The Bitcoin Group, the American original. For over the last 10 seconds, the sharpest Satoshi's, the best Bitcoins, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Jeffrey Jones from the Bitcoin News Show. It looks like it's just us today Thomas, but I'm quite excited nevertheless. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network. You're going to have to hear me talk a lot more today. Moving on, we've got breaking news. TD Ameritrade is going to allow Bitcoin futures starting Monday. That's right. The day after the CME Group launches, TD Ameritrade is launching. We'll talk about this more in issue one. Bitcoin futures again. This time, the much larger CME Group is following last week's launch by CBOE. CME Group recently announced that they were raising the margin requirements from 35% to 47%. As they expect volatile trading on the cryptocurrency markets. The CBOE launch saw their website decimated by demand with their marketplace stopped multiple times as the price of Bitcoin jumped almost 20%. Jeffrey Jones, what will happen this time and what about the TD Ameritrade news? Yeah, it's pretty interesting stuff. There was a lot of fun out there about people saying how futures is going to get a little bit crashed. Features is going to end up crashing the market. There's going to be a whole bunch of shorting and everything like that. Of course, that's not really what happened though. To be fair, CBOE is obviously pretty small compared to what's coming like CME and things like that. Now with this new announcement, this is just inevitable. At this point, we can see exactly what's going to happen. This is going to be more futures launched than this is going to be an ETF. There's going to be another ETF. I'm fully expect at least a couple ETFs next year, which really will end up sending the Bitcoin price to the moon, which will give the Bitcoin community and developers a lot more opportunity to be able to go ahead and pursue the things that they want to pursue. This is just expected now at this point. There's going to be all sorts of Wall Street entered in. By the end of 2018, all of Wall Street will be in. By 2019, all of everybody else pretty much. Remember, this story will repeat across the planet in Japan, in London and on and on and on everywhere where there's major trade centers of the world. They're going to want to get in on a piece of Bitcoin and that's not going to change. It also notes later in the article that they expect larger institutional firms such as JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, except to allow their customers to trade. The article has a bit of an ominous tone. It says that will allow the entry of hedge funds and larger institutional players who may have a very different notion of Bitcoin's future. That's when things might get interesting. This is again referring to the idea that they could come in and short the Bitcoin market and destroy the value of the price. Do you think that's going to happen? I really don't because I see this as a perfect opportunity of good money pushing out bad money. We see that there's only going to be a very, very limited supply of Bitcoin. The world is waking up to this. You do not short a mania, Richard Hart likes to say. You do not want to short free money. You don't short Ponzi schemes and you don't short these huge rallies. This is going to be insane. The mania is beginning to set in. We're about to go parabolic. The world is getting out. This is the best form of money that mankind has ever seen. People want to create opportunities for this. People want to create markets for this. People want to get a lot of the rest of the world to get into this. This is going to be absolutely huge. Of course, we've been saying this for years at the World Crypto Network. But this is the reality that we described. It is now coming true. Like I said, this is a Wall Street entry. Now, to play devil's advocate here, isn't this their last chance to stop Bitcoin? Maybe if they could short it into the ground, they could break everyone's heart. Everyone would walk away from the project and the banks would be able to survive and sell their services for another thousand years. Well, remember Bitcoin doesn't just exist in the US, right? There's markets across the planet. There's ETFs that's going to be launched across the planet. Future markets that's going to be launched everywhere in the world. Maybe Wall Street might try to do something funny. But again, with these huge margins on shorts, there's just no way. You can burn through all the free money you want. There's only limited supply of Bitcoin as a hard asset. So you just don't short this type of rally. The power of hotlers is absolutely strong. Hugely strong. More and more every day is the price rises. Again, this is what gold was supposed to do. This is what gold was supposed to protect us from. But it's not. And Bitcoin is, and that's why the money continues to pour in. We see the price rise. It's got this big fat price ticker shoving it into everybody's face. And about, look, this is what's happening to the market. This is a sign of the global economy of the state that we're in. We don't see assets like this rise. These global reserve assets like Bitcoin rise like this without some kind of huge warning sign, without taking it as some kind of huge warning sign about what's to come. In 2018, you know, with the way that we have now with these debt to GDP ratios, negative interest rates and on and on and on. Yeah, it's going to be a very tell tale year of 2018. It's also worth noting the last asset class added to the futures exchanges was gold more than 40 years ago. There's been nothing since then. So that's how big, what a big deal this is. That's why I'm saying these. I think they might have added uranium. But that's about it. It's like in 1985, you can just pick up uranium at the corner