It goes live really fast, I figured out. The Bitcoin Group, the American original. For over the last ten seconds, the sharpest sitoshi's, the best Bitcoin's, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists. ์ง็ดๅพ General Bytes. Good evening guys. Good afternoon wherever you are. Joshua Gala from Valใใญ. Good evening ladies and gentlemen. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network. Moving on to issue one. Issue one Bitcoin hits all time high, rising above 20,000. Bitcoin broke through the psychological number of 20,000 dollars of coin that's this week, even going so high as $23,000 a coin before we're tweeting slightly to $22,000 a coin. Martin, what do you think about this incredible development in Bitcoin price history? It's fantastic. I'm not usually focused on the price, but what I do know, as I said, when the price goes up, there's just a lot more media attention for Bitcoin. Any attention for Bitcoin is good. However, I think Bitcoin will continue to rise. We'll see more and more of these old-time highs until people actually get tired of it. Personally, I think we'll be looking at 10 times to 50 times within the few next few years. So yeah, I get better get used to those old-time highs. Gosh, good golem. Yeah, like Martin said, I don't really, the price is price, and we all say, oh, I don't really care, but what you do notice when the price goes up, more and more people care about Bitcoin. It's mentioned on the news. People start using it. People start buying and spending and trading it, and this is all one step closer to freedom. One step closer to removing yourself from banks and states and having that freedom of transactions that we've all wanted for and why we all got into Bitcoin. I also want to think to say that even if you don't have a lot of Bitcoin, it's okay, like Josh said, to celebrate the price. The fact that Bitcoin is at this price that all these institutions are getting in, all these rich people are investing their money is a sign of Bitcoin success. So whether or not you shared in it monetarily in a great way or a small way or you wish you had more or you used to have more, all those horrible thoughts. Put them aside, like Josh said, let's focus on this new monetary revolution. I saw a great tweet by Marty, Mattie, something like that. He was like the number three guy in Bitcoin. It's like Satoshi, Hal Finney, and this guy. He said that he could have had, I think it was $500 billion if he had the Bitcoin that were on his laptop. But of course, he sold those. He traded them. He sent them to people. He set up faucets. He evangelized. He told people about Bitcoin and this helped Bitcoin get where it's going. So it's really easy to say, I wish I'd had this many, right? If I'd had this many, I would have held them until now and sold and all these kind of back, you know, hindsight thoughts. But I think we have to let those go. Because like Marty says, if we're in trouble and if it keeps going up more, who knows, he could have lost a trillion dollars on his laptop. I don't know, all that kind of thing. All the stories about the dumps and the lost coins and the, I lost this and I traded this and it gets out of control. So I think we're all going to need therapists. Exit question. The price of Bitcoin this time next week. Last week, a lot of people were saying lower. I was saying it myself. And of course, the price probably went higher. Martin, challenge the price. I wouldn't really know. I think it will go sideways for a while and then it will probably go up again. In the long term, it will go up. But for the next week, I don't know. I really don't. Sorry. Josh Gagala. Geez. I think it'll probably, if I really tune in. No, one Bitcoin will be worth one Bitcoin. One thing that is happening is, you know, people, we're definitely noticing more people buying more gold now. So I think what's happening is that people are crossing out slowly, slowly moving into some Boolean. But there's always two sides of a trade. So people are jumping out of Boolean back into Bitcoin. So there's a lot of people that hope that Bitcoin goes higher. And I mean, it definitely, it's always hard to talk about that question because actually the true value of Bitcoin is way higher than what it is now. But at the same time, when I hear things like Visa that Bitcoin crossed the Visa threshold. So Visa's market cap. I think, well, you know, first of all, they're two different things, company market caps and Bitcoin network market caps for short, they're different things. But let's take it at face value. I get a big skeptical that that Bitcoin is more valuable than Visa right now. Of course, in the future, it is. And me as an evangelist, of course, it is. Of course, of course, Bitcoin's more valuable than stupid Visa is. But as a pure network effect, every so many, many, many, many, many more people have got Visa cards and they use it every day all the time sending transaction fees every single day to Visa. So there is something to be said for that. Although, if you take that also and look at something like Tesla, Tesla's value is so massive now, it's more than most car companies and multiple car companies, the huge established car companies combined. So sometimes the speculators get a little bit ahead of themselves. So we don't know it. We don't know where are we? And Tesla would be smart to perhaps take some of that wealth out for a ride and buy one of these established car companies, then just connect their motors and their engines to a existing system. We'll have to see if that happens. I think the price is going up. I always think the price is going up, but I don't have any information on that. I left the Magic 8 Ball at home. But it was interesting to see on Belogies Twitter account this week, he was saying, what will happen when Bitcoin is bigger than Apple? Right now, he said Bitcoin would have to get to around $117,000 a coin to be bigger than Apple computer. But Apple could go up as well. But he was also saying that it seems inevitable now. Bitcoin will be bigger than