The Bitcoin Controversies

was a surprise. So if you missed that episode, go back and give it a listen, Yeah, because it'll it'll definitely give you some context for what we're going to talk about today, which is the controversies of bitcoin and also what's in the future. Yo. That's a that's a really great question that many people are asking themselves because there have been so many con troversies of over bitcoin,

especially in the past like three to five months. Yeah. Yeah, So, I mean, first of all, they're just the very nature of bitcoin, the fact that you get at the coins by either purchasing them in an exchange or you mind them through using computer power to solve mathematical problems. Well, if you're thinking, hey, I've done a computer I can

solve math problems. Well, if you listen to our last episode, you know that you need a lot of computing power because they're you're just you're The competition you're up against is crazy. Yeah, and so some people will join mining groups sort of like almost like a lottery pool, like

we were saying in the last episode. And some people force other folks to join a mining group without them necessarily knowing about it, by creating buttonets a k a. You might have also heard of buttonets being referred to as zombie computer armies. Yes, these are the boy. If you're a longtime fan of tech stuff, you've heard us talk about this. This was one of our first episodes. But essentially what this is is when a hacker uses

software to get administrative access to someone else's computer. Generally, this is done by fooling the person into installing a program and then yeah, there's usually a trojan horse malware that will install a backdoor access point for for someone to go over in network and then send commands remotely so that they make your machine do stuff they wanted to do. And there are lots of different ways that hackers use bought nets, and one of them is to

direct computers to mine for bitcoins. So what they're doing is they're trying to get as many different computers as possible to coordinate in this task, and then the hacker reaps the benefits. So your computer might have actually been the one to mind that bitcoin, but you don't see any of that because it's going to some hacker somewhere. Yeah. One particularly widespread bit of malware like this was was

busted back in April. Jonathan actually blogged about it back then. Yeah. Yeah, So, I mean it's it's still one of those things that remains a concern because it's, you know, it's the world of the digital realm. I mean, it's it's one of those things where you've it's different from our physical world, right, and as we alluded to in our previous episode, the fact that all of this is different from our physical

world lens bitcoins. I mean that and the fact that they are necessarily decentralized and unregulated means that sometimes people use them for less than upright purposes. Yeah, okay, so we're gonna we're gonna lay it down. Uh, you know, just be perfectly honest and blunt here, because when when I did an episode way back in the day, I think it wasn't wasn't two thousand eleven, I think we said in our previous episode, but we kind of danced around it because we didn't really want to address it

very much. But it's very much something that we have to talk about, and this is markets that would support illegal trades, and illegal would depend heavily upon where you happen to be in the world, because I guess you know, laws are different in different places. But absolutely largely this

was mostly focused on drugs, illicit drugs. So the famous market was the Silk Road, now the Silk Road at first of all, it took took its name from a historic trade route that connected Asia to Europe, and the idea was that this was a market where buyers and sellers could meet anonymously have these transactions. Bitcoins were accepted there, one of the few places that bitcoins were excepted, one of the earliest two and uh and you it was

a tour hidden service. So this meant that you could actually log again and you don't have to worry that you're being tracked or that your identity is out there for everybody. So it was kind of a haven for this sort of activity, so much so that, uh that the illicit activity made up the majority of the things you could buy on the Silk Road. It wasn't just illegal stuff. You could buy legal stuff too. You could go to the Silk Road and buy clothing or computer

parts and things like that. Sure, but one report from the Guardian said that drugs were up to sevent of what was available on that market. Yeah, at that point, you're like, I'm going to an illegal drug store that also has a computer aisle. That's essentially what you're talking about there. So I mean, and here's the thing. You'll see Bitcoin community folks, some of them, not all of them. I don't want to paint everyone with a broad brush. Certainly not, but there were some who would say, look,

this is just a free market. The fact that drugs are there is that's irrelevant. We're talking about. This is where merchants and buyers can get together and exchange goods. It's meant without government interference on that level. Sure, I mean that that's intellectually I can understand what you're saying. But practically seventy percent of the stuff there was illegal.

