The Joe Rogan Experience - #490 - Andreas Antonopoulos

Episode Date: April 22, 2014

Andreas Antonopoulos is a bitcoin entrepreneur, he also serves on the advisory boards of several bitcoin startups and serves as the Chief Security Officer of Blockchain.

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night! All day! Boom! How are you, sir? I'm doing great. Great to have you back again, man.

It was fun having you on before and a lot of feedback. A lot of people learned a lot about cryptocurrencies and the benefits of them, what's going on, where the push is, where the negative things are, and put a little balance to a lot of the negative press that you hear about Bitcoin and all these different various cryptocurrencies in the media, because that's literally all I hear. I mean, I know people are trading things back and forth, but you really put it into perspective for us, especially when you were talking about that, what was it, $150 million transaction?

That was the one that was done through Bitcoin? When you start hearing things like that, you go, okay, well, there's some people out there that have some serious fucking money, and they're banking on this. They're throwing their chips in this corner, at least some of them, to see what's going on. And I guess the idea is, if it's worth $150 million today, who fucking knows what it'll be worth in five years. That's the big gamble, right? Yeah. Yeah, it is. But I think it's important not to look at it as an investment. It's so much more interesting as a means of

exchange than as a store of value. It can do amazing things in terms of velocity, just getting money from one place to another. And it's not about the big movements. What's even more fascinating is the small movements. So for example, I take tips on Twitter. And without knowing these people, they can send me a quarter, like 25 cents or 10 cents over Twitter instantly. And you can't even do that with any other payment system because it costs so much to move money and it enables all of these little tiny, tiny transactions. And they add up, you know,

and it's fun to be able to connect with people that way. And it's direct, unlike, say, like a PayPal situation where you have to give them a piece of the action. Yeah, and not just that. I mean, it requires no prior arrangements of any kind. They don't need to create an account. I don't need to create an account. I can just put up my Bitcoin address and start receiving things. Now, if you pay taxes on Bitcoin, I mean, how do you sort it out over the course of a year? Because the dollar value of it goes up and

down. So how do you figure out, like when you make taxes, do you do it at the current rate, the day you file it? I mean, how do you do that? Well, first of all, we're still trying to figure that out. It's been about a month since the IRS released some information on how they want to tax it. And they're taxing it like a commodity, which means capital gains. So you have to account for the price when you bought it and then the price when you sold it, and then look at the difference. And if you gained, you pay capital gains tax on that. And if you lost, you can account for capital losses.

That seems like if people were smart, they would buy up a shitload of Bitcoin and then sell like right before and fucking crash the market and then pay their taxes and then buy! And then you'd fucking just keep winning. Yeah, the market's big enough that you can't really play those kinds of games.

Dude, always thinking. It's going to get complicated. Is that a possibility? Could you do that? And did I just violate the law? Is that insider trading? I'm confused. The market's pretty huge right now. So on a daily basis, tens of thousands of Bitcoin move around.

So unless you were able to bring a very big amount to bear, you can't really do that. You can't move these markets artificially. You'd have to be like some Bill Gates-type character to do that. And it would be difficult. There are far more liquid markets to do that.

If you want to play games like that, go play them on S&P 500 with front-running high-frequency trading. That's what's going on. That's where the big games are being played. This is small stuff. They have to make the stock market illegal. They really do.

The shit's... You got a good point, too, about saying that it's important to not look at it as an investment because there's something kind of gross about those kind of investments. Like when you find out like someone got in on a stock early, like some tech company, and they made like 300 million bucks like for no fucking reason. And then you're like, wait a minute.

What did you do? Where's that money coming from? I don't get it. It's way too volatile because it's a growing technology. It's a brand new technology. It's still being tested. It's way too volatile because it's a growing technology. It's a brand new technology. It's still being tested. It's way too volatile. And for the average investor, that means it's way too risky.

Now, there are some investors, sophisticated investors, who have a broad portfolio and who may want to take a small part of that portfolio and put it into a very high volatility investment in order to churn some returns out. very high volatility investment in order to churn some returns out. But they would do that in a very knowing exactly how much risk they're taking, which is a lot, and balancing out that risk over a bigger portfolio. But your average person, no, this is definitely not the kind of thing you want to be playing with. Use it to do transactions. Hold it for long term. Playing with this market will only get you burned. There's this real temptation to try to day trade this market. And a lot of people fall for that temptation. I played with it when I first started with Bitcoin. Learned that lesson pretty fast. So if you were day trading, exactly how would you work that out? You would say, So if you were day trading, exactly how would you work that out?

You would say you'd buy up a bunch of Bitcoin, and then when the price hit a significant margin, like if it got to a high enough level, you're like, you know what? I think we just hit the lid. Sell that shit! And then you sell it. Yeah, buy low, sell high. It's a simple rule.

But the problem is you never know where high is, and you never know where low is. And most people essentially end up falling for the basic psychology of panic and greed. And so they end up actually buying high because of greed and selling low because of panic. And then they end up flipping that equation and losing a lot of money. Don't do it. I mean, it's really not worth it. This is a very interesting technology. Treating it like penny stock and trying to greedily make money off it

will only get you burned. Well, spoken as a true believer. I agree with you on that, and I think that's cool that you stress that. I keep hearing about this Mt. Gox monkey in the news, man. This guy is constantly in the news. What are they going to do with that dude? And for folks who don't know, explain, if they haven't

heard the earlier podcast, explain what this Mt. Gox situation is. First of all, there's no mountain. Here's the interesting story. This started out as a trading site for cards, for playing cards, called Magic the Gathering Online Exchange.

Which everybody knows, and no offense to Magic the Gathering fans, you guys are fucking dorks. There's no offense. No offense. I'm a dork too. There's a lot of dorkiness to a lot of things that I enjoy.

Yeah. But you guys are fucking serious dorks. And that was the basis for the original Mt. Gox site. The domain, at least. Yes.

And then it became this exchange, one of the biggest exchanges in the world for Bitcoin, but not secure, not coded properly, just a wreck. Well, the thing is, Empty Gox, as I like to call it, which kind of rhymes with empty gox, because it really is just an acronym. It's not a mountain. It started off as a trading site, and it offered something really important and valuable.

In the early days of Bitcoin, when you were trading locally among individuals, there was no price discovery mechanism. There was no way to figure out how much a Bitcoin was worth because there was no liquid market. So, you know, if I bought some Bitcoin from you, we had to figure out what price we were both comfortable with. And maybe we'd ask somebody else, well, how much did you buy it for? And that's how you discover the price, right? Because if there isn't a really big liquid market, you don't know what the price is. Was it more stable then? No, it was even more volatile.

Because keep in mind, at the time, Bitcoin was trading for thousands of a penny or pennies. So you could basically buy 1,000 Bitcoin for $1 in the early days. Wow. And that would be worth what, like a hundred grand now or something close to it? That would be worth half a million dollars now. Half a million?

Well, wow. I'm so behind the price. What is the price of a Bitcoin now? Oh, it's 500 bucks now? Yeah. Wow. I was way off. I was thinking it was 300 or something. Yeah, I wasn't sure. It's been up, it's been down. What's the lowest it's been in recent times?

So last year, this time, it jumped from about $100 to $266 and then dropped again down to $50. So at some point last year, it was $50. And then in the mean... Now it's $500. Then it went all the way up to about 1,000, maybe 1,100 on some markets. Really? And then it dumped all the way down to 800, stayed there for a bit,

and then it dumped all the way down to 500, and then it had a brief period flirting with 370, and then it went back up. So here's what's happening. Every few weeks, China started... Back in April of last year, the China market opened up. Oh, started back in April of last year, the China market opened up. Oh, sorry, in November of last year,

the China market opened up and everyone was like, yeah, China's in Bitcoin to the moon. The price shut up. Oh, interesting. And then China said, we're thinking of banning it and the price crashes.

And then, but maybe we won't ban it and the price rises. But maybe we'll ban it and then the price crashes. And we've been playing this, is it banned? Is it not banned? Is it banned? Is it not banned for the last five months?

And it's been a roller coaster. And in the end, it really doesn't matter. I mean, this is all. So for folks who don't know what we're talking about, this Mt. Gox thing was this online exchange that it turned out someone somehow whether it was an inside job or not someone somehow was stealing money to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin. Took all of the

money in the exchange. 100% of it? Well like 85-90% of it. Oh my god. So someone somewhere stole an insane amount of money. But you're not hearing about some wild manhunt to get to that money if it was like – there was a guy named Lee Murray, all right? And Lee Murray was a mixed martial arts fighter from the UK who was a real crazy man. He was like as wild as they come. He was like a real live version of a character from a Guy Ritchie movie. Guy was nuts. He fought in the UFC

he was a really good fighter too fought Anderson Silva and Cage Rage I mean high level guy um and he was also a fucking thug like a super legit criminal and he was a part of a huge multi-million dollar bank heist where they came in with fucking ski masks and bulletproof vests and, you know, high-powered rifles and machine guns. The full deal, like full black ops, like a movie. And they, I mean, they have the security cameras of these guys. And then somehow or another, they all got nabbed. And this guy, Lee Murray, was one of the ones they chased after the hardest. He went to Morocco. He was hiding there. And he got arrested there for kidnapping someone and

beating them up after he did the bank job. I mean, this guy's a fucking maniac, right? But the point is, there was a fucking manhunt. It was all over the newspapers in the UK. It was everywhere. They were going after these motherfuckers. And it seems to me like the amount of money that was stolen in Mount Gox is commensurate to this. It's bigger. Bigger. But here's the thing. Is it really bigger?

Yeah, I think. How much was the UK bank? Let me find out. Nobody knows exactly how much is gone at Gox, but it's somewhere between six and eight hundred million. Oh my god, it is bigger. But here's the thing. Bernie Madoff stole twenty billion dollars. Twenty billion with a B.

And there wasn't a manhunt there because the real truth is that if you want to rob a bank, what you do is you go get a banking license. Then you rob the bank using a keyboard do is you go get a banking license. Then you rob the bank using a keyboard instead of a machine gun.

Yeah, using the loopholes. No one starts a manhunt that way. That's the modern way of doing bank heists. And that's the way that doesn't get you shot and nets you the biggest return. Well, when you're a crazy criminal, though, and you don't know how to work a keyboard that well,

I mean, you've got to be L33T, right, to pull that shit off. So this Mt. Gox thing, someone somewhere has stolen, let's put a number on it. You say $800 million? I don't know. Nobody knows. It's several hundred million dollars. It's somewhere between five and eight, I think. Let's just say it's $100 million.

Let's be super conservative and say it's $100 million worth of cash. At the current Bitcoin price. If someone stole $100 fucking million worth of money, like if $100 million worth of diamonds went missing, what a manhunt there would be for that person. But sums like that are stolen and go missing in the banking system and in government affairs all the time, and there's no manhunt. I mean, this is fairly typical of what happens. These are white-collar crimes.

It's about records and forensic accounting and analysis and drawn-out cases where they try to figure out what happened. The bottom line is every year about 100 hundred or more banks fail spectacularly and the money disappears. And this was just another bank failure. It really had very little to do with Bitcoin. It was a bank failure of the very traditional kind. This was not a system that used Bitcoin to protect its security. It was a system that collected all of the Bitcoin in one big account and then lost that. So it's essentially the account was robbed and the account just happened to be holding Bitcoin.

Yeah, and actually the dollars are gone too. There was dollars involved as well? The currency accounts in the banks were also... How much was that there's there's some dollars missing i don't know it was a lot a lot less stole my money too man it was a few million it was a few million or maybe tens of millions but but it wasn't like hundreds so yeah here's the thing like um you have a bitcoin wallet right that means you control the keys and that's the essence of bitcoin is that individuals control them they don't have a Bitcoin wallet, right? That means you control the keys. And that's the essence of Bitcoin,

is that individuals control them. They don't have a bank. They don't have their money in a bank where someone else has custody of it. And then they just have a little IOU note that says you have this much in the bank and maybe we'll give it to you when you come to work. That was my next question.

Mt. Gox did not have individual Bitcoin accounts for the users. They took the Bitcoin and then put it all into one of their own accounts and managed it. So they took it out of the security of each person having their own keys and instead collected all the money in one big wallet. That's crazy. Why would they do that? What's the benefit of that? would they do that? What's the benefit of that? Well, there's this instinct to implement the same types of centralized banking institutions. And here's the thing, when you have that much money under the control of an individual on an organization, society then builds all of these regulatory institutions because they figured out that when you do that, those institutions, those organizations, those individuals steal the money again and again.

When you put one person in charge of the money, they steal the money. I mean, that's what power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. And there is no more powerful corrupting influence than money. So when you have people who have millions in their control, bad things happen. Someone just fucks off with it. They just figure out a way to do it. Right.

Or they're sloppy with their security and somebody else robs them. But in either case, all of the banking regulations we have are to stop the fact that individuals control too much money from stealing that money. Bitcoin is a different solution. The idea is instead of collecting all the money in one big bucket, you have each user controlling their own money. You don't put it in a bank. You don't concentrate the risk. And that way you don't need all of these elaborate controls because you don't take the control of the money away from the individual. You leave it in the hands of the individuals. Well, Mt. Gox took it

away of the control of the individuals, but then didn't have any of the regulatory institutions that we traditionally have in banking. So they weren't using the Bitcoin security. And they weren't using the traditional banking regulations and audits to protect them. They were in this gray area in between where they had all of the control over the money and none of the protections. What the fuck? That's ridiculous. That is a very fascinating point. Gross incompetence as well i mean

like really really bad management a really bad coding really bad technology use just gross incompetence of an unbelievable scale i mean you think with all of that money they'd hire some competent people but the incompetence started at the top well you look at the guy at the top and his dumb fat face. Look at that fucking dummy. Look at that. That guy's never been good at anything. I'll tell you what right now.

A guy with a dumb fat face like that, and if you have a dumb fat face and you're smart, I apologize. I apologize right now. I have a dumb face too. He plays Magic the Gathering. Yeah. He doesn't just play it. He owns a fucking online exchange.

Well, he actually bought it from someone else. How much did he pay for it? I don't know. I mean, there was some kind of, this goes way back in the early days. But here's the thing.

Mark Karpalos, the guy you just showed in that photo. Let's call him Big Fat Face. Okay. Can we do that? Sure. So I don't know him personally.

I never met him, but he provided a really critical service at a time when Bitcoin desperately needed it. He provided a market where people could buy and sell Bitcoin in a transparent way. And for the first time, you had Bitcoin pricing. You could figure out how much a Bitcoin was worth because there were lots of people trading it. And therefore, the price that they settled on over thousands of trades was price discovery. You need that in a market to function.

So now you had a price. And for many years, the Mt. Gox price was the price of Bitcoin. All right. So let's stop calling him Big Fat Face. But then... Let's call him Poor Bastard. Okay. So Poor Bastard starts out good.

