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. Hello, Internet. Hello, posterity, and thank you for having me. Jimmy Song, Bitcoin developer. Everyone, good to be here again. Richard Hart, Bitcoin Thought Leader. Hello, everyone. Tones from Liberty Life Trail. Hey, guys, just enjoying my segment activation, segment locking day still. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network, moving on to issue one. Issue one, surprise issue, BitFinex, issues service change for US customers. BitFinex is making changes to the services they provide to US individuals. They are suspending individual accounts and will no longer serve the United States of America. The price of Bitcoin is 35, 39. Gabriel D. Vine, what do you think about BitFinex ending service for US customers? Well, I'm not surprised at all, actually. It's been apparent for some time that the United States banking system and financial regulation system is among the most restrictive in the Western world. And to be honest, I am rather surprised that the regulatory agencies have not yet cracked down on the domestic exchanges. In fact, I will go out on a limb and say, perhaps, Kraken's days are numbered. Coinbase is a broker. They might have it a bit easier since they're not touching things quite as directly. But it's conceivable that before the regulators lose their ability to enforce any regulations because of complete defonentialization of the entire government scheme, which I believe is coming, but only gradually over the next decades. It's conceivable they might crack down a bit more. That also could go state by state. I'm kind of just conjecturing right now. But this type of jurisdictional restriction is very much anti the ethos of the internet. And there was a big fight against creating country-based domain names because the original internet pioneers in the late 80s and early 90s, excuse me, not just the internet, but web pioneers. Wanted to keep things as decentralized and have it be a separate space. And that movement really informed the cypherpunk movement, which formed the philosophical basis for Bitcoin in the later years. So it's against the ethos of the internet. This type of jockeying will be less and less effective as technologies improve. I think BTC was a bit of an anomaly, but I think that perhaps 1,000 blossoms will bloom in its place. Just like the Silk Road happened. I think we're going to have gray market Bitcoin very much in the ascendant in the years to come. All right, we'd just like to thank everyone for watching at home. If you could give us a thumbs up and a share, that would help more people watch the show and find it. If it's your first time here, please subscribe down below. Jimmy Song, Bitfinex is shutting down US customers. What do you think? Not a surprise at all. I mean, they already had not allowed a lot of states to people in different states to not really do anything on their exchange. But is it that big a loss? It's already a lot of people that couldn't go on there anyway. And the traders that really want to go to another place or use a VPN or something or use accounts from other places. So it's completely expected, not a shock at all. It does seem like we're losing exchanges at an alarming rate. Richard Hart, BTC-E, and now Bitfinex? Well, their failure modes were different. I think Finex is shutting down because they can establish banking relationships. If you try and open up a Bitcoin exchange in the United States, you'll find that one of the only banks that will work with you is called the Silicon Valley Bank in California. And they are not willing to risk their relationship with the Fed. Hold on a second. That's famously Coinbase's bank, Silicon Valley Bank. And many have been critical of Coinbase, who's been focused on keeping their reputation and keeping their relationship with the bank. Coinbase recently raised $100 million. The largest raise in crypto, not counting ICOs. Richard, are you back with? So they don't want to lose their relationship. So they restrict the number of new companies that they'll work with. And having a license in New York with this special Bitcoin license there gives Coinbase an advantage over most other players in establishing banking relationships. It's unfortunate that for the same reasons, Bitcoin hasn't been able to make much penetration into the third world because their banks don't work well enough to let you buy Bitcoin. It's the same reason that we don't have easier adoption in the states because of all this meta-law enforcement. Instead of hiring real investigators to do real investigation and lock up criminals, they do the equivalent of putting a videotape like camera in your house. So you have a cool video of it being emptied of stuff. But it doesn't actually prevent crime. German Shepherd would prevent crime. A video camera is a meta tool that doesn't really prevent crime. Just like AML KYC is meta-law enforcement that kind of sideways tries to prevent things from happening. The actual crime that has an actual victim is only loosely related, right? So I prefer that all the money that goes into meta-law enforcement, like AML KYC, a lot of this fancy stuff that doesn't involve a real guy trying to really catch criminals. It mostly just generates a bunch of reports that don't go anywhere. It's like the intelligence service. If you have too much data, like all these terrorists, they get caught, but then no one goes and arrests them, right? Like the Sarnayas were alerted by Russian intelligence services. They told the American law enforcement agencies what was going to happen. They never did anything. Why? Because there's just too much data, right? And if they had less data and less things to look at, then they could focus on the fewer hits that they did get and get more done. So I support real law enforcement, real investigators, by reducing the cost of meta-fake law enforcement, they're just kind of after the fact says, oh, well, I guess maybe we can catch this guy after the bad thing already happened, maybe. It's like those red light cameras that don't actually stop speeders. All they do is print tickets. Ton Vaze, the question everyone's asking, will the retraction of BitFinex from the US markets crash the price of Bitcoin? Should we pan? Yeah. Comment on your letter. The red light cameras don't even just give tickets. They actually cause accidents because now everyone stops short because they know where those red light cameras are. But hey, Richard, I actually wrote an article about that. It's titled When Banks Become Law Enforcers. I wrote it about two or three years ago for coin telegraph and it talks about all that stuff that you just mentioned. You remember Operation Chocolde? I don't remember these things by name, but you're right. When you have all the data, it's the same as if you have no data. It