The Bitcoin Group, the American original. For over the last 10 seconds, the sharpest Satoshi's, the best bitcoins, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Blake Anderson, cryptographic economist. Hi everybody, thanks for having me on today's episode. Theo Goodman from HAS online. Good evening everyone. Ian D. Martino from the Bitcoin guidebook. So far people. Jimmy Song Bitcoin developer. Good to see everybody. Oh, for gracious. Ciao. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the world of crypto network. Reminding you to give us a thumbs up and a share. Moving on to issue one. Issue one Bitcoin 1600, Ethereum 100. The price of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and almost every other cryptocurrency continued to soar this week as a perfect storm of good news hit the cryptocurrency market. Starting with the SEC who is considering an appeal of the Winkle by ETF, followed by the continuation of good news and buying pressure from Japan, who has discovered Bitcoin in a big way after their government's recent regulation paved the way for perhaps mainstream adoption. Blake Anderson, is this the parabolic rise? The mother of all upswings. Can the Bitcoin bull be stopped? I love it. The Bitcoin bull, the bull is good. Well, Bitcoin is great because it has a monetary policy which decreases in speed. Ethereum's cool too, but Ethereum does not have a blocked reward taper off like Bitcoin does. So Ethereum is being produced at one rate and Bitcoin is being produced at another. All the cryptocurrencies going off are good, but Bitcoin has that really cool kind of deflationary model of distribution, but not just a distribution because that's negative connotation. It's kind of based on the rate at which people found gold when they came to the new world at first. It was really fast and it tapered off. You had to blow up mountains and all kinds of crazy stuff. So what's cool about Bitcoin is that when things happen on a macro scale, it tends to go into deflationary spirals. It engenders the things that are required for a deflationary spiral to start to sit in. So we see these different times for deflationary spirals happen. This, I think, was kicked off by good events in the crypto universe and then a series of bad events in the legacy economy. I'm not going to go into the list of bad events that happened in the legacy economy right now, but in my story of the week, I'll go through some of those factors, which not only is Bitcoin doing well here, but it's getting spin influenced by the legacy economy. Not doing so well. So I think that we have the factors like the block having and stuff that are going to engender these kinds of movements. I think that a lot of the dialogue that we saw was a correction in the ETF hype. And I think that now that we have less people that are trying to go with a different implementation that people are associating XT and all the previous versions now with unlimited. I think that we have less social resistance and that just allows the natural scientific objective nature of Bitcoin to go up and value, which is pretty cool. Bad for the legacy economy, good for Bitcoin. Theo Goodman. Now this is just Bitcoin things. This is pretty much, this is not the parabolic bull rally of all time suggested by our host, Thomas Hunt. This is Bitcoin business as usual, where you have hype cycles, pumps and dumps, Judas candles and people losing and trading. This is not the mother of all rallies by any means and part of it is due to the Taiwanese banks, the on and off frames of many exchanges are clogged up as in part caused part of the rise of the Bitcoin price in general. So I would not say this is the mother of all rises. This is just Bitcoin things. Speaking of Bitcoin things, Theo, what did you think today of the $100 price swing? I saw that it hit maybe 1650 drop back down to 1550, seems to be recovering. Do you think it was a major signal or anything like that? I think that in any of the big rallies in the past of Bitcoin, you saw candles like that. So from a candle technical perspective, if you look back in 2013 and look at how some of the, just find some of those massive red candles, you'll see really similar moves if you look at it in a viewpoint, of course, not exactly $100 perhaps, but just in logarithmic terms and other terms then you'll see really similar actions like that. So it's just typical for the Bitcoin market. Yeah, Blake is right. It definitely does have to do with a lot of things, inflationary things going on in the world, uncertainty. Of course, that all plays into it somewhat, but I think a lot of it is just that this issue with the on and off ramps to a lot of the exchanges is not just BitFinex. It's many exchanges also with China that's not solved. And when that's resolved, then the market will, readjust itself to whatever price it thinks is the right price. Ian, D Martino, the price of Bitcoin keeps rising. Will it keep rising? Well, not really too technical with the price and stuff. I just go back to history to every other major rise in Bitcoin. There's always been a big jump. Now, I don't know if this counts as one of the next big ones like the jump over $1, the jump over $30, jump over $200, jump over $13, and all that stuff. But each of those were followed by a big drop. So if, but this is only like $200, $400. So I don't know if this really counts as one of those big ones, but I would expect to see the same thing we always see, which is another going down in this steady growth back up, hopefully, sometimes not. But I think both blakes right about everything. This is what we've been expecting for a while, a depletionary nature of Bitcoin, the price should generally just continue to go up. The other thing is harder to get Bitcoin, and that is not a good thing, but that does cause the price to go up. The last big rise over 1,000 in December coincided with circle not to take a Bitcoin a lot of exchanges, a drop in, or a lot of Chinese exchanges holding on to withdraw. So I think Bitcoin needs to be more accessible to people, and that will probably cause the price to go down, but that would be better for the overall market long term, because Bitcoin is for everybody. And once everybody's into it, then that depletionary nature is going to be a lot more powerful than it is when it's just a mixture of depletionary and difficult to get, which is what I think we're seeing right now. I kind of hope I'm wrong on that, but let's wait and see, as always. So we're not there yet. We're going to need some more people. Jimmy, song, your thoughts on the Bitcoin price rise. Well, the standard economic answer is that there's a lot of demand. Every exchange is very slow to accept new users. By the way, I still haven't been approved by Gemini. I've been trying to get on there for over a month now. The WincoVos ETF, I don't think, has that much to do with it? That's not going to get solved if you read the SEC decision from before. The reasoning was very sound. It was, we can't regulate this thing, so we're not going to let it on our platform. And I don't think that's going to change in any case. I think the big demand is coming from Japan and Korea. If you watch like CoinMarketCapper, anything, the biggest exchanges where you're getting a lot of volume are in Korea and Japan. And that's a good thing because culturally, those are two places that value saving quite a bit. And if they're saving into Bitcoin, instead of their own currency or the US dollar or something, that means that it's starting to pay a cold as a store of value there, which is great. