 Welcome to the Bitcoin show episode 14. I'm Bruce Wagner and I'm Ed Gal and with us today is Roger Ver live from Japan that's why we're at night today we're doing we're actually taping this at 9 p.m. Eastern because Rogers in Japan and it's morning there it's tomorrow or is it the day after tomorrow wait that's Australia only one day okay so Roger's joining us from Japan and he is the founder of memory dealers calm is that right that's correct got it right okay good and the reason I wanted to have you on the on the show Roger we had never talked before today but the billboard is what caught my attention I you know I had seen that going floating all around Twitter and actually the first time I saw the photo of the billboard that says we accept Bitcoin I I immediately retweeted it and said this is marketing genius it really is because this you know this the billboard itself the idea of doing this is just gonna go viral which of course it did and I was I have never heard of memory dealers calm but boy now I have yeah the whole world has so and the main media also they they talked to us about it they're like oh yeah the memory dealers they know all about you so the tell us our is memory dealers calm is are you the largest retailer do you think that accepts Bitcoin now um I think we're probably one of the largest accepted directly obviously Amazon and others accept it but that's kind of indirectly with the middleman so I think at this point we're probably one of the largest although our niche is rather specialized and so tell us about about memory dealers obviously sell memory is that is that them is that your main specialty the niche well we started out selling memory specifically for network equipment such as Cisco routers and switches and then more recently we actually sell more optical transceivers used in the same sort of network equipment so at this point we actually sell many more optical transceivers than we actually do memory but we still sell plenty of both and I'm glad to say we've actually gotten a couple of orders where customers have paid through bitcoins already that's great it's pretty exciting to see what is an optical trans transceiver they're little they're little devices that'll connect your networking switch to a fiber optic cable and transmit your internet data down a fiber optic cable and convert it the optical wavelength into a electrical signal on the other end oh so that's what that's basically what Verizon has when we have fiber to the floor so that's what they're doing fiber to the home and that sort of thing we sell parts that are used in those sort of systems oh very cool so we can we could run our own fiber network with the with these devices I'd love to help you with the hardware for that okay sounds good we already have fiber but I'm not giving up any of my bitcoins that now maybe I say you know we we we accept bitcoins but we only pay in dollars but so how long ago did you first discover Bitcoin well I first heard of the idea of online digital cash back in the late 90s and then a couple of months ago I was listening to free talk live which is a radio program the United States and I heard them talking about Bitcoin and that was towards the end of last year and I went and looked into it at that time and thought wow what a great idea but too bad nobody's using it and was really disappointed by that and then a couple of months ago I heard again on the same radio program that the United States government went and cracked down on internet gambling and I personally don't gamble at all and don't have any interest in that but then when I heard that some of the internet gambling sites were going to start accepting bitcoins as payment I knew that bitcoins were just going to explode in popularity yeah it's gonna be the next big thing and I've hardly been able to sleep a minute since then I've been so excited about bitcoins and they're just gaining popularity every single day and it's really really exciting to be something to be a part of something that's gonna really change the world I'm pretty confident that bitcoins are the most important invention since the internet itself it's right the world is changing because of bitcoins right in front of our eyes it's such an exciting time to be a part of this people in the know people technical people and technology you know technologists and so on are so excited about it I think the more technical they are the more excited they get about it and it's sometimes I almost feel like it's a religion you know like you know when when did you accept Jesus you know but say when you know what was the price of Bitcoin that the time actually at the time that it must have been like six cents right when you discovered it can you I could ask question oh I was saying so Bitcoin was like about six cents for a Bitcoin at that time bitcoins when I first thought yeah it was way less than a dollar and then when I actually got real excited into bitcoins because people were starting to use it was a little bit over a dollar and by the time I actually was able to wire some money into Mt. Gox and buy some bitcoins they were over two dollars already right yeah exactly I remember well when we discovered it was 20s about 20 cents or something 16 yeah 16 cents okay whatever and then I remember how excited we got that morning when we saw that it had reached 50 cents oh my gosh so what we had we sold of course you know and then bought it back a week later at 77 cents you know and so on it's just it's crazy it's like this whirlwind but it's happening very fast if you have have you been following the media reports about it yeah I've been I've been spending just about every waking moment focusing on bitcoins pretty much full-time the last couple of months now and reading everything I can find about it and it's just such an amazing time to see it new technology that's gonna change the world we look pretty good for focusing on it 24 hours I know I remember when I first discovered it I was like literally not eating or sleeping I was just like obsessed with studying and reading and reading and reading everything I get my hands on about it for like about a I don't know four or five six days something like that I was just obsessed like I just didn't even