The Bitcoin Group, the American Original. For over the last 10 seconds, the sharpest sitoshis, the best bitcoins, the hardest cryptocurrency talk, we'd like to welcome our panelists, Kyle Torpy from KyleTorpy.com. So everyone, big to have me guys. Jeffrey Jones from the Bitcoin News Show. Hello, everybody. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network, moving on to issue one, the price of Bitcoin. The price of Bitcoin declined again this week, coming down from around 10,188 all the way to 7,625, before recovering to 9,000 or around 9,109. The current price is 8,503 on BitStamp. Is the mainstream media gleefully reported? Has the Bitcoin bubble been popped? Is it all over Kyle Torpy? Yeah, well, obviously it's not over the long term. I think a lot of us saw this correction I'll call it coming. I mean, over the price rise in 2017 was just ridiculous, especially in the last few months, I think it was at 5,000 by summertime and then it almost hit, or maybe a bit hit 20,000, I think it got very close by the end of the year. And I remember around the summertime is when I started getting my non Bitcoin friends started to send me questions, be like, is it now the time to get in? Back then they would say, they should buy a, should they buy a theorem instead of Bitcoin? And then by the winter time they were saying should they buy Ripple instead of Bitcoin? So there was all that meme about whatever is going to replace Bitcoin too. So to me, that article on Forbes last week where I talked about how the hotlers are the underlying value, they provide the price on the Bitcoin price. So we might see where that floor is. If I was getting, I don't know if it was the same for you guys, but if I was getting questions from people who don't really know anything about Bitcoin or Altcoins or anything, they just know that I'm a guy that does it as a full-time gig all the time and they're asking me if they should buy in. It makes me think we could have a lot of weak hands even at the 5,000 price level. So this is why I always say this. And back then I was telling them, you got to be careful because the fact that you're messaging me and we haven't, be like a cousin I haven't talked to in like two or three years or something like that. I'd be like the fact that your message to me probably means that we're in some kind of hysteria. But of course then the price went up 4x from there. So that's why I try not to day trade and that kind of thing. So yeah, if it's still think just buy some Bitcoin if you want to speculate on the price and don't look at it for like five or 10 years is the best way to go. Otherwise you might find yourself losing your hat. A lot of people thought this market's top was around the time there was the Kodak coin, the previous top I think was around the time that Paris Hilton endorsed an ICO. But once again if you just held long enough all of these tops go away. Jeffrey Jones. Yeah, it's been an interesting couple of weeks that the crypto is never ever boring it seems. There's always something going on. So this is another example of that basically. We've basically had the famous retest of 7500 feet on most exchanges. We did end up retesting 7600 or so, which was about exactly where we needed to go because everything above 7600 last year was weekends. Everything above 7000 basically or 7600 or so was complete and pure speculation from people who had no idea what's going on. I'd say that's just my guess to me, but basically my opinion around 7500 or so and below was all the people who were actually really in big coin for the long term, but everything above that was just speculation. So that was bound to go. Nobody of course knew how high we could go. We were at 20k. Could we have gone to 25? Probably. Nobody actually knew. And so it was of course nobody attempted to call the top. But once the top was in, we could see that and we could see that we're definitely headed for some kind of 50% correction. As of course, Tony Bayes has been famously saying for a while we will hit 7500 and we did. So now that we have, I suspect it's to go sideways a little bit now to pitch a little bit and then slowly build our way back up. But with Bitcoin, it's always been about the same thing where we pop in the fall, we slump in the winter there and then have some kind of either spring or summer or pop again. So we'll see what happens, but that's about what I'm guessing is we're going to see again. And again, people, it really was huge hype. And people, I had people calling me about ripple that I haven't talked to in years. And this was just absolutely insane asking me if it was a good bite, a bite ripple. And now of course it's done the ripple thing, right? Which is all the way back down. And so it was absolutely absurd. And so that probably should have hinted at me that we were at the top around there. But nobody really, really knows. But I can tell you that nobody in crypto, in Bitcoin is worried. Nobody was actually building anything that has actually been in the space for a year or more. And we've all seen this thing before. We all know what happens