations, I think it's going to be the kick in the pants to the development community to build some sort of alternative that doesn't rely on this kind of a centralization and doesn't rely on the banks quite as much as a place that Coinbase encircled us. So go ahead Tom. Okay, now I was going to say so so the reason why this kind of a jando, um, packing doesn't go to the banks is because the banks are only holding your money, but IRS a Bitcoin isn't money, right. So I know the IRS that Bitcoin is property, but to me, it sounds a lot more like a stock like Bitcoin is like Microsoft stock, right. So in which case, and they're treating it completely as short term capital gains, right. So no long term hold. Or is it is it long term? I don't know. It could be both. It depends how long you hold it, but it doesn't matter. So to me, Coinbase is like a broker. They're like an e-trade thing. Something like e-trade is regulated. And that's what I said earlier, not only does e-trade inform you as a, they're at each rate. How much money in capital gains you've made at the end of the year. So you can bring this piece of paper to your accountant. So if you look at the money that each trade told you you have made after commissions, down into your tax for, and him how much taxes you need to pay or how much, or if you can take a loss, right. Like if you lost money on these. Up of that, each trade also sends this information to the IRS. And I noticed for a fact, because when I first started trading, I didn't even know nothing about taxes. And I got this I. R. S. inquiry paid capital gains taxes like three years ago on your brokerage because the IRS knows this information because of regulation. Now Coinbase doesn't have this regulation. First of all, Coinbase wasn't mandated to provide capital gains losses or gains to its consumers. They did not take the initiative to do so on top of that coinbase doesn't have a direct line to the IRS to provide this information to them, which is why when you don't pay your capital gains taxes, because if you are trader of the financial markets, the IRS eventually knows you did not pay those taxes. Again, the reason for this John Dosepina and I actually have to agree with it. Look, I'm not going to I'm not going to sit here and scream libertarianism. This is what I've been dealing with in the financial markets for last 10 years. So maybe I'm used to it. And this is what I expected. So because the because Coinbase did not have a direct channel to the IRS to provide them this information on every single user, the IRS has to do this for Coinbase to build this channel. And I think this goes well into the exit question. So we'd like to ask, will this continue? Is this the beginning of a wave of investigations into other companies such as circle purse.io, maybe some of the exchanges like Kraken. Will we see more of this? Will this roll over into the ICOs on the various crowdfunding? Tonvase has the government woken up to Bitcoin in a negative way? I mean, this should basically my guess is circle is already on the phone with the IRS saying how do we avoid, you know, bad publicity for our users. And I guarantee you that starting this year Coinbase will send you gains on a sheet of paper saying you bring this to your accountant and coin, sorry, not Coinbase circle or Coinbase as well. But circle will they're going to preemptively do this. Kraken will do it for their US customers. Again, I mean all these K by seed companies. They should they're going to take this seriously because they know if they get this subpoena on them, they're going to have to deal with it in crunch time. And these will actually contact if I was look if I was running circle, this is what I would be doing right now. First of all, I would be building, you know, get a developer, you know, make them compile all of this. I mean, you have to damn data. I mean, they're the ones that buy and selling. I would send all my US customers and probably EU customers. I don't know what their taxes are. I don't know what they're, but even if you don't know what the tax regime is, here's what happened to the IRS. They just say, they said you owe it retroactively back to 2009. So circle needs to be even contacting those people that haven't even used their system in years and back dating this stuff from the very first circle. They should be notifying their customers how much capital gains they earned by moving their coins in and out of circle. And then it becomes the customer's responsibility. Back when they moved their funds out of circle, where did those funds go? Did they sell it or did they just move it to their own world? I mean, this is going to be a nightmare, but going forward, everyone is going to know. It's going to put this information into their terms of service. They're going to provide you with this information. And I bet your circle is going to have a direct channel to the IRS. Does just like each trade does to the IRS so that I was knows how much the user made and if that amount isn't on their tax form, the IRS will just notify the user directly. And D Martino, will we see more raids like this? Yeah, I think circles pretty much the probably the next on their list though. There is a little bit difference because Coinbase kind of encourages the day trading. You know, they got a day trading platform there. It's supposed to circle, you know, it's more just to buy big coins and move exchanges or to save them. There's not like a high volume trading where you can see the graphs and everything. You just see the price and buy it. So maybe they won't take much of interest in circle as you know, a site that's encouraging high volume trading like that. But I would suspect that the I mean the next logical step would go out the circle. Will they be going after like cracking all those other sites? I mean, it just remains to be seen. But we all knew this was coming. You know, the big claim regulation and start with the bit license in New York. And it's just the building and building up going to have to see how it goes. I'm a little surprised to see it happen when we're having a transition in the government. Next administration might take a different policy on these kind of things. So it's interesting to see them make such a big move during this time. But I guess you know, it wasn't in the process of happening a long time ago. And this is just coming to the public recently. But. Someone does make a good point that other businesses like E trade do provide this information, not only to the customer, but to the IRS. So it seems like coin base while they weren't required to do this. They probably should have been doing it anyway. It seems like this ruling is going to force that. Yeah, yeah, but you know, there's so many. Tom compared Bitcoin to a stock and for a lot of ways he's right. But we all know Bitcoin is unique in the number of properties it has and the type of. Things you can do with it. So it's not really like that for everyone. You know, not everyone uses it like a stock. Not only the IRS. Well, let me finish. Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm getting to is so believe me fish. You know, I don't know if the IRS is going to. Make that distinction. I would suspect that they're not. But you know, we're like anything. We're just going to have to wait and see. And you know, if you're doing something illegal with your Bitcoin, you should have already been taking precautions. And if you're not, well, then, um, I guess you should start worrying. Again, the presumed victim here is people who made large financial gains on Bitcoin coin. If you bought Bitcoin on coin base and then spent them on Silk Road, you have all kinds of other issues. But this has been how we've warned and discussed about this. But let's. One quick comment. One quick comment. So coin base, isn't coin base isn't big enough to basically push back. They're just not. So what you basically need is you need a company like Amazon. Start accepting Bitcoin as a payment for their goods. Then Amazon can make a phone call to the IRS and say, hey, can we make all Bitcoin transactions under a thousand dollars? That are clearly made for purchasing goods and services treated as money and not does investment vehicles. So that is what you need. You need a company with the size. So make them listen. Everyone right to Jeff Bezos today. Let's move on. Can I say one more thing real quick? All right. I wouldn't say that they're too big to fight back. They're plenty big. You know, they've gotten. I forget how many different seed rounds they've had where they raise millions of millions of dollars. No, I think they're going to go. In 2015. I don't know if they're big enough to win, but they're definitely big enough to pay for a lawyer and bring this to court and see where it goes. And you know, it's possible that other exchanges and other. Bitcoin businesses may join them in that fight. But I think they've raised a lot of money. If you can't pay for a congressman, you're not big enough. That's just generally my opinion. I think they're raising up the win, but they'll be big enough to the fight and bring this to court. They raise the company, but I'm not sure they make a lot of money. And I think you have to do both to really play in this high level game. But we need to move on to issue two because we're running out of time. Issue two Bitcoin 750. And Bitcoin price has been bouncing back, refusing to go below 720 with repeated tests of the 750 level. Right now, it's sitting at 770 and 74 cents according to coin desk on my screen. What is driving the Bitcoin price rise? China, India, the IRS and Coinbase? Or is it simply time for Bitcoin to rise higher from the recent, recent happening? In D Martino, your thoughts on the price rise? Yeah. You know, we've seen with Bitcoin, the history has been these giant jumps up in price that, you know, Bitcoin is $1 and then all since $30 or it's $30 and all of a sudden it's $1,300. I think what we're going to see this time and keep in mind that that last price rise up to the $1,300. We don't know how real that price rise was because of all the funny business going on Mt. Gox and their bots. So this is really the first time where we have this many users and we're seeing a big price rise. I think it's going to be a slow and steady price rise as opposed to the giant spikes we used to seeing and people have been hoping to predict. But yeah, I mean, this is basically the community has been telling the world this for years that Bitcoin is going to go up and we're starting to finally see it. I don't think, you know, it's going to be $10,000 tomorrow. I don't think we're going to see like huge spike, but, you know, I don't see us going below 500 again anytime soon. So I would just say, hold on to your coins and enjoy the ride. Ian's right. It may be a more mature ecosystem this time. We don't have just one exchange. We had Mt. Gox last time. Tone, do you think this is it Bitcoin rises slowly and steadily from here on out? I really love your comment a few weeks ago when you said tone is always short term bearish. So I'm not sure how that leads to long term bullish. I actually thought about that and you're you're right. I mean, I am short term bearish on Bitcoin. Ten of this time. It's like so rare that you would catch me and I'm bullish on Bitcoin because when it's going down, I always think there's more room for it to fall. And I'm also biased, right? Like I love to see Bitcoin going down, right? It just means I'm buying it at lower level. So I'm like bias. I can tell everyone it's going to zero. But so I've always said that like above 760 is just open air like above 760. It's open air to new all time highs in price. And when you break new all time highs in price, people just want to jump in. But we're about 20 or 30 more dollars away from a new all time high market cap. And that's going to just hit the Twitter sphere real quick. The all time high market cap. And people are people are noticing. I mean, I've been saying it for a while and I know tour is on top of it. And he'll be tweeting all about it. Not to mention that theoretium is crashing and all these old coins are going down and people are moving back into Bitcoin. Roger, via called the bottom perfectly. I tweeted that out. I mean, when Roger started saying Bitcoin is losing its dominance against the U.S. And it's trending down for like a year and a half. He called that bottom just top notch. Just like Mike her and called up called the bottom and price twice by you know, rage quitting and starting Bitcoin XD. Because the Bitcoin problems, you know, that he did those at the lows as well. So I mean, what markets hit extremes, they completely reverse. So I mean, I really wanted to see Bitcoin fall to about 650 and kind of take a little more time to break out. Now that it's breaking out, it's probably going to go higher. Honestly, who knows. But I think the coin base is having a big effect because all those people that you know, were like, you know, smiling, paying 1% to buy their Bitcoin are now will now have to go into the streets. And buy it the way some of us have been doing at a 10% premium. So if all those coin base users and circle users, people realize the IRS issue and all these people go