Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Dogecoin Sleds to the Olympics

Episode Date: February 2, 2014

Topics covered in this episode: The arrest of Charlie Shrem – BitInstant CEO and ex-Vice Chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation The guy who’s taking on the US government to get his Silk Road coins back New York hearings on bitcoin regulation The latest bitcoin regulation news in France BTC China accepting bank deposits again Dogecoin’s olympic quest A brief Ethereum update This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/005

Hi there, today's February 2nd, 2014, and this is Episode 5. Doge coins, let's do the Olympics. On today's show, we're talking about the rest of Charlie Shrem, bid instant CEO and ex-vice chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation. We're also talking about the guy who's taking on the U.S. government to get his silk road coins back. We're talking about New York hearings on Bitcoin regulation, and the latest Bitcoin regulation used from France. We're talking about PTC China

That is once again accepting bank deposits We're talking about Dogecoin's Olympic quest And giving a brief update on Ethereum If you like the work we're doing And you'd like to support the show Please go to epicenterbidcoin.com slash tips For our tipping address Hello and welcome to the fifth episode

of Epicenter Bitcoin Your podcast about the latest news And developments in the Bitcoin world I'm Brian Fabian Crane And I'm with Sebastian Couture And we're very excited to be back again How have you been, Sebastian? Very well and yourself

Yeah, good too I'm excited about today And I'm also excited about the conference Coming up soon Yeah, I got my tickets Excellent How's your week been? Yeah, it's good, it's good

I've been quite busy And we've had I think fifth or sixth meetup too at the Bitcoin Startup's Bowling Group. So that's that's been going very well. And we're also planning to have a good meetup just before the conference here. So I think there will be lots of people, you know, that come for the conference at here the night before.

It's going to be a huge meetup. Yeah, I think so. I mean, we already have like people. Yeah, we already have like 50, 60 people now. So I think we'll be, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a hundred people at the meetup. Yeah, and you're going to get like Bobby Lee and all those guys coming to your meetup. Wouldn't that be sweet? Yeah, I think there's a speaker dinner that night.

So I don't know how many of those people are coming. But yeah, no, I think it would be cool. Your plot is giving a talk. So he's the guy who started Room 77. Oh, cool. Yeah, so it would be good. Should we get started? Yeah.

We've got some big stories this week. We're going to be coming some very big topics, as everybody knows. Yeah, absolutely. So our first story is, and I'm sure anyone who follows Bitcoin has been hearing about the stories, the arrest of Charlie Schram. So Charlie Schram is the, I guess, CEO of Bit Instant, although Bit Instant has been not operational for. about half a year or now. And he's also the vice chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation. So this is a pretty big story.

And was the vice chairman. Yeah, he's resigned now. And so he's been arrested at the very end of last weekend's Bitcoin conference in Miami. So I think he was supposed to give another talk. And they had to find a replacement for him. And another guy named Robert M. Fayy. Giella was also arrested. So he's a 52 year old in South Florida.

And this is all related to Silk Road. So let's briefly talk about what happened here. So Silk Road, of course, was a marketplace, a kind of eBay type thing that was running on tour. So the server was hidden and you could only access it if you were using it to tour. and you could buy pretty much anything you wanted there. Well, a very focus was definitely on drugs. So a lot of drug trading was going on there.

And it ran from 2011, February 2011 until October 2013. And then it was a very famous shutdown by the FBI. They arrested the guy. And also important in this context is that they were actually, mirroring the servers. So they knew where the servers was. They knew about it for a few months before. So they had, I think they have

logs of their chats and things like that. So Fyella, what he was doing was he essentially helped Silk Road users get Bitcoins because you could only pay with Bitcoin on Silk Road. And he advertised on the Silk Road forum that you know you could buy bitcoin through him so the way he did that was if someone said okay

i want to buy you know a thousand dollars worth of bitcoin he would go to bid instant and he would issue a purchase order and then bid instant would basically give him the details on how to make the payment so it would say like go to this bank you know pay to this account number this amount and, you know, maybe some reference code or something. Then Fyela would take this, send it to his customer. That customer would go to the bank, make that payment. And then Bidinsent would deposit that payment in a Bitcoin exchange for Fyela. And then Fyela would basically buy the Bikcoins and send it to,

to the person's, I guess, address, which usually I think was a Silk Road wallet. And of course, Fyello took a fee there. So he did this from December 2011 until October 2012. Then Bid Instant shut down the cash deposits. So he stopped his service completely. And then in 2013, April 2013, he restarted. But because he couldn't do it with cash deposits anymore,

he was accepting direct wire transfers to his own bank account. Of course, that was very risky because now people, you know, he offered this to people and they saw, you know, Rob R.M. Fyella. And this was also how he was caught in the end is that the FBI, made, you know, basically wanted to buy big coins from him and he gave them his information, including bank details. And I think one security thing, security precaution he was taking is that he required, he only dealt with people who had a record of transactions on Silk Road.

But of course, the FBI had been using Silk Road for years. So they had Silk Road accounts with a history of transactions. So they were able to, you know, deal with this security precaution and they called them that way. Well, what's also important is they actually knew about him for a long time. So I think they. But yeah. So let's get to the charges. So of course what he was doing was illegal because he was essentially operating a money transmitter.

business and he wasn't licensed in any way. This file a guy. Yeah, this file a guy. And so the charges against him are on the one hand operating an unlicensed money transmitter or money services business. And then the other charge is participating in a money laundering conspiracy. Now, I quite honestly, I, I don't really see how this is money laundering because money laundering, you know,

if you look at dictionary definition, it's money laundering is basically taking money that was gained in a criminal activity and then trying to transform it into money that looks clean. So this is not what happened here. Right. Here is generally a Silkwood users that had just took their money from whatever source it was and turned it into Bitcoins. But anyway, that's one of the charges. Shrem has, so let's briefly talk about Shrem and like how he comes into play here.

So he was the CEO of Bidinsent during the time that Fyela used Bidincent to provide his service. He was also the chief compliance officer. So he was basically responsible for making sure that Bidinsent was following the laws. And one of the rules that Bidincent had to comply with was that above $3,000, they would have to do K.C. So they would have to identify their customers, know who they are, know their addresses, et cetera. So in order not to do that. I think it's just important to point out for non-U.S listeners who may not be familiar with this. KYC means know your customer.