next. We go sideways a little bit and then we reach new all time highs because we remember nothing has changed. The technology is still growing at rapid pace. More papers are being put forth. More conferences are being had. More people are finding out about Bitcoin. And so it's not slowing down by any means. It's actually accelerating. And so with all the same things that we expect to happen this year, it's still going to happen, decentralized exchanges, lightning, atomic swaps, ETFs, on and on and on. All that stuff is coming. Just I guess it's important to remember that despite all of this craziness and the price drop of Bitcoin, remember, one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin. One Bitcoin, Bitcoin itself is still the world reserve cryptocurrency. It is still the unit of account for all of crypto. It is still the thing that backs up all of crypto when Bitcoin goes down and everything goes down. So one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin. It's still going to be here and we're still expecting huge, huge gains for this year. The Ripple story with CNBC was especially great. It was like a little microcosm of the way the mainstream media covers things. They told you how to buy it at $3. They didn't tell you how to sell it until it went down to 71 cents. True tragedy for anyone following it. But once again, if you read those as counter indicators, maybe Ripple's a buy today at 71 cents based upon the opposites. Moving on to the exit question. This time next week, the price of Bitcoin higher or lower, Kyle Torpey. I will say lower. Jeffrey Jones. I'm going to go sideways for a bit. So we're going to be about the same or so and then slowly climb our way back up. I'm going to fight the trends and I will go with sideways as well. Moving on to issue two, tether. All you need to know about tether, the cryptocurrency that could have devastating effects on the Bitcoin market. That's right. Time has finally come for tether. When we first talked about tether, aka real coin, it was a dollar linked altcoin. Everyone always said for it to be dollar linked, they'd have to hold dollars in an account and that would lead them open to regulation. They also worried that much like the gold tokens of the past, more tethers would be printed than dollars in the bank. To use tether, you had to trust tether. And now tether seems to really crumbling all around us, losing their auditor, receiving us a pina on December 6, which was strangely reported by the media a month later. And now many are saying they printed too many tethers at the low. There's too much money tied up in tether and it could wreck the entire Bitcoin market. Jeffrey Jones is tether the end of Bitcoin. Yeah, it's so funny that a single troll can just cause so much chaos. But this is the age we live in, the information age where a single tweet can change the world. So yeah, at this point, I think tether has been commented on enough. I don't have much more to say about it. It's only worth a few billion. The entire crypto space is worth much, much, much more than that. So it's just a little bit of, it's a little tiny fraction of the entire crypto space. Remember that again, tether is a temporary solution. We have to get fiat into crypto somehow. So right now we're using tether, you know, it's the only solution we have. Something better is going to come along. I'm not, I have not been and never will be too much worried about tether because again, it's temporary. It's a temporary solution just like Coinbase. Coinbase to me is an absolutely temporary solution. It's an evident ability that at some point, we won't need tether. We won't need, you know, Coinbase. But until then, there will be solutions that come along like tether. If tether goes, something else will come along. You can bet near bottom dollar that if tether goes, something will come to replace it. And hopefully something better or else we're just going to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. So, you know, I'm hopeful for the future. I'm hopeful for the, I'm hopeful for these closed loop economies that's going to be forming over the next few years to make tether and these stable coins needed less and less. So Jeffrey Jones, do the exchanges need tether? When I'm on an exchange and I trade back to Bitcoin, should I be trading back to Bitcoin or do I need to trade back to USD? Do I need to understand my trading? So there is lots of exchanges out there that do support USDT, right, tether. But do you actually need it to trade? Absolutely not. I'm trading cryptos, thousands of cryptos before tether ever came along, you know, with just Bitcoin. Bitcoin still remains the unit of account, the main crypto that everything is traded in and out of. So, actually, we don't really need tether through a lot of all coins. Maybe need tether more than Bitcoin, yes. But at the end of the day, again, we don't actually need tether. Just like to ask everyone to give us a thumbs up in a share with around 448 live viewers. Welcome to you at home. Kyle Torpy. Do you need tether? I kind of agree with Vortex