 So the Bitcoin show, your favorite show online and on every screen and device, everything that has a screen we're going to be on. So check us out on iTunes and OnlyOneTV.com and YouTube, we're all over the place. I'm Bruce Wagner. Many, many. And many, many. And today, first of all, today's episode is brought to you by our awesome, wonderful sponsors. I love the Bitcoin community. And the Bitcoin community includes BitcoinBonus, bitcoinbonus.com. All your online shopping, they give you kickbacks and Bitcoin. What could be better? And tradehill.com. Tradehill.com is the new, fastest, easiest, most convenient way to buy and sell Bitcoins online. Get a 10% discount for life on all your trades, if you use the referral code on your screen right there, TH-R141 and Mezzy Grill. Your authentic Mediterranean food tastes delicious. And they take Bitcoin. Mezzy Grill, M-E-Z-E, Grill.com. Check them out. And USGoldCoins.com, who is our hero, our money mentor, Andy Gauss, who, this is his company, USGoldCoins.com. Check them out. They're awesome. All right. So we're not just into Bitcoin, we're also into gold and silver rare coins. So today's episode, we're going to talk about what is a Bitcoin? Bitcoin for newbies is the topic. And joining Manny and I is Anthony Anderson, who's actually, you can see, I hope you can see well, he's actually broadcasting live from his car on the way to the airport. You're in Minneapolis, right? You're in Minneapolis? I'm headed towards the airport in Minneapolis and I'm flying to Los Angeles. So that's a whole other story. But we're going to, one of the 29 plus, maybe it's like 31 shows that we're going to be launching on only one TV is the Anthony Anderson show. He's going to talk about green living and sustainable agriculture and things. I don't even know, it just makes my head explode. But really, really cool stuff for your body and your health on the planet and all those good things. So, but Manny, I mean, but did I say Manny Anthony? Anthony is, so he's going to be in the Anthony Anderson show and that's coming soon on only one TV. But meanwhile, we're here to talk about Bitcoin for newbies today. And I want to talk about it in really, really simple terms. So we're going to have to lower our technical commentary so that we can really make it appeal to the masses. What is a Bitcoin? People ask me all the time in these interviews, what is a Bitcoin? How would you explain it? So let me start and then we'll bounce it back. Manny is a technical expert and Anthony is a semi-technical but more representative of the normal people who are just like, this is cool but it sounds really cool but what is it? Okay, I don't know if you can hear him, he's chopping up. But as you can see, he's on an iPhone and Skype video driving his car. So I assure you it's legal as long as you don't have it up to your ear, right? I hope. Anyway, so what is a Bitcoin? Bitcoin, I say on bitcoinme.com is the site that I created. It's kind of the Bitcoin for newbies site. The way I explain it is it's the future of money. It's kind of the gold standard of digital currency. It's not credit card like or cash, sorry, not credit card or PayPal like. It's cash like. What is, and I'll start by saying the five benefits of Bitcoin, if I can remember them all, in order off the top of my head, the benefits of Bitcoin are that is the world's first decentralized currency. So there's no issuing entity, there's no bank, there's no business corporation website or guy behind it. The government say, well, why do I care about that? The reason you care about that is every currency in the history of humankind, eventually somebody gets a hold of it and decides to start printing more. Whether it's Deutschmarks or US dollars, they just decide to print more. Of course, they're not actually printing them anymore. Now they just type zeros on their keyboard and magically there are more. So it's very convenient for the people who create the currency. But Bitcoin is unique because they can't print more. There will never be more than 21 million. But that doesn't mean there's a shortage because hand in hand with a limit of 21 million is that it's virtually infinitely divisible. Right now it's just divisible to eight decimal places. But there's no reason that that couldn't be extended. So we could actually be trading in millions of a Bitcoin or billions of a Bitcoin eventually as needed. So that's what makes it really beautiful, beautiful idea. So let's see, the world's first decentralized currency. It's not tied to the US dollar. It's got its own floating value based on the market of people buying and selling it. The transaction fees are virtually zero because there really are no transaction fees, they're just optional. So an optional fee to me, that's not even a donation to speed up the transaction. For the time being. Right, for the time being. It's not even necessary to put any kind of a fee on it at all. It's really a donation, not a fee. And then also it's irreversible. With PayPal, Mastercard Visa, every credit card known to man, the transaction can be reversed. In the case of Mastercard Visa and PayPal, six months later, the transaction can be reversed, completely screwing the merchant out of the money. It's absolutely unethical, it might be. And especially when the US alone, something like $45 billion a year is paid in fees just to credit cards. So it's absurd. And so a lot of people are really upset with the banks. Anyway, let's see, so it's zero transaction fees, decentralized, no fees, what are the other, it's nearly anonymous. It says anonymous as you want it to be. It's approximately as anonymous as cash. Obviously cash is traceable forensically, so is Bitcoin, but in different ways. So it's sort of anonymous, it can be made anonymous. A lot more than, I mean, it's the exact opposite of a bank, because that's completely tied to your identity. Another important aspect is that it prevents double spending, or does a really good job of attempting to do so. So if you spend one Bitcoin today on groceries, you can't spend it tomorrow on gasoline. So once it's spent, it's always been spent. And that's a very important aspect because for something like MP3s, you can make infinite copies and you'll always have, it won't matter. But with Bitcoin, if you make a copy, you're basically making it useless by creating more out of the same entity. That's an interesting thought too, that I wonder if it could be used for intellectual property in the future. But anyway, that's kind of under the hood. But it's really, really important aspect of the technology and how it works because obviously if you have a currency that you can spend twice, it's useless. So yeah, that's part of the fundamental nature of Bitcoin that, you know, obviously it really is, it acts as if it is an actual coin that you can only spend once. And only one person can own it and they can only spend it once. Sort of like digital gold. It