Yeah, that's right. In terms of compliance, you have to get the minimum amount of information from your customer. So name, perhaps some identification, like a copy of their driver's license and such. Yeah, utility spill. Right. But exactly. So above 3,000 in the US, they would have to do that. So what Bidinstant did, because they didn't want to identify their customers, is that they said the limit is $1,000 per day.

So they thought, yeah, no, that's $2,000 lower than the legal limit. So they should be fine. That was their idea. Now, of course, Fyella was doing much larger amounts. So he was doing up to $20,000 a day sometimes. And the charges are that Schrem, first of all, he knew what Fyela was doing. So he knew that he was doing transaction amounts that were much larger than their limit. The churches are also that he knew that Fyella was doing.

was providing self-growth users with Bitcoin, so that he was, and because silk-growth users were using them for illegal activities, which was buying drugs, that he basically was complicit in facilitating these illegal activities. The charges are also that Shrem helped Fyela providing that service, so he gave him volume discounts for doing such large transaction amounts. he also told Fyella, for example, to use different bank branches when the deposits were made, so there wouldn't be any suspicion. And for example, the cash processor, so the company that accepted the payment before sending it to bid instant,

they thought that suspicious things were going on. They had told Shrem like, you know, what's up with that? Can you look into this? And then Shrem, first of all, he told them that he was looking into it even though he wasn't. And he told Fyela how he should change the way he does the transaction. So they wouldn't arise suspicion. He also lied to the co-founder in that way, that the co-founder was, you know, let's ban this guy. And Shrem, so Shrem, you know, they did some thing where they said, okay, we ban him.

but then they didn't really and he kept doing transactions. He also ordered some Mariano Brownies apparently on the growth. Yeah, so now the charges against him are that he was also complicit in operating a unlicensed money transmitter business, that he was participating this money laundering conspiracy. and the third one is that he willfully didn't report suspicious activity. So he has an obligation to report suspicious activities with the government so they can look into that. And he didn't do that, even though, of course, what I was doing should have been a suspicious activity. So the charges are quite broad.

Yeah, the charges are broad. then also the potential penalty is massive. I think in Shrem's case, it could be up to 30 years, and Fyella's case up to 25 years in jail. So, yes. When I hear this and when I hear about these people, particularly Charlie Shrem, who was the CEO of a company, right, vice chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation,

this was incredibly careless on his part. I mean, you can say what you want about this fellow. I don't know very much about him. He's just a regular guy, I guess. Yeah, absolutely. But Charlie Shrem, obviously, people are going to have an eye on him. I mean, he's a CEO of a company and the vice chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation. So, one, it's very careless. Two, as the vice president of the Bitcoin Foundation, a foundation that tries to promote Bitcoin as a viable alternative to currency. and promote its good uses and try to condemn things like Silk Road. From an ethical perspective, this is just completely... Yeah, I completely agree. This was, you know, you can argue about this, like how terrible was this.

You can argue about Silk Road, how bad is Silk Road, how bad is Silk Road, et cetera, or not, you know. I mean, you can definitely have different opinions on that. And for my part, I certainly think that the potential. penalty they're facing is just excessive. Because even if what they did was wrong, 30 years, just seems crazy for this, you know. You know, especially living in New York where, you know, you have 20 years in jail for murder and things like that. And then in the U.S. they just go kind of crazy with these charges.

But that being said, what he did was just extremely foolish. And especially if you think about it, right? So the incident was operating very early. early on. So in a time where there was very little clarity of what do you need to do as a Bitcoin business, as a Bitcoin exchange in order to be compliant with the law. So of course, he should have expected that, you know, people will look very closely at what they're doing. And they have to, you know, if they come up with their own rules, okay, here's what we're going to do in order to be compliant with the law that doesn't even exist yet. Then at the very least,

they would have to stick very closely to their own internal rules. And they didn't do that at all. And there was, of course, emails, pass and things that really proved he didn't do that. So it was extremely foolish what he did. Yeah. Dealing with Silk Road and accepting, accepting, I mean, it just goes to show that at the core, this guy was dishonest. I mean, he knew what he was doing. He knew that he was doing with Silk Road.

He knew that he was facilitating the sale of drugs. You can say what you want about, you know, him knowing about it or not knowing about it. He knew about it. And he, and he facilitated it. And that was foolish. So I think at the core, I don't think this guy is very honest and, you know, whatever, whatever happens to him. And, you know, if he is charged, if these charges go through, well, he'll deserve whatever prison sentence or. Oh, I don't know if that.

I mean, if he gets 30 years, I don't think he deserves it. No, I don't think he deserves 30 years. But I think he deserves to be put on trial. And if he's found guilty, well. Yeah, I mean, I think we can clearly say he was just stupid, irresponsible. And, yeah, also, he shouldn't be surprised at all. Yeah. For, yeah.

So it's, it's, of course, bad for Bitcoin. It's very bad news. It has very negative publicity. And yeah, it's, you would certainly expect more for someone who is as prominent in the Bitcoin community. And of course, also is in his official role as vice chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation. I mean, he resigned from that now. But this has a very bad light on the foundation. And the Bitcoin Foundation doesn't have the best reputation, I think, in the Bitcoin community.

There's a lot of people who think, like, what's the value that Bitcoin Foundation? provides and they're not helping with, you know, this doesn't help them. So let's just talk about you, you touched on public perception. So I have some excuse on this because on the one hand, this just helps to, well, to show that, you know, in any sort of activity, you're going to have people that are going to be this honest. And, you know, there are certainly many people in the financial industry that you could, you could label as being criminal or whatever.

have you. So, but, but, you know, because this is Bitcoin and because it's been linked to Silk Road and it's been linked to illegal activity online, it's particularly scrutinized. And in that sense, this doesn't help. However, on the other hand, the fact that these people are being, you know, pointed out and labeled as dishonest and seen by others in the Bitcoin community as such and condemned further, well, it goes to show that, you know, the Bitcoin community as a whole is honest and, you know, doesn't want this sort of activity happening with Bitcoin. Yeah, I don't know. But then again, you know, the media doesn't help at all.

Like there's these articles that I saw or they talk about Shrem and Fiala as being Bitcoin bosses. So this doesn't really help, you know, the general public perception and further reinforces people's that Bitcoin is run by a few people, which is not the case. Yeah, no, absolutely. And of course, his official role as a vice chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation. I mean, it's such a high, you know, a role with this title as such as status. Yeah, people may confuse him as, you know, he's the vice chairman of Bitcoin Foundation. What does that mean?