here where it's like a temporary solution. Eventually, we'll have some kind of like, I don't know if it will be a stable coin or it will just be like mechanisms for hedging like in your Bitcoin wallet to fiat. I did write a somewhat negative piece about tether in Forbes, I think in the middle of last year, maybe. But it was, it was a reason for reasons different than what we're here in today about like how they might be insolvent or something. My main criticism was like the US government or probably not many governments around the world are going to let tether exist if they're unable to, I mean, I know they do KYC and AML at the entry and exit points. I just don't think they're going to allow people to like move tether between accounts without some real world identity being attached to it. That's why I called it like a ticking time bomb where I think they'll eventually shut it down and maybe people will have to like, you know, like they had to do with Mt. Gox where they had to wait years to get their money back because it will, you know, be caught up in the court system for so long. But in terms of this like stuff that, you know, Bitfinex posts about, I've never really bought too much of what he's had to say. It all seems very conspiratorial. Obviously, I'm not here to like endorse tether and say that they're, they have all the dollars to back their coin issuance. But you know, with that, the tether report that came out last week, someone made a good point on Reddit and forget what his username was, sorry to whoever this was. But the report was talking about how, you know, new tether were being issued whenever the Bitcoin price dropped. But the guy in the comments pointed out that the reason that there's more tether being issued then is because, you know, when the Bitcoin price drops, everyone, all the other cryptors drop as well. Everyone rushes to tether is kind of like this safe haven because it's, you know, supposedly picked to the US dollar. And when everyone does that at the same time, it creates, you know, the tether price actually goes over a dollar to like, you know, a dollar in five cents or something like that. So then if you want to come in and, you know, issued, you know, buy a new tether to be issued right then, you can like, you know, have a hundred million dollars with a tether issued or whatever. And then you have an arbitrage opportunity to sell it all for more than a dollar. So that might be why we see, you know, new tether being issued whenever the, there's a huge price drop in Bitcoin. And also, you know, it might, this was kind of my own theory where there might be people, they want to just get money onto bit, bit, bit, phoenix whenever there's a Bitcoin price drop. So they'll do it through tether that way. And if, you know, if you're creating new tether while the price is dropping, you might be trying to do like buy on the dips or something like that. So that might be why there's, there's like a price increase there as well. But yeah, in terms of all the noise around the tether token, the only thing I really look at is the price of the tether token and it's still around like 99 cents in change. So I mean, that's, that's probably the best indication of what's going on behind the scenes there. I would think because if, if anyone knew something, the ferris was going on, they'd have an incentive to, you know, or if someone's buying up the tether to back up to a dollar, you know, after people sell. So I think that's probably the best indication of whether there's anything bad going on there. And like I said, in the future, we'll probably have something, you know, where you hedge a smart contract to big to fiat and to nominate it in Bitcoin. You can already do that on your mobile phone with Abra, you know, you can receive some dollars and they're like, they call them crypto dollars, I think. And they're basically just, you know, hedging contracts, denominated in Bitcoin, like contract for different kind of stuff. So I think that might be, you know, the long term road when it comes to stable coins and things like that. You'd still have to trust Abra to hold the contract for you. Exit question, what does Bitcoin need more? A stable coin like tether, a decentralized exchange or cross atomic swaps, Jeffrey Jones. Well decentralized exchanges are really only made possible by atomic swaps. So kind of combine those basically. So I would say that, yeah, atomic swaps over lightning to enable these decentralized instant exchanges are absolutely integral. I mean, absolutely super important to the future of all of crypto in addition to Bitcoin. Yeah, just to clarify on the, the Aberthing, I think you do have to trust, I think they're the counterparty on all the contracts right now. But eventually that could also be decentralized and where they would create like a market of sorts, you know, maybe even something like Bitcoin hive mind would eventually enable that and you wouldn't even need like a third party or to oracle. But that's like a lot more speculative. But what was the actual exit question? Do we need a stable coin or a cross