The Bitcoin Group, the American original. For over the last 10 seconds, the sharpest satoshi's, the best bitcoins, the hardest crypto currency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists. Theo Goodman from Hasse online. Good evening everyone. Gabriel D. Vine from Future Rant. Happy New Year and hello posterity. Tom Vays from Liberty Life Trail. Grigging and condolences everyone. I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network moving on to issue one. Bitcoin prices currently at $880. Issue one, Bitcoin price rises and falls. The Chinese you want sold off sharply and then Bitcoin fell 20%. Sorry the Chinese you want rose sharply. And then Bitcoin fell 20% halting Bitcoin spectacular rally leaving behind a massive cloud of doubt as the relationship between the two currencies deepened. The cloud mushroomed the next day with Chinese central bank warning investors to take a rational and cautious approach to digital currency investing. Is this the end of Bitcoin's rocket ship ride to the moon or is this just an example of Bitcoin's deepening relationship with China and the world? I ask you Theo Goodman. Yeah it's all over Bitcoin's dead again and we can round all value of Bitcoin to zero as the financial time's abundant. Some random dude with British accent said in his article that the value of Bitcoin can be rounded to zero and of course that's always true. It just depends on what number you start at. So if you start at what million then of course if Bitcoin reaches a thousand then it's quite easy to round it to zero. And that's in fact what we can do now. No Bitcoin is still very linked to China, Chinese market, the value of the we want, what the people's Republic Bank of China wants to do every day if they want to, they're fixing and so on that does affect the market. Now it doesn't matter if it if you think it affects it fundamentally really it doesn't really matter. It definitely affects the perception and you see that in a lot of the reaction you can chart it out. It doesn't you can just see it. That's that's the reality of it. Yeah and since the main volume is on the Chinese exchanges of course that's where everyone looks it doesn't matter if the volume is wash trades if people think it's fake or not that the perception is that the volume is there and the volume is there just depends on what you define as real volume is wash trades real volume or not. It goes through the engine so you just have to decide if that's real volume or not or how much you want to trust it or just keep that in mind in any case. There's definitely still a link between China and Bitcoin, a capital flight maybe or just perceived the capability for capital flight. The government came in and told a few exchanges, okay, Coin, who be and PTCC, hey guys, you need to make sure everything is okay and by the way everyone Bitcoin is risky and that kind of thing. So just a standard China bands Bitcoin article circa 2013, 2014 the same kind of stuff we've seen before over and over again Bitcoin price goes up. Chinese going, we don't know someone lost money. I don't know. Okay we got to do something. Okay guys, let's make some real, some interesting articles, let's have and then people of course will translate them wrong, misinterpret them. And in any case things Bitcoin does. We have seen basically a full retrace of the whole move. It's funny. I just put up my old video from when the last time that China banned Bitcoin because at this animal house kind of joky thing to it, I didn't think it would happen again just hours later, but you can check that out. That's in the record now. I agree with you, it's a bit like Elliott and ET, they're tearing Bitcoin and China apart, but we don't really know that it's the Chinese people trading. We just know it's the Chinese exchanges. Gabriel Devon, your thoughts on the incredible price movement Bitcoin. You know I also agree that there's a China connection here and I do agree with Theo that the wash trades are not necessarily indicative or comparable to non-Chinese exchange volume. So it's really unknown at this point what the relation would be if they didn't have free trades on Chinese exchanges. It's really a sign of the immaturity and shallowness of financial media that they don't caught none to that difference in the exchanges and they still repeat at infinitum this fallacy that Chinese trade, the bulk of Bitcoin trading goes on in China which is patently unprovable. Could be true, we don't really know. The bulk of Bitcoin mining definitely goes on in China, but we don't know what it is. That's a lot easier to determine. It's not perfect but it's relatively clear and the consensus is definitely that that's true. But it's something over 50%, something like 60, maybe 70. But if China were to actually ban Bitcoin which they're not even close to doing as far as I can tell, well who knows, they're random. So they could just choose things overnight. It's an authoritarian regime so who knows. But if they were to, then the hash rate would drop but Bitcoin would survive. There's no other network that could suddenly take over and suddenly be the most powerful and secure crypto money out there. Bitcoin would still be it. What I'd like to talk to is the subject of the People's Bank of China. It's role in the Bitcoin moves of late. I feel that the Bitcoin price moves, parabolic move up, sudden slam down, are really kind of a small side effect of what the People's Bank was actually trying to do with their liquidity moves. So basically what the Central Bank of China has been doing is in order to punish speculators that are speculating on continued weakening of the yuan with their short positions is just suddenly, randomly, essentially drying up liquidity, sucking up the liquidity or injecting liquidity as they feel fit in order to screw people that they feel are quote unquote manipulating the currency, which is of course an extremely ironic thing to say when that's precisely the point of the existence of central banks to manipulate currencies, economies, et cetera. So via their fiscal policy. So what we saw was the People's Bank taking an unprecedented amount of liquidity at an unprecedented suddenness out of the market, three nights in a row, and well nights in our time, three days in a row, pushing the interbank lending rates to the incredibly high percentages of 60% than the next night, 80% and then when we saw finally the big drop in Bitcoin, 105% overnight lending rates. So in other words, I want to borrow, I'm a bank, I want to borrow 10 million yuan just until tomorrow. I got to pay 10 million five just to borrow it. So next day, 25 hours later, I got to pay 20 and a half million just to borrow that. So that was extremely shocking to the currency markets in Asia, but really markets around the world. A lot of traders lost their shirts, those three nights. They didn't, nobody thought that they would take it that far. And they absolutely succeeded in completely rattling and scaring investors and speculators in their positions with the yuan. I have a feeling that they, you know, might certainly temporarily achieve their aim of discouraging shorts and speculation on the yuan, but all of this type of stuff is temporary at best, these type of reactions. Bitcoin, I think, was maybe a slightly sort of a bonus side effect where the people's bank, you know, hey, might as well screw those Bitcoin guys too and show them what's what and so the speculators on the Bitcoin side decided to liquidate their positions. The people's bank made an outright statement that, quote unquote, Bitcoin is quote unquote, unstable as if, you