Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Johann Barbie: The Bitcoin Barbie

Episode Date: February 17, 2014

On today’s show, we’re joined by Johann Barbie, founder of 37Coins, an SMS based wallet solution. Johann weighs in on the recent transaction malleability fiasco and helps us better understand what’s really going on. We also talk about recent news out of Florida where two men where arrested after selling Bitcoins to Federal Agents posing as criminals. Thanks again to Johann for joining us and letting us record out of his kitchen where he brewed us some mean Nero (Burning ROM) tea. This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/007

Hi there, today's February 16th, 2014, and this is Epicenter Bitcoin, Episode 7. The Bitcoin Barbie On today's show, we'll be discussing the chaos surrounding Mount Goggs and transaction mailability. Is Bitcoin really broken, or is this just another case of Mount Cox incompetence? We have Johann Barbie, founder of 37 coins on the show as a guest host, to help us understand what's going on. We'll also be talking about the recent. the rest of two local Bitcoins traders in Florida and what they mean for the future of in-person Bitcoin trading.

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. Welcome to Epicenter Bitcoin, Episode 7, a weekly podcast about Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies. My name is Sebastian Kutjur. I'm a user experience designer based in Lid, France, and also the founder of the Bitcoin Cazil. And I'm Brian from Ben-Krain. I'm the founder of the Bitcoin Service Berlin Group,

and I'm a Bitcoin entrepreneur based in Berlin, Germany. And we've got a really special episode today because this is the first episode that we've done where we're all sitting around the table. And we have a special guest today. Johan, do you want to introduce yourself? Yeah, hi everyone. My name is Yon Barby.

I'm a developer and the creator of 37 coins. Yeah, so we have Johann today, kind of as a guest host, he's going to help us talk through some of the topics we have on, we're going to be talking a lot about this Mount Galk situation, transaction mayability. So it would be great to have a more educated technical

perspective than we have. So I think you can help us. Yeah, I'm happy to provide that as much as I can. Excellent. So before we get into that, we just want to cover real quick. So we're in Berlin, actually, right now. And we've been attending the Inside Bitcoin's Berlin conference, which was held on February,

12 and 13th so this week yeah Wednesday Thursday you were there too you were giving you want some panel to do yeah I was on the panel for trust and what is it well bringing Bitcoin forward trust and regulations regulations yeah so yeah so the conference was really cool I mean for me it was my first Bitcoin conference and getting to meet all these people and getting to meet you know people like Johan and and everybody else in the Bitcoin sphere, especially getting to see kind of the vibrant Bitcoin community here in Berlin and also in Germany, it was really kind of cool for me.

I really had a good time. And really, my takeaway is that we're really at the cusp of something, you know, 2014 is where everything's going to blow up. And I think that was the general consensus there at the conference. Well, how many conferences have you been to before, Your Honor? I think this is my second conference. I don't know if I was in the conference in Cologne. There was a Bitcoin conference late last year.

Yeah, I was so too. And that was a whole different scale. It was much less people. There was a lot of networking. Yeah, it was like a hundred-ish people there. Yeah. This was bigger. And this one was a whole different dimension.

I actually got surprised by like how many international guests. Yeah. How much networking was going on and talks and all kind of stuff. Yeah. No, this was my third conference after the Amsterdam conference last. year and and the Cologne conference I was there as well and I'm going to be going to quite a few more this year so it's exciting yeah I mean it was cool to see it was quite similar to in scale as well to the Amsterdam conference I think it was it was

more Americans here I have to know America a lot of Americans love Germans too so a lot of capital walking around yeah yeah yeah guys in suits but yeah as we we talked about this on the short segment we did on on for the last talk bitcoin podcast about this conference and uh because i was talking to five different people and this is what one of the things that amazes me most about this conference to five different people at this conference who are organizing conferences this year where they're expecting more than a thousand people so that's just kind of like blowing yeah this community is growing so fast that it's um almost impossible already to keep track of everyone, right?

Just a year ago, that wasn't very different. You knew everyone. And I think in 2012, I'm not sure if there was any conference. I don't know. When was the first Bitcoin conference? So the foundation's conference, the first sort of major Bitcoin conference was in May last year. And I know there was one in 2011 in Prague, I think, a smaller one.

And I'm not sure if there was anything in 2012. Yeah. And then last year, you know, it started coming in the fall. And now it's just. Crazy. Yeah. But yeah. And that's not to mention like all the conferences, just Media Bistro is organizing.

So this conference was hosted by Media Bistro and they're doing like 10 this year. Yeah. Insane. Yeah. But out those whole Bitcoin conference. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So there's, there's all across Europe and I think there's one in Hong Kong. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I just want to be sure that even though they have so many Bitcoin conferences, they keep the quality up. and they invite the right people. And here in Berlin, that has been kind of an issue, like, seen by the community. They outsourced this event to this, like, local company.

Yeah, rising media. Rising media. And there was no way to, I think, pay the conference fee with Bitcoin at the beginning. They didn't include, like, local people from the community that much. Yeah. And they should have really focused more on the local Bitcoin community. I think that's what shines about Berlin, right? our great community and no that's true i mean there's been uh quite a bit of

discussing i mean i've talked with various people about putting on a conference here in berlin but before we knew that this was where inside bitcoin happening and uh people definitely want to do that but it's just you know no kind of has the time to step up and do it because it's so much work yeah and um and it's it was definitely inside bitcoin's conference here in belin was not a conference by the Berlin Bitcoin community. And there's, you know, there's a big community here and most people weren't there. What do you think would have been different if it would have been organized by the Bitcoin, the Berlin Bitcoin community?

You know, the price would definitely have been very different. It would have been a more variety of talk. I'm sure it would not have been as well organized. I mean, these people have been doing conferences for 40 years, yeah. Yeah. But the president of a media bistro. So it was very. professional I'm sure it would have been much more chaotic and all over the

place it would have been more variety you know even had developers doing random things I mean you know I organized a big concerted Berlin and we have a huge variety in things you know like some talks are really bad some talks are really good and then some are some artists doing something some developers you always do a talk yeah I tried to I missed the last two ones and so I think you would have a lot of variety probably not the same kind of high standard of quality, but maybe also more interesting things, more creative things.

