Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - The One-Man Protest

Episode Date: February 9, 2014

Topics covered in this episode: Apple banning Blockchain.info’s iPhone app The breakdown and looming death of MtGox Auroracoin: A new and innovative Icelandic cryptocurrency BitWall’s paywall experiment with the Chicago Sun Times BitTag: A cool bitcoin price tag This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/006

Hi there, today's February 9th, 2014, and this is Epicenter Bitcoin, episode 6. The one-man protest. On today's show, we're talking about how Apple kicked off the last Bitcoin wallet, blockchained info from the iPhone. We're talking about the breakdown and likely end of the once leading Bitcoin exchange, Mount Cox. We're also talking about Aurora Coin, a super interesting and novel cryptic. currency from Iceland. We'll cover the successful Bitcoin paywall experiment of the Chicago Sun Times and Bitwall. And finally, the first Bitcoin price tag. 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 episode six of the Epicenter Bitcoin podcast, your show about the latest news and developments in the Bitcoin world. I'm Brian Fabian Crane, a Berlin-based entrepreneur, the founder of the Bitcoin Startup Spelling Group. And I'm Sebastian Nkut. I'm a Canadian user experience designer and developer and based in Lille, France, and also the founder of the Lil Bitcoin Talks meetup. Yeah, you had the first meetup this week, no?

Yeah, it was awesome. It was really great. So we had about an attendance of 20 people. Like I said, in the last episode, we had a lot of 20 people. at the meet up at a bar called La Machine and there, I think, I mean, from what I can see, the only the only place in town that accepts Bitcoin, so they were glad to accept us and to host the event. And so we had, like I said, about 20 people that came. And I had contacted an academic. He's a math professor at one of the universities here in Lille and he had wrote quite extensively about

Bitcoin, but from a very academic point of view, like he wrote quite a few articles in science magazines, and he's got like a 50-page paper where he dissects the whole thing. So I had... Oh, really? Is it in French? It's in French, yeah. And he had given about a one and a half or two-hour presentation at the university, I think it was last week or the week before, about Bitcoin to his students. So I was lucky. enough to have him attend the meetup and he had agreed to give a talk. So he gave a talk of about probably about 40 minutes where he just kind of explains Bitcoin from every angle, but from a very academic perspective. So it was kind of interesting for him to, and being a mathematician,

he's very interested in a cryptographic aspect of Bitcoin. So it was kind of interesting. And then I gave a talk, I gave a 15, 20,000. minute talk just kind of off the cuff off top of my head where I outlined four of the nine predictions we gave in our predictions episode. Cool. Which ones do you choose? So I chose the ones that I find are I guess the mass majority of people would kind of associate to more like the ones that we'll see happen kind of in the media and so. So I spoke about remittance, uh, uh, Bitcoin payments. Yeah.

I spoke about, uh, buying and purchasing, buying and selling Bitcoin. So, um, like exchanges and how exchanges are going to evolve, uh, Bitcoin ATMs and all that stuff. Uh, I, I spoke about remittances and regulation. Cool. Yeah. Well, that sounds like a great meeting. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's great you had 20 people at the, the first time. That's fantastic. Yeah. I got to say I was helped out.

I got a bit of a bit of a publicity push by a few well-known people here in the tech web community who tweeted about it. And there was a tech conference here two weeks ago, and they tweeted about it. I got some online marketing support from a few notable members of the community. So that was kind of interesting and kind of fun to have them involved. and that as well. So yeah, it was a great meetup. And now I'm just excited about having another one next month and already thinking of talks and things like that.

Cool. Awesome. Yeah, we have the next meetup coming up on Tuesday as well. And we have some great talks. And also, one thing I'm really excited about, there's a guy called Onyx Ashanti. and he's an artist, he does music, and he prints these 3D instruments. So they take body sensors.

So let's say he has like a transcranial or EECD and things like that. So basically take brainwaves and other things. And then he makes music basically with his body. So it's really cool and crazy. He gave it presentation of this at TED. There's a very popular TED Talk is like half a million views or something. And he's super interested in Bitcoin. Oh, okay.

And he, I was wondering, how does that tie in the Bitcoin? What does the Bitcoin come in? There's a few things. So one, he only accepts Bitcoin for his work now. Okay. And he's interested in, so he basically wants to do. a kind of performance that integrates a blockchain. So he tried to explain it to me.

And I find it kind of hard to follow, but he's going to do that next week. Are you going to be filming this? I think we might. Yeah, I think we should. Yeah, you have to. Yeah, you have to. And then we got to put it up on the website.

Yeah, I actually bought a camera for the last meet up, but then we just didn't, well, it's hard to a good sound out there as well and we didn't have time to edit it so but yeah i think this this one we definitely have to cool yeah and i'll be seeing you for drinks afterwards yeah we'll be going so another person who's giving a talk is a york plato he's um he's very well known in the big country have he heard of him i think so yeah so he's the founder of um of room 77 which is yeah i think the oldest place to accept Bitcoin like since 2011. And he'll give a talk and we'll go to his,

his restaurant bar afterwards. So it'll be cool. And they just got their first Bitcoin ATM. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I was there on, that was the last Thursday. Actually, I think they set it up on Wednesday evening. But like Thursday was the once a month there's a meet up there. People just meet for drinks and there was a Lama Su. So the first one in Germany. which is and it's so nice it's just amazing to use that machine so how how easy is it to use and

you know because we spoke about some of the problem i mean difficulties with using machines and having to identify yourself like how does it work yeah well so it's extremely easy to use so you just go there you press you want to buy bitcoin's then they have a scanner you hold the QR code of your wallet address, and then it gets the others, and then you put in money and you confirm, and that's it. It's super smooth.

Yeah, but I will, the identification thing, so I would put it like this. It's operated, this machine in room 77, it's operated in this kind of legal gray zone. So it's not clear whether this is actually, you know,

it's not clear that they will be able to continue like this or whether at one point they will have to. identify people, etc. And at that point, it would get a lot more complicated. But in its basic use case, it's just super nice and super smooth. So you're really cool. You can also sell Bitcoin for Fiat or? No, no, it's just buying.

Cool. And it's a really, I mean, you'll see it on next Tuesday. Yeah, I don't buy Bitcoin from it. Yeah, yeah. It's a really well-designed, a beautiful machine interface. It's really nice. So it's, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, joy really cool I'm really they they have for the yeah for the user experience of

side of it too you know yeah the user experience is great I mean I I I because I looked into this in detail so you know look at robocoyne and talk with them and you know the robocon immediately is an ugly machine but lawmuse is not it's just it's very nice very well done and the interesting thing is that they're so they're not operating this for profit. This actually belongs to some guy in Belgium. He put it there. And the idea is that anyone can put their own

bitcoins on there and they'll be sold. And then you can kind of go there and collect your money. Oh, sort of like a local Bitcoin through a Bitcoin at ATM. Yeah, something like that. I mean, I think they're also doing that for legal reasons. So because otherwise they will have issues of being like a money transmitted type thing, our financial service business.

So it's interesting. But it also means there's no transaction fee. There's no charge. I think they just take the exchange price. That's really good. Although they, when I was there last Thursday, they do just take the exchange test, but it was Mount Gogh price.