know, everybody in that country that's buying and selling Bitcoin didn't already know that. It's kind of stupid. So it's basically about prepostering and, you know, a sledgehammer approach from authoritarian governments as usual. This time Bitcoin happened to be caught in the crossfire. It's a good point, Gabe, with the Chinese testing out their ability to control their currency. And I think it could be also a dress rehearsal to the Trump administration coming up. Trump thinks that with a Congress on his side that he can act like a dictator, but the Chinese actually can't. When they want to do something, it gets done. And we're seeing an example of that of how broad and wide ranging and just plain strong they can be. We'll have to see how he comes up against that. Tony Vays, your thoughts on Bitcoin's up and down. All right. So I'm just going to do a screen share. I just thought I was putting together a few charts before. So here's the thing. I want to, I like putting these moves into perspective. I tweeted this out on November 22nd, okay? And look, everyone is going crazy about these currency moves in the Chinese you want. But when you look at it on a long term scale, guys, they're not that freaking big, okay? I actually remember very clearly when people were going nuts right here, right? So this chart is a line that, I mean, basically this is the strengthening of the Chinese you want. And this is the weakening of the Chinese you want. So everyone went nuts the last year and a half of the Chinese are officially lowering the value of their you want. And all that they've done. You back to what it was in mid 2010 around the time of the Bitcoin Genesis block. And I compared it to the euro, which has lost 25% during that same time span since the Bitcoin Genesis block. While the Chinese you want hasn't moved at its worst case scenario, the Chinese you want lost 10% while in that same amount of time, the euro was down. Send from this high and the euro was down overall about 35%. And by the way, the euro went even lower. The euro went down to here about 1.03 and it has since bounce back to current levels. So here's what the you want done since I've printed this chart. It came down a tad bit more and now it's back to here. That's it guys. This is what this right here, this is what has everyone. This is an eight year chart. So I'm going to close this now. I don't say that. So here's what it looks like. Here is the here is the move that just happened and these kinds of I mean, no one knows how to do. There's no consistency, right? So these two are actually the same exact chart. Only on this one for some reason, the lower you go, the higher the number and on this one, the lower you go, the lower the number. I mean, these two are basically the same exact chart. The time is different. And one is the fix, one is the float, but it's like. Cool, right? So we're not talking about anything crazy as far as the exchange rate and it goes to show you that look, they have a controlled monetary system in China. It's more controlled than in the US. It's more controlled than in Europe. And did they can do this? I mean, there's nothing stopping them from doing this, right? So what are some of the reasons that they did that? Is this the chart I wanted to show? No, I was going to show this one first than the other one. Okay. So this is China's foreign reserves and they've been slumping, right? As their currency has been weakening, they are foreign reserves have been slumping and they wanted to, you know, throw a little curveball in there and get some balance back in. And yes, this is Bitcoin down here as to, as to his drop. But the other chart I wanted to show was this. So this is, I think this is from today. Yeah, this is the latest one. This from today is from Bloomberg. Again, this was their devaluation. And again, this isn't unprecedented, right? I mean, here it is a year ago. But this goes back to what I think Gabriel was saying about borrowing rates. This was a big deal, right? To borrow the offshore you want. This was the big spike. And again, here is the foreign reserves and the foreign reserves have been going down. So China had their own reasons for doing it. I don't think China cares about Bitcoin enough to have anything directly to do with Bitcoin. So let me briefly talk about the price and then I'll talk about that. So this is the weekly chart. This candle looks bad. Almost hit this resistance line here. This is a weekly chart. I mean, we've had worse weeks. This really isn't the end of the world. Also, I think to what Dio said or Gabriel said, we haven't given back all the gains yet. To me, the breakout was the 760 level. And as long as we stay above 760 and preferably stay above my channel right here, I think we're perfectly fine and then bullish territory. This was basically just a wake up call to everyone that thought they were an expert trader. And I honestly know some people that got out at the top. I mean, I'm not a day trader. Would have loved to see this hit the top of the channel like it did here, here, here, here, here. I mean, this channel is still intact. Hey, Tony, what's the, what's the orange line that's just below the current pink support? Yeah, what's that? That is a 200 day moving average. And it's still trending up. And I don't have the 50. I'm here because to volatile, but that is the 200 day moving average. And again, it's another line you want to stay above. You've been staying above this line ever since October 2015. So we've been above this line for like 14 to 15 months now, which is great. So I'm still fairly bullish Bitcoin. Here's the hourly view. And this looks a little troubling to me. I don't like this formation of a descending triangle and upside down cup and handle. This can certainly break down. But to me, the number we need to stay above is 760. If we go back to 760, I would probably be a buyer and picking it up at 760 for a beautiful retest on the price. We go back here right at this line right here, the 757 line that I have on here. It's a Fibonacci. And then we go back. And the next time we hit the top of the channel, it's going to be in the 1350, 1400 range. So I'm still generally bullish Bitcoin. So let me close these to give me some more memory free up. Okay, so as a final thought, I'm going to close screen share at this point. I don't really need it anymore. So now what worries me more than what the Chinese did with their currency, that doesn't really worry me. I mean, that the Chinese are going to be messing with their currency all the time. Bitcoin is supposed to be a bit of a safe haven from these currency manipulations. So what bothers me more than what the Chinese government does, what bothers me more is the zero fee trading on Chinese exchanges and my suspicion of the fake bullshit volume. That bothers me a hell of a lot more than what the Chinese government does. Also, as the latest articles are pointing out, I didn't know that there was a relationship between the Chinese exchanges and the PBOC. So that may or may not worry some people around the world as to that relationship. Also, if China is having such a big effect, and what worries me more is the Chinese government coming down and telling the Chinese exchanges to shut down. Okay, so those are the things that worry me a little bit and they might worry some of the traders as well. And I mean, zero hedge always blows these things out of proportion every time that the Chinese yuan moves 0.002 percent, it's like a giant headline. But yeah, so those are my real thoughts. It's unfortunate that Bitcoin went up this fast and it's unfortunate that