Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Bitcoin Version 0.9, China Rumors, and Much More

Episode Date: March 25, 2014

Topics covered in this episode: The new update of the core Bitcoin client to version 0.9 Strange rumors about a Bitcoin ban in China OKCoin and Bitstamp raising $10m each and the business of Bitcoin exchanges KnCMiners’ first Scrypt mining product the Titan goes on preorders The proposal for a new Bitcoin symbol This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/012

Hi there, today's March 24th, 2014, and this is Episode of Bitcoin, Episode 12. On today's show, we're talking about the new release of Bitcoin version 0.9, false rumors of a Bitcoin ban in China, OKC coin and BitSlam each raising $10 million, K&C miners pre-sale of their first script mining product, and the proposal for a new Bitcoin symbol. If you like the work we're doing and you'd like to support the show, please go to epicenterbitcoin.com slash tips for our tipping address. Hello, welcome to Epicenter Bitcoin episode 12. My name is Sebastian Kutu.

I'm a Canadian-born user experience designer and developer based in Lir, and I'm also the founder and organizer of Bitcoin Talks to Lille. And I'm Brian Faventrain. I'm a brilliant-based entrepreneur and founder of the Bitcoin startups, group. How you doing, Brian? Yeah, good. I'm in London at the moment. I've been here for a few days and going back to Berlin tomorrow.

So I've been at this futurism conference the last two days, which was quite interesting. Although a talk on Bitcoin was sorely missing. I'm surprised that there was no talk on Bitcoin. You told me this earlier, and I was a little surprised about it. Yeah, I was talking with the guy who's organizing the conference or who, organize a conference and maybe we'll it's also a regular meetup they do

meetups maybe every month where they have often pretty well-known people coming in so I was talking with him about doing a Bitcoin meetup and he's interested in it he would like to do it I think he just doesn't understand it so well yet okay yeah I think it would have been I think people would have been extremely interested in it so what's a future conference

so So there are different topics covered like the basic idea is like, you know, where's the world going? What's going to happen the next 10 years, 20 years and beyond? The title of the conference was anticipating 2025. So it was about topics like nanotechnology, longevity. The singularity. Yeah. So, yeah.

It was a good confidence. It was pretty interesting. I was quite familiar with most of the things that were talked about, so there wasn't so much new for me. So I was hoping that there would be more kind of new areas. But one thing, honestly, I took away, which I found was very striking for me, was that, you know, if, let's say I had given a talk here about Bitcoin. and it was anticipating

2025 that's just you know I think for anyone who's in the Bitcoin world completely absurd to try to talk about 2025

you know we've done over like one year's predictions I think maybe you could try to do two years which would already be very daring and I'm sure you'd be off massively on major points

but then 10 years or 11 years completely unthinkable and And I think you see Bitcoin going so fast. And I think the reason is that you have to see economic incentives that are there that give a lot of incentive for all these people do independently work on this. And then you compare this to these other projects like, you know, combating aging or something like that, which you need a lot of funding and centralized. And it's very difficult because governments don't fund that kind of thing.

and it just moves so much slower. They can talk like 10 years, you know, what's kind of on the horizon 10 years, and they can talk about these things. But it's also, I think, because they just work completely differently in terms of the structure of how the innovation works there. Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, I think you're right.

It's very, very difficult to even tell what's going on six months from now in Bitcoin. But I think it's also because this is also new. You know, we've been talking about aging and these other topics for quite some time now. That's true. Yeah. That's true. You know, internet technology, we have some experience with that. There's some linear regression that we can kind of follow, and maybe not linear,

because it is exponential growth that the future. who will tell you. They'll talk about hockey stick curve kind of growth. And so you kind of have to always think of it in terms of exponential growth. But anyways, but we still have something to look back upon. Whereas in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, it's just like there's very little data to pull from, right? Yeah, that's true. No, it's certainly true.

If you talk with something like nanotechnology, it's been around for a long time. or another guy gave a talk on sort of brain hacking. So, you know, different ways of stimulating the brain through like transcranial direct simulation or light or other things. And these are technologies that have been around for 40 years or 30 years or longer. And there's research, right? There's research just progress in there. PhDs and writing research papers and, you know,

Ray Kurzweil writes his books there over at Google. Yeah, I think it's, it was astonishing to see the difference that, at least my impression is, of the pace in these areas and in Bitcoin, it's just like worlds apart. I think one, one exception perhaps was there was a talk on health, 2.0, so the whole idea of like mobile health, wearables, internet of things. I think that area seems to be moving really fast too. Maybe not as fast as Bitcoin, but still really fast. Should we get started with our topics?

Were there a lot of people there? It was like 200. Yeah, sure. 200, okay. Yeah, it's pretty decent sized. Cool. I've also been doing some interviews, some Bitcoin interviews with some local people here from the Bitcoin community.

So we'll be releasing those as kind of additional episodes in the next, in the near future. as well. Awesome. Yeah. Cool. All right. Let's get started of these topics. So I guess the big news this week, which was kind of waited, we were kind of waiting for it, is the update to Bitcoin QT client to version 0.9.0. And so the update came out on, when the update came out?

It came on, Brian, the 19th was it? Yeah, this weekend. Yeah, so this week on the 19th. So the core Bitcoin Deft Team says a new milestone in development of Bitcoin of the Bitcoin reference implementation has been reached. Version 0.9.0. As a major version, it introduces both new features and bugfaces. So if you go to BitcoinFoundation.org slash blog, you can get a full list of those changes there.

And there's quite a few changes. All the changes that we were anticipating already. So the major changes are to the payment protocol. So there's kind of a whole redesign of the payment protocol and how payments get executed. Yeah. So the main news here is that there's kind of a protocol of how there can be a direct communication channel between two parties and payment. So this in general is kind of designed for a merchant customer transaction. So let's say you go in the store and you want to pay for something with Bitcoin. Then this payment protocol

defines how that store can send you a payment request, which includes additional information. And then you can pay this. And so it has some really interesting properties. For example, when you get the payment request from the store, they, they will sign that request with their SSL certificate. So now when that request appears in your wallet, instead of just seeing some random looking Bitcoin address, you could see the name of the store. So in a similar way to when you go to an HTTP or an SSL site,

you would often see in your browser on the left side, the name the name of the website that was used to sign that, who owns his certificate that signed that website. So basically the same thing. Also using SSL.