store. What are you talking about? If these launches go smoothly as expected, will Wall Street welcome cryptocurrency with open arms? Obviously, Jeff agrees. Yeah. So I do believe you said the question was, will Wall Street open it with open arms? Yep. Is this it? Yeah. Wall Street is already bought the blockchain, you know, bait hook, line and sinker. The blockchain is only the introduction into Bitcoin. Once you start getting into blockchain, you start seeing all of these amazing, you know, all this talent and all these amazing companies and then you realize that, oh, wait, all of this has to be traded for Bitcoin, the underlying asset that backs up everything, the backs of this entire economy that people store their wealth and for their families and for their children and for the future and that we can actually create a real, a real goal, a golden age society on real money. And so that, you know, that's what people are going to see. And that's what they're seeing. And we see the buzz on Wall Street. I don't know if you watched the show called Crypto Trader with Rand, right? But you know, he visits New York and these other podcasts visit New York and you can just see all these people, all these conferences. I mean, the blockchain bug, I think everybody at this point has been bitten by the blockchain bug and it only is a matter of time after that until they get bitten by the Bitcoin bug. All right. I'd just like to thank everybody for watching. Make sure you give us a thumbs up and a share. We have around 393 viewers. It is kind of a holiday weekend. So we are seeing less guests and less viewers. But we appreciate you for sticking in there. Moving on to issue two, nice hash hacked. $60 million in cryptocurrency is missing from cloud mining marketplace. Nice hash. While some suspect an inside job, others say it's just part of doing business in cryptocurrency. Nice hash is claiming that they will repay their customers perhaps with a token sale. Thomas Hunt, your thoughts on the nice hash hack. Well, I'm not surprised. There are so many of these they just keep happening. We keep telling people not to store their money on exchanges, not to store your money in cloud mining. Cloud anything is so questionable these days. Remember the cloud is really just someone else's computer and that's where your money went. It's just not the people that you trusted went to the hackers computer. This hash is saying they might do a token that worked for BitFinex. It worked for all these ICOs. It might be the way the future. So hang in there. You might get your money back. But it's likely to be like Mt. Gox where they give you the value of your Bitcoins, not actually your Bitcoins. Jeffrey Jones, your thoughts. Yeah, we were speaking before the show. Thomas about how a lot of the stories that we do here are repeat repetitive, right? They continue to repeat. And this is just one of those stories about another exchange going down and getting hacked and this underlies the importance once again, we will remind our audience. Not your keys, not your Bitcoin. This is absolutely paramount because there is a lot of young people that are entering the space and they just don't understand. They're just like, what do you mean an exchange goes down? All my money was on there and all my friends money was on there. People need to understand this is very important. This is by hardware wallets are continuing to sell out at exponential rates. Well, also because of the prices, of course. I mean, at a half a trillion dollar market at this point, there is just so, so much room for error because we're so early in the space. There's so many people that hackers can count on, you know, not really doing their due diligence that they need to be doing in the security area of this brand new industry that is blockchain and that is Bitcoin. So, you know, it's, it's, unfortunately, a story that's going to continue to repeat for the foreseeable future until we really start really hardening our actual security systems because for years and years, the internet, you know, and systems have been terrible. I mean, hospitals, banks, all running on Windows NT and systems from the 70s, you know, it goes on and on. So, this is a, I'm hoping that Bitcoin really will usher in this new era of actual security and really, and kind of harden the world against this type of attacks. It's also about the lack of talent in the blockchain space for programmers. Right now, Bitcoin programmers are heavily in demand and if you can't get a Bitcoin programmer, you get the closest you can get. And when the closest you can get makes a security mistake because they're new on the job, we end up with these $60 million hacks. It's interesting to say though, a lot of people confuse the idea that Bitcoin has been hacked over and over again with a Bitcoin exchange or a cloud mining exchange being hacked. Jeff, what's the difference? Was Bitcoin hacked here? No, and so, you know, a lot of big time investors, for example, these crypto people like at crypto hedge funds and things like that and they understand, you know, the long-term holders and things like that, they understand that it's not actually the underlying asset Bitcoin itself that gets hacked. That has actually been continuously secure since its inception. There's been a couple of little hiccups but they were fixed within hours by the community, a dedicated community around the world of people who commit themselves to this movement, to this protocol, to this idea of having sound money on the internet. And I just don't think that there's going to, you know, I just don't think that people are going to learn until we have these more and more of these hacks and more and more of these examples of these things happening. But really, again, these, it's not Bitcoin that's being hacked. It really is the slack of security, the fact that we