really is a completely relevant. Tours. No, it's not going to cause a price crash in Bitcoin. But this has always been a problem. I'm not surprised by this at all. And BitFinex of all exchanges has now been hacked twice. And the last thing you want to do is deal with retail customers. So even if this isn't a regulatory problem for Coinbase, they're better off dealing with institutions and focusing on big players. I've met Phil Potter, the CEO of BitFinex, and he comes from traditional Wall Street background. And if he has some kind of a deal in the works where he becomes the exchange for major hedge funds, then why the hell does he want to deal with retail customers? It just makes no sense at all. You can deal with big players, they understand risk, they understand insurance, and you can go about it that way. I never been a fan of any of these exchanges. Any exchange that took in KYC AML from its users was never even a consideration for me. Yeah, it'll be some liquidity. I liked using BitFinex as a price. I thought they were one of the better exchanges. And we're going to be dealing with this for years to come. I mean, Bitcoin is going to be the next big boogie man when the government is tired of policing the drug market. They're going to, this is even bigger. I've always been scared to use Bitcoin in any way shape of form that connects it to my real life identity and I'm expecting these problems to only accelerate. So I'm not surprised by this. I mean, Coinbase might stick around because it's a nice big honey pot to identify everyone for the federal government. Any exchange that is quasi outside of the full US jurisdiction, they're not going to be servicing US customers in any time soon. I mean, this is to be expected. What is it going to do to the price of Bitcoin? If anything, it'll make the price of Bitcoin go up because now it'll be even harder to get your Bitcoin. So now you really got to go into the OTC markets and you really got to pay a premium to get it and then everyone else is going to want a higher premium to resell it. I don't see any downside to the price from this. If anything, there is only upside. Excellent. And we're moving on to the next issue, issue two, all time high. The price of Bitcoin broke. New all time highs this week shattering the $3,500 barrier with many analysts predicting rapid growth that could direct the price of the fledgling cryptocurrency to $5,000 and beyond. What is fueling Bitcoin's rapid growth? Is it hype, actual adoption, or perhaps an irrational belief that we've put all this scaling drama behind us? I ask you, Jimmy Song. Yeah, the scaling drama is definitely stopped behind us. But there's certainly less uncertainty. And the fact that this hard fork went without too much trouble, that may have given the markets a sense that, hey, if we have a hard fork in November, that might not be too bad. We've always viewed hard forks as this really difficult and painful thing. And we're realizing, you know, there are some socialized costs. But it's maybe not as not quite as bad as we expected. That said, there's a lot of demand. There's a lot of Bitcoin cash dumping. So the money that's coming into buy Bitcoin cash, that seems to be transferring over to Bitcoin via Bitcoin cash dumping by Bitcoin holders. And maybe that's pumping it up a little bit as well. But yeah, I mean, I think it's doing well. And it's surprisingly well. And I think it does deserve an all-time high as a result of handling this very difficult transition without too much trouble. Richard Hart. Well, I was worried that when the result types of reasons to buy, that we didn't break the 3K all-time high because I figured anyone that ever had a reason would want their free 10% pre-evaluation, BCH coins. And we didn't at the time. And then we started to get fantastic news from Segwit going great, locking in, hard fork, being relative non-event, except pay-free money. And so I guess that's pretty cool. Actually, and then we started to get massive news out of mind-shift changing amongst the people who have the real money. The guys that have 10 or 20 staff in a family office, billions and billions and billions of dollars that always laughed at the Ponzi scheme that was Bitcoin, they ain't laughing anymore. They realize that it can't die, it won't die. There's this cool law that states that the longer a thing has existed, the longer it will exist. And it goes for plays in Broadway, it goes for technology of all sorts, it goes for networks. The longer a thing has existed, the longer it will exist. And that's very well for Bitcoin. It's known as the Lindy effect. Nice, the Lindy effect. So, you know, the Lindy effect would give us an advantage over other cryptos. The fact that we have the most press, the fact that we have the best security teams, the fact that we get hacked the least, the most distributed places to exchange, through local Bitcoins, this thing is all point to the one network that beats all the other networks. Now, most people don't misunderstand Metcalfs law. They think that Metcalfs law states that a network is valuable as a function of a square of its participants. But there's some caveats in there, and that the bigger network always wins. And so, if there's a competition and you believe in Metcalfs law, then Bitcoin's supposed to win it, because it's been around the longest, and it has the most critical mass and the most users. And you can count the users. You can count the transactions. You can count the unique wallet IDs. You can look at the membership on any forum anywhere. Bitcoin by far has the most users. So, with all these things put together, that we skipped right over 3K. We didn't even spend a couple of minutes there. We literally just blew right through it and never saw it again. And, you know, those guys that were short at 3K that were worried, they didn't even have a chance to like review their position, because now we're looking at 3,500. And on the way up, now if you've been watching the markets, they're just so fun to watch. All the buying pressure appears to be coming from GDACs. And it feels like to me is giant institutional money that is accumulating and pushing and pushing and pushing. And I don't think that there's enough coins in the world to satisfy their desire to buy it. And that's the great part about having a truly mathematically limited system, where there's only 21 million. And guess what? Lots have been stolen and lots have been lost. And you can't sell the lost and stolen ones. So there's not even any, like there's only 16 million that have been mined. And probably Satoshi's got a million of those. So now there's 15 million. And a couple hundred thousand of those are just lost. So now you're down to like 14, 5. There are not enough coins in the world to give every millionaire a single coin. That's how truly rare