So that's, of course, first of all, it's more secure. And second of all, in terms of usability, the cool thing is in the future, perhaps we wouldn't even see the Bitcoin address anymore. Yeah, I guess that kind of depends.

on how the Bitcoin clients are going to implement this, right? So there's a lot of, this is the technical kind of base of how payment requests are going to be generated, but then wallet software will implement it in such a way that, I guess they'll have their interpretation of how they want this to actually have. So just to get back to the payment request, how it works is the merchant or the person who is requesting the money would generate. a payment request, which is essentially a file. Which means that you can transfer that to your customer either through a URL. So for instance, if they're on a mobile website on an Android phone or on a computer, if they click it, it'll be the regular kind of Bitcoin colon URI.

so that can carry the Bitcoin payment request. but it can also be an attachment, say in an email, or it can be transferred over NFC, for instance, and I don't see why it couldn't be transferred over QR code as well, since you can have the URI information within a QR code. So there's multiple ways that you could transfer a payment request, and in fact, it seems from the blog post here that BitPay has already implemented it. Yeah, I think I know the Bitcoin, the Android,

you know, Andreas Cheapras wallet, he's also working on after a while. I think all the major wallets are implementing that. And just to come back, leave it to, you know, how are they going to do that? I think the idea of this is to get rid of Bitcoin addresses, at least to the extent that in certain transaction, you wouldn't see them anymore. I mean, perhaps this won't happen so soon because we'll also have to figure out the whole usability of this like how are wallace going to look like uh but at least that's the direction it's going and i think it's very positive because if you think of kind of regular people getting

into bitcoin uh bitcoin addresses they probably shouldn't see them in normal transactions and it's much better if they you know they go to the nike store they see like oh nike send me this payment request, that makes more sense than I'm paying some money to this random looking aders. Right. Right. And so if we look at the messages here, in fact, I'm looking at the technical documentation. So you can have a payment URL. So secure, usually HSTPS location where payment message may be.

sent to obtain a payment acknowledged message. So you could have a payment URL sent with the request. Yeah. So that, you know, the customer could verify that in fact, the

payment request comes from that URL. And it looks at zero, you can also have an an actual data. You can send arbitrary data, so you could just send a description for example what the payment is for

so if I'm in this store I send you payment request I could say it's for three shirts and two pants and you could put in for example the equivalent in euros so you could say okay this is 100 euros so and their wallet could of course

then display that information which would make it I think much more user friendly and also more secure because now I pay that because the payment message I got from the merchant was signed by the SSL certificate. If I pay that, I can prove that I paid exactly that invoice for those products and to that merchant, which is really great.

Yeah. Now, the technical documentation is actually very interesting. If you got a GitHub.com slash Bitcoin slash Bips, you can search for. BIP 70. So this is BIP 70, payment protocol offered by Gavin and Dreson and all of the technical documentation is there. So exactly like what the protocol looks like. There's a nice, some schematics here on like the the workflow of a

payment protocol request and as well you can see all of the kind of the technical description of what's included in the payment request, so different fields. and values and such. It's a step into, I think, you know, some really well-needed real payment system sort of basics that were missing from Bitcoin, whereas before payments were done in a very kind of rudimentary way, this brings it forward into the kind of, and gives it the feature that merchants actually need to be able to accept payments in a kind of serious way, right?

Where you can have a bit, the client's refund address, for instance, sent with the payments so that the merchant doesn't have to look for the customer's refund address that they need to do a refund so that you can send a memo with the invoice ID so that you can sign your transaction with SSL. So all this kind of stuff is very important for merchants to be able to. look at Bitcoin as a serious payment option. Yeah, no, I totally agree. I think it will be very interesting to see how wallets, point of sale systems,

or online payment processes like Bitcoin and Coinbase will implement this. I guess they will have to find some kind of uniform way and standard of how this is done. But I think once it is done, perhaps a few months, standard line, six months down line, et cetera. Hopefully we'll see a, you know, kind of a step up in terms of the usability and just friendliness, smoothness of Bitcoin payments.

Yeah. There's some other important changes to this core client update. We've been calling it the core client update because, so there's a branding change. Now they're no longer calling it Bitcoin QT, they're calling it Bitcoin

Core. And so this sort of addresses some of the nomenclature issues that we've been having where the Bitcoin payment system or the protocol is called Bitcoin with a small B and the Bitcoin, the currency is Bitcoin with a capital B and there's Bitcoin QT. So now the protocol, the core protocol is now going to be called Bitcoin Core. Yeah, I think the issue is also, I know they've changed this now, but it used to be if you went to Bitcoin.org, it was kind of in beginning, like, download the client. And, you know, it used to be the Bitcoin client. And I think when people were there for the first time, a lot of them ended up downloading Bitcoin QT

or now, how it's called, the Bitcoin Core client. And, of course, that's really inappropriate for the vast majority of people, because it will take, like, days to update the blockchain and download the full blockchain, and it's just not the right client for normal people. And I think what they try to emphasize with this as well is that this is the client that developers, more advanced users or people who have a particular reason for using the QT client should download or the core client should download. But it's not like they go to wallet solution. Right. Sorry, I was mistaken.

What I just said, I said that they're not calling a protocol Bitcoin core. I was wrong in saying that. So they're calling the Bitcoin QT Bitcoin Core. So like you said, the sort of. emblematic Bitcoin software written by the core developer team

right. So the reference client is now called Bitcoin Core. So in the rebranding, Read Me, it's reduced confusion between Bitcoin to network and Bitcoin the software.

We've renamed the software client to Bitcoin Core. Yeah. So it would be great if they could call, if we could rebrand Bitcoin to network to something else. I think that,

you know, it's great to call Bitcoin the currency Bitcoin with a capital B. But I really think that the protocol should be rebranded to something a bit more generic. That's an interesting fault. I honestly do find it quite hard to, when you write about Bitcoin to know, like, when is it the big B and when is it the small, when it's the capital, when it's the small caps.

Yeah. So it is, it is quite confusing. I mean, I guess it's probably too late, by frankly, to rebrand it. Yeah. but it's a yeah it's an interest perhaps it would have been better because I mean when we talk about the the internet we're generally

I don't know we can be talking about the worldwide web or we can be talking about the internet TCPIP protocol but at least there's the there's kind of the reference term that you could always go back to when you're there's confusion about the internet

I'm using quotes here you can only say, oh, well, I meant TCPIP, right? And there's always that distinction. Whereas in Bitcoin, it's a bit more complicated. Yeah, no, I agree. So there were some other changes regarding the transaction mailability. You know, the thing that has been on our mind, or that was for a brief time, it was kind of that number one topic everyone was scared about.

So I think what's going to happen now, of course, the problem with transaction availability was that as a node, you could get a Bitcoin transaction, about the big on transaction. You could kind of change it slightly without altering the content of the transaction and then send it on and this could lead to all kinds of confusion. So now there was some changes were made that nodes will recognize if a transaction was kind of, malformed or changed and then they would refuse to relay it or send it further. I don't know if this solves the full problem. So I don't know if this addresses all the malformed transactions or some of them, but hopefully at least it would improve the situation. Although I think there haven't been any more transaction mail-ability attacks recently.

Yeah, I'm reading again in the read-me. So it says this release contains a few fixes for transaction ID malleability issues. So there's apparently there's five fixes. And these are, these are quite technical. So there's a command line option which avoids spending zero confirmation change. Yeah. There's also a new rule, so this rule is standard transaction rules tightened to prevent reeling and mining of mutated transactions. So a mutated transaction is a transaction that has been changed after it's been initially issued.