Should we get started? Yeah, first I just want to mention for our listeners that we'll be releasing a lot of a lot of contents around in the conference within the next few days, I guess probably two weeks. So we've got a segment of interviews that we did at Room 77, which is a bar here in Berlin that accepts Bitcoin and the first brick-and-mortar establishment in the world to accept Bitcoin. so we'll be releasing that shortly and we'll also be releasing

maybe one or two episodes with all of the interviews that we did on the spot with speakers such as Johan and probably more than two episodes I think we did about 20 interviews perhaps there's so much content I don't know what we're going to do with all this and also we recorded a lot of

most of the talks so we'll be releasing well the talks that we feel are the most interesting that were the most influential so look forward to those episodes so that extra content on the feed within the next few weeks okay so we have some really important topics this week to talk about and since we've been at the conference we've not not followed it as closely as we often follow what's been going on so we've been kind of catching up and see what like what has been going on because it's surprising to be on the

conference floor and nobody was talking about the news you know and yes new else everybody said hey have you heard about this thing that's going on like no no I'm too busy looking at the internet the internet at the conference wasn't working yeah yeah but yeah so let's uh let's kind of briefly go through what's been going on and then we can dive in a bit deeper yeah what it all means so i think this started this whole uh sequence of events started with mount gox you know we all know that they've been having real trouble with uh field withdrawals so it's been very difficult getting us all us out especially But so far, getting bitcoins out wasn't a problem.

But then about a week ago, or perhaps a bit more, people started having problems getting their bitcoins out. And what happened is that people withdrew their bitcoins, and they just never arrived. And then they put in support tickets, everything. And at some point, Mount Cox just kind of put their balances back up, but nobody could take them out. And, of course, there was a lot of panic surrounding that,

Bitcoin price crashed. Mount Cox made a press statement saying that they have some technical issues, they have to freeze it. Nobody knew what's going on. Yeah, and just at this point, things were not very clear. I mean, nobody knew what was going on. Yeah. Mount Cox's communication was so. Yeah, it's been consistently horrendous.

And then they did another press release, and they said, this is a flaw in Bitcoin. And the Bitcoin Protocol. Yeah, exactly. And of course, the reaction of a lot of people in Bitcoin community was they were very angry at Mount Cox because they felt like what was really their incompetence. They were trying to blame on Bitcoin. And blah, but there was a lot of chaos around that. And some other exchanges actually also suspended their withdrawals. And I think right now they're all back up except Mount Cox where it's still suspended.

it, they said they're going to release another statement on next Monday, so the 17th or tomorrow. So this problem that caused Mount Gauksa to stop withdrawals is due to a term that we've recently heard coming to existence, which is transaction malleability. And I think that it would be important to really kind of explain what this is. So can you explain to us what transaction malleability means? Yeah, I'll try as good as I can. So this is actually not a new term. It existed in the Bitcoin community since the beginning of the protocol.

And this particular issue that was discovered that Mount Gog's references is known to the community since about three years. What happens there is when you sign a transaction. the signature doesn't cover all of the content of the transaction and what can happen with that is that people can listen to the network look at the transaction and then just might modify certain parts of it that are not covered with a signature and release the same transaction again so the trends the content of the transaction is effectively the same word so for example we're talking about this earlier in a in a in a part of a transaction you have

multiple pieces of data and sometimes you can have the values for those pieces of data can be different but they can mean the same thing so for example it could be like having leading zeros in front of a in front of a number or something yeah so there are specifically two things that can change the one thing is called the signature malleability and that's so the bitcoin client relies on open ssl and the open ssl library and the open ssrcly library allows search like multiple representations, non-standard representations of the same signature. So the same signature you can just write in different ways. And that's one issue.

And then the other way to do that is script, meliability. And this references all the signatures that are in the inputs. And those can be changed as well. And there is no complete definite solution to that because the signature cannot include itself. So how would you be able to sign the whole transaction? But there are certain steps that are on the roadmap of the Bitcoin development team

for many years already. And those are to kind of standardize how the transactions have written. And this would prevent the transaction to be able to have different signatures. But what this requires is a hard fork. So that means that all the clients on the network have to go with it and we have to wait until we have the network penetrated with the new clients deeply enough before we can change over so can you briefly talk about how what the problem here is and how this could be exploited so it seems like in the case of mount gox people released the transaction

which was slightly modified and then this transaction instead of the original transaction was included in the blockchain in the next block. But what they got from Mount Gox was the hash of the original of the first transaction and they took this transaction which was now not in the block and they went to Mount Gox and they said, look, I didn't receive my money. What actually happened is that the other transaction still paid them the same amount of money. So this malleability cannot affect any serious like properties of the transaction. You still get your money. Everything things same like before, but it's just harder to find the transaction in the block. Yeah. You can still find the transaction if you look at address, amount, and timestamp,

you will find the same transaction and you will be able to verify that you have your money. But it seems like the support team in Montgox wasn't managed very well and they weren't aware of this, of this possibility to verify that the money arrived. So, so one, another way of looking at it, I guess, is that there's no real way to way to you know change transactions double spend money steal money etc but this flaw if you know if we call it that can be kind of used it's like a social engineering thing now you would call Mount Cox up and says I've drew this money it's not here I didn't get it and you do that by changing this was actually I

need to look for this transaction they can't find it because I've changed transaction ID now but it would seem that Mount Cox would have to be incredible dumb if they you know let's say I with two a thousand bitcoins from Mount Cox so you know a large amount and then I would go back to them says I didn't get it it's really seems like they should go and check what happened here and they would find okay it's weird it's a different transaction ID but I see here's the input here's the output there's a time I did pay that so if they didn't do that it seemed it would be like incredibly negligent

Yeah, exactly. So I don't know if they actually paid out bitcoins twice in that way, but they could simply prevent that by not publishing the transaction unless it's included in a blog. So then people would not be able to listen for the transaction and modify it and publish it again. Wait, can you say that again? Because if you think about how would this attack be executed, Does that mean the attacker would have nodes that are very close to Mount Gox's nodes so they can get all the transactions that come out of Mount Gox? And then if they have really well-connected notes, they would change them

and then basically hope they're faster than Mount Cox. Is that how it would happen? I think, yeah, something very similar has to happen. And something very weird happened on Tuesday evening, where we actually saw that on the Bitcoin network, about 40% of all the transactions that any of the nodes were publishing. were rewritten in this kind of way and a double transaction was published for that. And yeah, I think the miner can choose randomly which one he picks, which transaction he picks,

but they usually go for the first one they saw. So you would have to penetrate the network with the wrong transaction faster than the correct one would travel. I just maybe I can, one way one could try to do that is because I think usually if you have a Bitcoin node it would be connected to perhaps eight other nodes or something but I think if you write your custom note You can say you want up to a thousand connections. Oh you can do that with a standard one. It's just a configuration Yeah, so I guess that would be one way You don't even need to have a large amount of resources You need to have some

much bandwidth though. Yeah, the bandwidth and the latency is probably yeah yeah, you have that pretty good network equipment I suppose also So if you talk about these, you said 25% or 40% of the transactions? I'm not sure. Like, Andreas said that it was around 40%. Yeah. What he saw in his wallet? Do you have any idea what the motivation was there? Um, I mean, what's the point?

