The Bitcoin Group, the American original. For over the last 10 seconds, this sharpest Satoshi's, the best Bitcoin's, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Blake Anderson, cryptographic economist. Hey, everybody, thanks for having me. Gabriel D. Vaughan from Future Rant. Hey, everybody, thanks for having me. Tom Vays from Liberty Life Trail. Hey, everyone. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network, reminding you to give us a thumbs up and a share so that more people will see this video. Moving on to issue one. Issue one. Who controls Bitcoin? The issue is not bigger blocks. The issue is not transaction-moneyability. The issue is not as-inclused. The issue is control. Who controls Bitcoin? Is Bitcoin a science project with peer-reviewed open source code adopted by a learned consensus? Or is Bitcoin a business consortium with its decision made from the top down in a boardroom? Blake Anderson. Well, obviously, I mean, from an economic and sociological perspective, all of the best things that have ever happened have been totally top down and then enforced by violence. If the top down approach doesn't work by, you know, illustrating a superior value proposition than you have to have, you know, violence. So I think that we should consider solidarity here and the fact that, you know, proletariat crops will not compete and we should plant them really, really, really close together. And we should just rely on the top down approach to be completely altruistic and create good things. No, I mean, the opposite is true. Top down things are not, you know, very competitive by definition in terms of free market competition. And we want to have open source competition of ideas and meritocracy so that we can create higher arcies of just competence, of justly anointed competence. So I was watching Jordan Peterson. He was talking about how you want, you know, you don't want equality of outcome. You want equality of opportunity. And then the difference in that outcome can be measured in, are you an expert brain surgeon? If so, I want you to remove, you know, a tumor from my father's brain. But if my father has a brain tumor and there is no, you know, credible, you know, hierarchies of expertise, that's not good. So I think that you can take that same information and apply it to Bitcoin. Do we want to have, you know, meritocracy and open source software development and have users communicate with the developers what they want and then have that stuff, you know, take off. Or do we want, you know, a small centralized rich people to manipulate the protocol to what best suits them? And I think it's a very, very, very clean, clear answer to users in terms of we want bottom up, you know, tenable development of this thing. There's way too much value that's going around in a live, you know, value transfer system to start a monkey and around with, you know, top down stuff and not having the true open source development that made it great. So I'm kind of more of the, you know, free market kind of a cipher punk person. And I think that that's a lot of what gives the value to this new system that really, really, really instantiates these ideals and software. And there's not a whole lot of other places to go to really get this same value proposition of cipher punk ideals that are instantiated in a code. There's just nowhere else to get it. So I think that that is a strong value proposition. And I think that that's what keeps Bitcoin valuable. And I think that Bitcoin will continue in that direction. And then people are thinking, you know, it's going to split off. Is it not going to not split off? I personally think that it won't split. But if it does, I personally think that the value system, which holds on to the ideas of decentralization, individualism, it's going to do much better in the long run because I think that economically, those are the things that drive, you know, categorically superior ideas. Gabriel, Devon, have the passengers taken over the plane? The passengers. No, I would say the crew is trying to take over the plane from the tower and entire sort of union of pilots. Let's say the stewardesses are trying to take over the plane from the anyways. Hey Gabe, Gabe, let me help you. Let me help you. Yeah, please. It feels like the pilots want to take over the job of the engineers that have built the plane for them. Yeah, the pilots are down in the prepare terminal, telling the technicians how to do their job, even though they've never looked at the guts of a plane in their lives and only know how to use it from the cockpit. Yeah, you know, this is a highly entertaining process of an attempted coup of a decentralized free open source software project that is really hilarious and entertaining to watch, not only because it's completely doomed from the start and has absolutely no chance of succeeding because it all has to be done in harsh, disinfecting sunlight, but also because the actual processes are so incredibly weak. I was expecting by now, I got them to become four years ago, and I was expecting by now that they would have much more sophisticated attacks and much more subtle back doors and the code and like, you know, maybe, I don't know, kidnap and Greg Maxwell something. But we're just seeing this sort of shouting into the void from these complete idiots. I mean, you know, I think that they're all blackmailed or brined into this situation because I think a lot of these people actually aren't nearly as stupid as they are coming across. They're technique to try to subvert and take over the Bitcoin code ecosystem is just really laughable. And I want to point everybody to Alex B on Twitter, right, it's an occasional article, but his tweets are really excellent. He's got a picture of himself. You'll know it's the right guy because he's got a picture of himself eating a popsicle. And this is the open source software development for everybody. You just, you don't even know who anybody is. It's, you know, it's Cypherpunk City. Anyways, Alex B. Hey, it's the popsicle guy. It's popsicle guy with a leather coat, brown leather coat, I think, anyways. So he created this great tweet storm. It was actually kind of a distilled version of this medium post that went into great detail about how exactly one makes a proposal to Bitcoin, the Bitcoin open source software development ecosystem, otherwise known as the core developer ecosystem. This is not a group of people. These are just all the people who have ever contributed to the Bitcoin code base. And he made a great analogy to the early days of the worldwide web. About five years after the web had been designed and proposed, in the early 90s, there was a corporate ecosystem that was very concerned about monetizing this technology. And rightly so. I mean, as we see, you know, at TCPIP, the internet and the worldwide web are extremely thin protocols over which you can build a lot of businesses. And as we've seen the e-commerce and other business over the internet is huge. So they were naturally attempting to direct things for their benefit. Unfortunately for them, the ITF group that's somewhat analogous to the Bitcoin code apps today, fought back. They realized that the changes that these corporate sharks wanted to make onto the worldwide web would be vastly curtailing to the general populace and prevent regular people from jumping on the network and creating it will and participating. And they fought really hard. And it was kind of a turning point, I believe it was 92 or 3, when the tide began really shifting against the corporate people because the users recognized that these changes were not to their benefit and they were centralizing. And there are certain elements, of course, of the web that were centralized because we didn't have a payment protocol primarily. But now that we have the Bitcoin blockchain, we can actually decentralize further. And we're seeing that process playing out in various projects such as Made Safe. But back then, the moral compass