Starts out good. Everything's going great. He helps out a lot of people by letting them establish a price. Yeah, which made a huge difference for Bitcoin. I mean, that was the first time you had a liquid market where people could actually trade not just face-to-face,

but could exchange various currencies for Bitcoin. And that was incredibly important. Without MT Gox, Bitcoin would have been... So he's essentially just a symptom of a growing market that he just wasn't prepared for like as if like here's a perfect example yeah if i was running something okay i'm a dummy like when it comes to computers i'm a real dummy so if i was running some sort of online exchange and somehow or another started trading bitcoin and then i saw i started seeing

hundreds of millions of dollars. I would have to bring people in. I would have to bring in financial experts and coding experts. I have to try to... Security experts, maybe? And I'm busy as fuck, man. I wouldn't probably do it right.

I would probably fuck it up just the way poor bastard fucked it up. Yeah. So can't really blame him except he's got his finger out. Well, here's the thing. Fuck you back, buddy. There's a chance, you know, we don't know if this was just gross mismanagement or also fraud.

I'm not going to go as far as say poor bastard because there's a good chance that he hurt a lot of people very badly. And there's a chance that he was culpable. Big fat face, you motherfucker face you will find out but but at the same time it's a classic story of someone who um was in a situation that was way over their head and then they tried to handle it without asking for help and then it snowballed and they tried to cover up some mistakes by trying to cover up by making bigger mistakes and then bigger mistakes and then bigger mistakes how do you try to cover it up well once uh so some money was taken uh in an earlier incident from the system and then i think he tried to cover up the lack of money by essentially generating more fees from the customers and

paying for the previous loss by bringing in new customers and trying to stay ahead of the loss. Which, by the way, we've seen this again and again. That's a Bernie Madoff move. Essentially, he was running a mini pyramid scheme. Right. And pyramid schemes are very rarely intentional. Nobody starts out to say, I'm going to run a pyramid scheme.

What happens is they take a bet, they lose on that bet, and then they try to cover up the fact that they lost by bringing in more people. And they're like, as long as I stay ahead of this, it's not going to bite me. And then it gets bigger and bigger. one of the Swiss banks, who was essentially trading bigger and bigger bets in order to cover up previous mistakes and getting further out until eventually it all collapsed. We've seen this happen again and again. It's really trying to cover up an early mistake

by making a bigger mistake, and then it snowballs. Well, I have seen legit pyramid schemes. I had a guy who was a coach at a boxing gym try to talk me into a pyramid scheme. I mean, he was describing it in the dumbest way ever. He was describing a pyramid scheme. He's like, a bunch of people put the money in, and then, hey, I got money out. That's why I got these rims on my truck. And I was like, what are you doing?

He's like, you invest. You put money in, and then new people come in, and then you can take money out, and then new people come in. I go, it's a pyramid scheme. Do you know what you're saying? He didn't know what a pyramid scheme was. Well, I learned that lesson in seventh grade. Yeah, it's a fair release.

Where my school buddies were running a little candy pyramid scheme. A candy pyramid scheme? Yeah, it's basically, it was candy. It was, what's basically, it was candy. Where did it go? We had one of those cantinas where you could buy donuts and things like that. So it was kind of like a donut pyramid scheme based on the school cantina. That's hilarious.

But they actually drew it on the blackboard as an airplane where you sit at the front and then two people sit behind you and then four people sit behind you. Wow. And then it was kind of like, it was called the airplane.

And it was basically a pyramid scheme that some kid had heard from somewhere and introduced into the class. And then our teacher sat us down and said, this is what a pyramid scheme is. And this is why you're not allowed to do this in the school. Doesn't it seem like you'd want to like

find out where that guy is now? I mean, if he was doing that with candy back then, what a fucking creep. President of Avon. I would like to send him a thank you card. He's ahead of verbal life. Financial education. I mean, what a valuable lesson to learn early

and then not fall for it again. That is so true. Yeah, especially because you got to see it in an actual form, not like some sort of abstract lesson that someone's teaching. You got to see it actually play out. Plus, 800 people in the school, it fizzles out pretty quickly. You run out of suckers really, really fast, right? So it only lasted, I think, about two weeks before the whole thing came crashing down. But it was a fantastic demonstration in real life

in a closed, controlled environment. And the only losses were really to the collapse of the local donut economy. That's funny. The guy who came up to me, I explained to him that it was a pyramid scheme, and he still tried to sell me on it. He's like, no, no, I'm telling you, you should do it.

You should put your money on it. I'm like, what are you saying? I just explained to you what this is. It's a pyramid scheme. You know what a pyramid scheme is? Like, people get ripped off saying like did you i just explained to you what this is a pyramid scheme you know what pyramid scheme is like people get ripped off hey you're not gonna get ripped off okay i gotta go yeah but this was a pyramid scheme almost like just to cover up incompetence and then it sort of snowballed like a lie that you couldn't help and then that lie you may have got a bunch of other lies to cover that lie. Well, keep in mind, I'm speculating.

This is based on the information we have right now. We've seen that there were a couple of failures early on. And then it seems like he was trying to cover up for those. We don't know yet. Right. We don't know whether or not he was a part of it as well, right? We don't know how much was stolen by outside people. He certainly did try to cover losses,

but we don't know if those losses occurred because he lost keys to Bitcoin and essentially lost the money, or if it was stolen, or if it was embezzled, or if it was whatever. We don't know. And there's now parallel prosecutions happening, both in Japan and in the United States to find the answers to that. Here's the interesting thing.

We're going to find out the answers to that because Bitcoin uses a public ledger and there's forensic evidence sprinkled in the Bitcoin transaction ledger that allows us to track exactly what happened. This is the most transparent financial system. So we're going to get some really interesting answers. So we'll be able to find out who has it? Not really, but we're going to be able to find out what happened and when it happened. What happened and when it happened, but you can't find out where it went,

and you can't track it. IP address, right? You can't track IP addresses through Bitcoin. You can or can't? You cannot. Cannot. No, you cannot. So there's no way

to figure out where that stuff went. Where the Bitcoins went. Not really. But you can see when it went out of accounts that were known to be controlled by Gox. So you can rebuild a timeline. Here's the other thing that's not going to happen. Mt. Gox didn't get bailed out.

Mt. Gox didn't get 0% interest loans from a central bank in order to pretend they're solvent when they're not. Mt. Gox didn't make deals with other banks to cover up their losses by collateralizing them in CDOs. Mt. Gox didn't get

to acquire some of the failing banks, add them to their asset sheet, and then pretend that they were not failing. Mt. Gox didn't get to bail in all of the customers of Bitcoin across the entire economy. Mt. Gox didn't get to hyper-inflate the currency in order to save themselves but destroy the economy. No. All of those things happened after 2008. Hold on a second. What you're saying sounds exactly like what went on with our economy. Yeah.

Hold on. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Is this guy in trouble? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Where is he? Exactly.

He might be one of the few examples of bankers going to jail. Really? Yes, which doesn't happen very often. It really happens in two cases. Really? Yes, which doesn't happen very often. It really happens in two cases. It happens with two small fish who can't get out of the hook of justice. The hook of justice, I love it.

Or it happens for those who steal money from very, very rich people. Can't do that. Bernie Madoff didn't steal millions of mortgages from people. No, he stole money from very, very rich people. You can't get away with that. Ah, I see. Do you think that, is this guy in hiding? Like, is he...

No, he's in Japan right now. There's extradition requests. They know where he is? I believe so, yeah. How has no one killed him? I mean, you would think that this guy, with hundreds of millions of dollars, like, every step that guy takes,

he must be looking over his shoulder. Does he still look like that? I would shave my head and grow a big tape beard. Yeah. Well, first of all, Japan has very few, very low incidences of violent crime. There's not too many weapons around. The culture is not like that.

And then the other culture, which is, well, geeks like me, I mean, you know, trying to attack someone and cause them harm, I'd have to reach for an asthma inhaler four times in the process of committing a crime. But it seems like a guy like you could figure out a way to code an app for your phone that controls a drone that shoots missiles. I mean, I would think people like you could figure out a way to code an app for your phone that controls a drone that shoots missiles. I mean, I would think people like you would be the worst people to fuck with. Not motivated enough.

I don't know. But you're not motivated enough, but you didn't lose hundreds of millions of dollars to this cat. Like, what if you had $100 million in that $800 plus whatever it was that disappeared? If $100 million, you know, whatever, plus or minus, was all yours, you would be fucking bloody furious. And there are a lot of people who are very upset and very hurt by this situation,

and a lot of people who lost a lot of money, including it had a ripple effect. You've got to realize that many Bitcoin businesses had money in accounts there. So that loss then affected the cash flow of other Bitcoin businesses that suffered and charities, many charities that lost money in Mt. Gox. Oh, wow.

So a business like, say, one that I keep hearing about is Tiger Direct. Tiger Direct, which is a pretty huge computer company. Overstock.com. Both of those use Bitcoin, yeah. That's interesting. Overstock. I keep hearing good things about Overstock. Yeah, of both of those use bitcoin yeah um that's interesting overstock keep hearing good things about overstock yeah they generally don't have much exposure because they don't they here's the thing people who are using it as an exchange so when you have excess bitcoin

move it in there sell it for dollars move the dollars out it's just in and out right versus storing the bitcoin there as a wallet uh and giving them full control of that and just leaving piles of Bitcoin there. Those were the ones most affected. And some of the day traders who had to have piles of Bitcoin there so that they could trade very quickly, those were very affected. But people who just move money in and out, you know, maybe they lost that day's take. And if you look at it merchants like the ones you mentioned uh they don't leave stashes of bitcoin around they're going to exchange that pretty quickly they're going to move out of the exchange if they're smart so they exchange it for

dollars and then they move okay now um how much can you actually store on your phone like your phone like if you wanted to store a million dollars with a bitcoin could you put it on your phone you could store a trillion dollars worth of Bitcoin, could you put it on your phone? You could store a trillion dollars worth of Bitcoin. You could store whatever you want. I mean, there's no limitation. What happens if you lose your phone? Jesus fucking Christ. You'd have your phone connected to your wrist and wrapped around your waist with chains.

Yeah, that would be a supremely dumb and bad idea to do. But you can make backups of Bitcoin, which you can do with regular money. You can have multiple copies. You can encrypt those copies. So you can do a lot of things to protect yourself against loss. Can you have sub-wallets? Can you have your main wallet and then have a sub-wallet that has a completely different passcode or way to get in? You can have a bunch of wallets, right?

Yeah, you can actually make a whole tree structure of wallets. So why didn't this company, this MK or whatever it's called. Mt. Gox. Yeah, why didn't they just have a shitload of subwallets to protect each individual user instead of putting it in a one? That goes to the gross incompetence I was talking about earlier. So that's not how. There are other businesses who also have custodial accounts over Bitcoin. And they implement very smart systems to segregate Bitcoin.

So, for example, on a daily basis, they will sweep 95% to 98% of the Bitcoin off into wallets that require three out of six people to come together to unlock them with the keys separated on separate devices. And those systems are very difficult to break, right? Because you need collusion between multiple people. And that protects both from external theft, but it also protects from internal compromise, a malicious insider, embezzlement, fraud, even by the CEO sometimes. So there are ways to get around this.

You can have good security practices, and all of those good security practices were completely ignored by Mark Karpos. So he's a fuckhead no matter what. Yeah, so the question really now is gross incompetence or fraud.

We don't know, but in either case, it's bad. It hurt a lot of people. But in the end, it had nothing to do with Bitcoin. It was a classic bank failure of the traditional kind

that it was the result of the fact that they fell in a gray area where they didn't have the protections of Bitcoin and they didn't have the regulations of a regular bank.

So this guy lives in Japan. Did he move to Japan when the shit hit the fan or was he there the entire time? No, he was there the entire time. So he's always lived in Japan. That's where Empty Go the shit hit the fan, or was he there the entire time? No, he was there the entire time.

So he's always lived in Japan. That's where Empty Gox was based, yes. Oh, interesting. Okay. Empty Gox. I love it. And so Empty Gox now is insolvent? Is it done? They were trying to do some kind of structured thing, and then I think it was four or five days ago, the Japanese authorities decided to decline and force them into liquidation. So they are now done. Mt. Gox is over. The one thing we can say about Mt. Gox is that they can no longer hurt anyone else.

That's the good thing. Now, this gentleman who runs it or ran it, he's walking on the streets? He goes places? He's just like a regular guy? Do they follow him? I have no idea. I think he's under indictment. I don't know what his status is.

So he's under indictment from America and from Japan? Correct. And there's a warrant for him to come to the States. Okay. So it's not as gangster as if he robbed a bank and held it up with guns. They're not going after him with a SWAT team and dragging him back. But most likely he's fucked. We'll see, yeah.

Most likely. Yeah. I mean, I would be surprised if he doesn't face some kind of serious consequences. You weren't that concerned, though, about this in the overall scheme of things for Bitcoin. You thought this was just sort of a bump in the road and that eventually it would be overwhelmed by the sheer positive benefits of cryptocurrencies. Well, I mean, I think the thing is that it didn't really affect Bitcoin itself. It wasn't a weakness of Bitcoin. It was, in fact, a very strong argument for why you need to decentralize financial institutions, because when you centralize them they fail in exactly this fashion

That's that's what we're trying to change about financial Services make them more decentralized diffuse the power so it can't be corrupted and compromised There are going to be more I'll tell you right now There are going to be more bank failures both in Bitcoin and of course as they happen every single year by the hundreds There are going to be bank bank failures, both in Bitcoin and of course, as they happen every single year by the hundreds, there are going to be bank failures in every currency, including Bitcoin. There are going to be CEOs who run away with the money until we implement better solutions to control the power.

So for example, if you've got a startup and they're raising money in Bitcoin, you don't give all of the keys to one person. You split them among multiple people. Because the person you think you know, who's your cherished partner in this venture, and you've known all your life and your childhood friend, when they have access to a couple million dollars, they change. People change. They're dramatically and radically affected by money. They're dramatically and radically affected by money. And then all you need is a precipitating event, an illness in the family, a crisis, you know, a bad thing happening to that person. And they will grab that money and run.