So it was so expensive. Yeah. I was happy. I was also kind of excited at my meetup because it was the first time I spent Bitcoin for, physical products like I've bought with Bitcoin but this is the first time where I actually

went and did a Bitcoin transactions I bought my beer with a Bitcoin and so that was pretty cool and oh yeah we also had a a journalist come and he's doing a whole a whole bunch of stories on Bitcoin for the Gazette du not which is kind of like the newspaper of the

department of the north of France and so he came and he He had already interviewed the professor who gave the talk. And so he interviewed me about doing the meetup. And he interviewed also the owner of the bar who accepts the Bitcoin. So I think we're going to have an article. Well, we are going to have a few articles in the, in the Gazette here. It's going to be kind of cool.

That's cool. Yeah, I also interviewed. I also had an interview with some journalists on last Thursday. So I think there's been an article there too in a newspaper from here from Berlin. He was actually, it was nice because he was a very, he actually. really understood Bitcoin, was very excited about it because, you know, you have a lot of journalists that come from just kind of remove perspectives, like, what is this? Or it's just to write a story.

But this guy was really, really interested in it. And that's great. Yeah. Good. Should we get started with our topics? We have a lot of cover this week. Yeah, we've got a lot of stories this week. I mean, obviously the blockchain.

Dot info story, Mount Gok also. and everything that's been going on there. So it's going to do it. Should we start with Blockchain. Info? Yeah. So Blockchain. Dot info was removed from the App Store, effective February 6th.

And so their app was in the app store for the last two years, and they had over 120,000 downloads. The wallet app was effectively a wallet, although I have the, I have the, I have the blockchain.Infoam app on my phone. And it seems to just pull the information from the website. Yeah, that's right. I don't think that... It doesn't store the private keys there. Right.

And I don't think that it, unlike some of the other clients, it doesn't synchronize with the blockchain. All the transactions happen on their side. I think it's just a client-facing app. So this is in contrast to perhaps some of the other apps that have been removed from the App Store prior. This is where it kind of, I think, well, it surprised me anyway that they had removed it. But I mean, Apple's removed other Bitcoin apps before like CoinJar or Coinbase and also.

I think in terms of functioning, that's similar to Coinbase. Yeah, yeah. Coinbase worked kind of the same way. It was also, you know, a native access to the web. Yeah. But also there was Glyph. I think Glyph actually had a wallet. Did it not?

No, no. They used Coinbase. They used Coinbase. Okay. Yeah. So they removed the app on February 6th. And obviously there's been a lot of uproar about this. Blockchain responded in a series of posts on its blog over at blog.combochon.info.

And the media has been all over. Like if you go on their blog, they've got an article there from the 7th that just lists all. of the newspapers and, you know, publications that have written about it. So there's lots of ink that's been spilled about this. So what their response is that, you know, this is this is Apple using its, uh,

its power to, um, well, to dictate, you know, what, what goes and doesn't go in their app store and there are several reasons why they may have chosen to do this and we'll go into that,

uh, in just a few minutes. And now, so blockchain is working on a HTML, 5 wallet, which is essentially, you know, for the non-technical, uh, listener, um, it's, it's a website that you go to on your iPhone. So you go into Safari and you, you go into a website. And then you can bookmark it. And when you bookmark it, you bookmark it to your, to your home screen. And that allows you to use it as though it was an app. So it kind of looks and

feels like an app. It, it's using your internet connection to, to get the information, much like the blockchain while it was in the first place, but it's actually using HTML5 technology and not native development. Now, this has some drawbacks. Like, there are certain things that you can't do. For instance, for the time being, I don't think you can use a camera in an HTML5 app that Well, actually, there's, have you heard of Coinpunk? No.

So CoinPunk is a project that, that was actually before Apple shutout, blockchain. dot info app so it's been going for a while they have an indigogo campaign so crowdfunding campaign and they're working on an hml 5 wallet the bitcoin wallet exactly for the idea is exactly for the iphone and uh they do have a QR code scanner okay so it's i think it should be out soon i mean i think they've been working on it for a while they've raised like a you know a decent amount of money a few thousand five thousand dollars or something yeah the ability to read a QR, well, to use a camera on an HTML5 website is dependent on the HTML5 specification. And that's fairly new.

Like so if Safari supports that, it's, it's very new. And it may still be in beta and not all browsers support it. So, but if Safari does support it and that in that case, in fact, an HTML5 wallet would be able to use the camera. Yeah. I think there's a, there's ease, or supposedly at least. Okay. There's a video of him on the website where he goes to this subway, some subway in Pennsylvania. And I think they have kind of a working prototype and he uses it and buys a subway with this.

Cool. So like I was saying, so there's a petition that that's up on change.org. It doesn't have very many signatures. It only has about 5,000. But the response to this has been just huge, not only in the media, but also from iPhone users that use Bitcoin. So there was a Reddit post, I think it was just after this, where somebody said, for everybody who records themselves, you know, does it. it was for here he made a post and he said for every hundred upboats this post gets i'm going to give one nexus five to someone who destroys their iPhone five and posts a video yeah so so then lots of

people were following that you know there's some guy who drives out in a desert with his like long-range gun and shoots it numerous times some other guy with a machete like goes down or with various tools they destroy their iPhones i just was like uh he's he's huge he's he turns the camera to himself but he's just this guy with a big beard he's got a cigarette in his mouth and he's like it just looks like he's going to put a hit on someone

yeah I know so actually the guy the guy who shoots it he also looks kind of scary with his mouth has gone there and so they gave out how many six I think five or six

yeah six I think he gave out yeah I feel bad for the six guy who distorted his iPhone but didn't get out next is five Yeah. So, yeah, well, I mean, this is the, this is where, you know, the questions, how would this affect, I guess, phone sales, I mean, not phone sales, but, you know, all these people that have been using, that use iPhone and want to use Bitcoin, they're going to be moving to Android. I mean, we've seen a lot of people move to Android.

In fact, even in one of the block posts from blockchain, they said that this was, you know, right after Apple removed. the iPhone app, the Android downloads went up significantly. So, yeah, but I mean, if you look at the iPhone sales, I really doubt this is happening in a magnitude where they care about it. Oh, yeah, no, absolutely. But I'm just saying, I think that we're going to see a lot of Bitcoin users move to Android. Yeah, I mean, I have an iPhone and. Yeah, how do you, how do you spend your Bitcoin? then well so i so it is often as annoying i do have the coinbase wallet because you know once you

have the wallet they they they don't remove it and coinbase wallet i mean for those who remember it was in the app store for about a month in november and so i downloaded it then and it still works so I can use that but you know I wouldn't be able to update it and maybe I'll stop working at some point it's possible or if I let's say I upgrade operating system or something like that then they will break and for I'm for me it certainly like if my if my iPhone would break now I would buy an Android and if by the time I have to you know sort of want to the next phone they haven't reversed their stance on this I will definitely be. be moving to Android.

So, yeah. Yeah. I use an Android, like I've got a Nexus 5. And yeah, I mean, there's a, there's a block. There's the official Bitcoin app. I've got blockchain. I've got feather coin, dose corn, light coin, you know. And I'm sure there's more.

So, uh, I've also got these cool little, uh, ticker widgets on my home screen. So I can see the Bitcoin prices. Well, you have those on the iPhone too. Oh, yeah. They don't. They only, they only, they only, they only banned. wallet so Bitcoin information apps, tickers,

all those things, charts, you do have those. Like there's a app called zero block and then you know it that's really nice. They were actually bought by blockchain. Okay. Info. And they have really nice charts and things. So that is there, but the wallets, so really

what you want to do, use Bitcoin, that unfortunately is, yeah, it's going to be difficult. So let's just kind of go into maybe some of the reasons why Apple's doing this. I think there's two kind of main reasons. One is that they want to, because of the uncertainty,

the legal uncertainty surrounding Bitcoin right now and in different countries, and because they have such a foothold in so many different countries, and there's terms of service that are kind of, that are global terms of service, they want to limit their legal risks. I don't buy that. I honestly don't buy that.