atomic swap and or decentralized exchange? I think the decentralized exchanges are, you know, they're much more fundamentally value valuable than like the centralized exchanges that everyone uses today just because the governments would have a much harder time shutting down something like local Bitcoins where everyone's, you know, interacting in a peer to peer manner rather than, you know, on the centralized exchange. And as we saw in China, after they ban the exchanges, everyone just moved to local Bitcoins and whatever other OTC trading actually have there. I think Bitcoin is another popular one. Bonus exit question. As Jeffrey Jones noted, a segwit and lightning network are necessary for cross atomic swaps. What will happen to coins such as BCH who don't have cross atomic swaps because they don't have segwit, Jeffrey Jones? Well, cross-ecomics swaps aren't actually are actually possible without segwit. Just as lightning itself is possible without segwit, the only problem is it becomes much, much less secure. So you're going to have to come up with a solution that segwit solves, which to my knowledge there is nothing yet. So what was the question Thomas? All right. So they'd still be able to be on the decentralized exchange even without segwit. So they would, but again, it would be much less secure unless they present some technology that we don't know about yet. And I don't think people would trust it. They can try it, but I guarantee you if something like BCH starts doing cross atomic swaps, there's going to be funds lost because there will be some kind of mess up. They simply don't have the amount of people looking at the code that Bitcoin and Core team does. So it's just going to be damn near impossible to get that right out the gate as we've seen with their previous development fumbles from Bitcoin cash all the way to Bitcoin unlimited and XT and on and on. All right. I think the question's answered. Shout out from a Gartha Crypto who says, buy the bad media and sell the good media. The only rule good traders have lower hire. We're still buying. Thanks, a Gartha for the super chat. And we'd also like to say, did you know there's a world crypto network audio podcast and it has more than just the world crypto network. It also has Richard Hart, tone, vase, Jimmy Song, Adam Meester and much, much more. Check out the world crypto network podcast on iTunes or on the web at worldcryptonetwork.com. Thank you so much. Issue three, square cash. First there was B cash, but now there's square cash. Jack Dorsey's other company in addition to Twitter, square has suddenly taken an interest in Bitcoin, releasing a quick mobile app that allows you to buy Bitcoin directly from your credit card or bank account. Should this be the end of Coinbase? Is there finally competition in the Bitcoin buying arena or is this just nothing compared to the Robinhood launch? Kyle Torpy. Are you more excited for Robinhood or square cash? Probably square cash. I was playing around with it earlier in the week and it's very slick. It seems very easy use, very user friendly. I don't think it'll be the end of Coinbase at all. I think Coinbase has so much experience in this space now. They're pretty much the standard for a digital asset brokerage. I know a lot of people try to give them a hard time because of the lack of transaction batching and segway integration. I think they're mainly just worried about keeping their servers online at this point. I did write about this earlier in the week. I talked about the trend of all the Silicon Valley apps switching from back in 2013. Everyone was about payments. Everyone's going to be buying their coffee with Starbucks and they're going to use their Coinbase wallet or whatever. Starbucks Coffee with Bitcoin. Now it seems like all the Silicon Valley apps are aimed more at holding or detrating that kind of thing. We've seen Robinhood, square cash. You mentioned even Coinbase pivoted from more merchant adoption. Well, the square cash app doesn't even have a send and receive. It should just buy, sell and withdraw. There's no sell. Exactly. Exactly. Even Abro, which I keep mentioning for some reason, I don't know. I don't work with them or anything. Pivoted, they started out as an international payments app. Even if you go to their homepage now, it says invest in Bitcoin and Ethereum with your mobile phone or something like that instead of focusing on payments. Then the ledger hardware wallets, they're one of the more successful businesses outside of the exchanges and stuff. It's very much a pivot as we've seen Bitcoin itself pivot from cryptocurrency to crypto asset until we get lightning more off the ground than it already is. Jeffrey Jones, your thoughts on square cash. Yeah. It's definitely interesting. As I mentioned earlier, these services that allow you to purchase Fiat, digital assets for Fiat, really is a temporary thing. However, these will be huge, absolutely huge and then nothing at all. Just like AOL. They're going to onboard all these users become huge and then once the users are on the ecosystem, they have no use