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, Blake Anderson, cryptographic economist. Hey everybody, thanks for having me. Max Hillabran from towardsliberty.com. What three shows, three shows a day and two other shows without me, what the, no, that is too much, that is clearly too much. Five shows in one day, World Crypto Network Friday and Shinobi from Block Digest. Hi, Dihon. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network, moving on to issue one. Issue one, the SEC rejected nine Bitcoin ETFs, but now they say they will review their decision. According to Commissioner Hester Price, Hester Pierce, the decision to reject was made by the staff, and now the Commission will review. Commissioner Pierce spoke out in favor of a Bitcoin ETF after the Winklevi Rejection, saying that the problems of market manipulation, lack of access to capital, and other problems that the SEC had with Bitcoin, could easily be solved by approving the ETF. Blake Anderson, will the SEC change their mind and approve the nine ETFs? Everyone but the Winklevi, or should we just wait for the CBOE? The CBOE and the VIX. It's a good, it's a good question. I think that if I had to speculate, they're probably going to be maybe an ETF next year. I don't know if they're going to do one this year. If they do one this year, I think that there's some things that are a little bit unsettled in terms of, is there going to be a hipothication, re-hipothication? Are they going to make it so that big investors, people with more than $150 million are required to use custodians that are going to engage in a hipothication and re-hipothication? It's a setting up to be almost like the big short part two in terms of, if they get all this money in terms of creating this paper Bitcoin, then it's an unstable system. And then the rug comes out because when you hypothicate or re-hipothicate, basically you have one Bitcoin. And if you have somebody that's holding it for you, a custodian, and they engage in re-hipothication, they're daisy chain lending it out. So one Bitcoin becomes five Bitcoins on paper. And then when they lose that one Bitcoin, the losses are experienced at 500%. So it makes this inverted pyramid right for the rug to be pulled out. And maybe they're responsible, and that's why they're trying to make sure that they have better custodian relationships and are pushing it off until next year. But I'd say there's probably just a little bit of confusion early on. And that even by the time that they do approve it, these things won't be solved. And there are other issues in terms of forks and stuff with giving your keys away. We've always been big advocates here of hold your own private keys. Don't let other people do it. And allowing somebody to lend out, you know, based on promises to your keys isn't the best idea in terms of this equity-based, you know, bear instrument. So I think that the rest of the panel will probably have some thoughts to add to that. These problems are also apparent in the gold market, where there's also manipulation. Just reminding everyone home to give us a thumbs up and a share. And to say hello in the chat down below, Max, Hila Brand, your thoughts. Well, Blake, there was fantastic. And it's funny. The SEC Will it ban Bitcoin ETFs? It's just like the Oh no, China is going to ban Bitcoin. I mean, it's the exact same method. It's the exact same meme. And it's regulation. It is government bureaucracy. It is going to be slow. It is going to be able to not adapt. And completely sleep over this technology. And hopefully not mess it up too much. The interesting thing is, though, how can, you know, let's say, really heavily institutionalized systems use Bitcoin as a technology. And, you know, I, of course, work at Deutsche Bank as some of you might know. And here I currently heavily push the aspect of the importance or the possibility of providing high quality custodial solutions. Because as Blake said there, this is the major problems, especially for these ETFs, is that you somehow have to use these Bitcoin or these other cryptocurrencies in a custodial form. And of course, there are several different questions or ways that you could do that. One major way would be full custodial ship. So do it like Coinbase completely take over the control of the Bitcoin. And the user does not really have any access to his coins. That is, of course, something that you can do. A lot of risk, because if you lose some Bitcoin here, that means that, you know, you really have to repay them. And Bitcoin cannot be created out of the near. And you as the bank have the full risk. So I don't think that this is a good approach. But on the contrary, if you have then a second path, that will be multi-signatures. So that means maybe being the third out of two signatures in this customer's relations. So the customer or the client has one signature in his hot wallet that he uses every day. Another signature in his really cold wallet that he stores, not with you at the bank, but at the other bank to be safe. And then you, the bank, have a security measure, the second factor authentication for this client. So this is basic security of customer funds. But without taking over the full custodianship of these coins. So I do think that there are several interesting business opportunities here for startups in general, like Jamison's flop, Casahodel. Or of course, other enterprises or entrepreneurs in business. They dance around it, but no one will really answer my question. Shinobi, will the SEC approve the nine ETFs? All right. So first, I kind of want to look at the logic as to why the past few proposals have been kind of rejected and then kind of circle back maybe a bit at the end to the custodial aspect