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot more demand than supply. That's a very good thing. I mean, I believe that this is sort of like the long term effects of the having. This should have happened probably a year ago, but for whatever reason, it got delayed until now. And the fact that we're not generating as many coins as before is a good thing because that means that there's less supply, more demand, everything's been great. So that's my take on. Let's move on to the exit question. Force prediction, the price of Bitcoin this time, next week, Blake Anderson. I don't know if it's going to be higher or lower. You got to have long horizons. But let's just say a little bit higher. Theo Goodman, going to give us that 888111. So four ones. Four ones, ladies and gentlemen, Ian D. Martino. Still muted, keeping them in suspense. I want to say exactly what it's at right now, 1560 and 10 cents. 1560 and 10. It's like the price is right rules here. Jimmy's on. Well, so this is something that I've been watching kind of closely. The number of followers I have on Twitter has been tracking the Bitcoin price for about the last three months. So given that, and I am right around 1510 or so, I'm expecting it to be whatever my follower account is, which now that I've said that is probably going to be around 1600 by this time next week. Everybody go follow Jimmy. And I'm of course going to lead the pack. Let's go 1657. There we go. Moving on to the next issue. Issue two coin base adds Litecoin support. Litecoin, sometimes called the silver to Bitcoin's gold, has also seen dramatic price swings after it adopted segregated witness. The controversial Bitcoin scaling solution before Bitcoin. Adding Litecoin to the exchange has been discussed for years. But now they've finally done it. Does this thing more about the changes in Litecoin or the changes in coin base? Theo Goodman. I think it has more shows more the changes in coin base than Litecoin adapting segway or something like that. And I think they're going to continue down that road. I think you can just kind of look at what Kraken is doing. They've got a bunch of tokens, several alt coin pairs. They even have different currencies. Of course, GDACs and coin base is separate. So it's kind of a different thing. So with Coinbase having Litecoin, then I guess you could say your average person that is just getting into things could have the ability to buy Litecoin. And actually, it is really funny. So there is a video that I saw of a new crypto enthusiast. And they made a video. They go, oh, I made a new account. And I signed up at Coinbase. I thought I needed to buy one whole Bitcoin, but it was so expensive. So I bought one Ethereum instead. And wow, the price is really going up. So you could have some people that decide one whole thing of something. Because that is a certain psychological thing that humans have. When you have one whole, and of course, one whole Litecoin is a lot cheaper than one whole Ethereum or one whole Bitcoin. So hey, they might sell some Litecoins over it. And yeah, I think that they're just going to continue to expand. We might even see Coinbase have all kinds of tokens from ICOs whatever other startup kind of stuff they're going to get into. I think that's definitely the direction that they're going. Hopefully they can get enough money that they can buy a whole nation. Theo, is it possible that people will switch from using Bitcoin to onboard into the altcoins or the ICOs? Will they start using Litecoin for this purpose? I don't think they're going to use Litecoin for that purpose. I don't see a reason to do it. Litecoin sometimes could be an advantage to move from crypto exchange one to crypto exchange two as far as fees and speed are concerned, versus Bitcoin or Ethereum. But that just all depends on the current situation and what you want to do and the fees and all that kind of stuff. So I have heard of people using it for that just to move from A to B instead of Bitcoin. If the mempool is congested or they don't like the fees that they've decided it's better to use Litecoin. I haven't heard of many people using Ethereum for that, but I think that it has been done. But most people out here are actually using Litecoin for that just to move from A to B and then go back into Bitcoin or another altcoin. So that could be one purpose. But like I said, I think Coinbase, not GDAQs, Coinbase appeals more to your average user, new users, people that buy and hold time spans. It's not the Blake, what's that word you like to use a lot? People that think in super short term. Ephemeral. It's not for ephemeral people. Ephemeral or ephemeral, there's debate on that. So I don't want to. People with long investment horizons, I think it's one of your other ones. I would agree with that. But it is possible to use Litecoin for that, but it would be more volatile, which sometimes could help you and sometimes could hurt you. And that's just adding more complexity to your trading behavior. We have 196 live viewers. Thanks to everybody, giving us the thumbs up and spreading the word. Ian D. Martino, your thoughts about Litecoin being added to Coinbase? Yeah, well, Litecoin joy has been really great at marketing. And that's really, let's gotten them to where they are. Marketing and the efficient development structure and some legitimacy which are really leaving the creator of it. I haven't finally come to Coinbase after years of speculation of that. I think it's use has always been as a good hedge. And hedge against the block size debate on all these other Bitcoin dramas. You could hedge with Ethereum, but Ethereum's going on after a whole different thing. I always feel like if Bitcoin collapsed and just went away because of all these issues, Ethereum would continue going on with this enterprise stuff and maybe more crypto-anacrifices people. People are more interested in things that the banks aren't as much interested in, but more navigate towards Litecoin. So I think it's good to see that. That's good for people to get an easy hedge while still falling the same cryptographic principles that Bitcoin has. I think it will help Litecoin and everything like that. But I don't think Coinbase is going to get into all these different coins. Just don't see that as their game, man. There's too many scam coins and they're too legitimate. They're too connected with the financial institutions. They had their own pay-coin thing and be a shit show with the regulators. So I think they're going to be very cautious about it. Maybe they'll add another currency. But I think if they're going to add more than one more currency, there's going to be another currency taking away first. Jimmy, your thoughts on Coinbase and Litecoin? Yeah, I mean, I don't think it says anything about Coinbase or Litecoin. It just says more about user demand, right? Coinbase first and foremost is a business. They need to make money. And this is a good revenue driver getting a lot of people to trade. And I think the first day they had some ridiculous volume on Litecoin that was on their exchange. And you got to remember, like in the exchange world, Poloniax is just killing it right now. They have higher volumes than anybody else on almost everything. And that's largely because they have a lot of variety and they have a lot of different coins that people can go and trade and buy. And that's a good thing, right? Like other companies are seeing that and saying, hey, you know what? I want some of those profits. I want some of what they got. So that's what they're doing is they're they added Litecoin. It is kind of funny though how long it took. It kind of reminds me of how Mount Gox took like forever. And they said, hey, we're going to add Litecoin. We're going to add Litecoin and then they want to add Litecoin. So at least it's not, it didn't take that long. But yeah, I, who knows? Yeah, I, user has seemed to like Litecoin for whatever reason. Much of it seems kind of speculative to me. I mean, like, the scaling problem right now, they have for, I mean, they have the same one megabyte block, but it comes four times as fast. So they have four times the capacity at any, any 10 minute period. So I'm not really sure why they need segway. I mean, I guess it's useful for Lightning network and cross-chain atomic swaps and things of that nature. But I mean, yeah, it's, I don't, I don't think there's enough demand to test it for the scaling part. But I