for the people that onboard them onto the ecosystem. What happens is the on-boarder inevitably pivots to something else, AOL pivoted to content and things like that and blogs and such. I definitely see a need for these. I see an actual explosion of these over the next couple of years that are all going to come out wanting a piece of this pie because there is so much of it to go around. This is absolutely great competition for Coinbase. Coinbase has a bit of monopoly right now, but that again will be short-lived as I've said previously. But 2018 will be the last year of Coinbase's monopoly. There will just be too many other people coming in, grabbing a piece of that pie. Robinhood is great. SquareCash, Abra, all of these apps, there's going to be more and more and more. This is a sign of what's to come. Now it is, of course, great early days, but expect more and more services to be able to offer you Bitcoin. And eventually, of course, this will happen one day, your local bank will offer you Bitcoin before they finally capitulate probably in quite a business. But facilitating these different currencies and things like that will be a job of the bank no longer so much as holding your assets, restricting you, holding you back, but more kind of giving you options similar to how the ISPs, the telephone companies in the 90s eventually pivoted to ISPs where they still were able to make a lot of money off this new frontier, but they no longer had the power and control over you that they once stayed. So we're going to see similar things like this happen. And I'm just excited to watch it play out, but really I'm just excited to see Coinbase's monopoly begin to fade and that will absolutely be good for the ecosystem. Exit question, moving back to the Robinhood app that no one talked about, as more and more companies offer cryptocurrency trading, will we see E-trade, Charles Schwab, the main players following Robinhood, making these Bitcoin and other altcoin offerings available, Kyle Torpey. Yeah, definitely. I think I'll just take time. I think on E-trade, you can already trade the futures if you have a futures account on there. But yeah, I imagine eventually anywhere you can do your normal stock trading, you'll eventually have access to crypto trading as well. Maybe through the futures and maybe eventually ETF at first and then maybe like physical, if you want to call it physical crypto assets as well eventually. Jeffrey Jones. Yeah, as I said, this is a sign of the times to come. This is absolutely going to be integrated into everything, not just the financial institutions that you mentioned, but everything your phone, your car, your TV, it's going to be everywhere. And just some quick comments, you know, on Jack Dorsey, his comments on Bitcoin were absolutely great. I mean, I really loved what he had to say on Bitcoin and crypto. It seems that he gets it. Whereas the opposite is happening on Facebook, they've made the decision to completely ban all crypto ads entirely. It's a pretty stark contrast from what Twitter is supporting because from what I can tell all the great conversation about cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin is happening over Twitter. It's not happening over Facebook. Of course, there's some, you know, niche Facebook groups and things like that and that's great. But the general, you know, water cooler conversation, all the big conversations are happening over Twitter. And I don't see that changing anytime too soon. Obviously we have telegram rooms and things like that. But this public global, you know, water cooler area, I see Twitter continuing to help facilitate. Very good. And moving on to issue four. Samsung gets into Bitcoin mining. The world's largest manufacturer of computer parts and accessories, laptop screens, mobile phones, all kinds of things. The largest business in South Korea is now getting in on Bitcoin mining. Aiming to make ASIP chips using their large foundries and perhaps finally providing competition for BitMain. Jeffrey Jones will Samsung unseat BitMain as the number one Bitcoin mining manufacturer? So we don't quite know yet if they're actually using their own new foundries, for example, right? Or are they using the same ones that BitMain is using? So we don't actually know yet if they are directly competing with BitMain yet. We don't actually know yet. Hopefully we'll find that out soon. But I got a guess that they probably are. You know, they could of course just come in and just partner up with BitMain. But at the end of the day, I don't think they're doing that yet. We'll have to wait and see. But my gut tells me that they're not going to do that. And even if they did, there's just going to be more and more people that come in and eventually want to go their own way, right? It's only going to incentivize new people to break off from the herd. So I would like to know more and more information about this and we'll of course help update you guys as we get it. But for right now, I'm going to see this as good news. I'm going to see any new players getting into the mining space as good