of things. But specifically with the Winklevice proposal, like the reason that was rejected was because it was planning on using a Gemini's auction market as the index for the price of the underlying asset. And their big problem with that was that, you know, it's a bismally liquid market. Like, Gemini's been open for years now and they've really struggled to attract any kind of significant volume in the space. And so particularly, there worries about price manipulation, affecting the ETF with the Winklevice proposal was that it would just be Gemini's auction that was kind of underlying than that asset value. And then with the nine proposals that have just recently been rejected, if I'm correct, my understanding where these were all proposals that were planning on using the CBOE CME futures as the underlying. And it's kind of the same kind of logic here. Like they've been progressively building up more volume and liquidity, but it's still very insignificant compared to the underlying spot markets. And I would hope at least also another aspect of that is being futures based, it would inevitably be cash settled and not set up in a way where you can actually redeem for the underlying asset itself. And I would hope the SEC is kind of looking at the dynamic of futures versus actual Bitcoin backed ETF proposals and how that could affect the stability of the market. And then to kind of circle back to the custodial aspect of things, I really think that is also a big aspect as far as how the SEC is looking at things because we've seen hacks massively damage exchanges in the CCO system for years now. And I think potentially one of the ways you could try to solve this is utilizing some form of infrastructure such as the liquid side chain backed by blockstream. Because this would allow you to kind of have something in a more federated control where there's actually legally liable companies kind of managing the custodial ship of the assets in a distributed way. And also would allow without introducing a UTXO set float on the main blockchain, potentially allow you to kind of do things like actually break up different baskets in the ETF into their own outputs that could be kind of tracked and audited on the side chain. And a little bit more of a transparent way than just kind of lumping them all into a single ETF address. And then being a lot more restricted in the ways that you can kind of break things up for individual audits. And so I think like mostly I think their concerns are with the overall, you know, whatever they're choosing in these proposals to use as the underlying index for the net asset value. But I do think the custodial aspect is potentially something that's influencing the decision. But to answer your question directly, I think if anything has a chance at getting approved, it would be the Vanack proposal because that actually is using underlying Bitcoin to actually back the ETF and could potentially look at more liquid indexes as far as tracking the net asset value. It does seem like a no-brainer for them to actually use Bitcoin to back the Bitcoin ETF. But we can't always count on Wall Street to do that. I agree the Winklevi proposal was just all Winklevi all the time. And like you're saying, if these other proposals rely on the CBOE futures and they say it's not liquid enough, they all go down. That would include the CBOE proposal that a lot of people are waiting for. So we'll have to see how that goes. This moves on to the exit question. How many ETFs will be approved in 2018? Give me a number. Blake Anderson. Well, I want to give you a number, but I also want to throw back to something that didn't get covered. You talked about this earlier. A friend of the show, Andreas, who used to be on the Bitcoin group way, way back in the day, was talking about the technical risks of having a lot of people with lots of money holding lots of keys. And then in terms of soft forks, if there was some type of soft fork for a privacy centric individually, you know, privacy-orienting type of change. And then they didn't want to have that applied to any of the wallets and the key that were being held with the ETF that could present an additional issue that might make people not so, for lack of a better word, horny for the ETF to be approved and be more maybe individual adoption oriented instead of saying, hey, let's get this big, you know, 36 lane onway, freeway ramp on the Bitcoin. So how many will be approved this year? I don't think that any will be approved, but the next year, I think that as they start posturing and pricing in known things will see a lot of price activity. That number is called zero. The Aztec number zero, Max Hillbrand. Can you give me a number higher than zero? Can it be lower than zero? I don't know. Probably not. I don't think that they will be approved this year. Maybe next year, I don't know how many a couple, maybe all of them, but there will be many ETFs as soon as they approve one. I would doubt that they will only allow one ETF to exist. And maybe to pick up on something that Blake said here, it is so important to have the aspect of your keys, your Bitcoin, not your keys, not your Bitcoin, and centralize keys in a honey pot means high risk of losing them. And this is really important. So it is really interesting on how to, you know, integrate stuff like Multisick and, you know, hardware wallets and stuff like this in a neat way and in a secure way to really do this correctly. So I don't think that a boring ETF that just makes a synthetic tether somehow to the Bitcoin value is this interesting. But with much rather like to see a method of distributing, you know, these Bitcoin in a orderly fashion to everyone with cryptography to secure it. Although