You know, people might confuse that as being sort of a decisive role in how Bitcoin is run or who owns Bitcoin. or for people who don't know anything about it, this is very confusing. But yeah, at the same time, I think one thing that we can point out that's kind of positive is if you read any of the official documentation or charges from the government and the state attorney, et cetera, they really emphasize that this is not about Bitcoin, nothing is wrong with Bitcoin, et cetera. It's just about this particular thing. So they're, I mean, they explicitly say that numerous times.

So I think that's a positive thing. So they really clearly do distinguish between this or this particular way of using Bitcoin and Bitcoin itself. Absolutely. Yeah. But the media, I mean, people aren't reading those charges. People are reading what the media says. It's all in how the media will frame this. And if, you know, we have to remember that these charges have been left.

there's, you know, there hasn't been, he was released on bail, I think, but there's no trial yet. So this will, of course, we'll keep hearing about this as, as the story progresses. And this, this perception issue will revolve around how the media will, will, or portray it. Yeah. I was, I was really wondering about this as well, because if you look at the service, Bit Instant provided. The question is, of course, you know, could they do the same, you know, could they in the same way go after other Bitcoin exchanges, Bitcoin businesses,

you know, that were dealing early on with Bitcoin before there was proper rules. And before, I mean, right now, any Bitcoin exchange in the US or any big business that does this kind of thing, they are getting money transmitter licenses in all the states, etc. So they spent a lot of money on lawyer. But they didn't use to do that. So a bit of instant when they started, they didn't do that. And I think most businesses at the time didn't do that.

So the question, of course, is also, you know, are they going to go back and go to all these businesses and say, well, what you did back then, you know, that was illegal. Yeah. Are they going to be grandfathered in? Yeah. So from my impression, if you read the charges, I don't think they have that intention. So, you know, for example, the co-founder, he's not mentioned by name in the charges. I guess we could find out who that refers to.

But it doesn't sound like they're going to have any charges against him. So at least it seems hopeful that they won't do that and they won't just do this kind of blanket attack on old Bitcoin businesses that were early on and that perhaps didn't have the most solid guidelines and compliance. Yeah, and perhaps even exchanged some fiat money for Bitcoin that were then used to buy drugs on Silk Road. There's potentially other exchanges that have been tied into this unknowingly. Yeah, and it was also important, right? It's that they have a tremendous amount of information on Silk Road, I think,

and a tremendous, I mean, I think they have the chats between private chats between users from the last few months before they said what was shut down. So it's, it would be interesting to see what else is coming there because I don't think this was the last thing. So do we have any idea when the trial is happening? Because he was released on bail for. Yeah, he's released on bail. I think he's on their house arrest now. Right. He's saying with his parents.

In New York. Yeah. I don't know when the trial is. starting. So he's been pretty quiet. We haven't heard anything from him either. I mean, I haven't seen anything. He hasn't posted on Twitter for some time.

I don't think he's reacted officially or even unofficially online. I wonder if he's prohibited to do so or if he's just remaining quiet. Yeah, perhaps. So his lawyer tells him not to say anything. We have another story, actually, that kind of ties into. this bringing up or bringing back the Silk Road. Sorry. So there's a guy.

We talked about this on episode three that the US is about to sell 29,000 bitcoins that people held in their Silk Road wallets. So this was, again, there were basically two things there, right? One was the Silk Road wallet, which was really Ross Albrecht's wallet. So the guy who operated Silk Road and all his profits. And the other thing was all the big coins that people held in their Silk Road accounts. Yeah, and we had speculated in one of the last episodes about how they were going to go about this. Yeah, exactly, how they were going to auction these off.

Right. And now there's some guy, of course, if you think about it, not everything on Silk Road was illegal. You could buy illegal things there. You know, there are people selling some kind of books and, um, and other things that were actually not illegal. And so if you just have an account on Silk Road and some money in there, that doesn't necessarily mean you were doing anything illegal. And it doesn't necessarily mean that the US government has the right to seize and auction off your funds.

But nobody stepped up and said, no, wait, these are my funds and I want them back. because of course people are scared. They don't want to have their name in public. They don't want to reveal themselves to the U.S. government, especially in, you know, that they were being an act, that they were enacted so weird user. But now some guy in England just stepped up and he wants his bitcoins back. I don't blame them.

So this guy, his name is. Yeah, no. So he has a hundred bitcoins on there, supposedly. So it's a substantial amount. Right. And his name is Peter Ward. He's a 52 year old guy from Devon, so it's South West England. And he was selling things like bongs, rolling paper, seeds.

So kind of like drug paraphernalia, but yeah, but not actual drugs. So everything he did was legal. He has another store, a physical store. He sells the same things. So he was selling those things on Silk Road. well. Supposedly, he also has like comprehensive records, you know, his books are in order. He even paid taxes on his sub-growth sales, et cetera.

So now he's going there and he's like, I want my Bitcoins back. Well, he's also kind of a funny guy. He was arrested, I think, in October 2nd. And the UK police walked in on him because I think they must have had the information from the FBI that he was a silk quote. a vendor and they seized some of his merchandise and including some personal drugs. So he did have some drugs, but on his own he didn't sell them. And he, I think he was on his birthday and he said that he was apparently at the post office

when his apartment was raided and he had some coke on the mirror ready for his birthday line. But then when he came back, he was arrested instead. But he was released without charge. Yeah. So there's nothing against him, really. I don't know why he wasn't arrested for his personal drugs. But yeah, so now he's trying to get this money back. Well, and I wish him good luck, but I don't know how that's going to happen. I mean, first of all, he's in the UK. He's not in, he's not physically in the US. But he's hired a US lawyer. Oh, has he? Okay. I think so, yeah. Well, I wish him good luck, but I don't see that happening. I don't know. Perhaps if others start coming forward, other legitimate businesses come forward and say, you know, I want my Bitcoin's back.

This is interesting because it's like if, I don't know, I'm trying to think about it. If you were on eBay, selling stuff on eBay and some other people on eBay were, well, I guess not eBay because eBay doesn't hold your money, but say if people start doing illegal activity on PayPal and all of PayPal gets seized, would everybody else's money be put in the same boat? No, I mean, I think he absolutely should have, be entitled to get his money back. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think even if you, even if you bought drugs on. on Silk Road and you held some funds in there.

You should be able to get your money back. I mean, it doesn't make any sense that because of that, you're not entitled to get your money back or it's not your money. Of course, if you, let's say you were buying drugs on Silk Road, then you bought this before and you had more funds in South Road. Even though you may be entitled to get your money back, you might also be, you would still have committed a crime and you basically be revealing that you were doing illegal things.