of the users was very clear to discern in their preference for the freedom preserving principles that the IETF stood for. And there were very, very similar things going on, maybe not quite as uncouth as today. But it's been 25 years and our culture has degraded even further under the Fiat, unbacked Fiat regime. So we're seeing some. And also this is a money protocol, not just an informational protocol, so it's less abstract in the value. So we're seeing a little bit more heated arguments, but there are numerous parallels. It's quite amazing. And I think we're going to see the same thing here. Said with 2X is in clear contravention of the Bitcoin proposal standards for a very, very clear reason. The originators of it want to usurp control of the Bitcoin protocol to benefit themselves rather than everyone as a whole. This is something that is not secret. You can go back, you can see it in Reddit posts, been tweeting it out for several months, numerous characters that are involved, Garzic, Veer, Andreson, they complain about how they can't get their terrible ideas incorporated into the Bitcoin core code base. The reason is because they fucking suck, and they're terrible for regular people. They're terrible for the little guy. They're terrible for end users. So they want to take the philosophical underpinnings and throw them away. And they're talking about doing a hard fork in order to try to threaten a compromise. But that's not what a compromise is. It doesn't work with threats. With threats, you just create a war, and you create a schism. And luckily, as a free open source software development is a public process, they just won't get away with it. There's nowhere to hide. There's too many eyeballs looking at what you guys are doing. That's why they're keeping their development and process private, relatively private. They have a limited input, not only on the code side, but also on just the conversations, because they don't want the real story. They want to control their own narrative. The hard fork will never go through, but said, Segwit will. But their threats will certainly bring up a lot of jitters. And this is something that they can do. They can use rhetoric. They can use attempt to use persuasion. They can do threats. But I don't think there's any guts behind them. This is all just a takeover attempt that's completely going to fall flat on its face exactly like it was 25 years ago. And now we're living in the world of the internet. 25 years from now, we'll be living in the world of Bitcoin. Tony Vaze, is it all about control? Yeah, I mean, I pretty much agree with everything you guys said. I don't want to repeat it. So I got to try a different way of saying it completely. But I mean, I have videos from two years ago where I was saying exactly the same thing I'm saying now because of Bitcoin XD. And then Bitcoin Classic. It's all the same stuff. This is where I encourage everyone that's watching this live. Please go to the Mad Bid Coins YouTube channel. Check out last night's interview with Eric Mbroso and Jimmy Song. And I was getting very frustrated with Jimmy. That was like the first time. I was, I really like Jimmy's commentary. I think he does play devil's advocate sometimes and it's badly needed. But in this case, Eric said it better than I can ever say about what's going on right now with Segwood and Segwood 2X and the environment and how it's all political. And it's not really about bigger blocks. What bothered me is Jimmy kept asking Eric, well, what can be what can be done in order to compromise. But there is no compromise. First of all, Segwood was the compromise. Second, how do you compromise on your technological competency? Like if you competent in something, whether it's coding, whether it's anything, whether you are a painter, whatever your specialty is. And then someone comes to you and says, well, you need to compromise on your knowledge of the situation in order to accommodate somebody else. And it's a appeal to moderation fallacy is what you're talking about. Yeah, it's definitely problematic. And that's what Jimmy kept asking Eric to do. And it was just insane to be. It was just very, very frustrating at that part. Like, look, there was several things that Eric said there that were awesome. So one of the most important takeaways from that is I like the fact that Eric strongly believes, yeah, Thomas, go ahead. You want to throw that up on the screen on the big screen? It's up, man. Oh, it's up, okay, because I was still watching Blake. All right, cool. So one of the things that he was saying, and this is very important, is that core developers, they gauge the community, they gauge the economic nodes, they gauge the miners, and they program the best possible solution. So when they spent all this time programming segwit, they did not expect it to be controversial. They were programming segwit with the full understanding that it's going to go smoothly. That's why they implemented segwit activation as a BIP-141 that uses BIP-9. And BIP-9 basically is that 95 percent. Myiners will signal for 95 percent. And the only reason that is done is so that it's the least disruptive way of getting the change in under the assumption that everyone wants to change. But Erika is absolutely correct. Going forward, BIP-9 will never ever, ever be used again because it is now being used as a voting mechanism, which it was never designed to be. It was just there for the miners to activate it smoothly. If the miners now start using BIP-9 as a voting mechanism, then they have literally given away their privileges. I think the community has gotten so complacent and have given these miners so much power that now they want the rest of it. And they're not only going to get the rest of it, the pendulum is going to swing in the completely opposite direction toward the miners are going to be begging to stay relevant. Because things are going to start changing now. I think people have realized how important nodes are. People have realized how important it is to validate your transactions. People have realized that if you have some kind of significant value in Bitcoin and you want that value to stay in Bitcoin and for Bitcoin to go up in price, you might have to spend some money mining Bitcoin even at a loss in order to protect your investment. Look, we do a bunch of things at a loss in order to protect our money. How many people pay for a gym membership that they barely use? How many people pay for an internet service that a place that they use maybe once or twice a week? Let's say you're barely ever home, but you want your internet to always stay on. It's too much of a hassle to constantly call your provider and turn it off this month, turn it back on the following month. We do things all the time for convenience at a financial loss. It's about time we start taking Bitcoin security more seriously. I think that the user activated software will activate. I think that people will realize that running bandwidth to X is dangerous. I don't have, I already have my other Twitter thing open. I want to share my screen real quick. I'm not really going to be doing this long. Come on. This is one of my internet starts acting slow. It's the surface. I know I got to pull up my Twitter folder. All right, let's go back to the screen sharing a minute because now I'm not entirely sure that Jimmy's playing Devils advocate. And if it is, I'm going to play the same game here. Let me describe one view of the current situation. The DCG and Bitmain group has 87% of the hash power. Essentially, they control the ground. They have the miners. Now whether we like it or not, Bitcoin too or whatever you want to call it may actually happen because they signed the New York agreement. They agreed to run that code as Eric was very alarmed last night. It is sight unseen. We are seeing the code today and it is written by a different team. It's not the official code that they've been used to. But apparently these DCG companies have made that