the best way would be just to hold Bitcoin, so I don't know why we make all this fuss about it. Everyone knows the safest cold storage is underneath a cat, underneath a cat. Shinobi, will you give me a zero? Is it three for three? I think that the Vanak proposal has a slim chance of maybe being approved this year, but in all likelihood, I think that none will. And to kind of build on what Blake said, I would really hope that none are approved until the SEC has finished the comment period and decided on their pending rule change that would allow an ETF to just launch without any kind of, you know, approval process as long as they were strictly dealing with the underlying asset and not futures. Because, you know, he and Andreas are very right. And that if we see ETF approvals start happening while you still have this kind of gated wall deciding who gets through, then that can lead to a very disproportionate concentration of economic power that would affect consensus rule changes. And I think if this proposed rule change goes through that would allow things to just launch without approval as long as they're dealing with the underlying asset that would lead to a lot more distribution of that influence instead of really concentrating it in an unhealthy way. The panel is correct. No ETFs this year. You get nothing. You get nothing. You can't always get what you want, but sometimes if you try, you can get what you need. Moving on to issue two Indie Go Go Indie Go Go the crowdfunding website you use when you think kickstarter is too expensive branched out this week hosting a token sale for a luxury ski resort and planning to offer the ability for other campaigns to print their own security token that will be regulated by the SEC max Hill brand is this the return of the ICOs has Indie Go Go captured lightning in a bottle or is it a lame imitation? Well, you know, I am of the opinion that ICOs fundamentally actually do show quite some potential. You know, it's a scarce digital asset and it can it can apply pretty much to any contract that that you fundamentally want to right? It's a digital signature upon others. Of course, how to enforce this contract is something completely different and if you need a blockchain for this also a complete question. But you know, there are other solutions to this entire phenomenon and there will eventually be tokens that can represent assets such as stocks that just make sense right? So somehow we will find a solution to this problem and I do think that crowdfunding is a great idea for some specific projects. I don't really necessarily think that it's good for venture capital for, you know, but rather for more established companies with a already existing network. But I mean, it's interesting. Also the applications that has to simply funding open source development and development of smaller communities who previously have been excluded from the really expensive and inaccessible venture capital and capital markets methods of accumulating capital. But of course, it also might just be flashing your QR code for your Bitcoin address and that being it. The real question there is one of enforcement. Do you want to invest in the business that fills out the form or the business who didn't fill out the form but made a token? The choice is up to you. Shinobi and now you Indiegogo, is this the new ICO? I mean, honestly, I really don't know what to make of this because like this one story, I kind of just had to play catch up on before we came on air. But like they kind of reference in the article that this is them trying to go back to their roots of democratizing access to capital. And I mean, it really kind of makes like no sense to me because at the end of the day, like it's a crowdfunding platform and the whole purpose of this was to kind of allow you to raise money without strings and with very little like regulatory requirements or red tape to deal with. And so it would seem much more in line, you know, getting back to those roots in my mind to just, you know, accept crypto currencies for just the normal crowdfunding activities they support. And then specifically in terms of the ICO, I think that gets into a really great regulatory area when you start talking about like what promises are being made with a token because if anything whatsoever that implies, you know, a profit to be made through the token itself or some kind of equity in whatever you're donating to, like you're you're a security now, you're subject to the limitations, accredited investors only. And I don't get how that matches with the crowdfunding model at all. I credit it investors and Indiegogo users both. But like on the flip side, I could potentially see an argument for being classified as a utility token if you're donating and getting a token that's simply like redeemable for whatever product is being built or access to to whatever service is being started. So like I'm not really sure what to make of this in terms of how it's going to affect the ICO landscape. It just seems like very not in tune with their core business model kind of the opposite of how they're trying to paint it. It is a good point. We haven't really seen a custodian model where you could put in say a large amount of Bitcoin and then donate to someone $10 a month until the Bitcoin runs out by holding the money in Bitcoin if the price of Bitcoin actually goes up. You could keep donating that $10 a month much longer than you originally had planned. Blake Anderson. Well, it's funny. They're like we're going to democratize the access to all this stuff so that everybody can be involved registered investors only. And then it's like hmm. And I think that we've seen some pretty visceral diminishing returns on the ICO