I think, I think it's a legitimate thing because, you know, for Apple to get into, well, to have Bitcoin wallets on their, on, on, on, what's the risk there? So let's say they say, okay, we'll allow it. And then in some countries, there will be like, no, this is illegal. You need to get rid of it. I mean, then they could always say, okay, you know, we'll ban it in Turkey or wherever. This is, will be zero problem for them. And it's not like anybody will come to them. And nothing bad would happen. Yeah, but you got to remember, Apple's very conservative in their decisions, right?

So, uh, and if, if for them, they see that there's a, there may be some risk or that it gets them in some sort of legal gray zone and that they don't see the advantage, you know, the, the financial advantage or whatever to, to get into it. And, you know, that really outweigh, you know, the legal risk really outweighs. I just don't believe there's a legal risk there. No. I mean, just look at that. Android. They allow all kinds of Bitcoin apps and where's the legalist there? I mean, where's the legalist for Google?

I don't see it. And of course, I mean, the app store does have different apps available in different countries. So they could totally make it available. And then if a certain country goes to them and says, you can't allow this, Bitcoin is illegal or Bitcoin wallets are illegal here, they could remove them. This would be no problem. And I don't think any government.

government would even have a problem with that, you know, if upon request, Apple would remove them. I mean, that would be a very conservative thing to do. And I really don't believe that would cause any danger for them or any legal risks. There was an interesting interview on, on, on let's talk Bitcoin by the founder of Glyph. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah. Yeah, and he, I'd like to find it so that we can maybe go over it. There was an interesting thing, as he said, is that if your app gets removed from the app store for whatever reason, it's up for you as an app developer to prove that it's not illegal in all countries where Apple operates or something of the sort.

Yeah, it's just absurd. Yeah, no, no, I remember. Yeah, so something like actually they did, blockchain or the info did ask, you know, what's, why is this? And then they were being like really vague and it's like, you know, in some jurisdiction this may not be legal. And then he was like, well, in what jurisdiction? Where is what about it not legal?

And then their response was, well, that's for you to figure out. Which is of course absurd. Yeah. So. Yeah. No, it's, I mean, it is. shame what they're doing and what's what are your thoughts on the idea that or the theory that they're doing this because they're planning their own payment system and they're planning to implement

mobile payments soon so they basically want to eliminate competition well above above and beyond that whether or not they're going to be implementing payments is one thing but i mean you got to know you you have to realize that for the time being there there are in-app payments in Apple apps, you know, you can have an app payments in your app and they get 30% off of that. So if you can bypass that by using Bitcoin, they're using that. They're losing that 30% margin. No, no, but they could still, they could block that functionality. I mean, they could totally block that now and still allow Bitcoin wallets.

I don't know how they could block that really. I mean. But what about, um, the Play Store? an Android. I mean, Google gets a share of the sales, no? That's true, yeah. And don't they get share of in-app sales revenues as well? Yeah, but they're not as, they're not as strict as Apple in terms of what you can

and can't do when it comes to in-app purchases. For instance, in Apple, Apple will be very strict against implementing back. doors, like, I'll give you an example, like, for example, the Kindle app in, in, in, in, in the Apple store, if you want to buy, if you want to buy, um, a book, you've got to go to the Amazon website and purchase your book. You can't even have a link to the Amazon website in the app. Like, they have to explain to you. You've got to open up Safari and it, right? On the other hand, Android, if I'm Google and Android are not as strict on this. So this is where there's a line, right? So Apple will say this, you know, even if somebody uses Bitcoin for in-app purchases or, I don't know, purchasing content or what have you, that's in strict violation of what they allow where I think Google might, I mean, I haven't read the terms of service for Apple or Google.

I mean, I think it should be able to, you know, I think. I think they should be able to prevent that if they wanted to and still allow Bitcoin Wallets. I don't see why. It would be difficult. And I'll explain to you why. Because a lot of apps, I mean, a lot. There are some apps that are not native apps in the sense that they're native apps,

but they pull content from the internet. They're essentially a wrapper for a website. So for instance, you might have a newspaper. that has a website, that has an app, and their app is just a container for the website. So whatever content gets brought in is not native in the app. So there's really not a lot of ways Apple can vet that before they approve it, I think. But they could tell, I mean, they could remove the app if something like that happens. Oh, yeah, sure.

And then if they, let's say they ban the app, I mean, that's an extremely threatening outcome to an app. But you got to think this is just more work for them, right? So they don't want to, I don't think they want to lose time. I think they'd rather just outright ban Bitcoin from being, you know, for whether, whether it's wallets, whether it's, whether it's, whether it's, whether it's doing in-app purchases, whether it's whatever. They just want to ban it in, in preparation, I mean, to protect their, their 30% profit. And also perhaps, like you said, in preparation for. whatever payments they're going to be implementing. Now, that's interesting because I just want to get back to this.

There was a complaint submitted by a Bitcoin enthusiast to the Department of Justice. And their response was, we've determined that the information provided does not raise antitrust issues that warrant further review by the division. And the reasoning behind this is that for the moment, Apple does not offer payment services, so it does not compete with Bitcoin. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense to me. I really don't see why this is an antitrust issue. I mean, I think there are other problems I have of it, but that's, yeah.

But the day that they implement payment, so let's say next to your Apple starts. Yeah. Right. So I don't know if maybe they're shooting themselves in the foot in the first place. Because when they do start doing payments, if they start doing payments, then they're going to be an antitrust. I mean, I mean, I personally think this, they will have to be worse on this stance and I think they will have to do so pretty soon. You know, I mean, I think within the next six months, I would expect them to have to allow Bitcoin wallets.

I mean, maybe I'll be wrong. But, you know, if Bitcoin keeps growing and being adopted at the rate it currently is, you know, this. this is just not tenable. I mean, now we have small, you know, a small group of users leaving Apple for Android.

But once Bitcoin payments become more prevalent and you can't do those properly if the iPhone, you know, that's, that's a problem, I think.

Oh, yeah, yeah. So I'm, I really hope they're going to reverse on this soon. And I just find it a bit.

Yeah, I mean, I, I find it very disappointing that they take this very narrow-minded stance. I mean, blockchain or info on their blog post, they were quoting Steve Jobs or, no, their Apple commercial. You, where was that? Let me just pull that up. Just one second.

Yeah, so this is the, are you talking about the IBM? Yeah, yeah. So there's this, let me just read this aloud. So this was from an old Apple commercial. So here's to the crazy ones. The misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them about the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things. They push the human race forward.

And it's of course very ironic, no, because now blockchain the info comes and says, well, you know, who's the crazy one now? It's, and it's just, it's this turnaround where Apple was once a rebellious company. And now they're this big, monopolistic, conservative

monolith, you know, comparable to Microsoft, I guess. I think how people saw Microsoft five years ago or eight, years ago. And it was funny too is the guy who was offering the nexus for the people who destroyed their iPhones. His Reddit username was a round peg. So he took it from this, from this quote. Yeah. So. Yeah, but you know, I agree with, you know, and I identify with this, but this is not the first time that this famous quote has been pulled and, and used against

Apple and you know, to kind of contradict a policy that they've implemented. I mean, I'm a regular listener

of Mac Break Weekly on the Twitter network and I've, I've heard this kind of argument before. Okay, yeah. So, but there's just one last thing

I want to get back to in terms of legitimacy. Like you said that eventually, you know, Apple would have to turn around and on their decision and reconsider accepting Bitcoin wallets. I totally agree. And I think that this is, I was reading on a coin desk.