are very early days here and we need to harden our security, we need to come up with these principles. And the biggest thing is we need to figure out how to do gold storage better as some of these exchanges. Some of these people do have it figured out. For example, Zappo, right, they kind of go to the extremes. That's the other end of the spectrum where they just go around the world and random places, bury their bunkers 100 feet deep and solid cement. I mean, you know, that's one way to go. But again, you know, I think that over time we're going to figure this out just like we figured out internet security, you know, credit cards over the internet and things like that. For the most part, that works pretty well and we're going to figure it out with Bitcoin. We're going to make sure that this can be used by people around the world. All right, and the exit question, I'll ask myself, what can users do to avoid losing their money and hacks? And obviously, like we've been saying, keep your own keys, get a hardware wallet, get a paper wallet. What I'd also say is a good idea here is diversify. Hold your Bitcoin in multiple accounts, maybe some in this exchange, some in this hardware wallet, some in that hardware wallet. One thing I'm thinking now for myself even, I should probably buy another hardware wallet. Maybe I should buy two or three of these things. When your investment grows, the way that you store your investment needs to grow as well. Jeff, you have to. Absolutely super important because remember, when you have, you know, $3,000 of Bitcoin, well, it's a $3,000 amount. That's how much security you put into it. You put $3,000 of security into it. But if you have $100,000, well, you really need to start thinking about putting $100,000 of security behind it because this is the new age and this is early days. This kind of stuff can be really easily lost and you really have to do your due diligence. You really have to research. If you want to be a part of this new global financial renaissance and reap the benefits of all this opportunity, you're going to have to put in the work to learn about it and to understand this. You can't be relying on, you know, some random blog post or things like that. You really have to put in the work yourself. And certainly remember that we're using physical security to hold our digital Bitcoin. So if you take your hardware wallet or you take your paper wallet, you put it in a safe deposit box, you put it in a safe, you put it in a fireproof safe, you get another safe deposit box. These are all options that are available to you before you come crying to us that you lost your coins. You still have a chance, split it up in the multiple piles, increase your security as your investment increases. Moving on to issue three, Bitcoin Mania. The more the mainstream media reports on how much money you could have made if you invested in Bitcoin earlier, the more FOMO grows. And it's now reaching Epic Heights as some Bitcoin investors are mortgaging their homes to buy Bitcoin. Jeffrey Jones, I ask you, will this Mania be short-lived or will these mad cat wildly late investors still profit and thus inspire more Mania? Well, I think there's been a lot of talk about how high Bitcoin can go and there's been a lot of smart people that have commented and they've kind of all say the same thing if you listen to all these people and I'll pretty much repeat what they say, which is, you know, Bitcoin is a very, very small market cap in the end. We did reach a half a trillion dollars but, you know, Bitcoin's competition is as a hard asset, right? So what do you have to compare it with gold, with the dollar, with things like that bonds, right? The directives market alone is hundreds and hundreds of trillions of dollars. So if we were to just extrapolate just 5% of gold or to take 5% to 10% of gold, I mean, we'd be at over $25,000. And so there's so, so much more to go and there's so much, and it's just so, so early still. We have so much more development to go. We have so many more problems to solve. We just, we aren't even really ready for the actual mainstream audience yet. You know, we're still, we're still using these running long addresses, right, of Bitcoin that's just more numbers than you can ever count. We still have these little hardware devices that we have to have that are just kind of weird and obscure. You know, when everything is built in and baked into everything you do, your software, your browser, your phone and everything like that, that's when the regular consumer can really start having a great experience. But until then, it really is early days and you guys, you got to remember that it's going to be a little while before we can be ready for the mainstream audience. And when we do it, it's really going to blow up. And that's what these investors are counting on. So people can see the possibilities. People can see what we can actually do. We can fathom these crazy ideas of autonomous transactions and distributed autonomous companies, right? Things like the Dow, right? And machine learning and all these things combining, it's going to get really crazy when all of this artificial intelligence and things can start using money. And that's just kind of this future world that Bitcoin and these other digital currencies allows. I'm afraid I have to go on the side that these late investors will also make money. Part of the reason the price of Bitcoin is going up is we don't know the value or the price of this new asset class and we're trying to discover it. And when you really, really dig down and look into the 21 million coins, I was having a discussion today with a wired author who wrote that Bitcoin would be completely mined out by 2030. And I got all mad and said, no, it's 21 30. And it's a completely different. It's 100 years. He did have a good point. It was 99% mined out is what