eat or sleep all I did with a similar experience it's honestly true I hardly slept or ate anything for well over a week until I actually got so sick I had to go to the hospital because I hadn't done anything other than study bitcoins oh my gosh well you've you look well you've recovered now but so you had Bitcoin fever it's a totally write that down Josh we're gonna do that for the comedy sketch a Bitcoin fever skit I want to I want to take a quick break and just quickly say this episode of the Bitcoin show is brought to you by our wonderful fabulous sponsors if it weren't for them we wouldn't be here and they are CarpeVM.com CarpeVM C-A-R-P-E-V-M.com video marketing sees your market say with video and Mezzy Grill authentic Mediterranean food meets modern flavor at Mezzy Grill Mez-E Grill.com right near Columbus Circle here in Manhattan and trade hill.com the new kids on the block the easiest way to buy and sell buy Bitcoin for cash and sell Bitcoin as well many ways to get it out 10% off all trades for life with this referral code TH-R141 on your screen and also US gold coins US gold coins.com our trusted advisor for excellent investments in rare gold and silver coins so when you decided that you wanted memory dealers.com to accept Bitcoin how did you go about implementing that a lot of people a lot of merchants are really interested in accepting Bitcoin but they're like you know how do you do that it's kind of new for everybody yeah it is new for everybody and that's kind of been the biggest challenge at this point I think one of the most exciting projects that I'm working on currently and have the help of a lot of really talented people is we're making a Bitcoin plugin for a e-commerce shopping cart system called Magento and over a hundred thousand merchants around the world are using Magento currently and that plugin should be ready hopefully within another week or two at the very most here and we're to release that for free to the entire world so anybody who has an online store that's running Magento will easily be able to accept bitcoins for anything in their store and I think that'll really help bring a lot of additional merchants on board to accepting bitcoins see I read about that is there another one or is this the one that I read about maybe I read that it was in development or something I would guess this is probably the one you read about it's actually getting pretty close at this point I've seen some screenshots of how it's gonna work and I'm pretty excited and I'd like to thank all the guys from the Silicon Valley Bitcoin meetup group as well those are the guys that have really been helping with this since programming is not my forte but they seem to know what they're doing that is so awesome yeah Magento is it Magenta or Magento? Magento is the name of a shopping cart program that over a hundred thousand merchants are across the internet I think it's the number one free open source shopping I looked at Magento I couldn't remember the exact name but yeah yeah you hear that Chris cuz he's setting up his own web store too and I told him about Magento and I remember I think it's the number one or it's one or two most popular at the top few and when I went to Magento's website I saw the major major retailers that are using it a big huge brand name so it's very impressive shopping cart and the fact that it's completely free open source is awesome and so of course there needs to be a Bitcoin plug-in and have you so it's not quite ready yet it's about to be it's getting pretty close so how's it gonna function how will it work it'll work just like a regular checkout you can choose if you want to pay by you know credit card PayPal a couple of different options as well as Bitcoin and if you choose Bitcoin it'll automatically calculate in real time what the correct number of bitcoins to send are it'll tell you the address to send the bitcoins to and then it'll confirm once the the merchants receive the bitcoins the merchant knows that it's okay to ship the goods so just like checking out with a normal credit card or any other payment method man that is so cool I want to set up a store just to play with that I just want that I would we're gonna set up a store just to sell something t-shirts or something because that is so cool yeah it'll be free and open source it'll be really easy for anybody to set up a Bitcoin accepting store with this software awesome now was was memory dealers that come already using Magento we're currently hosted with Yahoo and with about another week we're actually gonna migrate over to Magento so I contacted Yahoo initially and said hey when are you guys gonna set up your online shopping cart platform to accept Bitcoin and this was after it had already been on the front page of Bitcoin and unfortunately our rep over at Yahoo said what is Bitcoin so I said why don't you look at the front page of yahoo.com ask them if they've heard of Yahoo they didn't have any definite plans to make it happen so rather than wait around for them to do something I decided to do something myself yeah the help of some other people it's all coming together right and there's a little bit of a sidebar topic but is Magento is that did you do that yourself is it easy to use first for a novice or is it kind of difficult um it's it actually if you have basic computer skills it shouldn't be too terribly difficult like anything it takes some time and effort to learn but it's not it's not the most difficult thing in the world for sure okay and then I mean when you set it up I'm assuming you have probably hundreds or thousands of items that you sell how do you import is that easy to import them from a warrior thanks to the free market anywhere there's a demand for anything people find a way to do it and there's another company that for I think about $200 they'll import every single item from my current store into Magento wow we're talking about tens of thousands of items so for I think they charged around $200 I think that was pretty darn reasonable that is like that is like that's 10 Bitcoin 10 Bitcoin you only paid 20 cents each and so the the your Bitcoin business I guess it's is a more catering to like miners or just anyone at this point mostly we've sold a whole pile of video