craze. So it almost be like a little too little a little too late on this. People are kind of getting the idea that maybe ICOs aren't so great. But being registered securities, having them with the SEC, maybe they'll get a little bit more structure. Maybe they'll be a little bit of rebound in people's willingness to invest some money on a ski resort and have their blockchain enabled interoperability. But it seems a little bit gimmicky to me. It seems like it'll be tough going. But hey, if they can pull it out and turn it into a black swan, that'll be great for people that like their platform. And of course, that's the saying nothing of the technical challenge of Indiegogo managing all of these tokens. Because if you were a hacker inside of Indiegogo, or if you work there, either one, you could have a bunch of this luxury resort condo tokens. You could accidentally end up with a whole bunch of them like they're saying, maybe you could trade it in for a stay at the resort. Maybe you could trade it in for the deed. Maybe you could own the resort. But I think we're moving on to the exit question. How many Indiegogo ICOs will there be? One, ten, one hundred, or don't care, Max Hillebrand. A million, probably a billion. All of them, all of them will happen. And you know, this whole ICO crisis is not over. And guess what? It's moving to the next layer with the BHB network that Jocomo Supo is working on. Guess what? ICOs are coming to lightning. So it's going to be the same, but a billion times faster. So doesn't that sound amazing? I don't think that this ICO model is over. I do think that it is going to continue even faster, even with with more companies doing it. It's really curious on where this entire space is moving. Because I do think again that fundamentally there is some value here. Fundraising with Bitcoin is important and needed. The question is, will we find a way to do it right? I don't think that the current ICO model is a way to do it right. We need to make sure that these assets that are created, they can be and they should be fundamentally different from the Bitcoin that is used as money. Because you do not want to use your equity as money, in most cases. So it's curious how this entire space is going to evolve. Shinobi, can you give me a number bigger than a million or smaller? I think this will face plant and not really see any widespread use, but really at the end of the day, I could care less. This is an aspect of the ecosystem I really could not care less about. Impressive. Blake Anderson, Lesslin 1 or more than a million. They get the great Zuko involved over here directly. Maybe they can go ahead and pull this out. But I'm thinking that the regulatory overhead in terms of getting all this stuff compliant, is going to be high enough that it at this point sounds like it's going to drastically outweigh the benefits of the reach that you're going to get through the tokenization through Indiegogo. So I'm thinking a lot less, but I do agree with Max in terms of other better systems are going to probably carry this torch forward. The idea of free money is unstoppable. They will make at least 10 ICOs on Indiegogo. Did you know the World Crypto Network has its own audio podcast, featuring podcasts from, well, the World Crypto Network? Check it out on iTunes today. World Crypto Network audio podcast. It's like the same shows without the video. Thank you so much for giving us a thumbs up and a share. We now have more than 85 live viewers. And Shem is probably still going live. We've had like five live shows today, two or three at the same time. If you can't catch them live, you can always check out the podcast later. Moving on to issue three. China Crackdown again. China is cracking down on cryptocurrency, both on the technical side where they're planning to block local access to more than 124 global cryptocurrency exchanges. My God, who knew there were that many. And in meat space where they've banned cryptocurrency meetups in the financial district, as well as banning many cryptocurrency accounts on WeChat. Some say the crackdown is warranted to protect the Chinese people from aggressive cryptocurrency scammer. Scammers still, however, more importantly will China's attempt to ban cryptocurrency be successful. Shinobi. Well, honestly, I think there's really a lot of dynamics involved in this. Like first off, for quite a while now, the Chinese government has kind of been looking at crypto news sources as just a mechanism to manipulate the crypto markets. And I mean, as we've seen over the last year, so like they they've cracked down and shut down exchanges. They're slowly starting to push miners out of the country. And I mean, I think this is really just kind of following the next logical progression in the trend that they're following is that they're trying to limit like cryptocurrency growth in the country as much as possible. Because it like one, not to be a little politically incorrect, but the populations in Asia generally have a lot bigger gambling problems than in a lot of other places in the world. So this is something that is just a recipe for financial disaster. And I forget the exchange it was, but we literally had like somebody show up claiming to have a bomb at an exchange office. I think a month or so ago. And just because they got wrecked in a huge margin position. And I mean, like that is, you know, the one I'd say legitimate thing that the Chinese government might be worried about. But mostly it's access to mechanisms that would enable capital flight. Like, you know, the one of the biggest legacy examples we see of this is the real estate markets in Canada. Like large large net worth individuals in China are doing everything they can to try