The Bitcoin Group, the American Original. For over the last 10 seconds, the sharpest Satoshi's, the best Bitcoin's, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Gabriel D. Vine from Future Rant. Thank you for having me. I'd like to give a special shout out to my super-ho-skillet age. Jimmy Song, Bitcoin Developer. Thanks for having me. Tone Vays from Liberty Life Trail. Stop everyone. I'm back in the woods, relaxing and enjoying a little beverage. Should be fun. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network. Moving on to issue one. Issue one. UASF. Bitcoin users continue to agitate for their favorite fork, BIP 148. The UASF with more memes, hats and images or tornadoes whirling across the landscape. As the calendar slowly clicks towards August 1st, UASF activation day, which many Bitcoiners have taken to call in Bitcoin Independence Day, as it could truly be the end of the scaling debate, with Segwit being activated by a combination of users and miners. Gabriel D. Vine will the miners bend to the will of the users and activate Segwit on August 1st. Tone Vays from Liberty Life Trail. If you had to press me for a prediction, I would say yes, because the downside risks for the miners are so high, it does make sense in a game theoretical scenario that you can summon with your best guess for them to activate and just go along with it. Maybe delay for a few days or something, maybe drag their feet slightly, I could see possibly, but then they're risking losing market share or losing mining power, losing efficiency of their mining setup if they don't say gone. People do soft forks away from their mind blocks and things like that. I have listened to your interview with Jimmy and also of course, Red Jimmy's excellent essays to describe the many, many failure and risk scenarios involved in the user activated soft fork, bit 148. But when I look at the game theoretical situation and when I consider the history of threats coming from the miners like Bitmain who have been fighting Segwit witness activation the whole time, not only have they been lying about why they're opposed to it, the real reason is of course, their advantage through ASIC boost and they've been lying the whole time saying that there's some technical reason or some other bullshit, totally been lying. And then they've also threatened hard forks, threatened other things and they're not really economically incentivized to carry out any of these threats. And I think the same is definitely true with the Bit 148 situation. As Jimmy pointed out, if the Bit 148 signolers are controlling more than 13% of the hash power, the risks for the miners who don't signal Bit 148 go up astronomically. I'm of the strong opinion that the Bit 148 miner, hash rate will exceed that by at least double, I think triple. Now you may say that that is optimistic but there are a lot of people that don't tweet out what they're doing behind the scenes and I have a good sense that some of the Bit 148 supporters as well as just people who like many core developers are kind of neutral on it. But for example, Adam back, perfect example, he's not pro Bit 148, he thinks it's too sudden, he thinks it's too aggressive but he realizes that because there's enough people, a bunch of people who like it and are going to run it, it makes sense for everybody to do it. It's kind of a bit of a what you might call in chess, what is that called? It's kind of a checkmate. It's a bit of a, it's certainly a mate if not a checkmate for the mining infrastructure and really for the whole ecosystem. So I am of the firm opinion that we will easily exceed the 13% if not 51% by August 1st on the hash rate. And so I think it's pretty unlikely that these threats will be carried out. They have no track record of actually doing these things. They've been threatening hard forks forever and that's just a delaying tactic. And the miners are going to come out having lost a lot of clout after this but I don't think it'll affect them too much other than ruining their kind of, you know, I would say that it was a clever advantage. But once they started utilizing troll armies and disinformation campaigns in order to keep their advantage, it became an unfair advantage. So they'll just lose that advantage and be competing on a level playing field in which I think they'll do quite well anyways and continue a healthy market share in the mining infrastructure. So I think we're going to just basically go through. There might be a couple of hiccups where maybe some small risks that Jimmy has sort of outlined come to pass, maybe some double spends, some weirdness, but I think on the whole, we're probably looking at segment activation on August 1st. And just like that, we've got 197 viewers. It's pretty great for this early in the show. If everyone gives a thumbs up and a share helps spread the word about this show. And now Jimmy Song, your thoughts on the UASF. Finally, on the hash rate that the users have. And at this point, the last sort of statistics that I've seen is UASF bit 140, 8 has 0.18 percent of the entire network hash rate. At that, that's really kind of a very low number if you can. Almost there. Almost there. We're getting there, man. We're getting there. Yeah. What is 0.18 percent? That's about four days to find a single block. That's insanely long, right? Well, Jimmy, what is the incentive of a bit 148 minor to signal before the flag day? Well, the signal would be what we're serious, right? This makes the higher hash rate that you have, the more credible your threat is. So if it's around 0.18 percent, that's calculated. Slush is the only pool that supports it. And UASF 5148 is around 5.5 percent. Which if you calculate it out the entire total of the network hash rate, that's 0.18 percent. Again, four days to find a block. That's really, really slow. And at that point, you can't really distinguish between no minor support and tiny minor support. And there are going to be a lot of people that would abandon with that little bit of hash rate. Now, if it gets higher, there's certainly better scenarios for 5148. But until that gets higher, if it doesn't get higher, I certainly don't see UASF 5148 going anyway. So what are some of the advantages to not signaling and suddenly turning it on on flag day or an hour before? Right. So the advantage there would be, namely, you don't make the difficulty go up in the previous difficulty adjustment. But I mean, there's a lot of mining equipment sort of coming on anyway. So you're going to have to sort of count for that in any case. 0.18 percent's like nowhere near. Four days to find a single block. Think about just how much transaction backlog you're going to have in four days where you have like everyone that wants to get into like get their coins into an exchange or whatever. None of that works, right? Like for four days. And that's just to get one confirmation. And 0.18 percent is also really, really easy to crack. That's like somebody like, you know, a pool that has like 5% can dedicate like half a percent to attacking that pool, attacking that chain. And it would be very easy to do so. Let's see. I wanted to say that I see a lot of people on Twitter and stuff sort of like asking the question, why can't anyone say, why can't, why don't we have SegWit already? Didn't everyone agree? Thank for the large, for a large, the reason why is because not like a lot of these people that are asking for SegWit to get activated first aren't really giving anything back to the miners. They're just sort of asking for it and saying, you guys already agree. Well, you know, negotiations like that. And right now there's a lot of miners that want something back and return for their cooperation. And I don't think it has to be anything that big. It's just sort of like an acknowledgement from to the community because the sort of rhetoric that's going around these days is that miners don't matter at all. And that's a bit unfortunate because they do matter. And it's very important. I have a lot more scenarios obviously from my article earlier this week and then the two interviews that I've done with Thomas. So, you know, go please take a look at that if you're interested. Check those out on the Mad Bitt Coins channel. Let's go to tone Vaze, your thoughts on the UASF 0.18% doesn't sound very strong. It's huge, man. It's more than I expected at this stage. No, no, I'm kidding, of course. Hey, Jimmy, I got a question for you. Since you've always been kind of neutral since I've known you, what mining hash rate would it take for you to support user activated software? 75. What? No, seriously. Yeah, no, 75 is enough. So that the network won't split. And it's 50. Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait. According to look junior, 51% is enough not to split. Well, there are game theory scenarios where if it looks like UASF has more than 51%, I would expect the miners to do sort of preemptive hardwork ahead of it. So you would not support, you would not put one of these hats on until you see 95% support? Well, I love the hats, so I would totally put out the hat. But 75% I think is at that point, it's sort of worth going in that direction because that will keep it on one chain. I was way off. I was thinking like 25. I mean, I want Bitcoin to stay one chain. That's sort of my priority because I think we have sort of the same thesis. Bitcoin is the best store of value. But if it splits and breaks immutability, then a lot of its value proposition goes away. So that's sort of my stance right now. All right, cool. All right, so here's what I'm going to say on this matter. Like I really don't want to call the miners out. Like I don't think it's healthy to the community for people to stand up there and like talking about how miners are going to cave. Like the more the community, like I guess patronizes or antagonizes the miners, the less likely they actually are to kind of go with the user-activated software flow. And I really don't have anything against the miners. I really like what Erich Lombrozo has been saying in that he thought segment was a done CEO and he still doesn't understand what the miners actually want. He just doesn't understand it. And if he doesn't understand it, core developers can't code it. But if the miners get their own, if the miners are supporting core developers, then that there goes, you know, Bitcoin's decentralization property. Right? But the core developers need to understand what the miners want and right now we don't. Not we don't. They don't. I'm not actually developing. I still think the user-activated software is going to be something. Like I don't think it's going to just, you know, die off into the night. I think it's going to be serious. I think it's going to get more serious. I know I've been bringing attention to the matter and I'm going to try and do something about it. But we'll see. We'll see if it helps. I mean, the exchanges are being dead silent. I am about to put pressure on the exchanges. I mean, I don't want to put pressure on the miners and I don't want to put pressure on the core developers. I want to put pressure on the economic. And more importantly, what the hell they're planning on doing? Oh, but I was there like a specific question on this topic or we're just generally talking about the user-activated software. I think getting Jimmie's idea that he'd only supported it 75% in the realities that it's at 0.15% is quite a lot of information so far, but it is very early. Oh, I put a lot of 0.18 or 8th. Close enough. Close enough. My miner hasn't gotten my miner in the mail yet, man. But that's the thing. When I get my miner in the mail, I don't know if I'm going to get my miner in the mail. I don't know if I should turn it on now. I mean, look, in reality, one miner ain't going to do shit, right? But out of principle, do I turn on my miner now and show 548 or do I wait till the end of August in order not to put the hash right now? Now with one miner, it doesn't really matter, but what if I was ordering 1,000 miners? I mean, now what? A surprise attack is always better. So we'll see how it goes. I mean, I'm still all for it. I have to be for it because I have one segment and I don't want like chain to split either. So we'll see. I'm still supporting user-activated software. I'm going to, like every week, I have to reassess my views on the situation. Now I know this is going to sound overly simplistic, but what if we expanded the idea of UASF 2, UASF, and thank the miners? And everyone goes out there and just starts thanking the miners. You say, thank you miners for running these computers. Thank you miners for keeping your data centers going. We just create this whole positivity around the miners and then maybe the miners go, you know, hey, they pay us a lot of money. They use our product. And now they like us. And maybe they would activate the UASF. Let's go down a line, Gabriel. Can we add positivity into this campaign? No, I think it's total bullshit. You're just smoking hope, you know, over there and floating in the clouds, tripping on acid and golden gate park with the other idiots. Not that I have a problem with acid, but here's the thing. You know, there's an economic, clear economic reason why Bitmain has been against Seguit. They've been lying and doing disinformation campaigns to prevent an upgrade that's going to help the ecosystem that they're supposedly working in. They're clearly a bad actor and they deserve to be pinned to the wall on that. And they also brought on Bit 148. If anybody's mad at whoever coded up Bit 148 or whoever's wearing a UASF hat in the style of the United States Air Force, you're looking at the wrong people. Bitmain brought this on themselves by being bad actors in the ecosystem and lying and blocking an important bug upgrade, a bug killing upgrade that has huge upside and very few downsides. And they deserve all the bad press they'd be getting. Any positivity that you may plug into this situation will be crushed under the economic realities and gain theoretical situation that Bitcoin's ecosystem finds itself in. That may be true. Jimmy Song, your thoughts on bad actors and saying thank you. Yeah, I mean, I thought about this quite a bit and I don't like, I know a lot of people sort of point to Asik Boost. I've run the numbers on Asik Boost. It's worth about $2 million to Bitmain. Not that much. And I've looked at their code for actually communicating between miners. I haven't seen evidence of covert Asik Boost sort of like the things that you would need to communicate there's no code for. So if they are doing covert Asik Boost, they would be entirely on their own machines only and it would have to be like sort of custom software. I don't know. I'm not sure that's the reason why they've been blocking things. The real reason I think that they have been sort of like obstructionist, if you will, is because I mean, I think they kind of disagree with Tony here. I think they've been pretty clear on what they want. They want to make it like by blocks. They said that for a very long time. Whoa, whoa, whoa, Jimmy, why would they work that? I mean, even today, Antpool is not even mining full freaking blocks. Why not? I held it. I want to make it by blocks. Remember sometimes you just want something because you want it. I like a reason here. That's Bullshit Thomas. This is a real situation with real economic realities. There's no, there's got to be an, I mean, I respect Jimmy's idea where he researched. He says, okay, I don't think Facebook loses the reason to say that it's just to save face or something. And oh, it's Chinese culture, it's saving face. As a negotiator, sometimes at the end of the deal, you ask for one more thing to be thrown in. You don't even want that thing because we don't really go to the ocean. It's a battle. Well, I mean, there's a lot of reasons why you would want to make it back. No, no, no, there is a right. Like, I will take, I will take almost any reason from Bitmain as to why they don't want second, but the idea that they want two megabyte blocks is complete and utter bullshit. That is like the one reason I don't believe because whale pan that tweets out. Every time they mind a block that's half full. And there was no reason for that. Not. So, Jimmy, what's the reason that they would want to make it by glass? Well, so first of all, from sort of technical standpoint, you want to, if you want to set a precedent that hard forks are okay, this is a great way to do it because it's a code and if everyone updates. But they're not okay. That's the problem. Well, I, I, right? Like there's a lot of other all coins that have done hard forks and, you know, I mean, that's sort of, I mean, that's the argument that they've given. And, you know, to some degree, like I sympathize with their, with their reasoning is, hey, if you want to see a hard for work, well, this would be a good way to do it. I don't know if that's the reason. I have no idea. But that's one, one technical reason that you could reasonably make for doing trying to megabyte blocks. Let me, let me, let me ask you another question to the people on this panel. Did the Ethereum hard forks work? Where in the unfortunate situation where either classic is $17 and a $15. I don't know, like, what's your question? I think it did. No, but it's a, it's a yes or no question, but you will have to give a reason because otherwise your answer makes no sense, no matter which way. Did the Ethereum hard forks work? I think they've had four, three of them work just fine. The fourth one actually split it. I mean, I don't know. And obviously there are a lot of other all coins that I've actually done. No, Jimmy, it's a hard question because I didn't actually explain what the word work means, right? So what does the word work mean? If you're an Ethereum co-founder that's sitting on 200,000 Ethereum and now you've just doubled your Ethereum that's viable on two forks, did that work for you? No freaking yes. Well, I'm not sure what it is that you're trying to gain out of it, but I mean, it totally depends on your investment goals and stuff like that. But it's also when they hard forked to get the money back from the Dow, they got the money back. So in that way it worked as well. Roger is on record several times saying