cards that people use for mining we've sold a few other items that aren't really related to bitcoins at all one of the most exciting Bitcoin orders I had was from a gentleman in South Africa and anybody who's made international purchases with credit cards in the past know that the credit card companies charge you all sorts of fees and it's real pain but with Bitcoin and this guy it went through so smoothly and click click a really good experience for both of us and I'm sure he has his memory and I have my bitcoins and both of us are happy and it's really exciting to see things like that happening no chargebacks no transaction fees either of us instantaneous cash everybody knows the value of it there's no currency exchange scamming going on and percentages here percentages there and but did you read the headline that the death of Bitcoin bitcoins over did you know that somehow that passed me by yeah I know it's like wow who was which one was that that said that I'm fortune no or the Forbes as well I'm not sure which one it was but one of them anyway the other day I was reading these headlines going oh my gosh these people just don't get it it's just it I mean the you know that the automated exchange site that that you know had 90% market share completely hacked and all the users info exposed and it barely a blip in the value this barely a blip it's that it's gone its way back up again I mean Bitcoin itself is stronger than ever so I can tell you this as well even with all the trouble at Mt. Gox just by kind of dumb luck their office happens to be with walking distance of my place here in Tokyo oh wow and I spent the last couple of days helping them try and get everything back together after the hack and based on the number of customers contacting them and wanting to get involved in buy bitcoins to them bitcoins are getting more and more popular every day without any doubt they're just absolutely overwhelmed by the number of people contacting them trying to do this with them so you guys go and like have lunch together you just like you're right there in the neighborhood yeah they're right down the street I've had lunch with them a couple of times and dinner once or twice as well they definitely need some additional help at their office but they're working long and hard to make that happen and I think they're down the right path help wanted in Tokyo if you have the skills contact Mt. Gox I know they're looking that's awesome so and you're an American guy you said you're from California right correct so how did you end up in in Tokyo I ended up here over five years ago kind of now for some personal reasons and I'm really enjoying life in Tokyo and you know I still like my friends and family in the US but Tokyo is a really good place as well yeah I know I can relate completely because I lived in Taipei Taiwan for about a year and a half and it was very similar experience it's it's very it's love-hate relationship but there's a lot of things I loved about it yeah and so you cater to a global audience as far as yours your hardware like where's your distribution point or do you have more than one or how does that work yeah our main office is in Santa Clara California right in the heart of Silicon Valley we have around 30 something employees over there and then we have a small sales office here in Tokyo and then another one in Korea but by far the vast majority of our businesses in the US based out of Silicon Valley and this the source of your products is do most of them come from Japan or is it just coincidentally that you're there like like everything nowadays most of our products come our manufacturing Malaysia or China yeah most of our customers are in the US or Europe so how does it I mean how is it then to run it's mainly like an American company but importing from China and Malaysia and you're in you're basically you're the remote worker in the company right how does it how is that to run a company so remotely yeah well you know it's 2011 and with email and instant messages and technologies like Bitcoin it's making it easier and easier every day and did you say this is the one of the first times you've used Skype I've used Skype a few times but I think I only have just maybe a couple of contacts on Skype you're in my business almost everybody uses AIM or MSN so everyone just talks on AIM or MSN with everybody and you can talk to multiple people at once that way whereas with Skype video chat you can only talk to one person at a time so it kind of binds things so AIM is are you talking about video chat or audio no I'm just talking about text messaging just text wow you can run a whole company with text chat on AIM that's amazing I have a lot of chat windows open all the time believe me you are just on the cutting edge it's amazing yeah a lot of chat windows all the time I know we do too constantly but that just baffles me that people can you can run a company on AIM it's just the technology what did we do before the internet so do you see the percentage of sales I mean what's your forecast for the percentage of your sales that are Bitcoin well I think the most important thing to increase the percentage of sales with bitcoins currently is to get more and more merchants to accept bitcoins and anybody out there that has a friend or family member or anybody you know who runs a business ask them to accept bitcoins that's going to be the real key and the faster that businesses are willing to accept bitcoins the more bitcoins will be out there in circulation and the price will go up and the popularity will go up and the news coverage will go up and it'll be a win win win for everybody involved right I think that's the biggest thing we need to do so the faster that happens the faster my percentage of business done in bitcoins will increase yeah and if you also have a company and you have vendors that you pay normally ask your vendors to accept bitcoins payment try and pay them in bitcoins that's right I was just we just had Marwan Salem from Mezzi Grill on the other day and we were talking about his he's like the first retail you know restaurant in the to accept bitcoins that we know of and for sure the first one in Manhattan and he was talking about that too trying to talk to his