People make very poor decisions. And they still tell you, hey, man, I needed it. Right. And they'll rationalize it. Or they'll make a mistake, day trading and making a loss or losing some of the money and then trying to cover it up. Whatever it is, my advice to Bitcoin companies is when you're starting out, look at the person sitting next to you and do not assume you can trust them. Assume that people are fallible and then put

in place controls so that no single person can run away with money. And then you're going to be much more secure and everybody will be able to be above board david seaman who was on the podcast last week had a really interesting take on bitcoin that i thought was kind of funny um he was saying that if if bank like bank of america for say if they were smart that they would get involved in bitcoin he was like you already have this established name brand like cryptocurrencies are going to be here. They're here to stay. This is his take. He's like, why wouldn't you capitalize on the name brand that you've already built in on

and get in on the market quick? Get in on it now, in the early days, and establish that Bank of America still has a footing in this as well as in regular money. And he was like, it would be a really wise investment. I think you're going to see that happening in short time. We saw this with the internet,

which was at first the telecommunications companies fought tooth and nail. They could not believe that a decentralized packet switch network like the internet would deliver quality voice and quality video. They wanted to build highly controlled and structured networks. And they tried to fight it because it threatened the long distance market, which was very lucrative. It threatened many other markets. Today, three quarters of all international calls happen on Skype. Three quarters. Three quarters. That's a market that a few,

you know, two decades ago was a 15, $20 billion market and disappeared. And essentially they had to restructure operations. Now they made up for it. The smart ones became very good as internet service providers

and created whole new businesses that replaced those lost revenues. So what happened there is you have these telecom companies trying to fight it until some of the smaller ones, some of the ones that don't have solid entrenched positions and can't take advantage of size, think, you know what, maybe I'm going to cut off from this herd and go play with that Bitcoin a bit.

And as soon as that starts happening, there's almost a stampede because everybody tries to rush into it. That's what happened with telecommunications. The smaller providers started peeling off from the herd, and instead of fighting it, they started trying to build service providers. So it's really just a matter of who runs first. Someone's going to start running, and then... Right, and then the herd breaks apart,

because until the first one breaks, everyone's like, well, we're too serious for this Bitcoin stuff. And they're looking over their shoulder, trying to make sure that everybody else is also staying away from it. But eventually the market dynamic changes. So it's just essentially, it's just human nature. Like with human nature, there's just certain rules that are just always going to be into place. Play hard to get and follow the leader. Those are two big ones. Yeah. And Bitcoin threatens some business

structures within the banking industry. It's going to make it difficult for them to charge exorbitant fees to do international wire transfers when you can do it cheaper. Just like if you have Skype, you can't justify $3 a minute long distance calls. But at the same time, the smart bankers are looking at this and they're saying, yeah, but if we have a cheap, efficient, secure payment system, we can build some really interesting things on top of that and create whole new businesses that are very competitive, that can actually give us a lead. So we outrun the herd. The, you know, disruption in a competitive market is actually very enticing to the second and third tier players

because they don't have an advantage. They're too small to compete against the big guys. But if they see this disruptive technology, they think, well, maybe if I hitch a ride on that, I'm going to overtake everybody. And, you know, I can be the Blockbuster or I can be the Netflix. I can be the Tower Records or I can be the iTunes. And we've seen this happen in technology races before.

Yeah, that's fascinating how people, some people just don't want to buck the trends. They don't want to go along with the flow of things or they want to buck the trends. They want to somehow or another figure out a way where, you know, they can prove everybody else wrong. And VHS is making a comeback and, you know, renting movies is still valid. You know, there's, there's a lot of those fuckers out there that just won't let it go. Radio companies. Change is scary. Yeah, it is scary. But that's the nature of the beast, especially today. We're involved in the craziest time for change the world has ever known. Yeah. At the moment, being on the top of an industry, especially an industry that's involved in technology, is a very precarious position. if you talk to Kodak a decade ago,

do you think they would realize that suddenly the largest vendor or manufacturer of cameras in the world would be a telephone company, Nokia? Nokia, within three years, became the world's largest maker of cameras. And suddenly the entire industry changed, right? And how do you compete against that?

They're not even in your industry. They just came out of left field. It's like you're suddenly the horse buggy manufacturer and Ford is taking your business. And you never expected that was going to happen. Well, Nokia has a camera phone now, a Windows phone, that is some insane amount of pixels. It's like 40 fucking megapixels or something. 41? 41 megapixels

says Jamie. Jamie's on top of that shit. 41 fucking megapixels on a phone. I mean, this thing, I think, has the Note 3, I think it has 12 or something. No, it's better than that. Are you familiar with Moore's Law? Yes.

So for your listeners too, Moore's Law was created by Gordon Moore. For processors, right? Processing speed. Yeah, and what he said was that he estimated that because of the way silicon works, every 18 months, the speed of a computer would double or the price would drop by half.

And that has been true now for more than 25 years. And that thing then plays out in camera megapixels, in storage on SD cards, in the size of your smartphone, in the number of sensors you can put into the smartphone, and its battery. Battery life is the one that's lagging behind and it's the main thing that's holding back this technology. Moore's law also applies to things like Bitcoin. It also applies to networks like the internet. And what it means is that if you're in an industry that's established and suddenly you have a competitor that's coming at you with the power of Moore's law, you better watch out because it's not a matter of whether you will be able to compete in a decade. It's a matter of whether you will be able to compete in a decade.

It's a matter of whether your industry will still exist in a decade. Right. Right. Yeah. Isn't that fascinating that whole industries can just vanish? 150 years of Kodak and then suddenly film doesn't exist. Gone in a decade. Do you remember when you used to have to pay money for long distance?

You know, long distance calls don't exist. You can call New York right now on your home phone. It's regular. Call on your cell phone. It's totally normal. If you used to call long distance on a cell phone, it was an exorbitant amount of money. Saturday afternoons, London, payphone. When I was a student, I would go there with a stack of coins that was probably about

$10 worth in today's money. I would sit in a payphone and my family would know what time I was going to call, coordinated. I'd call in. There'd be a line of 15 relatives sitting, standing behind the phone on the Athens side. And it'd be, hi, mom. I love you very much. Hi, dad. I love you very much. Hey, sis. It's all awesome. Okay, next. Aunt. Aunt Maria. Aunt Julie. London's awesome. And I'm stuffing coins as fast as I can into this payphone and then four or five minutes later, $10 down the drain and I've said hello to the entire family and that's all I could afford. That was my experience. And now you could Skype for hours for free.

Isn't that crazy? You can look at a video of each other talking to each other through your laptop for free. Wow. Fascinating, fascinating times. And when you put it in that kind of a perspective, you really sort of understand the change. Just the ability that we have to reach out to each other is just unprecedented in human history. It's never been even remotely close to what it is now. I saw somebody walking down the street the other day,

Skyping with someone while they were walking down the street, and they were talking while they were walking down the street. They're like, yeah, so we're going to blah, blah, blah. And the other person's on the other end. I'm looking at their phone. I'm like, this is crazy. They're doing it through a cell phone connection. I'm doing that all the time now, yeah.

Walking down the street through a cell phone connection, streaming video back and forth to each other. It's amazing. Amazing. What do you think about things like, is there a reason why Apple doesn't have any apps where you can exchange Bitcoin? They have some Bitcoin monitoring apps, correct? They've basically banned any apps that allow you to run a wallet to do transactions is there a reason for that i mean is there like can you find like a logical if you try to take devil's advocate there's there's three or four reasons and i can give you them from the

obvious to the to the cynical and paranoid um first of all I think they are worried about this strange technology that they don't know anything about. And they're worried about what kind of reputation hit they'll take if one of these apps is compromised and causes their customers to lose money, right? More worried than Google, who allow all of these applications on Google Play. So it's not a legal thing, because Google has lawyers too, and they're quite happy to allow Bitcoin applications, and Apple does not like it. That's the obvious answer. Then there's another thing.

Whenever you spend money on buying an app or buying something inside an app, Apple takes like 30%. So their own payment system through the App Store and iTunes and all of these things generates an enormous amount of revenue because they take a very big cut of these things. Now, if you could put a wallet in a phone, then you could also put a wallet in an app. Then you could also do Bitcoin transactions in an app.

Then why give Apple 30% cut if you can just bypass them and do all the payments through that? Do you think that that's ultimately going to be Apple's demise though? I mean, if you look at, you want to talk about like people that had a grip on a market and then it slowly slipped away. Apple had an enormous chunk of the smartphone market just a few years ago. I mean, they had the majority of it.

Now 80 something percent of the smartphones are Android phones? That's crazy. I mean, that's quite amazing. And the technology has surpassed them. Now you have several choices with Android phones that are waterproof. Big, giant ones, the Sony Xperia, you could throw it underwater for a fucking half an hour, like five feet of water for a half an hour. mean the the Galaxy s5 the new one water resistant

You could take a shower with it listen to music you could put a fucking Stuff it in your underwear and literally shower with the thing on I mean Fingerprint sensors they had them first on iPhones, but now Samsung Galaxy's s5 has a fucking heart rate monitor I mean, they're ahead of the curve. The Android phones aren't playing catch up with Apple anymore. Now they're bypassing them. And I wonder if that's going to happen with things like iTunes, exchanges, things. Right now it's convenient to use iTunes, but once I switched over to Android, I found a thing called DoubleTwist where you could send your music to your phone. You could use iTunes with this thing.

And also I found Amazon MP3, which is just as easy to use, if not easier, than iTunes. iTunes is a horrible application. I can't stand it. It's like you put it on your Mac and you get a pinwheel every time you click on anything, especially if you have a horrible application. I can't stand it. It's like you put it on your Mac and you get a pinwheel every time you click on anything, especially if you have a large collection. And it hasn't really changed or improved much at all.

But it does ask you to accept the terms and conditions every time you sneeze. So you have to click on that thing. It's like, listen, Apple, I've accepted the terms. I haven't read them. No one's read them, but I accept them. I accept them

forever. Just give me a checkbox that says from now on until the end of time I accept. I accept. Please stop. Yeah, do a retina scan. Every time I look at your app, assume I'm accepting. I like iTunes for some things. I use it still

to buy movies. I use it on my buy movies. I use it on my laptop exclusively. I use it on my home computer exclusively. Like if I'm buying music, I buy my music and I buy it all through that. But on my phone, it's just as easy to buy it through Amazon. It's very simple. It's not like some new thing you have to learn. Same process. You search a genre, search an artist oh i wanted to buy like we were in the green room the other day at the orlando hard rock me and joey diaz and joey diaz goes on this epic rant about led zeppelin uh led zeppelin one because there was a poster on the wall that i took a picture of and i put it up on my instagram and it was the first tour

poster from led zeppelin in 1968 69 and we were like could you fucking imagine what that must have been like to experience like Zeppelin for the first time like back then like and Joey was going off about how it blew people away so listening to him I get inspired I go to my phone as he's talking within like 10 seconds I type Led Zeppelin in the search boom it's downloading three seconds after that bam i'm playing the album i mean like wow that's crazy i put it on speaker we sit down and we start laughing about how easy that is to do and how amazing this music is well yeah exactly apple um changed the way we think about music changed the way we think about music, changed the way we think about phones, and created all of these new technologies.

But this happens again and again in technology. Let me give you the context. By the way, iTunes Store is not loading right now. Just to show you. Pinwheel. It's pinwheeling right now. I clicked it as you brought that up. I said, let's see.

And I clicked it. It's fucking not loading. So what happens with technology again and again is that you always have to make this trade-off. You want to have an experience that's very tightly controlled and therefore consistent, right? You combine

a very limited set of hardware, a very limited set of features, but what you get is that it works every time consistently. And then you can have this kind of Wild West situation as you do with Android. And at first, it creates a lot of fragmentation and everything's inconsistent and it doesn't work very well. But over time, here's what happens.

The control situation that gave you the advantage at first starts lagging behind innovation because it can't change fast enough. And the Wild West starts getting better and better at quality until eventually it wins. And we've seen this happen over time. And then the control situation has to open up the borders again, let everybody flood in, do a lot of fragmentation and experimentation, and the cycle starts again. That's going to happen too.

I mean, we're going to see much more openness in music. We're going to see more openness in phones as a result of this. And then Apple will have to actually go out and invent something new instead of just, you know, small incremental changes. This Apple shit's bothering me, man. Bothering me? Bothering me. What?

It's 52% Android and 41% is Apple. Really? When I read there was 80. I read 80 somewhere. And Apple still has sold more applications. Apple has sold 50 million apps, I think, or something like that. And Android has sold up to 48 million apps total. What's bothering you about it?

It says 81%, man, on CNET. CNET says Android dominates 81% of the world's smartphone market. Yeah, that's the global versus I think what you quoted is U.S., and it's a very different market. Oh, okay. Well, let's look at it globally. So Asia has a much bigger Android penetration. Okay, that's what I read.

I was in Vancouver this weekend, and I had to use my Android phone completely, only using my Android phone, no iPhone at all. And I do not understand people that say that the Android phone is better in any way. The camera was horrible. I tried to take so many photos using that camera, and this is the Note 3 that has a really nice camera. That camera is a piece of shit.

All Samsung does is add a bunch of crap to their phones to be the first, but they do it so half-assed that it just doesn't work. Like you keep on saying that's the heartbeat sensor and the thumbprint thing is one of the worst, like the thumbprint in the new S5 is horrible. People are saying it's the dumbest thing ever, that it never works.

It's just a piece of shit. Well, that's exactly the compromise. You either have control and tight quality, but it's slow, or you have speed, but it's, you know, at first, it's flaky. Yeah, and I would be the first to say, hey, you're right, you know, this iPhone is a piece of shit. I still buy all the newest phones just because I'm looking just like everyone else to find something better. But, man, you can't break this thing being quality. Like, it's always working. You have the best photos you can possibly get.

All the apps are perfect for it. I definitely agree with you on the photos. There's a big difference between the iPhone photos and the Android photos. I think the sensor on the iPhone is a lower megapixel, but much higher quality. It's just a better phone. But what is a megapixel on an iPhone? It's like 8? 8.

People forget lenses and things like that, which make a huge difference. Carl Zeiss lens. Backlight. It's actually 13 megapixels on the Galaxy Note 3. But it's not as good. It's fine if the light is good. Are you talking, Jamie? You know you don't have a microphone on you,

you motherfucker. I can't hear you. What are you doing? Why don't you make sign language at me? Can't hear that either. The, there's, I mean, I think there is a better camera than the iPhone, but it's not the Note 3.

I think there is a better one out there. Yeah, I'm sure there is a better camera, but I'm just saying. Okay, let's find out. What's the best, let's Google, best smartphone camera. I bet Apple's in the top two. There was also a report saying that, you know, why it's such a big share is not because of quality, it's because of price, that Android users are more poor, and they get more technology for the money, so that's why it's become so popular, because all the poor markets are buying it. So it looks like Android's just destroying Apple in that regards,

but it's not meaning that it's a better product. Best smartphone camera overall, iPhone 5S. It's the best market audience, especially in Asia, where you can get an Android phone for $50 to $100 instead of $300 to $400 equivalents for an iPhone. Image stabilization and dual LED flash. You got one of the best phones for taking pictures in low light or any situation. Apple has improved its camera app for the 5S.