that, well, the value of both Ethereum's together was bigger than the Ethereum before the fork, so it's a good thing. I mean, that's on a very short-term basis. I have no idea, right? And this has been my investment thesis that Bitcoin is mainly a store value. And if you change store value properties about Bitcoin, then that's going to punish the price. Whether or not I'm right, I have no idea. But as far as... Well, so there are other reasons that you would want to do a hard fork. For example, if there was some vulnerability found in Shot 256, that's certainly something that you're going to want to patch right away. Say the NSA gets some quantum computer that can do Shot 256 hashes and find feed images really easily. That's fine, but I know that would be contentious, right? I mean, we're talking about contentious hard forks. Right. Anything can even contentious soft forks kind of lead to hard forks. So, I mean... Right, but like the hard fork in 2013 was never contentious, so it wasn't a problem. Which one? The one in Ethereum? No, no. You'd pick that in 2013. People still say it wasn't really a hard fork and some people say that it was, but whether it wasn't a hard fork, it's kind of irrelevant because it wasn't contentious. Right. So, I mean, that's kind of the argument, right? Like if you are going to do a hard fork, presumably it would be something that wasn't contentious. And if everyone agreed on like two megabytes, for example, I don't think... I don't know if it would be go smoothly or not. Right. So, basically, the user activated soft forks side of the fork on August 1st actually has two options for a non-contentious hard fork. One of them would be a defensive hard fork to change a proof of work in order to prevent being... Why... Being basically shadow... You know what I mean, right? I think followers know what I mean already, right? So you do a proof of work change if you think that your blocks can be replaced, but by stealth mining by the legacy miners, right? So you can do a proof of work change and I do not see any contention in that hard fork on the soft fork side. Another non-contentious hard fork would be like you just said earlier and it'll take four days to find a block. Well, not if they hard fork and change the difficulty. Right. But, yeah, I mean, that's entirely possible. In fact, anyone can go do that right now, right? That's something that's available to anyone that wants it. The key though is I think there may be reasons other than ASIC boost that BitMain is holding out. My personal feeling is that it's really more about control and it's more about sort of having more of a say in the development process, which they really don't right now. And that maybe because they don't have any developers working on it. And you know, most of China, there's not people that are contributing to Bitcoin core. So. But to be honest, if they had developers working on it, people would get nervous and get the hell out because like you can't have this. This is why I'm like, this is why I point out that Roger Vier is trying to get his hands in every facet of Bitcoin. He's clearly involved in mining, especially since he wants to open up a cloud mining pool. He's always been involved in media by owning Bitcoin.com. He's involved in wallets by being one of the biggest investor in blockchain.info. He's literally involved in development though, if Bitcoin unlimited team gets anywhere near the code, which is what he wants. And I don't even know what else is left. The only thing that's left is an exchange. And then he'd also be in control of trading Bitcoin. There's nothing else there. Like if you have one person so involved in every facet of Bitcoin, I sure would hold any of it. I mean, it depends on what percentage of each study holds, right? Like it's, to me, it's fine if he has like one or two percent of every single thing. It doesn't matter. Yeah, but he clearly has way more than one percent of Bitcoin.com is 100%. I think it's a bigger problem with the miners writing the code. I think you worry a lot more when you have the same people writing the software as designing the hardware. There's much more chance for some kind of collusion. I'm not saying I know what kind, but if you were going to have a problem, that's where I think you'd have a problem. That's why I think there is a separation right now, which Jimmy says the miners are pulling away against. It's probably because it's best for everyone. But again, no one wants to stay with a deal that's best for everyone. They want more for their side. So I think we have a power play by the miners here. Yeah, and that seems to me like, and that's going to be the subject of my next article is sort of like this whole trust issue and sort of the games that are being played right now. And you know, you may say it's because, you know, it's in somebody's financial interest or this or that. I think that everybody in this game is playing the long game. They want control for the long term. And that's really the big, big point here is that this is a relatively small dispute, you know, like about SegWid or whatever, or two megabyte blocks. I know people make it out to be this giant deal. But as far as like the actual utility of Bitcoin doesn't actually matter all that much in my opinion, like the big, big value proposition for Bitcoin is that it's a great store of value. And whether or not you get SegWid or two megabyte blocks, it, you know, the store of value part stays mostly the same. And this is really sort of exploded and become a much, much larger issue in large part because, you know, you have these two conflicting, very dominating, very, they do groups that have been clashing for the last few years. And it sort of flared up on this particular thing, but it's kind of where it is. It's a tone is worried about Roger Vier. I'm more worried about digital currency group, not to say anything negative about them, but every article you read at CoinDesk says at the bottom, DCG is invested in CoinDesk, DCG is invested in Coinbase, in Kraken, in almost all the subject of the articles. And while I'm not saying that there's been any problems, it just looks really bad every time. It's a real, it's something that I've been seeing a lot in the world lately and I kind of want to be calling it out. So this is a good opportunity. There is a constant struggle and also a constant tension in analysis and perception between skin and the game and conflict of interest. But what are the situations where it's an advantage to somebody's argument or rhetoric that they are invested? And what are the situations where the fact that they're secretly invested or even openly invested is undermines or invalidates their opinions and their rhetoric or whatever trolling, information campaigns, propaganda, whatever you want to call it? And I think the truth is a spectrum and every situation is different. Sometimes skin and the game means that the fact that you're invested and it means that it's real and more true. And sometimes it means that you have a conflict of interest and your opinion should be thrown out. So I think that's a very delicate subject and to say, oh, because XYZ company is invested in XYZ propaganda or media outlet, they've got a moral issue or an ethical issue to overcome. Maybe not. It's a very complex issue, I find. It's not always easy to tear that apart and sometimes it's both. And that's to say nothing of double agents and even more complicated situations. Well let's try to move on to the exit question. UASF 148 149, Segwit plus two megabytes or status quo. How does Bitcoin scale in the next six months? Gabriel, Devon. As I said before, I think 148 is going to succeed. I think Jimmy's worries are logical, but they won't pan out. The Bit 148 side I think has far too much going for it and there's way too much fear on the other side. And I think it's going to win. Jimmy's on. I think status quo is most likely. I made that prediction way back in January 1st when I put my pin tweet up there and it's been that way for a while. It's possible that something else could happen and change things drastically. I would expect a lot of money to be involved if that's the case. I so far haven't seen the giant amount of money that would be required to change things in one direction or the other. Stickin' with the status quo, tone veys. I still believe it. Like we'll see what happens in July, but as of right now I still think the user activated software is starting to gain some momentum. And let's see what we can do with it. I still think I usually root for the underdog, so I'm going to stick with it. All right. And just like to thank our 435 viewers, thanks everybody for giving us a thumbs up and a share. This helps more people find the show. And thanks everybody for tuning in on this Friday afternoon. If you liked what we're talking about at the UASF and you want to learn more, check out my interview with Jimmy Song on the Mad Bitcoins channel where we talk all about the UAS F scenarios joined by tone veys. I also discuss the UASF and Bitcoin development with Bitcoin Core contribute to Erich Lombrozo. Subscribe now at madbittcoins.com. Thanks