The Bitcoin Group, the American original. For over the last 10 seconds, the sharpest Satoshi's, the best Bitcoin's, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Tone Vays from Liberty Life Trail. Good evening everyone, and as you can tell, I have finally listened to Thomas. I was not going to wait eight years for enough donations to come in. And I decided to spend some money. The Blue Yeti. I've yet heard myself on, but everyone is telling me that it's making a huge difference. And as a story, I bought it like two days later, I had realized that I wasn't such a rush to buy it on like Black Friday because it was on sale. And I totally forgot to choose my color because something this shape and this big on my desk, I should have just one as well made in black, but I guess I have the stock color of white. It's a very classy silver. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network, moving on to issue one, issue one Bitcoin powerhouse, pulls the plug on Bitcoin. Circle is diseng that they're deciding to focus more on their mobile payments business and are removing the ability for Bitcoin buyers and sellers. This of course led wired magazine to write another Bitcoin obituary. The future of Bitcoin is not as a digital currency. Tone Vays is it over with the rejection of circle and the IRS attacking Coinbase is Bitcoin over? Oh man, so circle. Oh, great. Now I now I remembered what I forgot to freaking open. Oh, maybe I still will. Anyway, so I have my screen share on and I found this article particularly like, well, not funny, but kind of funny. Just look at the title. The future of Bitcoin is not as a digital currency, which seems to just slightly, slightly contradict the title of Satoshi's white paper, which clearly states Bitcoin appear to appear electronic cash system and pretty much currency. So I find it like so hilarious how people have already turned blockchain into whatever they want it to be. And they're now like calling Bitcoin whatever they want it to be. And you read this article. I don't understand like I have. It's not like revisionist history in a minute like. I always had a bad vibe from Jeremy. I never understood what the hell circle was doing. Well, basically explains how they're not going to use circle for people and they're going to use it in their background of settlement, which makes no freaking sense. The article also goes on how circle is moving older people to Coinbase and then Coinbase is also trying to get out of this whole Bitcoin people buying and selling Bitcoin, right? So what the hell are they doing? What do they think Bitcoin is? They're like, oh, we're going to use it as a settlement system. But no one is securing it. It's decentralized. It's by miners. You don't have control of it. Absolutely no sense to move. You see the company between trusted points through Bitcoin, it's just complete nonsense. Now let me go back to the beginning. This is my blog. Totally forgot about this. So I started this blog all the way to the end. So the first time I ever posted on my blog was in March of 2014. This is before anyone knew my name like nobody. This is before I attended my first Bitcoin conference. And the very first article I wrote was about the IRS, which we're not going to get to. I totally forgot about these. I can forget the first like articles you ever write online. So it's not March. So it must have been in April. It's ironic how the first article, so when I tell people I've been talking about the IRS issue, forever, I literally have been talking about the IRS issue forever because it was the first thing that made me create a blog and write something. This is back when I didn't expect my blog to be only about Bitcoin. This is also back when I had a life. Okay, so it wasn't March. So it must have been May. Hold on. I was talking about, I was writing about current events. Here we go. May. There is an article here from May 4th of 2014 is a compromise on Bitcoin regulation possible. And in here, I talk about Jeremy O'Layer and I will attempt to read on air, which is probably not ideal. I'm talking about, so Jeremy O'Layer gave a keynote at this conference and it's funny that article talked about how Jeremy O'Layer introduced his company at a Bitcoin conference and it's possible this was the conference. Remember, this was almost three years ago, but this conference was in April of 2014. So unless there was another conference just a few months earlier because he didn't introduce Circle in early 2014, so this might have been it. So here's what I wrote. This is, I was a new, I was a new to Bitcoin. So I barely understood what Bitcoin was. I barely understood what the blockchain was. And here is what I understood about Jeremy O'Layer, first conference I've attended. Okay, so here we go. I'm just going to read from my own blog. I've heard of this company for over a year now, yet no matter whom I ask or look around the web, it's still completely unclear what his company will do. And I'm talking about Circle. The description says, make it easy to exchange store, send and receive Bitcoin. But considering the fact that these things are pretty easy to do right now, this could not be any more vague. And then I have one more paragraph. His speech did not go over well with the Bitcoin community as can be seen here and I link to a Coinbase article about his speech. I hope the link still works. Actually, due to statements like, and now I'm quoting Jeremy O'Layer, critical components to ultimate mainstream acceptance is the ability to assign identities to transactions. And then he follows this word while still maintaining financial privacy and even anonymity. That makes absolutely no sense. But from day one, Jeremy O'Layer wanted to assign identities to transactions. He had no interest in Bitcoin at any point. Then I wrote a couple of other things. But what no other article pointed out, and I looked at a lot of articles after his speech, because I clearly heard him say at that event that he wanted some kind of federal reserve and government and Wall Street to have a say in Bitcoin's direction and coding, which I thought was completely insane and no other media out of it picked it up. And this is why I thought it was important to write about this on my blog, again, as one of my first seven things I ever wrote. So this was my first. There are also blaming Bitcoin in these new circle articles. They're saying that Bitcoin is partially at fault for the reason they got rid of them that the scaling wasn't going well and these various things. It's another case of these companies kicking Bitcoin on the way out. They use Bitcoin to get their acceleration and their popularity. And then on the way out, they're like Bitcoin is terrible. I forgot the other one was BitReserve. BitReserve, they changed their name uphold. And the uphold CEO came out and said how horrible Bitcoin was. Even though again, it was the thing that launched them. Sorry, Tom. But my article from two and a half years ago proves that that's not true. I mean, he clearly quoted. Coin needs the ability to assign identity to transactions. So he's mad that Bitcoin didn't do what he wanted it to do. But something it wasn't actually designed to do. I don't understand. So I had a sarcastic tweet the other day saying that all those people that the use of the word blockchain to get funding, Jeremy Lair used the word Bitcoin to get funding. And now, this company will have nothing to do with Bitcoin. I know they're still saying that they're going to use it privately as a settlement. That's, I think that's ridiculous. I honestly, I'm going to call bullshit on that one. And when they stop doing it, no one is going to report on it because going forward, there is absolutely no reason for circle to be discussed in the crypto space. So when they finally realized that Bitcoin is not for them, they'll stop using the settlement system. Circle is also completely closed. So unless you get a disgruntled employee leaving circle, you're not going to know whether they are aren't using it in the background. I mean, they could still be saying it publicly to kind of save face so that people like me aren't like immediately connecting the dots saying they are not using any of that investor money for what they planned on doing. Now that doesn't mean that they can't be a successful company. Now Goldman Sachs invested in them and I guess Goldman Sachs will look to get their investment back to make this a profitable company. And I don't think it has anything to do with Bitcoin. And Bitcoin was probably the main reason they got that funding. I remember those headlines. They were off the charts. It's not just Bitcoin. I mean, remember they were one of the first companies not to use Bitcoin in their marketing like Abra, like Circle, and then Bit Reserve. But it's more than that. They also said that they're developing an open source system that seemed like it was exactly like Bitcoin. They called it Spark. They said they were going to use that to send transactions around. I hate to say, but this is echoes of change. Change tip had some kind of centralized ledger that they were keeping all their transactions in. And then when you wanted to cash out, they would send you the Bitcoin. Once again, they're replicating a system for sending around value. When