Exactly, yeah, yeah. Right. The other fix is additional information in list transactions slash get transaction output to report wallet transactions that conflict with each other because they spent the same outputs. Yeah. I understand a lot of this. bug fixes to the get balanced list accounts RCP commands which would report incorrect balances for double spent or mutated transactions and as there's a new option

this is also for the command line client to rebuild the wallets transaction information so I'm guessing based you know base it recreates transactions and ideas based on the original transaction content yeah

Yeah, I think that's, yeah. So hopefully that solves the problem. I don't know if there was still so much of a problem, perhaps in, I mean, after all, if we think back in the first place, the problem became such a topic because Mount Goggs claimed that's how they lost all their money. Of course, now we kind of doubt this is really what happened, although we still don't know. so if they didn't actually lose some money that way perhaps this was never such a big problem as it was it seemed like for a short time yeah there's also a change in the transaction fees so right now the kind of default transaction fee was 0.01 milly bitcoin oh no it was 0.1 millie bitcoin which is about the five cents I guess and now it was reduced.

reduced to a tenth of that, so 0.5 US cent at the current rate. And what this means is I think Bitcoin nodes would have refused to relay some of the transaction if they're below that, or you know, you can't even execute them with a lot of wallets. So now you can. I don't know what that will mean in reality because, of course, the miners could still say we don't include it in the block. So as far as I know, they still haven't really.

figured out how to design the optimal way of establishing transaction costs or its transaction fees. So I don't know if this solves it. But of course, one issue that it addresses is that Bitcoin transaction that actually not become that cheap. You know, if you think of nine cents that they were a few months ago when the Bitcoin price was really high. it really isn't that little. Yeah, for microtransactions. There's small transactions, right? I mean, let's say you pay a dollar and it's 10% transaction fee.

Well, you know, that that's, you know, that kind of doesn't live up to the promise of cheap transactions. And so this brings it to about five cents at the current price. Is that? No, no, 0.5 cents. Oh. Oh, okay. Yeah. So if Bitcoin transactions with this new transaction fee of 0.01 milib Bitcoin are going to be included in the blocks by the miners in general, hopefully they will.

Then this will make Bitcoin transaction really cheap. I mean, less than a cent. At the current rate, of course, if the Bitcoin price goes up by a factor of 10, then it would not be as cheap anymore, but still five cents. reasonable, sort of reasonable. So this is something we talked about a few weeks ago, I think, where it would be desirable that the transaction fees would be fixed or algorithmically calculated based on what, I don't know, but it seems kind of flawed that a few people have control over what transaction fees should be,

and that it has to be a manual hard-coded thing, right? Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, it should be some sort of market mechanism where it's like supply and demand and perhaps a priority thing where you say, I care more about my transaction, so I pay more and I'm sure that it's included the first block and I have to wait.

But I guess how to implement that in reality isn't so trivial. So I think that is the goal where they want to go in the medium term but they still haven't done it with this with this upgrade also maybe one thing I'd like to mention so this is now version

0.9 I just checked when was 0.8 and it was more than a year ago it was in 19th of February 2013 so it's been quite a while yeah overall there's been a lot of uh...

I don't know if the next version will be version 1.0. One is version 1.0, yeah. Or if this can be 0.10, could also be. Yeah, I guess so. But, yeah, I guess, I mean, in terms of versioning,

you've got, when you write software, there's different ways of versioning. So having a version 1.1.0 doesn't really mean anything. Yeah, it's true. If this is the way they chose to do versions. But it is still, you know, right now, if you download,

But if you have to Bitcoin QT, or I guess Bitcoin core client now, if you go like, if you click on the about, about the client, it says, you know, this is experimental software. So we use that at your own risk. And it's kind of ironic if you think of now Bitcoin having many millions of dollars of value, billions of dollars of value. And it's still like, oh, this is experimental software. So, of course, it's, it is, I think, an important milestone. When you say, okay, we've passed that, we are there. There's the first stable version. We stand behind that.

This is secure. I think this will be an important moment. Yeah. When it comes out of that experimental software. Exactly. Yeah. It becomes something that you can, I suppose, trust. Now, there's another interesting.

update I was reading about it's called coin control okay so this is a new feature that allows advanced users to manually control coin selection so every time you receive coins and you unspent output

gets added to the wallet right so what happens is say you have to transfer for one bit your wallet software will choose what inputs amount to a little bit more than one Bitcoin. It'll make a transaction for one Bitcoin to the address you're sending it to and then grab whatever's rest, left, the change, and set back to you. So these outputs are combined as necessary for the outgoing payments.

So normally this process happens automatically and outside the user's control, but with, coin control, the user can now select which unspent outputs to be used as input for a transaction. Yeah. And also makes it possible to control which address change will go to. So it sounds like you can have manual control over where your change goes. But this seems like it would be a wallet implementation rather than a protocol level thing. No, it's a wallet implementation. Yeah.

So this is for rich clients. for the core client for the core client yeah but not in this version in the 0.9 oh that's interesting yeah I think this is of course especially important if you talk about privacy so if you want to have well so if you of course a change addresses can be a privacy so you know or So let's say you got several different transaction paid into your wallet, then which ones will be used? So let's say you want to send your friend some money, then which balances will be used as inputs to that transaction will, of course, tell him some things about how many bitcoins you have, where you got them from, et cetera. So if you can selectively choose, okay, I want this and this and this, then. you could, at least in theory,

enhance your privacy. Now, the problem, I guess, is not user-friendly, right? So if you have to think of, like, so which one where you maybe have to go blockchain and info, et cetera. So I don't know how... I'm looking at some screenshots here.

It tells you, like, you select the addresses that you want to use as inputs. So you have kind of like the list view. It'll show you the transactions

I think yeah it seems like it looks like transaction addresses so you look at the transactions you select the transactions you want to use as

as inputs and then I suppose there's another place where you can set the change address yeah I mean I guess the point is that

this is a good thing is a desirable thing in a sense but it's not really ideal if people have to do this manually. No, it's an advantage. Yeah, exactly. But ideal would be if wallets actually did have some kind of intelligence in which unspent outputs they use as inputs.

So I think Mike Kern was writing about this at some points that, you know, this will be important in that wallets are smarter in what, what they use as inputs so privacy can be more protected. But yeah, I think it will be of course it's a big topic that we've talked about, numerous science, I'm sure

we'll come back to the whole question of how can you maintain privacy. There's some other interesting information about this update. The Windows version is now a 64-bit

client, so 64-bit Windows users can benefit full 64-bits. It's interesting, though, I just updated. Yeah, me too.

And it's still Bitcoin QT on the Mac. The name of the software is still Bitcoin QT, although the welcome stream is Bitcoin Core. Yeah. I noticed. I noticed it, yeah.

I don't know. I forgot about it. I think it's probably just because when you when you copy it to your apps directory it will rewrite the old version but if they change the name you would keep both. Yeah but but yeah so

is there something else you want to cover regarding the upgrade? No I think we pretty much covered the important parts of it for me the most important aspect of this update is the PAN protocol stuff like I said this is

highly it makes your it's highly important but it really makes transactions sort of I say I mean

it makes it makes it so that transactions are near the way transactions work I'm sorry it's late it makes it so that transactions happen in such a way that it's similar to how they happen now

with payment systems, right? So you can now include invoice numbers. You have a new layer of trust, which is who you're paying with the SSL certificate and such. So I think we're moving in the right direction. The next question is, how will payment processors and wallets implement this in such a way that it's easy for Bitcoin users to use? Yeah, that's right.

I think that that's going to be the main thing. It's like how this is going to be implemented. But you're absolutely right. I think there's at least the potential in there that it will bring a really big improvement in terms of usability. But you're right, though, when you say that, when you say that potentially this is a way to eliminate Bitcoin addresses in a transaction, well, in effect, you do eliminate Bitcoin addresses because you just scan a, an NFC enabled device, and you get all the transaction information plus the Bitcoin address that you're sending it to, and then the wallet implementation can then decide or not to show the

merchant's address or just so the URL or their name. Yeah, so the important thing is, of course, if you look at the blockchain, the transaction is going to look the same. but as a user you may not have to see the Bitcoin address at all and that's a good thing I think yeah well I think that's all we have to cover for the 0.9 update unless you had anything else you want to add no that's that's cool let's move on all right cool so the next story we've got we want to talk about is the sort of again China Stories coming out of China that are affecting the Bitcoin price.