for your support. Issue 2. AMD Search. While the gaming market remains their first priority, shares of advanced micro devices more commonly known as AMD saw a 7% rise in the price of their stock. After announcing that digital currency prices have begun driving demand for their graphics cards, Jimmy Song recently we've seen Bitcoin and cryptocurrency breakthrough into the larger financial markets, featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and so forth because the price is up. But is this issue greater than it seems? Has Bitcoin mining and cryptocurrency broken through into hardware? Are we about to see a gold rush in mainstream Bitcoin and Ethereum mining? Well, first of all hardware manufacturing requires just a sick amount of money, especially chip manufacturing. You have to have right relationships with fabs, you have to have a design and you have to do tape out and all this other stuff. And it can be a very, very expensive endeavor. I did look into some of like AMD's financials recently. They had a revenue of $4.27 billion in 2016 and they managed to lose $500 million. And they actually, as far as I can tell, they haven't made money in a very long time. They're actually worse than Amazon in some way. So the fact that Bitcoin mining is actually trending upwards in terms of how much profit you could make, I'm sure is of interest to them. I wrote an article a while ago just how much money does BitNake? They make around $200 million in profits doing Bitcoin mining. AMD is losing $500 million and the amount of money that you can make completely depends on Bitcoin price. And I wrote that article like a month ago when prices were in the 1300s or something. So it's even more now. I imagine for somebody like AMD, they're paying attention largely because this can be like a path to profitability for them. It's $200 million now, maybe $400, $500 million with a recent price rise. You do another order of magnitude. That's their revenue for a whole year and that's in profit. It's a very ripe and juicy feel for a hardware manufacturer like that to get into. As far as the specific article, it was pointing to graphics cards which are like a poor man's ASIC. It just has a lot of processors in a GPU so you can do a lot of things in parallel. I imagine ASIC and FPGA seem a lot more likely going forward. The big boys are going to come into this space. It's inevitable. As Bitcoin prices go up, you have bigger entities coming in. You see that sort of hedge funds and things like that. Bigger else. The same thing on the hardware side. You're going to see some really big players coming in in the next six to 12 months, especially if the price goes up towards the moon. But what about this? Boil or alert? What happens if Ethereum switches to proof of stake as they have announced? Jimmy. Yeah. Ethereum is a little weird in what they're planning because it's really controlled by a very small group. It doesn't have a lot of the control issues that Bitcoin has. We were talking about in the last segment because really there's an Ethereum foundation that has a trademark to the name Ethereum. They can control it in whatever way. They have a development team back created that thing. The creator that's like, we'll be talking about him pretty soon. He basically sets the direction. Most all coins are like that. I like Charlie Lee or Litecoin. Fluffy Pony didn't create Monroe, but he tends to drive the development there. When you have one person that you can go to, that gives a certain amount of risk because you can't necessarily make these large investments because it's a lot more fickle. I don't know. Maybe they go bribe and say, please don't switch to proof of stake and we'll give you 5% of earnings or pay patent fees or something like that. Bitcoin is in the unique situation where people have an idea of what's going to happen. They know that it's not going to change very easily. While it's a disadvantage from the last segment, it's also an advantage for stuff like this. We have been talking about the potential downsides if Ethereum does shift to proof of stake, but we never talked about it being 7% of AMD's revenue. Tone Vays, your thoughts. No, I just think it's pretty cool. It's just nice to see Bitcoin in the mainstream. It's nice to see a real company getting involved. It would be nice to see if something like Intel starts getting into competing with BitMain maybe. I think it would be kind of good even though they would also need competition. I don't know if we'd want a single-US company that has connections to the US government. Be in control of Bitcoin hardware. But all kinds of competition is good. This is great. No, it's good. I remember one of my friends when I was first getting into Bitcoin 2013, he was all pissed off because he was trying to buy a graphics card for his computer to play video games and they were constantly sold out because of all of the Bitcoiners. He was getting really frustrated. I remember those talks he was like blaming me for. I wasn't even a fighter. But no, I don't really have much comment on it other than it's good to see. Jimmy had a lot of summed it up with some of the numbers. I think it's great especially if they bring some competition. It would be nice if AMD started developing some really efficient graphics cards. Maybe they'll be able to find a way to compete with the A6. I don't know. But I don't think the graphics cards really do much for Bitcoin. It's more like mining something like Litecoin and then sell it for Bitcoin or other screw coins. I don't really think anyone's mining Bitcoin with GPUs anymore. It would be nice to see them getting into actual A6. That would be awesome. I'm not sure what the specifics would be. But I'd love to see Intel or AMD add a little chip to the motherboard just for mining Bitcoin, just for running a node, something like this. It would just go in the background and then everyone just runs one. Gabriel, divine your thoughts on hardware and Bitcoin. I don't think what you just said is going to happen because especially with portable hardware, battery usage at the utmost and in most places in the world, especially most people buying chips from AMD and Intel, you mine at a loss. Any future satoshi you're going to make joining a mining pool with that chip is going to be worth less than the electricity you paid for to charge the battery or that you're paying for. It is true. We are seeing a fleet flight from two tablets and two laptops. No one really has a desktop with extra power anymore. So it is kind of a pipe dream perhaps. Yeah. And that was something that maybe satoshi didn't see coming. I'm not sure. In any case, I think it's amazing and fantastic that AMD is getting into this. But I will say, I've been involved in the space for over four years and I've been surprised at how few people have climbed on to Bitcoin. And I guess it's just this typical thing of a brand new technology and so many different previously separate elements that were kind of smashed together into this field. And it takes a bit of a generalist and technology knowledgeable person to understand what's going on with Bitcoin. So I guess I understand, but it's been hard for me and somebody like Edward, Renegade investor UK who's been making these videos. He has a day job with finance guys and he's just like, none of these guys get it. And he's just making these videos like, oh my god, this is the most undervalued asset even now after 10X rise over the last 18 months. So I'm surprised that AMD and Intel haven't been in this field. Yeah, I know that it's only been one to five to 10% as large as there are the business. But now it's getting to be, you know, possibly 10% as big as Jimmy pointed out. And you know, that's a serious market that you need to jump on early. I wouldn't be surprised if they have been doing some research behind the scenes before they make any announcements. But I mean, they're way behind the curve. If they're just like reacting to the fact that a bunch of altcoin miners are buying their graphics gear instead of like, you know, designing some ASICs behind the scenes. But once again, as Jimmy also pointed out, they've been taking a loss. It's not like they have a bunch of extra capital to do R&D for supposedly up and coming fields. In my opinion, this is a growing field. They should have been making ASICs two years ago. And they're really late on the ball. I have a feeling that distributed systems like Bitcoin and altcoins and made safe will next decade form the bulk of chip manufacturers volume sales one. What do you think it was that scared them off, Gabe? Do you think it was the silk road that could cause them a problem? Early on Bitcoin was commonly associated with drug money. If Intel and AMD saw themselves as running the virtual underground drug market through their machines, would that have turned them off at a corporate level? Now, I think it is just a pure projection issue where the risk was they deemed the risk too high that the market might flag for many years. We're watching the Bitcoin mining hash rate just skyrocket for months and months and months, even when the price