The Bitcoin Group, the American Original. For only the last 10 seconds, the sharpest Satoshi's, the best Bitcoin's, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Blake Anderson, cryptographic economist. Hello, the Internet. Thanks for having us online. Theo Goodman from Hats online. Good evening, everyone. Gabriel D. Vaan from Future Rent. Hello, Internet. Hello, posterity. Ton Vays from Liberty Life Trail. Hello, everyone. Coming to you on location again, this time from downtown Philadelphia. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network, moving on to issue one. Issue one, Bitcoin Scaling Meeting Plant for May. A group of Bitcoin industry leaders, developers and minors are planning an invite only meeting to discuss Bitcoin Scaling. The group includes representatives from Bitcoin.com, Bitfury, Bitgo, Bitmain, Bitpay, Blockchain, Blockstream, Block, Coinbase, DCG, Gavin Anderson, and Jeff Garzick. Will they succeed in creating a solution to Bitcoin Scaling? Or will it be too late? Blake Anderson. They're totally going to come up with a solution. It's going to be great. They're going to scale. I mean, the solution for how to scale Bitcoin is an eventual block size, increase after Segwit or some kind of combination thereof. But there's multiple ways to scale Bitcoin, all of which need to be done so that the value proposition of Bitcoin becomes as large as possible of obviously the order of operations and which is done is extremely of material importance. You don't want to, you know, gift the order of operations and do something to weaken the system. So I think that everybody getting together and working in the same scaling kind of an effort will be good. The minors do have some incentives which might be a little bit wonky, which might be a source of, you know, hardness to overcome with these specific talks. But I don't think that it is an insurmountable thing to overcome because I think if the entire network scales well, that the percentage is assigned to various different people in terms of fees and things like that, we'll go up high enough that it should be a non-issue. Hopefully people can be long-sighted and they can see the value of a green long term instead of getting into fights about the ephemeral breakup of things. And I think that people can have that as their scope that we will be able to move forward. I hope that we don't have too many people pushing for appeals to moderation. I hope that both sides come with very, very tenable arguments that are vetted as such by their side and that we don't have a whole lot of fallacy going back and forth because sophistry being used in technical arguments has a tendency to piss people off a whole lot really fast. So let's keep that in mind and not do that. We'd just like to thank all of our live viewers if everyone could give us a thumbs up and a share and help new people find out about this show. Theo, good. I think it's a good thing, of course, but actually I don't think it's a good, I don't really think, I don't have any confidence in the technical aspect of the scaling meeting at all. I think it's just good that they meet because a lot of times the best way to get to know someone is just to fight them in person verbally fighting. I mean, I don't mean that they should just, you know, ho down there at the scaling conference. After you meet someone and you guys have your little debate or whatever, then after that, usually you can understand each other more. At least that's just my opinion. And I think that just the people meeting in person that are much better than talking on Twitter or Reddit or whatever and that in itself is the main utility of the whole scaling conference as far as I see it. Excellent points, Theo. And I'm excited that they're meeting, but I'm worried about the timing of this. May seems a little too far away. The scaling fever seemed like it was a much hotter pitch than that. I would like to hear about the meeting much sooner. Not sure about the invite only private attitude of this. Gabriel, divine your thoughts. So can we go over the attendance again? You mentioned some corporate attendees, BitPay, Coinbase, you got some mining concerns in there. You got a couple of developers that kind of left the project over a year ago. It didn't really seem like the technical side was represented. You have to have a bit or a block in your company title if you want to attend, as my take on the name list. But like, it could be wrong, just observations. Yeah, I'm going to have to express something a little bit more skeptical than Theo here. This is not really a coming together, in my opinion, since it's a very lopsided crew. So it's mostly the corporate and business interests. So as such, I think you're going to have a total lack of anything concrete result from it. But nevertheless, I also agree with Theo that maybe these people coming together, who some of whom do, of course, have interests that are pitted against one another, like for example, some of these corporate entities. And the miners might have directly opposing viewpoints or business models or desires in the ecosystem, which could be interesting. But I think in general, it's kind of marketing. And I'm not feeling particularly optimistic about anything concrete really coming out of it. What tends to work I've noticed in a decentralized system of open-source software development is the proposal method, where cypherpunks write code, programmers write code, software is about code. So a bunch of jackass executives and business people and former developers coming together to wink each other off. I'm not really feeling particularly optimistic about any results that can come from that. What I get optimistic about is actual proposals, concrete commits, actual code, whatever side it is. You look at, I'm excited to see Bitcoin on the limited's software actually coming out into the wild and getting attacked. At least they're doing that. Tweeting or talking like we are on the internet, that's really a very, very soft stuff. I mean, it's great for us. We get to experience our, we get to express our opinions, but it's not really the stuff that matters, the concrete stuff. So, I think this stuff is not going to result in commits to the core code base. I think this stuff is not going to result. These stuff in meetings is not going to result in innovations that solve the differences of opinion. That's really what it's going to take. Actual innovations of actual code that create solutions like segregated witness. It created a solution to the transaction malleability bug. There's nobody out there that says actually transaction malleability rules. No, everybody agrees that it's a bug and this was a solution that was put forward that people are like, geez, that's pretty awesome and it has side benefits. So, I think we're going to see some interesting innovations to solve these problems that will have nothing to do with these types of meetings. Excellent points, Gabe. And I'd like to discuss this more in our scaling topic later, but there is a question if scaling is really a technical problem or a political problem. So, depending on where you slide on that, you might like the meeting more and you might dislike it less. Tone Vaze, your thoughts. You're still muted, but you got the screen share working. Still muted. There you go. Okay. So, I am going to focus only on the meeting. I will talk about my views on scaling at a later topic. So, I saw this article yesterday. I was actually like, not yesterday, sorry, two days ago, or it was yesterday. I don't remember anymore. I saw it right after it came out. I read it through really quickly and then I looked at the list and I immediately tweeted this out with the tweets saying, I can't believe Adam Bach would agree to this one of the stupidest meetings I've ever seen based on the invite list. And I was immediately corrected in that tweet saying, Adam Bach declined this meeting. So, this is one of those rare times where I had to delete a tweet because I was wrong. I didn't read the article carefully enough to realize that Adam Bach turned it down. But that was my initial impression. My initial impression was, why in the world would Adam Bach go to this? This is just beyond dumb. And then I made this graphics saying which of the people invited actually belongs at that table. And it's a bit fury. Should have a seat at that table. A bit main should have a seat at that table. Yes, they should have a seat at that table. And then I suggested to them another group of people that should be there. First of all, not at the CEOs, even from the companies that were invited, not at their CEOs should be there. It should be their CTOs. They're the people that actually understand how programming works, not the CEO. The CTO is his job to actually be there. So, some of the other people that need to be at that meeting are the core developers. But because the core developers are actually busy working and not doing PR, this meeting needs to take place