mean, it is nice to prove that the technology. It's a good test bed. And I think a lot of people are sort of rewarding them for that and sort of using it as a hedge against. If Bitcoin doesn't get that sort of scaling solution, then maybe Litecoin has a lot more capacity. So there's like a bus four times bigger down the road that we can use if our car gets too full. That sort of thing. So that's my thought, aren't it? Maybe they needed the scaling solution. So they'd have the scaling problem. They just weren't there yet. And it was funny to see Litecoin take so long to be added to Coinbase, especially since Charlie Lee works there. To see Ethereum added before it must have been particularly painful. Blake Anderson, your thoughts. I mean, absolutely. I was just about to say the same thing with Charles Lee and Litecoin and stuff. People are like, you got to find some kind of an alt that still has developers and interests or whatever. Well, having one of the lead engineers, or I think he's the lead engineer at Coinbase, able to comment about the community and having him around has been extremely valuable. And like everybody was saying, is there a dire need for this to be adopted on seg what they don't have the problem yet? But if they have more tight consensus, which it looks like they did, and they were able to get it through, I think that does nothing but draw positive attention to them. And that's good for their market price overall. Litecoin was talked about originally as being like, I talked with Adam Koch, I should about this in person a long, long, long time ago. And he was very, very confident that Bitcoin was going to be my space. And that Litecoin was going to be Facebook. And then we got into this kind of muddy debate about the difference between Shaw hashing algorithms and script hashing algorithms and how about how memory intensive operations doesn't necessarily mean that you're not going to be able to make an application specific integrated circuit to be able to go ahead and tackle that. Eventually, I did end up happening with Litecoin to some extent, whereas somebody made a memory, heavy, super computer, and then a lot of the hashing power was centralized. And I think one room for a Litecoin. It's not a killer criticism. And I definitely, I mean, there's some mining centralization issues with lots of different currencies. But I think that even with any of those problems that Litecoin had, they were very, very transparent and focal about it. At least Charlie himself was. And there was kind of something in charge to look to through to cut through a lot of the stuff that maybe Bitcoin PR is like, who do we ask? Who's the expert? So I think that a lot of mad respect to Charlie for helping to guide so many people towards using his coin as a test network. And I think that I'm really, really shocked that they accepted it after Ethereum. I have to kind of go against EMD Martino and say that I think that the risk of systemic failure in Litecoin is way, way less than the risk of systemic failure in Ethereum. Not that I'm really worried about either, but I think that it's good to have two different currencies that you can use on Coinbase or wherever to be able to jump from one to the other without having to go back to the dollar. So I think this is positive for Coinbase. Do I think they're going to continue to add more altcoins? I hope that if they do, they do it very, very, very slowly and sparingly with a high degree of criticism. I don't know if that'll come or not, but I have a feeling that it will. I think that if Charles Lee has a lot of input there that he's probably not going to want a whole bunch of lucky seven coin and shit being traded on Coinbase. So those are my two cents. I don't think I mentioned anything about the viability of either the two coins. I was just saying one's more favored by the financially lead and corporate structures that turn me off, but I wasn't speaking to either way of which ones going to survive itself. It's just which one do I want to use, you know, bank coin or something more cryptographically, I guess, sound? And it is worth noting, as we said before, that Litecoin has the unique position of having a creator. Charles Lee is a public person. Satoshi Nakamoto is a private mystery. So it is a big difference. And one that many people might find attractive. Let's move on to the exit question, which altcoin or token will be added to Coinbase next? Will Coinbase continue their conservative strategy? Or are they another cryptocurrency in the making? Theo Goodman. That's a good question. Wow, I do not know which one. I'd say I'm going to go for some kind. Yeah, rare Pepe. Yeah, Pepe Cash. I'm going to go for Pepe Cash. You're going to come kill you if you don't start stepping it up, man. Yeah, well, I've been disciplined for saying Pepe Cash too much. So I'm going to go for Pepe Cash. And that is technically speaking, goes together with my other concept that I said it's going to be a token of some kind is going to be on the site. Because that is what's hot right now, just like Zoolander. It's so hot. ICOs and tokens. Yes, Coinbase will add something. Yes, they are slow to add. That is true. They are conservative in that sense, but the market wants choice. They will add something. Spoiler alert, the Dow token would be a bad choice. Ian D Martino. Like I said, I don't think them adding something is on the horizon. I think if we look maybe three, four years down the line, if I have to pick something, I'm going to say maybe they'll make their own coin, Coinbase coin. Excellent pick. I was definitely thinking that's a possibility. Jimmy saw them. Well, they've had a lot of experts come into their headquarters and talk about their coin and so on. I'm going to pick sort of a dark horse. I'm going to, and that's not a pun. But Monero, I think they'll integrate that at some point. Charlie Lee has more influence, maybe Decred, but I think it'll be more Monero. A privacy focused altcoin on Coinbase. There goes their banking relationship. Yeah, because of that. Yeah, I mean, Blake Anderson, your thoughts. They're going to go ahead and implement Lucky Seven Coin and it's going to be fantastic. Zoolander was mentioned earlier. So I think that adding Lucky Seven Coin to Coinbase will go as well for them as a free gasoline fight accident. That would be wallet emptying fantastic. Unfortunately, no one on the group is correct. The answer is auger. The answer is auger. We're looking for auger. And yes, Coinbase will continue to chase, crypts, and pollinets, but they'll always be one spot behind letting pollinets take the early risky money while Coinbase shows up for the late small money. That's not how you do it. Moving on to issue three Bitcoin dominance index. The Bitcoin dominance index or the inverse of the combined altcoin market capitalization chart has been falling rapidly since March of 2017, seemingly in a downtrend since the creation of altcoins is Bitcoin losing its dominance a bad thing in DeMartino. In general, I don't think competition is ever a bad thing. You mentioned there's less altcoins being created now than before. I think that's good because we have way too many altcoins being created two years ago. But when you look at some of the coins that are taking this place like Ethereum, there's reason to be concerned because I didn't get into Bitcoin to jump on bank coin. Combitition is a good thing. You see that with the block size debate, just one little problem can cause a lot of issues in the crypto world where it seems like everything just grinds to a halt when two sides can't agree what seems to me to be a pretty simple issue. When we have other development communities that are a little small, a little focused, see like coin at SegWit, shows them how easy it is to add it. Bitcoin has been around for a long time now, maybe a year or so, probably two or three years. It's nice to see some competition. It's nice to see some smaller development communities that are maybe a little bit more