was stable, the hash rate was going up like a percent every two weeks. That's huge. That's a really big growth market. And lately, it's been four and five and six percent every two weeks, every difficulty adjustment. The mining rate is just skyrocketing. They didn't want to take the risk and invest what there are, the R&D and all the sales and all the time that it takes to invest in an ecosystem that's so much smaller than the commercial GPU market, the AI market, the data center market and consumer electronics markets or just standard hardware that they're already producing. For example, the AI market was a no-brainer for them because they're already producing the GPUs that uses the precisely the same hardware, whereas Asics are custom hardware. It's still only in the six digits, excuse me, eight digits, nine digits level. That's only now that they're finally taking notice. I think it was just a matter of risk where they didn't want to take the risk that just in case the ecosystem wasn't going to grow beyond. This is what I don't understand. If you actually do a market analysis in 2014 or 2015 and know what the heck you're looking at, you're going to see, oh my God, the earlier I get in on this, I could get such a head start and it's going to be hundreds of billions of dollar industry really soon. I think that they're late to the game and they just didn't want to take the risk. It also seems like they could have made an investment in one of the existing minor players and maybe even had some claims to their intellectual property when they do decide to go perfect. Perfect. Yeah, that would have been such a smart move, but they just don't have the capital as Jimmy pointed out. Well, that's too based. Oh, sorry, Jimmy. Good. Just wanted to point out that when you talked about having a chip inside pretty much everything that does Asic mining, that was actually 21.cos. Just model that doubt. And I imagine that like a lot of these other players like Andy and Intel that were looking at the space realized, well, there's a startup doing this. We're not going to be able to devote as much time as somebody like 21. Now I don't know where they are with their hardware, but that's the lucrative charge people to send you email market. That's good stuff. Yeah, not sure where they are right now, but that would be interesting to find out. I imagine that prevented at least some people. I thought that was a good idea too. I was interested in it, but they didn't seem to adopt it in their actual practice beyond the $300 21 Bitcoin machine, which was pretty critically savage. Let's move on to the exit question. The elephant in the room, when will Intel enter the cryptocurrency mining market, Jimmy saw him. Well, there's three big players in the chip fab, sort of like manufacturing industry. It's AMD, Intel, and Samsung. I believe that one more order of magnitude for the price rise in Bitcoin and all three are in. And they have huge chip fabs. They know it's a huge opportunity. Money makes everyone pay attention. As much as people hate on Bitmain or whatever, they figured some stuff out. That Intel, AMD, and Samsung know. So I think people should be cheering for those three guys to get in as quickly as possible, because that will decentralize mining like nobody else because it's going to make Asics plentiful and it will be very profitable for everybody involved. It's funny. I'm picturing the old BitPay convention booth. It said Bitcoin all over it. I'm picturing a Samsung lounge next to it, and an Intel lounge, and an AMD lounge, and they all have cool chairs. Is this our future tone vase? I'm going to, I think I'm going to go a little bit further than Jimmy. I'm going to say around this time next year. So I'm going to go towards the summer of 2018. And I don't know if Bitcoin will be doubled in the value by then. It really depends on what happens in August. But I do expect Bitcoin to be fairly high valued. But I think around this time next year, we'll be talking about them as trying to get their feet wet in this space. Gabriel, divine. Yeah, I'm in agreement with Tony about that. I think in the years time that we're going to start to see maybe some pilots, some prototype hardware coming out, but wouldn't be surprised if we see announcements from Intel in less than a year. I expect the Bitcoin price to be up in the five figures. But I don't think that it will have the value of what we think of as five years now. I think we're going to see some very strange currency times. I think we're headed for extreme stagflation over the next 12 months. So I don't think we're going to have the value of 6x, but we may have the price of 6x. In any case, it'll be enough for all the players to get involved, including Samsung, maybe not within a year, but I bet Intel and AMD will be making ASICs designing in the next 12 months and manufacturing them around that time. Yeah, next summer. And I think we are going to see that. We're going to see crypto mining as one of the main use cases of processors worldwide. And I'd like to just give Andrea Sampin, and Tenoppolo, as a shout out, because he's been talking about the race to the physical limits of chip technology for a long time, because we went really fast from commercial CPU to through GPUs to ASICs. And finally, we hit the state of the art limit at some point. I don't know what I think it was last year, maybe earlier this year. And now things are going to, he and a lot of other people are predicting a further, that mining centralization has hit a peak or is in the process of peaking right now, and that we're headed toward a more democratized or evened out playing field where everyone has access to high quality hardware. And yeah, it's conceivable. I don't know. When it comes to power and hardware and even labor to an extent, economies of scale still operate. So I'm sure there will be some centralization going on. The answer is Intel will enter the market within the next six months. But unfortunately, the chips will be defined for Ethereum, unless they go proof of stake, which seems like quite a mistake. Moving on to issue three, Ethereum Roundup. Ethereum creator Vitalik Booter and met with Vladimir Putin, who is suddenly a fan of blockchain, despite even Booter and explaining that it will be difficult and actually impossible to stop anonymous transactions on cryptocurrency networks. Meanwhile, Singapore is creating a digital version of its currency recently tested by banks in interbank transfer on a private version of the Ethereum network. Tom Vays, Will Ethereum, Continuous Breakout, become an international darling, the blockchain for the banks, a socially acceptable version of Bitcoin, one Ethereum to rule them all. Oh, man. These stories are like painful to me. Look, I don't understand like neither of them. They don't make any sense to me. Let's start with Singapore. The article was fairly clear in that they're not using the Ethereum token. They couldn't care less about the Ethereum token. What they did is they took the open source code and then they created a digital dollar on top of it that they controlled the supply of it. There's no mining. There's no Ethereum token. What they're doing is using the code which may be useful, may not be useful. It really depends who's advising these people. If you have a bunch of investors in Ethereum advising all these people, then yeah, they're going to sell them a bunch of bullshit. I like that's never happened before. There's not much else I can say about Singapore. Let's talk about the Vitalik and Putin story. This makes no freaking sense to me. Why on earth would Putin or something like Ethereum considering it has a currency component which is like the Bitcoin currency component that the Russian government doesn't seem to like, but Ethereum has the same feature that people use it as a feature. It makes absolutely no sense. If Russia plans to build on top of Ethereum, oh man, I feel so bad for Vitalik because when that sucker forks and implodes, now is this who you want looking for Putin because you fucked up something in the Russian government. This can get really bad. On the flip side, if I was Vitalik, what I would be negotiating with Putin is Edward Snowden type of deal so that when the SEC tries to find them and arrest them, at least Vitalik can run away to Russia and hide out. Those are just my general thoughts on a situation, but I haven't had time to read the articles. I don't know the details, but personally, I don't see how this can possibly end the way. It's strange bedfellows with Vitalik and Vladimir. Gabriel, divine your thoughts. First of all, I'd like to give my initial impression which is, oh my god, what reality are we even in right now? I mean, okay, you can say, we bash Ethereum a lot on the show, etc. But I mean, what? Vitalik meets Vladimir Putin, possibly the most influential man on the political scene today. Probably more influential than Trump. More powerful than Trump. He's far more implanted in the world scene. He's been doing machinations for 20 years. I mean, geez, or more. What the hell? It's so weird and so bizarre that I have to think that it probably