and get as much of their capital out of the country as possible. Just because like China is trending in a very, very dystopian surveillance state direction. And I think like access to exchanges, access to mining equipment, which is another route for capital flight. And just having information sources that will allow people to kind of plug into this ecosystem and figure out how they can utilize these things is not something that China is really too worried about in the moment. But more in the future in terms of like continuing growth in the space, allowing that to function as a capital flight vehicle for more and more capital like the bigger the entire ecosystem grows. And so I think they're kind of preemptively trying to kind of put a lid on things and clamp down the doors before this actually becomes something that could systemically affect the Chinese economy in a large way. Blake Anderson, should the Chinese feel threatened by Bitcoin? Yeah, absolutely. They should feel threatened by Bitcoin. China is really interesting. Because if you've if you've looked at the China Fud machine and the roller coaster since the beginning, way back in the day, China on public Chinese television had info commercials about how to buy and get Bitcoin. And now they're flip flopping and flimflamming all around. But I think that in terms of how much central regulatory force there is in China, that they have a really hard time envisioning how their citizens will react to a wild west type market and they feel the strong obligation to protect their citizens because you know there's there's strong regulatory bodies in China. They're very centralists. They're very about you know central planning. And so it would make sense to me that they would come after we chat and try to go after all these avenues where people might be exposed to the great risk and reward of the free market. And it's not surprising. Yeah, they do have a lot to be afraid of in terms of Bitcoin. But also do they have a lot to protect their citizens against in terms of the wild wild west free market of ICO scams. I mean, yeah, I can see it from that angle too. So it's it's interesting to see I guess I'll say diminishing returns again in terms of how much power does China have to affect market prices on these different things with their big grand announcements and a lot. And when those diminishing returns seem to catch up to them, they stay quiet for a while and they come out with another big announcement. And then people are like, oh China hasn't said anything for a while. So they they must have a lot of you know, it's way again. So it's just interesting to see how much influence China has with the size of their population and their economy in terms of this, you know, these technologies with global jurisdictionality. So our jurisdiction. So it's it's an interesting roller coaster to watch. Max Hillbrand yet another China crackdown or this time for real. Well, you know, it is again another one of these China crackdowns and such just like with any other country, fundamentally it doesn't really work that much. It's a attack on free speech, which is of course, a point and the assembly free assembly of, you know, in groups just to talk about pretty much anything. So of course, if you want to talk about Bitcoin, talk about Bitcoin, it's okay on your own property just to their own and talk absolutely. It is, you know, it also shows then how how evil such a centralized government can become and how far they want to go in order to prevent these kinds of interactions between free people. So this this is one of the several signs and you know, I hope that people soon will more and more realize this is the importance of a sound money and a more importantly a censorship resistant money, which will of course make such government attempts few time because even if they try to censor the meetups themselves of Bitcoin, they will never be able to try to stop the payment of Bitcoin. And of course, if you go that far as to have free payments plus with the inherent flaws in trying to prevent free speech and the three assembly, it will be impossible pretty much for governments to try to prevent the regular meetups of Bitcoin. Moving on to the exit question, which will happen first? The ban will be reversed or the Chinese government will launch their own cryptocurrency, Shinobi. Honestly, I think definitely attempt to launch their own cryptocurrency. Like they're already kind of moving in the direction of piloting programs for like digital checks and different kinds of financial assets like bonds and stocks on a blockchain. And their central bank is probably one of the earliest central banks that really started doing in depth research into cryptocurrencies and blockchains. And I mean, I could potentially see them just because of how much they've been trying to stockpile gold over the last decade or so and kind of move towards a hard asset as far as backing things potentially issue their own system backed by Bitcoin in some degree. But I think ultimately they are not going to deviate from the trend of trying to lock their citizens out of access to peer-to-peer-uncensoredable systems unless there is huge political change in China. Blake Anderson. Well, what's interesting is people were thinking the other day that they shut down some things because Ethereum networks were allowing the sharing of the article about vaccine supply change management, allowing certain things that they didn't want to be in the vaccines. And there was tests that showed that some of the vaccines were unsafe and mandatory vaccination in China in certain areas as a huge political issue when people got upset. So some people are thinking that some of these crackdowns were a backlash