you create another layer with KYC and these other features that some Bitcoins don't want, people are going to naturally say, why can't I just use the actual Bitcoin? I think the comparison here is AOL and the Internet. You could get it AOL and you could get to a web browser and you could get to the real Internet. But there's this whole layer of services with the AOL on top of that. And eventually people abandoned that. And they started connecting to the Internet directly. Likely, they'll end up using Bitcoin directly. And all of these services will cease to exist. I kind of have to agree with you. Because Bitcoin wasn't meant for these services. And they will go away or they'll stop using Bitcoin. I mean, they're going to go to the permission ledger slash DLT space, which I guess is a segue way into the next stop. And also we have this. We have this great tweet that I wanted to share. We were going to talk about it on the earlier show, but I want to bring it up now. Alpaca SW says here, he says, that Amir Taki had a great sense of character. And he quotes this paragraph from 2014. I'm just going to read parts of it to you here. He's talking about Jeremy Alair, the CEO of Circle. Amir says, people like Jeremy Alair are scary because they're boring and dull people lacking in any imagination. They do not understand Bitcoin beyond the simple level and are excited because they've spent years in the corporation, brainwashing world, and now they see these new tools of power. It's important to understand the logic because it's the logic of many noobs to Bitcoin and familiar. Many noobs to Bitcoin, unfamiliar with the world of consumerism and unversed in the ways of open source and decentralization. And I think Amir has a lot of wisdom in this that he's really talking ahead of time here and he's saying, these people don't believe in Bitcoin. They haven't thought it out. They don't see the problems that Bitcoin solves. And when they come in with these questionable companies and we say, okay, you've raised 5 million, okay, you've raised 30 million. You're amazing. But the things you're building have already been built. We could already just use Bitcoin for these things. We don't need another layer on top of Bitcoin. We can use the Bitcoin. I mean, there's the Lightning Network. That's a different thing, but that's open source, not really a company in the same way that these are companies. But it just seems like they need to stop replicating things and use the actual Bitcoin. But you want to move on to the next topic, Tom? Yeah, no. I mean, I asked the like, I'm associated to my blog because it sounds like exactly the same thing I said about Jeremy Alair. And I was a new like a mere talk. He was already the veteran in the space, I guess. And I'm used to a word Bitcoin was only around like three years. But yeah, I'm sure there's an article where I was basically very critical of Jeremy Alair for the entire 2014. And then he kind of went away in 2015 until coming back more recently. So as I'm scrolling through my blog, look, again, 2014. And look at, I'm not even going to click on this article, which versus famous in the world of Bitcoin, be careful, the IRS will want their cut. I mean, I can't, I don't remember how like the majority of my criticism, when I started in the space was all about the IRS. This was my, you know, like, April March, all the way through June of 2014. Wow, I wish I remembered this when we were doing all those IRS versus Coinbase discussions. Like I totally, how completely forgotten that I literally used to just straight up write articles. I mean, the one you thought I was, I didn't even think I had a Twitter account back then at all. But I thought this was the most important issue in Bitcoin. And now everyone seems to care. Well, should a care back then. It really does seem that since they misclassified it as property, we've had all these complex issues where it should have been a currency. It should have been a currency from the internet, which is like another country. And we just should have accepted it in that way. And I think eventually we will. But we have this whole confusing period now where you have to pay taxes every time you move your money according to Coinbase. And we'll have to see how that goes. Let's move on to issue two. Issue two distributed ledger tech is back. The US Federal Reserve launched their first research paper from the previous papers had been from the Federal Reserve of Boston and Chicago. But this one from the official one says that distributed ledger tech is interesting. And once again, the paper talks as though Bitcoin doesn't exist. They're talking about how this technology could be implemented, denying the fact that it is already running like an airplane that's being fixed while it's flying. The Bank of Japan is also interested in distributed ledger tech. And Deloitte has bought their first blockchain startup, a company called SETL, Settle. And Settle again does things that Bitcoin could do. They make settlements. And they make settlements that are on the network, which is what Bitcoin could do. Ton, what do you think about all this exciting new distributed ledger tech technology? All right. While eating the paper, the Fed paper, like me reading long papers is really not a good combination. My reading attention span is probably about three pages. And after that, I either get very quickly bored. I'm a slow reader. My reading comprehension is really, really good. But my actual reading speed and I'm just stay enthusiastic about what I'm reading are very, very, very small, which is why I probably read maybe throughout my life that includes high school and college. I managed to fully avoid that stuff. Just never been my strong suit. So I was reading this and seems to me like the Fed is actually starting to figure this shit out, which is, I guess, good. Because unlike CoinDesk, they seem to understand the difference between blockchain and distributed ledger technology. Now, I think they're just starting to understand this difference. And hopefully they will see blockchain as something like Bitcoin that requires proof of work. And they will see distributed ledger technology as something like a database that has absolutely nothing to do with rules and regulations that are needed on the technology part. They're just needed on the institutions that are using this distributed ledger technology. Because nothing about it is, everything about it is just controlled by the admins. It's literally databases. So that I really like. So first of all, my favorite thing that I read is I hope my screen share is big enough of people can see it. And I just tweeted this out right before the show. It was funny how it literally calls the Dow Adventure Capital Fund. That is something that I made fun of the moment and coin desk where the CEO of the Dow, Jen Sitch, or whatever his name is, along with Steven Tual, are trying to explain to the world how the Dow is not Adventure Capital is fun. And I tweeted this out, following sarcastic remarks, because that's kind of what I do, where I said just because it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, cold at a duck, it's all good. That's kind of what the Dow creator told us back then. And I tweeted this out a month before the Dow imploded it. And it's nice to see that the Federal Reserve also sees this as a duck, creators of the Dow thought it was. So I also made a joke, Ethereum sold a token a year before it was created and made millions. This must be a new business model. And we'll get to this in our later story because this now is a business model. And the Dow also took this business model, thinking that there was no risk and they were going to get all these funds. And this is why there are videos of me, only first or there about plus or minus a day, saying that all the Ethereum and the Dow is going to be lost. Anyway, so that's one takeaway that I have. My own takeaway is, I've been spending a lot of times at these decentralized technologies, conferences. And there was one, hopefully they'll do more. Did they focusing on the technology sector? They're focusing on Wall Street and they're looking to inform people of what this stuff is. And I basically spend the entire day, I should guess I probably zoom in. And I literally spend the entire day questioning every speaker trying to separate a blockchain from a spreadsheet. And this was a quote that I had in the Bitcoin list. The download was at the top of Reddit, caused some controversy. But see, some people like me believe that a blockchain is something new, which is the proof of work consensus algorithm that Satoshi put into motion that gave us Bitcoin. That aren't sure. Right, why can't I climb my mouse? Okay, here we go. For those that aren't sure, here's the Satoshi definition. What a blockchain is. And literally you need proof of work to identify a block with the transactions and then you chain these blocks together by proof of work. That is basically people creating Google spreadsheets, putting it on a cloud, making it shareable. She is the same. And they're calling this thing a blockchain. And I'm getting really frustrated with CoinDesk and their writers, the South. So this means that I got to do it for them. It really took the feature list. And the thing that the loyth