it went down this fast. Stability in Bitcoin price is way more important because there are real users out there. And I'd rather have us go slowly and make it to $2,000 per Bitcoin a year later than watching it go up 30% down 20%, up 30% down 20%. It's not healthy, but hey, it's a free market. People can do what they want. But hopefully the Chinese exchanges will stop their shenanigans and one day soon remove the zero fee trading so the bots don't go wild. Real volume guys, real volume. That bothers me. BTC China is probably the best of the moral as far as that goes. All right, I think I've said enough on this topic. Excellent points. All the sun shine and rainbows with the Chinese possibly controlling closing the exchanges. But it is also worth noting that even if the Chinese government speaks out against something, it might not be entirely bad. This is again more publicity for Bitcoin, more people that haven't heard of Bitcoin, another chance to get on board, especially about the price descends. Let's move on to the exit question. Theo Goodman, the price of Bitcoin next week, higher or lower? Lower, lower, of course. We're going deep. We're going deep. We've got to get to some lucky numbers here. Let's see here. I think that 888 is a good one. We also could do 777. Gabriel D. Vaughan. We're about 888 right now as the web bot predicted, which is pretty incredible. Definitely would have been cool to earn some speculation cash based on those predictions. I think I'm going to be taking them even more seriously in the future. But I will say for a week from now, we're doing predictions time. It's always hard. I think we're going to break any lower than we already have. We're not going to test 760 again. I don't think we're going to bumble around here for a bit and then start trending up. I'm going to say 950. Almost the same. The cop-out answer. Tonveys. I think there could be some more downside. But next week will be higher than 880 or 885 as a 980. I think we will be higher than 890 a week from today. It's rare that I say this. Even though we could go lower in the short term over the weekend and stuff. I think we will bounce back. I am expecting it to stay with the nut channel. I'm looking for a bullish run into the summer. Let's go with higher. Higher. Moving on to issue two. Issue two Bitcoin exchanges cannot handle the load. During the peak price of $1,100, many Bitcoin exchanges such as Coinbase could not handle the load of their traffic. Instead, leading to several traders being blocked and receiving worthless cloud flare versions of the site instead, Gabriel Devon wasn't it safe for the maturity of the Bitcoin industry that even the venerable Coinbase could not handle the load. It's not a good sign. It's really surprising that web traffic, control, web hosting, capacity, flexibility. It's really in a way, almost an indictment on that industry. I think we've got a real technical problem right now that will simply not be solved ever. With many technical issues in the world, technological systems in the world, we won't see that challenge ever be solved because the paradigm itself is flawed. That's one of the reasons why I'm such a big supporter of projects like MadeSafe, which transcends the client server model and instead replaces it with a distributed system where the more demand arises for an information resource, the more the supply side scales to meet it. In other words, your website is hosted in a distributed fashion at a minimum of four nodes, I think it is. If suddenly 10 people come and look at your site at once and said two, there will be five or six. Then if 100 people there will be eight and et cetera, it will begin duplicating more and more and every time more people come to it, more duplications will come and the algorithm will scale to meet the demand. Until we have a system like that, we're still going to have this total bull crap where sites go down and it's just ghetto. I feel like we're living in a 1905 and you've got to go to the workshop and talk to the brass guys with hammers to make you a new car. I want to have a horn that's shaped like this and it takes them seven months to make you your custom automobile instead of a nice automated conveyor belt assembly line in the Ford factory in 1914. It's funny, Gabe, because it seems to me like we have solved the problem. We've solved it with BitTorrent. The only problem is ownership and secrecy. With BitTorrent, we can't distribute the video files that way because everyone downloads it. Everyone could potentially own it and edit it. And with the Coinbase website, they don't really want you to download a version of it. Even if they encrypted it and it was protected, you'd have probably a better chance of cracking it offline than you would online. Of course. I mean, I see the two as different. They're slightly different, downloading a video file that everyone can have versus whatever it takes to authenticate and access Coinbase's database. But I think they both could be solved by something like BitTorrent where the clients are contributing to the hosting. But that is certainly more security problems. Yeah, well, certainly the kernel concept of BitTorrent, the distributed hash table, which is of course used as one of the main elements in the Bitcoin protocol, is going to be used for all sorts of things. And I'm pretty certain that MadeSafe is using distributed hash tables as you know, possibly in various parts of their system. But your concerns about strong cryptography being broken in a double blind hosting paradigm are unfounded in my opinion. I do think there's more ability to brute force something when you have offline access to the database rather than online access. It's not exactly for cryptography, key based, key wise, but attempt-based hosting. Now they're sharding. They shard it up. They shard it up. Not even the person doing the sharding knows about where anything is. Nobody has any idea what they're hosting or why or what's going on with it. There's no way it's completely blind. That's the whole strength of strong cryptography. Without it, Bitcoin would be impossible and we would not have strong property rights in Bitcoin and it would not function. Well, they should make better websites that function in a more distributed BitTorrent-like way. And they should also do this for Wikipedia. Wikipedia is more of a one-way thing. I'm getting my information. Occasionally, people are editing it. That's a complexity. They have to deal with it. But I do think Wikipedia, always asking for server money. Why don't you put it on BitTorrent or something like that? Even if we had to download a browser plugin or something. Toned Vaze, your thoughts on exchange is going down. Okay, it's going to be my generic answer. That's why I always say because every two months, we're talking about some exchange going down or being hacked. We're not dealing with, I mean, I think that the Bitcoin core engineers are very, very good. Keep getting yelled at by Eric Lumpur, so every time I refer to it as block stream. Bitcoin core engineers are very good. Outside of that space, there aren't too many good engineers. I haven't heard of alpha-bay going down. They seem to be doing pretty good. Can't believe how many gambling sites are going down. I haven't heard of any going down. Sometimes they're slow to grade wagers, but they don't go down typically. It's all about competency in your development. I don't use blockchain that info wallet anymore because it's literally cost me Bitcoin to use it. It's all about how good your development team is. I don't have confidence in a lot of these