So this week, the micro-blogging site, Sina Weibo, which is, I guess, sort of like a tumbler in China, falsely reported that the People's Bank of China was going to enact a ban of Bitcoin on April 15th. So Sina Weibo has a live financial news feed and the ASU to state. which has now been retracted, indicating that China's central bank, the People's Bank of China, would move to halt Bitcoin transactions effective April 15th. So the statement read, it is rumored that on March 18th, the People's Bank of China has issued a statement calling for all Bitcoin transactions to be halted by April 15th. As of today, the People's Bank of China has not confirmed or an united statement. So the statement was later retracted and the sites then clarified by saying that this, well, this statement was not true. So the price kind of went down from there. We saw the price fall of about 2%.

And so this is not, why are we talking? Is that nothing in Bitcoin terms, no? Well, it's nothing in Bitcoin terms, but I guess what's interesting is that it hasn't really readjusted back since then. So we saw the price go down on March 21st when this statement was issued on Sinawebo, but it hasn't gone back up again. So if you want to buy, I guess it's a good opportunity for you to buy some Bitcoins at a low price. But to me, I guess my thoughts on this is that, I mean, at any point, anybody can just kind of give false information and falsely report some information that can have a negative impact on the Bitcoin price and make it fluctuate more or less significantly. So it just seems kind of dangerous to me that this is still kind of happening.

Yeah, I mean, that's, I guess that's, you know, that's, it's just normal. I think that's the case in any market. But, yeah, hopefully that will decrease over time as Bitcoin becomes larger, more liquid, et cetera. Yeah, I think we have seen this limbo that we've had of China, where it wasn't really clear. Is this going anywhere? Is our Bitcoin exchange is legal? Are they not? Does Bitcoin have a future in China?

And, of course, this. This new story is once again sort of called into question even if it turned out to be wrong. But what we also saw last week was that there was an investment of $10 million in OKCoyn. And 10 million dollars, that's of course one of the largest investments that they have been in any Bitcoin company. So, you know, that's, I guess, a sign at least that the investors that are doing that. And it's a Chinese VC firm called Cheyuan. I'm not sure how you pronounce that. And some American VC is like Tim and Adam Draper.

So Adam Draper is the one who does boost VC, which is the kind of Bitcoin-focused accelerator in Silicon Valley. So they also invested. So at least it seems like they are believing that Bitcoin does have a future in China. Yeah. And I mean, just, you know, Bobby Lee has always said that Bitcoin in China. is fine. Again, like he was on Bloomberg this week saying that, that, you know, Bitcoin exchanges still have, just kind of repeating what he's been saying since the beginning, right,

that Bitcoin exchanges still have a right to operate in China, that the central bank simply issued guidances in December, contrary to what people were thinking that it was actually banned. So there's been a lot of news come out of China that I think has been misinterpreted by the West. Now, this was not even news. This was just, you know, some false reporting or some misinterpreted of some sort of statement. But one thing that somebody pointed out, so Eric Gou, the co-founder of the Bit Angels Club, they're an incubator, he says that the fact that the Chinese Central Bank

swiftly came out to working, sorry, the fact that the Chinese Central Bank swiftly came out, came off working hours to dismiss the rumor, indicated that it had plans to shut down Bitcoin exchange at any time soon, Well, goes to show that the China Central Bank doesn't plan on banning Bitcoin. Okay. Well, I guess that's good. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, is there something else you want to discuss regarding this story? Well, just one thing, I suppose, which isn't really related to this, but it's kind of related to China. Well, it is, in fact, related to China. On March 14th, so not this week, but last week, the Chinese Central Bank made an announcement by which it demanded that payments that were made by scanning QR codes be halted. And so this wasn't really a response to Bitcoin in any way, but a response to, so some companies in China,

Tencent, who are behind a QQ Messenger and a whole bunch of other services and also Alibaba group, a very large e-commerce holding group. Those companies have been working on payment systems. And those payment systems largely use QR code, I guess,

to initiate transactions. And the Chinese government and Chinese Central Bank are not really looking to ban them, but for the moment, I guess, it's being speculated that they're simply trying to see what security implementations these payment systems will have. And so in a move to slow down and halt these new payment systems, proprietary payment systems, they've halted any kind of payments being made by QR code. So in the short term, it can have some adverse effects on Bitcoin payments in China.

But no, no, but Bitcoin payments in China are illegal anyway. There are no Bitcoin payments in China. So this is really kind of irrelevant. Right. Yeah, I mean, I guess if they came back to it and at some point said, okay, now Bitcoin payments are illegal, but I don't think that's very likely. in the next, I don't know, two years or something. I guess then it would become an issue because then you'd have to find some work around Kiorcos.

But I think for the time being, this is not particularly. Because I guess there was some confusion what the legality of Bitcoin exchanges in China was concerned because they said they're illegal, but then they also told payment process is not to work with them and it was very confusing but they were very clear that bitcoin payments are not allowed so i think yeah yeah but yeah this is a strange story like again bobby the sponsor that uh this you know since bitcoin payments are not being made available in china right now it probably doesn't affect bitcoin anyway but if they already be made available uh down the road not having QR codes is probably not a big deal because

in any case, we're probably using some other sorts technology as QR codes become kind of passe and NFC takes over or whatever Bluetooth kind of technology takes over. Yeah, I mean, I agree. It's definitely not something to worry about now. If the Chinese should say, okay, if Bitcoin payments are okay,

then one can worry about it, but there's no signs of that happening. Yeah, wow. Okay. Yeah, let's say about that. It kind of ties to that. Maybe one thing I want to very briefly cover, because we mentioned OK, coin, raised $10 million. Also, story leaked last week that BitStamp had raised $10 million last year. So this happened months ago. It's not quite clear when, but apparently it was following some trip at Lake Tahoe. and the investment was made by a Pantera Capital.

I think we've mentioned Pantera Capital before, but they're kind of a San Francisco-based hedge fund that is focused on Bitcoin. And they're owned by the hedge fund called Fortress Investment Group. And this is a very large fund. We've talked about them before as well, I think. because one of their sort of C level executives

was one of the first Wall Street people to say like I believe in Bitcoin and he declared that he himself put in a lot of money into Bitcoin and they are also the ones who invested in this

company called Exapel and we talked about last week. So they insured Bitcoin storage. So they're kind of making a big Bitcoin bet. And apparently last year they organized this trip to Lake Hall where there was a whole bunch of Bitcoin CEOs. And after that they made the, including the CEO of BitSamp. And after that, they made this investment.

So I guess what we can take away from this, my view, is that when we think back to these prediction episode we did at the beginning of the year, we talked about the Fiat bottleneck and the kind of difficulty of transitioning between currency, like Fiat currencies like US all year and Bitcoin. And of course, where there's friction, there's also opportunity. And I think we're seeing that with these investments, that there's definitely a very big opportunity in the exchange space and a huge need, of course, because if we see the constant disasters we're seeing with exchanges.