Apple. I just wanted to thank everybody for liking this show last week. I explained to people how YouTubers, not just Bitcoin YouTubers, but everybody needs these likes so that YouTube can prove that it's a good show and it's interesting. So last week, our goal was 100 likes. And it took a while, not everyone watches the show at Friday at 1 o'clock specific time. But eventually, it came around and we got 135 likes. So we shattered our goal. We have to set a new, more aggressive goal. I don't know if we'll meet it this week, but 150 likes. Here we go. So say hello in the chat or say something there. Do it today. So say something in the chat. Join us in the conversation. And I think higher next week. But we'll see. We'll have to find out soon. Moving on to issue two. Issue two coin base IPO. We've talked about it. We've talked about it and we've talked about it. And now it's here coin base in many ways has become the first company of Bitcoin, the first company of cryptocurrency after BitPay dropped off and it didn't become what it could have been. Coinbase now is going to the stock market. Seems like an obvious IPO following door dash, which was incredibly successful Airbnb, which was incredibly successful despite 2020, although unlike with Airbnb and others with coin base, there's always the threat of regulation. Josh Gagala, your thoughts on the brand new coin base IPO. I'm going to get all controversial now and I think they should have done an ICO. Yep, I'm going to say it because I think there is something for the new, you know, they're a crypto company. And I think they should be able to develop just like Binance did their B&B coin and they're doing something with it. Yeah, maybe it's not that useful or whatever, but you can definitely make a digital token something that is something, right? It's a value. It's a representation of something they could make it as a share and go through the all the they've got enough money to go through the SEC and make it a proper security and have people trading it on their markets, on their exchanges and secondary exchanges. But why are we pulling in the old guard? You know, this is a crypto world. This is the new guard. We should be trying to utilize all these exchanges, decentralized exchanges, things like coin base, themselves, things like Voltoro, to be able to trade coin base tokens. And I mean, that's just me personally, I think they and I think they would have raised or they will, I mean, I haven't done it yet, but I think they would have raised way more if they had a gone with an ICO because I think a lot of people would go, wow, I want to be part of coin base. Point, counterpoint, Martijn should coin base have done an ICO. I don't know. I wasn't much of a fan of all these ICOs myself and I do think, you know, ICO or an IPO, I think it makes more sense for them right now to do an IPO because as Green went off there, but the for the company itself, I think it's great that they managed to grow this in such a way that they're now able to go on the stock market. Even though there are still only an exchange and I don't mean this in a negative way, but I do expect them to like bolster their portfolio and actually branch out into different crypto related companies. They know they're in exchange and maybe an ICO wouldn't be the logical decision, but I think from a regulatory few points, it makes more sense to go for an IPO. But yeah, I think it will hear a lot from this company in the future where they'll probably branch out and have different products, not just an exchange. Oh, there's a new block. But I believe Kraken recently filed for a bank license. So it's not just coin base that's really doing great stuff here. There's also Kraken. So I think, yeah, good for them. They worked hard to get this far. Yeah, we just got the FCA license through for Britain because in England, in the great Britannia, you must now have a license to do with rare numbers. Oh, that's good because I know a lot of people that are struggling to get their license in time. And the FCA did is the UK regulator. They extended the deadline. I don't know until when because they couldn't get everybody certified in time. So yeah, congrats. Congratulations, Josh. This is a major source of headache with many crypto-currency companies at this time. It absolutely is. You have to play ball sometimes like that. But I mean, it's not the full license yet because like you said, they couldn't get through in more, but it's a temporary one. So that's great. And I definitely think this is good for Kraken. This is good for the rest of the industry. This is going to be major news. Wall streets are going to have to pay attention. And at least in the short term, I think this is going to be majorly successful. All the things we might say about Coinbase, they should be Bitcoin only. We wish they were the way they were before. So-and-so's account got hacked or frozen or whatever the problem is. They're generally a solid and honest company trying to do it the right way here, even with all the political talk and the other things that we had to talk about them recently. They're generally trying to do it the right way. And it's interesting to compare the Coinbase IPO approach with, I think, Joshua Reference, the Binance ICO Coin approach. Binance printed their own coin. Their own token became a kind of a wandering geographical exchange. No one knows where they are. And Coinbase clearly took the alternative strategy, large office in San Francisco, big IPO, famous CEO, all that kind of stuff. Exit question, will the Coinbase IPO be successful? Josh? Yeah, definitely. It'll be really exciting to watch. I think it'll, it's especially IPOing through a major bull market. It's all about timing. And if they can pull the timing off right now, they're gonna see a very, very good IPO for sure. Martin. I agree with Josh there. I think the timing is absolutely essential, critical. And there will be lots of people wanting to pour money into that crypto thing. And instead of buying Bitcoin, some will just say, you know, just