Why would you do that? I guess it's, it's great that we have this open protocol, right? And so many people are working on it. And if there is a flaw, It's actually good to point out that this flaw can have serious consequences. And Mount Gutz just said, oh, there's a problem with the protocol and it's the protocol's fault. And the community didn't really look at it. They said Mount Gox did some kind of wrong communication.

Then someone went out and he actually, like on a massive scale, fake transactions. And then people, even the community realized that is actually an issue that confuses people. and what the people think and perceive is what they trust in, right? So you're saying that this would be something that, you know, an attacker would do to prove a point? I think so. And, in certain, like, there's no financial gain. It's just to prove a point and get this fixed.

Like, you know, you see this all the time, you know, and just, right now, internet security where somebody will exploit something in order to prove that this enterprise solution or the software has this vulnerability so that they'll move and fix it. So do you think this might be? But if, I mean, talking about, the financial incentives of course you know if you're able to do that you know you're able to do that I mean this would be a fantastic way of shorting Bitcoin like you

sell you big coins you do an attack like that and then you know you buy you can make 30% or 40% so it within a few days so there's a there is potentially a very large financial incentives do something like that someone got rich yeah speaking of getting rich you had mentioned that people some people were saying that mount gox was offering to process their withdrawals faster if they paid a 5% fee So I don't know how True that is or how likely that is where do you hear this on CoinDisc there was an article Where they basically did a survey so they asked people to admit you know have you been have you tried to withdraw money

How long has it been how much? What was your response? Etc. They have had quite a few responses like a thousand people or something and some of them I think it was eight who said that they were offered by Mount Cox that they could pay a 5% extra fee and then they would get their order process so they would be able to withdraw their bitcoins now that's of course very worrying it's also important to note that these were people who claimed that they've been trying to withdraw a very large amount like a 2000 Bitcoin one guy one guy like $200,000.

From Mount Gox's perspective of course if you did something like that it would make sense to only offer it to very large accounts because the more people you tell that the more risky it is and more likely it's to get out but it's extremely worrying I don't know if it's true it could be fake I mean eight people's not that much and I didn't see any emails or any like real solid proof. So unclear, but it's certainly a possibility and extremely worrying. I mean, I think if you think of it back and another company with a very questionable reputation in the Bitcoin space is Butterfly Labs. And I remember there was a lot of reports too where, you know,

they had this huge backlog of orders of mining equipment. And of course, you have a huge financial incentives to get you mine equipment first. Because if you get a month later, it's lost like two-thirds of the value. So I think there was also reports there that, you know, some people were paying to get it earlier. So it has a very similar tone here. I don't know if it's true. But, yeah, it's certainly a worrying,

worrying story. And if it is true, that's certainly bad news. Yeah, but, you know, just to touch on that, you said that, so there's been this question about Mount Cox's insolvability. So you pointed out earlier that what they could do is they could sell, you know, people can't withdraw their bitcoins on Mount Gaux, but they could withdraw their Bitcoins on their laptops. And then they could go and, you know, buy them on Bidstamp.

Yeah, of course, so an important thing. So for those people who haven't been following this very closely is that at the moment, the Bitcoin price among Gawks is about half the Bitcoin price on the exchanges. And, you know, the reason, of course, is that you say, well, how much is my Bitcoin worth from Mount Gogs? And then people, I guess the kind of opinion of people is that it's worth half as much as Bitcoin in your own wallet. Because that's how they assess the chance of actually getting their Bitcoin out. It's interesting, too, you know. So you can really say that people attribute sort of a 50% chance for getting Bitcoin out. Although it's a bit more complicated because they can't get the dollars out either.

so who knows but what they could do is you know they could buy now bitcoin's at the three hundred dollars with their own money sell them a big stamp for twice the money and make a ton you know they don't even need to buy them they have direct access to them right that's right that's certainly right they can just take them yes yeah and i think that's the big issue like the these exchanges they accumulate not only so much money and they create so much friction they also these like central power which isn't was just very unnatural to Bitcoin as a protocol right everything's distributed and I'm really excited about to see where this whole space is going the whole exchange space and how that's that's a very interesting point

we did an interview with Tamash Bloomer at inside Bitcoin's conference he's the founder of Bits of Proof and he's a very well-known developer and he's working on a Bitcoin exchange and sort of the code for Bitcoin exchange where the company that runs the exchange would not have access to the funds of the people so I think he uses multi-signitual wall addresses if I'm correct I'm not 100% sure that's exactly yeah and so that would be one way I guess to hopefully prevent that and then what would also be the case there is that all the Bitcoin balances you know will be on the blockchain you see here's my Bitcoin because right now you pay your money or

your Bitcoin is into my groves and it's just you don't know right you don't know where it is if it's still there or not and it's just kind of in this void and you hope you get it out again so when we're at the conference obviously this was happening at that time my impression when talking to people there was that this was not really a long-term issue I mean the price went down there There was all this news in the media and everybody was talking about it. In fact, we got interviewed by some guy from the Associated Press and that's all I wanted to know about. And when I was looking at the, because the Associated Press they put together this little piece of video

and then they sell it to CNN or send me or whatever network, Bloomberg. And it's up to those networks to put their copy on, to record their copy on top of it, right? So there's spoken copy and I watched this little piece of video which has no spoken word, just images. right and all the images just like melkawks website he's scrolling on the mount gox website you know there's some graph of the price going down so you know what they're going to say about it is just going to they're just going to cover on this issue and then they've got some interviews of something from blockchain we got interviewed and we got asked about this so but anyway so just the media is going to cover it from this angle and they have been they've been covering it from the angle of like

this is the end of bitcoin like there's so many problems in this protocol these exchanges are not honest and you know it's a Ponzi scheme like there was an in an article in in the moment last week where the guy says that Bitcoin's a Ponzi scheme still still but the Bitcoin community they're like no this is nothing you know there's just a little bump in the road you know Bitcoin will bounce back yeah so what do you think about this like what why do you think there's such a gap between well, maybe because we're in, I mean, people in the Bitcoin community actually know what's going on, right? Like, and the media just kind of blurs it all.