What's really needed is that they're like high-powered quality exchanges with experience people and as security staff who actually know something about security. Yeah. No, I agree that there's a, I think that's an opportunity for investors to invest in serious people looking to build serious exchanges with, like you say, real services and real security because this is definitely lacking. I mean, I think that we need also to build more confidence in the ecosystem so that new people coming in will have some sound choices that they can look towards

to buy and sell their big points. And also bringing innovation because for now, I mean, exchanges are pretty much all doing the same thing. I don't think that's the answer. Yeah, it's an interesting conversation. And I think it's one that comes up a lot. And a lot of people talk about like, you know, multi-signature wallets or some sort of decentralized exchange, et cetera. But, you know, it really, running exchange is very simple. And I think what's absolutely needed is just have companies that are.

well funded and that are reliable and experience and they're not scams. And I think at the moment this is perhaps the biggest vulnerability. I think it is by far the biggest vulnerability at this moment is that there's just an extreme problem in that we don't have that. And if you think back to the whole Mount Cox story, BitSamps is the largest exchange now with 34 percent and that is exactly because Mount Cox collapsed. And if we have another large exchange, just BTCE, I don't know exactly if it's like second or third or something. But BTC has a terrible reputation.

And a lot of people expect that they may not survive very long. But nobody actually knows who owns them. you know, they are certainly not the most, I would say, careful when it comes to doing KIC all those things. So I think there's a very high chance they'll get shut down by law enforcement or perhaps they will just run away with the money, which of course would be terrible. So it's extremely needed that they're responsible exchanges that are high performance, secure, reliable, trustworthy. Yeah, and hey, I mean, I think that exchanges also need to innovate. You know, like you say, running an exchange at the core is something that's very simple, you know, at the very basic of what an exchange is. But I think that exchanges can also innovate by bringing new kind of services to customers.

So by new services, I mean new ways of bringing in their money, you know. Yeah, like Coinbase, for instance, do this kind of thing with the credit card where, you know, you can buy Bitcoins with a credit card, but then it's backed by an account. like BTCE now, which is offering withdrawals through buy credit card also. So this is a new kind of service. But also, for instance, have, you know, like this NeoB in Cyprus, where you can actually have real money, having it be a real bank account and being able to buy Bitcoin. So we need exchanges to be more than exchanges. We need them to be platforms.

we need them to be currency exchange platforms rather than just Bitcoin exchanges. I think that they need to look at themselves as more than just the Bitcoin exchanges and be currency exchange value, have a currency exchange value proposition that goes beyond that. Honestly, I don't think I agree with you.

I think what's needed is just have large performance, you know, like good exchanges. afterwards you can build on top of it right i totally agree with you we need the other thing too we need to have like smooth waste to buy bitcoin etc and coinbase doing great job at that but coinbase is not in exchange right so i think you just need to have these super liquid high performance exchanges that work for you know whether it's like uh financial institutions or whether it's companies like Coinbase that utilize that. And that's just super neat.

And there's a need that there's a few of them that work really well. Because right now it just isn't the case. And then I think what we also need is what you're talking about, is the innovation in terms of making it convenient, et cetera. But I don't think that necessarily is to come from the same people. I think it's probably better if something, some company like BitStamp, they just focus on doing a good experience.

change or crock and know those people that's interesting that kind of comes back to what we're talking about last week with uh with jonathan or an exchange essentially is just just a platform for moving uh for moving bitcoin and and changing it to cash um or fiat rather and then you have different layers of services but the exchange the exchange kind of just becomes an API for or these other layers of service. That's exactly what an exchange is. Yeah, absolutely. I think they exchange primarily,

at least these high performance exchanges, they need to have APIs. And they really, what they also are, they're a tool to, you know, to provide liquidity and to allow for kind of instant, you know, if you look at something like BitPay, you know, if you want to have that you can have a fixed price and as a merchant, you can accept Bitcoin

without having to worry about the volatility, utility, et cetera. You can only do that if you can do instant trading, you need liquidity for that. So they need these liquid exchanges to have APIs, et cetera. So I think exchange primarily is a service provider of liquidity, you know, kind of allows to get rid of the risk, the currency risk, fast, cheap, secure, and at the high volume. And that's complex enough. Yeah, that's interesting. I never really thought that way until now. And then I guess was afterwards, which was also very needed. I think, you know, if you talk about exchange going beyond what will be more important,

I think, than making it convenient because other people can do that if they have an open API especially. But what's also needed is that derivatives. I think that will be, I know a variety of exchanges are certainly working on that. I think Jaron of Coinsett, I think they're also working on that. we talk with him at inside Bitcoin's conference. Can you elaborate

a bit on what exactly Bitcoin derivatives are for somebody who's not very fluent in financial instruments such as myself? Yeah,

so the derivative would be like, let's say you need to buy something a month from now for 10 bitcoins and you want to lock

in, you know, you want to or let Let's play like this. Let's say you will receive 10 Bitcoins a month from now and you don't want to have the currency risk. So you could sell those Bitcoins basically right now or you could sell a contract, someone else that will give you the right to sell the 10 Bitcoins a month from now at a certain price. So now I don't have the currency risk anymore.

Someone else assumes it. So it locks me in to a certain price. So it's, it's really a way to, I guess there's two sides. It can be a way to hedge risk, so to hedge currency risk, or it can be a way to speculate. You know, so you would have, you could, you know, you could take, you could leverage. So if I say, I'm going to buy. So let's say maybe we run through a simple example. So if you have the Bitcoin price right now is, well,

It's like $600 something, $550. $560. Yeah. So I could say, if you, so another thing would be an option. So I could say I buy an option for $40. That gives me the right in two months to buy Bitcoins at $700.

So what would that mean? It means that if the Bitcoin price is less than $700, then my option is worthless. So it will just disappear and the $40 are lost. But now if the Bitcoin price goes to $900, then I can buy those Bitcoins for $700 and immediately sell them for $900. So now I've made $200 profit there. and I've only invested $40, right? Okay.

So you have it. This doesn't exist yet. I don't think so. I think, well, I, no, I think there are some people who are doing that. But it doesn't exist on the large exchanges and it doesn't exist in, you know, in kind of a significant amount. But if you talk about. Why is that? Is that because there's not.

exchanges don't have the liquidity to do that? Could also be because of regulations. Oh, okay. I think you might have to have different regulations to do this kind of thing. I'm not exactly sure. Yeah.

But it's definitely something different people are working on. And it will probably be changing soon. Okay. But if you talk about financial institutions moving into Bitcoin, this is something that is a huge need for. And whoever provides this kind of thing, you know, there's a very big business. And so is this something that the – so if we come back to what we were saying a while ago, is this something that the exchanges should be offering or that somebody with API access to the exchange is offering another layer of services on top of that should be offering?

I think that's something that exchanges should be offering because that's something that would be traded as well. You'd be trading those, they're like contracts that would be traded. And so who takes the risk? Is it the exchange or is it the people that are trading? No, so there would be two parties, right? So if you talk about that contract from before, you could be buying the contract, but somebody has to be selling it to you. So there would be someone else needs to create a contact and sell it to you. So there will be a marketplace for those kind of things.

Okay, so you have a derivatives marketplace. Yeah, exactly. So the exchange has taken on your risk. They just facilitate the exchange of this, well, the sale of this contract between two parties. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I see. Huh, okay. Yeah, so then the exchange is like, you know, like what we're saying, just really becomes a platform at a marketplace.