efficient than our overgrown bloated one. But I am a little bit worried about the kind of coins that happen to be taken in place at this moment. Jimmy, song, your thoughts on Bitcoin dominance? Well, all coins always have a heyday when the price is going up. I don't know if you guys remember the last pump, but like when used to be like $40, people forget that. Like if you bought it, the coin on Mt. Gox, my district, the whole bill 40. Yeah, I mean, you still would be losing money if you bought it at the peak, whereas if you bought Bitcoin at any time in the history, you're making money right now. And they all tend to crash much harder whenever there's a crash off a peak on Bitcoin as well. So that's what I fully expect. I mean, I don't know the future, but that's not my expertise, but that seems to be the pattern. I don't think Bitcoin's losing dominance as much as there's a lot of curiosity about all. And I have issues with that particular chart of Bitcoin dominance because it's based on market cap. And a lot of the market cap for something like the GNOS is token is that it's only like 5% of it is liquid. So there's a huge inflation there. Same thing for Ripple, same thing for a lot of these coins. Where they have tiny liquidity, have a huge market cap. And just because I saw one of a million shares, but only 10 are liquid. That doesn't really make sense to me. And I think ZCash was the start of this all coin bubble when they first came out. And that dominance index has been gained to a large degree. And I don't think it's quite as Bitcoin is still very dominant. It just doesn't seem that way because of these inflated market cap. That's my opinion on it. Blake Anderson, your thoughts. Bitcoin dominance. Bitcoin is basically like it has a very similar relationship with other crypto currencies as the US dollar does with international trade. If you want to trade internationally, you go to the reserve currency, which is the dollar when you interact from there. So Bitcoin being able to be that for most of the cryptocurrency, for most of the alt coins, basically means that it's an on or an off ramp. So what will happen kind of loosely is that like the big oak tree that is Bitcoin has all these offshoot roots of all these different alt. Then they'll start to swell. And then when people want to cash out any value earnings that they've made, they usually go back through Bitcoin. And either they'll just move back to Bitcoin and take earnings or they go back to Bitcoin and then they'll cash out fiat and they'll go on from there. But a lot of people end up cashing out from these alt coins going back to Bitcoin and then maybe being a little bit conservative with what they begin fast, it's not usually all going back and out. So it's almost like Bitcoin is like this oak tree, which is sucking up a lot of these value systems. I drink your milkshake style. Now that when that specific advantage will change is when there's more of these other alt coins, which are directly tradable for value and things like that. But for right now, Bitcoin has a very strong position like that. Also because of the deflationary nature of Bitcoin and all these other things being kind of derivative-esque of that chain makes it so that the rest of the panel is correct. If Bitcoin has a big spike down or whatever, expect to see the quot derivatives or the alt coins of that same system with that same on-ramp to be heavily affected. So Bitcoin's dominance as a percentage, I mean, this is a new area. There's going to be continually more different coins that do different things. And that's going to eat up the dominance as it's listed right now. But I don't think that we are close to moving over to some new kind of reserve cryptocurrency. I don't see those moves coming any time soon. If the US dollar had 100% dominance of the US dollar market, would that be a good thing for the US dollar? Blake. Ask me one more time. If the US dollar had 100% dominance of the US dollar market, would that be a good thing? Would it be a... I mean, no dominance in monopoly or not a good thing. Am I understanding your green forex market then? It wouldn't be the US dollar market. I just... If there was only one currency, it was only the US dollar. You couldn't trade with any of the other currencies. I think it would be a less of a market, right? Or the Bitcoin... As Bitcoin's growing, these other currencies are growing, they're trading back and forth. What they're creating in market is what I would say from that question. Differences and individuality, even if they're smaller, generalistic, are what causes the rubber to meet the road in free markets. Navigating these differences and having choices is extremely important. Monopolizing almost anything is almost always a bad idea. So Theo Goodman, as this panel of Bitcoin maxiless continue, are we all rooting for 100% Bitcoin dominance? Is this an okay statistic to lose? Of course, it's clear that because of the high transaction fees and inability of the core development team to do any kind of innovation whatsoever, all of the trading volume is flowing into altcoins. Just look at the dominance chart. It's clear as day to see. The market has spoken and things need to change immediately. Never mind. As a reminder, Max Kaiser set a Litecoin price target of $50 on his show in 2013 and it hit $49 something exactly on BTC. That was a moment in crypto history that all people should remember. And I do not know the episode number, but is definitely one to watch if you have never watched it. It's definitely a moment in crypto history. So what one has to ask is to what Blake and some of the others have said about this kind of so-called reserve cryptocurrency in that sense that is definitely somewhat true. Because where does the volume come from from all of these alternative cryptocurrencies? Where did all of the profits come from? People are willing to risk in buying all of these altcoins. Where did it come from? Profits from Bitcoin going up. Where do you think it came from? For the most part. Sure. And let's take a quick look at the volume. Are the volumes on the USD pairs, on the altcoin to Swiss Frank pairs, on the altcoin to Euro pairs? No. All the volume is on the altcoin to Bitcoin pair. Of course. If that's not dominance, what else is it? The main thing that the altcoins are traded against are Bitcoin. Of course, not USD or another Bitcoin. With our other markets, there are altcoin Ethereum markets, there are altcoin Monero markets, there are altcoin Tether markets that they do exist. A clear minority in volume to the altcoin Bitcoin markets. So that is the main market and that does not show a lack of dominance, perhaps quite the opposite. And definitely, I want to echo that as far as the market cap is concerned, I mean, how hard would it be for us here? See what we're? One, two, three, five people. How hard would it be for us to manage to pump the market cap of an ICO token that we release ourselves? And we have, I don't know, 10 Bitcoin, 20 Bitcoin, 30 Bitcoin. How hard would it be for us to buy and sell our own token to pump the market cap of it and to get it really high? So we're at the top and everyone thinks it's the best thing ever. That would be really difficult and would take a lot of brain work for anyone that has been in decryptive for any amount of time. So definitely, Bitcoin is losing major dominance here. Theo is right. It's a misleading chart. It's a chart of the market cap dominance, not of the trading or the volume or the usage. Exit question, is there an altcoin out there that will be Bitcoin? Has it been made? Has it not been made yet? Or will it never be made in DeMartino? Well, you can look at the usual suspects of Ethereum and Litecoin. I think they both stand a good chance. If more financial institutions get into Ethereum and it just becomes this dominant thing where you can go to your bank and use Ethereum, DeSemite, China or something, I think. And then plus you have all the ICO and all the smart contracts and all