So you might not want to do that. Yeah, but this is where I think the line's a little blurry because you say you should be able to get your money back. But in the eyes of the U.S. government, this is not actually money. It's a commodity or it hasn't really been defined as money. So in the eyes of the U.S. government, this is just stuff that they've seized. I don't know. I don't know if that makes it.

I don't think that makes a difference. But yeah, it's interesting. So he also has a, he has a legal fund to, for his defense. There's 75 bitcoins in it now. I thought at first this was donations. I was like, wow. So there's one, one transaction into it for 50, one for 25. And then there's lots of little ones, I think from people on Reddit or, you know,

who want to support his legal kind of defense or, his legal claim. But supposedly I read that he put his own life savings into that as well. So I presume that's at least one of those large transactions. So I don't know how much Indonesia is actually gotten. But he does have 75 Bitcoin. So, you know, roughly $60,000 to fund his legal claim. Well, I hope he gets it back.

Yeah, me too. I mean, one thing he also mentioned that his kind of, that is his hope, is that even if he doesn't get it back, he hopes that it will delay the sale and it might kind of upset and annoy the FBI. So I think that's his second hope that you can achieve with this. So this, let's talk about the New York hearing. So this is the next big story. So these hearings took place in New York, so as our internationalist. will know regulation in the U.S. happens on a state level. And so these hearings took place just 24 hours after the Shrem arrest. So the news was kind of overshadowed by the arrests.

And it was a two-day event that included many well-known people in the Bitcoin world. So there are different panels. Okay. So over the two-day event, you had investor panels where that included some people from the investment community. regulatory panels and also kind of consumer protections panels, okay, and also an academic fuse panel. So a wide range of topics were covered over the two days. We're going to focus on the investor panel because I think this is where it ties in mostly, it ties in a lot with regulation and how innovation is going to be able to, well, happen or not based on regulation that occurs.

So the investor panel that we're going to focus on was on the first day. and that panel included. So Jeremy Liu, who is a partner at Lightspeed Ventures. Barry Silbert, who is the co-founder, sorry, the founder and CEO of Second Market. Fred Wilson, who's a partner at Union Square Ventures. And the Winklewurst twins, founders of Winklewurst Capital Management. And we're one of the investors and main investors of Bid Instant, of course, Charles Trem's company.

So that's what it ties in with. the SREM story. So what is Bit License? So the idea is to create sort of a specific regulatory permission for Bitcoin businesses to exist. What we wouldn't want would be for Bitcoin to fall into existing regulatory frameworks because those frameworks were created many, many years ago for Fiat money and not this virtual currencies won't really apply. And what they would really like, what investors would like would be to replace the current

money transmitter requirement. So one of the very difficult things for U.S. companies to have to deal with is getting money transmitter licenses in every one of the 50 states in the U.S. And this can be very, very long, costly, and complicated. So the goal here is to help Newark's Financial Regulars develop a regulatory framework within 2014. So I just want to point out some of the more interesting things that were said. So it's important to point out that countries are currently try to figure out how to regulate Bitcoin, and it's a global phenomenon. So regulators need to recognize that Bitcoin is a global phenomenon. It's not confined to a state or to a country.

It's happening worldwide, and that needs to be taken into account into regulation. Another interesting point is that dominant exchanges are overseas, and this is mainly a result of unclear regulation in the U.S. and the risk of starting exchanges in the U.S. is high. So investors wanted to make this right and enable exchanges to be started in the U.S. and particularly in New York. Now, this is where I really sided with Fred Wilson, where what he says is what's needed is for regulation to take into account the small size of Bitcoin startups. Bitcoin startups are usually two, three, four people. You've got a CEO, CTO, maybe a few developers. And it's very difficult for these small companies to become compliant. So there needs to be a more

gradual, according to Fred Wilson, there needs to be a more gradual process of getting compliant. So he says we need to have sort of an on-ramp to regulation and where companies would simply have to let the state know that they're operating. And then this would kind of give them a time period. to move through the regulatory framework. And another interesting thing that he pointed out is it would be interesting to have regulatory compliance being implemented into code rather than labor, having lawyers have to submit forms or what have you. And the more that we can take regulatory compliance and kind of have it be put into code,

and so this code is certified and verify, as being compliant, the better off entrepreneurs will be because it takes that burden off of their shoulders. And basically kind of just, it's, it's, you're compliant by default because you're implementing this code. Yeah, I think one interesting thing, if you look at this whole regulation debate, well, there's a few interesting things, right? But the question of, you know, do we need specific Bitcoin regulation? The opinions are actually kind of divided on that, right? Because I think the official, the Bitcoin Foundation's lawyer, They felt that, no, we don't need specific Bitcoin regulations.

And whereas many there said, yes, it would be a good thing. Of course, it completely depends on how would that regulation look like. And I think Charlie Lee, so the founder of Lightcoin and he works for Coinbase now, he said a very interesting and I think important thing, which is if you start having this bit of license thing, The real question is, does it replace the existing money transmitter requirement? Or is it just another thing on top of it? Because if it's just another thing on top of it, then that's not progress. That actually makes it worse.

Right. So I think that's, you know, that's a really important question. If you talk about Bitcoin regulations, now, of course, it would be a desirable thing if that was like very Bitcoin-friendly regulation, if they said, okay, all this existing financial regulations doesn't apply to Bitcoin businesses. So instead you have these really tailored, friendly rules. But to be quite honest, I don't know how likely that is. It seems more likely to me that what we will see at least in the near term is that the existing

rules apply. And then there's going to be more rules on top of that specific for, you know, Bitcoin in virtual currency businesses. Because, I mean, after all, if they're going to say, no, the existing, you know, money, transmit, rules, et cetera, don't apply to, you know, virtual currency businesses, that's going to be a very hard thing to sell if you look at the kind of lobby and influence that the financial industry has. Perhaps, perhaps some of the compliance regulation, the existing regulation, which still

would still be applied, but some components of that would be reviewed or replaced by some of this bit license. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I guess it would certainly some of the people have to hope that it would be a replacement for a money transmitter license, and so it would make it cheaper. I don't know if it's going to happen, but it would be, it would certainly be a desirable outcome of all of that.