the article, the source that he went to. So he did have a minor error in that 1%. But that's it. 1% of the Bitcoin will be mined for 100 years. So if you have a little bit of Bitcoin now, that's why people say crazy things like it will be worth $100,000 or it'll be worth a million dollars of coin. Or we don't know the value of Bitcoin because we don't know how big the market is. We do know how many coins there are going to be and that they're going to be less and less coins every four years. And even taking his point and going to the 99%, 99% mined out by 2030. That's not that long away. Jeff, I want to say. It's really crazy. I mean, people don't understand that there's really only around a million coins or so around the globe at any given time that's actually liquid. I mean, a million coins on the markets, you know, for billions of millions of people. Now this is early days. So it's going to be not very evenly distributed like this. But eventually, over the years, as more and more people use Bitcoin, earn Bitcoin and spend a Bitcoin and it becomes a unit of account, you know, in addition to being a media exchange and store value, you can really start to see this becoming this global world currency. And really taking over these huge market caps of trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars. And so it's just so important to remember that this is the future of money money is going digital just like everything else. And you know, it's going to be really crazy when people finally realize that there really is only 21 million coins. And at any given time, you know, the whole world is fighting over around a million coins. And I think we're going to talk more about the number of coins in the next topic. But let's move on to the exit question. How has this media reached you personally? Friends and family assuming that you're rich? Or does everyone now contact you just wanting to buy their own Bitcoin? Jeff? It's, I guess there's a few people I know personally that think I'm rich or whatever right? Obviously, I'm not Bitcoin rich or anything like that. I'm able to do, you know, my show is full time and Twitter full time and things like that. But, you know, we're definitely living really, really lean. I think anybody on Bitcoin who's really honest with themselves and who's not actually wasn't born rich is living lean because we want to make this coin last. We understand that this coin is going to be very valuable in the future. And so, you know, it's really, really, really difficult to sell any coin. And everybody that I know that's living off of Bitcoin is absolutely living, living a very meager, you know, very moderate lifestyle because of that main reason, because we want this coin to last for the rest of our lives. We want to be able to be free from, you know, all of slavery, all of the slavery that's going around the planet. I mean, this is this nine to five job slavery craziness is just ridiculous. And so, I just, I think there's a lot of people benefiting from the price rise around the world, from in first world countries where you can actually have the opportunity to not have to have a day job to all the way in third world countries where you can actually buy groceries to feed your family to save people's lives. You know, you can actually in another country allow farms to spring up because you can sell the goods from across to a whole nother to a whole nother country without any type of, you know, regulation and taxation issues because you're using the blockchain. And so, this is just going to open up more and more opportunities and yeah, I don't see it stopping anytime soon. I would agree with Jeff here and say either you're born saving or Bitcoin will teach you how to save. Everyone I know is just trying to reduce their amount of money they're spending each month so they can hold more bitcoins. And everyone else I know is trying to buy in. I do want to say this, this recent peak or this recent spike has been different than previous spikes. Previous spikes I've not gotten these messages. Are you a millionaire yet? I've not gotten actual interest where people do buy coins. Some people in my family and friends have contacted me. I walk them through Coinbase a little bit. I tell them about what I think is going to happen and they do actually invest. But this is what it took. It took mainstream media. It took $18,000 Bitcoin. I've also heard it twice. I was getting in and out of the car and I heard it on NPR. They were talking Bitcoin. And then this is the real kicker on just a rock radio station. I heard a lady do a little tag where she's like, oh, and the price of Bitcoin is $16,000. And some kind of digital ledger. I don't know what it is, but that's sure good. So this rise is different than the last rise. It's not just much bigger. The amount of people involved is much bigger. We've seen it at the Bitcoin meetups too. Lots of new people. Jeff Mordell. I mean, it's crazy. It's all over Fox News. All my relatives know about it. Friends and family, it did start buying in. So this is absolutely different than 2013. This is the beginning of Romania that will really hit in 2018. 2018, I mean, we went from a few billion market cap this year in January to half a trillion, half a trillion. And that's just this year. What do you think is going to happen next year? We are going to go into the multiple, multiple, multiple trillions, if not 10 trillion by the end of the year or more. Nobody can call it up because nobody can predict this because this is global and unprecedented. So there is, you know, there's a whole lot of room for this bubble to grow. This will be the world's largest bubble that we've ever seen, ever, ever, ever in the history of humankind. Remember, not just a bubble. I saw this cartoon today on Bitcoin art gallery and the guy said it was a bubble and first he was blowing bubbles. He said it was a bubble. Then it was a balloon. Then it was a hot air balloon. Then he was living inside the bubble as if it was a dome and he had a house and a tree and he had a nice house. And yeah, it's more like a bubble you can live in. The world will be consumed by the Bitcoin bubble. Yep. And then we'll all just live inside. But let's move on to the next issue, issue four, inactive coins. Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzick is back again with a vengeance and his new project strikes right at one of Bitcoin's core tenants, ownership of the asset. Garzick sees to declare all of the Satoshi coins and perhaps others to be inactive. Then transfer their value to a united Bitcoin foundation that would be used to invest in altcoins. I guess I have to ask myself first, Thomas Hunt, your thoughts on this interesting project. Well, I do think it's interesting and maybe more interesting than Jeff's last project, metronome, where he basically discovered cross atomic swaps but wanted to create a cross atomic swaps token. I assume he's abandoned that project or maybe he's just, I don't know, drinking a lot of caffeine, doing a lot of projects at the same time. But yeah, I don't think it's right to take Satoshi's coins. I do agree that technically you could hard fork Bitcoin and take the coins very easily, as well as you could just print your own coins, which would be a more honest thing to do, having a pre-mine rather than a pre-theft. And then it becomes very confusing as to when coins become inactive. Are they going to come raid my savings account because I didn't move my Bitcoin enough. It's a very strange idea. One wonders if Garzik ever understood Bitcoin. But then also, I suppose not that Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency or our first attempt at this, but for Bitcoin to be so successful out of the gate, you have to wonder why we didn't try these things before. And there's good reasons. But now I think that we're going to have to try all of the things that we didn't fail on. And this is one of them. Jeffrey Jones, your thoughts. Yeah, it's just another one of the Bitcoin forks that's just going to be around here. I mean, everybody's doing it. The, what is it said of the ICO? It's the IFO, initial fork offering. Yeah. I think, you know, it's really interesting. I'm just glad that more and more attention is being brought back to Bitcoin because they think they're trying to undermine Bitcoin. In fact, they are just bringing more attention to the real Bitcoin as the market continues to show what everybody thinks is the real Bitcoin. And you know, this is just, in my opinion, another attempt of Garza to try to stay relevant. I mean, this guy is at this point ridiculous. I mean, what's going on? We simultaneously working on two separate forks while working on a, an ICO project that's going to solve the problem of Bitcoin forks. It's really not making any a whole lot of sense to me anymore. And I think at this point, Garza gets completely irrelevant in the Bitcoin community, just as relevant as Gavin or Roger, which is pretty much nothing. You know, they just continue to lose sight of the original vision of Bitcoin, really, which was, you know, not even want to say vision, right? Because then everybody's talking about Satoshi's vision, but the original idea of Bitcoin, which is this censorship resistant currency, this, this, the reason and ability for it to be censorship resistant is because it's decentralized. So therefore, it is the most important property. Otherwise, we're just, you know, building another PayPal 2.0. And I hope more and more people begin to realize this. And as they realize this, they see how irrelevant people like Roger and Garza Gar. It's also worth noting that all of these hard forks are happening on the original Bitcoin chain, not on the B cash chain. Let's move on to the exit question. In 2018, the year of Bitcoin hard forks, will we see more so-called crypto dividends, Jeffrey Jones? How many? Well, you know, there's many people that have been calling for this. I was more than likely one of the first after me was Jimmy and, you know, at the same time, Adam Meister kind of actually coined the term crypto dividends. So there's been a few of us that have been kind of expecting this ever since the success of Bitcoin cash or success, right? Ever since the fact that it actually, we proved that you could hard fork and still maintain a market cap. Ever since that was proven, the idea of creating these forks has been running rapid. We just basically, since that first moment, at that moment is when we started predicting that, OK, 2018 is going to be the year of the hard forks because everybody is trying to get around regulations, right? We did it with ICOs, but now somebody's banning ICOs, OK, we'll do a fork. And then when they talk something about a fork, they'll do something else. But look, at the end of the day, what's important is Bitcoin. This is where all the development is working on. This is where all the actual problems are being solved. This is the tool that people around the world are using to save themselves from the tyranny of central banks and corrupt governments. This is the tool that's freeing people from having to go to a day job and having to slave over something they don't want to do. This allows the opportunity for people around the world to do what they want to do and what they want to do. Once they've been freed by Bitcoin, it's helped Bitcoin. Like myself and many other people that I know. Jeffrey Jones is right. There'll be many hard forks, but only one Bitcoin. Moving on to bonus issues. We've got bonus issues at such a big news day here on Friday. Charlie Lee, Satoshi Light, creator of Lightcoin, had a great quote on Twitter. He said, The number of people upset me for donating to WikiLeaks shows why censorship resistance is