So when you when you strip away the philosophy and look at the reality, you have to be you have to be intellectually honest and say, all right, there, these things are being done to to purchase illegal goods. Now you might think that those goods shouldn't be illegal, but that's a totally different issue. That's the whole other discussion. And at any rate, in October, the FBI got pretty

deeply involved. Yeah, they arrested a man named Ross William Albrich on charges of drug trafficking, computer hacking, money laundering, and here's the big one, soliciting murder, essentially assassination. So uh, they ended up arresting him. They claim that Albrecht is the man behind the Silk Road, that he was using the handle dread pirate Roberts. Uh. You know, I do not think it means what he thinks it thinks it means. But at any rate, they arrested him. They claimed that

that what that he was the guy behind the Silk Road. Albrick, for his part, denies it. Uh, and the FBI shut down the Silk Road, although almost immediately Silk Road two point oh popped up into its place. Certainly, but shutting down the system froze all of all of the bitcoins that were in circulation in that in the market in the market right, which was some three point five million US worth at the time, and the fact that the FBI sees that amount of bitcoin means that they are

one of the largest holders of the currency in the world. Yeah, Makamoto and the FBI point that'd be a great children's book at any rate. Uh So, Yeah, there were a lot of people who were not happy about this, including the ones who started up Silk Road two point oh and Dreadpirate Roberts was active again, presumably on being controlled by a different person, assuming of course that Olbrick was

in fact the original Dreadpire Roberts. So Silk Road two point oh on February two thousand fourteen made these would be drug dealers unhappy a second time because they announced that they had been the target of hackers and that the s grow accounts of the Silk Road two point oh have been cleaned out of two point seven million

dollars worth of bitcoins. Uh Following Silk Road two point oh was another market called Utopia, which not only allowed for the sale of drugs, but opened it up to guns as well, because when you're called utopia, that's really the true avenue. Yeah no, yeah, that's I think there might have been some irony there anyway. They were also shut down just days after the site launched. Uh, the police held a sting operation and shut that one down.

Now here's the thing, um, as soon as one of these markets goes down, I'm sure other ones pop up because the demand is there. So until you get to a point where either the demand is not there or people feel that there's just not a too much risk and on a reward, then it's just going to keep happening. However, decentralizing it, you could argue, is um a worthy cause if you believe that shutting down this kind of thing

is a good, good plan, right right. There are people in the bitcoin community who say, hey, this shows that bitcoins work because you can shut down the markets that aren't playing fair and everything else can keep on operating. However, the rest of the world is saying, this is a currency where the markets can get shut down and then all your money goes away, which can of course reduce

confidence in that currency. So these these events are hurting bitcoin in the sense that its value can suffer because people feel less confident of it. I can, but that's not always the practical outcome of this kind of thing, and we'll talk a little bit about that later on, I think. Meanwhile, in November, in response to all of this hubbub, it was basically right after the FBI had had shut down Silk Road one UM, the U S. Senate held a hearing on bitcoin and the general potential

of virtual currencies. The Federal Reserve Chairman at the time, Ben Brannank, released a letter ahead of the hearing that acknowledged that UM that the government you know, of course does not have authority to supervise virtual currencies like bitcoin UM, but also said that this kind of stuff and I quote may hold long term promise, particularly if the innovations promote a faster, more secure, and more efficient payment system UM, and that that idea, along with general curiosity about it,

seemed to really be the moral of this of this Senate hearing, which was really interesting to me. UM. There was of course concern raised about bitcoin being used to drive crime, but the fact that people in the government were open to the concept and then thought that it was pretty cool and not only you know, to be used as a marker for stuff that should be shut down. I think it's great. Yeah, there's a there's a there's

an unequal distribution of savv nous in the government. Absolutely, and we're gonna we're gonna cover a little bit more of that just second, because you know, some people they get it for one thing. You know, once you open a door on the Internet, that doors open, right, I mean, even if you try and remove everything, it's once it's on the internet, the idea is out there. And as we've said, bitcoin is not the only digital currency out there,

and digital currency certainly is poised to be very disruptive. Uh. And you know this Bitcoin is kind of the perfect example of how disruptive it can be in the extreme. It doesn't even have to be that extreme to be disruptive. So uh, it's interesting. And and that that senate hearing where we had senators talking frankly about this kind of stuff, lent a lot of legitimacy to bitcoin in the eyes of the community and really the world outside the community.