and scarce the stuff is. So I'm a super bowl right now. And as long as I keep seeing articles and news on CNBC about how this is going to take 5% of gold's market easily and has value and excess of that as a currency and as a social network and as a data transmission network and as a layer for other things. And that's on top of its 5% of gold value. Like it's a no-brainer. It's some super bowl. Tones 5% of gold, what do you think? Well wait, is it already 5% of gold or we're going to 5% of gold? I think we're still going there. If we went to 5% of gold, I think the price would be 25 to $50,000 a coin. Oh wow. Now I think that that is actually achievable. I don't want to see that next week because that would put a lot of stress on the network. But I do think we're headed there. Hey Richard, as you were talking about GDACs, I'm going to throw another explanation out there. Don't forget Coinbase was not offering people decash and like a billion dollars worth of value left, GDACs and Coinbase in preparation for the hard fork. And it's possible that all this value is now coming back because all of these people are registered with Coinbase and GDACs. So it could be just the same people buying back in, the people that took it out. And now they're coming back in and now they're just buying some more. So that's another explanation for the selling pressure specifically from Coinbase. Just wanted to throw that out there. Sounds reasonable. I wish I owned Coinbase and then I would tell you much cooler things about why people were doing what they're doing. If I owned an exchange, I'd front run all the trades. Well, wait, there could be another reason why Bitfinex is getting out. That's where that Spoofie is. So I have no idea. But anyway, so the all time high. So my view on it was, and I think Richard, you were on the show when I talked about it, the moment we flirted with 3000 for the second time, I became a huge bull because I don't believe in double tops. And once we flirted with 2900 for the second time and we pulled back down a tiny bit, I was like, okay, get ready for this huge bust out to the upside. And my target was always 3500 over these last couple of weeks. Now today is a very critical day on my timeline, both from a historical perspective. I've been talking about August 11 for three years to be like a historic day for Bitcoin. And let's see, the day is not over yet. Tomorrow is also important. We are fairly extended here at 3500. A pullback back down to 3000 is perfectly reasonable and we'll need a couple of more days to really see are we going to shoot to that 405,000 mark? Or are we going to pull back a little bit before shooting to that 405,000 dollar mark? But I remain a huge bull. I think this B cash nonsense was a complete dud. Sooner or later, the old school big coiners with a lot of money that are supporting this garbage, they're going to run out of money and then that thing will die out. So I have that's not a concern for me at all. I am pretty happy with the price. I'm a little cautious this weekend to see which way it's going to go. But as long as we're making all time highs throughout the day, there's I think there is no reason to sell. You just hold on to it. All right, we'd like to thank our 996 live viewers. If everyone could give us a thumbs up and a share, maybe we'll get to a thousand. Gabriel D. Vine, are you a huge bull? Yes, I am a huge bull. I see a big future for Bitcoin as tone rightly pointed out. This is a pretty steep move. We can certainly see a pullback at any time. I kind of wanted to answer Brian Snyder's question here. Thank you so much for your donation. He asks, when do you guys think or at what USD price will the US state governments begin to invest in Bitcoin as a part of a responsible budget or to fix budget deficits? That touches on some pretty interesting issues that I referred to today in my future ran quick rant. Make sure to subscribe to World Crypto Network and get all those updates. You can see my video from today on the channel. I was referring to an excellent article from July of 2014. This is over three years ago by Pierre Rochard. It can be found on the Nakamoto Institute. It's also in the show notes of my video. In this article, I believe the title is speculative attack. Rochard lays out the case that governments themselves may be forced as an economically forced through necessity to invest in Bitcoin in order to defend their currencies from a feedback group whereby the populace borrows the very plentiful and abundant fiat and becomes leveraged investors in Bitcoin with that currency. That forms a snowball effect if you consider it. This is actually something that the Barbata Central Bank released a paper on, I believe it was in 2015, specifically talking about a speculative attack. That's a reality for them. For the US dollar, it's not yet in people's minds, but for a country like Barbados with a $3 billion economy. It's something really important. I think I'd like to call on tone to see if he's got an idea of a specific value. I will say Rochard mentioned $50 billion, but I think he was just pulling that out and now we're above $50 million. I'm going to go the other way on this. It's one thing for the Bank of Barbados to do it. I believe Barbados may be pegged to the US dollar. I'm not sure. If you are a country that's pegged to the US dollar and you want to hedge that US dollar position, that it makes sense. If we're talking like the US government to answer the question specifically, what would the US government consider investing in Bitcoin to kind of shore up their finances, the answer is never. They can't. If a government, the size of the US government, even publicly announces single Bitcoin for the future, they would complete that even the US government no longer has faith in the US dollar. They absolutely cannot do that. No major country that has its currency as a significant player could go and pick up Bitcoin for this purpose. I don't see it. Also, what would they say? As they continue to double down on money laundering was, now they're going to go ahead and buy an anonymous currency. I do not see any of that flying yeah, a country like Barbados, even a country like Hong Kong because Hong Kong is pegged to the US dollar. Any country that's pegged to the US dollar or any country that is about to give up on their own currency, sure, they can do something like this, but not Canada, not Japan, not Australia, not not not a single first world country that actually has to deal with other first world countries. I just like to point out that Bitcoin has just reached a new all-time high during this discussion. It's currently at $3,569 on Bitstamp. All right. Going back to the question, I'm not sure it's so much a question of a price when governments will get in more of a time. Like Richard was saying