either in New York where there is an office that's involved in Bitcoin core development or in San Francisco where there's an office involved in core development. So, you go to them because they're too busy actually doing work and not talking and debating. I would love to see Uno Coin because Uno Coin is doing what Coinbase does only in the right market and they're not a spy machine for the US government. I also would like to see some other exchanges there. Basically, the exchanges that already made a ruling that Bitcoin unlimited as an old coin like Bitfinex and BTC and BitStamp. Also, wallets. Where are the wallets? I understand that blockchains are there. Blockchains is the worst wallet. I used that wallet until it cost me a Bitcoin. I was lucky to get that Bitcoin back only because the person was nice enough and I was able to find that person afterwards. But that wasn't my fault. That was a blockchain that didn't have wallets fault. Plus, there are original backups that they emailed to you. Thank God, I didn't have many coins there at the time. So, I think blockchain didn't put a terrible wallet. If you're going to have some wallets there, have some wallets that are way more responsible. And what about the hardware wallets? They should be involved too. Bitcoin operators and companies that are actually providing stuff for Bitcoin users like Alphabet and Nitrogen Sports and Paxful and Exotic at TV and how about some of the users from Exotic? How about the royal Tiffany at the meeting or something like that? It's insane. I looked at this list that I'm like, well, who are they working for? I know Roger Veeer considers that it says that I'm not a Bitcoin user, but I actually am a Bitcoin user. And I never used any of the companies on this list. So, no, they are not the leaders that I respect in the space. I respect the leaders that have actually been taking chances and providing the usage of Bitcoin to people that actually need Bitcoin, not people that want to buy their Starbucks coffee with Bitcoin. So, that's my view on the meeting. I think it's just, it's dumb. And this is actually probably one of the reasons why the price is falling because it's scheduled for May and the meeting is scheduled for May. People think that nothing is going to get done and we're going to have status quo. And you know, what? I'm okay with status quo. If they don't want to segue with, if they don't want to actually scale Bitcoin and lower transaction fees and do things the right way without splitting into two coins, then status quo is what we get. And I'm okay with that. It's fine. Now, Tony, how would you compare this meeting with the scaling Bitcoin meeting? So, these are the same people or different? No, completely different. These people would be sitting there. They wouldn't get a chance to speak at the scaling meeting. You have to be technical. You have to understand code. You have to be a programmer. You have to contribute something to the code. None of these people would ever speak there. I mean, maybe a bit fury. I'm sure we'll get a chance to speak there. All the miners got a chance to speak on a panel. But no, I mean, Brian Armstrong would have nothing to say. Garsak speaks there. But again, Garsak speaking for Gaben, what the hell is that? That's ridiculous, right? I mean, look, we have a decentralized group of developers that are working on the best scaling solution. They compromised with Segwit because from what I learned from Peter Todd on your show the other day, Segwit was not going to have anything to do with the block size increase. And then it probably would have passed. They compromised to add a block size increase in Segwit. And now we're having all these problems. The debate isn't over technology. The debate is over politics and over who's going to be president of Bitcoin. The debate is also over, I like these miners. They don't want to scale. They like the high fees. So like, people need to have to figure out what the hell we're actually debating. And no, none of these people belong there. These are technical solutions. And we are going to talk more about scaling later. But my interpretation of this is if it is a political problem, having the CEOs together could get us a political solution. If it's a technical problem, this meeting will do nothing. Moving on to the exit question. Exit question, side note, does this mean that there will not be a fork of Bitcoin until May? Now that both sides have agreed to meet? Yes or no? Blake Anderson. I think that the risk of this fork is over inflated from the beginning. So I don't think that no, there's a risk of a fork and it has nothing to do. But Blake, get your mic closer. We can't hear you at all. Yeah, you're my gigantic headphones. You can't hear me? No, it sounded like it's the mic going to be gone. The mic's gone. The mic's not on. Yep, the mic. Close to the face of something. Yeah, it's squeaking. Yeah, check this settings. Let's go to Theo. Theo, will there be a fork until May? No fork until May. Gabriel, divine. I think no fork at all in the short term with this year, even probably next year, maybe in two years we can revisit the subject. I don't think there's going to be a fork. It's just posturing. Tone vase. I also don't think there's going to be a fork. My chances of one of these Bitcoin unlimited forking is like plus than 30% or at maximum 30%. I hope it doesn't fork because I'm starting my process of moving my coins over to more secure locations, running my own Bitcoin core node. So hopefully I'm ready for the fork with my full understanding of what happens with my coins because right now I'm not. So if the fork happens, I'm kind of like a new. If the fork happens right now, like people are sending me text messages, hey, Tone, what happens to my Bitcoin or Bitcoin fork? So I'm like, have absolutely no idea. I haven't had time to figure that out yet. I didn't actually expect it to ever happen. So if it doesn't happen in the next few weeks, at least I'll be ready with the best information I have on. Also getting a lot of questions about that. And the basic thing is if you hold your own keys, you get coins on both sides of the fork, but more about that later. Moving on to issue two, issue two bats files complaint against the SEC. The bats BZX exchange filed a formal complaint this week against the SEC for their rejection of the Winklevi ETF. The Winklevi have been waiting more than four years to gain approval for their ETF. And the SEC's answer that Bitcoin is unregulated has been true this entire time. Will the SEC reconsider and approve the Bitcoin ETF? Theo Goodman. I think it's pretty much doomed at this point. And I don't see even if they launched the complaint and all that. I don't see it getting changed or return anytime soon. Gabriel D. Vine. Yeah, I'll go with Theo on this. They seem to make their opinion very clear, despite it being relatively arbitrary. As bats pointed out, they have absolutely no. Oh, they have no, what do I want to say? I can't hear you Thomas. What do you say? Oh, they don't have any need to listen to anybody about anything because they are regulators. They don't need to answer to anybody is what I'm trying to say. So in that sense, no, that's not like they're going to get somebody different to make the decision for them now. Tones. Now, I also don't think this is going to amount to anything. The SEC made the right decision. I've been talking about that being the right decision for forever. And I don't see what there is to reconsider, like especially right now, like this is when the bats decide to file this. If anything, you wait till the segment is resolved and Bitcoin stabilizes and then you can go to the SEC and say, see, these guys are responsible. They know what they're doing. They will stable the entire time. This is the day they chose to go to to inform the SEC of how, you know, Bitcoin is worthy of, you know, being traded on the traditional financial markets. It's ridiculous. A very embarrassingly bad timing for bats. Blake Anderson. Now we can't hear you at all. So much for that. One more chance, Blake. Anything? Sound? I'd say I've seen my equalizer on my screen. Now it works. There we go. Technology. Yeah, I mean, the complaint is coming really fast after they had several problems that I don't think were fixed. I mean, the SEC basically told them, you know, the conflict of interest on these measurement areas, among other things, are not really, you know, we can't allow that. We don't really control the regulation. It's a self-regulating system. And I don't think that those problems have been resolved. So to throw it back to the SEC debt to ask again so fast, I think maybe it's a little bit of a knee jerk reaction. I mean, I think that they really wanted to try to get a reverse opinion they should have tried to at least make some changes for it. So. And we're in agreement. This is going nowhere. Bats is complaining just because they like to hear the sound of their own voice. Moving on to