A lot of people who were curious about this currency but didn't know a whole lot about it. However, that does not mean that we suddenly entered a a beautiful dream state in which no one was using bitcoin for nefarious purposes, and sometimes they may or may not have been fully aware of how nefarious they were. So Charlie shrim he's a he's a former head of a company called bit Instant, who was on a trip. He was for the past couple of years been living a pretty

lush lifestyle, a lot of wining and dining, flying around. Uh, this fellow from Brooklyn was living the high life. And the reason was he was using you know, a bit Instant was this company that was kind of a handler for bitcoins, could could facilitate bitcoins and and really acting as like a transaction house. Now, he was arrested as soon as he got off a plane under charges that he had committed conspiracy to commit money laundering and also he failed to report suspicious activity. Plus he had a

charge of acting as an unlicensed money transmitter. Now all of those charges are from his alleged business with an with a man named Robert Faia, who was accused of being a bitcoin merchant who was working with drug dealers to buy and sell items on the silk Road. And so it's kind of Ah. There's an email exchange between

shrem and Faia. That's the key of this case, that so Faia's approach was that he was trying to transmit large amounts of money and bitcoins, and the law is still trying to catch up in the United States particularly, but across the world in general with the existence of bitcoins and how is that handled in transmissions when it's not actual US dollars And in general, if you're considered you're considered to be a money transmitter once you reach

a certain level. So a lot of people were telling shrim hey, you know, let's let's make the the top amount a thousand bitcoins. You can't transmit more than that because more than that you're going to get and then they're gonna say you are an unlicensed money transmitter, which

in fact is one of the charges. But this guy f i AA was doing a lot of business with them, and eventually shrim I guess was feeling really pretty comfortable with the whole thing, and they were possibly, uh transmitting as much as ten thousand or more bitcoins in a week. So yeah, it eventually got the the attention of the the government and they went after them. So although part of that Senate hearing included the canny observation that that

cash is probably still the best medium for laundering money. Yeah, and in fact, that was that would come back. In February two, fourteen, Uh, following this whole bit instant and shrim thing, a U S senator proposed that the United States put a ban on bitcoins, which doesn't work when you're talking about decentralized virtual currency. Yeah, you can't really ban something that isn't technically legalized in the first place.

But in this case, it was funny because you know, you had other senators saying this doesn't make any sense. And in fact, I propose we banned currency because, as it turns out, currency is often used for illegal activities. In fact, if you look at currency, the US dollar versus the bitcoin, boy, dollars are used in crime way more frequently, all the time, every day. So we got to get rid of that. And that was I mean,

that's about where that that new story. It was very much a kind of uh, you know, said drowbone kind of moment. Then we get to the hacking stories, the bigger hacking stories, because we previously mentioned um, uh, well no, and also the bot net kind of stuff, of of individual hacking. But um, but there is of course hacking of bigger fish, bigger money fish. Yes, exactly, because bitcoin the currency. They they're very quick to say that the people, the keepers of the bitcoin are quick to say that

the currency itself is not what has been hacked. It's not someone has figured out how to unravel the bitcoin so that they can make copies of it, which was one of the big fears about digital currency. Yeah, because people think, hey, if I download a song, I can make copies of that song for all of my friends, which is exactly what the music companies don't want me to do. But I'm totally gonna do it anyway. What would stop me from doing the same thing about downloading

a bitcoin and then making lots of copies. So that has remained safe. However, institutions that are dedicated to handling bitcoins have not had the same level of safety and security. Absolutely. So one of the big ones you've probably heard it, Uh, It was a Japanese company called mount Cox, which was originally a Magic the Gathering card exchange. Yeah, so weird, but at any rate, I believe it was in January. Man, this was a big one, right, This was the one