means a lot less than any of us would assume. We're talking about, he's at some technology summit. His aid came in and told him about this. New technology, the thing that's big coin invented and other people are doing weird other experiments. There's this Russian Canadian kid who made this thing and it's also taking off. Maybe it's better for us because then we can pressure him to do things because it's less decentralized. So we should maybe throw our way behind this guy and it's just kind of a throw away thing that he just found himself at. But we have no idea. It could be the complete opposite where Putin is like, oh, this sounds awesome. Now we can stick it to the US by having this, you know, some blockchain stuff and really hasten the collapse of the dollar by, you know, helping out this other project. I have the feeling that the truth somewhere in between where maybe Russia wants to do some private blockchain stuff using a fork and they gave Vitaluk some lip service so that he'll maybe be encouraged to keep developing things so that they can steal. And maybe they'll kick him down some development money or something for, you know, some custom features on their private fork, you know, something like that. But it's pretty crazy. I do definitely feel that when I look at the Bitcoin price, when I look at the Ethereum price, we've entered a new sort of realm this year in the world. And this space is a lot, you know, it's suddenly 10 or 100 times more important than it used to be. So we're going to see a lot more sort of link ups with, you know, power brokers in the world. And I have a feeling that we will soon then eclipse them. And we're going to look at Putin like a, like a has been and it'll be Erick Lombrozo and Jimmy and, you know, Miersher Popscu and, you know, Frick and Coinbase or digital currency group. These are going to be the big power brokers in the world and we're going to kind of laugh when we look at, you know, Tury Simei or Duterte. I do agree, Gabe. The simplest explanation is probably that Vladimir Putin just wanted to meet a Russian inventor. He's a young kid. He's a rising star. They had a little handshake and that's fine. But the problem is is that I don't even think that Putin is smart. I think he's cagey. I think he's a step above smart. He's always five moves ahead down the chessboard. And I don't know what he's up to, but I would keep an eye on him. And like you're saying, I'd be very careful if I was vitalic about signing a deal with the devil because you just never know how that deal is going to change in the future. Jimmy Song, your thoughts on the Ethereum meeting. Yeah, so I have a slightly different take than these guys. I will say that what you just said is probably fact there's in a lot. Vitalik is obviously of Russian origin and he's Russian ethnically. So he wanted Vladimir Putin probably wanted to meet him for some reason. You have to remember that pretty much every country in the world wants financial sovereignty, but they can't get it because the US and Europe pretty much control a lot of the financial system around the world. And there's a Russian central bank, but there's like sanctions and things like that. And that has to be incredibly frustrating for somebody like Vladimir Putin, who's trying to sell the gas from his country overseas. And they don't like something that he's doing. So they shut off his accounts on their network and they can't get paid for the gas that he's providing and things like that. And saying same for Singapore, right? They're sort of like the US and Europe pretty much control a large amount of global commerce because of banking systems that they have. So it seems to me like what Russia and Singapore and a lot of these countries will eventually end up doing is have their central banks. They want to sort of maintain a central bank and all the different things that you need to do. And having a digital currency equivalent is going to be a lot easier to track, a lot easier to control, a lot easier to determine the monetary policy of or to figure out track where the money is going and things like that. So I mean, from a central bankers point of view, from sort of a country's leader point of view, having something like a blockchain, your currency makes all kinds of sense because it's a lot faster, it's a lot easier to manage. It doesn't reach those that are probably sticking their hand in the cookie jar and taking like giant cuts of money and like providing political favors. There's an attractiveness to doing that sort of thing. So I believe that there's at least some component of that in him meeting the teleputer and probably just to get some advice. Hey, we want to design something like this. What are some things? I mean, maybe he didn't talk about it in that specific way. But I mean, I can't imagine there being a central bank that's reasonably large, not thinking about digital currency in some way, shape, or form. And you know, it's just scary a little bit, right? Because if you do have a coin that's completely digital, that the government controls, that they control the supply of and doing all sorts of things with it, that they can track and they know exactly who has what and all that stuff, that's kind of a nightmare scenario, right? It's Bitcoin turned bad. All the good properties of Bitcoin suddenly become sort of like properties that the state can control. But that's coming. You know, like Bitcoin is a force for good, but it's also sort of given weapons to the enemy as well. Central banks are going to be using this technology. It's coming and it's going to be sort of a massive loss of privacy in some ways for a lot of people that are a part of these governments. So you know, I mean, while this is just sort of like a nice story about the talent meeting of Vladimir Putin or whatever, I think there's a there's so many things that I think are so many more geopolitical considerations to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general that we really have to consider when thinking about the future because you know, this stuff is going to you know, change our lives in more ways than we can even imagine. It's a good note, Jimmy. And I usually think about Bitcoin. If it all rise, it could free individuals from financial stress people like myself, we have credit card bills, etc., etc. But if you really think about it, the entire world is in one way or other, especially smaller countries being held down by world bank and other loans that in some cases, they don't even have the currency to pay back. So if you had something like a cryptocurrency, you could create your own money and suddenly create a bunch of value, perhaps you could suddenly pay back one of these essentially impossible to pay back loans. Well, that's not another comment on that. Printing up a bunch of crypto coins doesn't create value. It's not any different than selling bonds. I mean, you're basically asking people to lend you money so that you can pay borrow from Peter to pay Paul. So it's not necessarily a better idea than, I got to push back on this because that's what every ICO is doing right now. That's what every altcoin is doing right now. All they're doing is printing money. They're not printing money. They're making tokens and selling them to people who buy those tokens from them. The money doesn't exist until the other people buy it and buy into it. So they're using persuasion. Maybe it's like a lot of people doing it like government bonds and if these countries printed government crypto, they could earn the money and then it's not me that gets to pay off. It's the world bank. So yeah, they're going to get kind of an empty bag. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So I just, it's maybe a subtle point. But I wanted to say that to what Jimmy was saying where I wouldn't be surprised at all if the world bank or governments use the blockchain to private blockchains to issue their own national or international currencies. I am really looking forward to that day because I can't wait to see those currencies compete against Bitcoin on world markets. It's going to be hilarious. And again, it sounds like a great deal to me if I can buy a car and give them a handful of magic beans. That sounds great. Tones, your thoughts on all this. All right. Did my start this discussion? I think you did. So let's ask you the exit question. Will the Ethereum market cap rise above Bitcoin in the next six months? I'm going to say no, but it's possible. I look, anything's possible. I mean, this insanity has no bounds. Gabriel D. Vine. I'm going to say no. I do think that Ethereum, the Ethereum scam has quite a few, quite a bit of legs to go. I think it might take a few years before the tax surface catches up with the ecosystem. So I'm going to say Bitcoin will outstrip Ethereum in the next six months, probably by double or quadruple. Jimmy, so I have no clue. I really do feel like they're different use cases though. Bitcoin is mainly store of value. Ethereum seems to be sort of a token platform where that's the main value proposition for people these days. They're buying Ethereum so they can get into these