that kind of stuff. I can see that taken over. That would be really disappointing to me because we have this, I think, pretty easily traceable currency with no unlimited inflation and all this stuff. It sounds a lot like the yet to me just in a virtual world of smart contracts. But, and then Litecoin, maybe if Bitcoin just collapsed because of the core developers are unable to get it together. But in that case, I think we'll see like some Bitcoin rebirth coin or something that people will like, but who knows. Other than that, I would think there would have to be something that is just so new and so innovative that we can even really comprehend it right now because the five of us aren't smart enough and it's going to take another situation to Okamoto to come along and solve some major problem that is holding Bitcoin back right now. I just wanted to jump in really quick because I was going to touch on what you said before but I had forgotten. And I think that there's a lot of people that agree with you that they think that the Bitcoin development is too slow. But Bitcoin is a very, very large production in use, a material value transfer system. So in terms of how we address change management policy in that system, we have to be very, very, very, very careful. So you have like Fortune 25 change management risk protocol procedure which are very, very, very slow and there's a lot of layers that sign off on it. At the very other end of it, you have publishing close binaries in the last minute attempt to be like, oh, we can do things quickly. And we need to be a lot closer to extremely stringent risk management standards with Bitcoin than coin with a smaller market cap or even with other things. And I think that in terms of Ethereum, Ethereum is cool and I love the E20 token and stuff and how you can make a customizable shit coin and raise with that. But I think that a lot of the use cases that are more advanced for Ethereum are going to require that code to be forked down, to be forked away so that the value proposition part of the code is not sunk by all of the attack vectors that are latent in the scope creep nature of how it's been programmed. So I think that it's very, very, very common to hear that the Bitcoin core team is too slow but we really, really, really need to make sure that we are taking a full, considerative view of risk management scope and make sure that we don't do anything that is going to be deadly or a killer problem or a zero day exploit in terms of this large production material value transfer system that's Bitcoin. So I understand what you're coming from but I think that it needs to be balanced a little bit by what the technologists risk management standards would kind of say about the same thing. I 100% agree with what you're saying in principle and that we do need a 100% take of, we're talking about billions of dollars, we have to take a very cautious approach that's what, you know, for the most part with block size beta, I want to just let the developers hash out themselves as, you know, they're for the most part smarter than me and, you know, but what's discouraging me is that there seems to be no progress at all how incremental when it comes to the debate, there seems to be no like, it reminds me of Congress in a way where there just seemed to be talking back and forth, back and forth and nothing seemed to be done. You know, that's what I like to see. I don't need to see bigger blocks or segway or anything get implemented tomorrow. I just want to see some people agree in the GOCHIA and see some progress, you know, somewhere of things that you see a lot of different BIPs going to Bitcoin development, mailing list and then it just kind of fade away because it just falls into an argument and then we're onto the next argument and then known as you've talked about the previous argument and more and nothing's been added or nothing, you know what I'm saying? I'm definitely a perspective. I feel like it's more that people are not aware of the continuing progress that's being made in other areas on Bitcoin and how the stop in terms of block size is because there's kind of been a decision on one side that we don't want to do that yet. We want to do the order of operations where we have the more tight code first with segway and then we can do a block size increase after that instead of increasing block size and then doing other things. So I can see your point though and I think that a lot of people agree with that but I don't want to take up too much time here. Now I was going to make a progress comparison as well. Go ahead, Ian. Yeah. So we mentioned Max Kaiser earlier and you did call the Litecoin thing I guess but I just want to take time out real quick to point out that guy promoted the shit to us shit coins on his TV show back in the days. So just like take a quick minute to say fuck Max Kaiser. Quark is the one that comes to mind if you ever heard of quark coin go look that one up. But now I was going to agree with you Ian on the congressional comparison except that I was going to law the comparison that I would say Bitcoin development goes slowly like Congress to protect the people like many have said it's like flying an airplane and fixing it while we're flying it and they're working on keeping it in the air not necessarily increasing the speed of the airplane. It's a very difficult job and we're just going to have to see how it goes. We need to storm the cockpit and demand the plane fly faster. I mean when I fly and travel that's always the best way to go about it. And we need more snacks. Let's go to Jimmy Song is the alt coin that will unseat Bitcoin. Does it exist? Will it exist? Go ahead. Well so first of all I got to say like there's a lot of Bitcoin development going on and if you don't know about it it's because the developers are working on the code and not necessarily marketing the fact that they're working on the code. All sorts of things that are related to scaling like around the edges to make things transfer faster to make things work a lot better. And they're all in the GitHub repository. You can see all the commits that get handled added. It's more secure. It's a lot easier to do certain things in the code and taking out useless things or security vulnerabilities. Lots of things happening. I don't think it's fair to say that it's Bitcoin development is stuck in anyway because it's not. There's a ton of stuff going on. The reason why we're stuck in this scaling debate is because consensus is hard. And that's okay. That's okay. That's part of the design. And we made the analogy to Congress earlier. Congress was actually designed so that they wouldn't get most things done. It's supposed to be really, really difficult to pass something. And you have to have a really good reason to change the status quo. That's kind of the way that Bitcoin has developed. It is, the status quo is doing fine. We hit a very large number for per Bitcoin this week. That's a good thing. Stability is a very good property for a store. Anyway, to answer the question, will any Litecoin actually overtake Bitcoin? My theory on sort of all coins is that their market cap is closely corresponding with the quality of the developers that they have. That makes sense, right? Because if you have really good developers, they're going to be able to create features that may one day be super necessary and be able to overtake Bitcoin. So I have three candidates and I have a massive respect for these three coins and their development teams in particular. First is the cash. I know Zuko. Extremely creative coin. That's very privacy-focused, obviously. They do some amazing stuff with zero knowledge proofs and things like that. Another one is Monero, another privacy-based coin. They have confidential transactions, all sorts of things like that. I don't know if either of those qualities by themselves are enough to overtake Bitcoin, but the development teams on each of those are good enough that you could possibly see them develop