into the local bitcoins and now have to pay. And remember, no, for these people go to local bitcoins. I mean, those sellers are in dumb. They're going to jack up the rate on you. And then the other day, the other day, out of the UK, and they said, hey, I got a problem. The local Bitcoin sellers on the street in the UK are asking you for KYC information. And my answer to him was, you're telling me that Bitcoin is grossly undervalued because I because if Bitcoin is worth 700. And I sell it to you for 710 and he wants to, you know, or he sell it to you for like 7, even 725. And he wants to KYC you. I guarantee you if you offer him $1,000 for a Bitcoin, he's going to let the KYC go. You know, there is a certain percentage where the seller will say, you know what? I will take the risk of not KYC you. I might be smart and not sell you $10,000 worth of Bitcoin so that I don't break other laws. But there will always be a price. And I think, and I just thought about this today, and I can certainly see that all of these regulated users are now forced to go into the street to buy it in a non KYC way. And now paying that extra 10 to 15%. So that clearly means that Bitcoin is 10 to 15% under price. And it will go up that much. Let's move on to the exit question, the price of Bitcoin next week, higher or lower, END Martina. Yeah, higher lower next week. I mean, this is such a boring question to me because I don't think it really matters if you're buying Bitcoin, you know, for your first time or whatever or just looking at increase your holding. It doesn't matter if you save $10 on it. If in five years, it's $10,000. So what is it? I saw that at 780 earlier today. I guess now it's down to 770. That's fine. Buy it right now rather than hoping it goes down to 750. And then it ends up going to 800. I mean, but you know, just hurry up and get on the Baron wagon before you know, it's 10 grand of Bitcoin. And if it gets to that point, then it's not going to matter if you save $10 or $20 waiting for it to drop down to like a temporary low, you know, back in 2016. So I don't know. Flip of coin, maybe you'll be higher, maybe you'll be lower, but long term is what's important here and it's going to be trending upwards, I believe. See, and that's a good point because 770 is still up for me. But if it hits 780, we're actually down a little tone, vase your thoughts. And I mean, look, I can take a guess on where I'll be next week. I mean, I do my own charting show where I look at the charts and I've been kind of neutral to slightly bearish on Bitcoin the last two months. But broke out the other day. 60 significant level. But again, if we reverse and pull back down to 700, I was trying to time it will only, you know, what will cause you sleepless nights. Buy it, wait. I mean, I don't recommend I know what a pitch bit going to people. I just look you needed. I'll explain to you why I buy it. And then you make your own decisions higher or lower next Friday. But my track record on these things are like maybe a 10% accuracy. So if I'm say now if I start saying short term bullish, maybe we'll go down, I'll be able to buy some more. Wait, 10% accuracy, man, there's only two options. She at least be 50%. I don't even know. You would think so. I don't know. I honestly, nobody knows. Nobody knows. I'm going to say higher this time. I usually say lower. So there you go. Nobody knows, but me. And I'm sticking with what I know. And that means it's going higher. Moving on to issue three issue three Bitcoin and Latin America. A new article from Reason magazine this week highlights the secret dangerous world of Venezuelan Bitcoin mining. Other articles from the same source recognizes the potential of Bitcoin to undermine socialism and promote freedom in the region. Ton Vays is this the story of the future will Bitcoin first transform Latin America and then the world. Tony muted. Can we hear you? Oh, yeah. No, I didn't hear you say who's going. I'm on or how you go first. Okay. Here's the thing. So I'm so 50. Well, not look, I'm happy that Bitcoin is used in Venezuela. I'm happy that it's used in Brazil. So I'm not happy that reason.com is publishing these stories. It's situations where you want to bring attention. Patients where rule number one, you don't talk about the coin. Like you don't talk about fight club. And you just do it. Profiled in these stories. Rodrigo. I looked at it and I'm like. That guy looks so familiar. Anyway, I got too many paths open. I can find the story. So I look at it and I see his picture and I'm like, I know him. Very few people know him. See, I know him. I'm going to sound like an old. I'm going to select the guys from Chicago. So I know Rodrigo. We were both floor traders back in the early days of Bitcoin at the New York City, Bitcoin center. Back when there was like a physical exchange and you can still see it in some of the documentaries. But all this is like we're talking 2014 here. 2013, 2014. And he's a quiet guy knows the stuff knows what Bitcoin is clearly doing a good thing. Just stand why in the world. He would put himself out there like this, right? Then there is another guy profiled in that video. He's like smiling. It's illegal to avoid a 30% tax on goods coming in. It is like this is so frustrating to me, right? Like there are some things you're doing. There are actually illegal. Look, I know that people as the article says, I mean, Venezuela's oil is breaking into zoos to eat a horse because they're hungry. And I understand that you are helping them by bringing Bitcoin into that country. But you are not helping them if you get arrested. The my or the effort. I don't agree with breaking rules number one into a fight club. Like in other regions where you know, a big person to make it harder, you know, so the community can rally behind you and all this stuff. But what you're doing something really good for an impoverished region. Like you I mean again right back in like even like when people are still smuggling or trying to get out of North Korea and they're like smuggling them into China. They're smuggling them into South Korea. I mean, these people that are running these things even back like during the slave trade when people had these tunnels to help you know bring people into Canada bring bring slaves to the North. I mean, these people didn't take out ads and newspapers showing their face, you know, saying we are, you know, we will help you, you know, crawl through this tunnel. And this is the part of the story that bothers me. There is a time and place to be public and talk about it. And there is a time and place to just do it. And it looks like