exit question. As the article notes, the SEC is currently unable to even properly respond to this petition because the SEC only has two commissioners, three short of their usual complement of five. Is this kind of starving the government leading to never ending gridlock a good thing or a sign of pure incompetence? Theo Goodman. Okay, so what my choice is not really good in your binary insurmote here. Okay, I don't think it would make a difference if they had five, six, or seven as far as this decision to be honest. Very good focused on the issue. Gabriel D. Vine. Well, both obviously, as is always the case with government, it's both a complete joke and incompetent as well as gridlock and a good thing. Tone Vaze. I completely agree with the theo and Gabriel, I have nothing more to add. Blake Anderson. Both a question. Should they appoint enough commissioners to the SEC or is it responsible to be morons and not appoint commissioners? That's the thing. That's the thing that worries me about the whole scaling debate being political. When you have a giant political bloated thing and you got to drain the swamp and that's not really working that great anyway because they already have all the authority. I mean, it's a nightmare. So hopefully, more science less politics. Training the swamp will lead us with poison meat and child workers without hands. appoint the SEC commissioners. Do your job at the government moving on to issue three. Issue three scaling Bitcoin. Bad bitcoins weighed in on the scaling debate this week. Interviewing Roger Vera, Peter Todd, Jameson Lough, Rhett Cratton, Vennie Lingham, and tonight Jimmy Song about the contentious topic. Topic giving each participant a chance to lay out their case and discuss the topic in great detail. Additionally, we saw excellent articles from Song and Lingham this week discussing what would happen if Bitcoin would fork. Gabriel Devon, your thoughts on this ever expanding topic. Well, I think that you're doing a great job of bringing these people on the air so that people can judge their opinions on a similar format and really compare and contrast the different styles, the different approaches, the different opinions being expressed. So I think you're kind of the hero in this situation. I haven't listened to all of them. I can't really watch Roger. I never really had been able to ever since the first interview I saw with him back in 2013 where I was like, who's this guy? He doesn't strike me as very smart when he speaks. He might be. I don't know about it. I don't think his opinions are smart either, but he could be a smart guy who's just really compromised or something. But the Peter Todd interview is excellent, full, chock full of really useful information. And the Vinny Lingham was really interesting to hear. He has highly, in my opinion, extremely specific viewpoint. A lot of people, you know, they call him the Bitcoin Gandhi because he wants to bring people together. I don't really agree with that. I actually have a lot of disagreements with his opinions, but at least they're informed. He's a corporate guy. He's an entrepreneur and he has his specific business model that depends on a Bitcoin functioning in a certain way. And he really wants to make sure that things smooth over. Whereas I'm more of a sensationalist and I think, and I'm more of an anti-fragileist. In other words, I think that controversy, political, shitstorms and conflict, and as well as technical challenges are very healthy for Bitcoin. And if Bitcoin couldn't fend off these type of challenges, then I wouldn't be interested in it. So I like the idea of bringing them on now. And I've been involved in the space about four years. And at that point, there had just been an accidental hard fork. And Satoshi, for example, in 2010, was like, whoa, it's only been 15 months. We're not ready to take on WikiLeaks and stuff. It actually turned out okay. But I think things have matured enough to handle these type of pedaling attacks like from essentialized mining infrastructure. So it's been really amazing to see the work that you've done putting these people on the air. I wouldn't necessarily agree that all of them deserve a platform. But that doesn't really matter. The point is that they have people's ears. And so you're kind of responding to that by saying, hey, here's what's going on. Apparently, I'm on the other screen. I'm on two screen. So yeah, as far as the scaling debate itself, are we commenting on that yet? Sure, this is it whenever you got, but other yeah, I mean, sort of what I just said, you know, it's time for Bitcoin to experience these type of attacks. This is obviously, in my opinion, a coordinated strategy to affect the Bitcoin ecosystem in a way that gives more power to certain parties. There could be even more motivations behind it. For example, those who wish Bitcoin to collapse or wish that you know, who have a lot of money in certain altcoins and would prefer that a different cryptocurrency take the mantle of the sort of gold standard of crypto money from Bitcoin, nation states banking, central banking, who accurately and rightly see Bitcoin as a threat to their business model, to their profit model, to their power, hungry approach. So, you know, Bitcoin is highly disruptive. Bitcoin is a major threat to entrenched interests. And there's a lot of them arrayed against Bitcoin. So naturally, they're going to go after those elements of the Bitcoin ecosystem who have the stand to gain or at least who they can convince have something to gain by joining this centralized effort, the Bitcoin unlimited scheme. Unfortunately, for all of those parties, the other side of Bitcoin, and I don't see a triangle as you've been portraying in your interviews, Thomas. I really see a centralized approach and a decentralized approach. I see two teams here, and I've tweeted that out. That one team is the original, sort of cypherpunk ethos of Bitcoin, of cypherpunk anarchists, computer scientists that are interested in logic, reason, code. They're primarily in Western countries and they primarily have this sort of libertarian and classical liberal philosophical approach reaching back to the enlightenment here. The existentialists versus the rest. Right. So the other side would be, sort of this bit main, which is based in China and George Quik Raza or whatever, based in Georgia, they're in communist or excommunist or halfway or sort of weakening communist infrastructures. They have no background in the freedom-oriented philosophy of the West. It's primarily an Eastern thing. They have a hierarchical and all-agarchical mindset. So they take a very different approach. They're like, hey, we're the ones spending, we have these big companies, and we're the ones spending the money, and we are the important ones, so we want that power. It's really fun to see the decentralized, as if you might want to call them, respond to that with like, hey, you know, actually you don't, because we're the ones who provide, who do the hotling, and we provide the value and the ecosystem and we'll just sell the other side of the fork, if you fork. So it's kind of, and anyways, if you really piss us off, we'll just choose to change the algorithm. And it was really very telling the proof of work algorithm, of course. And it's really telling to see, it was actually quite a shock to me, because I kind of assumed that these sort of power-hungry, hard-nosed businessmen of the Bitcoin mining concerns of the East at least had some lieutenants to inform them of some of the basic outlines of the philosophy of Bitcoin and its many followers, and holders, and especially the early adopters are still holding thousands upon thousands, hundreds of thousands of coins, millions even. And it was really telling to see kick vods as, you know, what do you want to call it, whiny panic attack, public panic attack, threatening legal action. And it's just, it's very, it's hilarious to anarchists who are hiding behind a veil of genuine anonymity with Bitcoin, which is possible if you take the proper precautions. It's sort of just entertaining and like, wow, and it's a real wake-up call to anybody who thought that those people really did have power to see the sheer panic and desperation that would necessarily be behind that type of empty, completely ridiculously empty threat of threatening legal action against a bunch of people in other countries that, with whom you have no legal contract in those jurisdictions. You're so going to get sued for this, dude, you're going to get sued now, he's going to see you for this too. Right, yeah, like he's going to go after me. I have, I have, I have it up. If I'm not on you, I'll use you. Discussions, yeah, if you need it. Discussions and speculation of proof of work change are super irresponsible exclamation point. And even in the remote of .01 percent chance it may happen, those responsible, we will spare no resources, get best lawyers and prosecutors to go after you, whatever you will be in