suppliers and asking them to accept Bitcoin because why not you know it's just like you said the more I mean a lot of people have said that this currency is not going to take off until you can buy real goods and services with it and I I see that I think also it could be the other way around like a lot of people I mean originally there was mining for the individual I remember when I turned on my computer and I made 50 Bitcoin I was like whoa immediately I'm going ding ding ding ding how many computers should I buy today you know and then I but then of course that kind of passed now it's a specialized industry and you can't you know you're not going to turn on your laptop and justify running it for Bitcoin mining but now we're in this phase where people are buying Bitcoin as an investment because they're doubling their money in a week and or more and so on so what I was thinking is that people are going to continue buying Bitcoin as an investment if it keeps going up the way it has then there's an once there's enough money in the Bitcoin economy merchants are not going to have to be asked to join it's kind of like when the internet was invented nobody had to go knock on the door of the porn industry to say hey you should check this out I mean they're like on it you know so when when there's a huge amount of money in the Bitcoin economy merchants are just going to say yeah it's just it's not we're not about credit it's about cash just sitting there right but I think that it is good to encourage people yeah I think it's it all starts at the customer level because we're into raw foods and things like that and as a strategy of social engineering they always say well when you go to the restaurant ask your waiter waitress where do you buy your chicken at like because they don't normally know but at least they'll go ask the chef and so on and so forth so the same idea you'll you know everywhere you go you should be asking do you accept bitcoins and everyone's gonna ask well what is the Bitcoin etc. if you want organic food or locally grown or whatever you have to ask for it whatever the customer asks for is what you're gonna get and that's true I think that's true anywhere you go do you accept Bitcoin and they're gonna go a what what a big what but but it's a you know it's an opportunity to educate people when I you know I created that Bitcoin me.com site and I made a tab there called accept so if you want to accept Bitcoin you can click that and it's just super super simple instructions for a business to to do to set up a simply set up a my Bitcoin account get a Bitcoin address it's easier than setting up a Gmail account or something and then how to create the QR code and put it in your cash register pretty much you're in business that's all you have to do you don't have to be approved by any bank or anything you're just done it's like as easy as setting up email and without anyone's permission that's how you do it real quick and simple if you do something like a one-off business or you know not a huge high-volume business or a retail establishment that doesn't have is not going to have a huge Bitcoin volume initially but then if you have a retail I'm sorry if you have a web store obviously this Magellan is brilliant because I'm not Magellan what is it called? Magento. Magento is brilliant because when like you said there's so many retailers using it it's so all they have to do is add this plug-in and they're in business does it I mean so you have to does that plug-in by the way give a unique address a unique Bitcoin address for every transaction? Yes it'll generate a unique address for every transaction so that way you know who it came from and it gives your customer some additional privacy that way and hopefully it'll make everybody very happy and willing to accept Bitcoin. That is brilliant you know I can you know I can see happening is like a retail store maybe even having a kiosk right there where they could self-service they could order whatever they want off the website even a who knows you know even a restaurant or something where you could click and order it on the Magento site click click click and do it with Bitcoin that way if it's easy enough is that I see things like that coming sooner rather than later yeah I can see that so would they they're given a Bitcoin address to send the payment to or does it integrate into one of the web-based payment services? They'll be given a Bitcoin address to send the payment to and then once the payments received at that address it'll verify their order. Okay it would be cool if it gives a QR code for the Bitcoin address too because then if it is a kiosk kind of set up your account your phone can scan the QR code. I'm sure that would be very easy to do as well as offer a little 2d barcode for them to scan and send the address there I'm sure that wouldn't take very much program you don't have to make that happen. And you know you're talking about the guys who developed that are from the Meetup the Bitcoin Meetup in Silicon Valley. That's correct. And you know our Bitcoin Meetup here in New York we host here in only one TV studios the our hackathon it has come out of that it's become a weekly hackathon they're the ones who developed they they're now Bitcoin labs.com and they develop the first Android app the full full featured app you know Bitcoin app for Android which is slick because those two things will work together you can just hit send and scan the QR code boom it's happening so fast are you shocked at how fast this is coming coming of age? Technology keeps going faster and faster I don't know if shock's the right word but boy am I happy about it I can't wait for it to happen I'm so excited about Bitcoins and I want it to happen today rather than tomorrow. You know do you ever get asked like because there's been all this you know hysterical crazy media talking you know trying to associate Bitcoins with you know illicit activities do you ever get asked about that because I actually had somebody contact what was it oh he wanted to be a sponsor on the show is what it was and then a couple days later he emailed me and said no he can't do it he can't accept Bitcoin his attorneys gave him legal advice that he should not accept Bitcoin you