And they deal with the liquidity of cash, well, not cash, but the cash currency. they hold the Bitcoins and then they just make their money on fees but then they offer all these services through API access. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Huh. But I mean, if you talk about Bitcoin becoming very big, then you'll have enormous volumes on these exchanges.

You know, just think of something like BitPay. Yeah. You know, they will generate enormous transaction volumes and then if you have maybe hedge funds or financial institutions getting into that and doing like trading

in a high volume you will have you have gigantic volumes so these exchanges you know it can be an extremely lucrative business and it's also you have network effects so you would want to

like an exchange that's not liquid if you talk about the options for example of the derivatives I mean derivatives it gets much more specialize you know you will have lots of different derivatives on Bitcoin. It's not just Bitcoin dollar. So there is a big network effect there.

If you have a small exchange that's not liquid, it's not worth very much because you won't be able to do any of those things. So there is kind of a first mover thing. So whoever does that and does it at a high, at that big scale will have a hugely more valuable thing than others. Yeah, and whoever, build that infrastructure, once that infrastructure is built, it scales pretty well. No, of course.

Would it not? I mean, your costs don't really go up that much because. Absolutely right. It scales extremely well, yeah. Well, this is something we can come back to. Yeah, I mean, I think this is why there's so much interest as well in this exchange space, because this is one of the crucial pieces of infrastructure for everything. I mean, you know, if you talk about payment processes, all those things,

depend on exchanges. So it's extremely important. So maybe we could talk about K&C minor, opening up script mining for pre-orders. Yeah, so I looked into this a bit. I've looked into Lycan mining a few times. Yeah, we've talked about quite a few times now. Yeah, we have, yeah, yeah. So should we buy one of these?

I don't know. I'll tell you, if I had $10,000 right now, should I buy one of these, Brian? Let's let's let's I mean I don't know of course you choice I personally wouldn't Um yeah so maybe you can briefly on through so K&C minor of course you know the Bitcoin mining company I don't know if they're the biggest but one of them they actually the one company or one of the few companies that have a reputation that they actually ship their products don't just take your money.

Yeah. So now this is going to sell for $10,000 and he does 100 mega hash per second. Now in script. In script terms, that's pretty good. That's pretty good. So I was reading up on that. I think if you build, so usually script today is mine with GPUs, so graphic cards. And I was reading, I think.

I once looked into this. So you could, if you get sort of a normal graphic card, you could do, if I remember correctly, something like a thousand kilo hashes, and it costs you maybe $700.

It may be somewhat off in those numbers. But of course, this is now a hundred times as strong. Right. And it's a lot. Perhaps more efficient also. They don't say

anything about the power consumption. So I don't know, but presumably, I would think so. Yeah. Which makes it hard. I saw that. The website where you can get when you can work in pre-order doesn't say much other than just the fact that has 100 mega-hashes. And even that's kind of hard to find. And, um, they, I mean, they're a hundred mega-hash.

I'm sorry? Yeah. So the 100 mega-hash is not actually that, they don't know if it's going to. be that. That's just sort of their minimum, but it may be more. Okay. Because they haven't actually built this thing yet as far as I know. So they're just saying, okay, you can give us your money. We'll give you these sometime this summer or fall. They will have at least 100 mega hashes and some unknown power consumption. So it's of course very risky because you don't know what you're getting, you don't know when you're getting it.

You probably will get it, but if you talk about there's some other companies selling Lycone miners that don't have any track record, and in that case, maybe you don't even know if you're getting anything. Now, this is interesting because it's the first light coin mining rig commercially built like coin mining rig. I mean, for now, people have you just using GPUs and graphic cards. So the question is, like, is there's another, there's another company. that also took pre-orders in January.

Oh. I mean, yeah, they haven't shipped, but I think they're supposed to sometime this summer. Although, I have to say, I looked into the company, and it was like, I don't know, it didn't seem very trustworthy. Right. So this is probably the first that's going to ship, though. I don't know.

It could be the other one, yeah. So the question is, is this is the end of GPU mining? Will I be able to buy a graphics card now and actually use it for gaming? Yeah. Because I wanted to buy a graphics card for gaming, and, you know, they told me that they were all out because everybody's been buying them for script mining. Are you serious? No, I don't play games. Because I'd heard stories like that, but it was actually France as well.

That was the case. and you can't get any graphic cards anymore. Yeah, I heard this also. But, well, I mean, what's interesting, whether this is profitable or not, I guess another question, but these script miners are interesting because, of course, you can mine like a coin,

you can mine Doge coin, you can mine feather coin, you can mine all types of other alt coins, since most old coins are written in script. And it opens up the possibility for, well, this has already, already exists, I think. But for a kind of intelligent software that will automatically mine whatever is more profitable.

Yeah, yeah, that's the standard way, I think. Yeah. So it's really interesting in contrast to Bitcoin where you're always mining the same thing. There's also other Bitcoin shaw-based coins. Right, but there's a lot less, right? You have more choices. That's true. I think the reason there's less is exactly because of the mining power with Bitcoin.

So I guess the problem was, right? So if you started a new Bitcoin-based coin with Shaw-256, then, you know, some mining pool or a large operator would put their mining power on your coin and they could kind of wreck havoc in your coin. So they could maybe the difficulty, you know, if you had some sort of, of a difficult adjustment thing, it would make it extremely difficult, and they would leave your coin, and then no one would ever find a block again. So that could happen, right?

Because the difficulty, of course, determines, you know, how fast you're going to find a block, and if your hash rate varies massively, this is extremely, makes it very difficult for a coin to function. So I think the one reason why light coin was so popular, was because you couldn't mine it with the Bitcoin hardware. So they kind of avoided that thing and because it didn't scale so well. Because he had these GPU-based miners, it kind of worked better. And it's very interesting. I recently linked to this site in my newsletter.

I don't remember what it was called now. But it had a tree where you saw the different coins. that would derive from each other. And of course, Bitcoin was first, and then there was some other thing. And then there was Lykegon was actually, at least according to this tree, wasn't derived from Bitcoin, but from them other thing that was derived from Bitcoin. Oh, really? It was some currency that I never heard of.

And it was kind of, it died again after a few months in 2011. But if you looked at this, there are maybe three times as many coins based on script. as on Bitcoin or shot 26. Yeah, so this is where it becomes interesting. I think this is why

so many people have turned to script mining. It's because there's more alternatives there. There's, I guess, more, I think, more interesting coins for mining, like Doge coin,

for instance, that has kind of a, that has kind of a lot of buzz and a lot of interest. Yeah, I mean, You couldn't even mine Bitcoin's at all, right? With, uh, with, uh, with graphic cards. I mean, there's been over since the A6, which was big kind of beginning of last year,

you know, or spring of last year. So 2009, it's like back in the 80s. Exactly. Yeah. So maybe we just talk about profitability a little bit. Yeah. So, uh, I guess, yeah. Yeah.

So as far as I know, there's actually another thing we need to talk about. So with the Bitcoin Asic miners, you would have this gigantic differences, you know, between graphic cards and these ASIC miners, these huge differences. So I think as soon as you had ASICs, all the GPUs are kind of out of order of A3 quickly. And I think with the script, even though you now have A6, the difference isn't as enormous.

So it doesn't scale as well, which I think is one of the reasons why you didn't have the A6 until now was that even though you can make them perhaps more efficient, they're not orders of magnitude more efficient. Dang graphic cards. Really, graphic cards.