is now invested in. And it's literally a feature list, secure messaging, payments, identities, but it's all on a central database. I don't understand what is making this a blockchain. And then I'm looking at this team, people I've never heard of before in my life. I don't understand how they can possibly call themselves a blockchain expert. There is like people. And almost all of them work at block stream or contribute to Bitcoin core development as just because they like this technology of a permissionless value transfer. It's getting really out of control. I might be the loud one of the few people that are holding out on that this world blockchain should actually mean something new technologically. But 1990s technology that got your email to you, nice and sorted to the second shoot. Google can give you your email to the millisecond if you want. Nice and sorted, nice and ordered. There's no need for blocks. There's a whole record of when things got added, added it, who updated them. I mean, I've worked with databases my entire Wall Street career. And things really changed when we got a new CTO who was a database guy. He took away everybody's admin permissions to the database. He made all of the database developers create stored procedures for everything. So even if the God damn mail man wanted to put something into the database, he had to do it through a stored procedure that had an LUBLUD field who updated it, what millisecond it was updated, and the entire history of transactions. I mean, if you don't understand, and I'm not even a database developer, all I know is how to write select statements in Oracle and MySQL and SQL, cases that we had. And each one of them had a stored procedure. Most of them had a front end, but a stored procedure is used on the back of the front end. Everything has triggers. Everything has fail saves. Everything gets backed up once internally within the building. A second time way, halfway through Midtown at the Google building, who has some of the most secured data centers, servers, there is in Manhattan. In a recovery, I believe it wasn't California over by Utah, I'm not sure why anybody would put a data recovery in California, considering a little earthquake prone over there historically, but also in the same country, I would have preferred, you know, their recovery to be, I don't know, maybe in somewhere else. But anyway, all this stuff was backed up, and everyone knew what the change was. This is not rocket science here. Is the revolutionary part? Well, that's the mining system. And I don't want to dwell too much more on that, but that's pretty much it. So basically, when I hear these presentations, especially IBM, like IBM's presentations have been really frustrating me. Like there was a guy, IBM guy speaking, and at one point he's saying, well, and then we put this transaction through the blockchain. And I just like, stop them. I'm like, okay, wait, stop. The blockchain. You're talking about the blockchain. What is the blockchain? I mean, these guys can't answer the question. I'm like, at least say a blockchain, I'll still pick on you, but not nearly to the same degree. There's only one, the blockchain. And even that is, you know, maybe hopefully it'll keep surviving. And that's Bitcoin. If you're going to talk about a blockchain, okay, then I'm going to ask you, so what blockchain are you using over there at IBM? Look, I mean, I understand that the word blockchain is totally diluted. And I might be ranting here for no reason whatsoever. And we should give up that word. But maybe I'm not ready to give up that word yet. I don't know. What do you think that was? Well, I do agree with you. I think it should mean something. The thing they keep selling us is basically that the businesses can't be trusted to not edit their own data. And that this new idea is going to take our medical records and make them non-editable and put them on seven different computers. But if those seven computers are all controlled by the corporation, who's to say that they couldn't edit them simultaneously at the same time? It's not impossible. What makes the Bitcoin blockchain impossible is all these different many hands that are monitoring it and that they're not all from one source. They're not all from one corporation. They're all doing the complex math. They're taking the time to generate those tokens and that the tokens have value. That they're paid in Bitcoin for upkeeping the network. If you look at all of these other blockchains, the health block chain, the dental records block chain, all of these things. Who's going to upkeep them without a token? Saying that there is no token. There's no need for a token. But the Bitcoin systems are complicated interlocking system, where having a token helps you protect the network and protecting the network allows you to have a token. And then the token can be valuable. It can be sent around. And it's a system designed for solving a specific problem. And they're trying to use it as a hammer to solve every problem. Every problem now. But even using that, the only reason why even that system works is because the token itself is the value. Not the system. Ethereum is showing us what happens when half of your believers believe in the token and the other half of the believers believe in the system that uses the token as gas to do something other than a value transfer of that token. Right? I think this will be the biggest downfall of Ethereum, even though there's like numerous ones. But there's no consistent answer on what the ether token is because the ether token is trying to be two things at once. And I think if you allow your token to be multiple things at once, you completely break apart the development because who the hell are you programming this system for? If circle wants to use the Bitcoin blockchain or settlement of other value, no sense to me because then what is giving the token itself a value that makes the system valuable? Okay, itself, that's what will give its stability. I mean, I know this might be a little hard to comprehend for some people and have it both ways. You can't have everything at once. Something will dominate the other. It starts to dominate. Where the hell is the security of your platform coming from? And this was definitely the problem with Ethereum is there's split between the speculators and the contracts. The speculators just want the value to go up. They don't care about the contracts. The speculators are the ones who said, oh no, we lost all this money in the DAO. We should roll back the contract systems to get our money back, which the contract people said, no, we can never roll back contracts. Code is law. We're trying to establish a new thing here. And they got split between those and they can't serve both masters. They can't serve the speculators. They can't serve the contract people. Now there's two different types of Ethereum who knows if either of them are going anywhere. But I agree with you, Tony. You have to choose what your ultimate focus is. You have to have one singular aim. I agree with you, but here's what something the Ethereum people may not realize is that the reason why now that we're what, four or five months since that split, something like that. The Ethereum classic is kind of like, but it's significantly less important. Aren't the Ethereum chain, even though one Ethereum chain was tanking two or three days ago, they were coming way closer to parity. Now Ethereum balanced up a little bit. Now, the speculators won. So freaking smart contracts using the Ethereum that matter. If they're actually worth smart contracts using the Ethereum for smart contracts and not the Ethereum for speculation in the price, maybe the other side would have won this battle. The only reason why the speculators won was because that was the bigger use case at the time. But Ethereum is planning on, they're still hellbent believing in this fiction that they will, that Ethereum will primary, Ethereum's primary use case will be smart contracts. I don't think that will ever happen. If it is, they get totally screwed on the other side from the speculators. So who are they programming for? They have just proved to us that they're programming for the speculators. And when is this power shift going to switch back to the contract holders? And don't forget, once Ethereum goes proof of stake, I think this becomes even worse because now you're incentivized to hold the Ethereum to make more Ethereum. I think the real answer all along is that the Ethereum programmers has been programming for themselves. The most effective and efficient use of this system is to make the early adopters and the founders millionaires. And I've always questioned the need for this to be a speculative and a separate token. From my thinking, you should be able to go to the Ethereum website by the tokens at $10 a piece, $5 a piece, whatever they want to set the price at. You use the tokens to run smart contracts. And that's it. It doesn't have to be this price thing. You have a price determination and all this complexity unless it's about the speculation, which we see time and time again. But let's move on to it. Sorry, one last count, one last count. We're going to move on. But exactly because why in the why in the world would you use it as gas and