a killer feature that Bitcoin may not be able to do in time. And the final one is Decred. The developers there are the ones behind the BTCD, which is the the Go-Lang version of the Bitcoin client. Extremely impressive developers. They come from the old OpenBSD, school of coding. A lot of them are contributors to OpenBSD. They really know security. They really know how to do a lot of complex cryptography. One of the interesting things, and I think this is the reason why Charlie Lee pumps Decred all the time, is that they have a governance model that's very different than Bitcoin's. It allows the community to have a voice in changes to the protocol, which may or may not be something that overtakes it. That said, all of these coins have less than a 1% chance of ever overtaking Bitcoin. That's my personal opinion. If you want more community involvement, I'll have to go find my UASF hat. Let's go to Blake Anderson, any altcoin, going to beat Bitcoin. Yeah, they're all going to beat Bitcoin. The experiment is over. Bitcoin was good while it lasted. Pat's on back all around. I think what it hurts say the experiment has resolved. I think that's probably the best way to put it. The experiment has resolved. It's going to be beaten. No, I'm probably going to catch some flat for this, but aside from motorcycles going by my house, I think that Bitcoin is pretty close to one of the optimal methods by which we can instantiate a value system. I mean, it goes back through human psychology. It's like, look, gold one, I'm pretty fast. Let's try to mimic that as much as we can. Let's not try to go faster than that. Let's not try to go slower than that. That worked in the past. Let's do that. So I think that the way that a block's propagated, the timing and all that and the monetary policy make the implementation of Bitcoin such that it's really, really hard to be like, oh, I just completely improved on a whole bunch of stuff. Things can be different fundamentally from Bitcoin. Like, like, coin has a faster block time and stuff like that. But undermining the fundamental value proposition of Bitcoin is, it's not very easy. So there's nothing that would lead me to believe, like, you know, let's invest in A, B, or C in case that's going to happen soon. I'm not saying, divest of all altcoins or don't, you know, make a femoral gains or day trade with altcoins. I'm just saying that this is the way that I see things playing out. Theo Goodman, better than Bitcoin? Consense has said that Ethereum will take over Bitcoin. That is their mission. That's what they're going to do with Ethereum. It's going to take over Bitcoin. And the answer is no one had it. It was Fedcoin. Fedcoin was the right answer. The market cap of Fedcoin will rise higher than the market cap of Bitcoin because it will be given to everyone who already owns dollars. They'll already have the implements for Fedcoin. There'll be two coins. There'll be the corporate federal coin that you use for all of your mainstream transactions. Then there'll be the Bitcoin that you use for your other transactions. That's getting ahead of ourselves. We can't talk about the future yet. We're not even there yet. They've only made two guardians of the galaxy movies. Let's move on to issue four Bitcoin scaling. Forgotten. The recent drama of Bitcoin scaling has all been wiped from the news. And more importantly, the agenda. As the price of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency has exploded. And no one can remember anything but how many coins they have and how they wish they had more. How does the recent price explosion affect Segwit, Bitcoin unlimited, BitMain and the rest of the Bitcoin scaling drama? Jimmy saw them. Well, price has an interesting effect on everybody. First of all, it relieves pressure to do things. Because everyone has more money and they're not under pressure to go and do things. The most creative things that people do tend to come when they're under a lot of pressure, when they have no other choice. Necessity really is the mother of invention. Right now, BitMain and lots of other miners, they're making money hand over this right now. They have a lot of resources at their disposal. And I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. A lot of devs obviously have a lot of Bitcoin. They're invested in it. So they can ride this out too. I imagine companies like Blockstream or any of the exchanges, they keep some of their investment in Bitcoin. So that's appreciating. That means that they have a lot more money. They have a longer runway. They're not forced to do anything either. So, in another sense, they both seem the devs and the miners seem to both be retrenching right now. And trying to look for another strategy, whether that includes some sort of give and take. I have no idea. But one thing is certain, and that is we have way more scaling drama to come. There is going to be way, way more of that before the end of the year. So that's my take on it. It sounds like the Christmas day during World War One when they all played soccer. And then they went back in the trenches and killed each other. Those are awful stuff. All of the story. Blake Anderson, your thoughts on Bitcoin scaling? Jucks, no. Well, I kind of, you know, it's said by thought of a Bitcoin scaling before. It's an issue that is tacked with risk management and change management considerations. So, you know, Bitcoin is working fine right now. People that want to criticize the way that it's working. Are free to use Litecoin or Altcoins. And once we have solutions that are thoroughly vetted and tested, I think they'll be implemented as they are needed. And I'm not all that concerned. I know this isn't the best example to draw or parallels to draw, but when there's like a debt crisis and the government is going to shut down and stuff like that, usually they don't solve it until like it's absolutely necessary, the M-tower. So I don't know. Maybe that's just the way that some money systems are. Maybe Bitcoin will emulate that pretty closely. Who knows? But, you know, I feel positive. And then of course, solving it is really just the most popular decision of all government. Kick the can down the road. The Ogan. Okay, well, if you have any kind of media publication whatsoever, what's going to get you more clicks and traffic? Bitcoin all time high. Bitcoin higher than gold. Bitcoin going to the moon or scaling, they are not getting along. Bitcoin is dying because they can't do anything. Bitcoin is not as fast as Visa. Bitcoin for the hundredth article in a row. So which one is going to get you more clicks and what is going to feed the echo chamber more? Which one? Well, of course, Bitcoin all time high. Bitcoin's price is too high. Bitcoin is going to crash. Bitcoin is the most performing currency ever known to mankind. Bitcoin to the moon. Bitcoin price crashes. People get wrecked. All that kind of dramatic stuff is what's going to get attention. And that's why we're hearing about it. And that's why you know, you're hearing less about whatever. The so called scaling and which is just ongoing development turns on the whole time. So it didn't stop. People are still working on that. People are still programming. People are still sure. People have a little bit of a break. Maybe they do one more party than normal. But, you know, people are still working on all this stuff. Just because you don't hear about any more drama or people don't care about the drama anymore. That stuff is not happening and they're still plenty of development going on. It's an excellent point Theo. And while I was preparing this show, I was searching for headlines about Bitcoin. Everyone has written about the price going up. And it's all the same vapid article with the percentage gain and it used to be this. And it's all designed to make everybody feel bad like you're stupid for not buying Bitcoin or for selling or whatever happened. But yeah, it's all the same article. Ian D Martino, your thoughts on Bitcoin scaling? Well Theo, you just