news because I have been saying for some time now that Bitcoin's mining central pockets of mining centralization is a temporary thing. You know, of course, was brought on and induced by the fact that all the hardware manufacturing happens over there, the cheap electricity. And, you know, we understand this now. It's a lie. It's centralized in China. But we always knew that this was just going to be, you know, it was one end of the pendulum. It's now going to swing the other way into more decentralized to the more decentralized side. And I see this as another sign of things to come. There's going to be more and more mining decentralization as we figure out more and more ways, efficient ways to generate power as we figure out more and more ways to distribute this power to find out ways of, for example, like mining on your phone or other different ideas like that. This is just going to more happen more and more where we are going to finally and fully decentralized Bitcoin mining. Of course, this is going to play out over years. But I'm really, really excited to see more and more people enter the space. Kyle Torpey. Yeah, like Fortek said, there's not really that much information available on this right now. From what I've seen, it does seem they are working with a Bitcoin mining manufacturer in China and they're not creating the actual mining hardware themselves. They're just developing the chips. I did see someone posted, there was an article in news. 8BTC.com in December where they mentioned this company I had never heard of. That's like a new Bitcoin mining startup in China. And they were said to have some kind of deal with Samsung. I probably should have looked this up before the show because I'm forgetting the name of the new company now. So there was that out there. I did, if it makes financial sense for any business to get involved with the infrastructure of Bitcoin mining, they're going to do it. With the TSMC, which is the largest manufacturer of chips in the entire world based at Taiwan, they're getting questions on their earnings calls about how much Bitcoin mining is affecting their business. I think in quarter four, they had between $350 and $400 million worth of revenue from Bitcoin mining from the chips they were manufacturing for Bitcoin mining companies. So yeah, if it makes financial sense for Samsung to get involved, they're going to do it and it looks like they're doing it. Jeffrey Jones, more on this issue? Yeah, I just forgot to mention one final point is that the hash power is on the subject. The hash power is continuously rising. It is continuing to rise at exponential rates. So there is more and more people that are turning on more and more miners. And just specifically, if you want to look at a new space that's going to be the new hip mining place, I mean, it's looking like it's going to be Canada. It's looking like Canada is going to probably take over as like the second biggest area and best area to mine. They're becoming more and more friendly to crypto. They're aligning themselves. They're electric grids more and more. They're getting, I believe from all the people that I hear on the ground from Canada, higher ups and so forth seem to be getting it. And even I just read an article just recently about how New York, I can't remember if it was the governor or something New York said that they should start in the future helping electricity grids facilitate Bitcoin mining. So this is going to be taken over by everybody. Everybody's going to want to get into this. And I just wanted to mention the fact that because there is a little bit of fun about miners and things like that out there. So I just wanted to mention that mining is not slowing down. It is increasing. There's going to be a whole bunch of new people coming into the space this year, specifically in Canada. So, you know, this is absolutely good and amazing for Bitcoin as it will continue to increase Bitcoin security. Exit question with graphics cards sold out virtually everywhere. And now Samsung entering the game. How long before Intel will enter the Bitcoin chip mining game? 6 months, one year or two years, Kyle Torpy. It's a tough one, but I'll say give it a couple years, I guess. I don't know, it's a hard one to predict there. This low moving, lumbering dinosaur of Intel, Jeffrey Jones, how fast is Intel? So are you asking when will Intel get on in on the mining? Yeah, so that's not going to take too long. I mean, we're already seeing retailers being told by Nvidia and ATI to not sell their graphics cards to cryptocurrency miners because of the they're creating a huge shortage. And this is not going to slow down. This is going to only increase. We're going to see more and more of this because I believe that the finance industry is slightly bigger than the gaming industry. This is going to take over when people can realize that they can have this possibility of mining. There's going to be more and more tokens coming out. That's not going to slow down. There's going to be more and more people getting into mining. That's not going to slow down. And there's