destroy this token of value? Meanwhile, you want people to invest in mining on your chain, but then you don't want to waste all the electricity for security. So you're going to go proof of stake and then you're going to give it to people just so that they can sell it to someone else who can then destroy it. I mean, look, the smart way to do this would have been to just create, doesn't even have to be fully decentralized. It just has to be encrypted and people need to trust that you're not spying on them. And that code doesn't care about who you are and that will execute. And then you charge them a fee, a proper execution of these contracts. And then the developers of the platform get to keep this fee to stay employed and keep this platform trusted. It's kind of like the the minor fee, only it goes to the people keeping trust in this platform. And if they lose this trust by the people using them for their smart contracts, there's plenty of competitors waiting in the wings to do it right. But anyway, we're now we're getting way off topic. So let's move on. All right. I think we're going to go a little out of order here because we're just talking about Ethereum and tokens. So we're going to move on to issue three hackers still over 300,000 dollars from one of blockchain's biggest VCs. And as we were saying, tone, what do you do with Ethereum? Well, one of the rep tokens are to be all new all auger system, which is rep tokens will allow you to become an Oracle, a decentralized Oracle. So if the 49ers win and we all agree, then we all get paid in rep and rep holders help determine the result of the contest. But what happened was the hacker got into his account. It looks like they used a back door through his cell phone. That's happening more and more lately. You just call up T-Mobile or whatever company it is, pretend you're the person and hack right in. What was interesting about this attack is that they took so much rep or rep tokens off of him that when the hackers sold them, they crashed the rep market, leading people again to call for a rollback or a change in the system. What do you think, Tony, about the hackers stealing from the blockchain VC? Okay, so I'm going to take the story into a couple of directions. So obviously, I mean, I haven't really been paying attention to this much. Obviously, they didn't roll back the chain, correct? No, they did not roll back the chain. But it was discussed. And for some reason, the price of rep is now higher than it was, prehack. It did recover and it is a little bit higher there was before. Not sure why. That's ridiculous, but okay. So I don't want to, I mean, again, right? VC holding this much rep bothers me a lot. It just seems like a lot of insider shenanigans going on. But again, just opinions and all just randomize speculation. All right, so there's several things in the story that just don't make all that much sense to me, right? Oh, by the way, this is why I don't use my phone as to factor authentication. I don't even like to factor authentication. I've heard other insane stories how their numbers change to someone else's number because they got into their emails and then they call up the phone company, they get their phone number forwarded to somebody else. And now they have access to their two factor authentication through their phone. So I would not have that problem by not having two factors. I have other problems, but I don't have that problem. We can talk about my off-set real two factor. You should have it on your phone. Not phone two factor. Okay, so so Joey, Joey King, here it is. Yeah, Joey Krug. Joey Krug. Okay, so this is one thing that was weird and I'm sharing my screen here. We've been sending emails out with instructions. If you don't sell wrap on an exchange and store in cold storage, it's fine. But if you store on an exchange, they can engineer your phone number. That's correct. I... So here's the thing, right? Why did they go for the wrap? Wasn't there other things in the exchange they could have sold? So this tells me two things. This tells me this particular VC either was literally all into wrap and they didn't hack any of his other stuff because he either didn't have any other stuff. There's something a little deeper going on with the wrap. Right? So I don't know. So that was a one thing that was questionable. Here's the other thing, right? Also a quote. In the past month, there have been at least 10 cases of people publicly involved in the cryptocurrency CNB with the device by all the phone hijacking. Almost specific circumstances. I can be convinced it was article. Oh yeah, here. Yeah. Olga, core developer, Joey Krug, acknowledged that he has been in contact with the group before. Krug has had asked $1,000 ransom that was not paid. Krug further noted that China's digital bear assets, there's not much technically. So here's the thing. I mean, like... Look, these statements, they could be nothing, but they make absolutely no sense to why would he be in touch with the hacker and the hacker demanding a $60,000 ransom. To me, I'm using like my little spidey sense here. It sounds like the hacker found some kind of exploit in the wrap token itself because otherwise the statement makes absolutely no wrong, right? And Joey chose not to pay this ransom, and then one of the major holders of wrap got hacked. And it's just like, look, I could be totally wrong here, and it could be a random hack through an exchange. But putting those two sentences in combination makes it sound like the exploit is within the wrap and not within the exchange. Maybe I'm just overthinking this here. I mean, I could see this as they've already hacked the VC's account. They know how much Olga rep they have, and they know that they can crash the market. And their essential threat here is we have so much rep will crash the market, pay us not to crash the market. That's my reading of this. So does this mean that the VC got hacked like weeks ago, and then there was a discussion between Joey and the hackers while the VC was basically sitting there waiting for a resolution. It's possible that they hacked the VC and then didn't do anything. So they're just sitting there, and they have access to his accounts, and then they're waiting and they're like, how can we maximize this money? Well, if we go to developers and we say, hey, we'll crash your coin. I mean, it did crash the Olga market. You can look at the... I know, but look, when you hack someone's account, and you have access to money, like that kind of money, you don't just sit there and wait for the guy to sell the coin one day himself, right? Or like move it out into cold storage. You don't do that, right? Like the moment you hack someone's account and you have access to that money, the sooner you move it, the better the chance you have. So that just doesn't make logical sense to me. That they would be sitting on this information while negotiating unless they had fully locked them out. And would be kind of tricky to lock someone out for weeks. By the way, a similar story happened to what's his name? Joby Weeks of BitClub. And there's a whole video about it with Sasha Daygame, which is interesting because Joby Weeks got hacked for about 100 Bitcoin because they literally hacked his email and then they T and had his phone number changed. Like this is how I know this story. So that the hacker now had changed Joby Weeks's phone number to be able to do to FF. Was they able to take all of his coins from the exchange and literally like move them out and sell all of his old coins. I think the total that he lost was about 100 Bitcoin. But then after that, because he now had access to his phone basically and his email address, he then hacked his Facebook and started and started PMing, private messaging, his friends basically saying, hey listen, I need like 20 Bitcoins right now. I'll pay it to you tomorrow with like 50% interest. I just got to do something real quick. And right after he was sending his messages, he was immediately deleting them so that even like Joby Weeks, they had no idea this was happening. And then Sasha was one of the guys that just said, hey, Joey's a good friend of mine. I know he's good for it. So he like immediately sent me, he's like, I didn't have 20. I only had 12. So I just sent it to him. And then the next day, I message Joey and say, or 20 Bitcoin, Joby and Joey goes, what are you talking about? And that's how Joey filed out that Joby Weeks found out that he got hacked. The hacker got his friends to like trust him and send him more Bitcoin. And yeah, this stuff gets insane. But just like reading this article, it's just like just so weird. I don't know. To me, it's just weird. Like things aren't like the dots are not connecting for me. I don't know what the real story is, but they're not connecting for me. But all of us is like a useless project. Well, I don't think we have time to get into it. Why are we talking is totally unnecessary? And it's only there to make people and I guess we see is rich. So there you go. That is a good point, Tony, about Joby Weeks and the email and the hacking. And I remember the famous story from BitPay that a hacker hacked the CEO BitPay's account sent a message to someone else, said, hey, move a bunch of Bitcoin to this address. They did it. The hacker tried