world. Bitcoin has become a multi million, the multi billion dollar industry with great financial investment society responsibility. We will protect this at all cost. And after, after, after I saw these tweets, I immediately replied to that second one because I didn't know who he was. I mean, I know other people at Bitfury, I've known him for a while, but I didn't know this guy. And I just tweeted at him asking him if he came to Bitcoin yesterday. Yeah, it's totally ridiculous. I mean, it's so, it's so extremely tone deaf. And it just made me realize, wow, these guys really don't have any idea about how this thing happened. And they just saw, wow, I'm in Georgia. And my power costs, you know, a quarter of a cent per kilowatt. And everybody else has cost three and a half. Well, geez, I have a huge leg up here. So boom, my friend has 10 million bucks. So let's just throw this into some hardware, get some nerds in to set it up, set up the boom. Now we're making money. Great. Let's do this forever. And then somebody comes along and says, hey, you could make double if you changed, if you changed up and you run this hardware and want to run this Bitcoin unlimited software, you get bigger blocks, means more money, right? Oh, these puny jerks want to, you know, want to change, don't want to change the software like we do. Well, I'll show them who's boss because what's worked for me in the past is talking to my friends in high places in the Republic of Georgia government. And they always get sent to jail. So that's what I'm going to do here. And it's a real splash of cold water to these clueless dorks that that's not how this world works. And you've been supporting a decentralized system this whole time. You helped it grow to an 18, or I guess maybe 15 billion dollar size now 16. And now you're going to have to recognize that you're not in control. So it's been a really fun experience to watch the, what's it called, immune system of the Bitcoin community, react as expected to the silly childish empty threats of the attackers and make the mistake. They are most definitely attackers. Yeah, there's tone bringing up the chart there of the price and the speculators of course are just kind of clueless about they don't know about either side. They don't know anything that's going to like oh my god, there's some problems. So let's sell. So it's just kind of short term stuff. Of course, you look at that 200 day moving average. It's not really budging a whole lot. But yeah, so I think this is great. I really welcome all the drama. I think it's excellent to bring more attention in the spotlight to Bitcoin, which is kind of a ugly stepchild of the financial world still. And I like all the drama. I like all the fighting. I love all the jokes. They're very funny. It's wonderful to see how incredibly empty and stupid the arguments of the Bitcoin unlimited side are. It's quite telling and not particularly a surprise to see the Bitcoin unlimited nodes getting the Bitcoin unlimited code base just really being full of such extreme weaknesses. It's really not a surprise at all guys. So yeah, it'll be fun. I don't think there's going to be a fork. Bitcoin is going to trundle on. No problem. Segwit have a feeling will actually get approved, whether it's through a user activated software. Or even if the miners actually just kind of give up and sort of realize that they've been outflanked and that if they want to keep making money, hand over fist, they better be happy with their place because the miners work for everybody else. Nobody else works for miners. Nobody works for miners. We just pay them what they want for their fees and everything's cool. And then if they try to attack, everything goes against them. It's not going to work. They have no chance here. And all the douchebags and all the the booromeres out there like like Vene Gupta who's like, you're facing doom. It's just, you know, give me a break guys. You know, all you're yelling and you're sniveling. And I love, I love Beauty On's term for it. A Bellboy Jacketed. Yeah, all the Bellboy Jacketed little twerps out there. You can't touch this thing. We got it. We got it. I mean, maybe there is some way to destroy Bitcoin in the future or whatever, but this isn't going to work. What you guys got going here, you guys got to, you guys better wake up a lot earlier if you want to pull something off on the Bitcoin core developers here. Excellent points, Gabe. And I think it's, it's worth noting that let's move on to tone. I forgot what I was going to say. Go ahead, Tony. All right, I'm just a couple of quick comments. I can't speak for the mentality of the Chinese, but I can't speak for the mentality of like Russians coming out of former USSR. How can you do that? Well, take your best guess. And I do have to say that it is pro like anti government. Like for example, you will never meet a Russian that immigrated like that escaped Russia or in the late 90s, like my family has and many others. They will never vote for a Democrat president in America as American citizens. It'll never happen. To them, a Democrat is a communist. And the last thing they want to see is any society in communism. So I think that one is going a little. I have to slightly disagree with that with Gabriel. And it makes sense for, what's his name again, George? Yeah, for George, it makes sense for a bit of George to get very, very upset at the changes that approve of work algorithm. Because a bit of fury has been supporting core development from the beginning. They have never mind an empty block. They've been on the side of the Bitcoin core team. They've actually been mining the right way. And they would take it as a threat to their business model because they have been supporting Bitcoin the right way. They see as a threat to their amazing business that they have built. Because if bit fury didn't exist, then Bitcoin would be completely centralized by one chip maker, which is BitMain. And clearly, BitMain is not on the side of core development. They are completely selfish in this regard. So I don't have time to get into it, but please read my article is a Bitcoin hard fork still available on my website, Liberty Life Trail. I barely have any time to write these articles, but I talk about all the possibilities. I do the China connection. Potential is the Chinese government involved. What are they thinking? I honestly think that they don't want to scale. They don't want to take these transactions off chain. And this is where the problem comes in because Roger should be supporting segregated witness. If he wants fast, cheap transactions, that is segret. Bitcoin unlimited would centralize power in the hands of BitMain and Antpool. It does nothing for scaling. And it takes Bitcoin development back a year and a half because it's built on a one to two year old code base. I mean, I don't understand if like is Roger being like the pawn of Gihon Wu in that. I mean, obviously the Chinese miners, they don't want bigger blocks period, but they'll take a bigger block if they know it's not going to do anything in regards to scaling. But it sets development back two years because that gives them the high fees and Bitcoin doesn't go off chain. Bitcoin transactions don't go off chain. I'm not sure what else I can add that hasn't been said yet. Oh, the notes. That's what I wanted to talk about. Hold on a second. I want to talk about the notes. So everyone is scared of China. So if you look at the note count, China is responsible for three and a third percent of the notes. And the moment I tweeted this out, everyone starts saying, well, you don't know that it's hard to measure in China. We don't know what's going on. Well, if it's hard to measure in China, why do I hell are we trusting them with the future of Bitcoin? If we can't even tell how many notes there are in that country, it's just like completely ridiculous. But here is who's actually in control. These are the notes. So this is every person that thinks about Bitcoin needs to create a full node. They need to run it in their house. I'm in the process of doing it now. Waiting. I already ordered an old laptop from Amazon. That's going to arrive that has the enough hard drive space and just enough memory for me to run the Satoshi 0.14 full node that is segred compatible. I'm going to be bouncing all of my Bitcoin transactions off of that node. I may store my Bitcoin on that node. I don't know. But I am going to move away from the SPV wallets and I'm going to trust my own node. That node will only support segred and I will go down with the ship of segred. Now, if you look at what we're worried about, look at Bitcoin unlimited 1.0.12. It's less than 5% of the network. Now, there is also a 1.0.1.1. That's also a Bitcoin unlimited compatible node, which is even older. That probably accounts for an additional 3-4%. Don't forget astroturfing here, Tom. We don't actually know if these numbers are accurate. There's a lot of signals. This was proved when the first time