going to be more and more people that need money. That's not going to slow down. So when you combine all this together, we're really going to see, forget who said, I believe maybe with Simon Dixon, we actually mentioned the fact that, sorry if I get that wrong, but basically they mentioned the fact that in the early days of the 1920s, big boom, the big huge boom in the 20s, the roaring 20s, wasn't just like because of the financialization. It was a big part of it was the fact that home brewing people were brewing like crazy. I mean, I'm talking about every bathtub in San Francisco was filled with frickin vodka. So it created this ability for this huge massively, massively distributed decentralized movement to be able to create wealth. And I think that mining is going to be the next version of that. So I guess I agree with Simon Dixon in the fact that this could become this huge new movement for every average Joe to be able to get into and create huge amounts of wealth. And again, help facilitate the move, the shift over the wealth transfer from the out to crypto. So yeah, I think it's going to be great. Moving on to issue five bonus issue, the Bitcoin puzzle. For the past three years, people have been trying to solve this Bitcoin puzzle. There were five bitcoins hidden in this artwork, apparently 4.87, approximately 40,000 pounds or 50,000 dollars. And now the puzzle has been solved. We don't know how yet, but it's very exciting. And it's an interesting thing about Bitcoin. You can hide them in artwork. We can have more puzzles and artwork like this. Kyle Torpey, what do you think of Bitcoin art and puzzles like this? Yeah, that's a pretty cool story. I mean, this kind of goes to show the underlying value proposition of Bitcoin in the first place, which is that it's a digital bearer asset. So if you do this kind of hidden, hiding it in a photo or whatever, then whoever finds it gets it and there's no one else, anyone can do about it. If someone tried to do this like a PayPal password or something, obviously there'd be that counterparty risk with the PayPal involved. But I think I remember someone doing something similar to this in like a Minecraft server, where they had a treasure hunt or something and they put some Bitcoin somewhere in the Minecraft server. But yeah, it just kind of shows the digital asset bear nature of Bitcoin. Jeffrey Jones, your thoughts on Bitcoin art and puzzles. Yeah, it's really interesting to see this community. We didn't, crypto community definitely did not start out mainstream, right? We came from very humble beginnings, but watching it continuously getting bigger and bigger and starting to go mainstream, it's really interesting watching it attract all of this mainstream ideas like all this amazing art. It's kind of, again, I was a little bit too young to see the internet kind of grow and prosper and things like that. But by the time I got to the internet, we already had chat rooms and everything was kind of already pretty standardized. But this is absolutely amazing to watch this community explode and get bigger and bigger and with it, bring all this unique culture with it, right? Because Bitcoin is global. Bitcoin is everywhere. It's borderless. It's open. It's decentralized. With it, it's going to bring this culture from all sorts of walks of life. And that's one of the things that I really find interesting about Bitcoin and crypto in general is the ability to bring to remove borders and bring everybody's ideas into this. And I've seen all sorts of great things from like cryptography and some other people online just making art of people. Like for example, I just saw, forget the name of the Twitter account that created this. But Jimmy Song just got a pretty awesome art image created of him as well. And it's just great to see the play of back and forth of, for example, like Jimmy, giving the community information about programming blockchain and then the community creating art about Jimmy and all this back and forth. And even things like crypto-kitties, some of this art is becoming valuable. And it's really going to be amazing to watch this interplay of digital and traditional art ideas kind of come together and meld with blockchain with cryptocurrencies. All the things that we're going to be able to create is just going to be amazing. And then when you start integrating it with actual mainstream video games, like AAA video games, it's going to really get really interesting. So this is just the very beginning, I think, of this huge culture explosion that's about to enter the crypto space. And it's absolutely amazing to watch. It was great to see and certainly a shout out to coin artists, creator of the artwork. And I want to second look. I did boom. There you go. Oh, there we go. We're back. All right. I think we're back. But let's move on to predictions or story of the week Kyle Torpy. What's going on this week? Sure. So I guess I'll talk about this Bitcoin magazine article that I did where I kind of tried to look at the various factors that led to the lower fees that we've seen more recently. So