earlier with the Lindy effect, the longer things around the more you have to respect it and Bitcoin keeps not dying and eventually governments are going to have to like tone was saying secretly try to get in. If any government publicly gets in, the price goes crazy. So let's not start those rumors yet. Let's move on to the exit question Jimmy Song, the price of Bitcoin this week higher or lower. This time next week higher. Richard Hart, I think higher. Tone Vays. Oh man, that's actually a tough one. I might have to go with lower. I mean this was this is a monster day. The week is about to end. We might hit a high this weekend. There could be a pullback on the weekend. I mean, I'm going to say after once it finally hits the top sometime in the next 24 hours, next Friday we're doing the show. I'm going to say slightly lower, but not but I still think it will be nice nice and fat over 3000. Always a contrarian like asking a weatherman about the weather. Gabriel D. Vine higher or lower. I just like to preface my prediction with statement that I'm that my track record on the weekly predictions is at warrant. It's really, really terrible. But I'll go with tone on this one. I'm going to say a little under 3500 after a spike up here. I think we're going I think we're going high today. I think we might even get 3900 today, but I think we're going to maybe correct back. I'll say I'll say under 3600 because if this thing keeps going up to like 3738 or even 4K, I can see a pullback back to 35 and then 35 holding it up. So I'm going to say under 3600 for next for this time next week. Much like Gabriel, my predictions are so bad. I'm practically a counter indicator. I'm going to stick with the panel and we're going to go higher because I always say higher. Moving on to issue two, segwit lock in. Segregated witness, the long awaited series of bug fixes and the path to the potential solution to Bitcoin scaling has finally been locked in on the network. As we now enter a two week grace period, allowing the miners to make sure their gear is up to date and ready for launch. Richard Hart, what excites you most about this new update for Bitcoin? Well, I think that it made people more secure in the fact that we can still upgrade this network. So it's got more legs on it. I like the idea that some people will have a better time building out their tier two apps using it. It also gave us that free money, which is pretty cool. And those guys can now go screw up their own chain and waste less time screwing up this nice one. So those are my top three. Tony Bees. So is this just the general comment on segwit? Look, I'm happy that segwit finally got adopted. I have not retired my hat yet. I think that this user activated soft fork movement is what got us here. I mean, I was very critical of this hard fork as it was happening as they were pushing for it. I think when it's all set and done by the end of the year, we're going to look back and we're going to thank these big blockers for showing us how dumb that move was. I think it'll help us to deal with the segwit 2x in the near future. I can't wait for segwit transactions to actually be on the network. And yeah, no, I, but every time every time you can breathe easy and be happy, here comes another, you know, attack on Bitcoin. So I don't know what that attack is going to be. I've been expecting that attack to be a fungibility attack. We don't, we still don't know how many private keys got exposed and how many people doxed themselves trying to get that free money, including perhaps some people on this panel. But, but so we don't know the full ramifications of that incident. So I'm hoping that we can breathe easy as we watch Bcash die. And then maybe it'll be smoother sailing. But from my experience, an Ereclan Broso taught me this well. The moment you breathe easy, here come another batch of people trying to, you know, control Bitcoin and kick out the core devs and centralize it and everything. So we'll see, there'll be another big fight. And, but this has made us stronger and made Bitcoin stronger. And let's see what segwit and lightning can bring. All right, we've got around 1200 viewers. Thanks everybody for giving us a thumbs up. We also had a $50 super chat and they want me to remind people that you can fight the regulators. And they're trying to abolish the bit license. This is for New York State. And you can show up at the courthouse in New York City and they're going to defeat the bit license on August 31st. So check that out. New York Bitcoiners are still out there somewhere. Hey guys, I don't think it honestly really matters. I mean, look, I'm in New York and I mean, I can't go. You know, you use Bitcoin in New York. Right. And I mean, I don't use any of the exchanges anyway and you probably shouldn't. And yeah, I think local Bitcoins doesn't really work. But I think everyone knows how to fake an IP address. Well, like, I don't think this bit license matters all that much. I mean, if Bitcoin does what it's supposed to do, it's supposed to the bit license supposed to be irrelevant. I think it matters to the people of New York. They don't want their state to be a backwater that can't innovate and use Bitcoin. It's an embarrassment. I'm embarrassed for them. Gabriel D. Vaughan, segregated witness. And are you embarrassed for New York? I, yeah, sure. Oh, it's well, I'm not embarrassed. I would say New York is an embarrassment on a political level. You're making a lot of friends there. Yeah, no, on a political level. I love New York, you know, I mean, Bryant Park. What's not to love? You know, segregated witness, you know, I've been against it from the start. And it was too complicated. We should just have a centralized server in Kazakhstan that we all pray to five times a day in the direction of Kazakhstan. And we go on on a mecca visit and we all pray and worship this one server that has the immutable ledger. I swear, I swear, I'm not telling that again and changing it. No, I mean, segregated witness is an incredible upgrade. It's almost like when it came out, I was just so blown away by how many advantages we went over it on our live lock-in show. I'm actually extremely excited about the capacity increase. The miners should be too, since they're going to make more money per block, I think, in fees, you know, conceivably. Then, again, maybe the fee pressure will go down. It'll probably even out could be the same as what they're making now. But regardless, it enables so many use cases that we can't think of and, you know, many of which are payment channels, but other things too. And lightning is only the beginning of, you know, payment channel innovation. There's also a little-known paper that I'd like to call out called full duplex payment channels that is a bit of a different setup to lightning network, but that could also be a