resistance is so important. If those people can, they would stop everyone from donating. The point is, it's my money and only I decide what I do with it. Period, a monetary statement, not political. And what Charlie's talking about is how whenever he wants to demonstrate the censorship resistance feature of Bitcoin or Lightcoin, respect to Charlie for mentioning both, he makes a donation to WikiLeaks. No company or government can stop him. And that's one of the reasons that cryptocurrency is valuable. And Charlie is wise enough to understand this and to expel it. But I want to ask you, Jeff, the hard question here, is it a monetary statement or is it a political statement? Well, at the end of the day, you know, Andrea kind of says that money is speech. It's just the way it is. And to me, cryptography, cryptocurrencies is truly the only free speech out there. And so this is this is Charlie demonstrating that idea right there in front of our faces for everybody to see. And I too have donated in the past WikiLeaks. And I will continue to donate to WikiLeaks and to other things like the tour project and the open PGP into these privacy focus projects that are trying to give people more freedom, that are trying to create more sovereignty for the individual. And it's these type of people that work on Bitcoin, that work on many open source projects that want to do this because for ideological reasons, they don't do it for money reasons, which is the reason why you'll never ever be able to buy a core developer. You can buy a Garzik, you can buy a Ver, Roger Ver, you can buy all sorts of different people, but you can't buy a person who's really, really, really set fast on their ideology. And this is what we've seen with people in the Bitcoin community and other open source communities. You know, the same thing kind of repeated with Linux in the early days, right? Like people just mocked him, all these professors and all these schools and all these academia, they all mocked at Linux. But yet, what did he do? He built it anyway. And it became amazing. And so too, is this going to be with a, so too was it with TCP IP and so too will be with Bitcoin. And these open source protocols will continue to thrive and bring more and more sovereignty. Now, we do have this problem like we just recently experienced with net neutrality. But I'm not sure Thomas if that's a topic, but the rest of sure, Bitcoin will not be affected by net neutrality. Bitcoin will, if anything, reverse this decision and allow more and more projects like VPNs and things like that, more privacy focused tools to be funded. And like Andreas actually said, like Bitcoin will completely revolutionize the way the internet gets funded from here on out if they continue to try these draconian measures. I do think they are going to continue to just try these measures and they have struck down net neutrality the other day. We could talk about more if you want. But I want to go to what Charlie said. And I do think this is the best way to demonstrate what he's talking about. So in that way, it is a monetary statement, not a political statement. Additionally, if he's using small amounts like $10 or $20, it's not really supporting their cause in the way that $10,000 or $100,000. It's not like Charlie's giving large amounts to WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks itself has become a little questionable. Originally, it had more of an open source intelligence idea. Now some would say that it's being used by Putin to open source his intelligence. So it's slightly different goal, but an interesting organization. And again, they were frozen by PayPal. They were frozen by the credit cards. They were cut off. You shouldn't be able to donate to them, but with Bitcoin or Litecoin, you can. And I think that is a great demonstration of what Charlie's talking about. I laud him for making the statement and for standing up against him because people are being critical of him now. They are riding him. People don't like WikiLeaks. But again, that's exactly what he's saying. You can donate money to unpopular causes with Bitcoin and Litecoin. So Jeff, do you want to go over Net Neutrality? I mean, last time everyone has a pretty negative reaction. A lot of libertarians don't like rules in general. So even when we have a rule that means there are no more rules, they can't agree with that, which is unfortunate. So a lot of our audiences is calling status right now and saying that you're going to create a new bureaucracy. When in reality, we're pretty much been sold to the corporations. The Comcast and Verizon senators have overwhelmed the people, senators. And we lost three to two on the FCC committee. They're being now sued by many states. California is considering having their own Net Neutrality. And of course, the computer geeks are working on new alternative versions of the internet, but none are ready for Netflix later tonight. Jeff, what do you say on Netflix on Net Neutrality? You know? Yeah. In this situation that we're in forced by crappy government, you know, and bureaucracy and things like that, it's not an ideal situation, but there's all sorts of issues. You know, on Richard Hart kind of lays it out the best. And when he kind of lays it out really clean for everybody. I mean, look, you only have one pipe in your house. You don't have a million other different pipes that can go to other different options, and other things like that. You have one pipe and everybody in the United States only has about one, maybe two ISPs, if you're lucky to choose from. So we already live in this insanely monopoly. They haven't had a free market in many, many years, maybe since the 70s, since 18th he broke up in the 70s. So it's a crappy situation. And you know, we can try to force monopoly ideas to compete with the monopoly and maybe that'll work. But at the end of the