So, I mean, what I want to say is I guess the kind of jump that you had from GPU mining Bitcoin to ASIC mining Bitcoin was much larger than the jump you have here. Right. Okay. And then, of course, there's a smaller market size for script base versus Bitcoin was the other reason why he didn't have these before. So the financial incentive wasn't as big. But if you look at the, so I looked at the profitability of this, you know, like should show one.

buy this. So if we assume so in the last three months I just looked at light coin. So in the last three months the profit with the difficulty of light coin is roughly doubled. Now this is going to take at least three months to be delivered I think. So if you assume it doubles again, then you would mine at the current light coin price about $4,000 in the first month. So that's 40% of your cost. Now, you can assume with all that mining hardware being involved, a 100% increase in three months is probably too conservative.

It may be much higher, in which case your profit, of course, you'd be lower. Or the money you don't be lower. So it seems very, it seems, it seems on, so let's put it like this. Of course, if the Lycom price increases, then you also make more money. So perhaps if the Lycom price increases, you'll actually make you $10,000 back and more. But then the question is, wouldn't you've been better off just buying like coins? To me, it seems, it's, it's very, it's very, difficult to predict how this is going to play out.

But my bet would be I'm pretty sure this is not going to be profitable, at least not profitable in comparison with just buying light coin or perhaps other script-based coins.

So you say, would you be better off buying light coins that is assuming that the light coin price goes up? What kind of affect the release of products like this have on the like coin price. Doesn't the,

isn't the fact that people are mining them also have some sort of an effect on price? That's a good question. I don't know. I've been thinking that a lot because oftentimes we'll say, yeah, yeah, you could have just bought the bitcoins or you could just bought the light coins rather than spend your money on this mining hardware or this cloud or these cloud mining contracts. Yeah, but does. very fact that mining hardware comes out not have an effect on price as well so i mean my

thinking all this is generally i think you shouldn't i think those are kind of roughly independent may maybe not completely but i don't really see why this would have a massive effect uh i mean okay if if now people buy the heart hardware instead of buying like coins, then perhaps perhaps the like coin price would be higher if they buy like coins instead of hard. But I don't honestly, I don't think there's really a relationship there. I think those are largely independent. It's interesting to keep an eye on that one. This hardware does ship if the price of not just like coin, but other script base coins like those corner for the corner.

whatever. I mean, you can look at, you can look at the difficulty over the last few months in Lycoyne and you can look at the price and, you know, difficulty is doubled. The price is down. Right. Yeah. And so, you know, like since, I mean, Lycone was a $50 once, no. And it's now, what is it now?

Less than $20. It's like $10 now. Yeah. What's it? $15. Yeah. I bought them when they were about 30 and now they're at... Half the price.

Yeah. But if you look at the difficulty, you know, this has been a dramatic increase. So, yeah, I mean, I'm very skeptical of the,

you know, of how much sense it makes for people to buy this hardware. I personally, wouldn't. Yeah, I see what you mean, but I think for, um, it might be fun, I guess. Yeah, I'll just say that. I mean, I think when I, when I first started reading about Bitcoin and stuff, the first thing that I naturally started going to, reading about was was mining. Like, I spent about a week, like on mining calculators,

although I knew I wouldn't buy mining hardware because there's just too expensive at the time and not worth it. I was drawn towards mining because it seemed fun to do this thing with your computer that would generate money. I think for a lot of people that has a lot to do with it. I think there's also a lot of people that have false hopes in thinking that. Yeah. I think I've talked with a lot of people, of course, about, you know, Bitcoin and mining and all those things. And one thing I've observed very often, which I find kind of puzzled. but a lot of people seem to think,

so they get into this and they seem to think, okay, so I see Bitcoin and this gains such tremendous amount in value. And buying Bitcoin is kind of too late now. You know, this is too obvious. And I don't want to spend money to buy Bitcoins. But maybe mining is the answer. Maybe mining is some sort of, you know, because I guess, I don't know,

there seems to be something psychological that people, that draws people a lot to mining. And I mean, it's that feeling of working for your money, Brian. I guess, I guess it's also the idea, like you get this machine

and then it, like, prints money for you. It, like, mines money for you, you know, it's, like, attractive, no. But I think from my understanding, this may be somewhat wrong, But for most of the time, I think, of his Bitcoin history, mining was not profitable. Like, I think like maybe all of this consistency.

Now, of course, if you mined it, you know, let's say if it took you $5 to mine a Bitcoin when it was worth $3 and you mine Bitcoins, well, even if it wasn't profitable as opposed to just buying them, it was still hugely profitable if you compare, you know, the increase we've had since then. But I, from my understanding, I haven't looked into this with detail, but I think this was always kind of the case that people, you know, that the competition was so high that it was actually cheap

it's just buy the coins. Right. But where is mining going then? If mining is not profitable, I mean, people are still doing it, but let's assume that people will realize that mining is no longer profitable. I mean, we need miners. But I guess maybe it's profitable some people, right? So maybe the people who got it first and the people who are most cheapest electricity, etc.

And then the advantage, of course, is also that the difficulty can decrease too. So if people ended up turning off their hardware, then you might have a decrease in difficulty and should hopefully be okay. I didn't know that difficulty could decrease. Yeah, of course. Oh. I thought it was only, I thought it could only increase. Yeah. The problem is only if the hash rate decreases too quickly because it will take maybe a few blocks.

there's some sort of schedule like every X blocks it looks at you know and it may decrease the difficulty but then if the hash rate decreases very quickly and the difficulty only increases later you might have this gap where the hash rate is really low but the difficulty is still really high and just no block gets mined or it takes two weeks for block to get mined so some of the alt-cons have had this problem which was kind of collapsed them okay and and what's i guess was perhaps uh worth note mentioning here is that other coins have, if you look back at the Bitcoin white paper, it says in there like one CPU, one vote.

I guess that was the original idea that, you know, anybody could use their computer to mine, and so it would be this democratic, decentralized mining network. And of course, that was a complete failure. And Lightcoin had that aspect. as well because I guess they saw that Bitcoin I wonder if that was the reason

but I guess so Lycairn, there was the idea that this was going to be more democratic you know, more distributed and it seems like this may also be approaching its end and now there's other coins

that are using some other algorithms that are trying to do the same thing again you know so I know there's something called word coin which is sort of popular. I don't know exactly how it works. Also, we were talking about Ethereum earlier.

Ethereum, they also were evaluating different mining algorithms, but the idea very much was also that it would be CPU minable. All right, should we move on to our next topic, or last topic, I guess? Yeah, let's see that.

Save the best for last. We all know this is the best. It's a brief update on what's been happening with Melkawks. I didn't want to cover this at the beginning of the show because it's just been so long and dreadful to talk about Mount Cox every time. But we'll keep it short this time because not a lot's happened, but we just kind of want to come back to it occasionally to give people an update when there's not much happening.

So Mount Cox found, so Mount Cox was out to $850,000. thousand bitcoins. Mount Cox has apparently found 200,000 of those bitcoins buried away in an old wallet that had not been used since June 2011. So on March 7th, they apparently found, and I'm using air quotes here, as they found 200,000 Bitcoin. In Mark Kerpelli's shoes.

Yeah, like, oh, what's this? Oh, a wallet. Who would have a fuck there? Who to fuck? So they found these Bitcoin in an old format wallet. And I love how these press releases always use these terms to try to kind of, you know, they use these terms like old format wallet. Why don't you just come out and give us the real story?