when they were seeing the decentralized nature of information proliferation was starting to be affected already. So I would say that a lot of banks and institutions already have kind of almost digital currency. I mean, most dollars are not physical. They're already digital. And along with what Shinobi said with they are cracking down in a type of posturing and getting the infrastructure ready to be able to have hash power and stuff like that. I would say that they're probably going to be a pretty close neck and neck thing in terms of if they do allow competition and or they have a backing on their layer that they would open up Bitcoin and stuff like that to support the price of their own currency. So it's a tough question. I don't want to really weigh in on one side of the other. I'll give this appeal to moderation and say, you know, it's too close to call. Valacy. Max Hilabrand. Well, I'd like to tell the story that Deutsche Bank has switched their systems from being analog to digital in 1985. And by the way, we are still using the exact same software that was written in 1985. I'm not kidding you. It's the exact same software. They have not yet made a major upgrade to another system. And they are trying to make it now because the problem is that they're all the developers who still who can still code in this language are either dead or you know, out of out of working condition. So they're literally only three more developers who can code in this language because of this such a old system and nobody can upgrade, which is hilarious. This both shows you that initially these banks used to be kind of early adopters, but damn, they suck at maintaining this and maintaining the edge. So will these governments make the jump to cryptocurrencies? Maybe, I mean, they already have them digitally, right? The question is, will they put this blockchain buzzword bingo hype on there on top as well? I would argue yes, they will try to do this simply as a scam to even further increase inflation. But the interesting thing is that now everyone is doing it, not just the government. So now the government finally has true competition with a bunch of other shitcoins and of course Bitcoin. So the question is, will the government coins be even worse than the shitcoins? Maybe most likely. I knew I should have learned Coball fun Coball story for you. Coball is this old programming language, probably what it's written in. They used to have to use tabs to separate parts of their code. The reason they had to do that is because it had to line up with the punch cards and that's how the old punch card system used to work and it had to line up. So backwards compatibility. The answer is it's a trick question. The ban will be reversed when the Chinese government launches their own cryptocurrency. You all were fooled. Moving on to issue four, gross energy wasteers. According to a new study from the University of Pittsburgh, banks use more than three times the energy consumed by Bitcoin and estimated 100 terawatts. These banking giants consume more energy than several small countries, the size of Ireland or Greece. Well, Bitcoin on the other hand could scale to 100 times its current users with only a 2% increase in power consumption. Blake Anderson, when compared to the banks, is Bitcoin actually good for the environment? That's how it's funny to watch people make these arguments. Stop and decrypt was in a pretty funny back and forth on Twitter trying to explain to people how all this works. But it's funny when you take the full scope of how much energy really is required for the legacy banking system to operate when you include things like the prison industrial complex, the military industrial complex, energy, IP patent trolling. These things are pretty expensive and not to mention the inflation and taxation without representation that's required for all of this stuff to operate the lack of competition with the banks. Just the lights on and the buildings and the computer servers and all that stuff outweighing Bitcoin is only a fraction. If you look at the value of the dollar versus the national debt and GDP and then you look at the unfunded liabilities, it's like, oh, here's the debt. It's like, oh, no, really it's way, way, way bigger than that. I think that this is a similar issue with the energy used to prop up the dollar versus the energy used to objectively secure the blockchain. So I think that this article is in the right direction, but you could actually make hypermassive arguments in favor of there's not just energy being saved. There's a massive amount of value actually being preserved by a superior protocol and standard that's the optimal medium of exchange that we have in existence right now. So that's a that's a lot of savings. And the market, as always, is looking for maximum efficiency like water rolling downhill. Bitcoin is more efficient than the banks with their armored cars and their automated telemissions and their little pieces of paper. Bitcoin doesn't have any of that. Max Hillbrand. Well, you know what? Is anyone of you still using the Euro? Because if yes, I thank you very much because you are paying my salary. So that is fantastic. I really enjoy that. This allows me to buy Bitcoin every week, which is nice. So thank you very much. But seriously, I'm one of the many, many thousands and thousands and thousands, hundreds and thousands, probably millions of employees were involved directly in the banking system. And they'll dochee bank has 100,000 employees. So those are many salaries, many pensions and many bonuses that are financed by you. Because banks are of course the first receivers of inflated money, which means they come first in the Kantian effects, which give them the