by Coinbase stocking instead, it makes sense. I'd rather have Bitcoin. Actually, I'd rather have both. But yeah, makes sense. I think it is a good timing for Coinbase. They'll probably do great. The same old analogy people want to buy the company that selling the shovels, not the company doing the digging. So yes, it will be a profitable ICO IPO. But perhaps in the future, there's additional regulation. This company could go up and down. This could be a fun investment ride, just like Facebook and others before it. Also a good chance for people to invest with their stock market accounts, which are still locked from a Bitcoin ETF. Hey, check out the World Crypto Network store at shop.worldcryptonetwork.com. You can get the World Crypto Network dual logo mug going out of print soon. The treasures don't float t-shirt. The Bitcoin not bombs 2020, haveening, perhaps limited edition might be going out of print soon. And World Crypto Network, the t-shirt at shop.worldcryptonetwork.com. I just want to thank everyone for giving us those likes. So far, we have about 30 live viewers and we have 14 likes. So give us a like down below. It's free. It's fun. You get to push a button. That's in George Jetson would do it. It's basically sprockets. Push that button. And also last week we got two dislikes. So thanks to the guys that dislike us too. We seem to be about two a week. So they come back every week to show their displeasure. But whichever way you want to go, like it or dislike it. Thanks so much. Moving on to issue three, self-hosted Bitcoin wallets become the front line in the fight over crypto regulations. Brian Armstrong CEO of Coinbase tipped his hat to possible Bitcoin regulations a few weeks ago and almost tipped the entire Bitcoin market. Now the regulations perhaps that Brian was worried about are becoming more in focus. New regulations could force you to format the flow out a currency transfer receipt, a CTR, whenever you transfer Bitcoin from your normal wallet at home to your Coinbase wallet. Coinbase would have to fill out forms on you every time you brought in foreign Bitcoins to the system, treating you like a potential money laundromer. If these new last minute regulations are implemented by the Trump administration, Martin, your thoughts on the potential fight over self-hosted i.e. normal wallet, normal Bitcoin wallet. I really think this is absurd. Imagine having a wallet, like a cash wallet, and then basically every time you make a payment or a transfer to say your bakery or your supermarket, you would have to go fill out forms. I think it's just ridiculous. It's against everything Bitcoin stands for. It's all about control. It's not about it's not about anti-money laundering whatsoever. This is just, I think it's just the thing for Trump. He just wants to be a pain in the ass in the last month he has to leave. I'm counting down the days. He will be out very soon. Let's just fingers crossed and let's hope this will just pass. To be honest, I think it's also tied to the FATF, this regulation thing which they tied into with the AML directive, where they want to basically control and see wherever people are transferring their own coins. Governments do get nervous whenever they control or account monitor. I think this is more about that than it is really about knowing your customer and anti-money laundering. It makes me a bit angry. This is why I'd rather see Trump go as soon as possible. Then you don't forget it and get it over with and do something else. If you think that this is going to stop with Trump going, I think you've got another thing coming my thing. No offense. I don't think it matters who the heck is the hood ornament on that crappy car. I think you're just going to get more and more regulations. Regulators are going to regulate and they're going to, it's just about good regulations and getting good feedback from companies like ourselves, like media, like the World Crypto Network, like strong people like Andreus Antonopoulos and being actually talked to and listened to because we're the ones dealing on the front line with potential bad guys and with a whole bunch of normal good people. We know what to look out for and it's definitely not that. All you're going to get is a ridiculous regulation that destroys the future of money in your country. Your regulators are going to cause your economy to go down, not up because of ridiculous regulations. If you are living in a country and your regulators are trying to stomp on the future, then I would be very, very, very seriously writing letters to your representative saying, hey, this will cause only damage. We saw this in the early days of Bitcoin with the UK passing taxes, GST or VAT as they call it here in Germany. They quickly reversed it, seeing that massive brain drain jumped out of the UK. If they thought breakfast Brexit was a thing, everyone was Brexiting way earlier back then because they didn't want to take part in that. Obviously, they quickly learned because they're a major financial hub in the world. And so is New York. New York also had problems with this whole bit license. I think New York could have been a massive hub in the world for crypto. Even with this bit license, some of the biggest conferences are in New York. But imagine if they didn't have this ridiculous bit license. Look, I think regulations are good in certain ways. If they have to be there, they can be sensible. But regulations that are just ridiculous do nothing but drown people in paperwork is the old school modus operandi of the old banking guard trying to make it so ridiculous that startups and software can't get around. But the problem is it does nothing to hinder the money launders. What you think, you really think that people are going to stop using buying drugs on Silk Road, on the black markets because they have to do so. No, they're just going to use Monero or something else. Or they're just going to use Bitcoin in another wallet that doesn't do that. And they'll tumble it. It's a ridiculous notion. The cops should be out there