What's the difference? Oh, it does, like, photos. There's slow-mo pictures. I'll tell you one of the coolest things. I think you could do this on the Android also. It's burst mode. But being able to just, and I didn't even know I had it, if you just hold down the camera, it just takes a million photos.

So if you're with, say you want a picture of Joe Rogan, you just sit there, hold down the camera, it will go, and take like 300 photos of you. And then you can just choose which one you didn't blink and stuff like that. I do miss the camera. That's the one thing I miss. But I don't miss that little bitchy screen. That little screen's a joke. Well, June.

That's all you have to wait. Yeah, allegedly. But that's a 4.7 one. The 5.5 one's not going to be for a long time. Yeah, it's September. So says you. What are you, a Mac insider? Who the fuck do you know, boy?

And this humongous iPad's coming out. Yeah, that's all good, dude. But this, I'll take it every day. I'll take that all day. It's not important. The camera's not nearly as important to me as being able to do my email, go online. Everything plays like flash. Anything that has flash on it plays, no problem.

That, to me, is gigantic. When I look at a YouTube video and it's that goddamn big, to me, that's huge. And also the stylus. I fucking love this thing. Are you kidding me, man? Yeah, I never use it. Every time I use the stylus, I'm just this thing. Are you kidding me, man? Yeah, I never use it. Every time I use the stylus, I'm just wasting my time.

Why am I doing this? Well, I use it a lot for writing my jokes. Right. That's interesting that you do that, too, because it seems so much, I don't know, I'm just so fast on the keyboard. Yeah, I mean, it's not the fast thing.

For me, it's a memorization thing. When you actually write things physically with your hand, you can remember them better. And this took, for a long time, I was still bringing the notebook as well. But I gave up on the notebook. I do it all on this thing now. I tell you, man, since this iPad Air, I've been taking my iPad almost everywhere. And now I don't give a shit about my phone.

This is just for texting. You mean pad or pod? My iPad. Pad. I thought you said pod. Yeah. This thing's so light and like you could just keep it everywhere and like if you really want to surf the net You know even the new one the small one Yeah, that is a good move, but you can't put in your pocket

Yeah I don't just I you know I honestly just don't trust the the the apps in the App Store and the Google Apps and the back doors and the hacking in the App Store and the Google Apps and the back doors and the hacking hack ability of the operating system to me I think this is the way the iPhone is just a brick and then see it like your important stuff your text messages and your crap like that should have the highest security not something that that's so easily been hacked so right here this comparison between control quality but slow innovation versus speed, choice, fragmentation,

but flakiness and weird security problems and cutting edge, that choice is playing out in many areas of technology, whether it's... And this choice played out on the internet at first, which was the idea that the internet was a far inferior network

to the carefully controlled... If you like it, the phone companies were doing the iPhone of networks, right? And the internet was like the scrappy, messy Android of networks. But over time, it continued to innovate and get better. And the other systems got slower and slower and less innovative. And so the closed systems have that problem. They lag, but they offer you much

better control and quality and security at first. So here's the thing. That's been happening in finance. And in finance, it's much worse because the closed control systems of the banks have existed for hundreds of years. And this scrappy new Bitcoin thing, which is not as fast in many cases, but fast in other cases, has more choice, but also puts more responsibility for security. It's more flaky. It's more scrappy.

It's more versatile. It gives you a hell of a lot more choice and it allows you to innovate really, really fast. It doesn't give you the quality. You don't have the controls and security, supposedly. But at the same time, the banking system is failing to deliver to consumers. It's failing to deliver security because people can get away with massive theft on it. And so now what we're seeing is this exact same scenario that you described,

that we saw with the internet versus telecom networks, that we saw with iPhone versus Android is now playing out in finance with Bitcoin. That's fascinating. They say that the best camera for power users is that Nokia. Nokia, they had on tomsguide.com is what I'm reading. They've rated a bunch of different ones. I don't know why Tom really knows his shit,

but it seems like a highly rated site. But the 41 megapixel camera apparently is just unbelievable. The photos are so big that even when you zoom in, like way in, like you could take a photo and zoom way in, it's still crop it, and it's still an excellent photo. Yeah, that's about the only reason why you'd want that many megapixels though, honestly. Yeah, it really is, right? Because megapixels, people stopped caring about megapixels a while ago for the most part. Even some of the higher end cameras just kind of stopped.

Even though they could go bigger, I mean, it's just not as important as when it was like from one megapixel to five megapixels. Unless you're making like billboards or something. Unless you're making billboards or you really are just going to spend time just cropping out sections of large photos.

And even that, with such a small device that's in your hand, I would imagine that there's a lot of blur. And even if you do crop out little pieces, it's still not going to be like something like if you had a tripod and a DSLR or something like that. Yeah, they're saying that the Galaxy S5 is a big improvement too from the Note 3 as far as cameras go. Yeah. Yeah. You get to a point of saturation where it becomes good enough. You remember the time when you bought a computer based on how many gigahertz it had

and how fast it was and you needed to upgrade every year. And then we reached the point probably five or six years ago when you bought a computer and then it was still perfectly fast enough four or five years later and you didn't need to upgrade it anymore, right?

Or when you used to need a bigger and bigger hard drive every single year, and then you reach a terabyte, and now you're like, well, I can store everything, so I'm done. I don't need any more, right? Same thing with megapixels. You reach a point where, at first, it makes a really big difference, and then it's such a small difference that it doesn't matter anymore.

You've reached saturation. You have to find something else to emphasize some new innovation. Yeah. Yeah. At a certain point in time, it's going to be very difficult for one company, like a company like Apple, to compete with the overwhelming amount of companies that are producing Android phones. That's the open ecosystem. That's the difference between being able to innovate in multiple places versus trying to control everything. And you can really see that too, if you pay attention to the original Android phones and what they are today as opposed to the original iPhone, which was incredibly innovative. The original iPhone is pretty close to what they have today. I mean, it was very similar in size, very similar in look. Obviously, the resolution got better,

the camera got better, it got quicker, It moves better. It has more features. But the original Android phones were dog shit. Yes. They were so bad. Do you remember? Did you have one, Brian? Yeah, I had the first Droid. Yeah.

God, I have one, too. It was so bad. I had it for one day. And I brought it back in. The Verizon guys were trying to talk me out of it. And I go, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. I'm like, look, take it. And they're like, well, you don't want to bring it back. talk me out of it. And I go, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. I'm like, look, take it. And they're like, well, you don't want to bring it back.

Just get used to it. I'm telling you, I really like it. Get this piece of shit away from me. Because I had an iPhone, and I tried to switch to a Droid to go on Verizon at the time. Oof. Is that what you had, Brian? Yeah, here's me doing a review of the first one. The phone has a 5 megapixel camera.

It's got a flash. The camera is really good. It has a washed out rainy look though, unfortunately. And you have to uninstall. Look at all this shit just to uninstall. There's some things about it where you're just like,

why don't they just copy what works? The iPhone works. That's the best way to delete applications, whatever. So there's a couple things here and there that I don't like. What's crazy is that, you know, down the line, more that droids started becoming more popular, they did start copying everything that iPhone used, and that's why they're in court right now, Samsung versus Apple in court. Yeah, what is the lawsuit about?

Do you know the specifics? Just a lot of different things like, like, uh, like, uh, the, the unlock screen,

I think like how you unlock this, you know, the phone and just different, like, you know, operating systems shit that, that pretty much they just kind of just copied. That Apple figured out first.

Yeah. And so the new iPhone is supposed to come out in June. Is that what they're doing? June is supposedly like the, the new iPhone six. And then they're going to have the giant one, supposedly. It's just what they do every year, where they announce it in June, and then it's like the next month they'll have

one come out. And then the bigger one, I guess, and the only reason why they're waiting a little bit longer is because the panels that they're going to be using in the new phone are backordered so much. Because when Apple starts selling something new, it pretty much just destroys anyone that does that.

Like, we make 5-inch screens. Well, yeah, Apple's going to buy 5 million of these. Right. Their screens are different, too. That was the other thing that I was reading about the difference between the HT1M8, which is probably the highest-rated Android phone. Right. Have you seen that one? Yeah.

It's pretty fucking slick. Even an actual Apple website was reviewing the HTC One M8, and they were saying that if Apple built an Android phone, this would be the phone that they built. It's pretty fucking slick. And they actually have a different approach to cameras entirely. They have a small megapixel phone. That's a slick-looking phone.

Apparently, the sound on these is incredible. The sound is supposed to be amazing. Like, literally, it sounds like a little boombox. I think that's one of the big deals, too, that why I haven't been happy with as much as the Android is. I really think that Samsung is not actually the best maker of the phones. I think even these HTCs seem a little bit better put together. Yeah, well, this one is particularly well-designed, but this one only has a 4-megapixel, what they call ultra-pixel phone.

Yeah, or ultra-pixel camera, rather. And I don't understand that. But it has two camera lenses. You see what they're doing there while you're clicking back and forth? What the two lenses are, there's two different cameras on the back, and those two cameras allow you to blur out the foreground or the background if you so choose to. It's pretty slick for photos. I've seen the pictures.

But four megapixels is just, the images are just not going to be as large. The real question becomes, is four megapixels enough? Four phones. See, I think that's what's weird is phones are actually taking over cameras. I haven't looked lately, but I'm pretty sure that the camera

sales, especially point and shooters, are completely down. Oh, they're in the shitter. Yeah, in the shitter. I used to buy them all the time because you know those were great to put in your pocket but nowadays you don't need that yeah I have one that I use just for after shows like why I have people like line up and take pictures with them and then I put it up on my website because just because it saves time but the actual need for them for the average person is almost non-existent. Unless you're like one of those SLR-type people that has a big crazy lens and all that jazz.

I guess that technology you were talking about, like blurring the foreground, is actually built into the new Android operating system, that whole thing. Yeah, you can do it with software. The difference with the HTC One is it actually does it with hardware as well, and it's supposed to look slicker. They have that ability to do it on the HTC, or not the HTC, the Samsung Galaxy S5 as well. You can do that in the background.

I just think that what HTC has decided to do is try to do it with two different cameras at the same time. So would you say this is the one to buy now if you were going to get a new Android? You think the Nexus, right? I love the Nexus. I like the HTC One, too. I have to say, I think both of them are great hardware solutions. Then you have to really be careful about what software is loaded on them

because depending on which carrier you get it from, they're going to have different quality of software whether it's the latest KitKat or an earlier version. I get my phones unlocked, I wipe them, and I replace the software with my own choices immediately. Not everybody does it. How hard is that? How much time does that take? It's not a matter of, I mean, it takes me two or three days

to get everything done but i mean you know not not that much time that's a lot of time man nobody does this stuff listen i'm i'm a technology contrarian i android versus iphone i do android windows versus linux i do linux even when it's at first dog shit user experience i do it anyway for the freedom and the versatility and the choice. But you have a Mac laptop. And I'm an early adopter on Bitcoin. And so, yeah, I have a Mac laptop. Do you run Apple on it or do you run something crazy? I run Apple on it and I also run Linux machines on it too as virtual machines.

So I have a combination of operating systems here. You run Linux on an Apple laptop? You could do that? Yeah. As a virtual? I know you could do that. Do they still have that option to run Windows on Mac laptops? Yeah, I've got Windows 7 here too. Man, have you used Windows lately?

When are they just going to give up and start over? They're not going to. They still have a giant chunk of the market. I love what they're doing now is that they're actually making money off of still supporting Windows 98 to banks. They were like, no, we give up on Windows 98

or XP, and we give up on Windows XP, but we'll, you know, if you want to pay us, we'll still support it. Well, do you remember when they had Windows stores at the mall that didn't sell anything? They had a Windows store, and I went in, and I'm like, do you guys sell computers? They go, no. I go, what the fuck are you doing?

You guys are Windows, and you don't sell computers? Well, we're Windows. We're not computer sellers. We're an operating system. They sold Windows. You could buy Windows there. Yeah. Who's running this?

Let me talk to that guy. Hey, dude, this is fucking stupid. You have all this cool shit. You should have a variety of different manufacturers of really cool computers. Yeah. Maybe I'm wrong. Now the Windows stores now sell everything. Oh, they do?

They have laptops. They have all that stuff, the Surface. And still none of it's selling. Yeah. You know, I'm more interested in these Android notebooks. I saw one the other day. I think that's the way to go. If you just want a little teeny notebook to put in your, you know, to check

email and stuff like that. Maybe they did sell computers, and I'm wrong. I think there were some early Windows stores that didn't, and it was just more like kiosks. Yeah, when I went to one of them, that's what I remember. Maybe I'm wrong. I'm trying to remember, because it was quite a while ago, but I remember

going in, and my kids were playing with, like, one of the things that they... Look at this. This article on CIO.com. Four things you'll love about HTC's ones and four you won't. What you won't love about the HTC One M8 duo camera is disappointing. The single most unfortunate thing about the HT One is the camera. The device rear-facing 4 megapixel duo camera with ultra pixel technology.

Stop moving. Two different lenses allows the user to detect and calculate the relative distance of subjects in the image. Sounds cool, right? Well, except for the measly 4 megapixels. It doesn't take long at all to realize that while the camera works fairly well in dimly lit environments oh so that was the idea they they kept with a low megapixel to some or another have it function better in low

environments but then the quality during the day is to be just left to be desired so the the what you're going to use it most of the time probably during the day it Okay, so there's only two options that are really good if you want to go with phones. It's that Lumina and the Apple. Those are the two big ones. Oh, and apparently the Sony Xperia too. For cameras. Yeah, the Sony Xperia apparently has a pretty dope camera too.

So I think the reason they're putting two cameras on the back of the phone, which would be interesting, is where you get the ability to shoot 3D directly. Because if you think about it, this phone is now wide enough that you can separate the cameras by about as much as your eyes are separated, the focal distance. And then you can shoot direct 3D off two cameras.

Well, do you remember when they had that for a while? They had 3D photography on some of those crazy phones you remember when they had that for a while? They had 3D photography on some of those crazy phones. Remember? Yeah. It wasn't good enough. They were really weird. And it only worked on your phone.

It wouldn't work on a computer. We'll get there. The first iteration is always kludgy. But I like to have the... Yeah, kludgy. What's kludgy mean? It's rough. It's roughludgy mean? It's rough. It's rough around the edges. It's a word I've never used.

Is that an English word? It's a geek word. It would be herby. How dare you? How dare you double it? Urban dictionary. Oh, it's an urban one? Oh, okay.

I don't know. It's a geek term. The first iteration of a technology is always flaky, but if it's powerful and disruptive enough, then there'll be an incentive to make it better. When I used the first iterations of web browsers, they were terrible. The first versions of Android, they were terrible. And guess what? The first versions of Bitcoin wallets are terrible. But I have choice. And I love that.