really interesting path. And then there's all the innovations that have been held back by the huge bug plaguing Bitcoin for eight long years transaction malleability. So it's a wonderful day for Bitcoin. And as Tom pointed out, there's a political win behind the technical win that is just so important. And it's something that I was a little bit reticent about in the beginning and didn't really pick sides. But I'm not, you know, of course, I've come to see the power of the users in pushing for this change that they wanted. And the political power there has been really quite something to see. And the fact that the fork happened and we still survive just gives just shows you what honey badger Bitcoin is. All right, let's go to Gabriel D. Vine for more, sorry, to Jimmy song for more technical responses. To segregate it. It's for sure. So I mean, lightning is interesting for medium of exchange, because you can do a lot, but I personally believe that store value is really where Bitcoin is that is much more useful. And in that regard, we're fixing transaction malleability, we're fixing quadratic hashings and both of those add security. So for me, those are the real things that Segwood adds that bring value to the network. So it's a better store of value as a result of having Segwood. And, you know, obviously we do have, you know, lightning network and all these other things that we are going to experiment with. And perhaps they do a result in larger rooms for more people to come in. And that should, in theory, you know, enhance the network effect of everything and have more people coming in and cause a larger price rise and continue that virtuous cycle. All right, let's move on to the exit question. How soon will we see Bitcoin scaling solutions such as the lightning network and active use six weeks, six months, right away, Richard Hart? Well, I think you can download their beta app now, start playing with it. So, I guess you could start putting transaction on there yourself, guy that asked. Toad Vays. I mean, I'm still waiting for my first Segwood transaction. So let's, hold up a second there. I mean, if we start getting lightning channels, you know, in Q2 of next year, I'll be happy with that timeline. Gabriel, divine. I think Q2 of next year would be the time when it's really in a rollout situation, but as far as just some some active use among specialists, I'm expecting the December-ish. Jimmy, song. Yeah, there's a lot of infrastructure that needs to be built before it's ready for consumer use. I'm going out on a limb and I'll say within maybe a year, a year and a half is when it'll really be out there because you need software to support it first. And a lot of Wallace simply do not support lightning channels. So there you go. The answer is six months or more. Don't hold your breath. Moving on to issue three, North Korea. As tensions between the United States and North Korea continue to escalate, investors are seeking a safe haven in cryptocurrencies. While the destruction of the world as we know it could be a disaster for the people who live there, some predict that chaos could be a boon for Bitcoin, driving the price ever higher as the nuclear clock continues to tick toward zero. Toned vase is chaos good for Bitcoin. No. Short answer is no. Chaos is not good for anyone. Maximum chaos will make your Bitcoin worthless and it will also make your gold worthless. You can easily prove this by going back to 2008. When the markets crashed in 2008, your gold crashed like 30% as the market crashed 60%. And that's because people lost jobs. People were losing their homes and people cared about, you know, what am I going to do to buy food for my family? And no one gives a shit about Bitcoin or gold or anything else. Okay, for that matter. If total chaos comes in, I mean, again, right, total chaos, what if electricity goes out, how useful is your Bitcoin? Not at all. I mean, of course, you got other problems. If it or not goes down, you got bigger problems than Bitcoin, you don't want total chaos. You really don't. In a total chaos scenario, bullets will probably be the currency, in my opinion. A scare is good. If people are scared that something's going to happen, then that's ideal for the price of Bitcoin, for the price of gold, for all that stuff. In reality, North Korea is not a threat to America. Okay, there's only two threats to America. It's China and Russia. Now if China goes to support of North Korea and we start a fight with China, that's a problem. If we start a fight with Russia, that's a problem. And North Korea is not a problem. If China is not supporting North Korea, and the US does get into a military action with North Korea, that work can end within a week. Very, very easily. Okay, so I mean, the South Koreans may not be happy about the way that ends. So you got to be a little bit careful there. But I don't see this as a credible threat. I mean, Trump just needs to give a break from Twitter. And right now, after what his Twitter handle did to the stock market, I guarantee you that there's like hundreds of people screaming in his ear because even though we don't think of politicians as humans, they are humans and they are very heavily invested in the stock market. So when one politician does something dumb and it crushes the stock market, they all feel it in their retirement portfolios unless they all knew about it and were able to legally insider trade because they're allowed to insider trade. Okay, so Trump is going to stop doing this nonsense. They're going to figure it out. The scare is good for the price. An actual conflict is irrelevant to the price. And a serious conflict with a serious country is absolutely terrible for the price. Tone's absolutely right. The end of the world is bad, but everything up to that point, probably good for Bitcoin. Gabriel, D-Van. I'll agree with most of what Tone just said there. Just like to point out that he's absolutely right. North Korea is not a real threat. It's a cooked up threat that the mandarins of the massive nation states like to try around as either a threat or as a friend that we need to protect. It's all theater. It's a siop. Kim is a completely CIA asset. All that stuff is just to make a boogie man to shunt funds to the military industrial complex. It's not real stuff. And I actually disagree with Tone that China and Russia are real counters too. The power brokers are behind the scenes all working together and all that conflict is also just fake. It's all a big siop. Armageddon will not be televised. Fukushima is a way bigger risk than anything that you're going to see on the news. That's a reason why they don't talk about Fukushima because that's what can actually kill people. And as for Bitcoin, yes, all of this drama makes people flee to stores of value that are more trustworthy. And amazingly