Like, they have no understanding of this. They have no understanding of the technical aspects and it's like they don't want to understand. Yeah, they want to have a story, right? Right. And that's kind of the issue. So when I went to the conference and I introduced myself as a developer, I got the same like kind of questions. What do you think about the Mongox thing and what do you think about those spam? There are some spam transactions on the network right now.

like really small amounts. And yeah, I was telling them, I think it's not being serious. You still get your money. Everything's fine. It works as before. And they were really relieved. They couldn't believe it because there's such a hype going on around that. I think it's important that we as a community kind of make clear and go out and tell people

that what media tries to achieve to make a big story out of it, like positive or negative, is not what it really is. The network is the same as before. and I strongly believe that this was a small glitch and it was something that was known for three years already I just want to repeat that over and over again

it's not a new buck just go there and check it up it was just exploited in a new way and some company which is doesn't do good doesn't have good technology and doesn't do good service for years already just use this to cover

their like bad doing but I want to kind of weigh in and maybe slightly different perspective on this because as we mentioned before there's this consensus that you know Bitcoin is going to explode Bitcoin is going to take over the world because we're going to become this massive payment system currency etc and and I believe that as well of course but that being said if we just look at this week there was a point in this when the three largest exchanges, BitSamp, Mount Cox, and BTCE were all not processing withdrawals.

And that's just if, you know, if you think of it in that context, I mean, you know, that's a real problem. I think it's a really clearly illustrates that in many regards, the infrastructure and just sort of stability of the Bitcoin system is just not nearly where it needs to be. nearly where it needs to be to really take on that scale yeah um i want to um i want to argue like that actually um those exchanges are not the bitcoin protocol those exchanges are on the edge of the bitcoin protocol to interact with fiat and the fiat fiat is actually the problem so fiat accumulates like how do you say like power and so on and we have all these issues because those uh exchanges a build in a centralized and an old-fashioned and an unreliable way.

The Bitcoin Protocol and the Bitcoins on my wallet were as safe as always. Yeah, that's true. But if you think of the next years, this intersection between Fiat and Bitcoin is going to be one of the most important parts. And to have really rapid growth, that needs to be smooth and it needs to be liquid. And that will evolve. At the conference, this was a topic that was covered by a lot of people. is exchanges are not going to be the central way of getting Bitcoin.

Like, we're trying to move towards other ways and perhaps even decentralized ways. It's like we have to tell us. I want to point out that this just, like, to me, like, when the Mount Gawks thing started happening, like, 10, 15 days ago, my first response was, like, I didn't have any money in Mount Gox. I didn't have any bitcoins there, but I had some Bitcoins in some other exchanges. My first response, like, take it out, like, you know, keep it on a wallet. And I had been kind of keeping my, not a lot, but I had been keeping some Bitcoin there.

And I think this reinforces the idea that you just shouldn't keep your money in exchanges. You know, the Bitcoin should be with you. You should have them on a wallet, securely, of course, you know, based on the number of bitcoins that you have. You should have an adaptive solution for that. But you shouldn't keep money on exchanges. Yeah. Never keep Bitcoins on a hosted wallet. Don't keep many of them.

Or on a hosted wallet, for instance. Yeah. It's a hostage wallet. Like an exchange is a perfect example for that. Of course you were. Especially where the most exchanges, I think all of them don't give you private keys. So you're screwed in any way. Like if anything happens there, you can't get them out.

Well, not just not the private key, but also not the public key. I mean, you're paying it. Right. You don't even get the public. You don't know. I mean, you just see your bitcoins as a balance on the accounts or the exchanges website. You don't see them. You don't know where they are on the blockchain.

And in a sense, you don't know if they actually exist. Or maybe they were sold somewhere. Who knows? So, I mean, that's actually that is, if you think of these, maybe come back briefly to this story that some people were offered 5% fee, extra fee to get the money out of amount of dogs. And of course, the question also is with all these millions and millions of dollars in Bitcoin, do they actually have all those bitcoins? That's good question. Because we know we often talk with banks, you know, this comes about a bank run. Because of course a bank doesn't have all the money in cash or in deposits that people

are entitled to. So if all of a sudden everyone says, I want my money out of the bank, that's a problem. And you want to be the first person to get your money out because if you're not, then it might not be there anymore. And we hope, of course, that with a Bitcoin exchange, that's not the case. How do we know this not the case? We don't know. That's the point, right?

How come nobody's talking about this? because what banks have been doing for years, exchanges can be doing also. So it's crazy to me that this is not being discussed about anyone. I think this adds an interesting perspective of these 5%. Because maybe that means like you want to do that. Because if you don't, someone is going to be, someone's going to be, you know, ruined, you know.

So someone might be there and left over and they have an entitlementary balance, but Manggox bankrupt these Bitcoin's don't exist anymore. So you want to be the first ones out. And I actually think we don't know if that's the case or not. It's a black hole. Like you don't have any transparency there and it might be fractional reserve. Yeah, it might be. But what's also what's the case is that once you will be able,

like assuming Mangox is going to enable withdrawals again. I think people are going to withdraw the money as fast as they can. Yeah. Because just the possibility of that being the case, the possibility of not being all the Bitcoin there means that you really want them out as fast as possible. So, I mean, I think in any case, Bangkok is done. Oh yeah, obviously. Yeah, I see no way how they can recall from that.

What was very interesting when BTC China last year stopped the free transactions a lot of traffic went back to Mount Goggs again and I didn't expect that because I saw so many so many other better exchanges out there like Cracken and BitStamp and so on so I don't know what was driving all this people to Mount Cox in crack has no volume though for example that's the thing but it could have like yeah no I mean it's true right there's been these complaints about Mongox for many many months and I've never used my because I always heard, well, you know, you try to get your money out of Mount

Cox, it takes months or weeks, and the price was much higher for Bitcoin, so I never used Mangrox. Why would you? But a lot of people still were, and a year ago, they had a market share of about 70%. I think during the crash in April of last year, it was, they were at almost 70%, and it's been kind of gradually decreasing but even just before this they were at almost 20% so it's still a very significant exchange and a lot of money there actually they're they probably have more money in there that even then was traded because a lot of people were just locked in there and can really

get it out right I think that's a very valuable lesson what just happened to a lot of people that use Bitcoin, we're used to this old trust system, which is based on like, how do you say big players and the bigger they are, the more we trust them, like banks. But now people see that that's actually not true. And if they just go ahead and they trust themselves and their wallet and their backup, that's where they're really like in the best position. What do you think is the future of trading Bitcoin for FIA? What is your take on? Yeah, with all the regulation that is happening, the bust of the guys that traded on local bitcoins in the US. We can probably talk about that.