I just want to point out one of the interesting quotes from Benjamin Losski, and he's the superintendent of financial services for New York. And what he says is if the choices between squelching money laundering and allowing innovation, we're always going to choose squelching the money laundering. It's not worth it to society to allow money laundering to exist and to allow 100 flowers to bloom for innovation. So you wrote here in the rundown that this drives you insane. It's a retarded way of thinking. I agree because if that's the case, we'll never have innovation. And I just, I spoke about this before and this is sort of the, what we've been seeing here in France, is that we always sort of tend towards squelching innovation and protecting existing.

Incumbens. Yeah, in existing incommences or businesses and protecting consumers. I just felt this was like mind-blowingly stupid. it. So yeah, absolutely incredible. So, you know, I mean, if you just think about this, so if there's any danger of some kind of money laundering going on, hence we cannot, you know, tolerate this as all. Of course, if this is the approach to new things and innovation, then we wouldn't have the internet today. You know, we would still, I don't know, use telegraph and, you know, there would be no cars. It's just so mind-blowingly stupid.

And I have to say, I think this is a problem in the U.S. especially. So if you think of 9-11 and all the things that have happened since then, and if you look at the Snowden and the things we've seen with the NSA, I think this is largely due to exactly this way of thinking. You say, like, you know, we cannot allow any terrorism to happen, any threat of terrorism, Hence, we have to go to these extreme measures to, like, prevent this. And then, of course, this leads to this erosion of liberty. And I think this is a very similar approach here.

It's like, no, there can be no money laundering. Hence, we must, anything that could be used potentially for money laundering, we must squash it. So, yeah, I, it's a, yeah, this is exactly what Fred Wilson said in one of the, in one of the hearings. that it's about freedom, ultimately, and whether or not you want to live in a society that embraces innovation, free speech, and freedom or not. So you're either free to innovate and do new things and have your liberties, or you're going to be living in a society that's going to be close to those things and try to protect an existing institution and protect citizens from the impending risks of a terrorist attack. I think it's interesting to point out the different

views and the different positions between U.S. regulators and European regulators. And although European regulators are very keen on this money laundering, terrorism, kind of aspects of Bitcoin, their position, at least what I've seen here in France and other European countries, is mostly based on taxation. They want to control it because they want to tax it. They don't want it to become this sort of thing that falls outside of the framework of European currency in the euro, whereas the U.S. is very much focused on money laundering, terrorist activity, stopping criminals. And of course, you know, Asia being much more focused on

state control of the money supply. So what do you think about this? Yeah. So one thing I would like to add here, I mean, I think I agree. Yeah. I mean, I think in Europe, there's definitely a bit less of a worry about this money laundering thing. So yeah, I think I agree. I think one important thing to add here is a very interesting paradox is that if you listen to people like Jeremy Aller of Circle and some of the people from the established Bitcoin businesses or more established, let's put it that way, they're actually quite, you know, they're like, we want regulation.

This is a thing. It should happen. Now, I think the interesting thing here is that there's actually a kind of divergence in interests. So for these companies that have a ton of money to throw at lawyers and can put up a million dollars to get a money transmitter license in every state, et cetera, and they actually have an interest if it's harder for new startups to do the same thing, you know, because it creates a huge barrier to entry and it makes their position much more defensible.

So, I mean, I think I remember Western Union mentioned that somewhere, is that one of their, you know, for them, difficult financial regulations is a good thing because they have all the money and they all set up to comply with these regulations. But for new people or new companies to enter the space, you know, they don't have that same advantage. So it makes it much more hard, much harder to start new companies. That barrier to ensure is so high. Yeah, so I think there's actually diversions here, like that for a company like circle that raised like $10 million or something, they're not, they're not going to be so negative about complicated regulations because they can probably handle it. But for new startups and for Bitcoin as a whole, it's a bad thing. And we don't want that. It was also said, like this analogy, somebody compared this to the music industry and how the music industry. and how the music industry has been sort of in the same regulatory framework problem where

you know you have these very small companies come in and try to want to work they want to revolutionize the way people consume music and then as soon as they approach record labels to to get rights well they're slept with a lawsuit so sometimes you need to test as a small company you need to test your business model before being asked for permission to operate. This is where the regular theory on-ramp scenario would be interesting where, you know, you can, you can test your business model. I mean, we live in an entrepreneurial environment where companies are implementing sort of lean models where they try and iterate and see if things work. And who knows, maybe you start a company and six months down the road, you figure out that

this isn't the route you should have taken. You want to change your company's business model. Well, you spent all that money or all that effort trying to get regulated for that first business model. And then you changed halfway down the road and you realize that, well, all that effort was for nothing. Yeah, no, it's a big problem. And of course, for innovation, we would want something like what Fred Wilson proposed,

which is that Bitcoin businesses don't really have to worry about regulation so much in the first year. and then afterwards, if it becomes bigger, if it scales, et cetera, then they can get compliance and do all those things. I don't know if that's likely that we'll see something like that. But of course, for innovation, that would be a great thing. Yeah, so there's, if you want to listen to part of that hearing we've been speaking about, you can listen to episode 78 of Let's Talk Bitcoin,

and there's a 20-minute segment there where, where you can hear these people speak about regulation. And there's been loads of articles written about it too. There's also been some news regarding French regulations. Is that right? Yeah. So we've heard some things out of France. Okay, so in December, early December,

the French Central Bank issued a statement, warning businesses and consumers about Bitcoin. Okay, so we had this first statement, which was sort of negative. And then a few weeks. weeks ago, and we spoke about this, I think, two episodes ago. There was a Senate hearing, which was quite positive that included members of the industry and also politicians and anti-money laundering authorities. And so that hearing was quite positive. Now, the statement that was issued is

issued by an arm of the French Central Bank, which is the French Prudential Supervisory Authority. And they issued a one-page statement. It's very short. And where they clarified the status of Bitcoin exchanges in France. So they start off by pointing out some of the number of criminal events such as the Schrem case. And they like to point out notably in the U.S. And they also go ahead and reiterate the risk of fraud and money laundering and financing terrorism and stuff like that. And they reference the focus article from December. And so this is their position.

Their position is that anybody who intermediaries who facilitate. the purchaser sale of Bitcoin must have a payment service license. Okay, so this is the first thing they say. And then they go on to say that the purchaser sale of Bitcoin. So in that case, the purchaser sale of Bitcoin may be conducted only through payment service providers. So credit companies, payment providers or virtual currency providers. And here's the list of these companies because those companies are listed openly on the website. So this is where it's.