has a lot of the same properties pretty much. Digital gold, except it's better because, of course, it's digital, first of all. And secondly, it's divisible. Like you can have gold and you can divide it down so far until it's like, the form factor is not convenient. The form factor is perfect because if you click it and you can send a millionth of a Bitcoin or a million Bitcoins, you know, with the same click. But it's divisible to any decimal place which you can't conveniently do with gold. Yeah, that's another example. And slice it and dice it. Are there any other things that I can add? Yes, a very, very, very important part of Bitcoin is that its supply is limited. You did touch up on that. That's only 21 million. But it's fixed right now at about 50 Bitcoins every 10 minutes I created, you know, through a process called mining. We won't get into it, but sort of the same idea as mining for gold where you have to put in actual work. But instead of putting in work of, you know, slaves in Africa, you're putting work for computer computational power. Right. So it's sort of the same concept. Exactly. So the net result for the user is that it's a predicted curve. Everybody knows, everybody on earth knows the exact, almost exact curve of how many Bitcoins are created and when. And they can even estimate down to the approximate date of when we'll reach, almost reach 21 million, and then there will be more. So based on that, the economy can thrive knowing that the, you know, how many will will exist. So in spite of the fact that new Bitcoins are being created every 10 minutes approximately, the value overall is going up dramatically. It just goes up and up and up. Sometimes there's, you know, some crazy headline that makes, you know, panic sellers drop, you know, sell and it drops the value for a minute and then it goes back up again. It'll drop and then go back up to 20% of what it peaked. Usually it happens that there's a big peak and it drops about, they maybe, you know, drops a certain amount and then it goes back up about 60% to what it peaked and then it keeps on going up. So if you panic when it's going down and sell, you will definitely be selling at the low. And if you get all excited when it's going up and up and up and then you buy, you're definitely going to buy at the high. But overall, even people who do that, from my experience, what's been happening is people that always buy it when it's high and always buy it, sell it when it's low, they still end up doubling their money because over time it's just, it's going up and down, up and down, up and down on its way up. It's just a crazy thing. Like in the title sequence on our show, how the thing goes, yeah, it goes up and down on its way straight up. Yeah, that's another problem right now that I guess doesn't make it very user-friendly is how liquid it is because the demand has a direct relationship with the value. So when there's more demand, you see the value go up. And when you see people sell, since the market's still very little, you'll see a direct relationship with value on that again. So until a couple more years where there's more Bitcoins in circulation or until there's that 21 million, I think it's going to be pretty volatile. Yeah, it's volatile because so many people are speculating. They're buying it. It's kind of like the Gold Rush days. So Anthony, you've heard me talking about Bitcoins since I discovered it. He's one of my best friends in life. So you've heard me rant and rave, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin. There are a comedy team back there. They were mocking everybody. They were like imitating everybody in the whole office. And they were imitating me. Joshua was like, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, not that it's Bitcoin, it's really all Bitcoin. But what do you say, what's your take on it now, now that we're like six months ago, you learned about it? It is so much deeper than what I ever even expected. What at first kind of sounded like, you know, maybe almost like a stock or something. It's like the idea of this wealth creation and how we value it now and how it's gone up. And you were telling me to get it when it was like 40 cents. And I was like, yeah, well, you know, and I'm just like, this is, but this is so much deeper because of, you know, with the way the economy is structured now and how it's like Bitcoin is really the, it's like the agile mammal compared to the dinosaur. And it can just, it's just, it's so much deeper than I think people even realize. And just to see how I'm really in awe of all this. Right, yeah. I mean, I think it was about 20 cents or something like that when we first learned about it. And I remember, yeah, I told you about it, of course, right away. And then I remember, I remember clearly the morning when it went to Mt. Gox, it went to 50 cents because I was so excited that Ed had to go. He had like a dentist appointment or something. And I'm like, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, it's 50 cents. It's doubled, it's doubled. Oh my God. And everybody's money has doubled. And I was like, sell, sell, sell, sell. And I did sell some. But, and then yeah, I was in the dog house for like weeks because I mean, a couple of days later, Ed bought back all the ones I sold for 50 cents. Like two, three days later, he bought them all back at 77, 78 cents, you know, that was not good. But actually a lot of people have stories like that. Like, you know, they bought it at a dollar when it hit $2, they sold them. Actually, I met somebody the other day who said he bought it when it was half a cent. You know, it was like 0.6 cents of a sense. And I said, please tell me you bought a lot. And he says, oh yeah, I did. I bought like a thousand bitcoins. And you know, it's not really a lot, but you know, okay, a thousand bitcoins. And then he said, I said, oh, that's great. And then he said, yeah, but I got so excited when it reached a whole cent that I sold them all. I'm like, oh no. I want to talk to somebody, by the way. If you're in the audience and you bought bitcoins at a phenomenally low price, and you bought a bunch of bitcoins when they were half a cent, and you still have a lot of them, I want to talk to you, even if it's not on the air, I just want to talk to you privately. Because I want to hear a story like that. Okay, so write to me. Just send an email to bruceatonlyonetv.com. My number is published, as everybody knows. So are you selling everything and buying Bitcoin now, Anthony? Or what? Well, recently, just because of my life, I've been trying to get my living set up and I'm putting my money into this garden and all this. But now that that's finished, you have more freedom, some investing. But now I'm scared that it's so hot. Is it, I mean, what was it at now, 13, 14? I don't even know. Somebody in the chat room wanted to tell us what it is on Trade Hill right now. I think it was floating