teams. I've never had confidence in BitFinex. I was referred to BitFinex as amateur hour from day one, literally from almost their launch. I haven't had any competency in Coinbase, not much. I'm not surprised by this. Coinbase can't possibly be making all that much money. I don't expect them to hire the best and greatest engineers to make sure all of this is up and running. These things aren't cheap. Bitcoin isn't free. Everyone that thinks that Bitcoin will do everything with Bitcoin is not going to cost them anything. These things have cost to them. I'm not surprised. Things always go down at the worst possible time. Otherwise, you wouldn't care about them. This is the life you chose as a Bitcoin trader. I'm sorry. I had no idea Coinbase went down. It was irrelevant to me because I don't use Coinbase. I never did. It only bothers me when BitFinex goes down because it manages to crash the price. But other than that, again, I don't trade Bitcoin. I don't think people should be trading Bitcoin all that often. If this is what you chose to do, this is the risk that you take on by trading it on incompetent and in most cases on regulated exchanges. Look, I know libertarians love things that aren't regulated at all. I did too until I came to the Bitcoin space. I've now realized that regulation is needed. I used to also think that I worked for their stirs in JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs as the most evil company in the world. I don't think that anymore because I've seen what goes on in the Bitcoin space. The people that I used to work with at those companies, they're incredibly smart. Most of them are incredibly ethical. Way more so on average than your typical Bitcoiner. I have a completely different view of traditional finance. Now that I've left that world for the Bitcoin world, it really flips your thinking upside down very, very often. Are we going to brag on Brian Armstrong in other ways when he's asking the community what all's to add and the results of that are always saving that for later section If you want to bring that up, you can. I'd say Brian Armstrong put out a tweet recently and had an unscientific Google poll that could probably be easily swayed and decided what new coin to add to Coinbase. It reminded me of Cripsy back in the day. You want direct comparison? Right. I'll mention it real quick. Here's this tweet. That's not a big picture at all. These were the results of his poll and nav one. I don't even know what nav is. I've never been heard of it until it's a little disconcerting to say that the next stock that you're picking to add to your exchange no matter Bitcoin or whatever, that you're choosing it randomly. Even if it was like Nabisco or Circuit City or AT&T or I don't know some other stock, you just three letters chosen randomly. I know. S&P 500 could do that. Next time they report the Dow Jones is a 30 stocks. Next time something needs to leave the Dow Jones that come back in, they should do a Twitter poll to the followers of the world to see what they want added into the Dow Jones industrial average. I mean, this is a little ridiculous. I've never been heard of nav day one. Brian Armstrong comes out saying he believes that this wasn't legitimate these votes. And then if you look at the replies to his tweet, a bunch of people are like, no, I voted for nav. I voted for nav. It was actually quite a quite funny on that. How could it be legitimate? How could it be any kind of anything other than what it was? I'm actually looking for the poll. Okay, so here's the original tweet. So here's the tweet of Brian asking for it. And here is my reply to his tweet because I actually filled out the questionnaire. Here is my tweet. And I put one coin and I'm very, very disappointed that one coin did not make his final list after I tweeted this out and it got like 40 retweets or something. I was hoping that other people would jump on this band. Why again? I was really hoping one coin would win that poll. That would have been absolutely hilarious. And the next time he does it, he needs to like, you know, be held accountable and he has to add it into the exchange. And that would be great. One other thing he just tweeted out, my last comment on Brian Armstrong, just tweeted this out, where was it? Oh, yeah, by the way, it looks like Brian Armstrong has changed his mind on Segwit. This was a very interesting tweet, by the way, from him. Now that he's learned more about Segwit, that finally, I guess, he only had what 20 developers on his stuff. Like what is that? It's just he's flailing. This is like a troll. He's like a troll. I don't know what this is the whole thing is just it's not bad. People are allowed to change their mind. That that happens. Yeah, but the fact that he was so pining on it without even having done any research. And now I've run more. It's starting. It started be a Trump situation where they need to take his account away from him. He's a very busy CEO. Yes, other things to do. He expected beyond top of everything. It's a reasonable thing. But by being out here on Twitter, being out here on medium, he's giving the impression that he is on top of everything. And that's not fair. He has a company to write. He's a busy guy. Good. Okay. No, I agree. No, look, I'm happy that he's changed his mind about Segwit. Now, if only he can help convince Roger Veer to do the same, that that would really be great. And I also replied to another tweet of his today, where people apparently have been asking him to contribute to Bitcoin core development. Oh, tell you, I'm not calling the answer. Now we're going to talk about this in a minute. But the exit question, okay, we're going to say that large exchanges with large amounts of money should be able to keep their sites up period. Anything else is a massive failure to serve their customers and may be considered liable. Not sure about that. But speaking of large exchanges, Brian Armstrong recently reached out on Twitter looking for good ideas. Let's see if I can share a screen. And he said, looking for good ideas. And the suggestion on Twitter was for coinbase to hire core developers. And it looks like Brian is taking this seriously and starting to take action. Is this too little too late or welcome to the party, Mr Armstrong? Let's start with Theo. I just want to comment really quickly about the other question I got skipped. And I think that's definitely some discrimination going on here, discrimination against bearded people, discriminating against bearded people, and spouting out anti-Trump rhetoric at the same time. First of all, I need to... My first row. No, no, no, no, no, first of all, no, the host is in control here. The host is the dictator. And as always, so if anyone has any issues about how long anyone speaks or what they say, they always need to go to the host because the host is in control at all times. In any case, I just have to say, sorry, Trump is a master Twitter user. And Armstrong is not a master Twitter user. Let's just get that out of the thing because Trump tells people what's up on Twitter and everyone retweets it and everything. While Armstrong sometimes is more of a follower, I would describe what I mean. What happened was Armstrong's buddies, other founder guys, you know, everyone and his buddies are doing year-end things like, hey guys, it's the end of the year and I want to do it into the year tween. What were the best things about my company in 2016? Or what should I do to improve since the year is coming to an end? That's a whole hands kumbaya or something like that. And it just totally backs fires for him. But he gets a lot