know what do you think about that I mean I'm sure they're just being hysterical and because they read some article and like oh you should stay away from that right? Well by the same logic you should stay away from cash because some people you know hire hit men and buy drugs with cash that's right it's just like any sort of tool it's all in how how you use it and Bitcoins can be used for bad things but it can be used for a heck of a lot more good things and I'm really excited about the good things that Bitcoins can be used for. The people that have a vested interest in us using the the Federal Reserve notes you know they're the people who have a lot to lose by by the implementation of Bitcoin do you think that they're gonna do something to retaliate against this the way the recording industry has done against you know peer-to-peer file sharing and so on? It's possible that they'll try but what's so exciting for me about Bitcoins is the distributed nature because I don't see what they can possibly do to stop it and it's open source the cat's out of the bag short of shutting down the entire internet I don't see what they can do to stop it I know the Great Firewall of China has already blocked Bitcoin.org but tons of people in China are already interested in Bitcoin and Chinese language Bitcoin forums have started and a number of my vendors in China are begging for me to pay them in Bitcoins and I'm gladly gonna do that for them the next time I open up. So yeah I think there may be some pushback from the established powers but I have a hard time seeing what they're actually gonna be able to do to prevent it and it seems like the snowball has already started rolling downhill and nobody's gonna be able to stop it and it's exciting to kind of step back and watch and see what's gonna happen. You're a pioneer it's history in the making what an exciting time to be alive but now speaking of China that's an interesting thing I didn't know that they had blocked Bitcoin.org but is there any way that you know of that that China or any government for that matter but especially China could they block Bitcoin from being used there? I'm probably not the very best person to ask about the technology side of that but from what I understand as long as even one node inside of China is connected to the outside Bitcoin network all the transactions will be able to go through just fine and I'm sure that there'll be plenty of smart people in China and at least one of them will be able to figure out how to connect to the outside Bitcoin network world. When I think about it I mean you don't have to have a Bitcoin client running you don't have to have a Bitcoin node running at all to use Bitcoin all you need is a private key and they can actually even put those on paper now they're getting all these sophisticated ways to do it so you really there are a lot of ways to actually transmit bitcoins without even having a connection to the internet at all as long as you can get the data. Another example in China is lots of people in China Facebook Twitter and one other incredibly popular website YouTube Facebook and Twitter so like three of the very most popular websites in the entire world are all blocked for people living in mainland China but what lots of people I know do is they hire some VPN service pay them a couple of dollars of worth of Chinese money a month and then they can access the entire internet so I imagine it'll be the same way with Bitcoin they can pay a couple of dollars a month and then they can access a you know Insta wallet or whatever online wallet they want or you know all sorts of different ways to keep track of their bitcoins so even though the Chinese government may try and block people from using bitcoins I don't think they'll have much success. Yeah I think that I mean and you know it's surprising because yeah we do we talk about YouTube Twitter Facebook being blocked in China but what's really surprising to me is all the rest of the websites that are not blocked in China we really make a big deal in the US about this censorship and it is bad it's horrible but I talked to people in China all the time and I give them websites I say look this website up read to me what it says and I'm shocked they can see like everything I give them except for Facebook Twitter and YouTube so and I'm surprised at how much they can see and so basically if they have access to any form of internet they can actually transmit it they could even send it through an email I mean if they can send the packet of information out and it can be processed if they can get to a web-based Bitcoin and there's so many new web-based Bitcoin you know clients that are springing up but yeah I think it's just spreading like wildfire there's just no way that that it could be stopped even if they could stop Bitcoin nodes completely it wouldn't stop people from using Bitcoin right or storing their wealth in it for that matter yeah I mean even if they get even if they're not transacting business in it to invest in it and store their wealth in it it's safer than buying those you know bars of gold in Hong Kong that they discovered were filled with lead you know yeah because now they're letting them buy silver and gold but who knows they can just recall it like they did here yeah so interesting that's it's gonna be very very interesting and if if China is not stopping it then you know hopefully the US will realize that it's just insane they really need to if they want to stop crime they should just stop the US dollar you know it's just absurd and cars and phones like I said but let's see what one of the I wanted to ask a question about we've talked to a lot of merchants and people in business that one of the things they ask immediately when it when we talk to them about accepting bitcoins is well how do I convert it to USD and that's obvious you use the exchange site but they're looking really more for a better answer than that like an automatic exchange where they receive the bitcoins because mainly they're dealing with cash flow issues and they need the USD to transact their business obviously so they you know there's probably people already working on this but do you know anything about like any kind of other merchant service that