catching the bad guys the good old fashion way by finding evidence and then going and breaking down their doors or whatever they do, not by trying to follow ridiculous, basically putting a fishing net over every single person in the world. And if they really want to do that, then they should do that with fiat because that's the one that you roll up and snort the Coke up your nose with anyway. All right, to follow that. All right. Well, I think this regulation was to be expected and that we're going to have this fight in the future, whether it's the Trump administration or any other administration, even though I don't support the Trump administration. Josh mentioned money laundering. That means transferring money around secretly without the government knowing it. They hate that. In the US, they passed a lot of laws in the 1970s to crack down on the drug cartels because they were money laundering. They were transferring around money without the government knowing that. And they hate that. So of course, they hate Bitcoin. They don't like the fact that maybe you gave someone some Bitcoin, they put it in a paper wallet. No one knows how much money is in there. It's hidden under a floorboard somewhere. They hate that. It drives them crazy. They just don't like it. They're going to keep going this. And for everyone, we're kind of in a Bitcoin gold and age right now. The prices up, the banks are whether Wall Street's with us. All of that could go away. It could completely change and go the other direction. I remember a time I'm old enough when Apple banned all cryptocurrency wallets. They were gone. If you had an iPhone, you couldn't use Bitcoin. You couldn't buy or sell or send or receive anything. That could happen. That could happen again. It did happen. So I think this is a big issue. We're going to keep talking about it whether it's Manuchin or someone else in charge. Exit question from the chat, BTC Moon Guy, will the potential government shutdown derail this Treasury BS? Martine, what do you think? Sorry, will the potential? What was the question? Well, I think we're kind of, it's tough to say without getting too political, but we do seem to be running the clock out on the Trump administration. We're generally running the clock out on the year. It's December 18th, we're three weeks into December. There's two weeks here. There's four weeks of January. Time is running out. Do you think that it will, do you think it'll stop them from passing this regulation the following weeks? Well, they have, I don't know about their agenda, but I honestly don't know. I know this Manuchin was asked to look at Bitcoin when Trump came to office, but as Josh said, it might not be related to the president and might be related to this FATF and team, you know, this FATF regulation coming up, where they want to like basically share information about any transfers made. So if I would transfer some Bitcoin to Josh or to you, Thomas, then my name would pop up on the billetemboard, which is used by all the exchanges, and then the address would be taken note of. And I think it's extremely dangerous. And but I'm afraid this will probably, this will probably, if not implemented before the current president leaves office, it will be implemented later. But I know just imagine the database being hacked, where they keep all this information that they share between all these different exchanges, or there is a rogue employee at one of the exchanges, then all the information is on the street and your name, address, account details, amount of Bitcoin, your own, our old public knowledge. And it's an operational security problem. This is dangerous. It shouldn't be happening, but yeah, we'll see. You know one thing, if I could just add to that, a lot of people get very upset about YouTube censoring people, about Twitter censoring people, but I think it's fantastic. Why? Because it decentralizes this nonsense every time one big YouTuber gets banned, it's like, yes, all those people go and they start building other networks. But you meant to host video on your server. You meant to host blogs on your server. This whole centralized internet is so ridiculously controllable that by these big companies censoring opinion, what happens is it's drawing large communities away from these centralized organizations, getting them used to, instead of by habit typing in YouTube when they're bored and just surfing, they put in, I don't know, library or whatever the hell, there's so many different video platforms nowadays and it's really really cool. And I think this will happen to Bitcoin as well. Every time you do past ridiculous laws like this, you start to get decentralization of massive structures like Coinbase, people will just move away from Coinbase and use other things. And so it is antifragile this thing and not just in the actual protocol, but in the web of things that use the protocol. And I would say Coinbase should, if they're going to be forced to do this, they should move out of the US. But boom, how's that before your IPO? Very unlikely with Coinbase IPO. And more likely they would cow-tow and do this exactly. I think the issue here has been clear for a long time. The government doesn't want you to have any secrets. They don't want you to have any encryption. They don't want you to have any Bitcoin. They don't want you to have any monetary privacy. They want to know what you're doing. It drives them crazy. They don't want there to be any cash either. Remember cash, like Martin was saying, he could give me 20 bucks, he could give me Bitcoin. Whenever you do that with your friends, the government doesn't know about it. They don't get a cut. That drives them crazy. They're also having a simultaneous war on cash. So I just think it's important for people to remember the old days when I Apple banned Bitcoin. And to remember, the government can ban Bitcoin again. It can happen. Moving on to issue four. Issue four, Bitcoin is in a massive bubble. And investors don't understand how its supply works. According to economist David Rosenberg, economist