around there. Around, yeah. It's like, gosh, I'm so mad at myself for not getting it when it was 40 cents. What did you say about 40 cents? You broke up a little. I'm just so mad at myself for not getting it. And even it was a dog plur 40 cents or, you know. Now it makes me want to get for it. Because I feel like I'm getting ripped off, but. Mm-hmm. Well, no, I mean, that's the other thing that happens is people think they're getting ripped off because it's now so high. But the thing is that, you know, that's what they said when it hit 50 cents. That's what they said when it hit a dollar. That's what they said when it hit $2. You know, it's like, oh, it's really a high time right now. And it's not really, because it's $2 then and almost 20 bucks now. What's interesting is that people are using Bitcoin as an investment versus, you know, sort of using it as a currency. So I think that plays in its value as well. And then we just saw what happened with Mt. Gawks and it didn't even go under $10, you know, except for that one temporary moment which is still unclear what exactly happened. Yeah, the flash crash. But it really didn't go below. I don't know what the lowest it went to on Trade Hill. Yeah, so if it's stable at around $10 or more, I think that's phenomenal, especially when less than a year goes worth, you know, pennies. Exactly. So it's just insane. And I think if it stabilizes something around this, even for a few weeks or a couple of months, it'll encourage people to actually transact in Bitcoins. It'll encourage merchants, you know, to accept Bitcoins where, you know, a lot of the volatility, I'm sorry. Volatility. Yeah. Comes into play. Yeah, you know, people who even old timers sort of in the Bitcoin world, forget that there was an exchange site before Mt. Gox that in Russia, they was set up and they opened up for business and they'd got lots and lots of money in and the guy ended up just shutting it down and running with all the money. And of course, like I say, Bitcoin survived that. Bitcoin has obviously survived this trouble with Mt. Gox. Mt. Gox, like somebody said, 90% of the buying and selling online has been through Mt. Gox. But now we have Trade Hill and so on, but there are more and more exchanges are popping up and everybody knows that. Yeah, and that's good because it encourages competition between exchanges and we're not essentially putting all of our eggs in one basket. Exactly. It's good to have multiple exchanges, not only for competition, but if one exchange does go down, it won't affect market price or it won't affect, you know, users who are using Bitcoin every day. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty resilient. The fact that it was at, what was it like 1750 when Mt, right before the flash crash on Mt. Gox, I think it was about 1750. That's what Kevin Day said. I don't really watch the price. People ask me what the price is every second, but I don't know. I watch it occasionally, but I'm not obsessed with it. But I think it was 1750. And then, and now, was it like 13 or 15 on Trade Hill today, something like that? That's not much of a, that's really not much of a dip when you think about it. I mean, it's not growing exponentially like it had been. It kind of like has leveled off a little bit, but it really didn't go down much for considering the fact that the exchange that handles 90% of the traffic went down. And someone in the chat room is asking, me, what do I expect it to reach after Mt. Gox comes back up? I think it's just gonna keep going up, personally. I think that, you know, I had originally said it would be $100 by the end of June. That might be stunted a little bit. Maybe it'll be $100 by the end of July. I may have to revise that estimate. But I do think it's gonna go up to, you know, 30, 50, and 100, probably by the end of July. What do you think? I don't like to speculate, but I will say that, you know, given the events, maybe people, just for a couple of weeks, you know, might be a little more hesitant to trade or it might delay their trading because they wanna figure out how exactly they could secure their funds. You know, we have to remember these wallet files are now worth a lot of money. So, you know, that might factor into how people trade. But, you know, I think within a few weeks it might start going up again. I think it'll probably stabilize around 20 bucks for a little bit. And I have to give the disclaimer that we don't give financial advice and we don't say bye-bye-bye like the guys in the forum do. I don't tell people to buy or sell. I have my own opinion and in my guess as to what the value will be is completely pulled at a thin air. It's not really based on anything at all. It's just based on my guess, based on the past performance. But of course, past performance is not necessarily an indicator of future. Yeah, a big aspect of Bitcoin too is faith. Like, if you look at the community, you could just see how much faith the community has in Bitcoin. That's right. Especially because they wanna see it strive, they wanna see it grow and they wanna, possibly when they become an alternative to fiat currencies. So I'm on that team. I hope that one day it could revolutionize the way that we use money every day. So I wanted to succeed because of that and I'm sure there's many others like me in that sense, especially in the third world. Bitcoin is just not in the United States. It's all over the world. There's many other countries in the world that need Bitcoin more than they do over here in the United States. Although, here in the United States, it is needed pretty badly. Right. That's one of the biggest issues. Well, one is obviously liquidity, like you touched on. People need to be able to get it in and out of not only merchandise and shopping and all that, which is absolutely important, but maybe even more important is to be able to get it in and out of cash. They need to be able to put cash into Bitcoin and get cash right back out of Bitcoin as easy as anything. That's interesting that you bring that up. I didn't read the article, but I sort of glanced at it. The CEO of Dualla. He recently, I forget which publication, but he started talking about, well, they call it virtual currency. I don't like to call it virtual currency because that makes it seem like it's imaginary, but digital currency. And Dualla plays a very big role in facilitating money from US dollars to Bitcoins. And they play a very large role in that, especially through Mt. Gox and Trade Hill, I imagine. So he had some thoughts on that. And I think that a service like that or any service like that, or just facilitating in and out of Bitcoin from US dollars will make it much more viable in the future. If Dualla nails it in the head with their new feature that they're coming out, the FISYNC or whatever, where you can do that instantly. So instead of waiting four or five days, you just wait a day or two, I think that