for the last two years, Rodrigo has been doing. And now it's becoming public and how he's being public about it. And I think that's a mistake. And I think it is a good point that Venezuela may be already too far down the road of economic collapse to get Bitcoin. There may be too much riding in the streets, too much complete lack of everything to set up this kind of infrastructure necessary to convert the country that maybe his efforts may be more valuable in another country as hard as that may sound to look at a larger scale. But now he is not in those countries. I mean, he's in Brooklyn. I should probably go to a call, go talk to him. I mean, I know I might be one of the very few people that knows the guy. I mean, he's literal. I mean, I'm sure if you anyone watched the video, I don't think anyone knows who he is. I literally forgot, forgot all about him, but I haven't seen him in like a year or a half. It was pretty much. But I mean, read that whole mining article, just a little long ago, slightly beyond my attention span, I didn't like other long week. So I didn't even read the mining one, but I read the other stuff and I'm. There's a time to be public. There's a time to just do stuff to help people and he's clearly doing stuff to help people. I mean, it may seem like it's good, but it puts him on a radar. He doesn't want to be on. Or I don't think he wants to be on. Let's see, Andy Martina, your thoughts on this articles. I don't know if the article mentioned where he lives, but she just kind of put out their tone. No, it did. I'm pretty good about that. Like a lot of the stuff, like people tell me something and privately, and I will keep it private, unless I see it in the public domain and then and then all bets are off. So I think this is actually a good thing. I agree that it's definitely a risky thing for the first person in his face out there, but you know, sometimes we need people to do something risky. And hopefully it doesn't become a martyr, but you know, that could be his future. But you know, okay, so it's illegal to get past this 30% tax. Well, I just have to look at some of the founders of the Silk Road or Cody Wilson in Bright Hoppin and their kind of philosophy, which is like, yeah, the government can tell us that we can't do something, but the code says we can. And you know, I've written about this, I've read about it in my book a little bit that, you know, this is going to be the big question for a future is if code supersedes law and regulation. And once it's out there, you can't really get past it. So you know, you look at a thing like Napster. It comes out, you know, it's a big success. Sean Parker gets arrested. You know, they shut down Napster and then what happens after that? 10 other sharing programs come out that are centralized and then a couple of them get shut down a couple of them are kind of evil with malware. And then we get a couple more iterations direct connect and stuff and then boom, we got torrents. And then there's nothing they can do to stop it to arm because decentralized. So maybe the people that are bringing Bitcoin to Venezuela, you know, obviously mining in Venezuela, you can't, you know, because the physical thing you can't just like avoid put it into cyber space there, you know, unless you believe in cloud mining, which is the dumbest thing ever. But so, so maybe some of the early Bitcoiners in Venezuela get arrested or you know, run into some problems and then the community will figure out ways to work around that you got a horrible government like that, which to me, I think, you know, seems like it's almost on the verge of collapse. You have people that's hungry that they're breaking in the zoo is to eat a horse, which I wanted to mention it. And he is that they just have horses in their and their zoos, you know that horses and exact animal down there. So he was like, oh yeah, horse, whatever. And next next little thing has a dog and then whatever anyways. So the code is going to be a law eventually because once it's out in the internet, there's no stop in it, internet's bigger than Venezuela. So this is just the first step of like getting past those things and it'll be done in a centralized way with like centralized exchanges and it's the government of Venezuela has the power to which I don't think it's very clear that they do. And then the power to they'll shut some of them down and rest some of them. And then someone will come up with a way around that or there'll be so many that they won't be able to deal with it. You know, you see this a thousand times, you know, when I first came out here, Thomas heard you talking about piracy and the comparisons between Bitcoin and piracy. I mean, if you can't see it, then I don't know what you're looking at. It's the exact same scenario played out. And I think we're going to see that played out over and over and over again over the next century of some technology coming out that runs the fall of the government. The government does what it can to stop it and within stop it, they help create something that's a thousand times more powerful. I think we'll see the same thing will have centralized exit. Maybe this is the thing that finally gets us a decentralized exchange that actually works and people actually use. And then we'll get past these silly government is that want to charge 30% just to go by goods outside the country that aren't in price insanely like they are in Venezuela right now. You know, I think I'm more socialist and most Bitcoiners out there, you know, I believe in universal health care and all that stuff. It's not a very popular opinion in this space. But like a government like Venezuela, you know, like even I see how evil and messed up it is. So I say, you know, I've been saying for years that the spot Bitcoin is going to make gains is in third world. It's not in America where we have perfect banking systems. We have a stable currency only really, really take on America when people need it and they don't really need it right now. You know, if your person paid attention and what the fed's doing and all that stuff, then yeah, you want Bitcoin as a hedge and you're going to hope that's going to go 10,000 and you'll be rich and stuff like that. But people in Venezuela need it so that hold on to their grocery money, you know, so they can pay rent and those are the people that are going to be helped the most by Bitcoin. And that's what's going to cause Bitcoin to explode. You know, before the 2013 price rise, there's like a bunch of articles, the Chinese are getting into Bitcoin, Chinese are getting into Bitcoin. And then boom, we went up and you