it again. They did it again. Hacker did it again. I mean, you got to have business practices. And I don't know how you pre-warn your friends. But maybe you just tell them you're like, I'll never ask you for a bunch of Bitcoin over email. I'll call you on the phone. I don't know. You have to have some kind of a handshake now. You have to have this some kind of code because. I know that actually. That is absolutely true. And if you ask all these people on building decentralized ledger technology, they will tell you that there will be a bull. There's a blockchain solution for this. I mean, the R3 will tell you that we have the solution for this with our decentralized ledger non-blockchain, right? Because again, right? It's all about everything at the end. It's all about trust. And I think this segue is well into our next story. It's going to be issue four. And it's pretty much along the same line. Issue four, A, 16z, USV, invest $10 million in blockchain token trading forum firm. And essentially, these would be the people buying rep tokens. These would be the people presumably buying Ethereum and other Ethereum based tokens. The plan here is the new company, Polychain Capital, intends to invest in so-called protocol tokens. So essentially, this is a massive altcoin trading fund. Tone, do you think this is a good idea? You know what? When I started reading this story, I had to double check the date. To make sure it's not April Fool's Day. This is the type of story I expected earlier this year on April Fool's Day. I still can't believe it. Like, I read this thing twice. I don't understand what is interesting and recent horror what's thinking. And what is Union Square of interest thinking? I have absolutely no. What's so funny is when I read this, I misread it and I assume that they like everyone else. We're actually going to be making the tokens. And I kind of understood that as an investment. I'm interested in myself in making tokens. I think that has a lot of interest. But this is actually buying, presumably holding trading and selling the tokens, which, as we've seen with the price of augur as we've seen with the price of Ethereum, it goes up and then it goes down. I don't know about the long term of any of these. That's not how I read it. In between the two ways that you understood it, I understood it as they would be funding companies focused on creating these tokens. And they would get those tokens as rewards for funding those companies. But again, it's like the stock market thing again where the companies get early access and then by the time it gets to the general market, all the profits gone. So they've managed to create the same system again with the ICOs. Right. But correct. And basically they took the IPO model and they completely removed two years of hard work to get and to at least show the world that your company has some kind of usefulness. They also completely removed all responsibility from anyone creating these tokens. I'm telling you, this thing reads like an April Fools joke. Like it even starts out like this sentence made me laugh. Let's see here. Led by Coinbase veteran, all of Carlson Wii, Coinbase veteran, Coinbase has been around for 10 freaking minutes in the world of technology. Right. And I don't think there's going to be a round in a year. So who are you championing here? I mean, I mean, I joke around calling myself a 10 year Wall Street veteran because working on Wall Street for 10 years is also like a drop in the bucket. You want to be there like 20, 25 years to be taken seriously. This guy is a Coinbase veteran. What has Coinbase done? Now that there are people have seen exactly for what it is. And this thing gets bad. Like look at this quote. This is the guy that's leading the charge. Tokens are very important. They directly monetize the open source founders and founding teams level. We've already seen many founders of blockchain networks get rich based on their creation. I mean, like there, this is like a letter to the SEC saying, please arrest me. Right. I mean, you have these founders getting rich, unnon-qualified investors buying these tokens and then the founders immediately walk away without any proof that their project has worked at any point in time or will ever work again. I this thing is just it's like comedy gold here. They're quote, take a position very early on in the project that I believe could truly become the infrastructure of the future internet. In fact, that could disrupt major centralized web services. That's what he says, but he knows he's just going to sell these things to the greater fool. None of this has proven. Like Bitcoin is the only one that's actually doing something. I tweeted this out like a year ago. Basically, everyone saw that Ethereum can sell a token without any product, any platform, anything, and no I mean, I don't want to use the word regulation, but not even a smart contract holding them to the promises of what they're promising with their platform. I understand that Ethereum managed to launch. It was a miracle that they launched. I've heard numerous stories. That project almost fell apart multiple times. I don't know how true they are, but I personally didn't think Ethereum was going to launch and they did and speculators made money, but now they think that that model is replicable long term. It's not. All these ICOs, the ending of all of these ICOs is going to be way closer to the Dow project than they are to the Ethereum project and how they're going to end. And Ethereum is also going to end like the Dow project and because of the Dow project, it's just going to take it a little longer. But these guys are basically saying that we will have a fund. Fund these companies. Now, open Bazaar is an interesting case because Brian Hoffman is fighting any kind of ICO and tokenization. So the question becomes how long can Brian Hoffman hold out and will open Bazaar ICO? Now, if open Bazaar does ICO, we know exactly what this is all about. Brian Hoffman understands that ICOs are crazy, but if the VCs force them into that direction, this is literally it's a chance for VCs to exit for the founders to so that both VCs and the founders make money, the VCs and founders make money now, the only difference is in the regulated IPO system. The only difference is in the current system, your IPO has to the market has to see a product and actually use the product for something useful. Now, I understand they don't always get it right and companies do IPO and then crash. And a lot of times it's because of the hype and a lot of times because the product turned out to be no good, but in 99 now in the dot com days it was different. But, percent of these cases, you have a product for the company to go IPO and people wanted and they know this product. I know Fitbit went IPO and they're stocking with nothing but down, a group on one IPO and their stock hasn't been doing well at all. Like look, a lot of these companies that even Facebook IPO and lost 50% of its value but then recovered, LinkedIn IPO lost a bunch of value and then recovered. But these companies that go IPO, you know what they are. They have a value, they have a product and the founders are invested that they can just cash out and leave. I mean, they couldn't leave on the IPO but the IPO brings them so much fame and limelight that they don't want to leave. They want to stay there a little bit longer and milk the popularity so they can then move on to another company. I mean, the ICO space has removed the concept of actually having your product something before you get rich and walk away and this cannot last, this cannot last as ridiculous. And opening this fund, I think, is a terrible idea. Like I said, this entire article reads like an April Fool's joke. I think OpenBizar is a great example here, Tone. OpenBizar as it's currently funded and used, it uses actual Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the money. You send Bitcoin to your wallet, you spend it on open, you did on open Bitcoin. Under the current model with the ICOs, OpenBizar would issue OpenBizar it would have its own value, it would have its own blockchain, it would have its own proponents and developers and all these complexities and they would basically recreate the Bitcoin system for OpenBizar. Not because it makes OpenBizar easier or better software or some kind of features needed to escrow the funds or anything, they would do this because it allows them to print X amount of OpenBizar coins and then sell them and then to create a market and then to get rich presumably, like all these other token crowd sales have done. In each case though, if we look back at the actually utilitarian value, you could just use Bitcoin. The whole point of this thing is that Bitcoin is there, it's a store of value. Don't recreate it. Yeah, they keep recreating it. No, I completely agree and even worse, right? So here's what happens. If token, I don't think Brian Hoffman will not tokenize and I don't think that's coming but if they say get a second round tokenize or a no second round, let me ask you this question. So OpenBizar tokenizing, are they removing the IPO part? Is the token simply going to be an investment in OpenBizar? If the answer is yes, then isn't that a violation of SEC laws? If the answer is well known, the token