will drive the value of Bitcoin up just because it makes it so much easier for a layman to use. So the founder of Dualla spoke about Bitcoin? I'm not sure about Bitcoin specifically, but digital currencies. We got to get him on here as a guest. So if you're watching, call me. We want to talk with you. We want to talk with Dualla and how Bitcoin has changed Dualla because I know that there's got to be a massive number of people using Dualla. He said in the article that every single day he's asked about virtual currency. And Bitcoin is, it's kind of like Ubuntu is to Linux as Bitcoin is to virtual currency. It seems like 99% of the installs of Linux is Ubuntu. But Bitcoin really I think is kind of like becoming, if it's not already the gold standard digital currency, okay. So let's see, so liquidity is one of the big problems that issues or concerns that people are, everyone's trying to come up with ways to solve that. And the next one that's just as urgent, if not more so, is security as you mentioned. I know that a lot of groups are working on new Bitcoin clients that will actually have the wallet file encrypted from its inception and backed up in the cloud, but with separate keys and things. Oh, okay, yeah. I know Gavin was planning on encrypting every individual transaction, every individual key in the wallet file. This way, because if you encrypt the whole wallet file and then you load it into memory, it's compromised in memory because it has to be decrypted memory, so it could be usable. So they're going that approach and I think that's pretty awesome that. And I'm sure there's the Bitcoin community, that's a lot of smart people, so I'm sure they'll vent something to supplement that as well. These problems will be solved soon, but in the meantime, as soon as we're done with this show today, what Manny and I are doing, and Chris, we're gonna work on a how-to video that's gonna document what to do right now today because people have money in Bitcoin and some people have serious money in Bitcoin already and you need a way to back it up securely on your own, trusting nobody but yourself. And so we're gonna create a how-to do-it-yourself video and put it together. And what I'm gonna do is we're gonna write out the recipe and have some experts approve that it's accurate. Then we're gonna create the whole video showing you exactly how to do it. So there'll be a video that you can watch and do it yourself at home. And when the video's finished, I'm gonna have some experts review the video again to make sure it's perfect. And then we're gonna publish it and put it out here on OnlyOneTV.com so that you can back up your own Bitcoin, whether it's your life savings or a month's income or whatever, you can actually back it up and secure it yourself. You don't have to trust any of these cloud-based services because, you know, let's face it, I mean, you're trusting somebody that you don't really know and all of them are new. I mean, Bitcoin is brand new, so... It is a problem with that, with the whole Mt. Goxbridge, a lot of myBitcoin.com users were compromised as well, because they used the same username and password for myBitcoin.com. So, you know, I've never... Well, I haven't used it, but I don't keep anything on myBitcoin.com. Not because I don't trust them, but because I trust myself more. Exactly, it's not that we don't trust them, it's that we trust ourselves more. One of the things that I'm asked all the time and someone's asking in the chat room is what is Bitcoin backed by? Because, you know, we're so brainwashed to think that currencies should be backed by precious metals like gold. And some people actually think that currencies are backed by gold, which they're not. None of them are currencies are. That's funny. At my work, I was explaining Bitcoin to a co-worker who used to deal with forex exchanges. So, you know, he sort of read about Bitcoin, like, back when it was like only pennies. I was like, what? You didn't buy? He was like, no, you know, I didn't understand it, so I sort of let it go. But I was explaining to it, and then, you know, somebody overheard, and they were saying, oh, you know, but we're backed by gold and stuff. I was like, you know, that's actually pretty false, you know? It's totally false. Yeah, we're based on a fractional reserve, central banking system. So, the problem with our current economic system, which I'm actually doing research on is I'm trying to do something else. But basically what happens is we're creating money out of debt, and we're using money as debt. Exactly. And on top of this, where, you know, the sole purpose of the central bank, which over here in the United States is the Federal Reserve, the whole purpose is to buy, you know, government-issued bonds, and then they're the ones that borrow to other banks at, you know, artificially set interest rates. And this, and the large scheme of things, of what it does, it devalues the dollar for the person that's using it, and it does that through inflation and how they create the money. So, I think Bitcoin is so radically new to so many people because if you go online, you'll see a lot of economists saying why Bitcoin is bad, and some of the reasons they'll say, oh, it's because it's not issued by anybody, you know? But Bitcoin is, it gains value by the same reason the American dollar gains value, and that's through faith. We have faith that others are gonna accept it as currency. We have faith that people are gonna use it for goods and services, and we have faith, especially for all the investors and speculators, that people will exchange it for US dollars. The big leg up that, you know, fiat currencies like the American dollar have is that they're mandated by government to be accepted as legal tender. Bitcoin does not have that. And, you know, the American dollar's not backed by anything. It's given value and we accept that value, and we have faith that other people are gonna accept that value. So, you know, Bitcoin is the same exact thing except it's not issued by a government where they could devalue it through inflation and printing more money. That's a great thing about Bitcoin that nobody can mess with it. And that's important enough to repeat that, you know, no currency, and especially not the US dollar are backed by gold or silver. A lot of people think that it should be. What I say is I wish that gold was backed by Bitcoin because it's all about faith. It's all about confidence. And I trust Bitcoin more than gold. I really do because it's a superior form factor. It's digital. You can encrypt it and back it up. And as long as the, it's really faith in the technology of cryptography and the internet itself. We haven't stressed this, but it's a cryptocurrency. And that's important to stress because it is based off of, you know, cryptography. The state-of-the-art of cryptography. It's as far as technology of 2011, it's absolutely unbreakable. And if there ever is