know, a whole lot of things would happen. Melcox went down and Chinese government put controls on Bitcoin and so then we had that slowed the set down to 196 or whatever it was. But ultimately Bitcoin has always been designed for the third world. It's always been designed for the underbanked and the unbanked. And we're seeing that right now. I said during the greasing, it's only going to take one country to collapse and their currency to become completely worthless for Bitcoin to explode. And we're getting pretty close to that right now in Venezuela as to whether or not it's too late to help them. Maybe, maybe not, but the people in Venezuela who already have Bitcoin who have been holding Bitcoin for six months or a year or something, you know, I guarantee they're very, very, very happy that they bought that Bitcoin a year ago or six months ago or whatever it was. So we're dev, you know, Bitcoin, you know, if we want to say we at the community help Bitcoin or whatever. We've helped then, as well as already. And that's going to continue and I hope more of us will buy Bitcoin and exchange the help some doing and help some buy goods outside the country that aren't so expensive. Then I think that something that should be applauded. I think Ian made a lot of good points there. What I want to go back to is this idea of code as law. And you were talking about what Cody Wilson might believe and what others might believe. And I thought about cyber warfare and I thought about the US versus Russia and China and how basically we're in this whole new world where there are no official laws. Officially our governments have treaties. We work together even even China, Russia and the US. There are treaties and agreements. But if you look at cyber warfare, there aren't any agreements. So China might think, hey, maybe it's okay to deduce a site in the US because there's not a law against it. And Russia might break into some email servers and then publish them. These kind of things are all happening in this vacuum of no law. And for a long time, what we thought was something like Napster is that the law would catch up and the law would start to understand innovation and have a more open hands-off policy. But what really could happen with Bitcoin is Bitcoin and the internet could completely separate from the law. And what becomes possible in code what you can run smart contracts, Ethereum, Bitcoin, whatever it is that you can run is what you can do. And that the law just never catches up. Tell me what do you think about that. Is it going to catch up? Are we going to see the Coinbase story is a bit of an IRS attempt to take back a normalization of the old system where you would check the law first and the new system is just, I coded it, it runs, I'm done. Guys, I think the law will catch up. I really do. The law will catch up. Maybe some jurisdiction. The law will catch up until there is another superpower and a new constitution. So what would explain piracy? What do you mean? I mean, the law didn't catch up to BitTorrent. Now we have anyone downloading anything they want on the internet that they shut the browser but they're still decentralized BitTorrent. The law catching up doesn't necessarily mean it will be a bad thing. So the law catching up may be a complete overhaul of music copyright to make piracy legal. Right. So the law does eventually catch up and it could use sometimes it's good. Like look, what America brought to the world was the separation of church and state. So maybe in another 40, 50 years there will be a similar thing where we separate technology from state or something like that. Right. So the law will catch up, especially once younger and once millennials control the government. Right. So we still have 60 year olds all over the government. Right. And here's not my whole life though. As soon as the gen-exers get in everything has been changed as soon as it never happens. It's always old, crusty, crumpling in the government. Yeah, and eventually it will happen, right. Because then then we are right now working on playing. I mean, the finally they're there. They're catching on to what, you know, the internet is of course the technology has evolved. I'm going to make one to I know I want to move on to the next topic as well, just two very quick points. So one of them is, you know, for every Cody Wilson, there's a hundred raw supergs. Right. So you don't want to be the raw super. And raw super was trying to be private. Right. I'm not even saying he was or wasn't pirate robbers. He was a cute. He was, you know, the court decided he was pirate robbers. Right. It doesn't, to them, it doesn't mean it again, right. Do we know if he was or wasn't we have no idea, right. But the court has decided that he was. And I don't wish that on anyone. And was super wasn't even a public person. Right. If someone was running a dark net market, they're not out there, you know, advertising for the dark net market, at least and neither show in their face. They're being private about it. And look, look, look, cryptocurrencies. It's, it's, it's borderline illegal for all governments because again, there is no law. And just because there isn't a law, you can't assume that it's legal. Maybe at some point, this was the assumption. But in today's world in my head, if it's not clearly stated as legal, I'm actually my assumption is that it's not my assumption isn't that it is. Now, I'm glad that there are people that push the limits. I'm not going to be one of those people. And some of these people go to jail, but the people that know they're pushing the limits. They're not public about it. They're pretty private about it. What Cody Wilson did is an exception. And he knew he was going to have a huge percentage of the population on his side as he did it. Cody took a very calculated risk. And he knew that there would be enough support to kind of lower this risk. And this is the reason why, you know, a lot of these other people, they literally literally stay in in the dark. They stay anonymous even Satoshi knew this and stayed anonymous. But the topic chose a different path. And we will see how the topics path ends. As well as the other as a lot of other people in this crypto space. So I do think regulation will at least catch up to them. And we'll see what the next rounds of CEOs see us. C IOs C IOs is like because I bet you that the next wave of C IOs is going to be anonymous and they're ain't going to do as good. I mean, the C C I, I see it. I see. I see. Sorry. I guess it's been a long week. I've been for Bitcoin conferences this week alone that I'm attending. So I'm like burning