David Rosenberg told Bloomberg that he believes, oh really, that Bitcoin is in a bubble. And investors don't understand how the supply works. He says, everybody seems to believe that we're going to get to that 21 million cap on the supply constraint. But there's really nothing in the protocol to suggest that the supply of Bitcoin can't go up once we hit once we hit that limit, which would be in 21 30 anyway. Josh Gugalla, your thoughts on is Bitcoin a bubble? And can we print more than 21 million Bitcoin? I've been talking about this stupid argument since 2011. I've got videos of it. I mean, it's so ridiculous. Of course, we can, as a community, it get all the noise to decide to make more Bitcoin. But none of us would. Especially not 51%. What we could do, however, is add more zeros, which is way, way, way more likely and probably will happen. Now, what does that mean? That means we all, there's the one cake, right? So instead of the government, which just print, you know, yeah, as the cakes and just makes more and more cakes, we have the same cake and just make smaller and smaller slices, making that cake worth more. This whole notion that, oh, we're all going to get together and just make more Bitcoin. Why do we go around promising bridges and schools and hospitals to people if they vote for us? And that's and we won't tax you, we're just going to make more Bitcoin. No, it is ridiculous. This is a decentralized protocol. And you're a liar or you're an idiot who ever said that. Oh, come on, Josh. The new guy says we can print more Bitcoin. So everyone should listen to him. We've talked about this over and over again. We lived through the user activated software and the Bitcoin 2X, the no 2X movement. Bitcoin is very difficult to change. It's very hard to change. That's part of why it's so good. So it seems very unlikely anyone would change the 21 million unit. It's kind of a cop out. I think he's using as a simple disadvantage to say that Bitcoin's bad. You shouldn't invest in it because the cap could be moved when in reality and people repeat this over and over again, it hasn't come true. It hasn't come true yet. Excuse me. But there are, you know, 43 million millionaires in the US and there's only 21 million Bitcoin. So they can't all have one. I like that. That comes up all the time. I also want to thank everyone for giving us those likes. We've got 24 likes, 51 viewers. So if everyone could just reach down below, give us one of those likes. Like Adam, vice versa. It's pound the like button. Drill it. Yeah. Thanks so much. And even if you're not watching live, if I'm talking to you in the future, you could still like the thing. I won't see it till later. But yeah, we could hit that goal of 150 likes on Martini earth thoughts. 21 million is enough for everyone. And as Josh Shed, there could be like, you know, an agreement maybe in the future that instead of the Satoshi being being the smallest unit of account, we could have like micro Satoshi, which are like thousands, 1000 of Satoshi. So, but that wouldn't increase the amount of Bitcoin and saying that, well, Mr Rosenberg and the article states that a Bitcoin is in the bubble. And the reason why he thinks so and he's credible and has knowledge to say that Bitcoin is a bubble is because he predicted the housing bubble, which you had got me laughing. I mean, the fact that you saw this housing bubble coming gives you enough street cred to predict that Bitcoin is in the bubble. I think personally, I think Bitcoin is is undervalued right now. It should be at least $100,000 worth. If you look at it, there's no single illegal or copied Bitcoin in existence. There is no it's it's it's been hammered so much over the past 10 years. It's rock solid. It's there to stay. And I'm 100% sure that more than 50% of all the Bitcoin users or people that hold Bitcoin currently on this planet will agree that 21 million is enough for everyone. So, nothing will change. There will be no consensus on increasing the number of Bitcoin ever. There might be a consensus on that. Yes, we'll be able to split it up and even smaller, smaller bits, but that that wouldn't make Bitcoin a bubble and Bitcoin will continue to go up. It's numbered go up technology. It's been tried and tested. It will continue to do so. Oh, by the way, for those that do the like button, make sure you also click the subscribe button and the notification bell because every time you hit that subscribe and notification bell, the Bitcoin price goes up and you can see the proof here is behind me. It's been going up already. So, just keep clicking that like subscribe and notification bell. They're definitely related. I was going to ask everyone yes or no if you think it's going to be more than 21 million, but I think everyone's in agreement. It's not going to be more than 21 million. We want to thank the new guy for bringing up stuff. We've already talked about seven or 10 years ago. Yeah. We hope that there's a lot more new guys out there. Josh, is there anything else that the new guys are going to lecture us about next? I know previously they said Bitcoin's not a currency or it's like two lips or it's only a store of value or it's only a currency. It seems again Bitcoin just plug in along. Well, it's the harvining usually brings out a lot of the fud where it's like, oh, well, once it halves and now come out with all sorts of graphs and reasons why it's going to absolutely tank and be some sort of spiral and then just keep I'm going and keep I'm getting more valuable. It's ludicrous. And then when it crashes, that's when you start getting it. Oh, it's over. In one of my videos, there, it crashes from 30 down to two euros and everyone's like, you idiot. See, it's a scam. It's a scam. And you're like, what are you just think, oh, okay, more for me, you know, whatever. Don't want it good. Everyone's just waiting for it to prove them right. They want Bitcoin to prove them right. That it is a scam or it's going to this or it's going to that. And then once it's proved them right, they don't know