where they were robbed. Hackers had managed to exploit a security vulnerability in the Mount Cox Exchange non exchange. Think of an exchange as a place where you can exchange currencies, So you could purchase bitcoins or you could sell off bitcoins at this exchange. They would base the value on whatever the market would bear at that time. Well, the hackers had been able to exploit a security vulnerability for

the course of a couple of years. Actually, Uh, it was just that the Mount Cox folks kind of figured it out gradually, and then then the news broke and then that's when every thing really fell apart. Yeah, February. By the way, I mistook that January. Well, it had certainly been happening before, but but it wasn't announced till

till then. Yeah, And and it turned out that they lost seven hundred fifty bitcoins that belonged to customers, plus an additional hundred bitcoins that belonged to the exchange itself. And at the time, that was about half billion dollars worth of bitcoins. Uh at if you took it at the that the the value of bitcoins in US dollars at the time the news was announced, keeping in mind these stuffs had been going on for a while as

hackers had found this vulnerability. So that was pretty much the end of Mount Gus at least, maybe not the end, but it certainly sent them into the equivalent of bankruptcy in Japan. In fact, the CEO had to step forward and bow and apologize to uh to customers, because that's the that's the custom in Japan. And the last I heard, the ends are that he will step down once a suitable replacement is found for him. There are other companies

that are even in worse shape than that. Yeah. Just a couple of weeks later, flex Coin, which which is a kind of bank for bitcoins UM, had to shut down after being hacked and and losing how many eight nine bitcoins? Yeah yeah, Now by this time the value of those bitcoins were less valuable than the ones from the previous ones because bitcoin had taken quite a hit in its value. H So, yes, there were more bitcoin stolen in the flex coin story, but they were you know,

they weren't worth quite as much. Yeah, they were. Oddly, they were worth less because confidence was lower UM, and it also was you know, banking quotation marks because well, it's not technically a bank because it is necessarily uninsured. That's you know, that's part of the whole anarchist package, right, it's not it isn't beholden to some government agency or some other corporate entity. And so because they weren't ensured,

there's no way to to to cover that money. Yeah, so that money is gone and as a result, the company is shutting down. The only bitcoins that they retained were what in what they called cold storage. They had two different styles of storage. There was a hot wallet, which was called that because the the bitcoins were active on network servers that were connected to the Internet. And the reason for that was so that they would be available for transactions, because you don't want that transaction to

take forever. You don't. You don't you don't want to have someone to have to go physically hook a hard drive up to a server in order to access your bitcoin every time. Um, but that cold storage is very much the Battlestar Galactica kind of kind of the new the New. Okay, I'm looking at you, frankly, I'm like, what the big silver cylon or is this sexy cylon

by Well, it's about sexy silocek. But but but but I'm referring, of course, to to the part of Battlestarre Galactic at the new series in which a few members that the government had started going like, you know, we really shouldn't have computer networks or large networks hooked up to other large networks, because that's a terrible plan for

security for security purpose. So and that's exactly what they were doing with cold storage, and that they were essentially having these on servers that were not connected to the Internet, and they said, you know, it's really hard to steal money when that money is not connect to the Internet. It's not impossible. You can use some social engineering and get direct access to the actual machine and be able to do it that way. Sure, but that is much

more difficult. Yeah, that's mission impossible, risky as opposed to the net risky. Yes, if I could mix my terrible Hollywood depictions of stealing stuff anyway, flex Coin said, it's going to work very hard to make sure that the coins and cold storage get to the valid owners of that currency before they shut down totally. So you would think that because we're talking, you know, we're recording this in March two thousand fourteen. We're talking about story that

broke in late February two fourteen. Clearly we wouldn't have any more stories to talk about about hackers getting access to bitcoins. Ah, yeah, now we do. Yeah, because it turned out that this morning, when I was looking at the news, one of the items was that actually was this afternoon. It was even later than this morning. There was a company called Poland Polo n X p O l O n I e X poloni x I guess uh.