is needed for the platform to run, which would kind of be bullshit because the platform is running without it at the moment, but let's say they pivot and they need a token to run the platform. So then what they're saying is they're saying what Ethereum is saying that the token, the mechanism by which you need to use OpenBizar. So you are now using the OpenBizar token to buy products and OpenBizar. That's the only logical conclusion. So I keep trying to tell people, imagine if in 2000, you had to go and buy eBay stock in order to buy shit from eBay, paying other people in eBay stock. And then imagine you had to buy Amazon stock to buy things from Amazon. And then you had to go and buy Netflix stock to then use this Netflix stock to buy a movie on Netflix or pay for your subscription. Like how this world or how about E-Trade? You have E-Trade. E-Trade allows you to buy other stocks. So what if E-Trade ICOs? So now you have to go and buy again with a speculative value to then change this E-Trade token in order to buy other tokens like Amazon stock in order to then buy tokens to buy products from Amazon. Like this is the system these people are advocating for. Like I don't want it's just mind-puggling how insane these ideas are. Their projects are so freaking silly they can't get any money. So this is what they're doing. And there's plenty of you know traders that are willing to just buy this shit up and down until the whole system comes crashing down. And then I'm telling you what's going to happen. It's going to be exactly like what happened in 2000 and 2008 when this whole system crashes down all these people are going to run to the government begging them to do something and they're going to come down on this heavy regulation unbid coin or at least try to of this shit ends. Unfortunately I don't think they'll ever be able to stop people from making altcoins. I think people are going to keep making altcoins and they're going to keep ICOs and selling them and have continuously I'm afraid that the the gift that Bitcoin is going to bring to the internet is infinite scams and just more and more complicated scams. And for all of the good ideas and all of the other stuff which may or may not happen as well we're going to bring the scams that's definitely coming. But let's move on to our final issue today issue five which may or may also be a scam. Z cash price continues the downward spiral below $50. As we know everyone was excited about the Z cash IPO everyone was going to make so much money because Z cash was obviously what we needed. It's anonymous currency the greatest thing in the world and everyone tried to buy it on the first day and they were all going to be rich but it didn't work out because the price has gone nowhere but down and don't forget coin desk is a subsidiary of digital currency group which has an ownership stake in the startup developing the open source Z cash platform. So while their previous articles were glowing and thrilled and exciting and how great Z cash was going to be now reality has set in and the downward spiral is continuing. Todd what do you think about Z cash and the current price. All right so I'm just going to talk about how look it was a terrible idea and we go perpetually down because this on a podcast a while ago look they hyped this thing up for years years. When the demand the demand was waiting at the door like banging down the door the Z cash you know half a coin of a time and now the inflation of Z cash like Z cash I think will probably double next month it'll double again two months after that it'll double again four months after that right. The Z cash is insanely high the inflation of Z cash isn't insanely high right now. In both say well Bitcoin had the same inflation in the early days but they don't understand that Bitcoin when Bitcoin had this inflation Bitcoin was worthless nobody was using it this inflation is Bitcoin allowed Bitcoin to spread all around the world yes guys like Roger Vir accumulated a bunch of it right and trace mayor was there and brought beers was there yes there were a few guys and got a bunch of it useful at the time it was virtually free at the time and by the time the world found out about Bitcoin 50% of it was already in out there in the world so when the demand came there was not there was enough supply also the Bitcoin blockchain had four years of optimizing the supply demand structure in order to fully accommodate the market when the demand came yes I understand that went up from a $10 to a $1,000 in one year and then it fell from a $1,000 to a hundred bucks a year after so maybe this demand came just one year to early you know because you can't you know you can't control people it's a free market right the the 2013 demand came a little bit early if the 2013 demand comes one year later we probably only go up no sorry we went up yeah we went up a hundred bucks that year right up 10x instead of a hundred x and then we only full half that no other cryptocurrency is capable of recreating panic supply and demand dynamic impossible because either you're hyping this thing up from the start person which is also dumb there's a reason why Satoshi's invisible he knew he'd be jailed by now or whatever right so you got to hype this thing up as a visible person I'm a big man yeah other key points are bringing up the evening no other point to bring up their tone is remember early on wiki leaks wanted to use Bitcoin for donations and Satoshi actually said he said no he said we're not ready for that yet and not anything against wiki leaks or anything political he was just saying as a network as a protocol we're not ready so Satoshi and his collaborators worked on Bitcoin for years testing Bitcoin whereas with zcash they certainly worked on as much as they could but like you say when they open the market there were zero zcash in existence they open the market when they mind the first one the very night of the mining was when polinex and others added it to the exchanges so it was virtually impossible to know what the price should be and everyone who invested early I'm horrified for the results there was I think it was it was going for over a bit coin it was going for for well over several bitcoins in the first hour the first minutes it was a crazy market and now now we've seen the sad result of that it may and it may have been a perfectly good academic project this is like many have said another Bitcoin test net it's another way to test some interesting features people have said in the past we certainly respect Zuko he has a cryptographic background he's well studied but as far as the economic side as far as the protecting the people who believe in you do the people who believe in zcash after losing all their money do they still believe in zcash and sadly I don't think that they will and I think that they're going to lose their interesting cryptography has led them down a financial ruin and you have to look at your project and you say where's your funds coming from who are we screwing over to get rich and zcash may have screwed over their fans here maybe not even intentionally but their fans are taking the fall no I agree with you I don't know and see this is why people are like oh you're a Bitcoin maximalist you don't believe in any of these projects just economically from an economic perspective I don't understand how any other project can possibly launch right I mean Charlie Lee came close I guess Jackson Palmer with Dogecoin came close at least with popularity wise that coin never made it to a hundred million dollar market cap manaro I guess did something but then it was the dark markets that temporarily are writing them high dash continues to do something crazy and they're just spending so much time on just you know I'm the hype machine a new cycle only because the creator of a pre-mind that he has all of it himself like all of these things are like completely shady that all manaro isn't really shady but again I don't think manaro actually came the closest right because manaro was around for like a year or two and it was kind of useless and no one really cared about it and then there was a pump because of the dark net markets now the day that happened I had speculated with zero proof that I bet you a lot of those dark net markets bought up manaro and that's how they made the money and that seems to have been my seems to have been proven true when people took a look at the volume of manaro and all this stealth buying of manaro pre-announcement so I don't think this pump is real it was basically they wanted to make some money and they chose the one coin that they thought was most legitimate and served their purpose that they can do this with but I don't think it's gonna last forever you know if you can't if you can't trust the dark net markets who can you trust oh and then one of those markets like immediately shut down right after this and like took everybody's coins I don't know you see I don't pay attention to the dark net markets hold that much because I've never used them I've never used so crows never been on so I've never been on a single dark market if you've been in Bitcoin for a little while the dark net markets are always the same story and the alt coins in the same way are often the same story it goes up it's really great