would enable that what I generally tell people is if they're trying to exchange their bitcoins for some sort of government issue currency they don't understand what bitcoins are yet right our money they should use bitcoins as your money there's no if you already have bitcoins there's not much reason for you to exchange them back into dollars or yen or euros or anything else you should use your bitcoins as bitcoins and pay for whatever it is you want to buy in bitcoins so if you wanted to exchange them back for government issue currency you don't understand what bitcoins are yet thank you that's what I've been saying I've been saying and we were not hearing that's exactly right like why would you want to know what can I get it back into real money I mean no no no it is real money it is the only real money is it backed by something is it backed by gold no I wish gold were backed by Bitcoin it's other way around the only reason that I have heard that really makes sense there's only two reasons I've heard that really makes sense for selling Bitcoin for dollars or currency one is if you're just really really hard up and you have to pay the rent you just you have to have it you got a cash out to to pay for something that you need and you have to do that the other one is for a business with a really tight cash flow where they just don't have enough dollars and they they're getting a lot of Bitcoin and I'm not sure if that's actually happened yet it could be just in theory but if somebody in the businesses receiving so many Bitcoins and they they have to pay their suppliers or they have to order with dollars then of course they have a need to convert it but I'm not sure that that's really happening any business that starts accepting Bitcoin initially it's probably gonna be a very very small percentage of their transactions and they they would be wise just to keep it in Bitcoin right I would sure think so the price seems to keep trending up up and up so I'm not interested in getting rid of my Bitcoins for dollars I'm more than happy to pay people for them as Bitcoins and I asked the people that I pay Bitcoins to don't exchange them for your national currency pay the next guy that you need to pay money to with your Bitcoins exactly that's gonna be the real key to getting Bitcoins to spread worldwide and become a worldwide currency that everyone in the entire world can use up up up that's one of my catch phrases that the chat room has pinned to me is when I say up up up and very misleading but but yes the so you either keep them just keep them as an as a savings as an investment or and or contact your suppliers and say hey let me pay you with Bitcoin and educate them about it and that you'll probably be able to buy you know one of the things that happened here we have the fifth floor of this building here on Fifth Avenue for our studios the landlord here we introduced them to Bitcoin and of course at first they bought two hundred dollars worth or something and then they doubled that and they're like whoa and then they bought a bunch more and and then they bought a bunch more and they're very happy now but the the thing is that what was it it was like the the very next month they they they were blackberrying me in the on Saturday morning can you pay the rent in Bitcoin please and we're like okay yeah we could pay the rent in Bitcoin but not until 4.59 p.m. on the day it's due because the value just kept going up and up and up so yeah so we I don't know we may be the first business to actually pay our lease on the first of the month in Bitcoin so that's it's very cool yeah if you talk to people you educate them you know very quickly they'll respond and and why wouldn't they who wouldn't want to accept Bitcoin right better than gold so what other advice do you have for a small business or even a medium-sized business are there any special things that you've learned from this experience of accepting Bitcoin I think the main key is to accept Bitcoin and then once you have bitcoins use use your bitcoins to pay the next guy down the line if you're real concerned that the price of bitcoins are gonna go up some more and you want to hold on to yours use some cash that you have in the bank to buy more bitcoins than use those bitcoins to pay your vendors and the more people you pay bitcoins with the more people that will have bitcoins and the more that they'll the circle just spread wider and wider and wider until everyone in the world is gonna be using bitcoins that's what we're gonna do at this point I think you spread the word and you can spread the word by spreading your bitcoins and using them to pay for anything that the sellers willing to accept bitcoins for I think you're right definitely it'll happen organically the more bitcoins merchant accumulates probably the more vendors will accept them and so that whole synergy will happen automatically and it's not something that anyone really needs to worry about Satoshi G is a handle in the chat room has a good question he wants to know how do you price your items in Bitcoin with the new Magento plug-in it'll be taken from the current price at whoever's the biggest exchange which currently is Mt. Gox but maybe that'll be trade hill or somebody else in the near future and then they'll convert from whatever national currency into bitcoins at the time of the sale at the time of the sale and then eventually there'll be a plug-in as well for merchants who are scared to hold on to bitcoins for whatever reason they can convert their bitcoins at the time of the sale into whatever national currency in real time as well personally not interested in doing that but I'm sure for a lot of merchants they'll want to be able to do that yeah and for those merchants that are a little bit leery about it that's really good to have that option because then they have nothing to lose it's just like credit card processing except it's free and it can't charge back so it's like there's absolutely no downside mm-hmm and what about sales tax how do you deal with sales tax in that situation yeah that's calculated at the time of the sale unfortunately every county's sales tax is different so you have to have a whole table that calculate sales tax for every single county within