So Jeremy Aller, who is the CEO of Circle, had made a few statements about this. And, you know, he sees this as not at all threatening to Bitcoin because, you know, Bitcoin is here to stay. And for Bitcoin startups, you know, VCs are looking at long-term. They're not driven by this kind of news. And they look at it as a long-term, from a long-term perspective. Yeah, I mean, I totally agree. They're also saying to themselves, you know, one day when Amazon and Google and who knows who else, maybe even, you know, whatever large merchants start accepting Bitcoin and we've got mass adoption,

And they're not going to be able to ignore that. You know, they're not going to risk losing customers because they're not accepting Bitcoin wallets. And I think at that point, they're going to have to reconsider their, perhaps reconsider their current business model or monopoly on payments within their ecosystem. Yeah, no, I definitely agree with that. I think in the long, in the medium term, this doesn't matter. They'll have to be worse on their decision. It's not like Bitcoin is going to be. seriously harmed by this.

There was actually a bit of a price drop just following the blockchain or the info announcement, which I don't know. It didn't really make sense to me. But maybe it's unrelated. Who knows? But yeah, I very much agree with the sentiment. I think, you know, by and large, this is not that important. And when we look back on this in two years, you know, this is not something that will be in the history of Bitcoin.

Yeah. You know, it would just be a little footnote. It's important. Important part of that if you want to use blockchain. Dot info or any other wallet on your iPhone, you can always jailbreak it. And that will. Yeah, that's true. The blockchain and info is insidia.

So you can still get it the future. Yeah. My man is actually chairbroken. So I guess I could do that. I haven't jailbroken. I, I haven't had an iPhone in many years. so I don't know how easy you see this to do these days

with the iPhone Oh, it's super easy to chat back it. Really? Yeah, yeah, no, it's crazy. Oh, cool. So I guess that hasn't changed. But you void your warranty. That's the thing.

So if you have warranty on it and something happens, then they're not going to pay. So that's really the risk. Yeah. Anything else? Should we move to? No, let's move to another massive topic this week.

Mount Gogs, no? So Mount Gogh, of course, everyone knows about Mount Cox. It's the most important Bitcoin exchange or was the most important Bitcoin exchange over the history of Bitcoin. It's been around since it was started in 2010, but it became, originally it was started as a trading exchange for cards for the game and magic the gathering online.

Have you ever played that, I've got a few, I've got a black deck and a white deck, I think, in the parents' place. Yeah, so I've never played this. I mean, I've seen people, I remember seeing people play this and have friends you play it. I never played it. Yeah, if you walk into a comic bookshop, if you walk by a comic bookshop on a Saturday night around 11 o'clock, there's chances you'll see people in there playing magic. Yeah, exactly.

So this, so this started as that. And then I guess that wasn't much of a business to be in. I don't know. For some reason, they switched to becoming a Bitcoin exchange in, I think, 2011. And so it was pretty early. And they have been the dominant Bitcoin exchange for much of Bitcoin's history. At the peak, they had 97% market share, so basically a monopoly. And they, you know, in April 2013, there was this Bitcoin crash where it went briefly up to $260.

and then it crashed her down to 60, 70 or something like that. And that was actually at least partially due to Mount Goggs being deduced and you weren't able to trade on Mount Cox. And at the time, Mount Cox had about 65% market share, I think. So people were panicking because, you know, there's the biggest exchange by far and it wasn't basically breaking down. So that was, I mean, the price is. explosion, there may have been all the reasons, but at least that was kind of the trigger for this

collapse back then. And there's been a decrease of the Mount Cox market share for a while now. So as you mentioned, that was about 10 months ago or, yeah, 10 months ago, they were still at about 65%. And just before this happened now, they were at the 19% market share. So it's been going down dramatically as much diversified, big stamp now is I think almost twice as big as Mount Cox. But still, you know, they're a very important exchange. And now this week, maybe we should also mention there's been this weird thing going on. So if you if you knew come to Bitcoin, you look at the Bitcoin price, right?

You look at Bitcoin price on different exchanges. You would notice on Mount Cox the Bitcoin price was significantly higher would be like $100 higher per Bitcoin for a long time over the last month. Now, the reason was that if you wanted to withdraw cash from Mount Goghs, this could take months. This could take several weeks to months to ages, especially for US dollar. So people, if they have money in Mount Cox, they really wanted to buy Bitcoins because the Bitcoin is they could take out quickly. Whereas if they would take out money through bank wire, you know, it just was quite a nightmare. So that's why you had this price differential.

Okay, so wait. So you said the price was higher. The Bitcoin price was higher in Mount Cox. Because it was taking longer for people to withdraw their Bitcoin into Fiat. So just think of like if you have money in Mount Cox. So a lot of people have money there because it's been around forever. So if you wanted to take your money out, you could do two things, right? you could either take wire, you know, you could sell the Bitcoins.

So you'd have, let's say, $2,000 in there. And then you could wire that money to your bank account. Or you could, of course, buy Bitcoins and then send you the Bitcoins out and sell it somewhere else, for example. And the problem was if you just withdrew the money as US dollars, this could take forever. This could take a month for a very long. time and it was a nightmare. So then people say like, well, you know, if it takes that long, maybe I rather buy bitcoins and then I can have them within an hour or, you know, within half an hour. So that's why you had this price differential. So people would come in and say, oh, this is

arbitrage opportunity. Maybe I can like buy somewhere else and sell it on Mount Gog's and then, you know, make some money that way. But didn't really work that way because it was so hard to get money out of Mount Gog's. And, but it was. changed now this week. So here's kind of where the news come is that up to now, it was difficult to withdraw cash, or especially U.S. dollar, but you could withdraw Bitcoin. Now, this week, Bitcoin withdrawals as well have basically started crashing. So people, I think what happened a few days ago, maybe on Monday around then,

was that people would do Bitcoin withdrawals and the balance would disappear from their Mount Gogh's account but they would never arrive at their own wallet adders so they would be like what's going on and afterwards after a few days of I think there being increasing problems with this Mount Cox just said we freeze all the Bitcoin balances

I mean I think you can still do trading but no Bitcoin withdrawals. They freeze all that. You know, they say for technical issues or because they wanted to be in a static state and look at the system and some reasons like that. And they say they're going to do another announcement until Monday and they hope to figure out what's going on, et cetera,

or to solve this problem. So, yeah, if you have Bitcoins or if you have any money in Mount Cox at the moment, there's no, there's no, possibility of getting it out um so that's also caused the price crash it's very significant about 20% it crashed and a lot of a lot of worry of course people scared for their money and some guy from australia he flew to to Tokyo it's quite a funny story did you see that yeah he's got a quite extensive reddit posts on his exchanges with uh with with with people there on the ground.

Yeah, he was hanging out in front of the office doing his like one man protest against Mount Cox for three days and he was, he was tackled, you know, he was tracking down,

talking with the CEO and, I could just see this one guy's standing in front of Mount Gox with a sign. Yeah, it's quite, but then at one point he said someone else showed up who was, he called it in a mystery

for some kind of big, Bitcoin holder. So I guess that guy came to and he just said that that old Bitcoin holder had some staggering amount of money in Mount Cox. So this guy was kind of sent

in his name to try to collect the money. It sounded a bit like some mafia. Boo. This guy comes and he's like, hey, is my bitcoins. Yeah. So.