out here. I think Tony makes a good point about Cody versus Ross. Cody developed a 3D printed gun. He published the plans, but he didn't really start a company where you could order the parts to make your gun. He kind of separate himself where I'd say Ross by creating the or allegedly creating the sell of the dark net market. I mean, I think it was a lot more than that because it went to millions of dollars and thousands of orders and it was just a complex thing. But what you also said, Tony, about the debate about the powers about what is not restricted is open versus what is not restricted is closed. That's an old debate and it's been around for a long time and I think we should have it more in the future. It also came up during the constitutional convention when they were discussing about the powers and what they actually decided is that the power is not enumerated in the constitution would be reserved for the states, which has been a whole debate in itself. I think we're going to move on to issue four. So let's just try to get out today. So issue four, SF Muni hacker demands Bitcoin ransom. And once beginning to sound like a broken record, Bitcoin and its partner in crime, crypto locker, the software that encrypt your hard drive and demands a ransom was back in play this week. This time forcing the SF Muni system to run free fairs during the peak black Friday shopping sales and the hackers demanded a ransom. So these are stocking up on BIPA a similar ransom in D Martino is the hack the fault of Bitcoin and encryption or our insecure systems responsible. Definitely insecure systems. I mean, that's like. I don't even know how to say our encryption is the problem. I mean the lack of encryption is the problem. The lack of securities, the problem. This has been. You said it's a broken record, but this is just a new wave of crime that is not even I don't even want to say wave crimes just a new type of crime that's enabled by anonymous payments, which we knew anonymous payments would enable new types of crimes, you know, but the trade off of getting rid of that is, you know, allow and the government and potentially everyone anyone who has, you know, went back to the clipper chip and put a clipper chip at every phone and every computer or, you know, built the back door for the government, then it would be not only in the government knows everything one of your purchases, but anyone who's able to hack the government, which they approve that they are immensely hackable. Just look at the NC, look at what we saw in this election. The encryption is the only defense you have against hacker so to, so to blame these hacks on our only defense to them is, you know, at night, and I'm not saying that you think that. But, you know, I'm sure some people do, you know, and it's an old bumper sticker, you know, if you outlaw guns only outlaws will have guns, what same thing can apply to encryption, you know, if you outlaw encryption it's not going to stop people from using encryption, it's just going to criminalize the people that use encryption. No, it's, it's that these companies, from governments have just been so relaxed on their security practices for decades now, and now there's anonymous payment method that makes it so someone can profit off that people are going to profit off that what they're going to have to do is start taking their cybersecurity seriously, which, you know, they haven't been doing since the 90s, you know, the first, the first online store to offer quote unquote safe purchases online was a site called net market. And five years after, you know, the very first internet e-commerce transaction that was safe, you know, that wasn't like drugs or something that was also, you know, legal transaction on a website, someone by a sting album of all things. Five years after that, that site got hacked in about 100,000 credit card numbers were, you know, sent to hackers. So this has just been a recurrent thing that happens on the internet. Now they found a different way to profit off of it where they asked for big coins rather than just taking credit cards and going to best spies quickly as they can and buy in TVs. But, you know, companies have to take their cybersecurity seriously now, maybe they finally will. It's time to step up and I agree, sting is a great artist, but I prefer his work with the police. And Ian's right here, it's very complex. Encryption is both the problem and the solution. And what I would bring up is, again, we're seeing what I see as a combination of tools. Originally Linux was tools, open source tools developed by Richard Stahlman. And what Linux did is he put those tools together into Linux. And Satoshi in the same way took several tools and ideas about cryptography and coins and Bitcoin put those together into Bitcoin. What we've seen the hackers do is take this crypto locker and crypto hard drive program, take the ability to get Bitcoin and put that together into now. When you take over someone's computer back in the day, maybe you could delete some files or put up some funny stuff on their website or just kind of mess with them. Now you can lock down their hard drive, request money in a kind of pseudo anonymous fashion with Bitcoin. And it just really comes together. It's this perfect storm of negative and bad computer tools. But Ian's right, we can't outlaw encryption. It's not going to work the cats out of the bag. Tony, what do you think about these hacks and hacking? Okay, hard. I need to pull up a share my screen. I said I just remembered that I had a screen shot of this. Okay, so here we go. And I want to share my screen. So I have to make this quick because I'm supposed to run out somewhere. But let me hold on. Let me just share my screen real quick. Excellent. All right, I have the image. Do you do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do. Here it is. Okay. Can you guys see this? Yeah, excellent. So I learned one of the best presentations I've seen oh here not by a Bitcoin guy, but he understands Bitcoin very well. It was by a man named Miko hyphenen. And they do basically internet security. So I agree with Ian when he I just don't blame the current system, right. I agree that the problem is current internet security. But also they didn't need the current internet security the way we needed today. So yes, they absolutely need to upgrade their system and using encryption and give their users privacy so that a lot of these hacks are mitigated. So crypto locker is not new. And I learned this from Miko hyphenen's presentation because here is crypto locker from 1989 where your computer has been encrypted and all