decision and they are going to run this code. So going forward, if we go forward without 87% of the hash power, there are a couple of things that are going to happen just on the very face of it. The block time that's around 10 minutes could go to 60 minutes. So if there is any spam still in those blocks, it's going to be harder to get it out. It's going to be harder to get your transaction through. And additionally, there is threat of attack from the 87% who could break off as little as one fifth of their hashing power to completely overwhelm the original chain if Bitcoin won does not proof of work switch. So are you guys agreeing with me that this is the ground and you just don't care? Are we at a different estimation of how important 87% of the hash power as well as the exchanges and other companies in the DCG family are? So we'll just go Blake and then Gabe and then Tom, go ahead Blake. Well, what I would compare it to is there are several parties that Bitcoin interacts with, whether it be node managers or miners or companies that are exchanges and stuff that are on, off ramp, like Coinbase. There is a different party that have different interests that kind of balance each other out just like the executive legislative and judicial. We know that system of keeping power in check maybe hasn't worked the best, but it's worked better than nothing which can be argued. So if you look at it based on that example, it's almost kind of like the legislative and judicial are trying to switch their jobs. Like the legislative is like, well, we're going to write legislation that's all bright line and we don't need the judicial to go in on an individual basis and make sure that people are guilty or not. It's like, that's not the best way to run the government. Or the other way around when you have the judicial being like, we're going to write a whole bunch of our own custom legislation and we're going to go with that instead of what we're being given by the Bitcoin triangle. And I think that things not working in the way where you give me the instructions and then I execute them when you try to say, well, I'm going to write my own set of instructions and not work within this triangle of exponentially increasing value that everybody's going to lose out there. So that's kind of my opinion on how this is playing out and what it's akin to. Gabriel, Devon, how important is hashing power and the miners? Yeah, like Blake says, hashing power performs its function in the ecosystem. But when it gets too big for its riches, the users will rebel and they know that. So it's very, very risky to go against the developers that have led the code construction for so many years. Once again, I'd like to point out the very extremely different functionality of signaling and actually running code. Signalling and promises have a very tenuous relationship with actually running code on a huge mining farm. I mean, these CTOs of the mining companies are probably having fights behind closed doors. They're butting heads with the CEOs who want to make their investors money. They want to make inroads with rich investors with other companies. They want to create blocks. They want to have cartels and do what's most profitable. The CTOs are behind the closed doors saying, this code isn't even done and you want me to run it in three months. You realize how risky that is? We could crash all of our miners for weeks. The hackers are going to be... Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait three months, three weeks. Well, I'm talking about the 2X stuff. Well, okay. How about three weeks? Let's get through that part first. Well, the three-week code is mainly segwed. As Jimmy said yesterday, most of the changes were name changes and the BIP 102 changes. I think that it's the two megabyte hard fork, which is really unwritten and would have no influence from Bitcoin core. It'll be totally different code. I want you guys to all finish. It brings up something really interesting to Eric said last night. No matter what happens, a good way to piss your life away is by getting a job where you have to lie for your employer. Don't do that. Don't have any job where you have to cut your opinions for your employer. That is a surefire way to hate yourself in the longer than anyway. Yeah, that's what the CTOs are doing right now because they're the ones at the companies who know what's going on and they know what the risks are. They're telling their CEO, I'm not running this code. I bet you anything, 86% of that, or whatever, everybody but Jihad, maybe, of the CEOs are like, oh, don't worry. We're just signaling. This is, in my opinion, is absolutely meaningless signaling to the community that has no bearing on what the actual code being run at any given time is going to be. First of all, but second of all, even if they do run it, you're risking so much. Okay, if I do agree with you that signaling is not the same as running the code, but these are businesses they are in a group and they have signed an agreement. As long as they keep going down the path of that agreement, I see no reason why they would change their mind suddenly. And if the CTOs are saying this has, we just got to start my side show. We need to hear from the CTOs. They need to explain to you. I just explained to you why. I mean, what that reason is because signaling, well, no, but that's the CTOs. I mean, again, we've been through this with Nixon. You just fire people until you get someone that will run the code. I mean, I don't think that there's going to be any change in the CTOs. The CEOs are the ones signed the agreement and the CEOs are the ones who run the company and they're in a group together and they want to be the good of that group. I don't see that changing unless we hear from the CTOs, which we said last night, we'd like to hear from whistleblowers, public, private, secret, whatever you want to do. If game is correct, if you are concerned about running this brand new code on Bitcoin that's not been tested, which is literally brand new. Yeah, we need to hear from you. But otherwise, yeah, I don't see the CEOs who make the decisions who run the companies changing their minds. I disagree. Hold on. I don't believe that they will need to change their minds because all the signaling is false. That's their listening to their CTO. I don't know if that code has been run before. Bugs have come out, Windows, other software has bugs. It gets run and also weaker technologies, VHS, beta max, Blu-ray, BHDD, DVD, things have it. Totally different standards than Bitcoin. Yeah, hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Protocol versus other things. I mean, like an operating system is going to have a lot of bugs, but a protocol like TCP IP, if we want to have, you know, just like Eric's, like my favorite, my favorite package is we can have them. They had to roll Bitcoin back and this is just in recent history. Like, there have been bugs in Bitcoin. There could be bugs. Yeah, but the type of bugs that a protocol can have and the type of bug that other things can have are a little bit different. TCP IP is a protocol and if there's a bug or if there's a change, there can be an intermediary that can go ahead and translate those packets and a blockchain protocol, that same thing is not possible. So there is, you know, reason when you have a large material value transfer system that is that anal retentive, you really do have to be a little bit more careful in that. All right, guys, let me get in on this. Okay, so there are, there are multiple things going on here. Okay, first of all, I agree with Gabe about the signaling, about the CTOs, knowing what the hell is going on over the CEO. Okay, so I completely agree with you. Okay, I ran across this picture today online and I'm like, oh my God, this is perfect. This is what's second to X's, right? I mean, you have a secure path to walk around or ride your bike and then there is this path on the side and that's what's said with two X's, right? You're