enough, financial press is starting to get the drift that Bitcoin is actually a safe haven asset. Well, I'm certainly against the idea of a dictator in North Korea having a nuclear weapon that could reach California because I'm in California. So Jimmy, song, does it bother you? Texas is pretty close to California. I mean, I don't know. I don't pay attention to politics too much, but I will say that geopolitical turmoil is good for Bitcoin because in large part, when you have conflict, when you have uncertainty, people want protection of their store of value. And the biggest thing that can hurt your store of value right now if you're not in Bitcoin is inflation. And governments are known to finance war by inflating their currency. That's happened ever since World War I. And World War I was a conflict that got out of control largely because governments were printing money. So given that, I think, you know, anytime there is sort of conflict and people are scared about, you know, whether or not their dollar or whatever currency that they're holding is good, it's good for Bitcoin because a stable store of value is extremely important in times of chaos. This is the one thing that's going to stay the same. I mean, that said, if everything blows up, obviously we're all dead and only cockroaches survive. But as long as there are humans, as long as, you know, even if the internet goes down, right, there are ways to transmit blocks and things that, you know, that we that are possible technically using radio waves and things like that. So I wouldn't worry too much. Let's just put it that way. And you can, you can, and it is good for Bitcoin. Richard Hart, is it time for me to invest in small liquor bottles and toilet paper? Well, you look like a big guy. Don't get a small liquor bottle. Get a big liquor bottle. I want a small one that I can trade with them. It's negotiations. I don't have a lot of whiskey. I only have a small amount. My opinion on the North Korea thing is that if you're a super power and you've got to keep your arm services sharp anyway and you're willing to invade countries full of sand and rocks to move the sand and rocks around that don't have nuclear capabilities, then you may consider a more serious threat with more serious action. Now, I'm making these decisions from a place of ignorance because I don't have good data on the actual, you know, game theory of models that they run to see how, you know, these things would work out if attempted. But I think that we should take existential threats seriously. I think the risk of nuclear problems in that area have gone up and not down. And that means that whatever was being tried in the past hasn't worked. And so if we could reduce South Korean casualties, I'm not sure any number of reduction would be acceptable to them. You know, at some point you can't just appease people. You have to do the hard thing and take the punch in the face and fight it out or else, you know, they might get to a point where the fighting is not even an option anymore, right? If you truly are negotiating with a madman and a mutually assured destruction, the craziest person wins because they care the least. So you're better off supplicating to them and you don't want to end up in that situation. So maybe they're aware of some, you know, future state that the world's going to exist in which disarms that. But I'm not aware of that state. And so my suggestion would be to go in there and fucking crush and destroy through whatever means necessary. Any means they have of harming in mass innocent human beings elsewhere in the world. There's no reason for them to have that technology and target strikes should be issued. And a lot of innocent lives will die, but those innocent lives are the ones, you know, helping through not having a civil revolt or through letting it get as bad as it did. Better those innocent lives that were slightly responsible are lost than the innocent lives that were totally even farther from responsibility, somewhere else in the world that doesn't speak the language. Moving on to the exit question, the world will be destroyed in a nuclear fireball because of the bellicose rhetoric of two portly leaders. Yes or no, tone, vase. No, absolutely not. Gabriel, D. Vaughn. No, Jimmy Song. No, much like a hard fork, it'll amount to a lot of hype, but not much explosions. Richard Hart. I missed the question. Will the world be destroyed? Yes or no? Yes, because of entropy and the expansion of the sun, but it's not a time frame you're unlikely to care about. And not the responsibility of human beings. It's the sun's fault. Moving on to issue four, game of thrones, HBO hacked. The home box office network suffered a major intrusion in this week with the hackers claiming more than six months of access to HBO's network, allowing them to have scorned with the scripts for the popular Game of Thrones series, demanding a ransom of six million dollars in Bitcoin. HBO claims that it wants to pay the hackers, but is having trouble sourcing the Bitcoin. Gabriel, D. Vaughn, will this sort of thing become commonplace in the future? Will the only people able to have secrets be those who are willing to pay? A short answer. Yes. We're entering a new age of secure computing and networking. And Bitcoin is pushing this there at about a hundred times faster than we were going there before. It makes possible so much shenaniganery that was very, very inconvenient before, and depended on a shoddy world of atoms, technologies. Now that we have this bit money, it is absolutely convenient to hack the shit out of any centralized repository of data and hold at ransom. What that means is two big lessons. One, centralized institutions are now sitting ducks and have a huge weakness that they didn't before, and will possibly mean their general downfall, maybe not in some cases, but it's conceivable that the massive hierarchical institutions that we have all grown up with are destined for the dust heap of history. The second lesson to take away from this is that the computing habits of everyday people will be undergoing a massive transformation over the coming, I would say five years. Anybody who can master cybersecurity and secure their Bitcoin properly will end up being the sovereign individuals of the 21st century, and the others will be the baristas. It's going to be a real shock to those who advocate for equality at all costs, the removal of the separation between classes. If you're out there listening and you don't know how to secure your Bitcoin, do your research. There are no shortcuts. You have to do it yourself because nobody can take responsibility for your money without needing your trust and therefore opening you up to the risk of trusted third party intermediaries. As General Patton warned, and I often quote, fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man. Are