what to do after that. Martin, what will they say next? Should we cancel the next halving? Is halving too difficult for Bitcoin all of a sudden? It's there. It's in the protocol. It will not change. The halving will happen. But before that time, I think we'll see a hundred thousand dollar Bitcoin. It's never going to work technology. By the way, folks, you can already go sub-sotoshi. If you use the Lightning network, you can actually send less than a satoshi. So how's that? Put that in your pipe and smoke it. New guy? Meanwhile, the price of Bitcoin cash is somewhere around $300 a coin. So if you traded one for one, if you had sold all your Bitcoin and gone to the other side of the fork, instead of having $23,000 a coin, you would have $300 a coin. Moving on to issue five, probably the largest issue on the show. This week bigger than the show itself. This is like what we talked about the virus last year. And we were talking about that. This is much bigger. Well, perhaps nothing's bigger than that. But issue five, solar winds hack. According to early information, the United States government attached agencies, contractors, nuclear weapons, the Department of Energy, the Uranium Control Centers, pretty much everything that the United States has has been hacked presumably by a state actor. We don't know. We assume state actor because of the size of the hack. They're calling it a supply side hack, which means that this company, solar winds, was hacked first. Solar winds provide software for government computers, contractors, other people like that. They were hacked. A payload was inserted into the solar wind software. This payload then went out into hundreds, perhaps thousands of government computers leaving them vulnerable when other exploits were tried. Other networks were taken over computers within side computers were taken over. This is a difficult problem to get rid of, a difficult problem to deal with, and a very difficult problem to explain to the normal people about what's going on. The media is currently trying and failing. Martine, your thoughts on this epically, likely state-sponsored hack? It reminds me a bit of the time when all the computers on the internet were running Microsoft Windows. This is what you get when everybody is using the same software because everybody is using the same software, most Fortune 500 companies use solar wind software, most government contractors use solar wind software. It's software for managing and monitoring your network. That makes it even more dangerous is something like this is hacked because it can reach everything. Basically, any computer running in those companies is probably running a solar wind agent, which is actively monitoring the health and performance of the network and the systems itself. Then reports that back to a centralized server within the enterprise or maybe a hosted version somewhere else. By doing a supply chain attack and actually inserting a piece of malware into that software and then have a distributor to all the clients, extremely lucrative. I mean, it gets you everywhere. Yes, this is scary. This is one of the reasons we shouldn't be having a mono culture of software running on interconnected networks. We need to software to be open source, which solar wind isn't. We need the diversity of different packages. Because this is probably something that's demanded by the US government to use this software with to monitor the health of the network. It also highlights the dangers and gives a reason not to use the biggest software. Nowadays, we have max, windows and Linux machines on the network. If you want to exploit a network, it will be tough for you. You have to create malware for three times of operating systems. If everybody would still be using windows, you don't only need one vulnerability, which isn't known yet. Then use that to basically infect everything. I think it's scary. I think it's the digital version of Pearl Harbor. Basically, it's the largest attack on the US since Pearl Harbor. I think most people just don't understand the dangers of this. It's scary stuff. There are a couple of interesting clocks that are running. The president of the United States has not publicly addressed this hack. That's one thing where you can just look at your watch. You can say how many days has it been when no one has tried to publicly address this hack? There's also the number of days left till January 20th, presumably, when a Biden administration would take control, Biden has already publicly said this is an unacceptable hack. If it is from a state actor such as Russia, it's unacceptable. The thing I keep thinking about with both this hack and the attempted hack or successful hack on the 2016 election is either you're backed into a corner and you have no other options. This is all you've got left to take on this big attack and to attack this big country. Isn't there any blowback? Isn't there any real-world response? Sure, maybe the United States doesn't have the cyber capabilities to hit Russia back or to hit a state actor back or they don't have anything worth hitting. Whatever it is, there seems like there could be something that could be done to them. The Trump administration so far has not mentioned it publicly, not done anything to them even sanctions or any kind of diplomatic telegram. Hey, please don't do this. Anything, nothing's been done. It's very, very strange. Also, the Defense Department has stopped briefing Biden if you're keeping track of the coup and that's a good stuff. We'll see how that goes. Josh Skugala, your thoughts on what Martin describes as the Pearl Harbor of hacking. Governments hack each other all the time. It's nothing new. They're always hacking each other. Banks get hacked all the time. You never hear about banks getting hacked. They just reverse transactions. The biggest thing that people need to worry about on a personal level is that these, the KYC and AML laws, when they become stronger and stronger and you need to put so much personal information on these private networks and then they