ICOs. Whether or not that's sustainable is a big question to me. Eddie once said there's a sucker born every minute. So it's possible that the supply of suckers is inexhaustible and these ICOs that seem to do nothing continue to get funded, but who knows. It's really hard to tell. I do feel like there's a crash coming at some point, whether or not that happens in the next year or the next three weeks or the next, I have no idea. But tools of the two coins seem different. So I can't predict whether or not. I'm afraid that it will and while I would like to say that it won't stay up there, I'm afraid that it will to moving on to issue four Bitcoin bubble. The price of Bitcoin is risen rapidly, breaking all time highs and threatening the $3,000 level market watch attempts to understand Bitcoin by creating a price per earnings ratio based upon Bitcoin's daily transaction volume. Is this a proper way to judge Bitcoin and is Bitcoin in a bubble? How high will it go before it pops? Gabriel, Devon. So Thomas, tell me, I didn't actually get a chance to see this article. Are they calculating it from the transaction volume in Bitcoins per day? Or in the fees paid or what? I think they're trying to judge it based upon usage. So if a lot of people are using Bitcoin, then it's more valuable and if less people are using it, it's less valuable. And are they pegging that to the dollar or are they just keeping it on Bitcoin? Because a thousand Bitcoins a minute traded in 2010 and a thousand Bitcoins traded a minute in 2017 is quite a different proposition. It seems like they're just calling it a network value based upon the daily transaction volume. So I just thought it was kind of a simplistic way and more of a purchases way than a store of value. Let me just get in here real quick. Yeah, I also didn't have a chance to read that article, but if they're using exchange volume, that's meaningless. They have to use on-chain transactions. Oh, yeah, no. I think that's what it is. It's the blockchain. I think it's probably the value going through the blockchain daily. So you just add up the entire amount of Bitcoins that were moved back and forth over the chain for the 24 hours on all those blocks. And then maybe I think you would want to translate that into a more stable unit of account like the dollar in order to really sort of judge it. But I think it's a okay metric. I think it's a useful metric in general to use it as the entire basis for your network value is probably way oversimplified. But it's not bad. You look at the thing you say, okay, it's a billion dollars a day. That's pretty cool. And then divide that by whatever market cap or what are they doing with the transaction volume? Just looking at it and charting it. They're mainly just looking at it. I think that I just looked at it and I thought it was incredibly simplistic because it didn't take into store of value. If you just store your value in Bitcoin and don't move it around, you don't show up in this chart at all. Yeah. I think it's kind of like a typical Keynesian, this sort of central banking power era of legacy finance where they think that liquidity and velocity of money is everything. And saving is nothing. And that whole paradigm is for such a big collapse, this transformation into crypto and into sound money is going to be like whiplash for all these people that just don't understand that stuff. So I think in that sense, it's completely wrong and that's a really good point. I think judging Bitcoin as a payment platform, that would be the most useful initial metric to use. But as you pointed out, that's a huge oversipification. And it's going to be great to watch those analyses fall apart when we get payment channels because it'll be completely dark. You won't have any idea what's going where and you'll just have to, as we all do, rely on price as the main useful signal in markets. I was just really surprised by the article because while I have seen it go up really fast and that usually denotes a bubble, when I looked at their actual analysis for it, I thought that they were going kind of with a traditional company analysis attempting to fit Bitcoin into an existing box rather than seeing it as this multi variant, multi functional currency type instrument, which it is. So I just don't think that these simplistic tools are going to be successful. Even though yes, they do get it down to a number and they watch the number go up and down in the chart and then they can make their predictions based upon that. I just thought it was far too simplistic. Jimmy Song, your thoughts on market watches, price per earnings for Bitcoin? I mean, the idea of price per earning for a crypto kind of seems dumb to me, but I mean nobody's really come up with any other way to measure intrinsic value for Bitcoin. I'm not really even sure there is an intrinsic value for Bitcoin. It seems sort of like, I think somebody wants to describe currency as like the bubble that never pops. So it's a little bit strange. It's kind of a strange article. It's an interesting article that makes you think so in that way it's good. But yeah, I mean right now it seems like there's a lot of people coming into this space, so maybe you can measure that and come up with some sort of measure, how you so. Yeah, I mean, I will say that there's a big surge of people right now and money coming in. Some institutional investors are starting to come in. Lot of hedge fund managers are coming in, though not their funds, which is very interesting to me. Yeah, I mean, I imagine Bitcoin's going higher as a result. I'm not sure if this is the right metric, but who knows, I've been wrong before. So, don't forget, investment house or hedge fund, the point is to make money for the people that work there, not necessarily for the funds. So if they saw something like Bitcoin early, I'm sure they buy it for themselves. Let's go to tone vase, your thoughts on this. Well, you know what, there was a metric there that I would like to see. I would actually love to see how many bitcoins are being transferred on chain over time adjusted for Bitcoin's inflation rate. That would tell me a couple of things, right? If we're way more bitcoins are moving on chain now, which they kind of are, but adjusted for the inflation, that would kind of show you how the Bitcoin activity has increased over time. But, and here's the big one. Back in the day, when people were sending, you know, a thousand Bitcoin to each other, you want to see how much of that Bitcoin is now locked away and hasn't moved. And you want to factor that out of the equation, right? That said, the days destroyed, you're talking about tone. Right. So, I think there is neat math to be done there. I don't know what it means quite yet until looking at the numbers. So, that's kind of cool. But, I'm going to talk about the Bitcoin bubble, which was also what they talked about. I do not think Bitcoin is in a bubble. In fact, and I'm about to break the news on this show because clearly we're breaking the record here, where we got like 550 viewers. 544. Oh, all right. Almost a 550. Okay. So, here's my view. And I've thought about this for the last couple of days. And I'll talk about it way more on my economic channel. And I don't want to put the exchanges on the spot yet. But I honestly think that Bitcoin price is about to shoot up. And here's why. People are getting nervous for August 1st. I know Jimmy isn't, but some of us are. Okay. And you have to be crazy to keep your Bitcoin on an exchange. And exchanges aren't saying shit. And they don't have to say anything yet, but in about three weeks, the exchanges are going to have to say exactly what they plan to do about August 1st. In the meantime, you have to be not so to keep your Bitcoin on any exchange going into August 1st, unless you're literally a new. So, what does that mean? That means people are going to buy their Bitcoin on an exchange. And they're going to move that Bitcoin the hell out of there. So, that means the global Bitcoin supply out for sale is going to significantly shrink. And when you have a shortage in supply, any kind of demand can shoot the price through the roof. And you'll have these instances when the price would like go to 4,000 in Bitcoin probably next month. Maybe this is my speculation. And then someone says, holy shit, I want to sell. I don't want to, I'm scared about the user activity it's so forth. They will then move their Bitcoin to the exchange. They would sell it. But whoever is buying that Bitcoin is again, I must not person is totally nuts. He would immediately, he would buy it off the exchange and he would move that Bitcoin back into his own private key. Once again, constricting the supply of Bitcoin out for sale on the exchange. Now, this greatly affects the OTC market. Because these people are going to the OTC markets with a suitcase of $100,000, $200,000 or a bank wire. They have no idea how this should works on the exchange. They're just telling some guy, hey, here's $100,000, get the Bitcoin. These OTC dealers now go to the exchanges that have a constricted supply. Because again, you have to be a complete idiot to keep your