we finally seeing that Jimmy Song, are centralized institutions done? Are they just honeypots of data waiting to be stolen? The larger your database is, the more valuable and the more likely you'll be hacked? To some degree, I guess, but there's always been information markets for that sort of thing. What Bitcoin is providing is just more liquidity because you can sell it and get paid for it a lot easily. Bitcoin is a bare instrument, so it's taken out a lot of the friction. We've always had national inquire, willing to pay for pictures of Princess Diana and some random locale or whatever. It's always been the case. I don't see how this is really that different. Somebody just went in stole HBO's thing. By the way, HBO, you got to go reach out to some OTC trading dust. You can get that amount pretty fast. You just have to wire them cash or bring a suitcase or something. I don't understand how they didn't know how to do that. There's not a single technical person on the entire staff of Game of Thrones or HBO. I don't understand that. Anyway, but yeah, it's just an information market. Bitcoin just makes it a little more liquid, like it does a lot of markets. I don't really have that much of an opinion on it, to be honest. They tried, but they couldn't find a large enough suitcase. Richard Hart. Yeah. If you're tired of losing your customer's data, you should stop collecting their data. I mean, most companies that collect all this data, they don't even profit that much off it anyway. They think that one day they're going to use it for some great use or it'll grow. To be fair, this is company creative data. They couldn't have outsourced that or not held onto their own scripts. They could have had less people involved in the chain. It sounds like the producers were reading the scripts, not necessarily necessary. It's not the biggest loss. In the grand scheme of things, most of the people that enjoy the content probably have never read a script or cared to even read a script. The biggest loss is maybe some spoilers. Unless you're willing to not look at Twitter, you're going to get those anyway. I got one a couple days ago, unfortunately. I won't share it with you because I won't spread the spoiler disease. A private company losing their script is a small problem. Millions and millions of people losing their personal data. When the government lost all of its security clearance data, that's a thousand million times larger problem, greater than million times larger problem. I think we should focus on getting companies to do the right thing and stop taking data they don't need. That means everywhere. You do not need it. Stop asking me for it. I was in a place that routed me like a sheep through some stores and I don't like being routed like a sheep. It's offensive to me to be forced to walk through a store. At the end, I saw a little review thing and I said, okay, I want to leave a bad review. There was no reason for me to do this fucking S curve. Leave the review. Click next. Next question is how much money have you spent here today? Then I had an extra review to poorly review the second question that they asked. I don't want to live in that world. Make money like the good old days. Give me a better product at a better price. Don't increase the route that I path through your fucking store. Sorry for cursing. Tone Vays. No more secrets for HBO. I actually, I'm going to agree with Gabe. We are going to enter a world where people need to start taking their security more seriously. Because right now, they need to know the Bitcoin will force them to basically give people a digital print, digital footprint on anything electronic, including scripts. Right now, the best method we have for identifying who's reading what is to like watermark their email address on a document. Anyone that knows how to use copy and paste can just copy that text into a whole new word document. I mean, there is absolutely zero technology that puts a digital footprint on these things. So in the future, this is a good lesson. Just like what was it? The fapeting, the fapeting, the files when Apple got hacked for all the new celebrity photos. That was a good lesson for Apple's security. Maybe you shouldn't allow infinite password guessing without any pauses, like infinite number of password guesses in eight seconds. Maybe you should be take your security a little more seriously. So this is a good lesson for HBO. I'm sure all they had to do was send like a mass email through their company saying, hey, if you understand Bitcoin, why don't you give this person a call? And then they could have sourced that Bitcoin fairly quickly. They could have, I'm sure there are several people at HBO that know how to deal with this. And yeah, I mean, this, we are going to an age where security matters. Like I've been saying it on this show since I joined the show like what feels like two years ago now. And I might have been two years. And I've been saying the only security that matters to me is my Bitcoin protection. I don't care if my bank account gets hacked. I don't care if my email gets hacked. I couldn't care less. I don't care about anything in my security. I don't care if my computer gets locked. I'll just reinstall the operating system. Well, like the only security that matters to me is my Bitcoin security. And there's always, you know, I'm always thinking about how to improve that. All right. Let's move on to the exit question. The most important part of this discussion. Forced prediction. Who will sit on the Iron Throne? Give us a name, Gabriel D. Vine. First of all, the phrases who will sit the Iron Throne. Secondly, I'd like to just point out that Game of Thrones is an absolute travesty since season five. It's a total disaster ever since George R. R. Martin left, which I was given. I wanted to, I was totally willing to give DBWIS to whatever his name is, the benefit of the doubt. I was like, go for it guys. You know, you, you, you, you had such a great start to the series. Four seasons of solid content. And just boom, falls off of a cliff. The hound tumbling down was just the beginning. This whole disaster of a show has been such a catastrophe and such a slap in the face to the legacy of George R. R. Martin's excellent sprawling song of I said, fire epic. Just so sad, so sad. So really, you know, it should be little finger. But because this show is so derpy, it's probably going to be like Brienne of Tarth or like a random wildling. I like the random guesses. We should have also said spoilers if you're not caught up on Game of Thrones. Not that I think you spoiled anything. But I don't know that the show's gone completely sideways. I threw a our stupid. I think they have gotten a little more television with the cutting and the simplicity of kind of rushing to an ending. But I