Bitcoin unlimited was attacked, only half of the quote-unquote Bitcoin nodes went offline, which actually meant that only 50% of the Bitcoin unlimited signals were actually running Bitcoin unlimited. That's a good point. But here's what I can say. I get a lot of people watching me and I hate everything I say. I have a lot of Bitcoin unlimited supporters watching me. But I think most of them are paid chills because I have now gotten dozens of messages of people telling me they're setting up their full nodes. They've set up a full node. They're asking me for help on how to set up their full node in order to support segred. I haven't seen a single message from a person that said they even stalled a Bitcoin unlimited node in their house to support Bitcoin unlimited and put their software on it and move their bitcoins only to that software. I haven't heard a single person put their Bitcoin in the hands of the Bitcoin unlimited coin base. They're all just talking. This is a complete political war. It's a fight for who's going to be president of Bitcoin because under core supervision of the code, there will never be a president of Bitcoin. I'm going to be president of Bitcoin because I'm going to spin up a whole bunch of virtual nodes and have them all aim towards my presidency and then I'm going to win. If you are going to set up a Bitcoin of full node one last thing Thomas, this part is this important. There are plenty of good guides online on how to set up your node and make it part of the system. Excellent points, Tony. Just to go back to what I was going to say earlier on to Gabe's points, if you take a look at this chart of the Bitcoin triangle and I know it's a very simple chart. One of the things to look at here is that none of these groups control Bitcoin. You may be the greatest Bitcoin miner, the greatest Bitcoin coder or the biggest user, but you don't control Bitcoin. You need a unique combination of all three of these groups to make the network work. You've got a good point there. That's a totally different thing that I was talking about, sort of core versus unlimited or whatever. What you're talking about is the power balance between and the system. That's a different thing. You're right. Speaking of the power balance, anyone have that tweet? I think somebody tweeted out, like Luke Dash Jr. or somebody put together this big chart of who controls Bitcoin and showing you the users and the miners and everything in one big chart. Is this ringing a bell for anyone? I'm not aware of it, but we can take a look. Just to go back to you guys were saying you were just saying a miner who is the best miner in his industry and he's a huge person in every other business discussion. But when it comes to Bitcoin, he doesn't control it. No one group controls. I also disagree with the notion that the price needs to fall to get segured in. I've talked about this on other podcasts. I don't agree with it. I think it's a terrible idea because the lower the price, the less, like basically the miners that are going to go out of business first are the furthest away from the chip makers. As the price of Bitcoin drops, you're centralizing mining down to two companies. That's terrible. Blake Anderson, your thoughts on scaling Bitcoin? On scaling Bitcoin, well, after Mike Herne-Rage quit a long time ago, I put down my mental roadmap for how I thought Bitcoin should scale. I went on the David Seaman Hour with Amanda B. Johnson and I laid it all down. That video has been deleted, which I guess is fine. That tends to happen sometimes with videos online, especially with certain people that are hosting those videos. But what I said, yeah, it should have been on the steam and blockchain, Amanda, without ever, it will never, ever be deleted. I never posted anything on steam. I never posted a single fucking word on that exchange and I caught a lot of flack for it. But I feel proud of myself as a result of that choice. But no, my role in Mepis XXA, we need to basically, the way that I see it is Bitcoin is like a train. The cars and it's got the railway. If we double the speed of the train cars, it's not going to go to as many locations. It'll still go to the main service locations, but the amount of locations that this train goes are going to be dialed back. The core people want to do is they want to make the train cars lighter so that they can go faster without having to make it so that there's not as many locations. I think that in terms of scaling, you want to do things that are not going to snip away at the core value proposition, SPB wallets and not verifying the entire chain being part of my arguments when that video is made. Art is still all of my arguments. I basically looked at, as objectively as I could, what is the best way with a risk management conscious path forward to do all this stuff? And that hasn't changed. So I feel like the recent price bullet pullback I think was due, at least in part to the ETF, no more response. I think that a whole bunch of people jumped onto that swing and then pushed it farther than it would with concerns about a fork. When I don't think that the concerns about the fork were as warranted as they would have been if the forkable question was more tenable if they hadn't pushed closed binaries, well as stuff hadn't happened. So I don't know. I feel kind of disappointed and cranky that I kind of took this position quite a while ago and my position is still the same but that people are still debating. I really can't blame anybody myself for that. I guess I need to go out and repeat myself more. I just don't like to repeat myself. But I think that being able to have the same roadmap for that long goes to show that this wasn't something that was developed over a long period of listening to different people and trying to decide who to side with. This was just looking at the objective computer science and what is the least risky for our baby and let's not let the king cut it in half because we're too prideful to choose a solution. So that's where I think that we should be on scaling. I think that we should keep everybody involved and not make people mad. But I mean I can also understand the one side wanting to a censored non-tenable argument. So I can understand the other side getting mad because they got censored and appeal to moderation isn't really really going to help. And that's what I think both sides are going to want to see. And we're in a tricky situation. I don't know if it was good or bad for Thomas to get all this stuff out there. I want to lean towards good. It's good talk about it. But at the same time, a lot of people are worried about we gave a lot more credence to rumors and suppositions that needed to be. So we'll see how history plays out. We'll see if it was good to get it talked about or if we gave too much attention to something that shouldn't have been given so much time a day. As always, the market has spoken loudly, but we're not sure what it said. Theo Goodman. Okay, well scaling Bitcoin. Okay, first of all, if you do something that threatens my company's business plan, then I'll just sue you. And I want to give a big shout out and hail to the new president of Bitcoin. I want to give a big shout out and hail to the new secretary of Bitcoin. I want to give a new hail and shout out to all the publicly known high up rank and file members of Bitcoin that we are now have basically. And also, I want to us to go back to the 1980s where we were there was a time when we were playing a game. And I'm going to ask you, you know, shall we play a game? Can play bridge? We can play malability test? We can play chess? We can play poker? We can play astro turf? We can play proof of work upgrade? We can play the Nile of service warfare? We can play air to ground, replay warfare? Or we can also play theater-wide tactical hard fork? Or we could even go to theater-wide biotoxic and chemical warfare? Or even to global thermal, thermal, nuclear warfare? Now, if anyone is unfamiliar where that comes from, in the story, there is this mega computer that does all these simulations and is supposed to train the best possible response. But what happens is someone presses the nuclear button and everyone ups their defcon and actually a lot of people shit their pants. And basically, in the film, the Satoshi of the whole simulation program has to come back from hiding and teach everybody that there is no winner when you choose a lot of these choices. So I think that, you know, war games, the movie, maybe it's a stretch, but you know, has some parallel to some of the things going on because some of the things that people are proposing are just off the list from the movie when he called up the war simulation room with his dial up telephone. And I think that a lot of them don't really help anyone in the end. It's just about, and that's why that's what I said about the whole scaling conference, whatever. Yeah, of course it's all marketing and it's all show, but that's when you play bridge, my