the state of California but it'll calculate at the time of sale and then you have to go and pay that to the state so that the calculations all will be part of the software and then you have to just file the correct forms to the state and make sure that's paid for as well and you can't pay the state and bitcoins quite yet not yet who knows if if California will be the first state to accept bitcoins New York is the just accepted gay marriage so you know who knows what can change the one other thing I would like to add if I may sure is a with with people that are involved in business you know kind of gently be persistent with your vendors and ask them you know every time you owe them some money say hey can I pay you in bitcoins this time and I've been doing that for the last couple of months with my vendors in China and the first time I asked all of them all of them said no why would I want any of that and I said we'll just take a look at it you know think about it we can ask in the next time and at this point I've been doing that every time now one guy is just begging me every single day hey pay me in bitcoins today I want bitcoins as soon as possible he's willing to accept partial payment in bitcoins another vendor says that they're willing to accept part of the payment in bitcoins and every single time we have a some payment due to some of our vendors I asked them hey you want to be paid in US dollars or in bitcoins and I think by just kind of gently being persistent every time you owe somebody money asking them if they want in bitcoins slowly but surely they'll grow more and more comfortable with the idea of bitcoins and be more and more willing to accept bitcoins payment. Remember when gas stations used to have a thing that they kind of tried to get rid of this the credit card companies tried to ban this but used to have a they used to have a signed discount for cash they give you like you know three four five percent discount if you paid in cash pretty soon that's what's going to happen the websites and the companies are going to say discount if you pay in bitcoin. Yeah we're actually at memory dealers about to start a promotion it'll have something to that effect. Oh we got the exclusive a discount if you pay in bitcoin. It could be a bitcoin discount. Awesome oh my gosh that's great and when you see most of your customers you say you're in the United States right. That's the vast majority in the United States in Europe. Okay so you ship all over and you said you ship worldwide every day. Okay is it did you might have said this earlier forgive me if I'm at repeating but is it mostly shipped from California or from Asia. The vast majority ship from Asia to our office in California and then there we do the final configuration and whatever our customers need and then ship to the rest of the world. Okay that's great. So from now on we're buying everything everything that we need from memory dealers dot com in bitcoin. Well you are an evangelist. They say I'm an evangelist. You're just a missionary. I've been converted I'm bitcoins it's the currency of the future it's really really going to change the way the entire world does business. I tell all my vendors to I said hey if I pay you in US dollars it costs you money to receive the wire it costs me about forty dollars to send the wire plus it takes you a couple days to get it. If I send you the payment bitcoins you get it right away. There's no fees for anybody involved. Everybody's happy. There's no problem for anything and one of the things that I think are really going to help bitcoins become more and more popular are in countries where the government really tries to control exports of currency with bitcoins they don't know who you sent money to or who you got money from or where it came from or where it went to and in countries like that I think bitcoins are going to be really really really popular even more so than in freer countries. Yes that's absolutely a lot of countries have very strict you know exporting currency laws they have some countries even have very strict laws that you it's illegal to use any currency except the government issued currency for transactions I know Uzbekistan has that they have this currency called the Somme and it's illegal to transact business in anything but the Somme which they keep in deflating and so the value just goes down down down quickly everyone's becoming impoverished very quickly so I can imagine in countries like that in Russia and you know many many places like that the Bitcoin is I mean we think it's amazing here in wonderful the United States but in these places it's just essential there's no other way to really store your wealth other than gold or silver which is just too easy to steal. Well there's already a send across the world yeah well in those countries there's a black market there's already in those countries a black market for using dollars and other currencies so it's just a matter of that's right absolutely there's a there's a black market you know I know somebody so-and-so the back door at the bank and they they buy US dollars or whatever you know in exchange there's all these the black market exchanges for US dollars and US dollars cash have kind of filled that need for you know in the black market in these places but now Bitcoin oh my gosh you don't need any of that you know and there's no fees it's absolutely brilliant I mean it's got to be really scary if you're a central bank or if you're a Western Union or if your Mastercard Visa American Express they're I mean I don't know if they're scared yet maybe it's not even blipped on the radar like I said in that Forbes article you know that I said you know they're just they don't even know what Twitter is these suits by the way this is an interesting topic do you see a difference in the age of people if somebody's you know the generation they come from if they're in their 70s or 60s or their 50s versus if they're in the 40s or 30s or 20s as far as their acceptance and understanding of this or their belief in the future of it well I think in general younger people seem to be more accepting and willing to embrace new technologies so I guess Bitcoin will be similar to people that are probably in junior high or high