obviously there was like a decline in just the number of on-chain transactions per day. I think it's just, you know, in terms of that, it's just like the speculative trading around it, you know, declining. Like less trading between exchanges, that kind of thing. The number of transactions being created in like broadcasts on the network are actually at the same level they were in May of 2016, which is kind of crazy. But also we've had, you know, so there was just like lower, lower demand for block space generally, but there was also, you know, even though the number of transactions has been going down a little bit, the number of outputs in each transaction has actually gone up quite a bit since, you know, early 2017, which indicates that, you know, exchanges and other places like that are implementing batching. So you know, they can basically, you know, use one transaction to pay out to, you know, a large number of their users every 10 minutes or so instead of doing one on-chain transaction for every single withdrawal. And there's this website outputs dot today that actually tracks the number of outputs attached to each transaction. And you can see it was down by like two, like, 2.3, an early 2017 and now it's like up above three. So we're seeing like, just people be more efficient with how they're using the blockchain more generally. And that kind of gets to a point I had in another article where I talked about how the high fees kind of created the incentive for people to, you know, implement batching and segwit. So maybe if we did like a hard fork for the block size, you know, last year or something, maybe everyone would have just kind of kept doing what they're doing and not try to, you know, be more efficient with how they use the blockchain, which is kind of a key point that a lot of the Bitcoin core devs were making, when, you know, arguing against raising the block size limit because they wanted, you know, all these companies and even users themselves to be more efficient with how they use the blockchain. We did see like an all time high in segwit use over the weekend too, but that seems like it was mostly, you know, people who had segwit outputs already consolidating their outputs. So in the future when they make a transaction, it won't be, you know, take as much space on the blockchain and they'll be able to transact much more cheaply. But we had, check out that magazine or the article Bitcoin magazine for the full scoop on that. All right, thank you, Kyle and Jeffrey Jones prediction or a story of the week. Yeah, a couple of things, I guess we went over a thousand channels on the lightning network. This is the main net. We actually went over a thousand channels and that is continuing to grow really, really happy about that. Really glad to watch this grow like crazy. It's really fascinating to watch how fast the lightning network is taking off. I'm really excited to see this. But then let's see, I think that, you know, we, this week there was a lot of news about banning, you know, from South Korea to India to all sorts of places. And I just hope that at some point we realize that a country cannot ban crypto, you know, from all the information we've learned this week about South Korea, accepting it now, Indian accepting it now, we have to understand that at this point, no single country can stop Bitcoin. So people stop pan exhaling if a country says that they may ban it because the odds are, they're not going to ban it. This is 2018. You can't, you cannot put the idea back in the box. We are now here. We have arrived. There is no stopping these cryptocurrencies. So that's another thing. And then finally, I guess I really loved the response from Davos. Again, I mentioned this, but, you know, the response from the community to all of the fun and fear and regulation around crypto that was talked about at Davos, the community just fired right back. I mean, it was just absolutely great to see how aware the community is and how far behind people at Davos really are. They're not going to see this coming, guys. It's really getting crazy. And then of course, I'll have my show this Sunday, as always, on the Bitcoin News Show. Have a bunch of people talking about Bitcoin as usual. But I will be off the Sunday after that. I'm going to have family in town, but very much looking forward to Bitcoin News Show this Sunday, guys. Join us at noon Pacific. All right. Thanks so much, Jeff. And thanks to everybody for joining us today, giving us a thumbs up and a share. If it's your first time here, please subscribe down below. And just a shout out this week to the World Crypto Network. We celebrated four years on the air yesterday, February 4th. We started February 4th, 2014. We did a little four year spectacular, but even that was nothing to touch the depths of this archive. You can really go back and learn about what happened in Bitcoin 2014, 15, 16, 17, and now 18. And this is thanks to everybody who volunteered their time to give their information to the internet. No one really gets paid here. 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