They lost around fifty grand worth of bitcoins in US dollars. Uh. The actual number of bitcoins lost were seventy six point six nine. Like we said in our previous episode, bitcoins can be divided down into teeny tiny numbers. They lost seventy six point six nine bitcoins, which represents about twelve point three percent of all the bitcoins they had in storage. So their solution temporarily is to reduce everyone's account by twelve point three percent to distribute the loss across all customers.

That's a terrible way of covering a loss, right, you might think, but my money wasn't stolen, and now you're stealing my money. Not supposed to be temporary they are supposed to work at trying to recover in some fashion the value of those bitcoins and restore it to everybody so that uh, this distributed loss is not felt so keenly and that it's eventually restored. But yeah, you would imagine that this would probably make some customers a little miffed. Certainly.

I've seen some online responses to that my fitness um of of people just going like, you participated in a currency designed for thievery, and you were surprised when it attracted thieves. And I think I think that that's a little bit harsh um, but perhaps an interesting point. Yeah, there's a there's more than a little speck talk. But you know, we've got some more we want to say about the crazy shenanigans, what goes on with this crazy currency. But before we do that, let's take a quick break

to thank our sponsor. Now we mentioned before that one of the other controversies, or or at least one of the other concerns about bitcoins is how did they fit in with the world of taxes. Because it's a decentralized currency, it's not dependent upon any government. However you are doing using it to do business, you may be doing business at least you know, the the equipment you use, maybe

within the confines of a particular country. I'm pretty sure you haven't figured out how to put a server someplace beyond the reach of all law, right, most most servers are not physically in the clouds. Yeah, maybe you found some way. Maybe you bought an island and it's your own little sovereignation, in which case you can skip forward a little bit in this. But does call us because

that sounds like an awesome party. Yeah, especially if that islands like somewhere near the equator, I will totally go. But anyway, the the the problem here is that governments don't really know how to deal with this properly, in the in the sense of how how would we tax the use of bitcoins? Could we tax it? Should we tax it? I think most governments say, yeah, we should

totally tax. Now. What what is not beyond question is making money through the exchange of bitcoins, Because if you are exchanging bitcoins for other currencies and you're making money that way, that's something that the government, at least in the United States, will totally tax. The old buying, low selling or h had a moment of terrible doubt. Yeah, well I do whenever I look at the market. Se this is why I don't play the stock playing is

the right word for it. Uh. Yeah. So the idea here, of course, is that if I if I invest in bitcoins, like and I'm not mining, if I'm actually uh using them as a like a commodit change, right, yeah, like I exchange. But yes, yeah, I've purchased some bitcoins using US dollars. So now I have the equivalent in bitcoins available to me, and then the value increases over time, and then I sell those bitcoins to get US dollars again and thus make a profit. I could be taxed

on that. So that's in the future we may see taxes being applied more broadly across different types of transactions. So that's that's another problem with bitcoins in general. And uh and the biggest one is kind of related, I think, because it's all about the volatility of that market, of the exchange market, of how much a bitcoin is worth in um forgive me, but real dollars oh sure, yeah, well, or just value. You could just say, what's the value

of a bitcoin? What can a bitcoin get me? And the truth of the matter is that changes so quickly and so dramatically, even over the course of a day, that it's hard to answer that question in a meaningful way. I mean, we've seen bitcoin's value go from around a dollar per bitcoin US to twelve hundred dollars US per bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah,

in the span of thirteen alone. Um it went from between twelve and thirteen bucks to uh to one thousand, two hundred forty two dollars per coin on November twenty nine, and then had crashed back to under six hundred by late December. So, in other words, here's here's how I want to put my argument that I always make, and I've made it multiple times, and I've debated this with other people in the technology space. I say that bitcoin is not really a currency. It's more like a commodity.