Bitcoin on an exchange going into a fork. And I think there will be a huge contraction of the amount of Bitcoin in circulation on exchanges. And that can make the price shoot all the way up. And then it's going to be interesting as hell. That's just my current speculation. I kind of really thought about it this morning and I'm like, wow, that actually makes sense. So I am as bullish right now on the price of Bitcoin as I've been at any point this year, even with the greater the uncertainty going into August 1st, the more bullish I become on Bitcoin because who the hell is going to keep their Bitcoin on an exchange? Anyway, those are just my random thoughts. What does August 2nd look like in that scenario if everything blows over? Probably a crash? Big correction, sudden correction. Probably a sound correction. But on the flip side, if August 1st isn't to blow over, if August 1st, up to August 11th, I've adjusted my astrology date to August 11th. I will talk about from August 14th, August 11th. I'll explain that on my show next time I talk about it. But if we have a stalemate, and no one knows what the hell is going on, then no one is moving any Bitcoin and it's even a bigger supply shortage, which can again move Bitcoin even higher, which creates all kinds of game theory scenarios of holy shit Bitcoin prices going up. I guess the like the US government shutdown is a good thing. I don't know. It will be interesting, but right now I am very, very bullish. We can only hope that Mercury isn't in retrograde. Let's move on to the exit question, the price of Bitcoin this time next week. Higher or lower, let's go to Gabriel D. Vaughn. Oh, hmm. Higher or lower next week. That's a tough one. I think we're in the late spring doldrums right now, recovering from the massive, massive rise. And I think everybody's just kind of like holding their breath and they haven't figured out what tone just told us. Yeah. And so maybe I'm going to say flat 2800. Jimmy saw. Well, for about the last three months or so, the price of Bitcoin and my follower count on Twitter has tracked very closely. And whenever Bitcoin prices above my follower count, it tends to drop. And whenever the price is below my follower count, it tends to go up right now. I have 2968 followers. So that means that I am going to go with what's what's worked for a few months. That means price is going up and tone. I wish I can say that because then Bitcoin would be pushing like 11 and a half thousand dollars. One day, one day the price of Bitcoin will reach my number of Twitter followers. It's not going to be next week, but I think we will be on the way there. So I think we're going to be higher and I think we're going to be above 3000 at this time next week. All right, all time highs. Let's move on to prediction or story of the week. I'd like to thank our 575 viewers for sticking with us. Gabriel D. Vaughn, do you have a prediction or a story of the week? In my stories of the week, I often talk about BitSquare, the decentralized peer to peer client side Bitcoin and Altcoin and Fiat Exchange software, which is in beta. It's got some flaws, but it's a really great start, great UX. I really respect the leader of the project, Manfred Carrer. My announcement is that I will be interviewing Manfred on my show Futurant right here on the World Crypto Network. Keep an eye out for that. Probably not for a few weeks, but they are doing a token sale of some type. So I'm also announcing that I'll be researching the DAO that they're creating in support of the BitSquare software. And considering how Manfred has run his project so far, which is completely open source, totally decentralized. It's not a corporation. I'm hoping that the DAO model and how it's constructed is extremely fair and equitable and most of all ethical. So I'll be reporting back on that and talking about it with Manfred on the show. So keep an eye out for Manfred Carrer on Futurant. That's good stuff. You can subscribe to the World Crypto Network right here to watch that show when it comes up. Jimmy Song, prediction or story of the week. My story of the week this week are two famous people that talked about Bitcoin, Mark Cuban and Jim Kramer. Now it's clear that both of them don't know all that much about Bitcoin. Bubble, Jim Kramer said that ransomware could take Bitcoin to resource something to that effect. But the actual story isn't what they said isn't that important. The point is that Bitcoin is now really going mainstream. And one thing we know about sort of new tech going mainstream is that it is always sort of slanted badly by the current players. For example, when microwaves were first introduced, people were being scared. People were scared by everybody else saying, hey, they take out all the nutritional value of whatever you microwave. When electricity was first introduced, people were saying you could die. And I know it would start fires. When internet was first introduced, everyone said it's for porn. And is it for anything useful? When mobile phones were first introduced, people were saying you're going to get cancer. And then you're going to have, you know, like, you know, areas in your brain are going to get affected. That's just how people react to new technology that they don't know. The fact that these people are talking about it tells me that we're in a very good situation. And Bitcoin is growing up. That is my story. Hey, especially, especially good to hear Kramer talk about it because he was very critical of it years ago for quite a long time. Don't go ahead. Hey, Jimmy, what did Mark Cuban actually say because I, I'm in my own bubble these days. So he tweeted that Bitcoin is in a bubble. Bitcoin went down a few hundred dollars and then went right back up. Yeah, and people thought I did love the articles where they said that that Mark Cuban caused the collapse. I'm not sure what that was based on, but yeah, they said that. Sorry, good. Jimmy, Tom. I was just curious because I didn't know what what Cuban said. All right. So. Oh, it was fine. Like you mentioned about the internet. So I recently saw a funny tweet. So I can't thought they credit for it where someone said when the internet first came out, I mean, if we all remember a wall is the messenger, right? I mean, I think we're all about the same age. I was still in high school and they said, hey, so when the internet first came out, everyone would say, no, don't talk to strangers. You might then go outside and get into a stranger's car. And now we're building apps to literally do that to help people get from place to place, which I thought was actually. Hilarious comparison. But okay, so my story of the week is going to be on a personal nature. After years and years of being a Bitcoin maximalist, that label is now in question because tone based now accepts a light coin donations. I still have not have not actually gone out and converted any of my Bitcoin to light coin. So don't panic yet. But because Bitcoin is a little bit difficult these days to be used as micro payments. I've been getting like a lot of, you know, support for accepting like coin donations. Also, you know, a lot of not a lot, but, you know, some trolling, some fun, some some actual trolling. Look, people are getting creative with their trolling. So yeah, so that's actually my story of the week that I may have broken a cardinal rule. And I have added a light coin donation addresses to my videos. So there you go. So if you ever wanted to get me to be more interested in altcoins, here's your chance. Feel free to donate and light coin. Let's all troll tone by giving him a million dollars in light coin and making him suffer the consequences. My story of the week is a side project I've been working on. You can check it out at mycuriocards.com. These are digital trading cards on the Ethereum blockchain. This week's cards are cryptography cards and all proceeds from the sales of these cards go directly to the artist. So if you'd like to support cryptography and you have a little bit of Ethereum, you can send it to the vending machine here. And it'll send you back a card automatically to your address. If you use my ether wallet, you need to use a software you hold your own private keys to make sure you can get these tokens. But if you want to try them out there at mycuriocards.com. And I haven't been promoting it much, but I just wanted to mention these are cryptography cards and all the proceeds go to the artist. So thank you for supporting artists with curio cards. And we had 587 viewers right now. I almost want to keep going and have a whole nother show and do all the questions and answers. But I haven't looked at the chat yet. I imagine it's scrolling at a mile a minute. We had some exciting trolls in there earlier. So I'm curious to see how that social experiment turned out in the little section of the chat that it saves for me. But thanks so much to everyone for watching. Subscribe to World Crypto Network. Subscribe to Mad Biccon. Subscribe to a tone based channel. Get those economic updates. And thanks to Jimmy and Gabriel for being on the show. And we're out of time. Until next time. Bye. Bye. Bye.