So, yeah, what's the reason for this? So I think the general belief is that it's a technical reason. There is a guy named Jonathan Levin. He's at Oxford. He runs the virtual currency research group. And he's on this email list. So he was writing that. So I'm basically, I didn't see this elsewhere.

But what he was saying was that, when Mount Cox paid out with your money, they had some problems with the transaction ID. So it would be possible for someone else to change the transaction ID. And then the Mount Cox would look for the payout to confirm and rent out. And because the transaction ID was changed, you wouldn't find it. So it would pay it out again.

And so this was basically to be a way for someone to withdraw, their Bitcoin funds from Mount Goggs several times. Do we know if this has been done? I don't know if this has been done. Yeah, I think I saw somewhere that some people did do that. I don't know if this has been done just a few times or on a large scale. Of course, if this has been done on a large scale, well, you know, they might have lost a ton of money that way.

So that would also raise the question, do they have a liquidity problem? you know or I think it also raises the question about the stability of of the Bitcoin network if this is even like I I don't know very much technically about

about how this all works but from what I understand is the reason why this was possible with Mount Cox is because they're not running the standard client they have some sort of old client and they have their own version of it and so they're doing some

weird things and there's various people were saying I mean there was Andreas Antonopoulos and one of the core developers Gregory Maxwell was he was apparently talking with them at some point and they're all saying

that apparently the technical infrastructure of Mount Cox is just a complete disaster and so this was not a website that was built for to be a large scale exchange so I think that's very different from you know now you have new well-funded exchanges like Krocken or perhaps BitSamp, etc.

And they have much, much more know-how and better-built websites. So it sounds like this is not a Bitcoin, not a problem of the Bitcoin protocol, but this is a Mount Cox problem. Okay. So there's this article that you sent me this morning on ZeroChange.com. Yeah, that was quoting Gregory Maxwell. Right. I think he was wrote it based on some things Gregory Maxwell said.

So Gregory Maxwell is a Bitcoin developer and he works at Mount Gox? No, no, he doesn't work at Monkx, but he's one of the core developers. He's very, you know, one of the, I don't know, four or five most, I think, well-known and influential big core developers. So here's what he says, and this kind of gets technical. so I'm going to try to explain it as best as I can. Well, first of all, he says that the insolvency, the question about insolvency is just hysteria and that there's no problem,

there's no issue about, he completely dismisses the allegations that Mount Gox's insolvent. You know, of course people are going to turn to this. People are going to say that they're insolvent because, or suspect that they're insolvent because their communication's been kind of crappy. And then he talks about, image or coin spend.

So he says that newly mined bitcoins that are less than 100 blocks deep inside the blockchain cannot be spent. And any transaction involving them will fail. This matter was apparently addressed via the work, via our workaround that ensure the Munkawatt's wallet software spent the oldest coins first. So this was an issue that had arose last year. Yeah, so there was a previous issue. And then there's a signature encoding problem that you spoke about. And then so he also says that there's a, there's a, there's a mess, like it's an accounting mess,

um, where there's so many transactions flowing through their custom wallet. And so they need to address these transactions quickly and they need to detect where bugs, where they've encountered bugs and then kind of figure out like which transactions. are legitimate, which transactions failed because of the software wallet issues. So I think that, like you said, you know, it's kind of a mess. It's an operational mess. Yeah. And this might be why they may have said, okay, we're going to stop all withdraws so that we can figure this out.

Yeah, but I mean, the point, of course, is like that's, sorry, I mean, I'd like to rise one point before. So I guess Gregor Maxwell said they're not insolvent. And the point is, though, how do we know? We have no clue. Right. And is there any, no, but is there any reason to suspect that they would be insolvent? Like, is that even a rational?

I don't know. It's perhaps. I mean, they've certainly had loads of problems. I have, I don't know. I have no idea. But the point is, you know, if you hold Bitcoins, if you have a bit Bitcoin balance in an exchange like Mount Cox. I mean, it just shows a balance.

It doesn't show where those bitcoins are. It doesn't show you the address where you can go to blockchain or infancy. Okay, it's there. You know, it's just, it's more of an accounting entry and it gives you, it's a bit like in a bank account, you know, it's a right for you to a certain amount of Bitcoin, but it's not the actual bitcoins. So it's certainly possible that people would be, like, you know, like, it's a right? let's say had 50,000 Bitcoins on their balances in Mount Cox,

but only 30,000 of them really existed. You know, so that's, there's no way for anyone to verify that. So if you think of something like a bank run where people try to get their money out first, let's say if they did something shady and they didn't have all the bitcoins that people are entitled to and that they should have, well, you might have a situation like that where you want to be the first one out because at the end of it when everyone's moving out the bitcoins

there's going to be some people for whom they're on left so I mean one way they could address that is if they made for example all their wallets public and they showed that you know so people could verify that do any exchanges do that?

No no exchanges do that but I guess it could be something that maybe someone will do in the future. But at the moment, you know, this, we don't know. And that, of course, makes people nervous too because they are abysmal at communicating. So right now, I mean, if I had any money in Mount Cox, you know, I would want to get that out as soon as possible.

Because, you know, who knows? When let's say 50% of Mount Cox start with throwing the money, you know, we don't know what's going to happen. So, I mean, I personally, I find it very unlikely that Mount Cox is going to survive this mess. Yeah. Because who in the right state of mind would want to keep using them? Although, I mean, since I've become interested in being involved with Bitcoin, I've never used Mount Cox. And this was always there, right?

Since the very beginning, there's always a story, well, Mount Cox is very difficult to use avoid them. it takes forever to get your money out. So I was like, well, I'm never going to use them. But of course, for people who've been there longer, who have money in there, and they have a strong brand name, it's different. And a lot of people still are using Bangkok. So let's hope they're not insolvent. Let's hope they do have all those funds.

It's just a technical issue. And let's hope that people will be able to withdraw all their coins properly next week, hopefully. And let's hope that happens. but then I think Mount Cox is probably done. I mean, I don't know how they, maybe they'll recover to some extent, you know, maybe from 19% market share, they'll recover and then they'll have 10% afterwards. But, you know, I think by the end of the year, I would be surprised or much earlier than that if Mangonk still exists.

This just further reinforced my conviction that you shouldn't keep your money in an exchange. And I had a little bit of Bitcoin in BTC. and it had been sitting here for a while. And I was reading through CoinDest this week and saw that there were some kind of shady stories, which turns out to be hoaxed. But there was some kind of uncertainties around BTC. Like I just took out all my Bitcoin and took them out. Yeah. You shouldn't leave your, you shouldn't leave your Bitcoin in a wallet, in an exchange rather.

Yeah, absolutely. You should make your own cold storage. Only, yes. Yeah. This is something we should cover. And like we were talking about this earlier before the show. We both kind of experimented with making our old cold storage wallets with raspberry pies and, and armory. I'm thinking of doing a story about an article about this in the in the blog.