I'd rather be on the cutting edge and be dealing with something that's rough around the edges and get to experience the technology as it matures. Eventually, it will get to the point where it's as easy to use as an iPad, which is how my mom got on the internet. And Bitcoin will get to that point too. To me, choice is more important than polish. But for other people, they go with the opposite choice, and that's perfectly understandable. That's interesting, man.

Yeah, I agree with you in a lot of ways. Windows and Apple, you know, as far as like Apple phones and, you know, the whole idea, the way Apple locks things down and controls it and Windows where they don't. And they allow you to get into the registry. They allow you to do a lot of things with your computers that a lot of power users like. Maybe break it. Yeah. The average person might, it might fuck it up. So do you think that that could possibly have like a rational effect on Apple's decision to not have Bitcoin wallets outside of the commerce? Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

So as I said, you know, the straightforward one is that it introduces risk in an environment that is deliberately conservative about quality, security and control over the environment. So they're going to be slow to adopt things that are disruptive. And it's also self-serving because it threatens their payment network. And it might be self-serving because it also threatens their ability to introduce their own form of digital currency or digital wallet, which there are a lot of rumors that they're working on that. You can take all of those together, and it makes sense, but it's not a long-term decision, because if there's enough momentum behind digital currencies, eventually they're going

to add them. Slower than everybody else, but they will get there. Have you thought about the future and looked at the trends, the technological trends, and tried to extrapolate what would be the method for exchanging and controlling Bitcoin in the very near future. Is there a better version of what these apps can provide on phones that you believe could be implemented sometime in the near future? Oh, absolutely. Sometime in the near future. Oh, absolutely. I mean, at the moment, you don't want to have a lot of the raw elements of the system exposed to users who don't want to learn anything about these.

So right now, there's a pretty steep learning curve. If you want to understand digital cryptocurrencies, just the name alone, like cryptocurrencies, sounds so awfully geeky and weird. But if you want to understand digital money let's start by renaming that right so it's a digital money if you want to understand digital money um you get introduced these terms public key private key encryption address wallet uh bitcoin address uh transaction all of these are confusing terms because they don't actually mean what you think they mean. So a Bitcoin wallet is not actually a wallet because it doesn't contain coins. It only contains the keys that allow you to unlock the coins. The coins are actually on the network.

And you get into all of these things where you've picked a name, that name evokes a thought, but that thought doesn't quite match what's really happening, so it ends up confusing rather than enlightening, right? So a good name is one that tells you how this is going to work because it evokes the correct paradigm, the correct user interface design. And so we don't have that in Bitcoin yet. The words are wrong.

The terminology is wrong. The user interface and user experience is still very, very geeky. And that happened on the internet. I remember watching in 1994, there's this classic segment on Good Morning America when they're like,

so the thing with the at sign, is that the internet? No, no, Kelly, that's email. And the dot, that's the internet. And so why are there all these slashes, and what is an IP address? And I don't really understand any of this, right?

You get two things. One, the technology gets smoother and more polished, and the words get, at the same time, the culture changes smoother and more polished and the words get at the same time the culture changes and the culture gradually adopts the terminology so that now people are more comfortable with the weird words and the words have gotten less weird and somewhere in the middle they meet and you get mainstream adoption are people working on trying to get any sort of a Bitcoin wallet reintroduced into the Apple App Store? Because there was one for a while, right? Was there more than one or was one?

There was more than one and now there's more too. There's new ones that have been reintroduced already. To the Apple Store? Yes, absolutely. They use a few little, how do I call this, loopholes. Are you outing them or should we not say their names? I won't say their names at the moment, but there are ways to do this. Then what's the point? You're the fucking Bitcoin Jesus. If you don't say their names, they don't get promoted, and they fucking die on the vine.

They'll get pulled immediately. Will they get pulled immediately if you say their names? It's like an emulator for Nintendos that pop up almost every day on the store. It's like some backdoor into some food cooking program. If people want to find Bitcoin wallets for iOS, they can search for those terms

and find them. Okay. And essentially, the other way to do it is by building a pure HTML5 wallet that runs entirely in the browser. And then it's not an app you install. It's a page you visit,

but it's fully functional. It looks like an application. Do they have those? We're building those. Every company in the space is building one of those right now. To avoid the whole app system? Yeah. To get around the app system and to enable users to use it through the browser.

And you still have to use Apple's browser though, correct? You can't use Chrome yet. Can you use Chrome for Apple? Yeah. They have a Chrome application now? They have Microsoft Word now on ios really so any html5 browser and that's the nice thing about html5 it's the new version of the web protocol and it will run on any browser on any device and it will give you a full

app like experience it doesn't feel like a web page it feels like an application that's interesting that's really interesting so that will cut it all out. If you can get online, then you can get to this web page, then you can trade Bitcoin, period. So exactly. And this is what's exciting about the Bitcoin space for me, which is that we talk about this idea that we're going to convert dollars to Bitcoin. Like if only, say, Amazon adopts Bitcoin,

then all of the stuff they're selling through Bitcoin will now be sold through Bitcoin instead of dollars. It's like chewing out little parts of the traditional economy and just converting it into a different currency. And that is boring. It is so not the point. That's a bit like thinking that the internet succeeds when all phone calls happen on the internet and we've taken over the entire fax market and now fax is dominated by internet fax. And the whole point is that it made fax irrelevant. It didn't replace it. It made it irrelevant. And it didn't replace phone calls.

It gave people better communication tools and different communication tools. I'm more interested in what we can do with Bitcoin that can't be done today, rather than replacing the things we already do with dollars or Visa and making a better Visa, a better PayPal, a better online shopping experience. That stuff is boring. So here's what's happening. Within the Bitcoin economy, there's now hundreds of startups, and they're hiring people. We have a jobs fair in Sunnyvale that happened before 2008, where companies actually had jobs and would come to you in order to find you. And we're doing this in Bitcoin because of this incredible spirit of innovation that's been unleashed. So if you're an entrepreneur,

and you look at these rough edges, and you look at these difficulties in the system, and you look at the fact that it's not ready for mainstream adoption, what you see is opportunity, massive opportunity. Because remember, at first on the internet, you couldn't find anything. So someone said, well, how about we build a search engine?

And now that's a multi hundred billion dollar company, right? And search became an entire industry out of a single problem. And the problem was you couldn't find anything. Now you can find everything. And so at first people said, well, the internet's never going to succeed because you can't find anything on the internet. And smart entrepreneurs took that problem and said, no, if I solve this problem, not only do I make the internet work, but I also create an entirely new industry.

So right now, Bitcoin is difficult to use. But if you solve that problem, if you take, for example, the fact that a Bitcoin address is like a 37-character thing and it's unreadable, and you hide that, just like we no longer use IP addresses on the internet, we use nice and easy to use names. We used to use, you know, 192.168.0.1 and I had a list in my wallet of IP addresses. If I wanted to go to the Stanford website, I had to pull out my wallet and look up their IP address. That's how it used to work. And there was no way that was going to go mainstream.

So each one of these problems, each one of these rough edges, is an opportunity to create a whole new industry that does things in a different way, that reinvents financial services and that makes them new and innovative and decentralized and enables things that have never been done before. This is not about making a better shopping experience. It's about doing things we couldn't do before. And eventually, people are going to build wallets that are very easy to use and wallets that are going to be very beautifully designed.

And we're beginning to see that now as all of these startups are rushing in to fill in the gaps, to polish all the rough edges, and to deliver real quality consumer products that people can take this incredible underlying power of Bitcoin and turn it into an everyday experience that a person who doesn't want to know about any of the geeky stuff about encryption, about keys, about all of that, simply says, I want to send Joe some money. And the wallet is Joe, money, send. And all of the rest is hidden in the background.

And we're getting there. And we are getting there, and it sort of mirrors what's already been done with the internet. So people can sort of see the path. It's not like it's some completely new thing that's never been done before. No one's ever taken something that was unbelievably complex, simplified it, made it mainstream online. Yeah, they have. You could see it. So with Bitcoin, it's like the path is already lit. You just have to get people that are brave enough to step forward,

and that's obviously happening. Except for one fundamental difference. We don't have to lay hundreds of thousands of miles of new copper and fiber line. We don't have to build the physical infrastructure because it's already there. The internet took a decade and a half to spread in terms of adoption,

and one of the big issues was getting high-speed internet to enough people and then getting fully on all-the-time internet. Remember the days of dial-up? Remember modems going beep? Beep! Wham! Wham! Wham! Wham! Right. That's a car alarm, dude. I know. Remember the days of dial-up? Remember modems going beep?

Right. That's a car alarm, dude. I know. Now, it was impossible to get my mom to do email if she had to first turn on the computer, log on, double-click, start the dial-up, do all of this with her phone that made her phone busy so she couldn't actually use it. It would drop off sometimes, too. And then connect and sync the email, et cetera. Now she swipes her iPad and the email is there and she doesn't know how it works. All of this is always on.

It's Wi-Fi. It's simple. Boom, done. That's the progression we're going to see. That's fascinating. What are, right now, as of today, what are the changes in Bitcoin since the last time you were on? There are some really interesting things happening, I think. So let's see.

It's been a while. In real life, it's been two and a half months, which in Bitcoin terms is like two and a half years. So much has happened. It's just ridiculous. One of the interesting things we've seen is serious efforts and results in building multi-signature capabilities. I don't think we even talked about that last time, or maybe we mentioned it briefly. What is multi-signature capabilities? So this is a feature that was

added to the core protocol, the Bitcoin protocol, back in November of 2013, officially, and would work. So when you send Bitcoin to someone, what you're doing is almost like signing a digital check. And you're saying from Joe Rogan's wallet, and you sign at the bottom to say, yes, I'm releasing this money to RedBan. Great. So you've sent it. And the Bitcoin network will look at that signature and say, that's Joe Rogan's signature. Great. So therefore, now the money belongs to RedBan. Great. So you've sent it. And the Bitcoin network will look at that signature and say, that's Joe Rogan's signature. Great. So therefore now the money belongs to RedBan. You've done a transaction. So what your wallet is doing, what your phone is doing when it's sending Bitcoin to someone, is it signing a transaction with your key to basically say, I authorize this. It takes one signature to release the money from your wallet.

Multisig allows you to build wallets that require multiple signatures. Let's say you were running a company and you wanted to make sure that every single time you made a Bitcoin transaction, it had to be signed by the CEO and the chief financial officer. Right? So now you could say, well, it requires two out of two signatures. The account has two signatures associated with it. Both must sign in order to do that. Or you could create a joint account between two spouses. And you could say it requires one of two signatures. Here's the signature of one spouse.

Here's the signature of the other spouse. If either of them signs, you can do it. You could create a trust account, where you have either the signature of one spouse and a trustee, or the other spouse and a trustee, to sign off for the account of a child, for example. You could create an escrow account, where you say,

I'm going to sell you, Joe, something. And you send me the Bitcoin and I don't deliver. What happens then? That's a problem, right? Right. You can't get a refund. Now, instead of that, you send the Bitcoin to an account that requires two of three signatures.

Your signature, my signature, and an escrow party, a third party that works as an arbitrator between us. So if I send you the stuff that you wanted and you are happy with it, we both sign, I get the money, right? So you've paid me. It's like an escrow like you do with PayPal and eBay. Right. Now, if we have a dispute, you call the arbitrator and you say, I'm not happy, I didn't get this product. And you and the arbitrator sign and get the refund, send the money back to you. But if I'm not satisfied because I really did send you the product and you just don't want to pay for it,

I persuade the arbitrator that you're cheating, I sign it with the arbitrator, two out of three signatures, get the money to myself. So you can create these complex environments where you can do escrow, you can do trust accounts, you can have arbitration, third-party arbitration for refunds, so that you can solve problems. And you can create more complex forms of transactions that give you better security and better trust. That seems like you would really have to trust the arbitrator and they would have to somehow or another not be in cahoots with one party.

Yeah. So when you use the Visa network, you abide by Visa's arbitration rules, right? Right. So if you do a chargeback, and they're going to contact the merchant and say, well, show us a signature from this transaction, and Visa's arbitration rules apply, whether you like it or not. When you use eBay, PayPal arbitration rules apply,

whether you like it or not. The means of payment determines the rules of arbitration. So that seems like a good opportunity for something like Bank of America to get involved with. Yes. PayPal could be one of the arbitrators. If you like... Oh, thank you.

If you like the arbitration rules of that group, you could use them. Here's the interesting thing, though. What it does is it allows you to say, I'm going to have a market of arbitration providers, all with different rules and different levels of trust, and some of them will have very good reviews because people had good experiences with them.

Some of them are specialized in real estate, and some of them are specialized in auction markets, and some of them are specialized in antiques, and some of them are specialized in art appraisal. And so I'm doing a transaction with you and I want to buy an antique. I'm going to list 200 antique arbitrators. I'm going to pick the one with the highest level of reviews. He's an expert in appraising antiques. He's going to do a good job for us. We agree that's the one we want to use. Now we've got, it opens up all of these possibilities and it creates a whole new market for these services. So you've taken trust that was centralized in someone like PayPal.

You didn't have a choice but to use their arbitration. And you decentralize it. So now you have a market where the buyer and the seller can decide what rules apply. So do you believe that this is very similar to what we were talking about before with banks, that one person just has to do it, start profiting on it, and then the rush will be for all the others to sort of join in on the bandwagon. There's already an arbitration market where lawyers and real estate agents and others are providing arbitration services for a small transaction fee, like 0.1% of the transaction, in order to provide escrow capabilities. And you can do that when you buy

something with Bitcoin, you can now use escrow. And this is all within the last time you were here? do that when you buy something with Bitcoin, you can now use escrow. And this is all within the last time you were here? The technology was nascent and the services were still being built and now they're being built faster. So that two months really is like two years. Yeah. Let me give you another example, which is really cool. A lot of people are worried about their Bitcoin being stolen from their wallet because of a hack. So one of the ways you can use multisig, which is very interesting, is to have a two of three account. What I mean by two of three, it means it has three signatures registered and you require at least two of those three signatures in order to authorize a transaction. You keep one, you keep another one as a backup, print it on paper, put it in a safe, that's your recovery in case something goes wrong.

And then you give the third signature to a service that checks every transaction for risk. And what they do is when you make a payment, they look at the merchant that you paid, they look at their history, they look at what kind of amount it is. Is this usual? Is it like $10 and you normally spend that? Or did you just suddenly try to transfer half a million dollars out of your account and wipe it clean to a random address they've never seen before? And so based on that, they're going to risk score it. And then they're going to call you. They're going to send you a text message and say, we're seeing a transaction here you've requested for $2,500 to merge and we've never seen before that you normally don't do are you sure you know respond one for authorizing this transaction respond two to cancel it and if it's a really big one maybe they're going to call you on the phone you're going to speak to jim and jim is going to say um can you please give me the last

four of your social i want to check this whatever you can you can reintroduce some of the fraud prevention systems that banks do. But the really cool thing is, now that's a market. Instead of having to do it with your payment provider, you can pick who gives you a risk service. That's fascinating, but it's sort of along the same lines of the difference between Apple locking everything down. Yeah. You know it's secure. You're not going to get a virus from an app. And the wild world of like, say, a perfect example would be like BitTorrent.