for a while it goes back down and once you see this happen time and time again and maybe you've even put some of your own funds in and lost some funds trying to catch the wave on these things you get tired of it and then they start labeling you as a Bitcoin maximalist but really I know we have to go back like I'm a TCP IP maximalist I think we should make the best we can and the package should be equal and we'll keep improving it and if that's not an idea that jives with you maybe you don't like the internet maybe you're not interested in the history that we have of improving open source projects and by taking things that they said couldn't be done they said internet can't handle email it can't handle attachments streaming video torrents all of these things the internet was going to break the internet kept not breaking Bitcoin's the same thing it it's a general substrate for exchanging value and it has issues that we're going to fix and it has issues that we don't know about that we're going to fix and it's going to keep happening like this people are going to keep having new projects which are interesting and unfortunately they're going to try to make lots of money off them and remember for them to make money they have to be winners and losers and that if you're buying it late if you're hearing about it late you're the loser you're the sucker whose money is going to be taken so that these people can be rich right right um again Bitcoin there there were winners and winners right but um a winner if you were a miner is to hold on to those mine bitcoins like another six months to a year more than investment you spent on the mining those that perpetually were using their mining rewards to upgrade their mining software um they're probably never broke even then if one of those investment was butterfly labs uh then they went completely under right uh like lost everything so mining would have been profitable if you kind of did it right like yes get lucky doing it right so there there could have been winners and winners in um face but again um what Bitcoin did is not replicatable I'm sorry guys I know you think that I'm shitting out of these but it's just not replicatable because it happened organically where else are you going to find a dozen developers willing to program for free for years right um and something that may or may not work people mining and knowing that they're losing money just for the sake of science um your your options right now are doing the zcash thing hype it up and then not able to provide the supply or doing the ethereum thing hype it up and able to provide the supply but you're providing the supply by either selling something that does not yet exist which to me is illegal or um all the digital tokens I mean I guess if you have if you know building a new cooler or something and you put it up on uh indiegogo I think there is still some kind of rules there or something I'm actually like the guy that put an indiegogo for fun um I anybody want to donate money I'm looking to get ten dollars to make a new potato salad handed up with forty thousand dollars in indiegogo donations so I don't understand like what the responsibility is they are from that guy but we're not talking on a scale of millions of dollars right so like I said the other option is to do the ethereum route and to sell digital tokens that don't exist or to sell tokens that exist that you pre-mind to the tune of sixty million tokens right salad and for like fifty cents each or whatever right so if zcash was to have the proper liquidity and to to accommodate the demand when it's banging at the door upon launch they would have had to pre-mind those coins and now the question becomes where is that money going right and this is why bitcoin not replicatable it just happened organically and we all got lucky and you should be happy that it exists and utilize bitcoin with its properties to the best of its abilities but trying to recreate it is like I don't know if I try to put bottle or something way more complicated than that it's not going to work it's just it's just economically it's not unless you want to give me like literally a team of a dozen passionate developers that want to work on something worthless that suddenly becomes um chose by lock well and uh we've been mainly talking about the launch of zcash here we haven't even talked about one of its most controversial features which is the founders reward in every block of zcash mind a certain percentage of it is reserved for the developers as an ongoing payment for the developers but again we don't know the price of zcash so we don't know if this 10% is going to be a great deal of money or a small amount of money and how long are we going to pay them this i'm just saying 10% but how much are we going to pay them this percentage indefinitely forever and not judged on the quality of their contributions at all uh i've heard it's hard coded the addresses are hard coded in there they're going to be continuously rewarded so that was a pretty shocking thing as well tone what do you think of that as opposed to pre-mining or instant mining or whatever other ways that the developers have been rewarding themselves with these tokens i don't know it's rare that i say this i don't know look i don't know if that 20% mining reward 20 percent from first four years right um i mean look to me to me the 20% mining reward for first four years is a way to avoid them paying themselves with a pre-mine it's the same thing right um almost the same thing right so the coin has to uh still exist and keep mining but then again you know like they can run their own miners right i mean if the coin is worth something or they don't even have to like someone else is mining for them when they're getting paid right but they're avoiding pre-mining so that they don't get a bunch of shit from people like us that they pre-mine the coin they also probably i can get away from the regulators saying that well it was you know free market and they mined it and this was part of the contract wouldn't force them to mine it it was their choice but they were going to pass this fee um is it right um i don't know but to me that part like i know some people are picking on the 20% for the first four years to them paying themselves and other people are picking on the potting ceremony right that created this um uh random seed that kind of started all and if the potting ceremony um if if zcash succeeds in 20 years there's a small probability that those people could have colluded and it's all over right things are not um why i consider zcash bad um some people think those are the worst two things i don't i just i for me it's everything i have just explained it's uh i mean i mean you have to understand that the economics of bitcoin is not replicatable understand that so if you understand it purpose just to get rich because you know your coin will not succeed right if you're going to do it as a because you like the science that you need to stand up there and champion for people not to buy your coin and convince if these exchanges not to list your coin and you threaten them that you will reset your chain as list your coin all of this right i mean that's how i would have done it if i cared about science because remember bitcoin's life there was no exchange there was no not even a amount of docs right i think mongogs came in what but early 2010 at the earliest i guess right was definitely before bitcoin had a it was definitely after bitcoin had a price and um so there was no exchange there was there wasn't this um uh speculative mentality back then so if you're gonna tell me that you're creating a science project it better be like while all of this while people are wasting their time and energy and effort accumulating these coins it cannot have any value so the only way to do something like this is to literally threaten um like like you say i will hold on to that private seed uh but then again no one's gonna trust it right this is what i mean like you end up in a chicken and next situation how do you prevent the market from speculating on the price of your coin for years while it spreads around the world um and without it having a speculative value i bitcoin did it it did it how the hell are you going to replicate that you can i mean i can think of a few ways but i don't even know if they would work and there's a high likelihood that you will have to reset your project after a year of hard work and start all over again so that they can spread around the world again for free i i agree to i think the bitcoin usage problem when i first looked at bitcoin i thought it was really interesting but i thought no one would ever use it i didn't see a path from a little computer science project to this huge international currency which even though we're very small we're still a huge international currency compared to what it started out as a little computer science project run concerned about the founder reward is i just don't know how much they've cut themselves in for and i don't think they do either uh when bitcoin started out it was a few dollars there was never this kind of idea that bitcoin would be incredibly valuable per coin with z cash it's the same thing we we really don't know the value of the coin so we don't know the value of the