get hacked and leaked. Once they hacked and leaked and your private information is out of your biometrics, your eyes, your thumb prints, your face, your birth date of birth, everything you have, it means that anybody can open up a bank account in your name and take out as much money and loans in your name, then you're stuck with that debt and you'll spend 10 years of your life in a black hole because somebody else got hacked and you were forced for safety to put these documents on. The future, in the future, really it's important that we distance, we start building concepts of avatars where we build an avatar and that's the one that gets KYC and that's the one that builds reputation. We need to start looking at different mechanisms. We will eventually anyway because one day there will be such a massive hack that everyone's information is just everywhere and if I wanted to pull up Martin's ID, I could just search for it. If I wanted to pull up anyone's ID, I just searched for it and banks won't take that as ID anymore. Eventually we will have to go to an avatar anyway and that we build the reputation on because an avatar, you can turn off, if it's been hacked, you turn that off and say and report it as hacked. But me, my flesh and blood, I can't take this off and start again. Once all my biometrics are gone and out there, they're gone and out there. This is just part of the whole hackling. I know this isn't that much to do with the SolarWinds thing but governments get hacked all the time. They're totally incompetent in any administration because they don't have true competition. The only real way to move forward is free and open source, software and projects like Bitcoin that move encryption technology further down the road through incentivizing it by value, by real money. Everything else is ridiculous fast. I think that you're secure behind some of these technologies. It's just okay. I went to America and they wanted me, all my thumb prints, but at the airport and everything and my face and everything and I said, where's this going? And the guy said, ah, some private company had it but we've just changed companies and I'm like, okay, so what happened to all the data that went to that private? Yeah, we don't know. I think they don't have it anymore. Maybe, anyway, some other new companies got it now and they are the ones that say it's a super-secure. Don't worry about it. I was like, this is just so mad. It's crazy. It's crazy that we just go, okay, okay, okay, peace or my biometrics. And I personally know people that have had their identity stolen, that have had bank accounts and loans taken out in their name and have spent 10 years, it was eight years in a hole. They couldn't even buy a mobile phone contract because every time they pulled up the credit rating, it was in the dirt, it was in the dirt. And the guy spent eight years trying to get his name back. He eventually, I think, eventually got it back, he got it wiped he went through all sorts of court cases and all this nonsense to scrub his name. And guess what happened? It was like, I don't know, it was like maybe six months after that, the same thing happened. Again, someone took his ID and it wasn't because he lost his ID again, it was because his ID was already out there. His identity was already gone. So it wasn't like, he was now a foolish guy that just keeps losing his ID. No, once your ID is gone, it's gone and it's gone forever. So yeah, the notion of all, things need to change in cybersecurity. And we haven't, we've only had 30 years of proper cybersecurity. We deal in Valtteri, we deal in vaults, we deal in storing gold and silver in top tier vaulting facilities in Switzerland. Humanity has had thousands and thousands of years of understanding how to secure physical things that are just impossible to break into, like literally impossible. Unless you have the oceans in 11 team, of course. But but if you cyber security is very, very new, literally, you know, 30 years we're talking and it's evolving so quickly that anything that 30 years ago is not valid now at all. Probably if it was even 10 years or five years, two years ago, it's not valid anymore. So and the well, funnily enough, some of the most secure systems are actually really old because none of the hackers know how to breach that stuff. So it's a weird world, but yeah, don't trust cybersecurity. It's a joke if you think no one's getting hacked. Where the Americans are hacking, the Russians are hacking the Germans, the Germans are hacking Australians, Australians are hacking the Russians, Chinese are hacking everyone else. The North Koreans are getting blame for hacking, but they don't have any computers so they can't hack shit. Excellent again, Josh. So leave me, leave me hanging there after laugh instead of talk. All right. I can't help see this, but from a network administrator perspective and I feel for them and I can't imagine what it must feel like to have these hackers all over your system. It's all dirty now. Nothing can be trusted. It's all untrusted and that solar winds program that was helping you out, it was part of your positive network administration, how it becomes part of the problem. So I think this is a big hack. I think we're going to keep talking about it in the weeks and months to come as we find out basically the extent of the damage, certainly as a civilian or whatever we don't know anything, what's really going on, but just the early reports, Department of Energy, Nuclear Weapons, just in general the amount of data that you could take in and then use on the stock market to use on other things, just the value of information, the value of just sitting there and waiting and watching. You don't necessarily have to crash the computers to get the value out of them. There's a lot of value in just watching. So we will talk about this again. Exit question, is a cyber attack an act of war? Is it time to elevate our language? Have we forgotten the old ways where countries didn't routinely attack and cripple each other's networks? Martin? Well, attacks