ability test, chess, poker, astroturf, proof of work, upgrade, denial of service, warfare, background replay, warfare attack, theater wide tactical, hard fork, theater wide biotoxic, biotoxic, chemical warfare, and global thermonuclear war with someone in person, and you realize it's all bullshit, it's not going to work, and we're going to have to actually listen to each other and figure out a solution. We might actually have to compromise, and we might actually have to be humble for once. People fuck up, people make mistakes, you might actually have to be humble for once, and this goes for everybody. Nope. Nope. Can I just like, the actual scaling conference is all science. They do research and they present it. We're talking about just the social round table and this new one, that's the nonsense. Well, whatever, if you meet somebody in person and it's about meeting people, then you can fight in person. You got to find me in the party. Get it out, get it out of your system, go on and debate in person, there's your chance, great, then go on and meet. How, most of these people don't even need to wait till May, just buy a ticket, go meet the people, have your argument in person and then be done with it and then move on. It's probably a lot more productive than waiting to some May conference or whatever. Or come on the Google Hangout with Thomas, tell him, meet you when you run out of time and we'll do a timer for each person, get one minute and then it's cut off and you can yell down that person's throat. That's fine. Maybe that's what's needed. Excellent points, Theo. Of course, we all recall. The only way to win is not to play the game. Everyone needs to get back on the same page and this is similar to what I was discussing with Vinnie last night. We both came to the conclusion that what we need is united unified Bitcoin. We don't need to compromise, we need to unify. We need to put down our swords and come together for a higher purpose. We need to think about who the real enemy is, what the real purpose of Bitcoin is. It's not about getting people rich, it's not about being the best miner. We have much larger goals that I think we share together and together we will be stronger. As I said this morning, we are more like our fellow Bitcoiners than anyone else. Why separated the two weaker groups when we can be one strong group? Hey guys. So this is what I was talking about. I hope I'm not on mute. This is the Bitcoin balance of power poster. I actually need to fact check some of this. I have not had the time. Check it out. The miners are not in total control here. Don't be scared of the miners. People can't tell the miners what to do even if they are the only chip makers. If the solution is to change the proof of work algorithm to remove basics, that's what's going to happen for the actual users and nodes. They need to win at the end. What's the color scheme there? What's the color key? You have to look at that later. We're not going to go through the chart. But as we've said here, we could talk much, much more about the scaling issue, but we're short on time. So we're going to move on to the exit question. Exit question, Bitcoin, will hard fork? Yes or no? Gabriel, divine. No. Tone vase. I'm going to say no, but I can throw percentages out there real quick. I'm giving it a 30% chance that there will be a contentious hard fork. And like a 5% chance that this VTU coin is going to become the dominant chain. In which case, it's probably over anyway. So it doesn't matter. Even if hard fork is not going to succeed. Mr. Blick. From a technical perspective, there's no reason to be concerned about a hard fork. From a political perspective, I don't know. I hope that the technical perspective is strong enough that we don't even get into the second question. Theo Goodman. The question is not, if it will happen, it's a question about when I think you mean soon. And yeah, I tend to agree with the others. There will be no hard fork because we will come together to unify Bitcoin. Join us. I'm serious. Moving on to issue four, Bitcoin, Dis, Intermediation. A new article in Bitcoin has claims that an unintended consequence of the Chinese intervention into the Bitcoin market may spell doom for the leading Californian Bitcoin exchanges. The basic theory was that after the Chinese crackdown, the Bitcoin volume did not flow back into the regulated exchanges, instead flowing into local Bitcoins and the Black market. Tones does the growth of Black market and decentralized Bitcoin exchanges fell doom for the Californians. I found this to be a very weird article. It didn't make much sense to me. I don't understand why they're, where the connection. I don't understand the connection, right? So it makes perfect sense what happened in China. It's the same thing that happened in the US back in 2013, back when we had those early exchanges and Bit Instant and Trade Hill and people were using Bitcoin anonymously on exchanges and went that one away. Everything moved over to local Bitcoins. Coinbase came in and everyone started using Coinbase because they didn't read my 2014 articles and then they say, oh, shit, we have to pay taxes on this. The IRS is coming and now people are starting to get back into local Bitcoins. Same thing in China, so China is harder to use their exchanges now, so all the volume has moved over to local Bitcoins or I think they have another website, they're on local version of local Bitcoins, but the idea is the same. Look, that's how Bitcoin is meant to be used. Idealists, people are like, asking me, hey, Ton, I want to buy Bitcoin. I'm like, great, I'm having difficulty buying it. I'm like, yes, they're like, well, if it's so hard to buy it, how is it ever going to take off? And why is it worth so much? I'm like, well, if you need Bitcoin, you're going to figure out how to go and buy it. If you need Bitcoin anonymously, you'll figure out how to buy it. Look, if an S-court can do it, if a dark net market guy can do it, if a degenerate gambler can do it, no offense, deal. If we can figure it out, then it's not that difficult. And you know what? I respect that. I bought all of my Bitcoins in cash. I've sold all of my Bitcoins in cash. Not, well, I clearly haven't sold all of my Bitcoins, but I might have. I mean, you don't know if I'm lying to you or not over on the an heir. But the point is, that's what it is. It's a replacement for cash. It's not a replacement for your credit card. It's a replacement for cash that is computer compliant. Okay. And that's what I want to see. I'm happy about this. I don't see the connection straight to America. We have the same problem the Chinese do. The US exchanges are, you know, annually being probed by the US regulators, which is exactly what's happening in China now. And a lot of the volume was moving over to local Bitcoins. Now, local Bitcoins is a bit of a painstaking days and it's kind of dangerous. And they're still charging big premiums. And the premiums are probably going to only go up because guess what? An inimit is, has a value to it when you need an inimit. If it's good enough for prostitutes, it's good enough for me. Blake Anderson. I'm not concerned. I don't think that this is something that people should be worried about. I think price fluctuation is a million times more problematic than a, you know, a lack of competition or too much count. I mean, it's just nothing more to say. Theo Goodman. All traders are degenerate gamblers. The sooner they come, the terms of that the better traders that will be in their whole lifetime. The second thing is that these two exchanges, the Chinese exchanges and the California exchanges, of course, they have something in common and that is the letter C. But that's about it because the clientele, the third C in the equation, is completely different and it didn't change when the people's Republic Bank of China decided to do something. That didn't change the clientele of the Chinese exchanges. It didn't change the clientele of the California exchanges. If you're in the US and you want to invest in Bitcoin, you want to put that on your taxes. Everything is cool with that. Then the California exchanges are up your alley. If you want to do other stuff, then maybe other exchanges are up your alley. That's about it. They're China, California, clientele, three C's to the equation. Excellent. Theo, Ton, did you have a response for Theo? Just another really response. But when he said all traders that degenerate gamblers, I just wanted to expand on that because lately, I've gotten into a lot of these arguments on Twitter. I am not in Bitcoin to be a traitor. I am in Bitcoin because I believe in Bitcoin. I believe in a technology at Bitcoin. I believe the Bitcoin that I've pulled is going to be valuable. The reason why this Bitcoin is going to be valuable is not because of the traders. It's going to be valuable because Bitcoin itself is useful and valuable. When people tell me, Ton, you're an idiot, you need to sell and