greatest increase in purchasing power, compared to you, who receive the money behind them after them in the timescale. So this is only one way that the current financial system steals from you. And I know I'm a bit hypocritical when I say that, but truly, thank you for using the Euro. That's nice of you. Good things about the Euro, pretty pictures. Bad things about the Euro, crazy different sizes. Nothing will fit together. Shinobi. All right. I'm probably going to be all over the place on this, but I'll try and keep it as succinct as possible. First off, there is no such thing as waste of energy, unless there is actual production capacity that is going unused. And I think kind of using that phrasing is implying a complete lack of understanding when it comes to economics and how opportunity costs kind of allocates resources based on price signals. And as far as the energy consumption of the Bitcoin network itself, one, like a lot of the unused capacity is coming from renewable energy. So the arguments about carbon emissions is just nonsense, like fourth grade math going this much energy equals this much carbon emission. And it's just a ridiculous no-coin argument that shows a complete ignorance as far as how this system works with the economic incentives involved. And in the long term, I think like people look at the energy consumption now and just make these ridiculous assumptions that it's going to keep growing infinitely, which again shows the complete ignorance of economics. Like the the opportunity cost involved in the consumption of energy is going to always gravitate towards and kind of be bound to an equilibrium point. Like you will not just see infinite energy consumed by Bitcoin because after a point, because of how the difficulty adjustment works, you're going to gravitate to razor thin margins. And after that point, unless you are willing to operate at a loss for a long time to realize gains on a very low time preference horizon, you're not going to see more increases because there are still other profitable uses that that energy can be put to. And when you can't plug into the Bitcoin network as a minor and realize profits, but you can in expanding that energy somewhere else, you're going to do that unless you don't see a greater gain in mining Bitcoin and a long-term horizon. So like this entire topic, I think, is like coming more and more into the mainstream as a flood point just because the level of economic literacy in the world is so abysmally low that it's such an easy way to just confuse people and drive them into this reactionary, this is bad because they're not capable of actually assessing all the different variables involved in how they'll play out in the long term. I agree. They take it to its most extreme and absurd viewpoint as if we would take all of the energy on the world and use it to mine Bitcoin. And if you wanted to get food or something, you would have to borrow energy from the all-seeing and all-knowing all energy that just mines Bitcoin. I don't think we'd go that far. Can I have some more energy, please? I'm all of a twist. I need a bowl of gruel of energy. It's like in the future, Carl's Jr. Those little machines, or they feed you right there for the thing. Fuck you, I'm eating. I know. I didn't want to say it though. They're sloganists, so obscene, Carl's Jr. Why is your slogan so obscene? Anyway, moving on to the exit question. Now that we know that the banks are the wasteful ones, consuming more than three times the energy necessary to run the Bitcoin network, will the mainstream media withdraw all of their articles claiming that Bitcoin takes too much energy and issue an apology to the Bitcoin community, Blake Anderson? Yeah, I'm holding my breath right now. I've got my phone ready for speaker phone. I'm going to take the call personally and I'm going to let them know the Bitcoin community understands. You don't know that much. You're all hopped up on goofballs trying to write your clickbaits. That's okay. You weren't smart enough to know the difference and don't worry about it. Again, I'm holding my breath for that call because it's coming any second now. Max, Hilla Brand, they will apologize for the clickbait. Oh, yes, absolutely. They will 100% and not do that. They will continue, of course. But maybe they are right. That might be so. Why? Because we have had this incredibly high inflation rate in Bitcoin and of course this leads to all kind of malinvestments and misalignments of precious resources and maybe with this immense high inflation in the early days, have we subsidized this huge expansion in the economic or electric consumption in Bitcoin and the hashing power. Maybe, I don't know. Austrian economics would tell us that yes, this might be the case. Who knows. It's interesting. I'd rather know the economic realities of the FUD, Max. If Bitcoin succeeds, does the FUD succeed? So then there's more FUD and then there's more Bitcoin and then there's more FUD. It's always more FUD. Shinobi, will there always be more FUD? Will I get my apology from the mainstream media? Nope, there is a never-ending shit torrent of FUD waiting to rain down and I think this is going to follow the exact same trend. They're just going to keep trying to ram it home until enough actual experts are able to beat their way into the mainstream media cycles and kind of put a cabash on it and then they'll just move to the next one and pretend like this never happened and they're still reputable news sources that you should trust without fact checking what sort. I love it when they do the classics like Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme. It's two lips. It's only good for drugs. It's good to just put this one in there. Bitcoin