day, it's going to be a tough situation for the people in the US to deal with. We're going to have to face some hard truths and we're going to have to break up these monopolies. And whether that's going to take the collapse of the actual US dollar, I mean, you know, whether that's going to have to take the collapse of their stock price or all sorts of different things. Rest assured, I do believe that the free market will choose freedom as it always does. And now that we have cryptocurrencies, now that we have an ability to fund these types of projects really pretty easily, I think that the sky is the limit in terms of what we can actually do for freedom. It's also worth noting that the situation has changed. We used to talk about theoretical problems from net neutrality, but now these are real problems. Companies like Comcast own their own media companies and movie studios and television studios. So they directly compete with Netflix. So they have their own services, which they would like to go faster. Additionally, companies like Verizon offer voice service, which competes with Skype. They've actually shut down Skype in some areas. So this is not a theoretical problem. These are companies, vulturing in on the internet. There's even an idea before all this, if we go back into the dark ages, where the ISP shouldn't be looking at your traffic, that they just shouldn't have that option. This shouldn't even be a discussion or a debate. Everything should be encrypted from the beginning, and then we wouldn't even have this problem now. Maybe everything will be encrypted in the future and everyone will use VPNs, and that'll be the solution to this, but still a dark day for the internet. Now we've got one more bonus story. It's a very exciting Friday. We've got the Bitcoin Segwit Update Roundtable. Point base is giving us right here in the top. We wanted to give our customers an update on Bitcoin segregated witness transactions. We are planning to implement Segwit in 2018. So let's parse this announcement from Dan Romero, Vice President, and GM of Coinbase. 2018 is not the greatest that we were hoping for. We'd rather hear a more specific date like 1st quarter 2018 or 2nd quarter 2018. By leaving it open like this, they could deliver us Segwit next year on December 15th. This is very disappointing coming from Coinbase. They're a really big company. They should be able to have a lot of developers, different teams, walking and chewing gum at the same time. And it shows that they can only chew gum. It's very sad for Coinbase. We also have BitPay weighing in about the same thing. BitPay says that they are already working on various parts of their platform to support transactions with Segwit. But that doesn't really say anything and what does various parts of your platform. We've seen several smaller companies such as Treasurer and Ledger, AirBits or some, oh well not AirBits, but Green Adress. Some other people have accepted Segwit. BitWalla just activated Segwit. What is the problem with Coinbase? Jeffrey Jones, do you think their infrastructure is just terrible? Their programmers are terrible? Or are their priorities bad? Are they more into Ethereum and altcoins? Do they believe becoming the next cryptocurrency is more important than becoming Coinbase? I don't know. Jeffrey Jones. Yeah, I mean it's clearly political. The solution is technically sound and technically peer reviewed by everybody there and yet they choose not to have their developers put it in their roadmap. This here, this allowing the saying that they're just going to do it sometime in 2018 is just, I mean, it's childish in my opinion. The amount of money that I believe they just secured another like 10 millions of dollars and things like that. They've gotten hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. They're signing up hundreds of thousands of users a day. At this point it's just ridiculous that they won't implement Segwit sooner. But at least we did get a date from them so that we can always come back and say, look, you promised 2018. You said 2018. Where is the Segwit implementation? At this point they really are just seeing the dollar signs in their eyes. I mean, you saw Brian Armstrong go out there on multiple different news channels say that what's really important to us right now is adding more crypto assets. That's what our customers want. You know, they don't care about security. They don't care about our security. I like the way it's switched from altcoins to crypto assets. Yep. It's all crypto assets now. Thanks to Chris Brinesky. Thank you, Chris. If you're watching, thank you so much for making everybody refer to altcoins and shitcoins as crypto assets now. But that's basically what we're doing. That's what he's that's clearly what he has in mind. That's where he sees the dollar signs. I mean, look, their platform goes under anytime there's any strain at all. And so they clearly have made horrible and laughable technological technology choices. They either they're not hiring enough people or they're not hiring the right people. But at the same time, I have no faith in Brian Armstrong to lead us to CD as a CEO. So this company has been flawed for years. And you know, we have been pounding on Coinbase for years. But this is this is what we're at. They want to be PayPal. They it's a little. It's a little. Yeah. I've wanted to be PayPal to put it. It's a little shocking to see a company of this size and this evaluation struggle with simple scaling. I know that Twitter was a really complicated thing because everyone wants to see the feed at the same time and they all want a live update of the feed. Also, I've read the Twitter book. I know that it was a spaghetti mess of code and no one knew how anything worked and it was on multiple servers and Twitter had a whole bunch of issues that led to Twitter becoming Twitter. I'm not sure