your files have been locked up. And you need to send a money order or cash to a PO box in Panama in order to get the decryption key. So I and I was very fascinated by this another thing that I learned from Miko's presentation is that car. Right, did I finish sharing? Okay, here we go. The other thing that I learned from Miko's presentation is that crypto locker is the single unicorn in the crypto space. They have made over $1 billion in profits or revenues, which is probably almost the same because their expenses are very, very small. As far as I know, they're only expense. The most useful help desks. Because when you call them, they will basically walk you through how to go and get Bitcoin and how to use it. And so Bitcoin and they really have a motivated set of buyers there. Those people really want to buy those Bitcoin. So I was showing like some of the help desks conversations on chat and advice. If you get crypto locker. You turn off your spell check, you pretend you're in a grade and you try to explain to them how you're a poor janitor. All that money and they will drop the price for you. They are a very nice. They are helpful help desk to help you with the problem of decrypting your computer. They are also responsible for them for not a majority, but a decent chunk of the value of your Bitcoin and creating the succub. Crypto locker and the silk road. What a beautiful system we've built. So I mean, all of these systems, I mean, again, right, the more your system has more lives depending on it, the more you should care about security. Also, I can see the future where all of these systems are becoming less and less independent, less and less connected. And less and less in danger of losing the data. Right. So I try not to have any. I mean, I do backup my computer. But you know what? The only thing that's in my computer that's all that valuable. And they're not in pictures about the people. It's more like because I tweet a lot and I usually tweet with like pictures and screenshots. So I would suck to lose it like it would like if my computer got locked up. The only thing I would really lose is like my stored website history, I guess like all the links that I usually go to it was stuck, replicate like a hundred websites. And some of the ones that don't go to the roof and will save and it would also suck, you know, put it on my blog and Twitter, it would suck to have to go back and retrieve all those. Like if I lose all of my scam busting work on steam it, you know, that hundred hours of work, all those like fancy pictures and like the tone. The people like to say because I do in all of my tweets, like, it would suck lose those pictures. But you know why there's nothing all that valuable on my computer. So if I get a crypto locker as long as I can reinstall the operating system, it's not a big deal. So I can definitely. Yeah, but on most people keep a lot of data on their computer, they're kind of haphazard with it. Let's generally suggest backups are very key, especially if you're important data, upload your photos to somewhere online. Maybe Apple has I photo or the Google photo backup or whatever Microsoft has backup your important documents and then you're less, you're in less trouble. But I don't think it's going to take me to read down all my porn. I think it's going to take hours, man. I have to backup your porn. I don't have any of that in my computer, but no, no one's going to believe me though, but right, I know it's a hassle, but I think what a lot of especially like a company, I think they're going to start at least investigating like, you know, they're going to start preparing for this. And if it happens, there won't be anything too important stored on that computer to get encrypted in the first place. And I love that's also just good information security practices to have these backups to have your data is separate from your system and your system is clean and your data is safe. I mean, they have good practices. I love what airbits is doing with their edge security model. And I don't like storing my pictures on a cloud, like I said earlier, I don't want to give Apple, or I don't even use Apple, I hate Apple. I don't want to I think my phone is automatically backing up my pictures on a. I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that, so I need to turn that off. I'll storm in my phone. I guess I backup from my phone to my computer. I'm not going to lose them both at the same time. Security is better than your computer security. Also probably do the regulations or monopolies, I guess, and windows. So I mean, all those things, that's pretty much, I think I have something else to say on this topic, but. I'd be careful about thinking that your phone secure though. I used to write about phones and there's a lot of malware is really growing, especially in Android space. You know, last word about cell phones and like, I think 2013. At that point, it was like, something like 4% of malware was targeted towards Android phones, but that was up from like 1% the year before. I didn't grow in problem with cell phones, I expect that to just continue. So I want to say that cell phones are inherently more secure than your desktop. It's just that they're targeted a lot less, but they're being targeted more and more. I'd also say the other actor on a cell phone is they call the cell phone company and get them to forward your number to them. Then they take over all of your two of phase that you're set to your cell phone. That can be a real problem. I'm not going to watch out for that. Yes, I want to throw another comment about that. Where did I read that? Where they were talking about the two. How easy it was for a hacker to get their number transferred over to the hacker and then took over off the and then everything else was. It's a real problem because yeah, when you hear people and they're like, I had to defend. I still got hacked. It's usually this phone number problem. So. Joey, Joey weeks. Joey, Joey weeks. They got off of Biccup. They got them for the 100-bit coin, and then they used his Facebook to then send messages to his friends and Sasha ended up sending him like 12 Bitcoin. There's a whole video on this Sasha Day game. Just Google Sasha Day game on this is short. Like 20-minute interview. That's probably about a hundred good points of his little Ponzi scheme. There I feel so bad for him. Oh, it's a nice guy. Bitclothes, whatever. But this is what I was going to say, right? So a lot of people are now, so this is another use case, an additional use case for crypto locker, which I'm going to say it here, because I've been saying it