okay for a while, but this is not protected code. This is not secure code. Now, like what, here's what I'm, there are multiple things here that's scary, right? First of all, I don't care if it's an extra 500 lines of code that they wrote that the core developers did not approve of. That shouldn't be safe, okay? Now it may be safe, but it's not guaranteed to be safe. So anyone that chooses to actually run, seg with two X in a couple of weeks just to get seg with in there is literally like the guy on this bike path taking a chance from flying off the bike path, okay? Now we may get lucky, you know, nothing may happen, nothing catastrophic may happen and the seg with two X code may get us seg with, okay? And the bike doesn't fall off the path into off the bridge, okay? It's possible, it's possible. Yeah, let's try saying the tweet. Yes, it can work. seg with two X can get us seg with. Now there are two horrible things that can come out of that. First of all, people might now think that the seg with two X code is actually competent and legit and they will continue to run it and then the core developers will no longer be relevant to the system, in which case I believe Bitcoin loses all confidence and it's only a matter of time before this biker falls off that damn bridge, okay? The other situation is that everyone jumps off seg with two X says, oh my god, thank God Bitcoin is still alive and goes back to core code. If that happens, you're basically all of these people kind of disrespected the core developers, they jumped on an unsecure protocol even for a period of a few weeks and then jumped back. That can potentially create a future situation where people can think this is okay and this is how malicious bullshit sneaks into the code that starts spying on you. None of this is good, okay? And that's why I say in another tweet, I'm okay with BIP 91. BIP 91 can easily be blessed by core developers. If you're going to stand alone, BIP 91, let's get seg in there, you can signal for whatever the hell you like and then go back to running safe code because your company will be held liable if you run shitty, unproper code that causes a flaw in the Bitcoin network. That's all I'm going to say. Other than that, please listen to Eric. He does a way better job than I do on this situation. I want to remind everyone that business is about taking risks and the people that we are up against here are businessmen and it looks like to me that they're taking a risk to take over Bitcoin. This is incredible upside. They have phenomenal mining firms, factories, they're producing these chips. They have what seems like most of the major Bitcoin companies in agreement here. So I agree with you that it is a major risk to run that code, but I think it's a risk they might take. What do you guys think? We'll go Gabriel first. I think that the economic incentive is against it and that beats everything except for an external factor. So in the case of the CEOs all being bribed, of course, accepting for an external incentives, the economic incentive is paramount here and the market will punish those who are not those who make the wrong risks. So I think we're going to see mining pools drained. We're going to see income crushed. We're going to see reputations destroyed by companies' decisions in this situation. And I think we're going to see a lot of people that are trying to get called out by Barry Silverton, whoever else saying, hey, you signed this agreement. It's binding and they're going to be like, no, it isn't. Your code isn't good, so I didn't run it. Bye. Hey, Gabe. And on the flip side, Barry Silver is already complaining that Twitter is being to him. And I replied to that. I'm like, well, this is what happens when you try to force a hard fork and unsecure code down user's throats. And the other thing is, it's like, no, all they can do is say they have, look, all of these economic nodes, they've already stated publicly that they will only run the most secure code. So they're not going back on the agreement. They're going back to their original word and securing the value. Yeah, it's the Alan Silverts' deafening silence on the subject of this supposed consensus building of his brother is quite telling in my opinion. They got to support the family. Blake, any thoughts on this? Yeah, definitely. Being quiet sometimes is a great way of support. Blake? I don't think so. I feel like that's another closed-door argument. The best way to handle any situation is to just deeply assume that everybody that disagrees with you is both stupid and evil, that they have some kind of, like, a demon within. No, that's not good. So what I want to do is I want to try to look at this and say, okay, what are the odds that they're going to do it and the odds that they aren't? And you're saying that there's a giant systemic risk, you know, risk, and that that should discourage people. But when people act in groups, one of the most well-known psychological phenomena is a diffusion of responsibility. It's a really, really messed up thing. And one of the most famous examples of it is, you know, this woman, she's being beaten on the church, on these church steps, and there's a huge group of people around. Any one of them could have stopped it, but it ends up not being stopped. And I think that she died. And when people look into, like, why were all those people so evil that they didn't, you know, help her out? And it's not those people that are evil. It's that the diffusion of responsibility arrests you and thinking, you know, somebody, somebody must do something and you start looking at other people instead of, you know, just arresting your emotions and going and making a difference. I think that the diffusion of responsibility is going to be very, very risky in this case where everyone's like, well, maybe I'm, you know, supporting something that's dangerous, but the potential upside, if we corner this thing, is hyper-massive. And, you know, Johnny over here is doing it. So it's not all on me. I think that that actually does have a bit of a risk because there's also a situation where it's like, wow, look at how beautiful the emperor's clothes are. And I understand everything that's going on. But a lot of people don't. They're virtue signaling them. They understand what's going on in the using bus words, but they don't really understand. So I think that a diffusion of responsibility combined with people pretending to be... There's potentially so much to gain here, so much to gain, but again, so much to lose. Let's move on to the exit question. What happens going forward? Tell me in a word, Gabriel. Sedgwick goes live and there are lots of threats. The hard fork just somehow never happens. There's about three weeks of kind of just no message coming out of the Gihon Wu and Sedgwick 2x camp as they realize that none of the CEOs are actually going to run this code and it just kind of goes out with a whimper and Bitcoin goes on with one megabyte for at least a year or longer with Sedgwick. Ton phase. I mean, I still think my August 11th date is going to be critical for something. Hopefully that will be the day all this nightmare finally ends. Sedgwick is in the system. Everyone goes back to running 0.14.3. I'm sure 0.3 will be out by then because our core developers continue to work. Everyone will go back to core 14.3 and then we're going to be dealing with the nonsense of a paper promise of a two megabyte hard fork which is not going to happen. It looks like we're joined by Blake Anderson. Blake Anderson going forward. What happens? Brief summary. Well, I think that what's going to happen hopefully is that all of these groups that disagree will cancel each other out and will have no change until changes are really, really, really, really strong through consensus. That's the best possible case scenario and I hope that that's what happens when people are like Bitcoin isn't changing enough. It needs to change more and faster. It's like if that's what you think