So perhaps this is something we could touch on later about how to create your own cold storage wallet. Yeah. We could even do a whole show at one point about security. and talk about different aspects because there's, you know, a lot of things to talk there about, you know, there's paper wallets and, you know, two-factor authentication, all those things you kind of have to be aware of and think about and thinking about you, a Bitcoin security. And, of course, sometimes you do have to use an exchange, but the point is don't, don't store your coins in an exchange, you know, like, you know, if you want to sell them, transfer them exchange, sell them and then get your money out, but don't leave them lying there or, you know,

I guess some people, they had hundreds or thousands of Bitcoins in Mount Cox. And that's just very dangerous. Yeah, I think there's a kind of a convenience side to it too where, you know, you, you're going to trust the exchange. You know, they're, you know, this is, and my exchange is a legitimate company. They deal with Bitcoin. They deal with money. I trust that, that, that, that, that they have secure, you know, cold storage wallets and such. So I'm not going to risk taking my bitcoins and.

putting them on my Mac or on my personal computer or on my phone or whatever or so I'm going to leave them there and I think this is what a lot of people think, you know, that it's safe to leave your coins there, but this just goes to show that you don't know the inner workings of an exchange and you can't be assured that your that your coins are safe. I mean, this is not the first time this has happened, right? I mean, is it not? Yeah, you mean that they've frozen No, but that people have lost coins because they've placed them online. That has happened a lot of times before. I mean, exchanges have gotten hacked, so they would just steal all the coins that are on an exchange.

Or there was also the story in China. There was an exchange called the GBL. And that was basically a fake exchange. I mean, they, I think they set this up from the very start. The idea was, you know, you create an exchange. A lot of people put their money in there. and then you just close the exchange and take all everyone's money. So this was from the very start.

This was planned like that, I think. You know, they had like fake addresses on the website, offices that didn't really exist. And they stole, I think it was four million dollars worth of Bitcoin. Good. That way. So, yeah, I mean, this has happened many times. There was the Bitcoin economy.

It's just longer ago. But different Bitcoin exchanges, have gotten hacked. And of course, if the bitcoins get stolen, you know, if it's a small amount and if the company is well funded, et cetera, maybe they'll replace, they'll refund the user. But in many cases, it just means that they're gone. Yeah. I just feel bad for all those people that have their bitcoins in Mount Cox.

And I hope they'll get them back. I really do. But I'm sure they're, they're biting their nails right now. Those people that have significant amounts of Bitcoin in Mount Cox. Yeah. Feel sorry for them. Yeah. So the next story we want to cover is about a new currency, which is really interesting and very, very different from I think any we've seen so far.

It's called Aurora Coin. And this is created by some people in Iceland. And it's meant to be specifically a currency, a cryptocurrency for Iceland. And here's how it's going to work. There's going to be 21 million coins in total. And 50% are pre-mines. So that means they exist before the mining begins. The mining is already begun.

So 50% of them, you know, exists already. Now, those 50% will be given away to every person in Iceland. That's going to start on March 25th. So basically, any person in Iceland will be entitled within one year, to go and claim those, their share of these pre-mined aurora coins. So that's a 31.8 aurora coin per person. The goal is that, you know,

as many Icelanders as possible will claim their aurora coin. And they're using the national ID scheme. So basically people have this kind of electronic ID for people to claim their coins. And so there's gotten a lot of media attention, including on the main news site in Iceland, and hopefully they'll be able to reach a large portion of the population.

So have you been following this as well? I read about it yesterday. It seems to me, it seems very interesting to me because I've been kind of watching. Like there's a movement, I think, all around the world, like in the U.S. and also here in France and in the UK of local currencies. Like people want to stimulate their local economy. So they, you know, communities come together and they form local currencies

that can be used only in local businesses. Yeah. You've seen this before, I think. Yeah, yeah. In fact, there's a guy at my meetup who's kind of interested in this stuff, and I think he's going to do a talk soon. But I think this is the first time where it's actually been a cryptocurrency. And I was just waiting for this to happen.

And in my mind, this was sort of an obvious way for cryptocurrencies to go towards. That's very interesting that you mentioned local currencies because I find this extremely interesting as well, but from kind of a different perspective. And then there's this longstanding idea. And I think even Milton Friedman talked about this, is to have this kind of, kind of a basic income for every person. Yeah. So you would pay some amount,

and that would be the same amount to every citizen of a country. So in Switzerland, there's actually an initiative at the moment, and it's been, they've collected all the necessary signature. So there will be a referendum on this. So everyone in Switzerland will vote, and if a majority say we want this,

then it will be implemented. it and the vote's going to come within the next year and a half or something. And the idea of that initiative is that every Swiss person or every Swiss adult would be paid 2,500 Swiss francs every month. Which is about 2,000 euros, something like that. About 2,000 euros. So this is not enough to live on. I mean, perhaps if you're single and very minimally, but probably not.

but it's pretty close, right? So maybe you have to earn another thousand euros a month and then you can live on it modestly. And then maybe if you're extremely economical, you can. And the idea, of course, there's different aspects to this. I mean, one is about equality and more equal distribution of wealth and income. But there's also the idea that if you pay everyone this basic amount of work,

perhaps they have more time and more liberty to take risks, to start companies, to do charity works, to become artists, to do things that don't have a direct monetary reward. So there's that idea. Of course, what's the downside of this? Well, it removes a lot of incentive to work. That's one problem. The other problem is it's extremely expensive.

So this would require a gigantic, amount of money and the only way to get this is through taxation. So it would mean especially high incomes would have really, really high tax rates. And then the problem is people, you know, a lot of people aren't happy about that, especially the people who have to pay that. So they try to find some tax loopholes, away taxes and it gives it this incentive to make more money.

You know, if you have to give away 80%, of an additional, you know, an additional $10,000 you earn as someone who earns a lot. Well, you know, there is not a lot of incentive to do that. So in a sense, what they're doing in Iceland, it achieves some of those things, or it could achieve some of those things, but without some of the downsides. Because everyone gets some amount of money. And if there's a kind of a community consensus that they value this, they value this experiment, they value this money, well, then it will have a value.

The currency will have a value. But it comes from a new money issuance. It's not taken from other people. So this is extremely interesting, I think. And what's also interesting is that the value of this currency is not enforced. You know, if as a shopkeeper you say, I don't care about this, I'm not going to accept this, you can. But if you say I do like this and I do value this, you can do that too. And then value, you know, how much one a Rora coin will be worth that will depend on that kind of consensus.

I think that's really cool and really exciting. Yeah, I just want to get back to the basic income idea. I've heard about this quite a bit, you know, because Switzerland is just next door. And I was always kind of interested about the idea. But then again, I didn't have kind of the economic knowledge to understand how it works. So then how it works is you tax the very rich and they pay for essentially the very rich and very rich corporations pay through tax this basic income. So what you say is it's very expensive, but then you don't have to pay welfare. You don't have to pay unemployment also.

So that comes out of it as well. Yeah, yeah, that's right. I mean, some people, some people, no, no, you're certainly right, right. Some people already get this. So for them, it would be a replacement. So let's say retired people, unemployed people. Yeah. You know, people maybe with some disabilities.

So in, but, but you would have this for everyone. Yeah. I'm actually not 100% sure how in the initiative they do want to finance that. I mean, I presume the only way to do that is through taxation. maybe they have some other ideas. So for our American listeners, this might sound like a very European idea. And to me, it definitely, I think that for people in North America, I've never heard this, might be kind of shocked that this is even being discussed.

And there's a referendum that's, when is it, in 18 months? Yeah, yeah. It's not clear when, but within the next year or so. I mean, the signatures have been submitted in, I was just checking that in September. And then I think it's going to be discussed in the parliament. And then once they've done that, so I presume that's going to be soon. And once they've done that, I think within 10 months or something like that, there will be the referendum.

And this is the first time that this is actually, well, if this goes through, this would have been the first time in the world that this has happened, that we've seen this, right? Yeah. I mean, I think it's unlike. we'll go through. Yeah. But, yeah, it would be the first. And I, you know, I mean, I totally see, I don't know if I would vote for that.