then the price will drop and then you get to buy it back after and then you have more Bitcoin. To me, I want these people to admit that they're only there to make more money. You don't care. That's okay. If you're an old coin trader, you don't care about the old coins. If you're a Bitcoin trader, you don't care about Bitcoin as a technology. You care about making more Bitcoin. Now, you will probably have a core position. You will have a position that's your belief in Bitcoin. Let's say for, let's say, 25 Bitcoins is what you're willing to risk on the technology, but you're a millionaire. So you will trade a thousand Bitcoins up and down to make more Bitcoin. But when a going gets difficult and you get scared, you will only hold on to the 25 Bitcoin, which is your belief in the future of Bitcoin. But the rest is your trading capital. If every Bitcoin you have is also your trading capital, then your priorities is to make more money. Your priority isn't the future of Bitcoin. My priority is the future of Bitcoin. I hold on to my Bitcoin. I value it too much. Also, in my case, I don't want to support the traditional systems that spy on you. So the only exchanges that I would use are anonymous exchanges, but then my coins are at risk. So I would never trade my Bitcoin. I only hold on to my Bitcoin. I trade things I don't really respect. That's why I trade options in the traditional financial market. Excellent points. Tony, I just want to remind everyone of Theo's great point from last week when Theo said that speculation is a perfectly acceptable use case for an altcoin for Bitcoin for anything. It's your speculating on it. It's a use case. Theo, do you have more to add? Sure. I agree with that. I just don't like the moral argument. Go ahead. Go ahead. I mean, it doesn't negate anything about what I said. It's just an additional thing. It just think that that's it. I mean, sure, like you said, if you trade, that's one thing. And if you are just holding it, well, that is a trade in itself. It's just a longer term trade, or it's an ideological buy. Or it's an anti-trade. You're constantly speaking to anti-trade. You're just holding it. Whatever, whatever you want to call it, that's not what I'm saying. All I'm saying is the label degenerate gambler is not necessarily bad thing. Humans. No, it's a human. Humans are. Humans are. Generally, degenerate gamblers, and we try to use our logic to figure it out, and it doesn't work. So as long as you can come to terms with that, then you're on the right track. When people say, oh no, I'm the ultra technical person. I only do this. They're on the wrong path when they are trying to deny that. You have to be able to deal with that psychological aspect of it. That's all I'm saying. Yeah, sure. And I will tell you that's it. I mean, you know, sure, you can say, oh, I don't want to trade Bitcoin. I just want to hold Bitcoin. That's fine. That's one thing. I only want to trade options. I only want to trade commodity whatever floats your boat, whatever you're good at, whatever you're good at, then you can trade whatever you want. It doesn't matter. You know, and sure, of course, if you're trading, you don't have to believe in it. I mean, you could trade marshmallows. Who cares? Right. You know, it doesn't matter. You know, right. Trading is not an investment. Trading is a job or a hobby, but it's not an investment. I just got to get in on those marshmallow futures. Gabriel. Devon. Pork Bellies for me. Thomas, can you, I was digging a ditch before the show today. I don't understand what this article is. I didn't get a chance to look at it. Can you give me a synopsis or some sort of idea? What is this article? I think there's some fear about the way that the Chinese government regulated the Chinese exchanges where they're kind of saying, hey, that's Chinese money in there. And then if you make that argument, you say, wait, I saw that Chinese money move into the Californian American exchanges by that same argument that Chinese government could come along and try to regulate them. And if they looked at their market and they said, well, if we don't play ball with them, something bad could happen. So it just seemed like that slowly China was kind of taking responsibility for Bitcoin and saying, if you're trading it, we regulate you. The Chinese government above Bitcoin. And that's what I think they got to close about. Good. Oh, yeah, that's really good. You know, I've been thinking about that quite a bit lately as was pointed out by, I can't always recall the author's names. They're very, they don't trip off the tongue, but the sovereign individual interesting work of nonfiction from 1997. They made a big deal about how the world, what they, you know, they talk about micro processing, which is the word you don't even hear anymore, because it's so ubiquitous. But they were talking about how jurisdictions would become less powerful. The returns on violence would go down. And, and, you know, people would have, would be leveraging and arbitraging the differences by using digital networking technologies and micro processing. And of course, you know, the internet was around at that time. They saw it come in. And and, and here we are, you know, with, with, you know, you want to watch Netflix, but you're on vacation in Zimbabwe. And, you know, the, you know, the intellectual property laws, which are completely coercive and we're invented in the 19th and the 20th century. You know, our jurisdictionally based, but you pay for your account on Netflix.com and.com doesn't mean it's American. It's just.com because it's a commercial site on the internet. So it's this kind of a, you know, conflict that we've been experiencing between the jurisdictional geographic atoms approach to human society and the digital bits based approach of networking in the internet, where it's all one big thing. And, you know, when they were creating their domain name extensions, a big contingent of the early worldwide web technologists were heavily, you know, they were dead set against having extensions that had anything to do with countries or, or anything geographic because they knew that it really had nothing at all to do with that. So, you know, we're just, this is just one of the many ways in which this is playing out, but the stakes are quickly rising as we now have a native currency, a native money that has its own value, a sound money commodity that is based in a non-urusictional digital space. And this is just one of the many ways we're seeing that conflict play out. So you think it's like the separation between church and state, but infinitely more meaningful? That's an interesting analogy. I hadn't really thought of that, but I guess yeah, church is sort of not, it was non-urusictional, so maybe. And I would agree with you gave the geographical domain names or nothing more than a starting point for censorship if you own the country. I would also say that looking at this from the Chinese government's perspective and playing a little devil's advocate here, what else is the government going to do? This is really their only step is to take a position above Bitcoin and to say that suddenly they have a ownership of Bitcoin and if you're using Bitcoin anywhere you have to follow the Chinese government's rules. That's the only way I see that they're going to regulate it, and even then I don't think it's going to work. I think they're going to fail, but what else are they going to do? Let's move on to the exit question, which is kind of light, which Bitcoin exchange do you prefer? Toned ways. Non-actually, I don't care for any Bitcoin exchange, local Bitcoins. Or just meet some people. If you're going to use local Bitcoins, do it during the day, do it, I recommend doing these transactions in a bank lobby, probably the safest place to do your local Bitcoin transactions, and just be safe, and that's my exchange of choice. Do it in a bank lobby and deposit the money after Blake Anderson. Yeah, I mean, I have to agree with Tonalot. I don't have any problem with a coin base. All of my stuff is above the table and all my taxes are paid and stuff like that. So if I want to buy Bitcoin, I go to Coinbase, and that's easy for me. Charles Lee, if I ever have had any kind of a problem, has always been like, this is what's going on. This is what you can expect. This is what it's just, I think that if he ever leaves there, I don't really, really have a hard time, but for right now, Coinbase is really, really great because Charlie provides such great support there. You can trust in Litecoin, the O Goodman. I just want to take this moment to deviate and promote the counterparty, Decentral Explained Exchange, DEX, the counterparty, Exchange, DEX. You can reach it by counterparty.io, and no central party has your private key. I think we're going to be seeing a lot more decentralized exchanges in the future. Gabriel, DeVon. Speaking of decentralized exchanges, BitSquare is a fantastic app that you run on your