might not be in the correct spot with a math based digital scarcity protocol like that might not be your bag if you think that we're not action biasing fast enough. The answer is it's too soon to tell. We'd like to thank our 470 live viewers if everyone could give us a thumbs up or a share that helps more people watch the show. And as Tone mentioned, if you'd like to check out my interview with Jimmy Song and Eric Lombroso, it's over on the Mad Bitcoin's channel. Go ahead and subscribe to Mad Bittcoins and follow Mad Bittcoins on Twitter for updates. Do it. Do it on to issue two. Issue two. Vitalik is not dead. But deathhooks started by a forechan led to an Ethereum crash around 11% down to 270. The issue was solved by Booter and himself when he tweeted as selfie with the most recent Ethereum block written on it. But the question raised by the hoax remains. Does Ethereum have a cult of personality? Is the power too centralized in the dear leader, Vitalik? Gabriel, D. Vaughan. Yes. And yes. Vitalik or Vitalik looks quite ill in that picture. He's got rings around his eyes. I hope that he survives for his own sake because of his health. He doesn't look well. And I'd like to just point out there was a hilarious joke on Twitter recently making the rounds with a picture of Vitalik, buterin standing and he's really slanted sideways. Maybe the angle, maybe the camera was tilted but he's on this mountaintop and he's completely like this, standing like this. And it says italic buterin, something like that. Anyways, I thought that was funny. That's great. That's all I have. Yeah. So the answer is yes, it's too centralized. It's totally ridiculous that him being missing would affect the ethereum price. It is relatively decentralized as an ecosystem. But yeah, it's way too centralized in the foundation and that's going to be very difficult to overcome. To his defense, I've met him a couple of times and he generally looks like that. I do hope that he eats better and eats more. I'm not sure why he isn't. But best of luck to Vitalik. Let's go to tone veys more on this. We can see ourselves. All right. So Gabriel said, look, it's unfortunate that people wrote our article. But again, it shows a major flaw in ethereum is that there was an person that you can write that article about and have such a huge effect on the price of ethereum. Now there were a couple of things that I found hilarious the moment I saw this tweet. First of all, Mike and space had the greatest reply ever. It's right here. If you guys can see it. That was a great point that your blockchain kind of has to be immutable for this to actually make sense. The other part that the moment I saw this and I'm like, well, I don't think Vitalik understands how a blockchain works and what a blockchain do's case is because this isn't it. First of all, the Twitter blockchain that Vitalik sent this picture from proves that he's alive unless someone hijacked his Twitter. And if someone hijacked his Twitter, why couldn't they just get this picture or I'll do it even faster, there's your picture. What you got to do is take a screenshot. Let's go to my favorite application in the world. MSPane, you know, then all you got to do is replace this. Oops, not with that. All you have to do is just hit paste. Just hit paste. It'll be great. Whatever is in your memory, you'll come out there. It'll be just fine. I remember, right? Basically, I mean, come on. This is insane. Well, if someone has control of his Twitter account, they could have tweeted this out. Like this is not a blockchain use case, guys. This is ridiculous. I think Vitalik would argue that if it had been modified that they would be layering a present on it and that there'd be, you know, wider than whites and stuff, but it was not a very advanced display of technology. I'm going to jump in here really quick. In project management, this issue comes up literally all the time. It's called what we call it. In the industry, we call it the bus factor. It's like, what is the bus factor? It's literally just if one person on your team and charge of a project gets hit by a bus going like 120 miles an hour, to what extent are you going to be able to continue or even support the project? Now, when I worked with Wells Fargo and stuff, the bus factor was always pretty high on the project manager. So the project manager had basically make notes everywhere. So for how people pick up if anything happened to them. In terms of some projects, I don't want to call it virtue signaling, but it's not really a tenable thing to do to be like, oh, look, the bus factor is so low because everybody knows what I'm doing. It's like that's almost just the person that, you know, is it risk being hit by the bus waifed in their time trying to communicate to other people that would pick up the pieces that aren't going to be able to do it anyway. So I mean, I would love to say, you know, the bus factor on Ethereum is way too high because of Vatelik and that should definitely be fixed, but fixing something in terms of, you know, making it to somebody else's just as interested as a stakeholder and continue, you know, can take over if somebody else, you know, has something bad happen to them. That's good in theory and all, but is that really something that is doable unless you're a large, you know, at scale company doing a small Java development project where you can just bring in a different Java developer. Yes, you can eliminate the bus factor there, but like with Ethereum with Vatelik, it's a gigantic issue. And not that we don't have it at all in Bitcoin, there's some people that, you know, in the Bitcoin space, something happened to it wouldn't be good either, but I think the problem is much worse than the case of Ethereum. And especially with Bitcoin having a hidden founder with someone like Satoshi that you really can't say anything about except for what his email said, except for what his code said, we can't even say he's a he 100%, but it's a completely different situation. And you wonder how Litecoin is going to have it manage it now that Charlie Lee has retired from Coinbase and is now working on Litecoin full time. Yeah, Satoshi is not just a secure bus factor. He's a null bus factor, which is like, yeah, what's weird. Hey Blake, no, I was going to add to that. So the bus test is real. I mean, I've worked at financial institutions myself. And we actually do refer it to the bus test. That's how we refer to my institutions. And Satoshi passed, right. And Satoshi passed the bus test clearly. Now the Ethereum has a problem. Ethereum will never pass the bus test because the only reason why Ethereum even made it to where it started was because of Vitalik and not passing the bus test to begin with, right. So it was Vitalik's reputation, but it got Ethereum to where it was. So that project will never pass the bus test. And I think the order is different. I think that what it's good to consider Ethereum is academic testing ground and to give lots of accolades and stuff to the people that are developing new stuff there. But you don't want to say that these people are, you know, trust them no matter what or that the systemic risk of that big academic playground is any less than it is. You know what I mean? One thing is a material value transfer system that's locked down. The other is a crypto academic playground. And I think that both are cool and should exist, but confusing one for the other. Like holy shit, don't do that. Unfortunately, I think what started out as an academic playground has now become the corporation's challenge to Bitcoin. It has a founder. They can roll it back if they need to. Microsoft IBM, the rest of the crew is involved. And now they can say, this is our Bitcoin. We don't use that dirty street Bitcoin. We use Ethereum. I don't know what do you guys think. I think Ethereum is pretty full for people to be worried about that. It doesn't have any use cases that are off the ground yet. Not really. It's crashing to a halt. So I think