I'm skeptical because there's a huge risk and there's all these, I'm not a fan of like extremely high tax rates. I mean, I think in some European countries it's definitely too high. But the cool thing about this idea of doing this through new money. issuance is that you don't have to do it through high taxation. So you don't have this, for example, disincentive that very high tax rates cause. So I think this is really cool. And I mean, the sororcon is slightly different. So the way it could be done is if it was a monthly issuance instead of a one-off

issuance. I think that would be cool. But I also want to talk about a bit about the difficulty here. And I'm not sure how they've addressed this. So the difficulty, of course, is how do you make sure no one cheats? And this is very complicated. So, you know, how are they going to, how, for example, in Iceland, how will they make sure that only the people who actually own that ID can claim that money?

So either you would need to have a central institution that verifies that. or can you just enter your ID number and then you get the money? But then it seems you could brute force and take everyone's IDs and take other people's money. So this is difficult. And I think maybe I don't know how exactly their idea works. Maybe that is maybe they're the worst with that thing. But in general, I think there's actually a very difficult problem to solve. And I saw actually Bitcoin talk.

I read the thread about or someone asking someone asking. about this and the developers sort of dismissed it. So I'm not sure how, I don't know how reputable these people are. I don't know how good they are and how much they've actually know how they're going to do this. But as a concept, it's super interesting. I also want to briefly mention,

because I read about something just like this about a month ago in Bitcoin magazine. So Ritalik Boutarian mentioned something called a social coin. So that was a concept. It doesn't exist. The idea was exactly that. So the idea would be currency which gives a thousand units per month to every person in the world. And, you know, so if enough people like the idea, start accepting it, then it's kind of a citizen's dividend program. So I'm quoting from Bitcoin magazine with no centralized funding required. So it's exactly, you know, what I've been talking about. And it's, it's a lot like this Aurora

coin idea. So yeah, it's very interesting. Very interesting. And I think someone is going to attempt to do this social coin thing. I mean, it would be cool to do this on a global. I mean, of course, it's cool to have it in Iceland. And I think it also makes it more realistic that it will work because you have this more tightly knit community there with this Icelandic ID.

They have a uniform way perhaps of, you know, identifying people. And I think it has a higher suggestion. But what would be very interesting, too, is if you did this on a global scale. Yeah, I mean, I think it's an interesting experiment. And we'll get to see if it goes through and if it works and if people start adopting this, and Iceland will actually get a real example of how this might work on a larger scale. Like you say, they're in Ireland. They've got, what, 300,000 people.

So it's an interesting test bed, I think, for this kind of experiment. Yeah, and people are already trading it and mining and this is kind of like, Oh, really? Okay. Yeah, it's already, there's a subreddit and everything. So, yeah. Well, we'll have to see how that progresses, I guess. Yeah, exactly.

So I've got two, two more stories you want to cover on today's show. So last week, was it last week or two weeks ago? It was last week. the Chicago Sun Times Yeah, it was on February 1st, I think, the trial. Right, so just before our last episode. So the Chicago Sometimes did a 24-hour trial where they would accept Bitcoin donations for paywall the content.

And this is something that had been done by other newspapers as well. I think the Wall Street Journal and the Times. There's a lot of newspapers do it. Yeah, there's like, I think there were the ninth to do it or something like that. that. So Bitcoin paywalls, especially for press, have been discussed quite a bit lately. And there's been different things that have been proposed mostly because accessing content behind a paywall is kind of a pain. They're usually micropayment transactions. So the fees can be quite high. Well, not like that, right? I think that's kind of the issue is that,

with our current payment system, with credit cards, can we do micro-transactions? Right. You've got to go through some sort of subscription or... Exactly. Or you've got to prepay a minimum amount to be able to then purchase content individually. Yeah. I don't know if there's any ones where you prepay and you pay per article. I think in general, there are, you know, $5 a month to the financial times is actually

very expensive. I was looking at it earlier, something like four pounds a week, or something along those lines. And what's cool, of course, with Bitcoin is you might be able to do per article payments. And there is something called the micropayments channel where you can do Bitcoin, the micro-transactions cheaply, because the issue still is if you have a at the moment it's like nine cents of transaction fees.

If you have a small amount, it's actually, it's pretty high. But there's this a way to do it with Bitcoin for very cheap. I heard somewhere that there was something somebody was working on. And I don't know if this was in a protocol there on top of Bitcoin or if this was already included in Bitcoin, where you could send Bitcoins to an address and kind of. of have them being held there and as you would navigate a website and browse pages that are behind a paywall like that money would get withdrawn per per page i don't know if you heard about this i thought it was really kind of i think the way it works so we've had a talk on this that there

are a meet me up here and i'm not i haven't looked into this much myself i have just some vague idea So the way it will work is that I think if I was using a website, I would put some money in some address that I control or maybe it's in a semester type thing. And then as I use the website, there will be a transaction would be made to the website, but it's not broadcast. So, and I keep replacing that transaction. So once I stop, what the newspaper is going to do, it's going to broadcast the transaction. So basically, however much I've used at this point, it's going to be, will be transferred. And they can do that without my consent. So that removes the problem that that I'm just going to go away and not pay.

but it also means that there's only one transaction is going to be in the blockchain, so you only have to pay transaction fee once. Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, it's cool, yeah. And what they've done here is that you could, you could do a few things. You could either tweet the article

and then you could read it or you could make a Bitcoin donation. Right, so we're just going to point out that this experiment with the Sun-Times were, it was a donor, you had to give a donation and that money would go to a foundation. And they actually, I think they published an article in Coin Desk where apparently like

25 cents was what people were donating on average per article. And that was kind of the sweet spot. So yeah, it's interesting. I think for for newspapers and online content, this is going to be a huge area of development. I mean, I think everybody kind of thinks the same thing. Well, I was actually reading a bit about paywalls before a show. And I thought they were generally considered a success because I know for some newspapers, they have been.

But then when I was reading a bit more about it, it seemed like the tone was different, that it was, they thought it was generally not such a success. and only for very few companies, very few newspapers this works. And then I think primarily it works for newspapers that have a very unique positioning. So they have very content you can't get elsewhere. You know, let's say the financial times,

they have their Lex column or things like that where it's very valued opinion. So you say like if you want that, you have to pay, you can't get it elsewhere. Right. You mean for newspapers that have you're talking about newspapers in general. Yeah, I'm talking about newspapers.

So what I mean is that paywalls are not a very good experiment for newspapers in general. That's interesting. Or that they only work if a newspaper has a really, really strong brand and they're really unique positioning. But if it's just generic news, you'd be like, why would I pay for this? I can get it for free. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, but it's interesting.

And of course, with Bitcoin, this is one of these business models. that are difficult to implement, if not impossible to implement with our current payment systems, but with Bitcoin to become possible. And it will be extremely interesting where this goes. I think there's so many possibilities.

One thing that kind of relates to this, maybe you can mention that briefly, another way where one could use these kind of micro-transactions would be, let's say, if you have a Wi-Fi spot and you pay by bandwidth or by minute. So that's also something that's not really possible now.

But you could do that with Bitcoin. So yeah. Also video content. You know, it's been this has been proposed as well for our online video content, not just press. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's going to be interesting to see where this goes. Absolutely.