We'll come back to that later. Yeah. Yeah. I really wish that Bitcoin trading goes more local and goes more into a trusted community model where people know each other and they exchange bitcoins. And nothing of this gets registered on any official like government papers or there won't be tax paid for it or something like that. Let's come back to that.

I just want to touch on one other point regarding this whole story, which was the story that there was a DDoS attack. And I actually, you know, BitSamp also suspended withdrawals last week. And it seems like they mentioned somewhere that this was not the same problem at my cost of my ability thing, but that they would dedeons. Do you know about this? So can you maybe really explain what a DDoS attack is and if you know something about what's been going on?

Sure. No, I don't know anything specific about the situation that BITS. But a DDoS is a distributed denial of service. So what you do there is one node in the internet doesn't have enough bandwidth to attack like a big website that's connected to very strong networks. So what they do is they either go ahead and they use like DNS. server malfunctions where they can like, how do you say, like broadcast messages and those DNS servers attach more data to it and send it ahead.

It's called application, right? Yeah, they amplify the traffic through certain, yeah, they abuse services to amplify the traffic and then they jam the network of where this website is connected to. And this way no one can access it for like an extended period of time. And there are different ways to do that. And I don't know exactly what happened at Bidstam. But what it leads to is that the site is not available for a long period of time. What's actually interesting is that there was a CoinDesk article,

and where they mentioned this, I don't know how, I admit this may be incorrect, but they actually mentioned that this transactional maliability was somehow used to execute the DELS attack. I've no idea how that would work or if that makes any sense. it might be that that that was just a sort of a mistake by the journalists who wrote that. But it's an interesting fault. Yeah, it's an interesting concept to think about that because the traffic in the Bitcoin network is distributed, right? It goes often the nodes have very small bandwidth and they talk to each other only.

They have like trusted nodes they are connected to. So in such a distributed network is really hard to do a DDoS because there's no central authority you can attack and no big bandwidth you can make use of. So unless someone found out which of the nodes and the Bitcoin network below belong to BitStamp itself, I cannot see any way to execute an attack like that. Yeah, that's interesting. Well, what we do know now, maybe just kind of summarized is all. It's like a bit stamp and BTCR life again.

They work normally. Mount Cox, as we mentioned, they are going to announce on tomorrow, what's going on. And so hopefully they'll resume withdrawals again. We don't know if that's going to happen, and we don't know if this is all going to end some terrible disaster where people are going to lose thousands of Bitcoin or whether there will be, I guess, which would be the most fortunate outcome, would be some sort of gradual shutdown of Mount Cox where people can withdraw all their bitcoins and then finally this company disappears from the face of the earth forever for better I think we can all say that that

would be the happy ending of this story everyone would like that I think yeah and then then really what we can hope is that other exchanges step up no there's been a lot of investment over the last six year six months in bitcoin exchanges like millions of dollars of VC money so hopefully we'll have some really high performance reliable exchanges that are trustworthy that are you know honest and that don't mess it all up like and then they offered new ways of doing things so you know yeah exactly and we're waiting to see that what the next way of innovation is around exchanges whether that's some some sort of decentralized exchange or yeah or make them auditable on the blockchain like yeah yeah i think that

I think that is also important. I think that will probably take some time. I think in the near future we need to have maybe like Cracken or in other exchanges that really kind of scale up and provide these professional services also for financial investors or people who do large-scale trading and really provide liquidity because I think that's really important. Do you think it would be interesting to have different products, financial products based on Bitcoin? I think it's important to have derivatives, Bitcoin derivatives, shorting, things like that.

Yeah. But what's important in this context to note is that if you talk about financial derivatives, one reason why they're so dangerous in the sense is that you can get massive amounts of leverage. Because as a hedge fund, they can just borrow, they might have like, let's say they have, have a billion of dollars but they can borrow 50 billion and you know use how all the speculate and then that makes it kind of dangerous but I don't think this problem so much of the derivatives themselves I mean partially but it's mainly a problem of the leverage but I think because Bitcoin you can't do this no one's gonna lend you 50 bitcoins if you you know without so I don't think

you will have the same even if you have Bitcoin derivatives, I don't think they will cause some kind of large crisis. But I think they can be very valuable to provide hedging and to provide some services for merchants and other agents to deal with Bitcoin in a sort of secure way and manage the risk. So I think it will be a valuable thing. I agree. Yeah, so the second story we're going to talk about is a story that, came, reached us from Florida. And what happened there is that two local Bitcoin traders were arrested by, it was the

secret service. I don't know why the secret service goes after local Bitcoin traders. Are you sure is the secret service? Secret service is what? NSA? National service for the president. Okay. So I'm quoting here from the original article was by Brian Krebs.

He has a well-known kind of IT security, a blogger, and he has a blog called Krebs on Security, says from there. So it says, like, working in conjunction with the Miami Beach Police Department and the Miami State Attorney's Office, undercover offices and agents from the U.S. Secret Service, is Miami Electronic Crimes Task Force. Okay.

So what they did is they actually just looked on local Bitcoins, and they looked for traders who do large trades. So on local bitons, you can say, you know, I do between $100 and $1,000 or something like that. And then some say, you know, $10,000 or $30,000 or yeah, something, 100,000. So very large cash transactions. So they look for people like that and they contacted them and they made up with them. And supposedly they told them. them at least that wasn't a different article they mentioned that they told them they were going

to buy a stolen credit cards with the bitcoins they buy and then they arrested those guys so there was two guys arrested that way and uh i i think it's um of course it's a small story in a sense it's just two guys but i think it's an important story because it hints at a lot of yeah things that may be coming in the future yeah i was always thinking uh buying and selling on local bitcoins, I would be off the grid. I would not leave a trace anywhere and I would be able to get my Bitcoin's like. That's quite hard though. It's especially hard if you want to build a reputation.