technology that can hack it, break into it, it will actually, they'll crack all the world's banking systems way before Bitcoin. Well, the thing is that it's not impossible. It's just that it takes a large amount of time, more than our lifetime, so it's just not feasible right now. That's impossible. That's the thing, like you can, even if you can, you can crack one, one transaction or whatever, the thing is that each one is built on another, on another, on another. It gets exponentially harder to solve. Exactly, exponentially harder, which makes it impossible. So, I really trust that more than gold bars stored in a, you know, how many stories, there's always another story of some vaulting service in Hong Kong that has the gold bars filled with lead and all that. What's, I was just reading actually before the show, I'm probably gonna get the country wrong. I think it's Zimbabwe, which is in Africa. But they had, in 2008, their monetary system completely collapsed and at the height of that, you know, collapsed. I think it was like, I forget what the name of their currency was, but let's just say Zimbabwe dollars. It took like a billions of Zimbabwe dollars to buy like a loaf of bread or something like that. And they were like contemplating bringing out a trillion dollar note, you know, just craziness. That just shows you how central banking can get out of control or, you know, any fiat currency where any one person or one entity has control, you know, to print more. That's what we need, a trillion dollar note in the US dollars with Bernanke's face on it. I saw a picture like that. And that still wouldn't be enough to cover the debt. Yeah, exactly. The debt to who is another question. Well, let me take a break right now because I wanna, again, express our gratitude to our sponsors because without our sponsors, we wouldn't be here. And if you appreciate what we're doing here, please call our sponsors up, email them and thank them for sponsoring the Bitcoin show and only one TV in general. And so first is Bitcoin bonus, bitcoinbonus.com. For all your online shopping needs, everything that you're buying anyway online, even if you're buying it with Bitcoin or dollars, it doesn't matter, go to bitcoinbonus.com right before you click that buy button and check and see if they're listed there because you can find the merchant on bitcoinbonus.com and they're gonna give you a kickback in Bitcoin. What could be better? If the merchant doesn't take Bitcoin, maybe they'll give you Bitcoin for shopping there. Oh man, I'm such an idiot. What? You just bought something on Amazon and I forgot to use Bitcoin bonus. How could you? Okay, I'm gonna block the buy button on your browser until you are trained to go to bitcoinbonus.com before you hear that, Dr. Virgil? Go to bitcoinbonus.com before you buy anything. Don't make my mistake. Free Bitcoins, hello. Okay, next, tradehill.com. Tradehill.com is the new kid on the block. They're new, but they're an amazingly bright and energetic group of people that have started this company. It's basically the same idea as Mt. Gox for those of you who are new to Bitcoin. It's an automated online exchange. So if you can't find a local trader who's gonna buy and sell Bitcoin for you in your neighborhood or your town, this is the next best thing you can buy online 24 hours a day without even leaving your home. So they have many, many currencies and many ways to get money into them and to get money back out when you sell Bitcoin. And if you go to tradehill.com and you'll get 10% off your trades for life off the trade fees, which are minuscule anyway. If you enter this code, referral code, it stands for tradehill referral code, it's TH-R141. You see it on your screen right there. You get 10% off all your trades for life and we really appreciate tradehill for all that they're doing for the Bitcoin community and their support also of this crisis with Mt. Gox. I mean, everybody's kind of, it's almost like a tsunami. Everybody's coming in to help each other and everybody cares about Bitcoin. And also Mezzy Grill, the restaurant that's been featured on Al Jazeera English and oh my gosh, so many different TV networks and reporters are going there to film and shoot and photograph this restaurant because it's one of the, it's apparently the first restaurant in Manhattan that accepts Bitcoin. They have authentic Mediterranean food. It's kind of like a Chipotle, but a little bit more upscale and nice and Mediterranean food and it's delicious. And the reason they accept Bitcoin, you'll read, is because it's at a nice favorite place. We were going there two or three times a week. We became great friends with the owner, Marwan, and go in and ask for Marwan, say hi from Bruce and Ed. But we told him all about Bitcoin from the very beginning and so thus he is the first restaurant in Manhattan that accepts Bitcoin. So you can go in there with your MyBitcoin.com or your Android app and you can pay with Bitcoin by scanning the barcode on the cash register. It's so cool. You gotta go there just to try it. And now they're open for breakfast. He's reminded me. Yeah, now they have breakfast as well as lunch and dinner, which is awesome. We gotta go try their breakfast. Okay, and we always go there for dinner. And US Gold Coins. Andrew Gauss is a monetary expert in the world in my opinion and he has a company called usgoldcoins.com and US Gold Coins is about buying mainly, he sells gold and silver numismatic coins. Numismatic just means rare, rare and valuable. So they have a double value. They have the value of the gold or the silver and the fact that they're rare US coins. So you've got both things going for you. Sometimes it'll go up because of the value of the metal and other times it's going up because of the value of, because it's so rare. As people melt down coins, your coin becomes even more rare. So if you wanna diversify your investments and have Bitcoin, but you don't wanna have all your eggs in any one basket, you wanna buy numismatic gold and silver coins. US Gold Coins is the place to go. He's absolutely honest and above board and everything he does. Like I'm really vouched for his integrity. It's not just like another one of these gold factory places. So thanks to all of our sponsors, BitcoinBonus.com, TradeHill.com, Mezzigirl.com and US Gold Coins. When you contact them, thank them for sponsoring only one TV. So let me ask you, Anthony. Does everybody you know talk about Bitcoin or is it only me? I need it on Bloomberg. I was just like, whoa, oh my God. Just like that's huge, you're an exposure. But no, otherwise in my social circle, I don't hear about Bitcoin. No. But you saw, he was a- I bring it up to other people. Yeah, he was really impressed by the Bloomberg TV clip. I know, it's like my friend, I have my friend Chuck who, you know, I had been telling him about Bitcoin since the very beginning. He was a computer client of mine and he was just like, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is Bruce one year in one ear and out the other. It's another wacky thing that he's telling me about. He didn't really trust what I was saying. I don't know. But then when the Forbes magazine article came out and I said, look at this and I opened it and there's my name all over it and everything. He's like, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, it's real. He grabbed my arm literally and drug me to the bank. I want to buy Bitcoin right now. I want to buy Bitcoin right now. So I helped him through that process. He bought like $3,500 worth and then it was about seven days later, he called me up and said, sell, sell, sell, sell. And I'm like, I'm busy. Like, wait, wait, wait. Oh my God. Yeah, I know. And I said, actually I don't have time to do that right now and I've told you a hundred times it's not a stock and I'm not your stock broker. So, but anyway, he was like, sell, sell, sell. So I just tweeted. I said, a friend has this many Bitcoins to sell and somebody drove down from Boston to pay him cash like boom that same day for the Bitcoins because everybody wants to buy and he's selling. So his Bitcoin from $35, $3,500 a week later was $10,000. Could I do a shameless plug? Sure. I am going to sell my TV and my PlayStation 3 for Bitcoin. I want cash, I want Bitcoin. It's a 40 inch Panasonic 1080P television. It has a good contrast ratio. I don't know what else to describe about the TV. It's a running mill TV and then it's the older, fat, as they call it PlayStation 3s. It was the 80 gig with an upgraded 7,200 RPM, 100 gig hard drive in there. Okay, you're getting offers from the chat room already. So email Manny at onlyoneTV.com and your inbox will be full of offers. Is that email good? Yeah. Well, maybe email Bruce at onlyoneTV.com and I'll forward them to him just in case. Well, email it to Bruce and Manny. This way just in case it works. Not Bruce and Manny. Bruce at onlyoneTV.com or just send it to Bruce at onlyoneTV.com and I'll make sure he gets it. But yes, I know some people are selling their personal clothing, they're selling anything and everything to buy Bitcoin. So what do you think, Anthony? Are you ready to invest in Bitcoin? Well, what is it at right now? It's like $2 or something? It's not going down. I can tell you that. What is it at, you guys? 12 bucks or something? Oh, I know it's growing and it's... It's between 12 and 18. Between 12 and 18. I don't think it's such a trip. Yeah. It's like the Federal Reserve. Yeah, it's between 12 and 18 and we're not talking cents. I think it was the Fensigrash public pocket. What? What'd you say, Anthony? Can you hear me? It's at 18 cents? No, it was when I told you about it. Now it's like $18. Imagine if you had sold your car and bought Bitcoin then. Oh, so I didn't finish telling this. Go ahead, what? Oh, no, I don't think so. I think it's pretty unlikely that there... Like you never know. You never know. It depends on how like your, as Andrew Shave says, it depends on your level of paranoia, I suppose. But personally, I think it weren't, you know, and Bitcoin's not even, it's barely on their radar. At this point, it's way too small for them to worry about. They have bigger problems to worry about. But I'm sure that it's like barely a bleep on the edge of the radar, but eventually it will cause concern for them. But like I said in that Forbes article, the last line in the Forbes article, by the time they figure this out, it will have already caught hold. Because this is like igniting, like spreading like a wildfire. You know what gave Bitcoin the most credibility? Is when it shot up to $30. So that's when people really started paying attention. And that's when you started seeing influx of articles. The best one to date is the one by The Economist. I think they did a really good job of sort of piecing a whole picture together. If you used to really understand Bitcoin, you need to understand multiple disciplines. And you know, there's not too many people who have a strong firm grasp in each of those disciplines. So I thought they did a really good job of sort of giving an overall idea and a much better and clearer picture of what it is. Because most articles are very vague. Because even the authors, they even themselves don't have a full grasp on what it is. And I felt, you know, the author of that article, they did have a pretty good grasp. Yeah, The Economist, it was one of the blogs. An Economist blog, I forgot what it's called. Maybe somebody in the chat room could tell us. But it was like everybody seems to agree that that was the best one that explains, especially from a technical standpoint. And then The New York Observer was my favorite because it talked about me the most. You know, and of course that's important. But anyway, that young lady was phenomenal. I talked to her 45 minutes on a Friday night. She was so appreciative and she did a great story, which was really fun. You know, Ed, it's just when you go to a newsstand or a newspaper, you know, stand whatever and you buy the newspaper magazine and you see your name in print. It's like, that's so cool. Everybody likes that. But yeah, The Economist has done I think the best job. So many, you know, it's, I'm glad you brought that up because so many of these major media story, also the one on Bloomberg, it was really, really short, but it was very accurate. I think it was, you know, right on target. But some of them, like Fortune, fortune.com blog. I mean, I was very upset and I publicly, I posted in the form about that a rebuttal because the guy interviewed me and he asked me all these things. And, you know, I say he really combined two completely different thoughts into one and twisted my words and really made Bitcoin sound bad. And it seemed to me, before he actually interviewed me, he said something about, you know, I said, you know, please do better than these other journalists have done and explaining it. And I offered that I, you know, to read it before it actually went to print so that I could let him know if there's anything that's really inaccurate. And, you know, not to criticize, but just to make you look good. And he didn't do that. And he went ahead, he said, oh, don't worry, we check our facts, we're not like Business Week. We absolutely check our facts and we know what we're doing. We've done the research. And he said, if you, you know, people who are gonna disagree with this article it's gonna be because of our take on it, our position, our stance. This is before the interview. So it seemed very obvious to me that what happens in these situations is they're reporters given marching orders. They're saying, I want you to write an article about this new thing called Bitcoin. I know you've never heard of it, but do an article about Bitcoin. I need it done by four. And the take on it is it's disastrous and the public is never, it's gonna fail and it's not