Yeah. And I think it was a success. it was a one day experiment but they're supposedly in talks and perhaps they will implement this permanently and I don't know if Bitcoin is there

in terms of adoption that it makes sense to do that but of course if you have an alternative that you can tweet it then it might make sense even if only a small portion of the readers use Bitcoin and they did actually do pretty decent amount

they had 700 donations in that day So that's, you know, that's pretty good. Yeah. And just for our listeners to know, they're using a company called Bitwall. Yeah. And they're specializing in Bitcoin payments for press for digital publishers. Yeah. They're part of this boost VC.

So this incubator in Silicon Valley that focuses on Bitcoin companies. Cool. I'm just looking at pricing. They seem to be setting up, working out their purpose. pricing model right now. As of now, they're free for merchants. Okay. Yeah.

Cool. Well, let's mention the last topic now. Yeah, BitTag. This is super cool. Yeah. So this is, what is this? It's a price tag, like a digital price tag that you can put on physical merchandise in a store.

And which displays the price in, well, Fiat and Bitcoin at the same time and you can you I think you said you could shake it to yeah to refresh the price purchase the latest exchange rate so you know because with the bitcoin's volatility you can't really have a fixed price so that that's a problem with like I mean I guess there's two problems with pricing things in Bitcoin one is that the price is going to change and the other thing is that people don't really have a clear idea you know what 0.0 for Bitcoin is that expensive is it cheap people can't really relate to that and this price tag thing it well it solves the issue in terms of is the price current by you know getting a price feed and you can shake it

and it refreshes the feed and it kind of solves the problem of you know how much is this by just displaying the you know u.s dollar amount or pound amount as well yeah now this this is interesting because it allows for brick and mortar merchants to, I guess, more easily get in, you know, maybe where before it may have been an issue for big and mortar merchants to accept Bitcoin because they weren't able to effectively show the Bitcoin price on products. This opens up some possibilities for them. Now, to me, I think you said this was kind of expensive. This prototype is like, what, 40 pounds per?

unit. Yeah. Which is particularly expensive. And whereas, you know, this, this already exists. And for instance, here in France and most grocery stores, they don't have like the paper. I used to work in a staple store back in Canada. And every day we had to go out and put new price tags on products. That's not how it works anymore.

A lot of places now, they have these little kind of digital price tags where the price gets automatically updated. They're just like a little LCD screen. And I think they use some sort of, I think they use some sort of proprietary infrared technology. Like they might have some kind of infrared transmitter on the ceiling and that transmits the new prices. So I think this can be scaled and existing products might be able to be adapted to.

Yeah, hopefully. And I mean, they, their actual products will be a lot cheaper than the 40 pounds, they said. but of course to use this a lot yeah i don't know but it's it's cool and i can see in some in some stores that perhaps want to brand themselves as you know we're this bitcoin store and they i can i'm sure this would get a lot of media attention to if you're the first store that has this price tag i mean it's pretty cool no you come there you shake it and refreshes i think that's something because it's so physical you can touch it you can relate to it very differently than to online things so i think from from that perspective it might also make sense for for some merchants to do

this and so the price gets updated through uh Bluetooth floor energy technology yeah yeah and it has a little battery needs to have a little light sensor so you can be powered by uh it can be powered solar yeah but see this is where i think this is where this is where this is where this project product is flawed. It's got a microprocessor in it. It's got Bluetooth. It effectively calculates the price on the device. I think that it needs to be, I think this needs to be like a, I guess it's a dumb device where

nothing actually gets calculated on the thing. There's a solar, a little kind of calculator, solar pound and all it so they can show the price and the price gets fed down to it. from a central unit and it's just displaying price and that's when we're going to see the price drop and we're going to start seeing these things come in I mean this is effectively like I said it already exists so it just needs to be adapted so that it can be refreshed a bit more often and show two prices I mean because if we're going to have these things with microprocessors and Bluetooth they're going to remain expensive to produce yeah but it's cool and hopefully

we'll see that at some point yeah somewhere that would be exciting Do we have any Bitcoin acceptances to talk about? Yeah, there's, well, last week we put out a call for our listeners to let us know if there's new Bitcoin acceptances in their, in their city or around them in their area. And actually, somebody reached out to us on Twitter. His name is Gianni Itsetown. I think, I'm sorry if I'm not pronouncing that right.

He tweeted us on Epstein or PTC, so if you want to check that. And he says that Helen's Pizza in Jersey City, New Jersey started accepting Bitcoin a few weeks ago. So there you go. If you're in Jersey City, you can go to Helen's Pizza and pay your pizza with Bitcoin. Cool. Yeah. But hopefully make this jersey sometimes and take advantage of this. Yeah.

There's also in the UK, there's a retailer called Scan Computers that have started accepting Bitcoin and they're supposedly a big player. So I didn't know them. Do they have brick and order locations? Are they only? I'm not sure. I don't know. I think it's an online thing.

Okay. So not very many big acceptance this this week. Yeah, it doesn't seem like it, not as many as we've had last week. I think following the oversaw thing. But I actually, I remember I listened to the interview. I thought it was interesting on Let's Fuck Bitcoin. I had an interview with the Overstock CEO. And he was asked, you know, do you expect other companies to come there?

And he, I mean, he was speculating, but he felt, he said, like, I think there's going to be many, like, billion-dollar companies soon. Yeah. Like, within weeks. Which actually did happen with Tiger Direct. But perhaps we'll see more of that now. That was a good interview. And he seems to be very, very. seems to be very

he believes in Bitcoin and wants it to thrive and yeah okay well I think I was it this week absolutely yeah and if you know if you've got if you know of like we said last week if you know of new stores or merchants in your area that accept Bitcoin or even online

stores perhaps in your country let us know on Twitter at Epicenter BTC and we'll talk about it on the show yeah perfect And if you're in Berlin next week at Inside Bitcoin's conference, please let us know because Sebastian is coming over here and we'll both be there and we'll be doing interviews and producing content and talking to people. So it'd be great to meet some listeners.

Yeah, we've got to see if we can do a live show somewhere. Yeah, yeah. No, that's definitely the plan. Maybe have some people. We'll also be recording. Our first kind of in-person show, I think, next weekend, which will be cool. So thank you for listening to our sixth episode. Thanks for staying with us all this time.

We're really excited to see the numbers go up. And I'm super excited to be going to Berlin. I can't wait to leave there on Tuesday. We're going to be producing lots of content there and hopefully getting lots of interviews. I've got this nice pocket recorder that I've got. I was able to get my hands on so we can do good quality interviews and we'll be releasing those over the next few weeks

in the feed as kind of special episodes that won't be like on the regular Sunday release. And so follow us on Twitter at Epicenter BTC. And also we've got a Facebook page. Not very active for the time being, but like us on Facebook and maybe we'll start posting stuff there too. Yeah.

And if you're interested in Bitcoin News, you want to hear about what's going on, get some analysis every week on what's, then please sign up for a newsletter at Episandabbitcoin.com slash newsletter. And also tip us at Epicenterbidcoin.com slash tips. And we've got a Bitcoin address there. And we just set up our Dogecoin address and our light coin address. So if you want to send us some Dogecoin or Lightcoin,

you can also do that there. And also we're still waiting for feedback. If you've got feedback for us, whether it's on the type of content you want to hear, or maybe it's just, I don't know, Sebastian speaks too loud or, I don't know, whatever feedback you have for us. And also, if you're a podcaster and you've got some podcasting experience,

we're looking for somebody who can help us make our production better. So, you know, we're open also for some professional advice. Well, thanks for listening. and look forward to being back soon. Yeah, and I'll see you on Tuesday. Yeah, see on Tuesday, yeah.