And it's, I guess it depends too. But, you know, people would often send their phone numbers, for example, hey, I'm there, you know, call me if you can't find me. So those things will be on the local Bitcoin servers. You know, they'll have lots of that. Plus people also use local bitcoins to do bank-wide transfers. Local Bitcoin has an escrow service for that. In this case, too, local Bitcoin's going to have information on bank accounts.

Yeah, but when you talked about reputation, like there's other ways of building reputation. You know, if, for instance, you go to, I don't know, maybe you're a regular at Room 77 and you know that this guy is selling Bitcoin and he's reputable. like you know word or mouth can you can also build reputation on word or mouth but the thing is that's very inefficient no yeah it doesn't scale that well right maybe just because of that because you actually have to come to a you know a very like a smaller model for trading bitcoins that you were talking about this before well let's let's stick with this briefly and kind of just take a step back and it's like what does this mean like is this something that's going to happen on a large scale to local

against traders does this have a kind of repercussions for person-to-person trading or is it's just a one-off Florida thing that some some oversellers agents there well I think first of all if someone is telling you that they're gonna buy drugs or they're gonna buy stolen credit cards or they're gonna do anything illegal when they're buying your bitcoins I think that's a pretty good red flag that there's something weird going on like I mean I mean, just think about it for a second. Why would anybody, in the right mind,

to be telling you this, whether they're a federal agent or not? And secondly, I think if you're doing, I think as a seller on local Bitcoin, I don't know, I mean, once you start doing large transactions, you become vulnerable. And perhaps local Bitcoin is not a place you should be doing large transactions and we should just keep it at small transactions. Yeah, or just spread it out. You could have many small transactions and then those guys could

not capture you for one big trade, right? Yeah. So with the product I'm building, we're kind of tackling the same problem, right? We bringing Bitcoin with 37 coins, which is an SMS Bitcoin wallet, we try to bring Bitcoin to people that are not on the internet that are not connected to the blockchain. So using just SMS in the most remote area of the world, if you have a signal, you can still use Bitcoin. But how do you actually exchange those for Viot? That's the issue. And we have a build-in like buy and sell command, which does something very similar to local bitcoins. It kind of makes buyer and sell or find each other in an area and then execute the trade. So let's just assume like Bitcoin would be illegal like in Thailand or in Russia. Would people

still be using a solution like that or local bitcoins and how would they go about making this be really secure for themselves that's a great question so in your service what you're building are you using reputation we don't have reputation yet because we actually the trade happens of the system they just use the system to find each other but we don't know if they did one trade or zero trade so because of course the issue is if you meet someone in person and you're going to give them five thousand dollars to get some bitcoin so that's a very vulnerable thing to do you know you know you're going to go somewhere the other person knows someone's going to show up with five thousand dollars in cash or whatever the amount is of course that makes it very vulnerable to be robbed

on the other hand something you know the other person knows that that person's going to show up with x amount of bitcoins on their mobile phone yeah yeah exactly but that's why of course local bitcoins builds in reputation so you said you've done more trades you've done higher volumes of trade, I trust you more. You have reviews. And this kind of goes in both ways. It quite obviously increases the security of the transactions. But the issue here is not that local bitcoins per se is illegal.

The problem is that once you do very large transactions, and once you do lots of them, then you start basically being a money services business, and then it's illegal. So you have this real conflict between you. reputation where you want to have more transactions once you have higher transactions, want them visible and you kind of legal safety and protection from law enforcement where you rather not have any reputation. In this case allegedly in Florida it's once you start doing you start doing more

than $300 per year or something like this is something that red but I yeah it seems like too low but yeah there are some limits limits us to the amount of money that you can transact as an individual. And this is another issue because it's different in every state and country. And this is not known by most people. I mean, maybe in Germany you've got a similar type of law, which is one of these laws that everybody breaks. Yeah, so in Germany, I mean, I think you will have to identify people

if you above a certain amount. I think it's either 10 or 15,000 euros. So that's one thing. thing so that's the money laundering thing and then the other thing is whether you're providing a financial service or whether you do this in a sort of as a business then you also have to get ridges etc and that's sort of open to interpretation by the authorities is not very clear but people have gotten in trouble for that people have had to take lawyers they've gotten letters etc so this certainly happens

so local bitcoins i think was asked in a press interview if they do anything about this about local regulations and how they try to follow them and they said they're just a small team you know this company is so young and it's just a few guys somewhere up in the Nordics and they... Finland

yeah and they have like more than 160 countries I think where their services used so can they comply with all those regulations know what they say is like we expect the people on the platform to know about that and comply with their local regulations themselves

that's yeah but I think actually local bitcoins could help them so as you mentioned they kind of show the amount of the transaction that has been done before so if they would know that this amount exceeds what is allowed in the local regulatory environment then they would kind of how do you say make that invisible and just say it's more than so much and i think that would actually protect the users from authorities or from anyone who wants to like yeah I think there's a conflict there though you know local bitcoins they're not going to want to be in conflict with the let's say US authorities for example so I I think I saw that they were also asked by CoinDesk I think it was

you know what are you going to do about this and I do think that they said they want to make sure that people are more compliant with local regulations so you know one thing they could do is limit the trade amounts or what they might do. I mean, it wouldn't surprise me at all in the future is if they require people to do, you know, upload their ID. KYC? KYC, yeah. I mean, I think that's not unlikely.

That's going to happen. And maybe what you have is that something like local bitcoins is going to move more underground. Maybe you'll have a tour version of local bitcoins. That's going to be really anonymous. But then you will still have the same issue that you might have undercover. so that you know, portray that and try to get people that way. Exactly. So the holy grail of what BitConners are talking about is kind of a distributed exchange, right?

That would be awesome if we kind of could get to that model. But yeah, there's somehow no one who tries to attack that. Could you imagine that happening? And if so, how would that look like? Um, have you heard about the ripple model where people set up those gateways or what is it? Just wait, maybe you can talk briefly how it works. So, ripple is a kind of system where, how do you say, you extend trust to certain people,

you extend trust to your friend of like $100. And then he can use this trust. He can borrow $100 from you. And he himself has extended trust to other people in the network. And trust ripples through the network. That's why they call it Ripple. And actually, your trust into your friend could be paid through another, like, connection in the network.