of reaction. So that's good. He did get a lot of feedback with those tweets. And that is in fact good. And maybe, hey, why not fund some core developers and get other companies in there? That's great. It's an open-source project. Get other companies involved from other perspectives. I think that's excellent. People can change their minds. That's fine. It doesn't mean that we're always going to agree all the time. It just means that, you know, pay your cloud flare bill on time. Oh no, wait, that was cracking. Do another, that was another, that was another time when they hit you can go back on there. But all this stuff, okay, let me just go back to the exchange thing in the cloud fair. Things Bitcoin does. This is just things Bitcoin does. This is just totally normal for Bitcoin. The price pumps totally up. People are new for you. Dumpes on their face. People freak out. People bought top people sold the top. This is it. Cloud flare sites don't work. Fake volume is all just Bitcoin stuff. So if you're new to it, get used to it. This is just how Bitcoin is. It's not going to change anytime soon. This is just how things are here. This is just how it works. Get used to it. Actually, it's much more interesting now that there's a little bit of volatility going on. If you look back at 2015, that was like the dark ages of the flat price. And it's just sitting there and everyone is in a bad mood. And now at the price dumping and pumping on everyone, everyone's excited again. So that's just how Bitcoin works. The question was, what Coinbase we saw from, we saw on our show, check out the past episodes of the Bitcoin group. We've talked about it many times. Coinbase launched GDACs. They're exchange. They wanted to add Ethereum. We noticed that there's a trend to making a shitcoin exchange, an altcoin exchange out of Coinbase. And they've confirmed that that's the direction to go. We can think about why that's probably so. Well, one pretty, that's where the money is. I mean, look around there. Like, why does Polo have all the, making all that money and we're over here and we're like the legit Coinbase? What's up with that? We want to get in that game too. Let's write some medium articles about tokens and why they're so cool. Maybe we can even launch ICOs on our exchange. We can make the mega bucks too. We got them the mega bucks. For it in the future that Coinbase will have all that stuff. I wouldn't be surprised in one or two years to have 20 pairs or something totally nuts like that. Who knows? I really would not be surprised if they add a whole bunch of coins and a Brian Armstrong, Pippa Cash immediately. After you add one coin. See, now I'd like to welcome him to the party, but this just seems like too little too late. I wonder why you wouldn't have a core developer on staff already just for the intelligence aspects. I wonder now why are people running their businesses via Twitter? This seems like a pretty standard idea. You're running a Bitcoin business. You could get a Bitcoin core developer. Maybe get a couple of them. It seems like a basic business idea. But I guess you got to run a Twitter poll to get that these days if you want that kind of insight on your own industry. Gabriel Devon, your thoughts. Welcome to the party or too little too late. I'll say both. Definitely too little too late. Coinbase coming into the game in 2012. Well ahead of the really big pumps of 2013 and all the media attention that was really brand new back then. There was a little bit of coverage here and there of this little curiosity bit coin before 2013. But by January, when the price had already doubled twice, Coinbase was there. They were the only game in town for good UX, for US users to pick up some Bitcoin, for a mere 1% view and fee rather. They had the world in their palm. They were the start up. They were the Silicon Valley Bitcoin guys. They were ahead of the curve and they had tons of VC compared to all the other. We sort of ghetto companies that had been relying on Bitcoin barons, individuals like Trace Meyer or Roger Vier or whoever. They were like the mainstream guys and they had beautiful sites. It worked totally great, totally smooth. I used them for my first or second Bitcoin purchase or whatever it was. It was great. I thought they really had a great start and really they should have been looking into directly funding Bitcoin development at the latest mid 2013. The fact that they didn't, to me, is a clear sign that not as all as it seems. That Coinbase was actually possibly a play by some established financial players to get a foothold in a new industry and have the option to sabotage it if necessary by maybe underfunding the hosting or underfunding development or causing some sort of problems, delays, clogs. It makes me, I'm the resident conspiracy theorist, so my mind always goes to, well, who's actually behind these VCs? A lot of them get their liquidity from banks. From banksters and FinTech insiders, players from that industry. Then Brian starts coming out with these comments about snake oil bill crap like Ethereum and how it's the future right before the Bitcoin price starts going up again because people in other countries, they don't buy into what useless Silicon Valley nerds and supposedly leaders say. We've got a situation where the established player has completely dropped the ball. Now, suddenly now that the price reaches an all-time high, maybe his investors are like, oh, wait, I guess Bitcoin is for real. Maybe you shouldn't badmouth it anymore. Now, okay, no, no, no, no, you've got to convince the Bitcoin ecosystem that you're actually pro Bitcoin and stop dissing it. Now, you've got some liquidity to fund the core development. That's too little too late, but hey, any money you want to inject into the ecosystem is going to be appreciated. I agree, Gabe. Since the beginning, Bitcoin's always need Bitcoin development and Bitcoin media or advertising because we don't have any of that. It was sad to see how many banks instead bring us KYC. Then, for them to go from selling a grade A product like Bitcoin to then just selling all this garbage and all these other things and not even investigating them, just choosing them via poll seems like a very sad end to a simple business where they could have just sold Bitcoin. Toned Vays, your thoughts? I'll make it real quick. I don't think Coinbase can ever be pollo because pollo at least lets you withdraw up to $2,000 a day without KYC. cryptocurrency will never do that. So, it automatically puts it way behind the eight ball from the start. They have some issue. Pollo has some issues too. I don't know what their KY policy is, but I believe in 2016 they did change it. But yeah, I see what you mean. But as far as I know, they still allow you up to $2,000 per day, which is pretty good. But yeah, one last note on the core development. I mean, I was always against Brian Armstrong. He went for the whole classic route. I gave him a really hard time. It would be great if a lot of these companies contributed to core development. What I am against is them going out and forming competing teams trying to fork Bitcoin. This is what Bitcoin XT was. This is what Bitcoin Classic was. This is what Bitcoin unlimited is. And I think this is what Block is, but don't hold me to that one. What's his name? That's where Garzik went to. So, and I know people think that Block stream and the core devs or people contributing to it. Sorry, Eric. I tend to use the words interchangeably between core devs and Block stream. But I know there are differences. I just like for simplicity purposes. I tend to just randomly use