that I give the same leeway to Coinbase. It was not sure that it's so difficult to run a Bitcoin wallet and it couldn't be AWS'd that they couldn't roll out 100,000 servers or or hire the best guy in the industry, hire the wolf, bring in the wolf and when it's time to roll out the new servers, you just flex with it. I don't understand. I mean, I'm sure it's complicated. Look, we have AWS. We have Netflix that streams 4K video or at least 1080p to millions of people. You can't tell me that you can't scale somebody signing up on Coinbase and sending a transaction from one database field to another database field. I'm a web developer. I do understand scaling to some degree when it comes to SQL databases and the Microsoft stack and things like that. I know that I can just pop a website on Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure and I can just put a website on there and scale up almost infinitely. They're clearly doing something wrong over there and they spent a lot of VC money and they continue to spend a lot more VC money. At this point, with the amount of money and time that they've had, the fact that they can't scale their systems yet and the fact that they're only focused on these new assets just trying to bring in more dollars, just trying to get richer and not implement what the community, the operates to the protocol, that the community demand. This continues to prove why I don't like Coinbase. Coinbase continues to prove why I think it's one of the worst companies in the whole space to represent Bitcoin. We're also seeing some new hires from Coinbase but they mainly look like Wall Street people. I agree with what you say. They should get some guy from Netflix who runs the servers for the 4K and all this streaming and get him on this and I'm sure he'd get it worked out in three months or six months or something. I just think it should be behind us but I'm sure that's what Coinbase is saying internally as well. Any more on this, Jeff, if you want to move on to predictions or story of the week, it's all you for a prediction or a story of the week. Yeah, I guess I mean, I was forget about this part, story of the week. I guess I don't really have too many stories of the week other than, I did see a bunch of stories about how millennials, there's all of these polls about millennials and how they're storing more and more of their wealth in crypto and this just really shows, this really gives me hope for the future about how this next generation of people are going to run the planet. They're going to run it on these open source blockchains and that's just really great. We're creating more and more transparency as big. This is going to play out over decades of course but what's going to be the end result is more and more transparency, more and more fair wealth distribution and more and more fair rough creation. We will no longer have this centralized federal reserve like just sucking the life out of the entire economy and things like that. So yeah, I'm really excited to see what these kids are going to come up with, the companies they're going to build on top of Bitcoin, the economies that these companies will create and it should be a bright future. And I just also wanted to say thanks to everybody for, you know, pairing with just me and Thomas here, you know, it is the holidays and we want to wish everybody happy holidays and thanks again for joining us and you know, we really appreciate it, especially since it's just us but hey, we don't got a whole lot of other better things to do. So we try to bring you guys the news and information and our opinions the best we can. Yep, I definitely second that Jeff and my story of the week is mainstream Bitcoin adoption. It feels like we're here. It feels like it's starting to get started. It's not completely mainstream yet. I always refer this to the MP3 revolution. At first, I was the only one that had MP3s and I had a command line program that would confer them and I just love them. I thought it was the most exciting thing ever. And then everyone had MP3s and soon then it was a problem for the music industry and Napster and all of these things. But now it led to this world where everyone has Spotify or Apple music or whatever service you like. You can pay a little bit each month to get all the music you want. I'm pretty satisfied with the system. If there's anything I don't want, I go out and get it. Movies have much become the same way. You pay for Netflix, you pay for Hulu. You get access to all the content you want for a fair price each month. It's really fair. Bitcoin is the same way. You're going to have the money you want and you're going to send it around at a price that's fair using maybe the Lightning Network or second or third layer solutions. It's a big market. We have a lot of people to cover. We can't just limit our market to people that can use the fees or small amounts of small fees. We need to expand the whole bucket so everyone can get involved in this. It's really exciting to see everyone get involved and to feel this pressure behind Bitcoin again. We had the early pressure in 2013 and then we had the down times and now the new pressure is incredible. I'm really excited to see where Bitcoin goes in 2018 and probably talk about this more next week in our year in review, spectacular, which is usually me and one other guy. Again we always do it every year and we'll be back again next week. Jeffrey will be back on Sunday with the Bitcoin News Show. Let me show the QR code. In case you have some extra Bitcoin jangling around in your wallet these holiday seasons and you'd like to donate maybe $10 or $20 to the Bitcoin Group. We appreciate your donations. We do these shows pretty much for free. Thanks so much for watching. Give me a thumbs up in the share. I'm going to go check the chat and see how that went. Until next time, bye. Bye.