blame George R. R. Martin for not finishing the books. He had plenty of time. Actors get older. The show must go on. Jimmy Song, you don't watch Game of Thrones. Name a character. Tell me they will win. I'm going to say the dead corpse of Ned Stark. That is who's going to sit on the Iron Throne. It would pretty good for a non-Game of Thrones watcher. Richard Hart, do you watch Game of Thrones at all? I think the prettiest person wins. So I guess it would be the Queen of Dragons. Some called Gifts of Her, if you like Gifts. The Queen of Dragons, previously famous for her nude scenes, but now won't do them anymore. Tone Vays, let's hear it. The Iron Throne, sit. I generally agree with you, Gabe. Just not to that extent. I agree that it was better in seasons one through three, four, and even four. And then it's not as good now, but I still like it. The costumes are very good still. I'm still a fan of the show. I'm still a fan of the show. It would have been nice if for what Thomas said, if you would have finished the books in time, we could have really seen it. Now I do think that if it was the author's vision, that it would be something like Little Finger or the spider getting the throne. But because it has now become a television show, it will be more for the regular audience. And I don't know, it might just be Tyrion. All right. I like these pics so far. I want to go spoilers again. I have read the books. So I'm going to wow you and amaze you with the end of the show. You all want the end to be John Snow and Daenerys and Tyrion even. Guess what? They're all dead. They're all dying. John Snow is dying. Daenerys is dying. Tyrion's dying. Little Finger's dying. The spider's dying. Everyone dies. Sansa dies. Almost everyone on the show dies. Then out of nowhere, Robert Barathellen's son, the true heir to the throne, Gendry will rise. And who is that on his arm, but a Stark from the North? Ira Stark. Gendry and Ira Stark will win Game of Thrones. That is the answer. I believe I do have a prediction or a story of the week as we move to end this show. As I have just given away the ending of Game of Thrones, almost as if I hacked the very HBO servers that we have just discussed, I expect my $250,000 in Bitcoin. Please. Thank you. It's pronounced Gendry and Arya. So you got both the names wrong, but that would be awesome. That would be awesome. No pronunciation guides in the books. I just read the letters. Wrongly. Apparently one of the chat people, this is my story of the week, one of the chat people pointed out that you sound like, I can't remember the actor's name, but the main actor from Archer, the voiceover from Archer, and I realize you do sound like him. That is crazy. Oh my God. I love Archer. It's welcome comparison. So my second story of the week is that I started a new series for a future rant, which I generally do long form interviews, but I wanted to get a nice short story form in there. So I started a new series called Quick Rants. So look out for those, I'm trying to keep them under five minutes and feel free to hit me up on Twitter if you have any comments, suggestions, or critique. Thanks. All right. Jimmy Song, story of the week. I am going to say it's Coinbase's $100 million raise. They are the first Bitcoin Unicorn, though I think they are not the biggest Bitcoin company in the world. I think that's probably bitmings, just given how many miners and how profitable they are. But yeah, let's hope that Coinbase uses it to make their platform more secure and up all the time and not hacked and all this other stuff because I think if there's anything that we've learned about exchanges, it's that they get hacked all the time. So please Coinbase, use this money well. Hey, Jim, maybe grow a pair and maybe I'm blocked me on Twitter. How about that Coinbase? They don't block me. So I had how am I supposed to know that? But yeah, I mean, they're good people there, I'm sure. So, come on, Coinbase, you got to do really good with this money and let's take it from there. That's it. Anytime anyone raises any money in Bitcoin, we always want them to buy more servers, Richard Hart prediction or a story of the week. I think the things I care about most are the onboarding of the people that actually have all the world's money. So I care about ledger X and I care about positive state regulation and I care about opening floodgates of the people that have all the real money into this best investment class that's ever existed. Let them play along. That's it. All right, Tony Vey is a prediction or a story of the week. I guess I'm just going to take a look at the price. So I hope everyone can see my screen. This is the daily chart and I today was a very critical day for me. It's turning out to be a really cool day and the day is going to end in about three hours and this is generally a point where it's a good time to take some profit. But as long as we're continuing making all time highs throughout the day, you can let this go. So I would be looking to take some profit probably at the end of this candle or just see how the next candle shapes out. If we do bust out to another few hundred bucks, it would be perfectly reasonable to take a little profit. And if we bust out high enough, perhaps we won't get back down to three thousand, but we could get back down to 3500. And you kind of want these things to kind of have a lad kind of go up and down a little bit when things go up too far too quick. Bad things eventually happen. But from a weekly perspective, I'm still looking for five more weeks of upside. So even if some time next week or the week after, we happen to fall down in three to 3500 and then go back up. We're still fine. And we'll see, we'll see how far we get. And just as long as we can keep the B cash on their own stupid chain, and as long as these people don't come back to Bitcoin and try to like, you know, mess things up again, I see a very bright future for Bitcoin and especially its price. I've got a great idea on how we can keep them out. Build a wall. And yes, everyone's mad at me in the chat for ruining Game of Thrones. But if you read the book, you'd know too, it seemed like it was just right there. They even had a little bit of a flirtation. Going back to what Gabriel was saying, if George R.R. Martin was still writing the books, I would also give a throw with a dice to the fact that everyone in West Rose and East Rose, and whatever else it is, will all die, victory for the whites, zombies over all. George R.R. Martin is a bastard and he's capable of doing it. The showrunners of the TV show are not. Happy endings for everyone. Kings and queens kissing on the throne. No, the queen of dragons does not survive nor do the dragons. It's all been written. I got the details from the hackers. Thanks to everybody for watching. We're running out of time. Bye. Bye.