got to learn how to write a good headline. I mean, if I do a scaling debate, you just got to say, Civil War and Bitcoin is breaking its transact. You know, like that headline was written a lot of times. And I'm sure a lot of those sites got big hits for it. But other than that, I more or less agree with what you're saying. You know, I was complaining about development thing. And maybe it's just this whole scaling thing just getting to me. You know, you have to cover it if it seems like forever. Significant going on. I haven't been covering the smaller developments. I guess so that's on me. But I don't know. You know, rising tide lifts all boats. And so this makes everyone feel good. But you know, once the price goes back down, I think we'll be bickering again. And I think the price will go back down. You know, I want to someone with a bunch of people try to use Bitcoin and go slow. And then they get rid of it. Or you know, whatever's going to happen, you know, then we'll start fighting over scaling debate again. And be all these, uh, Democrat Republican, Roger Verg, Glad, you know, just like going at each other. It's, it's, uh, it's, it's what we're used to. You know, but I don't think any of that's ever going to stop Bitcoin. Oh, a little, a little term, you know, sometimes I feel a little, a little down on it. But ultimately I do think that, uh, it's an unstoppable monster. And as long as we're careful, like Blake said, with risk management and everything like that, I think, you know, there will be a lot of down points. But we will always be going up long time. I agree. And it does seem like the scaling debates gone on and on and on. But as we've discussed it here so many times, there is a possibility that one side is a cartel and that they're not negotiating fairly. And they're not really discussing technical issues. But we've discussed this over and over again. Maybe that guy that went with the CIA right before Satoshi disappeared. Maybe that, no, I think we're more concerned about the miners monopolizing the market, running a sick booth software that gives them a 30% advantage over the others. And I mean, I get it, you know, that's awesome. You want to keep that. But there's something to be said if you have that, every day that you mind with that is a big win. So you just need to stall. So there's something to be said about this third way of just stalling the debate as a win if you're getting that every day. So let's move on to the exit question. Long range prediction, segwit will be added to Bitcoin before the end of the year. Yes or no, Jimmy saw. No, no, the only way it happens is if we have consensus, that's the way the whole system is designed. And we don't have consensus right now. Much more likely is that we'll start to see off-chain solutions start to get more popular, whether it's lightning-like solutions that don't require segwit or something like that. I believe those will come on more as the year goes on and there's more demand for blockchain space or whatever. But yeah, I mean, it's where no closer than we were two years ago. And that's okay, that's okay. Because I think most people use Bitcoin as a store of value and not a medium of exchange. Wait, I thought you told me that, I mean, I know you were talking about other commitments other than, you know, segwit and bigger blocks, but you told me that things are progressing. And now you say two years, nothing's progressed, man. No, why? I just said that the scaling debate hasn't progressed, but there's always development going on. And they're preparing for, I mean, developers have clearly put out a solution in the form of segwit. The miners aren't accepting. So whether or not that's a good thing or bad thing is for the market to decide. And even after the value of Litecoin goes up five times, we can't get segwit on Bitcoin. All right, Blake Anderson, your thoughts on segwit? Yeah, I mean, it's like even when you have control over the whole system, like when you're doing like Fortune 25, math-based security project management, stuff takes a long time to implement. Even if it's been going well on testing that for a long time, you do, I mean, you do all kinds of stuff. So I mean, I think that it won't be this year either in terms of being activated. And I don't think that that's a bad thing or like a risk or this is some big issue that like the peanut gallery and novice people need to be like, oh, we need to go and charge the cockpit and have the plane go faster. So I think that being extremely careful with change management is absolutely paramount. And since that's what's being observed, it's all good and the hood. And just a reminder of how slow some of these financial companies move. A lot of their mainframes still run cobalt. There's actually a shortage of cobalt programmers. Everyone knows and cobalt use tabs instead of commas or spaces because you have to line them up for the punch card readers. That's classic. It's got a Theo Goodman. Your thoughts on Bitcoin Segwit. Segwits are already implemented. Like coin, altcoin number two, altcoin, vertcoin, vertcoin, altcoins. There's several Segwits activated. So wrong question. Segwit has already activated this year. Well, Segwit be activated on Bitcoin. May probably not. Just Bitcoin things happen. So force answer. Wrong question. Ian and Dean Martino finished it up Segwit by the end of the year. Clearly not. I mean, listen to everyone else here. You can tell the base going slow. I would just like to see some progress in the debate at least. I guess miners want to aren't accepted in there. Less of a group to be able to directly talk to because they're just you know, so many people and blah blah blah. But yeah, I'd just like to see some progress within the year. That would be a win at them. As no hope and there's no progress, Segwit will not be activated this year. Moving on to predictions or a story of the week. Blake Anderson, are you ready with a prediction or a story of the week? Yeah, I guess story of the week. Some kind of metrics to make you cringe. Let's look at how the legacy economy is doing during all this stuff. I have a couple of different points. It'll be a fun game. How many points do you think I'm going to read off? Number one, the week economic growth in the first quarter was a continuation of a long-term trend. Obama was the only president in history not to have a single year when the US economy grew by at least 3%. It is now in the fourth time in the last six quarters when economic growth has been the last than 2% on an annualized basis. Number two, consumer spending which drives the US economy more than anything else at this point in the US is tapped out. CBS News has reported that three-fourths of all US consumers have to scramble to cover the living costs each month. Number three, the job market appears to be slowing. The US economy only added about 98,000 jobs in March and that was approximately half of what most analysts were expecting. Number four, the flow of credit appears to be slowing as well. In fact, this is the first time since the last recession when there has been no growth for commercial and industrial lending for at least six months. Number five, last month, US factory output dropped at the fastest pace that we have witnessed in more than two years. Number six, we are in the midst of the worst retail apocalypse in US history. The number of retailers that has filed for bankruptcy has already surpassed the total number for the entire year of 2016 and at the current rate will smash the previous all-time record for store clothing in a single year by nearly 2000. Number seven, the auto industry is also experiencing a great deal of stress. This has been the worst year for US automakers since the last recession 2008. And seven out of the eight largest fell short of their sales projections in March. I have tons and tons and tons and tons of metrics like this but one of the most important ones is number 11. The student loan bubble is starting to bust and it's being reported