computer, you host your own node, and you only have to give up your private information to the person that you're doing the Fiat Exchange part of the equation with using BitSquare. It is an open source project decentralized. There's not really any support and stuff in there are bugs, but a really great product, amazing. I believe they're going to be changing their name to Bisk, which is completely awful, in my opinion, but whatever. They're getting sued by Square, but it's like, really who are you going to sue? Anyways, BitSquare is awesome, and I wanted to give a shout out to OpenDime as well, which is the hardware wallet that doesn't have a private key. You could spend it off of there, but you can also just give it to somebody, and you can use a little scanner to see how much is on there. It's really cool OpenDime. It's like a cash Bitcoin hardware wallet. That's funny you mentioned Square. I think I have the prior art on that. Tone Vaze. I want to do a screen share because I usually do price. That's hilarious, man. Square now has the rights on the shape Square and the word Square. That's insane. It's the most fundamental thing that we have a name for ever. Because they're both in the financial space, but hello, BitSquare is not a company. So it's like, you know, they're really going to sue an open source developer in Germany, I don't know. That seems to be the latest craze these days, suing the unsurable, as we saw from the show. I also like to give an honorable mention to ShapeShift, ShapeShift Exchange, where you can exchange your altcoins for Bitcoin or whatever you want. We're going to move on to Tone for Story of the Week or Prediction. I'm going to go prediction. I'm going to talk about the price. So in my last video on Wednesday, I talked about this would be a reasonable trade from a risk reward perspective, those that my followers if they're on tier. Because of, you know, we had a higher low and our momentum indicators were doing well. So this was a nice risk reward trade. And the price went up about $50. And you were looking to gain a lot more, but then the stop loss was $40 lower. So those that did not take the profit right here after $50. And you probably wouldn't have. I wouldn't have. The stop loss did get hit. And the price is now going down. So now if I glance at the daily chart, I have always been saying that I don't really want to zoom in. Don't tell me we dropped out of the channel. Don't tell me we dropped out of the channel. Yeah, we're dropping out of the channel, man. If tomorrow we don't get back into the channel, I might be turning a little bearish here. So this is a little scary. And I've always said like 915 was support because 915 was the bottom of the channel. It was the bottom of the channel, you know, two weeks ago, it was a lot closer to the bottom of the channel one week ago. But now we're already out of the channel. 915 is like right there. Some exchanges probably went lower than that. And right now, I mean, we did fall out of the channel for one day before. So you can give it a little bit of a window. But if we fall out of this channel, guys, I might have to go bearish here. So there are some signs of weakness now. And let's see how it goes. Maybe we'll bounce right off this 200 day, move an average. And I get back into the channel, but also see it on hourly chart right here. This I will, you know, we had this hourly channel going for a for a while. We fell out of it, went back in to hit the top several times. And now we're out of it. And now it's not looking as clean. So yeah, now there are some things to worry about. Like I said, I am not holding Bitcoin. I will, I'll let it go to zero. I'm not, I'm in it for the technology. But independent of opinions and emotions, the price, I mean, a lot of the the opinions are driving the price momentum. And while I was bullish, to bounce off not as much right now. And also, if we hit this area, we're not hitting this 950 area for the third time. The market isn't accommodating to you. You don't get three perfect chances to buy something. So now that we're down here for the third time, there is a high likelihood that we are going to break it and we are going to go lower. So I'm not hitting the panic button yet. Is that like the drowning safety thing? Like if you go under the water for the third time, like you're probably not going to be probably not coming back pretty much. Something like that. Yeah. Very, very technical. Right. I mean, you don't look, you don't get three chances to sell at the top before the crash. You usually just get one. You don't get two chances to buy at the low. You usually just get one. So that's the way bubbles pop and that's the way our lows are broken to the downside. So it's very possible we are going to fall out of this channel. Sounds like we're going to need some life preservers. We're going overboard. Blake Anderson, a prediction or a story of the week. My story of the week is that I got the flu and the flu this year is oh my god. If you're starting to get the flu at all, it starts like as like lower back pain and moves up into like head pain and you get near infection and a sore throat. It's just terrible. So like honestly, if you start to get the flu, do not go visit old people or babies and shit. Like really? You don't want to be that person. Because I was so sick and wiped out this week, I don't really have a time to contribute. So I'm just going to cut it short and say if you get this AIDS flu, you know, be smart about it. Take that medicine. Get better. Theo Goodman, a story of the week or a prediction. 8, 8, 8. As we've seen with the scaling debate, if you repeat something enough, not only is it believable, but it becomes true and profitable. 8, 8. Lewis Carroll said that if you say anything three times, it must be true. And then of course, there's the story of Carthagode, Dylenda Est, which you can Google. I'm not going to tell you now. Gabriel Devon. I have a story of the week. The story is of the most coordinated attack to Bitcoin failing. Empty threats of a hard fork falling on their face. And Hopi-Hopium Huffers, Assant, and Vinny Lingham shouting to the void that people with 180 degree different opinions and different approaches and completely opposite ends of the spectrum should magically come together. That's my story. I don't think it's going to happen. And I think that the conflict is good. And you guys shouldn't bother wasting your time calling for unity. Vinny is just desperate because his business depends on less drama. And you're just desperate because the conflict makes you uncomfortable. No, I just don't want Bitcoin to fail. I can't imagine a world where all these people who agree with me on almost everything are running on a different chain for some reason. It makes no sense. But we'll talk more about Bitcoin unity and Bitcoin unification tonight on scaling Bitcoin with mad Bitcoin. It's 730 pm. PDT. I learned which time zone I'm in. My story of the week is thank you so much for everyone for donating and watching the show giving us a thumbs up and a comment and a share. I was able to get a good deal on local Bitcoin. So I went ahead and picked myself up the ultimate distraction machine. So goodbye to my free time because I bought Zelda. So yeah, I'm going to be playing Zelda. And in a typical fashion, I'm going to play 30 minutes a day. I'm going to try to stream it on Twitch. I'm going to try to make some cool edited videos like PewDiePie, my 54 million subscriber hero. And I'm going to try to enjoy the game, which so far my basic impressions after 30 minutes is it's grand theft auto with Zelda. I can run in any direction and I can climb almost anything. First thing I did was climb the church to the top and I promptly fell off and died. So so much for perfect. But I'm very excited to play this video game. I'm excited to talk scaling Bitcoin and unifying Bitcoin with you guys. I want to thank everyone for watching. We had a new record here. We had 360 live viewers. You're still with us now. I don't know why you're still with us now, but you are. Thank you. Thank you for watching and commenting. I'm sure the chat scrolling by. I'm going to scroll back up and try to read what it saves for me. And if you didn't get a chance to comment in the chat, don't worry. We have a comment section. And it's going to be full of great comments and people discussing scaling, getting your opinion out there. And like I've been saying on my shows, let's try to unify Bitcoin. Let's try to understand the other side and bring them together because I can't imagine a world where we have two chains of people that agree on everything except for the block size. Bankers don't agree with us. Corporate people don't agree with us. Bitcoiners agree with us and we need to be on the same side. We need to face the challenges of the futures together. And we need to remember why we got into Bitcoin in the first place. But more on that later, because we're out of time. Until next time. Bye. Bye.