wastes energy. Always good to bring that up. Moving on to predictions or a story of the week. Blake Anderson, are you ready with a prediction or a story of the week? Well, my story of the week I kind of touched on it earlier today. I tweeted earlier that people like to do their technical analysis and they like to look at their tea leaves and stuff like that. I think that's fine, but I think that more people should probably talk about the fact that technical analysis is not useful for speculation in terms of investing on emerging markets. So I think that what is more useful is a long-term investment thesis and understanding the philosophy of science of what we're trying to instantiate with Bitcoin here. I think that some of the information that would be useful for that is I have a tweet that says stock prices continue to soar 20% year over year while the US economy is growing less than 3% a year. With the sound risk advice indicator above 2.0, it's generally followed by 50% corrections. Adjustment is coming and it's going to be painful. We'll Bitcoin absorb some of that capital flight. In 2008, a lot of people are familiar with the big shorts and that movie about the divergence in real property prices versus what property was valued at. When stock prices are going away from how much the economy is growing, it's generally an indication that we're starting to diverge again from what's real. When a correction comes this time, it's not just going to be the insurance and mortgage-brokering crisis that's going to be a bubble of everything bubble as people are talking about. I'm not excited for all of the pain and anguish that's going to come from that, but I think that it is interesting to include that in your investment thesis. I almost even think about is something like that going to happen before, during or after the next block having. If it coincides with the next block having, what is that situation going to look like? We're in a down cycle right now, but I think as long as you have income, you have savings that you have metered out and you pay your bills, then you have a certain amount of money that you dollar cost average into Bitcoin on long horizons. You should do very, very well as almost a short and hedge against all this fiat money continually diffusing what we can measure in the legacy economy because things are again starting to diverge to a dangerous level away from what should be expected and with the global reserve currency, basically being like what John Maynard-Kaines wanted to implement a long time ago. Now we do have that and now we have a runway that's completely global with which to try to diffuse all this money into a worthlessness and when that starts to catch up, it's not going to be a good thing. One of the things that you can integrate into your investment thesis is there's a lot of global debt going on and Bitcoin is basically an equity bearer instrument that goes from the bottom up and it commoditizes energy, the fundamental resource of the universe. So that's some pretty brick shithouse stuff to have on your side. Max Hillerbrand. Well, it's really interesting, right? I do think that the bus word bingo hype is always going to continue. I don't think that this will ever stop and the bus word game is still strong. I just received an article today by a German magazine. There's kind of this, well, socialist screen energy club and they are saying that there is now a Bitcoin lobby that is actively handing out Bitcoin for a green fund, screen donation funds in order to hype up the image of Bitcoin, but truly it is only creating a nuclear waste that will eventually destroy us all and it says that some are trying to use nuclear energy in space, which according to this paper is going to be quite drastic. So I'm curious how mining Bitcoin with nuclear energy in space is going to work out. That sounds like a great idea, nuclear energy in space. Shennoby, your prediction or a story of the week. Well, I guess this will qualify as both, but I am whipping out the popcorn and sitting on the lounge chair looking at the flaming wreck that is Bitmain sitting on a million B cash they can't liquidate a billion dollars worth of hardware that's not the most efficient anymore and dropped 85% in value lied about three different investors on their pre IPO slide deck. Fluffed up their figures based on all time high values and is now having people pull out of their deals and jihon scrambling to find whoever's leaking this from inside the company. Like this, I just want to say, Cobra, yeah, bro, I'm so happy we changed the proof of work from the unstoppable threat that is Bitmain. It's been pretty amazing. You thought that karma would happen to them and then karma did in the form of buying a million Bitcoin cash when they could have had 50,000 Bitcoin. Very bad deal. My story of the week, I guess it's just the world crypto network. Good job everybody. We had five live shows today. We had two at least that were overlapping, maybe even four that were overlapping. We almost had three shows at a time here, but Max had to leave one show to come join this show. We almost started early so that we would have three at a time, but I'm not sure that there's a limit now. I'm very curious as to the limit of YouTube live consecutive shows, but we've got a lot of great shows. Make sure to subscribe down below. Give us a thumbs up and a share. We had over 150 live viewers today. Thanks to everyone giving us the thumbs up. When we started, we had less than 50. How did that grow? I don't know. It was amazing. As always, you can support the world crypto network by donating Bitcoin to the address on your screen now, or any of the crazy altcoins accepted by Trezor. Until next time, bye, bye.