one term or the other. But yeah, if they want to contribute to that team and submit code for their review, that would be great. That's what I want to see. But that doesn't really, I mean, I don't think their investors would be happy with that, right? Because their investors didn't invest in that. Now, if their investors are holding Bitcoin, and that's the thing, like a lot of these companies, they should be invested in Bitcoin. They should be holding their, I guess it may or may not be responsible to hold your savings in Bitcoin, but you should like take a company like Blockchain that info, for example. They're doing a Bitcoin wallet. They had a huge fundraise. Same thing with Block stream. They they have money. That money should mostly be in Bitcoin because they are tied to Bitcoin. It's their job to make Bitcoin useful. It's their job to make Bitcoin valuable. So as they do that, and they hold their reserves in Bitcoin, they shouldn't need any more funding. Them doing a good job raises the value of Bitcoin, which would allow them to continue running their operation without doing any more capital raises. That in a way that should also be the view of Coin Base, they need to keep that $100 million that was given to them initially in Bitcoin, and pay people in Bitcoin, and this their job to make Bitcoin great. That's a great point. That's such a good point. I mean, God, it's just so obvious. If you actually did it, then you would really put it on the line. And yeah, the Bitcoin companies need to use Bitcoin. Employees need to have it on wallets on their phone and send it back and forth pay for lunch. Actually use it. Now, just talk about it. All right, Tony. Moving on to issue three. Issue three, the power to disrupt everything. Once again, Blockchain, one of the core technologies of Bitcoin that maintains the state of the network while preventing double spends is being applied to new areas. The Goldman video skips over Bitcoin's potential for innovation entirely, and instead focuses on what they can do with the blockchain, essentially a distributed, uneditable database. Something that has existed and continues to exist. Meanwhile, blockchain investment firms like Polychain Capital and Numera, are back in the news with plans to invest in other blockchain companies like the Gollum Project and Filecoin with Richard Crabe, the CEO of Numeraadi saying, if Polychain buys these tokens, it isn't quite a VC investment. And it's not really a stock purchase. It's a third thing that doesn't really have a name yet. There is no company. There is no stock. But this feels like a stock. Tonvez has the whole world gone crazy. Are we the last people in the world of madness? Oh my God. Both of these, I don't even know which one is more insane than the other. So I actually replied to Goldman and I replied basically, you have to watch that video from that tweet. It's so bad. They have absolutely no comprehension of what a blockchain is. They literally think of blockchain as a database. They really, really do. That not video was like, oh, we're going to put real estate on the blockchain. We're going to put everything on the blockchain. It makes absolutely no sense. The guy is talking about three-day settlement. I said it in this video a year ago, over a year ago. What am I saying? I don't know if I was in Arizona. That was like October of 2015 when T0 came out with their trial run and I said, no one cares about three-day settlement. Absolutely no one. It's not a technological problem. It's a regulatory problem. It has nothing to do with that. You don't need a blockchain to give you instant settlement. Your email settles instantly. So can anything else digitally? The last thing Goldman Sachs wants is an immutable record. It's insane. I tweeted this picture at them. This is Satoshi Nakamoto's original use of the word Bitcoin. It specifically involved proof of work. The concept of proof of work and bearer instruments, digital bearer instruments, Goldman Sachs is in acknowledging this. To be honest, I can hardly think of anything Goldman Sachs needs a blockchain for unless they want to hide money which they don't need to do because they have enough lawyers and accountants to do it legally. Why do they want to do it with Bitcoin? Bitcoin market isn't nearly deep enough for them. When one Bitcoin is pushing $100,000, then we can talk about it being useful for Goldman Sachs' operation. All right, so we're done with Goldman Sachs. Don't need this anymore. Where is the... Here we go. Oh, this article was just nuts. It starts off with saying that Coinbase is the most important Bitcoin company. Right there, it's a clue that the rest of this article is going to go from bad to worse when they're considering Coinbase, the most important Bitcoin company. That's pretty bad. Coinbase will probably end the way Cryptsy ended and people will yell and holler for about a week and then no one would really care. This is bad. What's this guy's name? Evan Olaf Carson-Wee. So he's starting this ridiculously stupid fund with Gavin. Sorry, Anderson Horowitz. That's what it is. Yeah, Anderson Horowitz. And Union Square Adventures. We talked about this fund before how nuts it is. I was going to make specific things in this article. He's talking about decentralizing everything. And most of this stuff is completely nuts. It's completely nuts. He's talking about all these projects with native tokens. But the reason to have no native tokens is literally to like exit scam before your project starts. This person has absolutely no comprehension as to why a company like Airbnb and Uber, why they became popular and why they made money. He doesn't realize that almost everyone that starts one of these adventures. They have absolutely no goal to realize what they're doing. Their job is literally to get rich quick and get out. They can have the best idea. But no one is going to force them to even bring it a quarter of the way to fruition. And these people will be out. Just ask like what six or seven of the co-founders of Ethereum. They're all gone. This is what these things are designed to do when he's using Ethereum as the prime example for this. This is just bad. It's like somehow, and again, this continues this incompetency in the Bitcoin space. A lot of people were in Bitcoin early. They were earlier than us. There were people in there in 2010 in 2011. Just because you were a Bitcoin early adopter and even started a company in Bitcoin does not necessarily make you competent. Everyone always likes to say how Facebook took over from from my space. Well, perhaps that people running Facebook were just more competent than the people running my space. And they knew how to advertise better. Everyone wants to talk about, oh, something else will come along and it will steal all the users. A lot of it has to do with the competency of the people building the system. And when you bring in guys like this to manage your coins and invest in scam coins, this will be very badly. This go on project is just stupid. I'm not going to get into it. Maybe somebody else will go ahead, guys. Theo Goodman. Well, instead of being a massive critique of blockchain projects and telling you by default that all blockchain projects are scams because I'm unwilling to investigate the real value. I'm just going to call everything a scam. And most of the time, I'll be correct. That's also a really good way to be correct. A lot of times just to call everything a scam. But instead of that, we're going to go real productive today. And I'm going to suggest that these guys now give me the names of all these companies. Again, when we