You don't have to like sugarcoat the technical details because people understand them. You know, you can tell us what this means when you're talking about an old format wallet. you can tell us, you know, whatever it means. So Mount Cox immediately reported the findings to its councils. On March 8th, there was a hearing that was held. Then the findings were reported to the court because Mount Cox is in a civil rehabilitation procedure right now. And on the 14th to 15th of March,

those big horns were moved to cold wallets. So, well, I mean, I'm hoping that now there are competent security people on the case and working with Mount Cox to make sure that not like the rest of their money doesn't get stolen. That seems quite unlikely to me. That seems quite unlikely. So we could just assume that these 200,000 bitcoins are going to get stolen next month. Anyway, on March 20th, they issued a press release on their website. explaining that they had found this money and

well basically just kind of going through what I just explained here and so this brings the total amount of bitcoins being held by MacGox to 200,000 to uh, 202,000 Bitcoins rather, sorry, so 2002,000

Bitcoins, that's with the 2,000 Bitcoin that they still had before. So at current prices, that means, uh, what, you get a calculator in here by, right? about a hundred million a bit more yeah so the current prices is that's $560 of course the implication would be this would be about a quarter maybe a bit less of the customer funds so if that turns out to be really the case I mean I think any anything coming out of Mount gox has to be taken with a grain of salt but if that really did turn out to be the case and if we kind of disregard the whole

fiat U.S. dollar gaps that there were as well this would be about 23, 24%. So, I don't know, perhaps that means people will actually get back 23% of their bitcoins.

It is we hope that they'll get back something. That's a fat chance. I think that's a fat chance. Yeah. Now, there's, Also some other kind of interesting. So I don't know what to think about this. There's been some speculation on Reddit as to whether this is true or not.

And also some kind of some people looking at these 200,000 Bitcoins and saying that the same 180,000 bitcoins that are then moving through the blockchain, not really sure what the link is there. So when they say that they found them where they, where they pull their. them the whole time. Nobody really knows. The communication's been so spurs and unclear that I guess we have to leave it up the hackers to give us the real information. Now, there's an interesting kind of development is that now Bitcoin are allowing users to log in and check their balances.

So when you go to Mountgox.com now, you have this page, which you can log into with your login info and you get their balance. in Bitcoin and dollars. So I think to me, this is a response to the information that was leaked. So it's great for customers to be able to see that they've got their, that their, what their Bitcoin balances are. But as Aaron G, the protester who went to Japan and protested in front of Mount Gox's office says,

hackers already liberated the Mount Gox databases. I was able to confirm my balance there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I guess we'll see. I think we still haven't really heard the whole story here.

And hopefully we will at some point. So the last thing we want to cover isn't really a new story. It's just something that we kind of want to cover because we think it's an interesting projects and kind of we support it. So this week in Paris there was the Paris Bitcoin meetup at the Paymium offices. And so their meetup is a startups meetup. So people come and pitch startups or pitch ideas. And one of the pitches, and I wasn't there, I just heard about it afterwards, was Bitcoin symbol.org. So if you go to Bitcoin symbol.org, you'll see what I'm talking about.

Their pitches, Bitcoin deserves the right symbol. So currently, Bitcoin does have a symbol, I guess you could call it, and that is the Bitcoin B that we're so used to seeing. So it's kind of like a B with two bars across it like a US dollar. Now, this works because it's very recognizable and you associate those two bars to the dollar sign and money and such. The problem is that this is a logo, and it's not actually a symbol, because, well, it's a graphical logo. It doesn't actually exist in terms of typeface.

So you can't currently use a regular font like Ariel or Times New Roman or any type of font and use this character. So this has been a real problem with Bitcoin, and so people have been using other symbols that kind of, that resemble the Bitcoin logo. So there is the Thai bot, for instance, and the Thai bot is a B with one bar going down vertically through the B. And this works, and people have been using it in text online when they can't use the Bitcoin logo. But it confuses, again, because we're using a symbol that's used for something else,

which is the Thai bot. And so what these people propose is a new symbol, which is a B with a horizontal line through the bottom part of the B. And the reason why they propose this character, and it's been already used to represent Bitcoin, some people are already using it as opposed to the Bitcoin symbol.

The reason why they propose this character is that it is a character that exists in typography, So in most fonts and typefaces, it actually exists. You can type it with your keyboard using special codes or copy and pasting it from the internet or whatever. Much like the dollar symbol or the Euro symbol, you can use it in Times New Roman and serif font. You can use it with Ariel or Helvetica, which is sans serif fonts. And you'll have a version of it in that font phase. And one interesting thing about the symbol is that it's not actually used currently by any language.

So from what they explain here on the website, it was meant to be a visual representation of the German double S sign. So if you ever seen German writing, you notice that there's sort of a kind of a weird bee. Sorry, not to offend you, Brian, but this is kind of like weird B thing. It's just that we don't use that. You just use two Ss. But yeah, it's a... Okay. Yeah, it looks like a B-Rivers kind of goes to the bottom.

Yeah. And so this character that's being proposed as a candidate's a Bitcoin logo isn't really used. It's in most typefaces. It exists in most fonts. but it's not really used by anything, so let's take it and use it for ourselves. And so we've looked at this, Brian and I, and we support this project,

and we support the use of this logo or this symbol for Bitcoin, and we think that it should be generally adopted. And so we're going to start using it from now on. In fact, we're working on our new cover design, and most likely it will be included in there. and we'll be using it from now on and our writings and presentations and whatever we're using the Bitcoin symbol.

And so we encourage you to do the same. So if you have, if you're involved with Bitcoin and you have a blog, for instance, we encourage you to start using this symbol. If you've got a company and a company logo in which you have the Bitcoin symbol, we encourage you to use a symbol also.

And we also encourage you to encourage others do the same so that we can all be on the same page here and all be using the same symbol that's recognizable. If you have a business and you accept Bitcoin and you're using the old symbol, we also encourage you to look on this site. So Bitcoin Symbol.org, and they have some suggestions as to some artwork that you can use to show that you accept Bitcoin in your, in your brick and mortar business or online business. So they've got some banners here. it looks quite nice yeah yeah i'd just say that i think they need some design work uh some of these are

a little wow it's open to your interpretation so there's not like a generally accepted i guess the next step now is to make some real kind of branding signage that everybody can use sort of like we accept visa that's you know generally recognize and globally identifiable We can make these stickers that just can stick anywhere we want. Yeah, so cool project. Yeah, we encourage everybody to Yeah, encourage everybody to head over there

and check it out and start using the new Bitcoin symbol. Okay, well, thanks very much for listening this week. If you want to support us, then you can tip us, so you can go to episode. Bitcoin.com slash tips. You can also

subscribe to a newsletter at EpicenterBitcoin.com slash newsletter going out every Friday. And you can write a review that would also be appreciated. So you can do that on iTunes especially or Stitcher. And we'll look forward to see you in here next week.

Yeah. And also, please follow us on Twitter. We're at Epicenter Bitcoin. Sorry, Twitter.com slash Epistenter BTC. It is really late. We've been rambling on. Yeah, let's stress us up. I don't think anymore.

So let's just say good night and good, I mean, you're not listening to us at nice necessarily, but thank you again for listening and we will talk to you next week. We're going to go to sleep. All right. Goodbye. Bye-bye.