Yes. You know, you fucking download a program from BitTorrent. Good luck, son. Better cross your fingers because you never know what the hell you're going to get, right? So here's the thing. I mean, if- By the way, these pickles are goddamn delicious if you want a pickle. Grillo's. Good luck, son. Better cross your fingers because you never know what the hell you're going to get, right? So here's the thing. By the way, these pickles are goddamn delicious. If you want a pickle, Grillo's Pickles sent us some pickles.

They're amazing. Have you had the sweet ones? Yes. They're my favorite. You want one? Now, can the normal Joe go over and buy Grillo's Pickles, or is there a website, or is it just like local shit, only people? Yeah, no, you can get them delivered. Grillo'sPickles.com delivers now.

They're the nicest guys ever, too. They came to our show in Boston. They gave out free pickles to the whole crowd. Dude brought like a million dollars worth of pickles and handed it out to 2,000 people. It's all fresh, too. Do they take Bitcoin? They should. Grillospickles, get on the ball, bitch.

You shouldn't really start Bitcoin now, right? If I wanted to buy Bitcoin, I wouldn't want to start now. I would want to wait, because I'm not going to spend, what, $500 for a single Bitcoin. Can you buy pieces of Bitcoin? Yeah, you can buy very small amounts. Oh, you can? Where do you do that at? So most of the exchanges or places where you can buy Bitcoin, you can probably buy, I think

the minimum is $20 or something like that worth. Okay. So you can buy a 20th of a Bitcoin. Theoretically, you could go and buy a hundred millionth of a Bitcoin if somebody was willing to sell it to you. But usually it's not worth doing for them

that amount. So you can divide it as much as you want. You do not need to spend an enormous amount. And then again, the thing is, what are you going to use it for? If you're going to try and use Bitcoin to invest in Bitcoin, be very, very careful. Do not take your retirement fund and all of your savings and dump them into this wild ride. That is not smart, right? And I need to say that again and again.

People don't do that. smart, right? And I need to say that again and again. People don't do that. I mean, I've done some of that, and it's not prudent, but my career is tied to this. I'm in the industry. This is not for the mainstream investor, and it's not really an investment. But... I'm sorry. Please go. Maybe put a couple percentage points of a nicely diversified portfolio, throw you know a thousand dollars maybe two thousand dollars if I lose it I lose it if I don't in the meantime I can play with it I can buy a bit of Bitcoin learn about the technology feel like I'm part of an early adopter thing that's cool don't go putting all your money in Bitcoin that's not smart one dude who had like nine million dollars in Bitcoin in a hard drive and he couldn't find it. So he was going through

the dump with a fine-tooth comb, trying to figure out where that hard drive was. Do you remember that story? Yeah. Well, fortunately, he didn't buy that Bitcoin. He was just one of the people who were involved in mining several years back. And then he forgot about it. And then he realized this whole hard drive he'd thrown away actually had a wallet which had

7,500 Bitcoin on it or something like that. That's hilarious, by the way. But it's no loss. You're going to have treasure hunters as a new occupation. It's no loss because he didn't actually have it. You know, he didn't... But if he had it, he would have it.

It could be a game. So it's a loss. Yes. It's a fucking loss, man. Yeah. That's not going to keep the dude from committing suicide. Well, I think it's going to create a whole new treasure hunting business.

People are going to start, and already we've seen this, people buy old computers on eBay, go through the hard drives and find wallets on them. Or porn or financial information, identity theft. Yeah, people need to know that too. If you get rid of a hard drive, you gotta wipe that bitch clean. You have to do more than that. You gave me a bunch of your hard drives, I wiped them clean, but I still didn't throw them away because

I know that there's programs out there that could just do that. So now I'm thinking, what do you do? Just dip them in acid? We should shoot them. Yeah. Let's take them to the range and shoot them. That'd be fun. Let's do it. Let's do it. While we're having this conversation, at the very moment we're having this conversation, my watch keeps buzzing every now

and then. What do you got on your watch? It's a Pebble. It's a smart watch. Oh, how dare you? You're one of those guys? Well, I'm getting Bitcoin notifications of people tipping me over Twitter as we're speaking. Which is very, very cool. I'm sitting here and as I say things, if I say

something that people like, my watch buzzes a bit because people start sending me tips. It's so weird. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. And now it's buzzing a lot. Can they steal from you? Can they be like, fuck you?

Can you get like a negative shock if you say something stupid? Are you willing to take a chance? I think that's, again, as I said, if you're an entrepreneur, there's an opportunity. Yeah. Pay someone to wear a shock collar that's ridden by Bitcoin. What do you got there? So I got my block. I just re-downloaded my blockchain app.

And I'm just checking to see what number should I give out? If people were like, Brian, what's your number? Your address. This address right here? Yes, the address you see right there. So there's no dangers of giving? People were telling me. No, it's like giving out your email address. This address right here? Yes, the address is right there. So there's no dangers of giving it. People were telling me... No, it's like giving out your email address.

Better, actually, because it doesn't reveal any information about where you are or who you are or any of that. All it allows people to do is send you money. Sweet. And that's nice because you can put that on a T-shirt. You can put it on a QR code. In fact, there was this guy who went to a football game with a giant QR code they'd printed, and during the ESPN coverage when they were on the Jumbotron,

they held it up and it said, pay for my college or something like that. They made like two and a half grand, or in a matter of minutes, because people would see it on TV, take a snapshot, and send them a little Bitcoin. Wow. Why not? There's a congressman who went to a recent meeting

wearing a sandwich board with a QR code on the front where you could donate Bitcoin to him. Wow. It's perfectly safe. You could publish that. You could put it on posters

around the city if you want. I might tweet it right now. That's fantastic. That's fantastic. Joe, so many people asked me for your Bitcoin address so they could send you Bitcoin.

Do you know what it is? Can you tell me what it is? If you still have the application, absolutely, yeah. We'll give it out. We'll see what happens. Somebody sent me one, too, and I'm like, how the fuck did you even get this? Yeah, I know. It's really funny the watch is buzzing all the time. Yeah, that watch, I'm not

a big fan of the Dick Tracy watch. That shit's ridiculous. I only use it, you know what I use it for most of the time? For notifications on TripIt when I'm traveling. It tells me like, and it goes gate change, and I don't miss my flight. I mean, that's useful. Yeah, I heard the Pebble's the best one out right now, still. I'm quite happy with it.

I'm enjoying it a lot. What's the difference between the Samsungs and the Pebble? I don't know. I got this as a gift, and it's the only one I've ever used and I'm just still playing with it. So here's something weird that happened to me after the first Joe Rogan. Here's my thing. Yeah, you still got it there? Looks like somebody

sent me one too. Right after I got some... Put this in front of a camera. How will that work? People can see the QR code on your phone. You can hold it up to the camera that's pointing at me over there behind you. And that will...

Is that going to work? There you go. Right there. Yeah, once the brightness stabilizes. Yeah, but you can publish that address. And that's Joe Rogan's Bitcoin address right there. And hopefully you can say hello to Joe with money. You can publish it later.

You can just copy that, put it in an email. If people give me any real money, I'll donate it to charity, by the way. Yeah. Just to let you know. That's always a good thing to do. Yeah, I would do it. By the way charity is has become one of the dominant forms of payments in bitcoin a lot of people are doing a lot with charity and it's because you can send money very quickly you can see how the money is being spent there's this fantastic charity that i'd like to

mention which is based in pensacola florida where they've made it pretty much illegal to be homeless. They first banned sleeping outdoors, then they banned blankets. And they tried to solve the homeless problem by busing them into other cities around and kicking them out of the area. I support that. How do we do that? Sweet. Brian, you missed the point.

The point is that's evil. Those poor people are poor Actually most of them are veterans Coming back from the war and having no jobs And having PTSD and no treatment I don't know of most of them but there are quite a few 40% of the homeless population In this country is made up of veterans

That's a shame So Jason King From Sean's Outpost Sean's Outpost.com Started collecting money with Bitcoin and used that money last year in the first year of the charity to feed 60,000 meals to the homeless people of Pensacola, Florida. That's incredible. And managed to create fundraising events from all around the world and to convert that money very effectively into food for people who desperately need it. And that's just one example.

There's a lot of charity. BitGive, the BitGive Foundation, which coordinates charitable giving, 100 Bitcoins, which is a charity that will literally give 100 Bitcoins to any charity that wants to take Bitcoin. They've raised the money, and now they're trying to find charities to give the money away to. How can I... I mean, that was just an image. That thing was just an image. The Bitcoin...

The barcode? Yeah, whatever it is. How would I put that online? So I can... Screenshot it. I've received one. Screenshot, yeah. I've received one 0.01 Bitcoin.

It's already happening. Approximately $4.92. Ah, $4.20. Oh shit, my phone's blowing up. I just got five Bitcoins. Or five donations. Just from that stupid image. That's incredible.

What if I put that image online? How do you make a screenshot with an Android phone? Well, no, instead of... I can send you a QR code that corresponds to your address. It's fairly easy for me to generate it. You can share that QR code through the application or you can just post the address above it. The QR code is just the

address. It's the same number that starts with a 1. That long series of digits is just in the form of a barcode to make it easier. I need to find out how you screenshot with a Galaxy Note 3. There's different ways you can do it. Mine, I just swipe my hand from left to right

over the screen. Really? Can you do that? I think I chose to do that through the settings. There's got to be a way, right? Yeah. But there's got to be an easier way. Like a button you press or something like that? Open settings, motions and gestures. Oh, that's the only way to be an easier way. Like a button you press or something like that? Open settings, motions, and gestures.

Oh, that's the only way to do it? Huh. That's S5. It doesn't always work. Yeah, but before we're done with the show, I'll get that barcode ready for you. You could post it on this show and see what happens. Oh, okay.

You press the power button and the home button at the same time. So how did he get that cool bar on his? The barcode? Yeah. You just touch the barcode on the home screen of your application. Okay. All right, I'm going to. And it will make it bigger.

I'm going to send this image. I'm going to put it on Instagram, and then we'll see what's up. Let's see if this does something. If you click on the Receive button, right, Ben? Yeah. And then I think it's one of the tabs at the bottom, and then when you do... Yeah, the problem is they won't let us make new iPhone applications

because it's lagging behind. I mean, there you go. At least they still let me download it, though, because I got a new iPhone the other day, and they still let me download the old program off the iTunes store. Oh, maybe because you already had it on your iTunes. Yeah, if you already own something, you're still allowed to redownload it somehow.

Hmm. Really? Yeah. So even if it's gone? Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah, it's kind of like so people that spent money on something, they still own that product, so they can't really take it away. Okay.

I just Instagrammed it, which means it also went to my Twitter and my Facebook. So almost 2 million people have access to that image right now. Let's see if my phone explodes. I've had that happen with an explosion. So let me tell you a great story of fundraising using Bitcoin. Did you hear about this story with Newsweek where they came out and said

we found the creator of Bitcoin Yes! That's the thing I wanted to talk to you about most today. I have a great story for you exactly about what happened and we've got a video online to share as well. So I was at a conference the morning I found out about this and I looked into it.

And a lot of people in the Bitcoin space are interested in who Satoshi Nakamoto is. There's been a lot of research. I think we should leave the person alone and it's probably not going to be good to find out who it is because all it's going to do is smear that person. They're going to try and smear him. So I would rather not know, because it doesn't matter.

The math is what matters, not who it is. But people are obviously curious. When I found out about this person in the Los Angeles area that was fingered by Newsweek as Satoshi Nakamoto, and by the way, I don't want to create more publicity for this poor man because he is not Satoshi. And it's become abundantly clear. We've got a lot of writing by the original creator of Bitcoin and it doesn't match any

of the style of, it's beginning to pour in. My phone is on constant vibrate right now. Yes. Listen. It's beginning to pour in. My phone is on constant vibrate right now. Listen. It's just constantly vibrating. Make it happen, Bitcoin community.

I'm counting on you. That's all Bitcoin coming in right now. Dollar dollar bills, yo. That's awesome. Justin Wren, fight for the forgotten. You're getting all this money, dude. Justin Wren, our pal that's in the Congo. Thank you.

That's great. Exactly. Yeah, he's a great guy who's living in the Congo right now, and he builds wells for these pygmies. He gets the medicine. This poor guy has gotten horrible diseases while he's been down there. He had dengue fever. He almost fucking died,

Horrible diseases while he's been down there. He had dengue fever. He almost fucking died. And he is dedicating his entire life to do this. So I will donate all of this to my friend Justin. And it's going to keep coming in. Holy shit, dude. This is nuts.

Okay, so the... This is pure madness. Want to feel my phone? Can I sit on it? Put it up your ass. I have a hungry ass, so it's coming in. This is ridiculous. There's a big community out there, and they're very generous.

Yeah, no, they most certainly are. I'm not kidding, ladies and gentlemen. I got about 100 donations in the past minute. Wow. My phone can't even keep up. You didn't need to make any arrangements with these people. There was no banks involved. There was nothing. It was just direct from them to you. Boom.

Charity happening in real time. Yeah, this is crazy. It's cool. Yeah, this is madness, man. Some people are donating real money, too. You can't steal my bitcoin dude Are you a hacker?

What are you doing? I've received donations that In some cases exceeded $3,000 In a single donation for a charitable cause That's incredible Okay people are sending me like 20 bucks That's crazy Yeah like there's a lot of them man

Not like a few Like a lot of them that are like 20 bucks. That's crazy. Yeah, like there's a lot of them, man. Not like a few. Like a lot of them that are like 20 bucks because it tells you what it is approximately by today's standard when it pops up. This is nuts, man. I better shut my fucking phone off. I'm going to run out of batteries. Just close the program.

On Samsung, you have to hold it down, turn it to the left. I know all that. How dare you? Don't fucking. Shut up, dude. You don't know shit. Fucking, you're an Apple fanboy.

You know that? How about that, bro? You're a fucking Apple fanboy. I'll undo mine by just going, there, I'm done. Ah, fuck you. Well, I can, no, you task manager, you just press close all. You don't even have that option on the iPhone. Suck upon it. You don't even have a task manager, bitch. You can you just press close all. You don't even have that option on the iPhone. Suck upon it.

You don't even have a task manager, bitch. You can't just shut them all off. What's that noise? Yeah, somebody hacked your shit. They started playing gay music. What's that? Bitcoin's face, the cover of Newsweek. So this is a story that Newsweek broke.