It's more like investing. Yeah, it's something where it you know it. You could use it to exchange, but that's almost more like bartering than than a currency because the value changes so dramatic. Well, although I mean, any any money that you're using is a little bit imaginary and you're technically bartering with it. But again, that one of the benefits of having a regulated currency is that the government can take steps to try and keep the value

as consistent as possible. It doesn't always work, because there are situations where you know, inflation will get out of control, maybe uh, due to external circumstances. That does happen. We've seen it happen across the world, certainly. But I guess the thing that you're arguing, and and it's a fair argument, is that if you if you're going to believe in a money system, then the more official and founded that

belief is. So the example I have here is, let's say that dollars behave the same way that bitcoins have behaved over the last couple of years. And I have a five dollar bill in my hand, and I'm peckish, and I decided I want to go out and buy myself it's last pizza. So I go outside and there's a pizza vendor and he's selling slices of pizza and it's five dollars of slice, and I think, well, you know that's I'm hungry, it's exactly what I want to me.

This slice of pizza is probably worth the five dollars, a little more than what I would normally pay, but open so I hand over my my hard earned five dollar bill, and he hands over his hard earned slice of steamy pizza, and then I devour it and I go on my merry way. The next day, the value of that five dollar bill now has the equivalent buying power of what five hundred dollars would have gotten me the day before. So, in other words, it's still a five dollar bill, but now it can buy five worth

of stuff. Yeah, from the previous day, from the previous day. So so in other words, I just in my mind, I'm thinking, yesterday I bought a five hundred dollar slice of pizza. I no pizza in my life has ever been that good. And I've been to Sorrento, Italy when I had amazing pizza there. It was not worth five dollars a slice. I can I can imagine it's really good truffle oil. I don't know, but maybe twelve dollars

maybe if I were feeling like like hoity toity. This is like a you know, a chic place, and I'm there to be seen, Yeah, exactly, but not five dollars a slice. So the point I'm making is that the volatility makes you nervous about spending the currency. I would I would be reluctant to spend my bitcoins for fear that I would miss out on the next giant jump

and value. So that if I ended up, you know, having like three or four bitcoins and I'm thinking, oh, wow, this is worth five dollars United States money, I'm gonna I'm gonna exchange it now, and then a year later it's worth thirty six dollars, I would be a little perturbed at myself. I'd be upset. And it discourages people from using it as a currency. They might use it to invest, and they might hold onto stuff, and some of the markets we talked about, some of the illegal

markets might use bitcoins for currency because of the other. Yeah, it's easy, but it's you know, if the very basis of your currency discourages you from using it, then it's not successful as a currency. That's not the fault of bitcoin itself. The fault of that is with the market. Because the value of something is based upon its demand. If demand is high, the value is high, especially if

you compare it against the supply. If the supply is low and demand is high, that thing is valuable, right, And in some cases we see things that manipulate markets so that you have an artificial value on something because it looks like supply is low and demand is high,

even supply is also high. Yeah. Yeah, if you ever want to really get this illusion, look into the diamond business and see how there is no shortage of diamonds and yet they're being treated like they're this incredibly precious resource. I think I'm nearly positive that one of our fellow podcasters here at how stuff Works has done an episode on that. And I know that there are articles on how stuff works dot com that go into deep detail

and they are they're fascinating, insulting, and terrifying. Um. But yeah, I mean, you know, and it's it's the kind of thing where it behaves like like a stock, like a commodity. And uh, you know, after the news about Mount Cox broke in in February, on that exchange, at any rate before it was shut down totally, the value of bitcoins dropped all the way down to something around two twenty dollars for bitcoin. Um, that's that's that's pretty dramatic. Yeah.