safe, it's not secure and it's probably gonna be made illegal and Americans are never gonna get a choice to invest in it. So write the article. So like it's almost as if they already had their position decided before he even knew the difference between Bitcoin and a toaster oven. So yeah, I mean, I wrote this whole email about like 30 things that were absolutely inaccurate. Like he just had so many things completely inaccurate and misquoting me too. Yeah, there's, I've seen a few articles like that. And even from economists, you know, like I said before, you know, some people are just so conditioned to like really love central banking because you know, it solves the problem of, you know, money supply where they could create as much money as they need to do as a please, you know. And you know, Bitcoin is a different approach because it's a deflationary currency instead of an inflationary currency like what we have now. So I think that's another aspect. It's so new and so different. This is the first ever kind of currency of this nature we've ever had. So people just don't know how to react. Some questions from the chat room are coming in. Why do we need to get cash out of Bitcoin? I thought we were trying to replace cash. Well, right now it's still in its infancy. So until we have sort of like in ubiquitous use of Bitcoin where everywhere is except in Bitcoin, you know, it's not really feasible and it's not really even convenient to, you know, just transact specifically in Bitcoin. You know, there's still so many people that haven't even heard of it. It's still not even really on the government's radar and maybe on the CIA's radar, but that's, you know, for different reasons. So it's too early for that. Right now the biggest thing that could give credibility and give value and sort of give like a base and a hold for Bitcoin would be usability of moving from fiat currencies to Bitcoin and vice versa. The easier that, and the easier and the faster it is to be able to do that, I guess the more transparency you'll start seeing and the more transparency there is, you know, the more people are just gonna, you know, why are we even training for dollars? You know, let's just trade for Bitcoin. And so I think as time goes on, we'll start sort of verging onto that. And I hope that's the direction that it goes into. But right now there's so many people just buying Bitcoin as an investment. It is about faith. It's having faith in the technology and that there is a future here. It's like, have you heard about that new thing called the internet? I wanna buy some of the internet. How do I buy some internet, you know? And it's like, it's kind of like it's in its infancy and people are like, they're seeing the future here. This is definitely gonna be big. How do I buy some? So there's a lot of people just buying it as an investment. And there's always gonna be misconceptions and people in the public and people in politics and the media, they'll never have a full grasp on it. Even with the internet, you know, it's been made fun of so many times on The Daily Show with John Stewart, but you know, there was a senator, Ted Something from Alaska that said, that internet was a series of tubes and it had to deal with net neutrality and things like that. So there's always gonna be large corporations and large sort of institutions lobbying the public that don't necessarily know what it is to do things in their favor. So it's always gonna be a constant struggle from those that actually know what's going on and the uninformed. In the meantime, I say there's three phases to the mass adoption of Bitcoin. The first phase was mining when everyone could mine. You just turn on your computer, run an app and it creates money and that was really, really cool. That's pretty much over now. Mining is a specialized industry that you need special software, special hardware and special expertise. So it's kind of its own industry now. And so now it's kind of like a quirky side thing that's its own industry, but the average person isn't doing it. It's not profitable. And then the second phase is what we're in now is investment. That's why liquidity is so important that you get cash in, you get cash out. Like I started to tell that story where my friend gave me, he bought $3,500 for the Bitcoin and then he sold it, like he wanted to sell it a week later. He got 10,000 back and he had this envelope from the guy, 10,000 in cash. Some guy drove down from Boston, right? And he gives him this envelope with $10,000 cash and I saw his face, he got it and he did exactly what I knew he was gonna do. He took this cash and he goes, okay, now if I buy Bitcoin with this again, like he just tested the system. He just wanted to put it in more than double his money and get it right back out and then put it right back in again. So he has consistently screwed up really. I mean, he's consistently bought it when it was really high and sold it when it was really low, but he's doubled his money, at least double his money every time. Yeah, it's gonna be interesting. I'm interested in how people who have more financial resources go about it than those who do not because there may be more of a barrier or it may make more sense because usually people with a lot of equity, they're more open to investments and such. And usually when it's the average Joe, a small investment for somebody who has a lot of equity is a small, it's a very large investment for a normal person like myself. So I'm glad I discovered it when I did, even though I don't have a lot of Bitcoins and I didn't have a lot of money at the time, I still have a little decent amount, not too much. And I can only imagine what it feels like to be able to buy $20,000 worth of Bitcoin and then see that go up in value. Yeah, that's amazing. It's like, well, I mean, it's a combination of having the money, of course, but also getting it early, of course, and also having the faith because I know there are a lot of people who got in really early, but they didn't buy any or they got in, it went up and they sold it and so on. So it's about getting in early, having some money and then staying in and keeping it in there. No matter how tempting it is when it doubles, triples, quadruples, you're so tempted to take it out, leave it in. I mean, the people who did that and continue to do that, they're the ones who are gonna be, I read an article somewhere, somebody was predicting that this is the new aristocracy, that if you own a, this guy said, not me, some guy, I read this blogger who wrote, if you have one Bitcoin, you'll be a millionaire and if you have 2,000 Bitcoin, you'll have Bill Gates wealth. Yeah, so that'll be interesting and what else I think is cool, it's gonna be a different subculture of people who invested early, these geeks and these intellectual types that'll start having this wealth versus these traditional people that were either born into it or massaged the system