have been going on as far as I can remember, or at least since the early days of the internet. If your enemy is or target is only 10 milliseconds away, then why not knock on their door to see if somebody is home or maybe the door isn't properly locked? So I think this is an act of war. Nobody gets killed yet, but you could wreak some harm. I have a fork, so you can make it difficult for the other. So yeah, I don't think it's an act of war, but this is serious, especially if it's on such a large scale. Josh Gagallar. Yeah, the thing is like with Bitcoin, if someone attacks Bitcoin, the network, it's anti-fragile, we just learn from it and patch it and make it better. So I wouldn't say it's an act of war, it's an act of hardening networks. You should presume you should presume people are constantly hacking you and should be constantly working at defending yourself as strongly as possible. And difficult as it's going to be, I have to say that I think a cyber attack is an act of war and that we have been allowing this to go on for too long, pretending that it didn't matter. As they attack larger and larger systems, as they have the ability to create more and more potential damage, either economically, loss of life or blowing up a nuclear power plant, we can't continue to just ignore this and pretend it's kids griefing a website or taking down a server. It's much more than that. Sadly, at this time, the United States is the big country with lots of guns and not lots of hackers, so it doesn't seem like a proportional response will be available. So if you have to do a full court response and you have to take them in other areas, economic sanctions and so on and so forth, this is not the act of friends. Friends shouldn't be doing this to each other. I disagree with Josh's cynical attitude that everyone hacks everyone. There are limits. There are scales here. And I think what they did is way beyond the scale, as Martins says, Pearl Harbor asks, it's a major offensive. And once again, you have to just think psychologically, either they have no other options and they're very desperate. They're megalomaniacal. They want to control everything and their power hungry, perhaps an aging man in the twilight of his years wants to be emperor of the world. Sounds cool. It's a cool chair. There needs to be a reason for them to do or they think that there's going to be no response. That's bad too. To have so much capability, economic capability, military capability, etc. And then to allow your systems to just get rolled this way. And again, someone was going to find out, to do this kind of thing. You know that someone's going to find out. It's too big for them not to find out. So in a very interesting issue, I think we're going to talk about a lot more. I see a lot of messages in the chat about it. So I hope you guys are discussing it too. Thanks again for giving us those thumbs up and shares. We've got 42 likes right now with around 70 viewers. So there's still a chance if you've just joined the show to give us a thumbs up. Also like Marti was saying, go and subscribe down below. We have about 60% of you that are subscribed. That means that 40% of you are not subscribed. So surprise, it's free. You can subscribe down below. We do these shows about once a week. We also do other shows about Bitcoin, crypto, currency, currency. Our team says the price is going up just as we say this. So if you want the price to keep going up, you got to keep the likes and the surprise, surprise, subscribe's coming. But thanks again. I think it's time for predictions or a story of the week. Josh, are you ready with a prediction or a story of the week? Yeah, we have, Victoria, just after many, many years finally launched allocated silver. So you can trade into allocated silver, bullion, secured and fully insured, fully audited. One of the largest auditing firms in the world, BDO, in a top tier tax-free Swiss vaulting facility. So if you ever want to be like the rich and have some gold or silver and Swiss vault, and then you can trade it back to Bitcoin when you buy the dip. So make sure when the price is high, you load up the bit, the cannon to be able to buy the dip with. It's always a good idea. No one ever wants to sell at the top, but it's always a neat idea. And it's neat, if I'll tell you you can sell into gold or silver as opposed to having USD or one of these strange tether stablecoin things. Martine, prediction or a story of the week? We sold 6,000 ATMs. It took us two and a half month to sell a thousand ATMs. And it took us four months to sell the previous thousand. And it took us a lot longer to sell the thousand before that. But yeah, 6,000 ATMs. So congratulations. So it goes for Bitcoin. Yeah. It's going to be a street corner near you. General buy ATMs are just some of the best ATMs. They're such good user experience, really, really cool. I always love seeing them when I'm traveling around Europe, and I see a general buy, it's always, I think, yeah, even if I use it, I think, yeah, and if I don't use it, I say, hey, use it. Well, thanks. Go to the air, Josh. Yeah. It's neat to see those numbers going up that you got the the next thousand faster than the previous thousand. Yes. There's this exponential growth that I think mirrors the exponential growth we've seen in crypto currency. And that's, yeah, I think that's a good thing. Eventually, you know, people should be able to buy their first crypto on any street corner. And well, we've got a long way to go. But yeah, that's I think very good. That's about all we have for this week. Thanks so much everybody for joining us. Give us a thumbs up and a share. If you want to buy a t-shirt or something, check out that link. If you want to donate, we've got links down below. I'm on Twitter at mad bitcoins or at world crypto net. So thanks so much for joining us. We'll be back again next week. I think it's the day after Christmas. We'll see. Maybe we'll be back probably if not the week after that. Until next time. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye, folks.