publicly for a while. Everyone is always scared off chain scaling. What happens after two more havings when there is no Bitcoin subsidy, when there's no new freshly-mined Bitcoin and my answer was, well, I bet you there will be companies. And there already are companies going to mine at a loss. So if, so because crypto locker has already made over a billion dollars in profit, and most of it, according to Miko, is just sitting there because how do you move a billion dollars in the list of? Do you mean the software crypto locker got a billion dollars? Or is there like this spread out between a bunch of different hackers? Why is that like one entity is? Or you don't know, right? Probably. It's probably spread out. But I mean, a few of them are, I mean, you'd have to dig into his work. The entity of crypto locker is spread out against multiples. But I'm sure there is like a few major players. I bet you there is like three or four that are dominating that space. But the concept of crypto locker has made a billion. And if it is like one or two major entities that are making this much money, I think they would be more than happy to mine at a loss, to keep Bitcoin as stable as possible. So they can continue making money. And the dark net markets will do the same. And the gambling industry will do the same. And the porn industry will do the same. And if Netflix goes to the Bitcoin alacard model, instead of monthly subscriptions by credit card, an alacard model where you pay, again, in the future, assuming Netflix wants to adopt Bitcoin. Which would be a major advantage to them, especially if they're international rollout. They're having times of problems internationally. I think it's a loss. Like how do you go to Africa if not with something like Bitcoin? I think they would be more than happy to put an expense onto their yearly tax form that they've spent $20 million mining to keep the Bitcoin network stable, because it's bringing them $40 million in revenue. And the only real problem here again is copyright. If I pay Netflix a dollar in Bitcoin, why should it matter where in the world I want to enjoy the content of that movie? A dollar is the dollar, the movie is the movie. No purpose. Correct. So if more of these companies are so dependent of Bitcoin for their profits, I think they would gladly lose, like give up. I mean, it would be just another expense. And it's also good to be on the public service. We're helping mine the Bitcoin network, Dave. Correct. So I can. All right, guys, I'm sorry. I have to go. I'm already late. And I'm not going to get to the story of the week or prediction. I think I've made enough predictions so far on this show. And I do have to run Friday night, which is why sometimes I have to cut these short even though this has already gone on longer than we originally planned. All right. Thanks for being on. I will see you next week. Let's go to Ian D. Martino. Do you have a prediction or a story of the week? Well, I just wanted to say real quickly. Just talking about when Bitcoin goes, when there's no more subsidies to support mining, there's still going to be fees. And you go to spline demand. That could actually raise the price of Bitcoin. If we ran out of gold in the world, people would still want to buy gold necklaces, it's just that that price of gold would skyrocket. But there'd still be people trying to buy. Through variable fee. I think they can raise the fee in the future to encourage more mining. But to your point, to his point about mining at a loss, too, I mean, that could have good tax implications. You know, we're like, hey, we invested in this Bitcoin mining and we lost a million dollars. So the lower, still not a tax bracket. Tax bracket. Which brings us full circle back to the first issue. Good job, Ian. You see, I'm looking out for you. Prediction just keep buying Bitcoin because it's going to go up. I saw some people in our chat talking about random ICOs. I just want to take this opportunity to say, don't invest in any ICO. All right. If you're going to be an early adopter on the next coin that's going to overtake Bitcoin, you can wait till after the ICO. You know, wait till after the ICO, see if it's going to be stable and it's going to last. I'll ask people to buy the Z-cash or an ICO or immediately after ICO. What do you think that the whole world's going to switch over to Z-cash tomorrow? Just wait. Wait three months. Wait six months before you put savings into it. Just wait. ICO, let all the suckers buy the ICO. You wait three, four, six months, and then see if it's still going strong, then maybe you can buy in because it's going to take, if any coin's going to overtake Bitcoin, it's going to take years. It's not going to, so you can still be, even if you buy Bitcoin today, you're still an early adopter. So if you're buying an altcoin, you're a super early adopter. There's no reason going to the ICO. And I see you punk selling ICOs in our chat. Stop it. Good warning Ian, very good warning. Everyone should watch out. And finally, I have a prediction. They're finding out now that no Christmas is coming. They're finding out now that no Christmas is coming. They're just waking up. I know just what they'll do. Their mouths will hang open a minute or two. Then the hooves down in hooville will all cry, boo hoo, that's a noise that I must simply hear. So he paused and the Grinch put a hand to his ear. And he did hear a sound rising over the snow. It started in low, then it started to grow. But the sound wasn't sad, why this sound sounded merry. It couldn't be so, but it was merry, very. He stared down at hooville, the Grinch popped his eyes, then he shook what he saw was a shocking surprise. Every hoo down in hooville, the tall and the small, was singing without any presence at all. He hadn't stopped Christmas from coming. It came somehow or another. It came just the same. And the Grinch with his Grinch feet ice cold in the snow stood puzzling and puzzling. How could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled, and he puzzled three hours till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before. Maybe Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store. Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more. And what happened then, well in hooville, they say, that the Grinch's small heart grew three sizes that day. And the minute his heart didn't feel quite so tight, he whizzed with his load through the bright morning light. And he brought back the toys and the food for the feast. And he, he himself, the Grinch, carved the roast beast. Oh, we're out of time. Until next time, bye, bye. Bye-bye.