Since then, on on most US exchanges, it's it's hovering right around uh six and in eighty dollars or it was as of Tuesday. Right now it's around six sixty dollars, because that's how it does. Yeah. Yeah, So that's the thing is that you see these stories too, and these stories start to mount up, and there are two big pathways that people have started to say this is what bitcoin is going to go down, and they are two

pathways that go in opposite directions. So you have one population saying the currency is robust, it can survive these controversies, it can survive all these problems. It's not the currency's fault that the bank was robbed, just as you would say it wasn't the dollar bills fault. If someone robbed a physical bank and stole dollar bills out of it, you would say it was the bank's fault for not having the right security to meet up with the the

challenge of fighting off these robbers. Same sort of thing. You would argue that these institutions didn't have the security to keep it safe from hackers, but the currency itself was perfectly fine. Um, so those people say everything's gonna be fine, We're gonna weather the storm, it will actually end up proving that bitcoin is a viable currency currency, right, and that in the future this is something we're all going to be using. Um, So you still have the

faithful who really believe in that. I'm sure many of them probably hold quite a few bitcoin, sure, and I am honestly it has surprised me that, in the face of Mount Cox and all all of these other robberies that have happened recently, that the value of bitcoin has not permanently plummeted or more permanently over the course of two weeks, right, right, and and part of this is you know, again, the value is all based on perception.

If everyone loses confidence in bitcoins, then the value will will plummet, like you said, but it's only if people lose confidence in it. If people don't lose confidence in it, if they kind of roll with this, then bitcoin will remain valuable. It's all based psychologically. So there are other people who say, you know, bitcoin is just doomed to fail. There's Antical in New York magazine that's all about the cult of bitcoin. Yeah, it's a really long article. It's

very critical of bitcoin and the bitcoin culture. Uh, and also includes a quote from a computer science professor at Cornell named Erman Gunn Serrier who said that Bitcoin at the moment is in a slump with a community that has become its own parody. The bitcoin masses, judging by their behavior on forums, have no actual interest in science, technology, or even objective reality when it interferes with their market position.

They believe that holding a bitcoin somehow makes them an active participant in a bold new future, even as they passively get fleased in the Boulder current present burn Yeah. So uh, these two camps obviously very much in disagreement about what the future of bitcoin will be. Um, Honestly, I don't know. Uh, I'm frankly like you, Lauren, I'm kind of surprised that the value hasn't taken a harder

hit than what it is that right now. Based upon this, I would think that people's but they would have all pulled out or pulled out more so at least the people who aren't, like the hardcore bitcoin community members like that, the ones who are really who have who have totally bought into that philosophy, that ethos I can completely understand them, being like dedicated to the very end, like a like

a cold computer teddy bear. Yes, And the investors who are more likely the ones who they are interested in playing the market are who are using it to their advantage as a curiosity. I could see them being the ones who really are have lost the confidence and want

to get out. It's it's it's not because they don't buy into the philosophy or the ethos they're buying into it as this is like yeah, so um, but they but they haven't or not enough of them have and right, so it'll it'll remain to be seen which of those two pathways happen. And again we will eventually not not in the very near future, we will eventually cover other digital currencies, uh and talk about those and how they are similar to and different from bitcoin. And I do

think that we're going to see some digital currency. We may see government regulated digital currencies as well. Who knows. We could have lots of competing currencies out there on the global market, and uh, it may be that it will take years before it settles into something that is, you know, stable and reliable. It may very well be that we have fractured currencies where if you want to buy things off one market, then you need one kind

of digital currency and another market you need another. For us, video gamers were used to this because you can't use warcraft dollars to buy stuff in ever. Quest. What I what I really hope comes out of all of this HUBU is a greater interest in and understanding of cryptography and it's potential use for monetary systems. Because whether or not you you want to buy into this, this counterculture movement, I think that it's a really terrific application for making

things more secure. Exactly yes, and uh, of course, with quantum computers right around the corner, cryptography is going to become more and more of a challenging field all on its own. But that's another podcast. So we're gonna wrap this up. Guys. If you have any suggestions for future topics we can tackle here on tech Stuff, let us know. Send us a message on many of the social networks

were on that includes Twitter, Facebook, and Tumbler. We have the handle of tech Stuff hs W or if you're old school and you like sending those emails, you can send us an email with the address tech stuff at Discovery dot com and Lauren and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it how staff works dot Com