Just briefly, what's a virtual currency provider? Is that something like Bitcoin specific? I'm not sure. I don't think it's Bitcoin specific. I think it's very broad. Okay. I just read about the story about an hour beforehand, so I read about it very quickly. But I'll need to go in a bit more detail about what these service providers actually are. So here's what frustrates me about this article. For one, okay, so they don't mention mining, whatever.

They don't mention the sale of and purchase of goods and services. So they don't say if Bitcoin should be used or not as. as a currency to buy goods and services. Maybe it's not for them to say that. But they don't really give any recommendations. They just say, okay, so if you're facilitating the purchase or sale of Bitcoins, you need to have the service license and here are the people that currently can do it. But if you're a new startup, if you're an exchange, a Bitcoin exchange,

it doesn't give you any indication as to how these types of businesses should operate. So just to be of question, how many companies, Does that include this list of? Quite a few. Like if you go on their website, we'll post that link in the show notes, but it's in French. Yeah.

There's a list of types of establishments. So you'll have like credit establishments, financial companies, uh, payment service providers. And then you basically have an Excel sheet with all the, all the names of these companies. Yeah, I see it.

Yeah. It's actually a lot of companies. Yeah, there's quite a few companies, you know, big and big and small. But what, what I don't like about, this is that they basically just kind of say, okay, this is your problem now. So if you're buying or selling Bitcoin, you've got to be one of these companies. And it doesn't give any

recommendations as to how a company should or could be compliant. It doesn't address the specificality of Bitcoin, where these companies that they speak of are most likely companies are dealing euros or fiat currency. So it doesn't address Bitcoin specifically. So it's just useless. It's just one of those things that, alleviates them from a responsibility. And, you know, this is how it is. And now you figure it out. That's usually how it goes.

You have to hire a lawyer and that lawyer figures out. Yeah, but it's also very typical. It's also very typical of French authorities. This is the way I perceive. Yeah, I mean, I guess the thing my thoughts here would be is, of course, that this is kind of a bottleneck, no, now any Bitcoin exchange or any Bitcoin business that does a Euro to Bitcoin, you know, is at this kind of position where it goes back and forth, has to, you know, go through one of these companies.

And of course, the consequence of that is that this costs money. This is slow. You have to probably hire a lawyer to look into exactly how to do it. And you have to write these documents probably up, et cetera. So this just makes it more expensive and it makes it slower to sort Bitcoin businesses. I have to say, it's the same thing here in Germany. You know, they, uh, if you do a lot of, a lot of Bitcoin things and exchange included, that's a financial, it's providing a financial service.

So you do need to have a certain, you know, license for that. And most, most startups wouldn't want to get that license themselves because it's, it's difficult, it's expensive. So they have to go to, uh, through a company. that has one and basically enter some kind of partnership agreement, which is really the same thing as here, I think. Yeah. I'm hoping I'll get to speak to some people at my meetup this week.

We'll be able to tell me a bit more about how this actually works. I'm thinking also of contacting the CEO of Paymium. Yeah. And seeing what has thoughts on this. So anyway. Yeah. So actually we have kind of related to regulation again. I guess this is a topic that just keeps coming up and up again.

And we'll keep coming up probably for the next for a very long time. Yeah. So in China, of course, this is a story we've covered a number of times. And essentially the Chinese central bank said that payment processes, so this is kind of going back to a story maybe six weeks ago or something, that payment processes are not allowed to deal with Bitcoin. And originally, they gave a deadline of a Chinese 31st, which is the Chinese new year, that at that time, they would have to shut down basically

their business with Bitcoin exchanges. Now, what happened when they made that statement is instead everyone suspended their business with Bitcoin exchanges immediately. So they were like, okay, they don't want it. So we're not going to wait until the deadline, we're just going to stop right now. And that, of course, caused that kind of crash in the, December where Bitcoin lost 30% or something of its value. And the interesting thing is that the Bitcoin exchanges in China have kind of kept existing, even though the volumes gone down dramatically. They're still there and they some have found some kind of way around.

So, for example, they would accept deposits. So you could do via transfers directly to the person's, to the CEO's personal bank account. and and or to the bank's business account. And so basically this deadline is passed now and the exchanges are still functional. BTC China is accepting bank deposits again as well. For a while, it was only another exchange that was accepting it. And now, you know, they are open to it too. So it's interesting.

I guess, you know, kind of the thing we can take from that is that Bitcoin is not, in China. It keeps existing in some weird limbo where it's not clear. Is it legal? Is it not? Is it tolerated? Is it going to continue? So I guess we will see in the next months what the position is of the Chinese government if they're okay with this or if they're at some point going to step up and say, no, this is not what we want it. And you really do have to shut down. I like how you characterize it as being in a limbo because that's exactly the way that I see it where we don't really know if it's okay or not. And I think that's partly because of the fact that it's a completely different culture and also language. So a lot of it gets

lost in translation, I think. Yeah. I mean, I think the changes, from what I understand, they don't know if it's okay themselves. So they're just, you know, going ahead because otherwise they can shut down the business. They don't want to do that. So now they do these, you know, kind of circumventing the rules and hope that they get away with it. And so far they have. Yeah, we'll see if that continues. Yeah, I'm hoping we get to talk to Bobby Lee about this. Yeah, sure.

We should ask him at the conference, yeah. All right, so on to maybe a funner topic. We just want to briefly talk about dose coins. So there's been a couple of dose coin stories in the last few weeks. So mostly related to the Olympics. So the Jamaican bobsled team raised $33,000. Is it doge coin or doge coin? Yeah, I was, or a dog coin.

I'm not sure. I think there's several ways of pronouncing it. And I'm not exactly sure which one's the most established. I mean, I think originally, right, it's just a misspelling of dog. So originally it's, um, it's part of a sketch from a very old video, uh, or what they called? it was a YouTube channel and they had these little sketches with puppets

and one of the puppets comes to another one and calls them a dog rather than a dog I don't know I watched it a few months back I forget what the name of the channel is and then they kind of re-branded or made it into the meme with the Shiba dog

so anyway so the Jamaican bobsled team raised $33,000 in Doge coins. And the Indian, there's three Indian Olympians. I think they're skiers. Yeah, I think they're different disciplines. Yeah, and they raised like $7,000 in Doge coin.

So this brings us to, I guess, wonder where Dogecoin is going. I mean, they seem to have a very vibrant community on Reddit with like 50,000 people. It's extremely popular for tipping. We're actually considering accepting Dogecoin tips. So we might put a widget up on our tip page. And it's like the first kind of successful internet name-based currency, apart from the coin-e-coin that we always know what those pieces anymore. That didn't really go anywhere, right?