So the only rule that there is in the Ripple network is when you, you always have to accept your own kind of trust back. So if that kind of comes back to you through another channel, like you would pay out. But Ripple ultimately builds on trust, as I mentioned. So it is not like Bitcoin in the way that's completely trust. and you know you can be secure that you get your money back it can happen that your friend defaults and then you're out of the money that's it um so like there is no i think there is no good solution out there to build this distributed exchange thing that would work completely without trust but

torr is a very good idea to have a kind of a system running where people find each other that's really the issue of finding the buyer or the seller and then how can you model and uh a physical exchange where you don't have the counterparty risk of him being an agent or something. Absolutely. Hided under a stone and use as crow. I think the issue is you have a really fundamental conflict between sort of the need for security, which is really well-fulfilled with reputation and a reputational system. And this, I would say resilience against government.

attacks and against regulations etc which can attack exactly that reputation system I like that you use the word attack because that's exactly what it is an attack on our privacy and freedom yeah you know we think about like let's say Florida etc the US you can I think that's the beginning because if we see in the future let's say Bitcoin's become really important or we take a country like Argentina where there is a strong need at the time because a strong capital controls and there's high inflation. There's a strong need for people to have an alternative. So if you see in the future that there is a widespread adoption of Bitcoin and that really does threaten the existing monetary system, the existing kind of, you know, tax base of the country

and how they can support what they're doing, then you might see real aggressive attacks against Bitcoin, you know, much worse than this. You might have people go to jail, you might have people, you know, get into really serious trouble for just providing this kind of service that this trade is through in local Bitcoins. You know what this reminds me of? Buying and selling drugs. Think about it. We were talking about this a while, you know, so we want to bring it to a smaller scale

where you have this system of trust. It's the same thing. Like, if you want to buy weed, okay, for instance. We all know that from high school. You have to know a guy. Who knows a guy? And then he's going to trust you that, you know, you're not a federal agent. And you've got to trust that, you know, he's not going to try to screw you or sell you shit, you know.

Yeah. And that, you know, you build a relationship of trust with this person. And eventually you get to share his number. And this is, when I think about this, it's exactly the same thing. I mean, yeah. But that doesn't scale, right? That doesn't scale very well. You have to have, you know, very many small people like on the ground, you know.

Yeah, it doesn't scale. And it's also risky. It is risky. Is it risky, really? Because it's working very well. I remember my neighbor who always used to sell me weed and it worked really well for years. What's wrong with that? Maybe we should go back from these economies of scale and try to live the small world phenomenon

again where kind of everyone knows each other and things are like money is based on this kind of concept. Yeah, I agree with you on this. I mean, I think this is the, I mean, this can extend outside of money and Bitcoin and whatever. It's what a lot of people are trying to do with food, for instance, and agriculture, bring it to a smaller local level. Maybe this globalization model that we have doesn't really work. And if we bring things down to a more local, small level, we can rebuild these relationships of trust with people, where people are dealing together.

And a lot of communities are doing this, too. You've got a lot of communities in Europe and the U.S. that are creating their own money, you know, and keeping it within the community. Yeah, I think what I think is very important in this context is that I think there will be a really big difference in the near future between how countries approach Bitcoin. Some will be very restrictive and some will be very open. And, you know, in the U.S., for example, you have Coinbase.

You have things like Coinbase especially makes it convenient to buy it. And now let's say you have coin waste and you have like things where you can buy it the kiosk, the grocery store, etc. Loads of different options of buying bitcoins and they're smooth. So people can easily move into Bitcoin etc. And let's say it's relatively relaxed and tolerant. Now you may still want to have something like local bitcoins if you absolutely want to stay anonymous. But for most people it's not going to be an issue.

But then if you have other things, Then if you have other countries where perhaps there's a really strong need to use Bitcoin because the either monetary system is really messed up or because for political reasons you're being pursued, etc. And their systems like local Bitcoins will be very crucial because they're resilient because they can't be shut down easily. And there this is a real threat, I think. Can they not be shut down easily because it's just one single IP you need to block on your

let's say Chinese firewall or something like that? And there is no local bitcoins in your country. country anymore yeah but you could move something I got to Tor and then that would be awesome but there is no widely adopted application like that yet right that's like it be a market niche I'll try to build that tomorrow I think I think there will be if you know I mean I think as soon as someone will do that that they say like okay local bitcoins is blocked in this country someone will build it on Tor and it will move there so it's just people for those are not familiar tour is it's

kind of a network of internet routers and nodes that allows you to serve the internet anonymously, but it also allows you to put on websites that are hidden. So those can be shut down because it's impossible to find the server. Yeah, hidden services, right. So that's what's the world used. And that's certainly something that we might see with a series like local bitcoins in the future, if there are countries that attack it very aggressively. Yeah.

Yeah. But the problem is that, you know, Tor is very inaccessible to the layperson for now. That's true on the web. But think about applications that, like mobile applications that have this stuff build in. Like, for example, 37 coins soon. You just, with a press of a button, you're there because it knows which hidden service to access with a, like,

certificate and stuff like that. And it builds a tunnel when you start the app. So can you briefly talk about that? With 37 coins, you're going to use Tor? How exactly are you going to do that? There is a similar network like Tor. So Tor is a kind of HTTP request response model where you can't do very interesting things. But there is a network which is called I2P, which is much more suitable for hidden services

where you have like standing connection, a TCP socket, for example. So if you want to have fast responses, you want to not only like request something from a website, but you want to have data sent from the hidden server to yourself. Then you use ITP and it allows you to kind of have to be anonymous in the way that there are many parties in between and all the data on the way is encrypted multiple times. And then the idea to use this with 37 coins is to make sure that we're kind of censorship resistant to those countries that don't want us. So is that the reason why you made that design,

decision when it comes to 37 coins is it exactly the kind of thing we talk about now where people move against as i'm gonna go to bitcoin's okay here they did on the user level but they could also do it on an application level so that's is that the reason why you chose this i2 p protocol yeah exactly because i want to be sure that people keep their money in this so it's important that it continues working no matter what the government decides yeah and if we built the um built the hidden service into it right from the beginning, then we can be sure that there will be not a moment when someone puts our IP on a filter list and suddenly all the people cannot use the wallets anymore. That's extremely interesting.

Are you aware of any other Bitcoin service that does something similar? Only to all the alternatives of Silk Road where you can buy stuff online. But that's in Tor. I haven't heard of any service that uses I2P yet for Bitcoin related things. That's extremely interesting. I mean, we talked about 37 coins a few before at the conference, and we'll be releasing an interview on that. But I wasn't quite aware that you were doing it this way.