that what it's good for is to be an academic playground, have all these great ideas come in. And then you fork them down into use cases that are actually tenable for what you're trying to accomplish because having like a protocol based operation operating system or world computer, like in terms of the things that make security possible. And in terms of what that idea entails, they are very mutually exclusive. All right. No more from tone. All right. Let's go on to the exit question. Going forward. Is there a solution to the vitalic centralization of Ethereum? Blake Anderson, you brought this up. Do you have any potential solutions? Oh, definitely. I think that Ethereum should be forked into several different use cases. And then those use cases should be built out on their own terms and on their own merit. I think that everybody wants to have Ethereum be this, you know, daddy network where they run the rails and everything goes on top. So they get a piece of everything because that's the greatest possible situation that you can possibly try to like create for yourself. But I'm going to have new rails and I'm going to create those rails and then I'm going to be the new economy. That's like that's a very, very greedy proposition. I understand that you could do something positive with it and stuff like that, but just coming from that understanding that, you know, I'm going to get control of the rails of transport and then everybody's going to pay me. It's like maybe in some areas that's more feasible, but in terms of trying to get the rails of a world computer and have world computing pay you. I mean, that's just that's not that that's not going to scale. That's not tenable. That's just so far away from the idea of ground up tenable computer science. It's not, you know, it's taking away from contract development for open source contracts, for multi-sig, vending machine contracts that could be made if there was a paradigm use case. So I think that all this scope bloke does what scope bloke does, which is to slow things down and distract things. I mean, if a tech project dies because they run our money usually is because this scope of what they were trying to accomplish bloated out to a area where it was no longer addressing the business needs of that company and it failed. And just because software is open source doesn't mean it's completely immune from those kinds of things happening. I just want to agree with Tony Blake that the bus test is very real. I read this book recently about Apple after Steve Jobs passed away and in many ways he tried to plan for his death and to have a good successor and a good plan for his company. And even then it was very difficult to keep things running the same way after his death. Let's go to Tony Vays, your thoughts on solutions to the vitalic ethereum centralization problem. I don't think there are solutions. I think ethereum is a centralized mess that is convoluted by all of the ICOs that are being built on top of it creating more pressure on top of the centralized mess of ethereum. I don't really, I don't see a solution there. I mean, I'm still waiting for ethereum to totally implode and to teach all these ICOs the lesson that builds on top of it. So you think it was a bad sign that they had to stop trading the e20 tokens? Well, what do you mean they have to stop trading the e20? What individual token or there was like an overall, like so what does that mean? ShapeShift.com in an effort to help the ethereum backlog so to speak, stopped trading the e20 tokens to try to get Ethereum to catch up because basically Ethereum was having these ICOs and it was really, really filling them up. Most of the exchanges also froze with draws. It was if the entire network came to a halt because of the two ICOs a couple weeks ago. So this is pushing systemic failure and this is without any of the dams operating at scale yet. Right. It's about that's a problem. But I don't have a solution to that and I'm not a, and I'm not technical enough to help them create one either, right? So it's like I just, I knew this was going to be a problem. I knew this was going to be a problem before ICOs even existed. I can, I easily for saw this problem, I have no idea how to fix this problem. I don't know if they even, see what bothers me is that someone like Nick who's not a developer saw this problem a year ago, not the ICO part, but the fact that Ethereum is not scalable and it's not sustainable, yet they ignored it. And I don't think they have a solution right now. You have access to some pretty sharp people though that are really honest with you. No, because everybody else has it. Everybody has access to sharp people. The question is, are you willing to listen to them or not? That's true. That's, I mean, that very well said. Reminded that line from Obrother Where Art That where he keeps saying, damn, we're in a tight spot. And I think they are in a tight spot. So thanks so much to our 500 viewers. I can't even look at the chat. It's scrolling so fast. Everybody must have given us a like and a thumbs up which, and a share which really helps people find the show. So thank you for your support. Moving on to issue three, hypocrite. A hypocrite is a person who indulges in hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is of course the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform. Mark Cuban, famous critic of Bitcoin, saying in 2014 that Bitcoin has no shot as a long term digital currency. One more recently saying that Bitcoin is a bubble has now announced plans to invest in unicorn and online sports betting company that is launching their own ICO using an ERC20 token is Cuban a hypocrite or a fool or is he proving us all wrong. Tonveys is unicorn a better investment than Bitcoin. So it's my initial I haven't even Googled unicorn yet and I'm sure it's exactly what it sounds like. I just tweeted Mark Cuban and my tweet basically said either he's about to be scammed which is bad or he's about to scam people which is worse right. So Mark Cuban clearly doesn't understand blockchains. He doesn't understand Bitcoin. And that's okay. It's not his expertise. He's a busy man. He did amazing things during the dot com area that was his expertise. He's running a basketball team that is his expertise. He's an investor in companies that is his expertise but he doesn't have block chain expertise. Now he can easily get some block chain expertise by making a phone call to some very knowledgeable people. Many of whom are sitting at an office in San Francisco known as block stream. There are other knowledgeable people about blockchains. He can listen to but if he's going to listen to people like the talent. If he's going to listen to people like ICO scammers. He's going to make huge mistakes and this is why people that go outside of the area of expertise usually lose a lot of money. So this is going to end very, very badly. If he's part of the ICO is going to be the biggest ICO pump. Ethereum has ever seen. It might actually be the straw that breaks the back of Ethereum. It'll probably shape people have to stop transactions for like a month. It can get real ugly. Now the craziest thing is he's out there just a week ago talking about Bitcoin being a bubble even though the Bitcoin price is what? Double what it was in the beginning of the year, maybe two and a half times. Yet he's about to invest in an ICO on top of Ethereum that has gone up 20 times this year. The value of Ethereum. It's block chain has gone exponentially huge and that doesn't seem to bother him. So don't go away. Ethereum probably. You're saying that being bullish on one thing and then bearish on another when that thing is a direct derivative of the thing that you're saying is going to go down is pretty ignorant, wouldn't you say? Well, yeah. And not just the derivative, 20X leveraged the derivative. I know it's not a proper derivative but I mean the rails to get in and out with Fiat going through Bitcoin. So essentially, E20 tokens are a