It didn't really go anywhere. But it's the first successful one. So what's interesting about this is basically it was a joke. at first and it's built this community. And I seem to remember when when Dogecoin first came out, there were quite a few articles and people were saying like, this is the next big thing. And I was thinking to myself, like, how is this possible? Like, how is this going to survive more than a week?

And, you know, with time, and it started gaining traction and people started using it and trading and tipping with it. And so I bought a few. And well, they went up and last, I mean, didn't buy very much. But it, you know, the price has certainly gone up. And market capitalization now is like $60 million, I think. Yeah, I think the remarkable thing is, you know, the market capitalization, $60 million is like number five or six or something in the list.

You know, it's still very small and it's like a 10th of a light coin. However, what's really remarkable is the transaction volume, which is just really high of Dogecoin. So there's, in the last 24 hours, I was checking. before, there was 122,000 transactions, DoeCon transactions. It's like more than double the number of Bitcoin transactions, which is remarkable. And, you know, first, if you look at the transaction value, so, you know, Bitcoin is much higher transaction values in terms of dollars.

So Bitcoin transactions amounted to $350 million in the last 24 hours. But Doecoin transaction was $11 million equivalent. And that's, that's in. insane. If you think that the market capitalization of $60 million, that means on average, each do-coin is transacted twice in the last day. That's just really remarkable,

quite stunning. I'm wondering if it really is tips that is such a huge factor that just people tip each other back and forth at this insane rate. What do you think it's being used mostly for tipping? Does anybody accept this? like the merchants except?

There's a few. So I looked into this. So there's a few that are starting to use a bunch of websites. There's, in Jamaica, there's some resort where you can rent these like luxury villas with doke coin. And so, by the, of course, it's absolutely minor. There's very, very few things you can buy with doke coins. So I guess tipping is one of the main uses, the nations.

definitely possibly very popular in this community. But yeah, I don't know. It's very interesting. Maybe one thing we can mention with tipping. So one place with tipping is very popular is on Reddit. So whether there's this kind of message board form thing, you know, whether you can post news articles or you can write comments

and people can discuss it. So what people can do on Reddit, someone built this Bitcoin tip bot. So you can associate a Bitcoin address with a Reddit username. And if you like what someone says on Reddit, you can give them some Bitcoin. This has become very popular. And now people have done the same thing for other currencies. Among them, they've done it for a doge, a doke coin.

And this is very, very popular. And of course, the cool thing, If you think of it in the context of tipping, is if you can tip someone like a thousand dope coin, and that's like $1.40. But if you did the equivalent in Bitcoin, it would be like 0.0017 Bitcoin. And that doesn't sound as great.

You know, it sounds like nothing to us, even though it's the same dollar amount. Yeah. So I think that's also one of the reasons why this is so successful for tipping. And because it's kind of, you know, if you think of it, this kind of a fun thing that's not a serious thing, but just, you know, like something nice. It gives it sort of a monopoly money aspect.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And especially that it's also this, you know, cute dog. Like here's a thousand of those. It makes sense, I think, for tips, really. Yeah. I was mining it for a little while on just my home computer here. And I had mine quite a few, but right before I got to the, uh,

The withdrawal limit for that pool, the pool ended up being a scam and the guy took off with the toad. That's horrible. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was worth very much then. It was probably not worth very much now anyway, but I was just disappointed that I had spent all that time mining on my MacBook and finally got to a decent amount of doge coins. And of course, I had bought like 20 times as much just with a few millib coins. So I guess the questions are here, does it have a future?

What can be the uses of dogecoin in the future? So we've mentioned tipping. Maybe dogecoin would be used for micro-transactions on sort of internet meme sites. Or maybe like I'm thinking sites like funnier die, for example. Like say they would have paid content. Yeah. You could pay it with doge coins, you know, things like that, sort of comedy, meme related, you know, internet comedy stuff.

You could pay with doge coin. Yeah, sure. I mean, there's this vibrant community there. So I don't think it's going away. You know, these people are not just going to lose interest in it. They're, like, really fanatical about dokecoin. So, and it's cool. It's like fun.

And they seem to be really cool in that they're like, you know, very excited about supporting things. And I think it's partially that they just like supporting things. Partially is also they love seeing like DoCoyne in the media. And so I think it's going to stay. And of course, the big advantage with all these cryptocurrencies is that it's so easy to go from one to the other. You know, you have this big contrast where it's very difficult to take like U.S. dollar and go to Bitcoin or some currency go to Bitcoin. But then once you have Bitcoin, go to Doecoin, et cetera.

it's the easiest thing ever. So you can make that really frictionless. It's gotten easier now for Dogecoin, but when I first wanted to buy them, there was one exchange that was selling them, but it wasn't very simple to... But now there's a few others that are accepting it, so it definitely got easier.

Yeah, I guess I mean, what I mean is also in the medium term. Because the trading, you know, you don't have to worry about all these regulations. regulatory things because you can really just do locate an exchange anywhere and nobody can stop them because you don't have this fiat bottleneck issue so i think in the future you can even have bit pay and payment processes they can just accept any old coin and it would be very easy for them to do that and you can have exchanges that do like trading and perhaps you can even integrate it in

the wallet so if somebody pays you in doko and you you don't want the coin, it would be automatically traded for Bitcoin or something. So at least I think it's very easy to do all of these things and people will do them, I think. And that makes it very easy, I think, for any of these altcoins to have some actual practical value. So maybe we talked about our last topic. Yeah, so just a very brief update because we've talked about it a few times is the Ethereum project. So Ethereum, as we've mentioned, this is new currency, new protocol that's very ambitious and wants to be kind of the next step in the evolution of Bitcoin and of cryptocurrencies

and take the innovation, the technological innovation that Bitcoin achieved and apply it to a lot of new and exciting areas there. It's not being done right now. Now, as last week we talked about it, and we mentioned that on, February 1st or two days ago, or yesterday, their fundraiser was starting. And that's been postponed, so that's not happening yet. It's not clear when it's going to happen, but they're going to announce it on their website, which is Ethereum.org.

They did, however, launch a test net so you can try it out. I plan to play around with that next week and, you know, kind of. tests, see how it works. But yeah, the fundraiser's been postponed. If you're interested in it, there's a talk. They made kind of an official announcement at the conference in Miami last weekend. And Vita Lik Burtarian gave a talk there. And if you look on YouTube for Ethereum, Miami, you can watch it.