to get to that status. So I think that'll be interesting in the cultural and sort of like political aspect in the future. Anthony, let me ask you this, what do you, I mean, from your perspective, because I know you're all about green living and protecting the environment and health and kind of this oneness of humanity, this new tipping point of enlightenment that the earth is coming to, what role do you, do you see Bitcoin playing a role in the big picture of that? You know, I do, I do and the idea of it being wireless and not, it's just like, I feel like it's such a representative of what we're going to be coming into in the 21st century and just the decentralization of it too and how it's so autonomous and I think it really represents where humanity is going to be going in the next few decades if we choose that path of freedom. And it's almost like big side of light and the side of freedom and the side of real potential and compared to what we've been used to for the past 90 years, Federal Reserve here. So it's really exciting to see the developments in the past few months. Do you see, what about your site, your online stores and blogging and all that? Are you accepting Bitcoin donations or accepting Bitcoin for purchases in any of the business? I haven't set it up yet. I remember when you mentioned it to me, I think I went to that site, the Bitcoin Me site. Right. And then I started to sign and something was going on and I honestly just got distracted and it just kind of got put on the back burner. So I haven't been able to set that link up. Okay, so for anybody who's interested in doing that, let me just tell you, if you go to bitcoinme.com, this is my site that I created. It's an informational site, it's a Bitcoin for newbies and that's the topic of our show, bitcoinme.com. If you click on the accept tab, I've just completely rewritten it. So if you click on the accept tab, you will see a little tutorial about how to get set up as whatever it is, your product or service or donations or whatever it is that you're selling or accepting to get set up to accept bitcoins, like literally in like 15 seconds, it's so, so, so easy. I mean, you can get really fancy and sophisticated and integrate bitcoin into a shopping cart, stuff and all that, and there'll be links for that too. But to get set up for the basic idea of accepting donations by bitcoin or accepting payments as bitcoin, it's like literally 20 seconds. You can set it up and start receiving payments and you'll get an email notifying you the minute somebody sends you a donation or a payment. So go to bitcoinme.com and click accept and then there's also buy and sell. If you go to on the same site, bitcoinme.com and click buy sell, you'll see really simple instructions about how to buy and sell bitcoins today. The easiest way today, option one is to find a local person who will exchange cash or your local currency for bitcoin and there's a way that you can just put in your zip code or postal code or the name of your country and it'll give you a list of all the people that are willing to come and meet at a coffee shop or whatever and exchange cash for bitcoin and option two is the online services like tradehill.com where you can do it right online by doing many different ways but one of the best ways for that is through a bank transfer. But if you want to remain in cash, then the best way is to do it through someone locally, a local trader. But anyway, bitcoinme.com has that tab as well, buy and sell. There's also accept and there's also what else? There's community. On there, there's the Bitcoin 2011 which is the bitcoin, the world's first bitcoin conference in World Expo. 2011 at NYC, we're hosting right here at only one TV studios. So make sure you click on that and email to get in for your registration if you want. If you have a product or service and you wanna set up a table and demonstrate or sell your products or services right here at the conference, let us know that too and you can reserve that space. Or even if you have suggestions for a speaker to be a keynote speaker at the conference, let us know that too. And then the last tab on there is about a giveaway. We call the Bitcoin fire hydrant which is coming. You can actually donate a bitcoin or two to that cause and we'll be talking about that more in coming episodes but basically we're gonna do this kind of a telethon drive that individuals can donate bitcoins, businesses can donate bitcoins in exchange for being mentioned in the thing or we're gonna do a massive, massive bitcoin giveaway. We expect the lines to go all the way down Fifth Avenue across to Broadway and down to Wall Street of people standing in line to receive a free giveaway of bitcoins. So we'll be looking for more information about that but that's a tab on there as well, the bitcoinme.com giveaway. So any final thoughts? Cause we only have like two minutes left. Final thoughts, I'll let Anthony go first. What do you say Anthony? Any final thought on this topic before you hit the airport? I think it's just so exciting and for the investment opportunities and just the investment in the community and the decentralization of the money. I really, I'm so excited to see where Bitcoin has gone in the past six months and it really gives me hope for the future. Right. Well, I look forward to a day where you know, Bitcoin is ubiquitous because right now it's still in infancy and it just has an amazing potential that nothing else in the history of mankind has, this is like the equivalent of the internet for money. The internet has changed how we move information, we exchange information, how research is done, how people communicate, how third world countries get connected with the rest of the world. So Bitcoin has so many socio-economic, political and just so many aspects of it that's gonna change about the way that we live and the way that we interact with the world. I'm just really excited and I'm really happy just to be conscious that I'm in the middle of it all. And I can't wait, I especially can't wait to see how third world countries, what they do with Bitcoin because I think they have the most to benefit from it where the country likes Zimbabwe where the monetary system could collapse or it's on the brink of collapse. So I'm just really excited for the world in general. Exciting times to be living in. Well, we're out of time now, we're gonna thank one more time, our sponsors, bitcoinbonus.com and tradehill.com and mezegrill.com and usgoldcoins.com. Thanks everybody for joining us and stay tuned. 4 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesdays, we have the Spanish language version of El Show de Bitcoin. So for any Spanish speakers, make sure you bookmark that link every Wednesday, 4 p.m. Eastern and Bitcoin show, the one you're watching is every day, Monday through Friday, 2 p.m. Eastern. So we'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for joining us.