About that guy. About that guy in Los Angeles. And here's the funny story. So his name is Satoshi Nakamoto. Actually, it's Dorian Percival Satoshi Nakamoto. He doesn't go by Satoshi. He goes by Dorian. And he's not the creator of Bitcoin.

There's no doubt in anyone's mind at this point. Newsweek fucked up big time. And they got it wrong. And worse, they doxed him, as we say on the internet. They produced pictures of his home address and his car registration plate. And so he got swamped, and not just by journalists. He got swamped by crazies,

by really crazy, dangerous people who suddenly thought he was a rich person and wanted a piece of the action. It was a really horrible thing to do. Very irresponsible journalism. And I'm a very big supporter of free speech. I am as well, but you have to be really responsible about that kind of a thing.

Right. If Newsweek does crappy journalism, they have every right to do that, and we have every right to call it crappy journalism. Not just call it crappy journalism. That guy deserves to sue the fucking shit out of them. Won't work. Won't work. Won't work?

Not in this country, not in California. Why not? First Amendment is very powerful. But First Amendment, you outed a guy, you gave his home address out, and you were wrong. I feel like for sure he should be able to sue. It won't be effective, especially because California has the anti-SLAPP statutes against strategic lawsuits against public participation. It's really strong protections for the First Amendment, especially with journalistic organizations. You have to show malice. You have to show that he's not in the public interest.

You have to show deliberate harm, and he has to show damages. It wouldn't work. Here's the point. Here's the important point. What did the Bitcoin community do with that? They immediately said, how can we help this man? People said, let's buy model trains. He really likes model trains. Let's send him cash. And some people started saying, let's do a fundraiser. Let's do a fundraiser. Let's do a fundraiser. But who's going to do the fundraiser? Need someone trusted in the community. And I looked at this and I thought, I really don't want to get involved but this guy really deserves a break so I started a fundraiser two days after this story broke I created an address which

started with one Dorian a Bitcoin address of vanity address and I said let's do a fundraiser for Dorian and in six hours that morning we raised 30 Bitcoin and $15,000 and over yes and over a period of one month we raised 30 Bitcoin. That's $15,000. And over a period of one month, we raised 50 Bitcoin, 47 some Bitcoin for Dorian. That's incredible. He can move now. And it really started pouring in,

like exactly what you saw just now. Well, let's give it out on air. What is it? What's the address? Okay, yeah. Let's post it on air. I'm sure he would like some more. I also got the video pulled up

if you wanted to watch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's play the video. So let me just say what we did next, which is we need to make sure we got this money to the right person. And I couldn't do that because a lot of people came to me and they said, I'm Dorian giving the money. No, you're not.

I'm not that stupid. The only thing I knew is what he looked like. So I visited him at his home yesterday and completed my part of the deal and gave him the fundraiser. And I haven't announced this yet. I just did a posting with a video. And he made a little video for us. So I'd like to play that video. It's for the Bitcoin community.

Yes. And while you're doing that, I'll pull up his address so you can do some more donations. Beautiful. Beautiful. Recording. Okay. And we can do as many as you want. I'll edit it afterwards. It hasn't been edited yet. It's still in process, the editing. Don't worry. It's a bit rough. Good afternoon, Bitcoin community. Thank you very much for your support throughout this ordeal that I'm still fighting. And I would like you to see this magazine, which came out in April.

It will be, no, actually March 14 issue of this year. The Bitcoin Face, the mystery man behind the cryptocurrency. And I'm not Satoshi Nakamoto as portrayed as a creator. My name is Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto. And of course if I was a real creator, I would never use my real name. So from that point of view, I'm sure you guys would know that Satoshi Nakamoto is not me. But Leah thinks so, and Newsweek said so, but it's not true. Okay I received the Bitcoin account from Andreas and I'm very thankful for you all these people in US, Europe, in Asia, in Africa, in South America, who supported me throughout. Thank you very much.

I want to hug you, 2,000 of you who donated, and I'm very happy. Each one gives me a tick in my heart. Thank you very much. And I would like to further state that I'll be one of the Bitcoin users, Bitcoin community person who would contribute even if it's

a little part of this world for good of humankind as Andreas and many other of you end over to make the world a little bit better for everybody, especially for poor people. Thank you. And I'll keep my Bitcoin account for many many years and hopefully

I can also contribute as you did to me thank you that's so cool I love his sentiment I love what he just said. You could tell that wasn't a canned speech. That guy was really

touched. Yes, it was. He's a really sweet person. And this wasn't fair what happened to him, but the Bitcoin community came through with a really great fundraiser that will have a material impact on this person's life.

That's so cool. And do up some of the damage that was caused by irresponsible journalism. And I can tell you, I mean, I spent three hours with him. He is not Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. No question about it. I mean, just setting up his internet connection was a huge struggle.

Is that his Bitcoin address, Brian? Yeah. Can you text me that so I can put it online or email me that so I can put it online? Yeah, absolutely. I've emailed both. Did you send it to me?

Nope. Please send it to me and I'll throw it up on Twitter right now too with the story explaining to everybody who this gentleman is and what went wrong.

That's sad that they decided to go ahead and print that story with no, you know, substantiation. They're still sticking by the story. They're still saying, we got the right person. How can they do that? And it's so obvious to everyone who's got half a brain cell.

What does this gentleman do for a living? He's retired. He used to be involved in... I mean, I don't want to intrude in his life any further. He just wants to be left alone. And by the way, he now has access to this fundraiser so he can use this money.

But yeah, I mean, they basically intruded into his life and violated his privacy and most importantly, handled his personal information irresponsibly. But in the end, the Bitcoin community came through with generosity and grace and charity. And that's really the big thing about Bitcoin is there's so much charity going on in this space. I think that's beautiful.

And it is cool that the Bitcoin community came through. But what drives me crazy is that this long-established journalism outlet would be so irresponsible not not long established this has been purchased the name has been purchased by new management has nothing to do with the previous management oh newsweek no this is completely new people running under the same brand when did this and now you know exactly what kind of quality journalism they put out, which is yellow trash. So they're just trying to make money. They're just trying to sell magazines at whatever cost.

Do you think they knew that this guy, do you think they're sticking by their story because he can't prove it? Do you think they're just trying to not be responsible for their actions or not be, you know, financially responsible for any damages that he might've suffered? They make money either way. They make money, they make clicks either way, the more controversy around it. It doesn't really matter at this point. That's very disappointing. So this is a new thing. People that have bought Newsweek, this is fairly new. Yeah. This came out on the 14th of March.

I mean, the purchase of Newsweek. Yes, this is their launch edition. This is what they launched with. This is what they launched with. You can't go backwards on your first issue of a new launch, because that would make you like, oh yeah, we suck now.

It's a stinker. Their first edition was an absolute stinker. Oh, what a bunch of dick bags. Dick bags. Ugh. It's so gross. I'll never buy a Newsweek, I'll tell you that. You can't do that.

You can't push a guy's fucking home address out there and pictures of him. We'll answer Dorian Yakamoto when his lawyers writes us. What? I like that guy. Fuck you. You got I like that guy. Fuck you. You gotta know, man. You gotta really be sure. You can't just accuse a guy,

especially in the midst of all this chaos with the Mt. Gox collapse. And the very real physical danger that is implied by first saying that someone has a lot of money, which he doesn't, and inviting all of the crazies to visit his address by publishing it.

Yeah, they're saying it was worth insane amounts of money, right? Like $9 million or something fucking crazy like that? $90 million. What was it? The real Satoshi could be controlling up to $500 million. What? In Bitcoin at current prices. So he could hold it.

You mean he might have that much? A million Bitcoin. He might have himself, he might have a million Bitcoin. Yes. That's the estimate, that Satoshi Nakamoto has a million Bitcoin. Okay, but is he real?

Is there a Satoshi Nakamoto? Is there a guy? Let's call him Mr. X. There is a real Mr. X? Well, I'd like to think that, well, she is real. She? Okay.

Why not? She? Why not? Who knows? They? She? They? Yeah, it could be anything.

I usually say she's at one of the conferences, so make sure you treat all the ladies right because one of them might be Satoshi. Could you imagine? It'd be so hot. Yeah, imagine if Satoshi was just a really smart, scrawled-john-handsome-looking chick. I mean, you know, you can say it's a pseudonym, so it could be male, female, doesn't matter. Of course. Could be several folks, right?

And I think the most likely explanation is that it was a group of researchers, but it doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. But if it is that group of researchers, that group of researchers is in control of $500 million worth of Bitcoin. Potentially. Potentially in control because we don't know what's happened with the keys.

None of it has been moved. None of it has been touched. So they're all just sitting on it and pretending they're poor. It's just sitting there. Will Tesla be the first car that you can buy with Bitcoin? I don't know. You probably can already. I think some dealers are selling

a bunch of cars for Bitcoin. I wouldn't be surprised. Dealers are selling cars for Bitcoin? A bunch of Lamborghinis have been sold for Bitcoin already. Get the fuck out of here, Lamborghini? People are buying apartments and property and planes. Because there's companies that you can trade it in for money. So you can pretty much buy anything with Bitcoins with an exchange.

And Virgin Galactic uh seats on their flights to space uh for bitcoin and they've sold seven already all seven people are going to space with bitcoin allegedly going to space they might just get launched on the end of a bomb that motherfucker's gonna have to fly for a long time before daddy goes to space. I'm so not interested in being an early adopter of the fucking spaceship. It's not really space either. According to Neil deGrasse Tyson, he thinks it's kind of a goof. It's high altitude. Yeah.

He thinks it's kind of a goof to spend $100,000 to go like a little higher than a plane and look down and then drop back down again. Well, you do go into zero G. Yeah. down and then drop back down again. Well, you do go into zero G. Yeah. And so, I think it's interesting because it's that reusable re-entry capability, which is revolutionary in the way they've done it. It's very

visionary. Well, no doubt about it. Richard Branson's a bad motherfucker. No argument there. I just think until you can go to the moon, you can go fuck yourself. That's what I think. Or until you can go zoom around a few times, hang out there for a day, sit in a luxury suite on the top of the earth and look down.

You can only go there for like a minute, and then you've got to come flying back down again, right? Isn't that the idea behind it? Yeah, I would agree. The ultimate goal is to the moon. To the moon, Alice. Have a nice hotel there, like a really nice hotel that you can stay at for a weekend. Yes, a moon hotel. Like zero-G swimming pools.

Zero-G sex. How about that? How about facials in zero-G? Squirt, she's ducks, like she's in the Matrix. You would have, well, I guess it would still propel. It would probably go on forever. If you could stick your dick outside of the spaceship and just shoot one into space, it would just take off forever.

But it would be frozen instantly. Girls on a rag, instead of being on your bed, it's floating around your whole entire room. Could be. That's disgusting. Yeah, what if she squirts? Ugh. Yeah.

Yeah, you don't want to have sex with zero G. How do we get to this conversation? This is the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. That's how we do things over here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you don't want to have sex with zero G. How do we get to this conversation? This is the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. That's how we do things over here. I'm sorry. I mean, we're going to help you promote Bitcoin, but we're not going to change the format. No, no. I'm loving it.

No worries. So Lamborghini doesn't take it. It's like a third-party thing. Is that how you do it? It's dealers who are selling it. Car dealers. So there are dealers that are taking that crazy risk accepting bitcoin well yeah how crazy is the risk listen you get a lot of a lot of publicity and marketing and then you take the bitcoin and you convert it the

same day to u.s dollars so you don't get any exchange rate risk and what's the difference nothing good point it's a very good point that's what a lot of merchants are doing. I kind of see it, but man, I would put a tap on it. If it was my dealership, I'd say we're allowed to sell one a month with Bitcoin. Everything else has to be with good old American dollars backed by blood and eagles. You can't just bank the whole thing on these weird digital currencies. I bet I'm going to be sending Justin Ren a thousand bucks by the end of this day. Yeah, it might be a lot more than that. I don't know.

I'm going to have to decipher it. I'm going to need your help. Yeah, absolutely. After this podcast is over, we're going to have to go over how much I need to write a check for. I'm going to leave the money in there, though. So if you keep sending it to him, he'll keep getting money. leave the money in there though so if you keep sending it to him he'll keep getting money um what else has happened in the last two and a half months besides these uh really fantastic innovations that uh that you're excited about well there's there's the whole environment which

is weird in terms of media and regulation it's been good news bad news good news bad news bit of a roller coaster you were talking the China thing you were talking about. China's banning it, not banning it. Russia's banning it, not banning it. Vietnam's banning it, not banning it. And this is really funny because, of course, the countries in which these iron fist bans are happening are the countries where the rule of law is least respected.

It's so true, right? Right? So it's like Putin banned it. Well, you know what? Hard dollars were banned in the 80s in Russia. You were not allowed to have foreign currency, hard currency, throughout the Soviet Union. It was banned, very, very seriously banned. Guess who started stuffing their suitcases with hard dollars first?

The Politburo. Of course. And then the army generals and then the, and then all of the people who in those countries are above the law. And then the people who are below the law then bribe the people who are above the law in dollars, of course, to also hold dollars. And the whole thing becomes a mockery. Putin is like a gigantic Russian version of John Gotti. You know, he really is. Like, you remember how Gotti was, like, so flamboyant about the fact that he was the head of the mob? Like, there was, the heads of the mob before Gotti were, like, real secretive.

There was that guy, Vincent the Chin Gajanti, or however you say his name, who would walk around the neighborhood pretending to be crazy. He would wear a bathrobe and slippers, and they wouldn't even, like, say his name. Because he told everybody that everything was being tapped all the time so don't ever say my name when you're talking about me point point to your chin so people would just like go and you know he's not gonna take that he's gonna you know he's gonna want to do something for our friend so you know that's a good idea they'd point to their chin because his name was vincent the chin gajanti or Gigante or whatever the hell it was. But then Gotti came along and was wearing fucking $10,000 suits and, you know, just was an obvious mobster and had obvious mobsters with him.