that 27% of all student loans are already in default and some analysts expect for this number to go even higher. This is a problem because basically student loan debt is non-dischargeable debt and non-dischargeable debt means that it cannot be dismissed under bankruptcy. The way that this country, the United States of America is set up is that we have bankruptcy laws. We do not want people to be crushed with all the blood out of them and then to be killed. We want to have some kind of a system wherein you can be like, okay, that person's underwater, they're being strangled. Let's try to give them some leeway, let's try to replant that turnip and let's try to get them to grow again so that we can have, you know, shit go on. Everybody enjoyed that for a long, long time but now all of this easy student loan money is going out there under the expectation that doesn't matter how much you go into debt. As soon as you get that piece of paper, you're going to be a millionaire and it's not going to be an issue. Now we have 27% of student debt holders in full-blown defaults and bankruptcy is not going to discharge these things. So what we have is people that are deciding, let's underpin the economy on this bad system wherein we put everything on the shoulders of the youngest power consumers around and like a power consumer would refer to somebody who's actually spending lots of money, not like a young 14-year-old consumer that's buying a piece of candy, but you know, college purchase is a huge investment and the college bubble and non-dischargeable debt is absolutely despicable. So of all the reasons that this deflationary spiral hit Bitcoin, some of those reasons include things like not being satisfied with what the dollar and the derivative systems underneath are doing and going towards whether it be non-dischargeable debt or warfare and things like that. Now I'm not saying, you know, go out and take a debt for college and you should never ever have to pay it back and that, you know, debt is a joke. I'm not trying to say that at all, but I'm trying to say that trying to pin all of this onto people without the ability to discharge this debt is an extremely disgusting thing that I think conservatives and liberals both should look at and say perhaps this should be redesigned or re-engineered, it gets to pin everything on a 20-year-old seems like an extremely irresponsible way to solve any issue. And we hate to say I told you so when so many people are hurt and affected, but we've told you so. I also want to say I have zero college debt. I don't have any debt. I'm not speaking of my own interests yet. I don't have debt. Every time they say they're going to forgive the loans I wish I'd taken tons, tons more. I don't know about that. I don't know how I encourage that. Let's bring back to itters, prisons, man. That's what I want. Many fine books have been written in prison. Theo Goodman, you're a story of the week or a prediction. Go ahead. Wow. Well, now I'm just totally, you know, into this whole thing about debt and I wonder if the future will bring the year of the Jubilee of Rect. But it'll be one of those, I think. The story is by far having to do with Bitcoin loads of transportation. And that is all about car talk. You've got to check out the latest episode with trade with Dave dropping massive amounts of knowledge about forks in the road and how that relates to our journey in the crypto sphere. Bitcoin car talk dot com. It's a great episode. They also had a rare Pepe makeover. I wasn't that impressed. I've seen kitchens that have bathtubs in them. I think that's much cooler. Ian D Martino prediction or a story of the week. I don't have either of those. What I want to talk about instead, while everyone's in the Bitcoin world is flush with cash. I want to just remind everyone that there's a young man in prison right now that angst of the actions of two corrupt agents and the government sphere of what our cryptographic currency can do. Of course, I'm talking about Ross Ulbridge. So while we all have a little extra money, I'd just like to ask everyone to go donate to the free Ross campaign. So the very kind sentiment, people can find out more at free Ross.org. Something like that. I think Jimmy saw on go ahead. All right. So earlier this week, there was a blog post written by someone saying Sean Spicer tweeted something in January that was actually like a Bitcoin transaction or something like that. I wrote a blog post basically taking apart the argument that got more hits on my blog than everything else that I had ever written combined. Right. And the thing that showed me was that people are pretty ignorant about Bitcoin. That article was so full of flaws. It said that there was some sort of like identity confirmation code within a Bitcoin transaction which makes no sense. There's no such thing. And that this eight letter thing was it. The service that the author pointed to was actually like a proof of existence type site. And it had nothing to do with identifying yourself. People were going through on like our politics on like Reddit and saying, oh, look at this transaction that it's linked to. And like if you go eight transactions down, you'll find something that was like $3 million. Ridiculous, right? Like the general ignorance of how Bitcoin works, what it does, how you're supposed to or how it gets used. What it can do is completely mind boggling to me. How much people want to believe that it's this like weird thing that you can blame almost anything on. For me, that's the story of the week is the ignorance of the general public with regard to Bitcoin. I agree, Jimmy. I saw that article in the Reddit. And I also thought basically just from like a logical perspective, why does Spicer copy and then paste that key for what purpose was he a like, is it an address? Like if it was an address, you'd be like, oh, he copied it to send it some money. But it was like to prove him like everyone knows these Spicer. He's on TV every day. I just made no sense. But yeah, it was a great article. Good job, Jimmy. Wrong. Wrong. That was the that was the nuclear code. Well, I love the nuclear code. There's another article out that says Trump has a red button on his desk. And when he pushes it, someone brings him a Coke, but a funny story. But I don't have a prediction or a story of the week. I didn't write anything totally unprepared. I tried to beat Ganon and Zelda today. I got killed two or three times. It was really embarrassing. I live streamed it. I'm not so sure that live streaming video games is a good idea. But not much else to say. I want to thank our 315 viewers for thumbs up in the show and for watching it live with us. I'm going to go check out the chat, see all the funny things you guys said. It's been a fun week with Bitcoin. Obviously, it goes up crazy like this. You wish you had more. That's pretty common among all of us. You also wish that you never sold any. But every once in a while, you just got to sell some. So don't kick yourself too hard. And don't feel bad. You didn't buy a theory. I'm at a dollar, seeing it go up to $100 because nobody else did either. But somebody did and hats off to them. But I'm getting all that Bitcoin for rent. I'd be the richest homeless guy in DC right now. I know. And see, that's the thing is it's you got the value out of having a roof over your head. Sometimes you got to make cells like that because we can't just live on Bitcoin alone. But maybe, maybe someday. It's going to discovery Bitcoin because we're all used to fiat money and you know, inflation and be like, Oh, spend it now instead of later. And then when you get Bitcoin, you spend it and you look back and you're like, Oh, shit. So it's kind of funny like trying to get used to that too. It teaches you to save some money. That's what sound money does. Yeah. It's changing the way we spend our money. But it's also it's also changing our time preference because we're running out of time. And up we're out of time until next time. Bye. Bye.