Yeah, yeah, that's the whole thing is to make it censorship resistance so we can bring it to countries like Cuba, North Korea, or whatever you can think about. Cool. They need to get internet in North Korea before they get traded Bitcoin. There's a thing, though. There is an area of the border between China and North Korea where you have Chinese internet,

but North Korean like mobile network. Right. And that's where we could set up the gateway. We talked about like the legality of all of this in different places. I wanted to talk about just a website. Someone told me about it, the conference. It's called bitlegal.io. And it's really cool because you get to click on the map.

You've got like kind of a heat map and you get to see Bitcoin, how Bitcoin is. It's bitlegal.net. Dot net? Yeah. Yeah. I thought. Anyway, Bit legal on Google. And so you get this heat map that shows from like red to green how, well, if Bitcoin is either legal or accepted or so in different countries.

And then you have this kind of detailed view of the laws and regulation that's in place. And maybe they need to get into this kind of local Bitcoin stuff and explain, you know, what are your rights and what, whether the red is. in your country if you're buying it. If you use such a services, you know, like these $300 limit kind of things where nobody knows about it. Yeah, the thing is with these things, it's all very hard to know and often it's not quite clear. You know, you might be fine. You might think you're fine. You know, I mean, I know in Germany, for example, there's a question, are you operating as a, you know, are you trading Bitcoin commercially or not? And there's no clear, there's no clear line.

Yeah. Even with eBay, we had this discussion for like five or ten years in Germany, like Airbnb. Yeah. It's not clear, right? I don't know, like governments have two monopolies. There's the violence they have. They execute with police and military. And there's the money monopoly they have with their local currency.

And we're taking away like 50% of their power when we take away the money. And not all of them will just let it go. some will fight back. But then who was it? Gundy said, like, first they ignore you, then they laugh about you, then they fight you, then you win. Good that we're already at this stage. We're fighting already.

That's, I think that's a good note to end on. But do we have something else to talk about? Did you want to maybe talk about 37 coin? Take the image. Yeah. Yeah, I'll just introduce it briefly. So 37 coins is your global SMS Bitcoin wallet. You can send and receive with 37 coins, Bitcoin is simply as just sending text messages.

And 37 coins is built on a gateway model. The gateway is just an application someone needs to install on a smartphone, on an Android phone, for example. And the phone number of this Android phone becomes a gateway for every other one in the country or on the same network to send text messages to it and then it gets a Bitcoin wallet open. as a response. So literally to provide Bitcoin wallets to one country, you need an old Android phone which is worth $30 and you need to install the app and bring it somewhere where there's internet. And the idea is that those people that run the gateway, it's like a business for them. They earn transaction fees. They can set a transaction fee for everyone who uses their gateway

to send and receive Bitcoins. And they have further incentives, for example, offering Fiat exchange, to new customers and something like that and so those incentives are meant to kind of spread the service to bring it to new countries and to new locations yeah so it's and who needs this service specifically those people that live in a remote area where there is no internet connection and I think the biggest market is actually there where people are unbanked because even though our banks are not efficient they're good enough so we don't people in like US and European Union they often ask why do we need Bitcoin because we have banks already but those people that live somewhere in

the remote areas and they have to walk for like half a day to get to receive a money their husband who works abroad sent to them they really see the need for that and they don't ask why they just ask how how can I use this stuff and I can like receive stuff conveniently and pay conveniently and This is what we try to achieve. So can anybody make a wallet that way and try it out? Yeah, so just have a look at the website and there is a big input field and put in your phone number and it will open a wallet for you right away.

And if there is no gateway in your country, it will tell you how to set up a gateway in your country. You can be the first one. So the wallets are, can you tell us about some of the security aspects of this, where the wallets are stored, the security keys or? security keys or so obviously this is for brick phones for like feature phones that have no computational ability whatsoever in terms of you cannot install an app on there to do anything so we cannot keep the private keys on there the challenge was kind of to model this in the way that it's still secure and that it's not a hosted wallet I really don't want to write a hostage wallet for people and then

they get their keys stolen just because I got hacked or something like that so all the funds are stored in multi-signature addresses and there is a shared responsibility model between the gateway and what we call the voice PIN service. The voice PIN service is not distributed like the Gateway but it's a central service that validates every transaction by calling the customer reading the transaction to him and asking for a PIN. A PIN is something that the customer keeps in his head in his memory and the phone is something the customer needs to own so there are two factors to verify the transaction. The phone something you

have and the PIN something you know. And that's the security of the systems build up. Cool. And when are you releasing this? It's online already since the end of December. And we have about 10 countries where gateways are operated. And in those countries and between all those countries, you can send Bitcoins to anyone who has a phone number really. It will open a wallet for them right away.

And the vision I have with this system is that Bitcoin adoption is kind of now where they're elite with people that know about it and that have money anyway but wouldn't it be great to bring bitcoin not have it have a trickle down society and then finally reach those regions in africa or somewhere in south america where people desperately need it but go the other way and kind of enable those people that don't have a bank yet and like have it adopted by the other six billion people before we in the west where we have banks anyway no that's get to get to get to use it yeah that's a really cool vision and I think we'll maybe you can talk with you again in about 37 coins and kind of where it's going and let's say two months or

something we hear like how that's been progressing now it would be very happy yeah yeah okay well yeah thanks very much for coming on and it was really great having you and having your perspective thanks guys it's great to do this I don't know how we're gonna go back to Skype after this yeah this is so much cooler yeah so uh Of course, we would invite you to follow us on Twitter at Epicenter BTC if you haven't already been following the conference coverage. And, well, we're going to try to do some more conferences this year, I think. There's quite a few conferences in Europe. So we'll definitely be covering a lot of those conferences.

And who knows, maybe even conferences in the U.S. or Asia or Australia. On the moon. On the moon. Yeah, to the moon. So thanks again, Yohan, for doing this with us and being our first guest. Cool. Thank you very much, guys. Yeah, and if you want to sign up for a newsletter, we write a newsletter very Friday. And some of the latest news and developments in the Bitcoin world, what they mean.

So you can sign up for it on EpiccentreBitcoin.com slash newsletter. And also if you want to tip us, we're at epcenterbitcoin.com slash tips. And we've got the Bitcoin address, like-coin address and a doge corn address so send us your doge coin all right thanks and I'll see you next we see you next time