founders reward so unlike a pre-mind where they'd have 10,000 shares or whatever they have 10% ongoing or 20% as you say uh and it's just it's really hard to determine the value of that so i don't know if they've overpaid themselves or if they've underpaid themselves it's a way to pay themselves certainly i just i don't know the results of it and and besides that right like again right they have the exact same inflation rate as bitcoin okay fine they want to be bitcoin you look at bitcoin you take bitcoin in January of 2011 right two years after genesis block in January of 2011 with already an exchange like mount gocks right the price of bitcoin was about 50 cents don't call me on it i'm talking from memory i wasn't even a bitcoin or until 2013 right so um the bitcoin in early 2011 was probably around uh 50 cents because in June of 2011 it went from $1 to $30 thanks to a combination of uh shakshuma that teaching everyone how to use soc road and wiki leaks accepting it as donations those two things happened one week apart from each other in june or july i don't remember the exact dates off the top of my head right so in January the most bitcoin could have been is 50 cents okay that's two years after genesis block bitcoin was 50 cents and um so not 50 percent so about 25 percent of all bitcoins were already in existence and i would say a good 5 percent of all bitcoins were already lost permanently right it were not in circulation because in the early days people were sending each other thousands of bitcoins and just losing them uh i've heard of these stories uh so how do you replicate that and if you assume z and at that time bitcoin already had use cases it was already being used in the dark net markets and people were already talking about it um using it for wiki leaks the z cash has a use case it doesn't have a use case right so if z cash doesn't have a use case in two years where people are actively using z cash in two years people aren't losing their z cash right now the way they were losing bitcoin in the early days right so we get to two years from now the cash be smaller than lower than 50 cents just logic would suggest that dominant cryptocurrencies uh as a use case which again i don't see happening so this perpetual fall i i just don't see economically what can possibly stop it at a current rate of creation of z cash and inflation plus the founders are gonna want to sell they're not gonna sit on this thing watching it uh the 20 percent uh uh founder rewards they're not gonna sit on it and watch it go down to a dollar they're gonna start selling this damn thing and it'll probably be just like steam where as soon as they get the coin they sell the coin they get the coin they sell the coin so it has a potential downward pressure continuing yeah but but but but since steam is not actually a blockchain and they can do whatever changes they like at any time uh that's why steam is constantly changing what the hell steam is um so they can steam it can come out tomorrow and say hey we made an adjustment to our inflation we made an adjustment thought to the way steam is like no one no one checks this stuff it's like when i talk about steam i'm like where is your content and then someone replied to me on Reddit oh the content is on the blockchain go check the blockchain complete insanity there's there's allegedly some kind of blockchain like a back-end database that you could connect to but i don't know that it's mined and stuff but let's not open that one up now i think we're headed towards the end of the show to own do you have a story of the week or prediction for us oh man so no all my stories are were were used as as topics today um try to think what else really happened this week i honestly don't like between the podcast we just had before this and this one i don't really think anything else is uh is going on in bitcoin i mean i like the price right now it's being stable at 270 i guess my story of the week is myself let me uh i'm uh i've been oh can i pull this up my story of the week hold on um is this it or is the other one oh i'm gonna open them both up and then i'm gonna share my screen so i was interviewed by the bitcoinist day let me share my screen it's actually not the interesting picture so i went to um um i went to rbtc for the first time because i look guys i don't use reddit like i know people um i i don't i've never had a reddit account i don't use reddit i've never had a bitcoin talk account i just don't use those channels i can barely keep up with with twitter um so i i just don't but i want to rbtc for the first time because my article was posted up there and uh this was an interesting comment uh sorry tamas people are considering the show the tone based show which is not not my doing um i love the uh vind Diesel comparison uh that that that was great um so rbtc is calling me the uh diesel of nerds um which is um which is great but i'm just not seeing that without the shaved head vind Diesel for me is a shaved head guy and i am very close to having a naturally shaved head um i'm getting there i also need to gain about i don't know a hundred pounds of muscle but um yeah so people are accusing me of being the block stream shell which i sound understandable but the conspiracies over there run deep um i uh when i do us uh talk occasionally talk on internet with like members of block stream i only later find out that they are on a block stream team so i don't even know who's fully on that team so yeah so you can stay with your rumors that block stream is somehow paying me but uh they do not i am not in regular contact with them at all uh when i'm in San Francisco i like stopping by their office which i have only done one time um and um i occasionally see the block stream members of conferences that's pretty much my only interaction with them um but yes i like the work that they are doing but the comments are on rbtc are great they did not disappoint um they love me over there um also the comments on rthrium were great to my article so if you haven't seen it go ahead and google it um that's not really the name of the article i think it's just called interview with tone based uh on bitcoinist let me see if i have it up on my uh here it is very cool and people can also subscribe to tones new podcast doing a weekly charts and stuff on the tone based channel so we check that out probably off your twitter something like that um yeah off my twitter i mean it's just on youtube it's just my youtube channel you can google it on the tone based um should be too hard to find but yeah this is the article i guess they did name it if segwood doesn't pass um it's likely nothing else will either yeah so i strongly encourage people to go ahead and read it and feel free to provide your opinion on reddit or even on discuss um you will not hear back from me because i do not have those accounts um i try to have as few accounts as possible i do reply on youtube and i tend to reply on twitter so that's pretty much my story of the week oh yeah the the work commenters here i cannot reply to i basically call me an idiot and stuff which is fine um we do have a free speech uh it's okay well i don't know why it's taken so long to load but people have to understand that a blockchain the bitcoin blockchain is not a free resource or have endless energy it's not free keep that in mind when you are criticizing it oh was the whole decentralization thing right people think that decentralization is efficient it's not the bitcoin is very inefficient and it needs to be that way uh if you think efficiency is brought about by decentralization saying um a lot of good things come from decentralization efficiency and making things faster and easier is usually not one of them okay so just again keep that in mind um i can't i can't reply to people's comments because i don't have a discuss account i just don't like all my comments being tracked at one place for someone to just easily read all my comments um and discuss wants to know your email and stuff like that and i try to sign up for a little thing this possible all right good stuff tone and i didn't really prepare a story this week uh so i just want to say thank you to the san francisco bitcoin meetup we had our christmas party last night it was great uh waxman pr was there keep keep bit give gave a speech about their new donations tracking software it's interesting stuff check that out at bitgivefoundation.org we're also joined by keep key list trying to think of the other one oh coin source ATMs and just thanks to everybody for sponsoring the san francisco bitcoin meetup and for coming to our meetups we free beer and pizza most of the meetups we have some speakers and it's just a really nice time it was good to see everybody last night uh so that's about it for today's show tone do you have anything else to add uh no that's it oh wow i think this podcast was so much longer that you think it's two of us it would go one two three but then i go off on a tangent my bad guys i i really try to keep these things short i i always try to do the same thing on my analysis i try to keep with the 20 minutes and there always 45 so it's uh we just gotta set a timer to keep it out click you off when it buzzes but we're running out of time i gotta go to dinner until next time bye bye