derivative of Ethereum and so forth. So at this point, I hope Mark Cuban doesn't end up scamming people so that he's liable. I would prefer it if only he gets scammed for tens of millions of dollars and then maybe he'll remember my tweet warning him about doing something to stupid. We also have a disclaimer in the style of coin desk. Full disclosure, mad Bitcoin did appear on the Shark Tank show and Mark Cuban did promise to invest $100,000 in Mark in mad bitcoins. We are still waiting for the check. Oh, and one last thing. Hey, Mark, if you're watching, my consulting rate is only 0.1 Bitcoin per hour. I know you will have to give up on your view that Bitcoin is stupid and you will have to purchase some bitcoins because that's the only currency that I accept for my service. I will gladly explain the basics of a blockchain and then I will provide you with some amazing contacts that will fill in the details for you and they might actually do it for free. If he's watching, congratulations on the broadcast.com Yahoo deal. I've never seen a better scam in my life. Of course, go Mavs. Let's go to Blake Anderson. I really like Mark Cuban a lot from Shark Tank. It's stuff like that. He's a family man. He's an investor. He's economics. I really like Mark Cuban a lot as a person. Other than that, it's tough to not add harm to somebody when they make decisions that you disagree with in terms of advice and stuff like that. I'm not going to call him an idiot or whatever. I do think that it's bizarre that he has a boat that is named after an Anne-Ran novel and that he also supported Hillary. That just seems super incompatible to me. If he had said Gary Johnson, I think he's a stoner or I think that this or that, if he had qualified it, I think it would have been one thing. I just think that it's bizarre that he would have principles that would say I want to own a boat called the Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged or whatever his boat is called and then do that. I don't know that he's making decisions off of principles. I think he's making decisions off of trying to read the T-Leaves and he has got to be an insanely smart person to have had as much luck doing that as he has. I don't know what he uses to reference the T-Leaves or if he has really, really good people. I think that that's all great and that he's done well. In terms of Bitcoin, Bitcoin is a much different beast. When he says that he thinks that Bitcoin's in a bubble and that he's going to create some kind of success with a derivative thereof that is at high risk of systemic binary failure, that doesn't vote well for anything. I hope that it sounds like he hasn't signed anything yet that he's just talking about this. Hopefully, he backs out and realizes with any amount of study on Ethereum, especially their 20 tokens, that this might not be the best way to start an actually good idea. Hopefully, if he hasn't actually good idea, they do it in a way that's tenable instead of not. Just like the plus factor at Apple and stuff like Thomas was talking about, it's not just the ideas that he write down to be executed after you're gone. Great idea is a great idea, but it's not a million dollar idea until execution is applied and done properly. Tony, I think your mic is open. Sorry. Let me just jump right back in here real quick for a second. First of all, I know people in the chat are calling me arrogant. You guys have to understand this, that Gabriel, Thomas, you Blake by self and a thousand other people. If you've been in Bitcoin for over three years, you are a significantly bigger expert at blockchains than Mark Cuban is. When it comes to blockchains, yes, when you put me in Mark Cuban in a room, I am the expert when it comes to blockchains over Mark Cuban. I am not the expert in blockchains if you put me in a room with Adam back, but if you put me in a room with Mark Cuban and his friends, I will be the expert. Will you Blake and Thomas and Gabriel? That's one thing that at half of our live viewers will be the experts in blockchains in that room. I think it's funny that he's Adam back as an example because every time on Twitter that I see somebody talking to Adam back and being disrespectful, if smart or whatever, I'm like, do you have any concept of who it is that you're being addicted to? I don't want to be hyperbole filled, but that's like going to Satoshi's teacher and being like, hey, what's up? What's up? I'm a slap, take that email. That's not a very enlightened way to behave. He faded a few of my treats recently and I swooned. And there was one more thing, I want to, you know what I already forgot what I wanted to say. When you said about the hypocrisy, you were talking about about the hypocrisy, but you know what? I lost my shirt, I thought so I was going to get it, maybe I'll remember. I also want to just follow up on Blake's point that Mark Cuban hasn't personally pledged to put money in the ICO. He's invested in the sports betting company and the sports betting company is having an ICO. So his money is tangentially invested. He may also invest in the ICO generally, I don't know, but this is just a clarify. Go ahead, Gabriel. Blake was mentioning the binary outcomes of this unicorn thing. And yeah, I'd just like to point out that, you know, Bitcoin has a fairly binary outcome in my opinion. You know, it's pretty likely that we'll either go to the moon or crash to like a curiosity with just, you know, very little value, you know, within 15 years. So I think that the binary situation is not a problem in itself. I just want to point that out. But you know, open protocols are in many ways the opposite of corporations. A guy like Cuban is in the mindset of the sort of MBA or VC mentality of, you know, thinking profit models teams. There's no team in an open protocol. There's no profit model. Bitcoin, you know, every product protocol before Bitcoin didn't even have anything analogous to buying ownership of something. Bitcoin is the first protocol that had something analogous to equity shares. So it confused, it still confuses the shit out of VCs, MBA types, because it has none of the hallmarks of businesses. It's not the same thing at all. That's why it was a bit of a shock to see the silvers actually jump in. Somebody like Barry Fasttalking Schmoozer, who really actually got Bitcoin and understood that there were a few areas to make money. But even the, even the, those companies, the digital currency group or whoever has invested in over the years, you know, most of those investors would have made way more wealth just by buying Bitcoin. I'm kind of glad that they didn't just do that because now we have on ramps, off ramps and some other services. But I would be surprised of a single business other than darknet markets, dark Bitcoin tumblers, and maybe a couple other very, you know, specific use cases have actually made more money that if they had taken all their seed capital and just bought Bitcoin and done nothing. You know, but here's the difference. And this is what a Cuban or a lot of other sort of less enlightened VCs than, you know, some more intelligent ones and so on. Valley, for example, who have been to Bitcoin for a long time. All the ones who kind of don't get it, the Cubans, the, who's that famous old asshole investor, or any famous Charles Munger. Yes, exactly. The Warren Buffers, the Charles Munger, all these guys that are dissing on Bitcoin. So, Charles isn't an investor. He's just a cheater. Yeah, exactly. Cruban has personally mentioned it. Right. What these people do not, oh, no, Cruban recognises he's very threatened by Bitcoin. But what people like, Bobuffet, who just discounted out of hand or Cuban, the things that he said, I mean, the price could be in a bubble. Yeah, but I don't think it is, but I mean, that's one thing. That's a temporary situation to say it definitely isn't going to succeed. It's so idiotic. And what these VC MBA types don't get is that network protocols, network protocols can become far