got polychain, what's another numera column project file column. I forgot about that. All right. So here we go. Okay. We got file coin, file coin. You need to come to these web addresses and invest. So you can what you need to do first. First, you need to go to www.wrapperpe wallet.com, get a wallet done. And then you can come over to the directory and check out all of the blockchain artwork that's being done. This is some next level stuff that's going on. And if you have not invested in this polychain, gollum, and all the other blockchain technology companies, then you are missing out. You are wrong. You are loser. And you're going to miss out. And you're going to look ridiculous later when this is you're missing this historical moment where you can invest in Wrapperpe tokens. Now these are going to be now the first series of Wrapperpe tokens are going to be historical things that are going to be in blockchain museums. Probably the first blockchain museum will contain Wrapperpe tokens. So if you call yourself a real blockchain investment company and you do not have Wrapperpe's, then you have failed. I think it's also important to say who's behind the stock? Obviously, Wrapperpe's behind Wrapperpe's. You can trust it. But with these other things, so openly and so happily, it's like a stock. And like Tom is always saying, a stock is vetted. A stock is justified. A company who submits all their proposals. There's all this paper. Or you could just trust CEO Peppy. Let's have care of you. Go ahead Tom. Well, one more comment on that. It's not just that, right? It's the proposition of all of these ICOs that you need their stock in order to use their product. And I think this proposition is insane. And I keep repeating this, people that watch me all the time. It's like Netflix. When they came out, they said, we're going to have a Netflix stock. You have to go out and buy Netflix stock and then use this stock as gas to purchase our videos or eBay forcing people to use eBay stock in order to buy things through eBay. This is the proposition of these companies. It's completely insane. And I think it's stupid because you need a common currency. It's a common currency that will make a product valuable. If Netflix came out and Netflix decided to use, I don't know, the Nigerian currency to run Netflix. Would I help with use it? Same company. But now you have to go and buy like whatever currency they're using to use Netflix. And no, you want to do this in the most common currency. That's the point. It's especially even to take that to its extreme and to say, let's say that I bought Netflix early. Well, now in the years later, I'm watching Netflix for cheaper than everyone else. So I'm an early adopter of Netflix. That's why I imagine. So if you bought Netflix late, you're going to be punished. Does that make any economic sense rather than Netflix just selling the plan at 20 bucks a month, no matter who you are, making tons of money that way? Or having this early adopter, late adopter thing where Ethereum, if you bought gas early, you can run a billion contracts. You're the contract runner. Everyone in your town is going to come to you to run contracts. Rather, if you bought it late, now it's hard for you to run contracts. It's hard for you to use the system. Does that make any sense? They just add a very extreme level here. Gabriel, divine. You're thousands. We're going to go. We'll go back. I was going to say it doesn't make sense. Well, if the gas costs are adjusting downward, like for example, a Bitcoin earlier adopters would send each other a thousand or 50,000 Bitcoin for their pizzas and stuff. And then over time, we start to use just a couple of millions of a Bitcoin. So if that, if the price can adjust downward, that's not necessarily an issue. And I'm not of the opinion by any means that the ICO paradigm is completely flawed and can never work. Of course, it definitely opens the door to scams and it doesn't make sense to compare it to the current paradigm at all. But I think that tone might be, he's on the phone now, so he's not going to hear what I'm saying, but tone might be underestimating the possibility for new types of paradigms to function in a distributed economy where new types of projects and new types of funbie paradigms and financial fiscal paradigms can arise. In a distributed autonomous organization situation, it's conceivable that we could have instant liquidity with something like a decentralized shapeshift. And like Andrea Sintonopolis says, thousands of different tokens. Now, I would imagine that these proof of work and proof of resource types of money would be the standbys in such an economy that are universally liquid. The thing is that any free-floating digital token will also be universally liquid. It just might be more volatile and not be used as much as a money or a currency, it might be considered more of a game token or a platform token. But to say that that whole concept is impossible or invalid or ridiculous, I think is definitely conceptual overreach. And I think it'll be really interesting to see how the ICO paradigm evolves over the next eight to 16 years, which brings us to the term, you know, cryptocurrency that is a reference in this article. And I think there's a really good point to that. You know, certainly right now Bitcoin has the volatility of a mid-range stock. It's less volatile than Twitter, but not by much. It's certainly a lot more volatile than most national currencies. And for Americans, for example, who are used to using possibly the most stable currency in the world, Bitcoin doesn't measure up. And no, it's not currency. This currency is named after it being current. In other words, government's issue script on a temporary basis to function in the economy so that they can draw off wealth from everybody that uses that currency. That's why it's called currency. And in that sense, I do believe, I agree with that point in the article that Bitcoin and other crypto assets, the term cryptocurrency is really kind of fallacious and not a great choice. I've actually been using the term crypto money lately because money has a history of, you know, something hard, something strong, like gold and silver are monies. I would say the US dollar is a currency and not really a money. And these paper fiat currencies should actually, you know, not as much be considered money over the long term, whereas Bitcoin, I think, as a commodity that needs work to be mined, to be created like gold is more of a crypto money. But that's more, maybe, semantics. I'd like to just bring back the popular and ever-so-valid, in my opinion, ever-so-accurate analogy to the intranet, right? So that's something that is often brought forward. And once again, Andrius was the one who brought that comparison to my attention a few years ago, where this idea of the distributed ledger tech or blockchain tech is comparable to the internet discussions of the mid-90s. And I was just thinking about it while Theo and Ton were talking, from around 92, which was four years after the advent of the World Wide Web, to around 97, not really much later, there were a lot of companies like Cisco and it's a big giant companies that don't exist anymore, you know, packet switching companies. What they used to call, I mean, I guess the term still exists, but tell, I can't even remember what it's called, telecom, telecom industry, right? We don't even barely say that anymore because it's like so invisible and everything on top of it is so much more important. And so many of those players died and it's like kind of a established system now. The telecom