And there was public hits and all this crazy shit. And everybody loved him because he was the face of the mob. This Putin guy is sort of like that in a way, but on a crazier scale, because he's running a whole country. I mean, he's essentially just grabbed the whole country. And not just that. Here's the little secret. I think the thing that most people miss

is the elephant in the room, and that's Gazprom. That's what? Natural gas. Natural gas. Gazprom. So basically they've nationalized the gas industry. The gas industry then supplies natural gas, which is one of the ways that we've avoided the impact of peak oil and energy constriction that is killing worldwide economies right now because oil has gotten vastly expensive. But gas got cheaper because of fracking and other

things. And Gazprom produces most of the gas in the world, so much so that they supply all of Europe with natural gas and they supply them through pipelines that go through which country? Afghanistan. The Ukraine and Afghanistan and various other places. But the line of pipelines of gas are the hotspots of war and civil war and occupation all across Eastern Europe. And right now there's this huge power play going on around the Ukraine. And a lot of that has to do with routes of gas. And it's a massive geopolitical power play between world powers. And Putin can

basically say, we just doubled the price of gas in the Ukraine, which is exactly what they did. I think they quadrupled it, in fact, which plunged the country into a recession. And then they said to Europe, you know, don't threaten us with sanctions. We're going to turn off your gas. And if you do, all of you are going into recession

because that's the only form of cheap energy you have. Are we going to go into World War III? It seems like some weird shit is happening. Japan is upping its military now. Its navy is getting larger and larger by the day. And they're changing their whole policy as far as how they deal with other countries because China is encroaching on a lot of these islands that Japan has been controlling. And it seems to me like more and more every day that powers are moving into position to

dominate portions of the world. And it just seems like some shit is about to happen. The era of cheap energy is over and the world has to reshuffle to accept that fact. Cheap peak oil changes everything. You can't sustain the same consumerist behavior in developed countries and that together with climate change,

it's a combination that creates upheaval all around the world. And at the same time, you have the world's worst currency crisis in three generations and we are currently living through the most significant currency crisis with dozens of countries suffering from hyperinflation with their currencies about to collapse europe and the euro hanging from a thread the british sterling hanging from a thread, the British sterling hanging from a thread, and the U.S. dollar going crazy with printing. And into that environment, you now have Bitcoin.

It's a really interesting time to live in because there's so much change going on. There's an escort service that accepts Bitcoin? Yes. Brian is very excited now. Did you put up your Bitcoin address? Yeah. You should say that I'll donate it all to Justin Wren. You'll donate it all to hookers.

Corvette. Yeah, Lexus. So I'm glad we didn't get very far with a conversation about empowering the poor and discussions about the good Bitcoin can do before Brian dumped us into an escort site. That's all well and good. It's nice to empower the poor, but guess who else is poor? Hookers! Yeah. No, I see what you're saying.

I think that's certainly the best way to do it. One thing that you can say about that particular case is that women in those professions are exploited by the men who... Take that down, Brian. You can't do that.

You can't just sneakily post that. Put it on your Twitter, you fuck. Put it on your Twitter and I'll retweet it. Okay. Sorry. Yeah, you're right. They're exploited. All the money flows to the men who control and exploit them right and so bitcoin is being used

already in in many cases for women to be able to keep control of their money so it can't be stolen by pimps and exploited exploitive boyfriends and and uh hustlers and all of the other criminals who are around them who take advantage of these women. So actually, it is quite an empowering technology, even in that particular occupation or related occupations. I was having this conversation on Twitter and people were teasing me. So I did a satirical shot. I said, look, I'm going to start the same business. I'm going to post a half-naked shot of me, and I'm going to make people pay me to stop

because I'm a pasty middle-aged male and nobody wants to see that shit. And I'm going to donate all of the money that I raise. And now it went viral on Twitter. It's me doing a Miley Cyrus impersonation of licking a hammer. It's just like from here up. That's a smart move.

But I raised, and I'm pretty proud of that photo because I ridiculed and exploited myself and raised $600, which I donated to the Rape and Incest National Network, which is a network that helps exploited women extract themselves from the abusive environments and gives them shelter. Essentially, it's like an underground railroad

to get them away from people who are exploiting them or abusing them badly. That's awesome. One of the things that we've talked about on this podcast before, and I think applies here, is that there's a certain morality to a lot of these big tech companies and to tech in general that I don't think exists in a lot of other industries. And that there's a lot of companies that are coming up now, tech companies, that are founded by very intelligent, very educated people who also have pretty strong ethics. And I think that's rare for businesses to have a fairly established trend of ethical consideration involved in their business practices.

And one of the reasons why, I think, is because no one understands transparency more than people that are really into the internet. No one understands the implications or the ramifications, rather, of your actions, whether positive or negative, more than people that are on the internet.

What are you looking up? I'm waiting for Red Band to pull up some embarrassing photos any moment. Any moment. Do you have that? the picture that he was talking about oh no no don't thank you he's being really nice to me today

he's a sweetie he's nice to everybody he's always nice believe me I did read though I was doing some research about the IPA thing because that's the only thing I did have but there is some people saying that you could find the IP if you were devoted to it meaning if I really wanted to find out what your IPA thing, because that's the only thing I did have. But there is some people saying that you could find the IP if you were devoted to it. Meaning if I really wanted to find out what your IPA is using the Bitcoin currency, I could just probably figure it out if I was really detailed about it.

No, you can't. I think that's entirely wrong. Because if you were doing transactions, those transactions would be communicated across the peer-to-peer network, kind of like BitTorrent. And they spread through that peer-to-peer network in such a way that you can't even trace where the transaction happened.

But in your particular case, you're not even doing any transactions. There is no way to associate a Bitcoin address to an IP address unless you're monitoring that person's specific communication. So, for example, if someone's monitoring your laptop, they can figure out you're connected to that IP address. But guess what?

If they're monitoring your laptop, they already know that. It's not so hard. But just monitoring the Bitcoin network, you cannot associate addresses to Bitcoin addresses to IP addresses. I'm putting up Dorian Nakamoto's. I retweeted yours, Brian,'m putting up Dorian Nakamoto's. I retweeted yours, Brian, and contribute to Dorian Nakamoto. How do you spell Dorian?

D-O-R-I-A-N. And Nakamoto? Yes, exactly. I see you hear it. Do you know who Dan Kaminsky is? Chief scientist for DKH. Ski is a chief scientist for DKH. He wrote in 2011 that you could do that. And that's what I was basing my findings on.

He said that unless you are very careful in the way you use Bitcoin and you have the technical know-how to use it with other anonymizing technologies like Tor or I2P, know-how to use it with other anonymizing technologies like Tor or I2P, you should assume that a persistent, motivated attacker will be able to associate your IP address with your Bitcoin transactions. Yeah, so I'm looking at my fucking IP address. It's Dan's Black Hat 2011 talk. Yeah, and they're not associating the IP address, the Bitcoin address, because it's in the network. What we're talking about there is a determined attacker who's conducting surveillance of the entire network and has the resources to track down what's happening.

And so people say that Bitcoin is anonymous, but in fact, it's not. It's pseudonymous and loosely pseudonymous. That means that if you conduct activities with Bitcoin that associate your Bitcoin address to other things, like, for example, you use it to buy something and then that something gets shipped to your home. Well, now you tied that Bitcoin address to your physical address, right?

Or I have a donation address that I publish. Everybody knows that's my address. Now, if I take money from that Bitcoin address, which is my donation address, and I move it into my wallet that I use to spend on other things, now everyone can track that step by step and know, well, that's my wallet, and then track everything that goes out of that wallet.

So I have to take some basic privacy precautions to protect against that. Now, would there be, because it's kind of like an account number, I guess, like at a bank, like you said. Now, is there technology or is there hackers that can take knowing your account number and recreate it in a program that makes it seem like you are that person and transfer money out of that account? No, because the address itself is essentially one part of an encryption key, and the other part of the pair of keys, the private key, is the thing you have on your phone wallet. That's the secret.

That's the thing that allows you to sign transactions. And the whole basis of cryptography, of encryption systems, is that you can't go from the public address to the private secret. You can't go backwards. You can go from the private secret, you can recreate the public address, but you can't go backwards.

That is the whole basis. That technology is the same technology that's used to secure bank networks. It's the same technology that's used to secure Tomahawk missiles. It's the same technology that's used to secure bank networks. It's the same technology that's used to secure Tomahawk missiles. It's the same technology that's used to secure everything. And so you can rest assured that the cryptography at the core of Bitcoin is solid because it's

used across all of the other industries. MARK MANDELMANN, So you'd be better off like, hey, you want to charge my phone on your laptop, and then you just download their phone, and then re-upload it on your phone, and then you have their wallet. You shouldn't provide criminal masterminds with a blueprint. So that's why you have a password on that application, so that if you steal the data of that application, it's encrypted,

and you can't see the keys that are underneath. That's what the PIN number and password do. And I have a secondary password that also prevents from spending, specifically for spending. All right, man, you want to do this again in three months? I'd love to. It's about three years in Bitcoin time. A lot of things will change. I really appreciate every opportunity. I appreciate it as well. I mean, you're very, very informative. We would never be this educated about this stuff if it wasn't for you. And I think you do a huge service to not just the tech community with this, but just the general population,

giving them an understanding of what this is all about. There's so much misinformation and confusion about it. I mean, we had, just Brian and I, two fucking dunces sitting there staring at each other trying to figure out what it was before you came along. So it helps us tremendously. And I think what you're doing is brave. I mean, you're getting paid through Bitcoin. It's noble. You're using it in great ways. I love what you did for Nakamoto.

I just posted his Bitcoin address along with an article explaining what went wrong and how he's not that guy. And I just think it's cool as fuck, man. And I'm honored that you're a part of this. Oh, thank you so much. And what I'm doing is I'm just expressing my enthusiasm for this space. But let me tell you a couple of quick stories about why this was awesome. After the first Joe Rogan experience, suddenly I had people everywhere coming and telling me that they got into Bitcoin because of that first show,

because they finally were able to understand it. And I'll give you two stories. A month ago, I was in a Houston airport. I was sitting down having lunch. I was in transit between flights and sitting there and someone sees my watch and they go, oh, is that the new Pebble? I'm like, yeah, it is. And you can write applications. And what kind of applications? Well, the application I have on here, which is pretty cool, is I can check Bitcoin addresses. Like Bitcoin addresses. Oh, that's pretty cool. Yeah. I said, you heard of Bitcoin? Yeah, I've heard of Bitcoin. Hey, hang on a second. Is your name Andreas Antonopoulos? I'm like, yeah. Were you on Joe Rogan? You're the reason I bought Bitcoin. I got involved in Bitcoin after seeing that episode. And I was just blown away. I mean, this is like I'm sitting down

for lunch in a transit area in a restaurant. I'm not used to being seeing that episode. And I was just blown away. I mean, this is like I'm sitting down for lunch in a transit area in a restaurant. I'm not used to being recognized that way. So the better part. Monday. Yesterday. I land at LAX. I go to Enterprise Rent-A-Cart to pick up my car. I get into my car. I drive to the exit. I hand

my driver's license and rental ticket to the booth guy at the exit. And he takes a look at it and he goes, were you on the Joe Rogan experience? Like, yeah, you're the reason I bought Bitcoin. You're the reason I got into Bitcoin. And I follow you on Twitter and the Joe Rogan experience got me into Bitcoin.

This story has repeated a dozen times for me. And not just from 15,000 people on Twitter who started following me after the first show and who got excited about bitcoin but complete strangers in the street and things like that and yes i get my share of crazies and stalkers and all of that and it doesn't matter because the vast majority is such a positive experience and what everyone says is that you asked really great questions you asked the everyman questions the question everybody wanted to ask, the simple questions to try to understand and grasp this topic.

And for me, that was a wonderful opportunity. So thank you. Thank you. Listen, the beautiful thing about having a podcast is nobody brings anything on the show that I'm not interested in. It's not like a network demands that I interview this guy who's on this sitcom or something like that. If I'm talking to somebody, it's because the subject is fascinating and it's actually something I'm truly interested in. And that's not having all those sort of like ladders and steps that you have to climb to put content out is really what it's all about in a way that sort of mirrors

what Bitcoin is. It's cutting out all the steps that are unnecessary between human beings interacting with each other, whether it's exchanging money or exchanging ideas and information. It's essentially, it's a lot of it is along the same trend and it's all along the same lines. Yeah. Let's get you, let's get you selling your products on Onnit and the other sites with, uh, We'll make it happen. Hireprimate.com. Yeah, oh, by the way, Hireprimate.com has new shit in. Hireprimate, we just restocked it.

We have a bunch of new t-shirts in now, and we have JRE t-shirts that are the logo that's on my Twitter page. That's the newest one, both in color and in black. All right, we're out of here, you fucks. We'll see you guys next week. Follow Andreas Antonopoulos on Twitter, please. And my podcast, Letstalkbitcoin.com.

Is that on iTunes as well? Yes, it is. Let's Talk Bitcoin. How many episodes do you have out there? A hundred. We just celebrated a hundred episodes in April. Jesus, Louisa's a hundred episodes of Bitcoin. You Louise-us. A hundred episodes of Bitcoin. You're like, I can't get enough Bitcoin information. Yes, you can,

motherfucker. Yes, you can. You can get a hundred goddamn podcasts on it. A-A-N-T-O-N-O-P. That is his Twitter handle. A-A-N-T-O-N-O-P. Thank you, sir. Thank you. We're honored to have you on. Every three months, right?

Yep. Three months. You got it. Three years in Bitcoin. All right. And we will see you guys next week. Next week, I've got a lot of great guests. I've got Steve Maxwell, world-famous strength and conditioning coach.

He's on Monday. Dave Attell. Greg Fitzsimmons. And then next Friday night, I'm at the Lobero Theater in Santa Barbara with Mad Flavor, a.k.a. Joey Coco Diaz. Almost sold out. So don't be slipping, Santa Barbara. Okay.

Thanks to our sponsors. Thanks to – today was LegalZoom, right? LegalZoom.com. Did you have something to say? I was just going to say, this Friday LegalZoom.com. Did you have something to say? I was just going to say, this Friday I'll be in Tucson with Sam Tripoli, and then Saturday in Phoenix with Sam Tripoli. Oh, beautiful.

DeathSquad.tv for ticks. Oh, beautiful. What are you guys doing? You doing clubs out there? Yeah, we're doing Hotel Congress in Tucson, which is this really badass hotel that's haunted and stuff like that. I heard it's badass. I think Doug, doesn't Doug live near there? Yes.

Close. You could drive there. Not that close, but like an hour and a half or something like that. That's cool. Is Tucson, is that place, how many is that seat? I want to say it's like 150, 200. I don't know. Cool.

And they do shows there on a regular? Yeah. Yeah. Dope. Yeah. All right. Dollar Shave. DollarShaveClub.com.

Go to DollarShaveClub.com forward slash Rogan. That's DollarShave.com. DollarShaveClub. DollarShaveClub.com forward slash Rogan. Thanks also to LegalZoom. Go to LegalZoom.com and enter the code word Rogan in the referral box at checkout for more savings. Thanks also to Onnit.com. Excuse me. Thanks to Onnit.com. O-N-N-I-. Thanks also to Onnit.com. Excuse me.

Thanks to Onnit.com. O-N-N-I-T. Go to Onnit. Use the code word ROGAN. Save 10% off any and all supplements. Okay. We'll see you guys next week. Much love.

Big kiss. Mwah. Mwah. Mwah. I'm out.