I haven't seen it yet. It just came out yesterday. So I'll also be watching that. And, you know, we can kind of update more when, there's some developments on the Ethereum. Okay, so let's talk about, you know, our new segment, which is new Bitcoin acceptances. Those are few this week.

So apparently, Lamborghini and McLaren dealerships in the U.S. are going to start accepting Bitcoin. I think it's been kind of a trend where car companies are starting to accept Bitcoin because we've got all these new Bitcoin millionaires. They're going to want to be buying expensive cars. We better get in on this. Yeah, exactly. I guess that makes sense for them.

And there's an online casino? Yeah, there's a baradjong casino. So I think they're in Malta, supposedly one of the largest online casinos. They have like 100 employees and they're accepting Bitcoin. What's maybe important to notice here is there there's a difference. You know, all these Bitcoin gambling sites that they're actually using Bitcoin in the gambling and they're integrating it. And somehow maybe they even use the blockchain for gambling. Very John is different.

They just accepted, you know, kind of like big pay, although they're using a different one. So, you know, they're receiving Bitcoin payments. They converted into euros. You know, they sell the Bitcoins. But you can, yeah, you can deposit money in the casino with Bitcoin now. And then there's the Chicago Sun Times that are experimenting with Bitcoin. So they're doing a test where readers will be able to go through the paywall. with Bitcoin.

Yeah, that's very exciting, I think, because that is truly innovative. And micro payments is micro transactions, something that, you know, is such a topic in Bitcoin. It keeps coming back. And that possibility of Bitcoin enabling micro transactions is something a lot of people are really interested in. But we haven't seen any of it yet. So I think this is one of the first real live experiments of using Bitcoin micro transactions. Yeah.

There's lots to be done this, especially in the press or the paywall is just such a hassle. If you could, I don't know who spoke about this, but I think it was in one of the last stock Bitcoin episodes. If you could just send money to an address and have the cost of reading the article just deducted every time you visit a page where you don't have to log in or you don't have to do anything, that would be so much more, so much better. And a way for the press to maybe make some money again. they've been having such a hard time. There's a company in Switzerland that you, that we both know well, called Venamco. Well, the company is called Venamco, yeah.

And then, yeah. No, you were saying? Yeah, so the company is called Venomka. It's actually a company of my cousin. So he founded it and known it. And they have, well, you actually, I was telling about this kind of randomly. and you knew the company and you knew their product.

But so one thing they do is called the device lab. So it's basically kind of a furniture thing where you can put various mobile devices so you can test websites and applications on that. Yeah, I knew about this because I, of course, work in an agency as a UX designer and we've been looking at this solution for our device testing. And they also make some testing software. and I'd seen a few weeks ago that they were accepting Bitcoin and looking into purchasing some of this device stand that they make.

So I was just kind of surprised to hear that it's actually your cousin. Small world, isn't it? Yeah, indeed. I've been looking at the solution for quite a while because they released it. I mean, they spoke about it on their website like maybe six months before it was actually released, and they released it a few months ago, and we're just kind of waiting a little while before we purchased one. Small world, I guess.

Yeah. So, yeah. So if you're in a mobile development, check that out. It's, uh, you can just go, Benamco, like V-A-N-A-M-C-O.com. And then the device, device lab. I think they're not accepting Bitcoin for the, the software subscription yet, but, you know, hopefully they'll, it's probably because it's hard to build subscriptions with Bitcoin. Mm-hmm.

So, but, uh, I presume, uh, I presume, uh, hopefully they will do so in the future then in germany there's a company called perfumery dd so it's like an online perfume merchant i think it's quite a large company so the cosmetics and things like that they're also accepting bitcoin now which is cool i'm um i find that interesting how so companies they accept bitcoin they'll put the price in euro but maybe it's not the case everywhere, but they don't put the price in Bitcoin. It would be nice if you could switch,

if you could click on the, kind of like on blockchain.info, if you could click and you could see the price in Bitcoin at the same time. Yeah. Maybe that'll come. I don't know. I mean, it'll probably come at some point,

but I think for the time being, people don't really have this reference idea, you know, how much is, how much of that costs in Bitcoin? You know, it's hard to compare things. And in the end,

these companies use Bitcoin as a, really as a payment system. So for payment acceptance. So I think it makes sense to price things in euros and you can pay in Bitcoin because, you know, they're receiving euros. It's priced in euros. So. But of course, in the future, I think if Bitcoin becomes more stable and Bitcoin is like really established and international and especially in countries where perhaps

your own currency is very volatile, it would make sense to price things in Bitcoin even. And then there's a. some more Canadian companies excepting Bitcoin. So we've seen a lot of acceptance in Canada. There's this article this week on, I can't remember what publication, but saying that there was 143 companies now accepting Bitcoin in Canada. And so a restaurant in Montreal called Montreal Poutine.

So Poutine is, of course, this very typical Canadian dish, which is made up of three ingredients, that's french fries gravy and cheese and uh so they accept bitcoin now if you want to buy a protein you can pay your protein with bitcoin protein was the base of my of my nutrition when i was in high school yeah it seems uh canada is really leading in a lot of ways of bitcoin there's so much going on there yeah kind of sad that i'm not there to see it happen yeah but i've got some friends there. I should probably talk to them about it and see what they think. Yeah. Okay. Well, I think that was it for this week, no? Yeah. Well, thanks for listening to our fifth episode. Yeah, so

thanks so much. And we look forward to being back next week before our sixth episode. If you have any questions, then please email them to us at epicenter bitcoinsat gmail.com. And, you know, we can cover them on the show. Also, if you're interested, you can go to a blog at percent of Bitcoin.com. There's some posts on Ethereum now. I don't know if, I don't think we mentioned

it last week because it weren't like that. So I wrote a post on that. There's also a resources post. So it has links to all the important things on, about Ethereum. Yeah, I really, I really like that. Yeah, so yeah, if you're interested, it's kind of a good place to go, you know, if it's a topic

interest you and you can see the links of forum, the white paper, etc. And of course, there's an episode of Bitcoin newsletter. So if you go to EpicenterBricon.com slash newsletter, you can sign up for our vehicle newsletter with analysis of the latest development and what's been going on. And so, yeah, it's been, yeah, that's been growing quite a lot too. There was like 20 people added in the last week.

So that's great. And yeah, we'll hope to see you next week. Yeah, also follow us on Twitter. so we're at Ep Center of BTC and please, please, please give us feedback. We haven't heard from anybody. We've heard from no one. We have all these listeners.

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