more powerful than any single company. Far more, I mean, who would argue that TCP IP is more influential than Google? It is. Google is a subset of the web and TCP IP. No company could ever be as powerful as the potential of a network protocol. That is what Bitcoin or C, that's what we see on this panel. That's why we're into Bitcoin. That's what people like Cuban will only see once it's way after the fact. I mean, the number of people that understand what a protocol is at the same time is understanding what a derivative is or like, let's say arbitrage. That's a very small group of people. Yeah, the Venn diagram is still very slim. I just want to throw one more piece of advice for Mark Cuban. So look, Bitcoin price may be in a bubble. It may be in a bubble, right? In a little bit of a bubble. Though going up two and a half times this year isn't, shouldn't be that big a deal, right? But Bitcoin technology, the blockchain technology of Bitcoin is not in a bubble, especially if core developers remain at the health. The Ethereum technology is actually in a bubble. And it will be in a bubble, probably popped with him at the helm of an ICO built on top of it. Let's move on to the exit question. What is the greatest thing that Mark Cuban has ever done? Selling broadcast.com to Yahoo and perfectly timing his exit of Yahoo stock. Selling a championship in the NBA with the Dallas Mavericks bringing the championship home to Dallas or appearing on Shark Tank and making VC investing popular and mainstream. Blake Anderson. Well, I would say neither. I've watched Shark Tank. I don't know a ton about Mark Cuban, but I know a little bit. And from what it sounds like he has said, he worked his way up from a normal blue collar type of position up to being as rich as he is. I think that's way, way, way, way more impressive than any pivoting that he's made later on in life when he said lots of money. I'm really impressed by people that can go from me or beginnings and become that wealthy. Even if they get crazy when they get there or they're, you know, motivations or whatever get out of whack, crazy is probably too harsh for word. But even if they, you know, lose track a little bit of, you know, who they were in the process, that's so much work that they did to get that much wealth. And they had to do that by serving people if it's, you know, a fair environment. So that's what I'm most impressed by. I think that Mark Cuban is a hard worker. I'm certainly not discounting his work ethic, but it's my understanding that he streamed college basketball games online, then sold it to Yahoo and perfectly timed his exit. But I don't know all the details. Gabriel, D-Von. Anyone who doesn't understand Bitcoin never impresses me. Tones. Wow. I thought I was going to be different. They can go off the board. But like you guys both went off the board as well. So I'm going to say I'm most impressed by him taking on the SEC and winning that judgment done with this ICO. He might be seeing the SEC again. And he might be fighting up again and round two. So there you go. Honorable mention Mark Cuban attempting to buy the Chicago Cubs, scaring the crap out of the other MLB owners. Always good theater, Mark Cuban. But we're running out of time. So we're going to move on to the exit question, prediction or a story of the week Blake Anderson. Are you ready? I was just going to talk about chat. Chat is amazing today. There's a lot of people in chat. The people to participate in chat during this show are a huge part of the core value proposition of Bitcoin. The people that are exchanging ideas using the democratized publishing value proposition that is the internet to create new things like Bitcoin, that's good. They keep doing that. The people that are watching this show, good, good for you. And I also want to talk about one of the questions that was just asked in chat. It's going so fast. It's hard to see. But it looks like people are talking about the IQ required to understand, to really understand Bitcoin. And at first I was like, well, this is just nonsense. It's trying to make people feel happy and they're smart and other people. But it really does require an extremely high Q to be able to understand the three separate areas of study that Bitcoin brings together technology, economics and sociology. So when there's disagreements in Bitcoin, I would say always, always, always try to approach it from the assumption that the other side legitimately doesn't understand what you understand. Always try to engage in academic leveling, make it so that you're not trying to use words and terms and examples that you know the other people don't know so that you can go, ha ha, gotcha. Don't do that. You can steal man the other person's argument, try to help them articulate it the best that they can so that when you, you know, dismember it with your, you know, arguments that it actually makes a difference. In the age of information, there's so much static that we all have to, you know, galvanize our ability to understand and perceive information. And the way that you do that is by studying logic and rhetoric and by engaging in productive discourse. If we don't do those things, Bitcoin will fail. We all need to continue to be evangelists of Bitcoin as we continue to get more and more and more people into it because Bitcoin is going to continually gain adoption at a very virtually exponential rate and the amount of people that we have that are educated and can talk about it and say that same kind of bus factor argument. Everybody make it so that if you were a time traveler, you could go back before Bitcoin was invented and invent it yourself. Let's make that the standard. If you fall short of that, that's fine. You're still doing really, really well. But educate yourself and be a real part of the community. We need you. Well said. And it's worth reminding everyone that you're still very early into Bitcoin. All you have to do is take all the people on the earth and the ones who haven't heard of Bitcoin, they're behind you. And if you took that chart, we're way ahead. We are ridiculously ahead. And everyone else is going to come on board. Gabriel, DeVon, prediction or a story of the week. I predict that this whole hard fork threat situation will seem like ancient history by the beginning of the next year. I hope so. Let's go to tone Vaze. Look like he's got some charts ready. But not that ready. Slow on the unmute button, Mr. Tone. I forgot I was on mute. All right, I'm back. Okay, so yeah, Gabe, I kind of agree with you, but don't worry. There'll be a completely another attempt at a different hostile takeover. So I'm just going to do my charts. I mean, there's only one story in Bitcoin and that scaling and we covered it. So as far as my charts go, these are the weekly candles. We really need to close above 25.30 on above the threat line on the weekly candle by Sunday night. And then I would be way more optimistic about Bitcoin if that happens. Looking at the zoomed out version of the daily chart, yes, this may be the popping of a bubble, but I don't think that it is. I think there are way too many people that are bearish and I still think the price is bullish. The zoomed in daily chart is not looking great, but it's also not bearish either. Is that inverted cup and handle right there? Maybe, maybe, but we had good support. So I'm not calling it yet. If we, if the daily closes below this yellow line and below this blue moving average, that is going to start leading bearish, but right now I'm going to stick with the trend. I'm going to stick with the bullish trend. And on the hourly chart, we've been flirting with this line for multiple days now. And I think we're going to break it. I mean, the charts are telling me not to be scared. So I'm not scared yet. Let's see what happens with this beta test of Segwatu X. All right. Good stuff, Tony. To quote Zoutonged. I'm a bull and I'm bullish, but oh, we're out of time. Until next time. Bye, bye. Bye, bye. See you later.