guys were saying, well, this internet and this web thing is cool and it's cute and your grandma, you know, can set up her web page with a purple background in flashing HTML, but really, you know, intranets, now that's the future. You know, IBM can pay us $6 million to set them up an internet and all the different parts of their giant company can participate in these big hierarchy triangles, pyramids can make their companies more efficient by allowing the modules to communicate with each other. And that lasted about five years. I remember these. Part of the internet problems is they didn't think that TCP could handle large files or video streaming, but I agree gave currencies the thing that flows and maybe a term they might want to go with is crypto property, especially for these new stocks. Yeah, crypto money, crypto property, crypto assets. Money kind of occurs. Hey guys, I have a prediction or a problem. After you're going, did we hit all the topics? Was there a fourth topic that I missed? Now that was it. Topic three was it. So just anything to say goodbye. All right. Now that's it. I don't have a prediction. I mean, Bitcoin has been that best of prediction from earlier today. No real story of the week. The story has been Bitcoin. All right, guys, I'll let you finish up. Sorry. I got to run and see you all next week. Bye, Bitcoin and all the good night tone. Let's just move on to predictions. Hey, I wasn't done. All right. You can talk some words. What's for the last point? One last point. So if we look at the five year window of 92 to 97, that's comparable to 2013 to 2018, which is lines up exactly 88 to 92 is the nascent years of the web, 2009 to 2013, nascent years of Bitcoin. That means that we may see these jokers talking about distributed ledger realizing that it's useless crap doesn't take advantage of the network properties and network effects of Bitcoin. They're going to they're going to finally lose interest in about 18 months. That's my prediction. And let's update Cisco's still around. Let's go with maybe sun micro systems or SDR somebody like that or cool or Oracle still around to. Sure. But the strange thing about companies like Cisco and Oracle is that you and I never use them, but behind the scenes they're huge. But yeah, I think Sun's a good example. HPs, server division, all these IBM main frames, they're all very questionable right now. They thought they'd be there forever. But let's go on to a prediction or a story of the week. Theo Goodman, are you ready with a prediction or a story of the week? My prediction of the week is that Detroit covers the point spread Detroit plus eight points. That's going to be a good game against the Seahawks. Now, I don't know if they win, but I think covering eight points. That's a good one. And if I was going to bet an underdog in the wild card games, then I would bet on Detroit plus eight points. That's that's pretty good. I don't know why the Steelers minus 10. Yeah, I guess that is a mismatch against the dolphins, but uh, and that's a lot of points, but maybe they cover it. I don't know Sue. I really like Sue as the defensive guy, but uh, I don't know about that. And then moving on, you got the Packers and the Giants, that's probably going to be the main wild card game. It's the most interesting. I think that's going to go over the total of I think it's at 46 or 44 right now, that's going to go over the total. And I believe we have one more game. Let me think right now, who else has played in the wild cards? We got Seattle against the Chiefs Cowboys. I don't know. There are the Sanana. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm missing one. I'm missing one. I'm missing one. I'm going to say. I mean, I know, no, no, no, excuse me, uh, Texas against the Oakland Raiders. Now, that is the bad news bears games. The two teams with quarterback problems and a lot of issues all over the place. Now, I've been back and forth on this one, but actually Savage is not going to start as QB for Houston. And I actually liked him coming in for us, swiler, but he's in cushion protocol because nowadays, you know, you can't touch the quarterback and everyone is all touchy feely in NFL, but I guess that's for the better health of everybody. In any case, I'm going to and the total I've been back and forth on this total is currently at 37 pretty low total. They think they're just going to hit the running game, but I will go out and limb and say this is going to go over 37, even though most people are probably going to bet the under and just think these quarterbacks can't get it done. So I'm going to say over the total of 37. And those are my predictions for the week. There's a lot of football there. I'm going to say go 49ers, Gabriel, T. Vaughan, your prediction or story of the week. Story of the week is, what's something I've been doing a lot and I mentioned on the show, a cliff highs, all to report web bots and their incredible accuracy in predicting Bitcoin Christmings, just stunning this linguistic analysis pulling out the words from all over the internet, calling it with the assumption that everybody's like a little bit psychic or that there's predictive capacity there, just stunning. I know that he's been really accurate for over a year now, but I didn't really start studying it as you guys know until a little bit more recently. And he called 88, 88, you want and $888 as a strange attractor for the price. He also called that the price would shoot up above 100, excuse me, 1000, then go back and dither around 88. Here we are today at exactly 88, just stunningly accurate, amazing. His next levels force these quote unquote strange attractors are once again 1088, which maybe is the next place started in between 88, 88, you want and $888. And then the next one that he mentioned was, I believe 1448. You might have mentioned something else too, but the numbers after that are super, super high. He's got long term data suggesting $13,000 and 88,808, you want, which he just under 13,000 at today's rate. So keep an eye on those web bots reports go to halffasthewin.com to check out them, they're 15 bucks. Pretty soon I wouldn't be surprised if the price rises. Interesting stuff, Gabe, people can check that out. And I didn't really have a story of the week, but I was watching the chat and I was reminded that we should warn everyone about scams. I got an email that claimed to be from blockchain.info this week. The email was actually an image. If you click on the image, it takes you to the scam. I didn't click on the image. I took a picture. I put it on Twitter. I told people about it. If you see a scam, if you see a bad link, don't click on it. If you keep your coins in an online site like Coinbase or Web Wallet, you should get 2FA. Even 2FA might not be enough. They might hack your cell phone. You should call your cell phone company and try to put a pin on there so they can't change your phone number. The new thing to do is you call the cell phone company, say you lost your phone or whatever, social engineer them, get them to change the phone number over to you. Then when you do all the 2FA resets and everything, you get all the passwords. Everyone needs to watch out. These systems aren't as safe. The safest you can be is putting 2FA on your Gmail using something like Gmail or a site that offers 2FA protection using Google Authenticator instead of Authy. Even though Authy is so easy and so great to use. These are your choices for security versus convenience. We should all try to be more secure. I think that's going to wrap it up for this show. Until next time, we're out of time, oops, bye-bye.