school today in a few years those you know oh you mean you didn't use Bitcoin when you were a kid how did you buy things that people didn't always use bitcoins yeah how did you buy things and Satoshi will be a legend legendary lore and we we even talked about in a previous show about these online games kind of like gambling type of games which are and right now incorporating bitcoins as their only form of monetary exchange for the games which is another realm of the same thing well yeah I mean people I think that most people most thinking people and I'm not just talking about this you know citizen United States or something I'm talking about people of planet Earth most thinking people realize that you know they don't really want the government telling them what they can buy what they can sell much less having eBay tell you what you can buy or sell and pay pal and all these things you know shutting down your PayPal account and can and and seizing all your money and then going to court and saying well they're not a bank so they don't have to fall under banking regulations well what are they you know I mean what the heck are they it's a digital currency that's corrupt is what it is I mean if they just can close your account seize your money no explanation and you get a form letter email that says there is no recourse there is no you know it's like okay okay thank you thank you very much but the idea that this is the people's money that people can actually transact it freely without any obstacles I mean it just seems like it's a it's a natural human right that we should have we the human beings should be able to control their own money this is revolutionary and also it's kind of like the internet itself remember when the internet was born I don't know if you're old enough to remember when the internet was born but I am and people said wow there's this new thing it's called the internet and it's going to be big I want to buy some stock in the internet and everybody wanted to buy stock in the internet nobody knew how you know it was a disaster obviously because they bought anything that in and .com but now this is like the birth of the internet again but you can buy it you can actually own it almost like shares of the internet the shares of the New World money you can make them as well yeah if you know how to do it so do you like do your friends I mean you talk about Bitcoin all the time and your friends think you're crazy yeah I was just recently attended my sister's wedding and everybody knew about bitcoins by the end of the wedding my sister might not have been too happy that I was talking about bitcoins at her wedding the entire time but everyone seemed really really interested in bitcoins and all my cousins and extended family now know about bitcoins and a lot of them are really really interested in bitcoins although I did find that my younger family members were much more interested in willing to accept the idea of bitcoins whereas some of the older family members I have that are in their 50s or 60s said oh it sounds like a pyramid scheme or or seemed much more skeptical of bitcoins but all the younger people seem to think oh wow what a great idea why didn't somebody make this before no Bitcoin is not a pyramid scheme Bitcoin is a religion and we are evangelize the Church of the Bitcoin I think that we should do that now but it feels like it sometimes when you're evangelizing about something so amazing it it feels like a religion sometimes but of course it's not but it's just technology it's like talking about Facebook or Twitter or whatever it's like have you seen this is so cool is such an amazing amazing amazing idea that once people hear about it they do feel like they need to evangelize it to the entire world yeah because it's such a wonderful amazing world-changing idea and it's gonna change the world for the better it's gonna give people back control of their own money and allow people to decide what they're gonna do and they're not gonna have to ask permission from Visa or Mastercard or PayPal or anybody else who they send and receive money with and also in this case I think that for once it's actually a very good thing that government wheels spin very slowly because they're saying it's gonna take years you know for them to get this legislation before they can even figure out what it is and get their mind around it by the time they figure out what it is and then they try and draft some legislation people are gonna be going what are you talking about I'm not giving it's like a smartphone like when the iPhone came out like boom everybody had one you know it's gonna be like that like boom everybody has Bitcoin everybody uses Bitcoin Starbucks I'll bet you Starbucks is gonna be accepting Bitcoin I don't know I'm like I'm gonna bet exactly when but the all the retailers will be accepting Bitcoin and it will happen so much faster than we think and when that happens as that happens the government isn't gonna have time to react by the time that people realize this is not illegal this is not criminal this is not shady this is just money it's all it is there's there's nothing that they'll be able to do because that you it's like it's like the government saying we're gonna take away your internet we're gonna take away your email and your text messaging I don't think so I really don't think that anyone's gonna vote for that guy people I read an article one you know recently I was talking about where it says that you know this is not gonna sit well with lawmakers like since when do we care what sits well with lawmakers what are lawmakers the king you know and we're this no no no lawmakers work for us the people and so this is the people's money and I think that as people realize it and we evangelize it and educate people it's good it's just spreading like wildfire it's amazing I like I said you know I've done so many media interviews by the way since you did that billboard you probably got a lot of attention have you had any media inquiries to ask you about it yeah I've had media contact me from all over the world from countries all over the world have been asking me about what made me accept Bitcoin why did I do the billboard why did I do all sorts of things and I think that billboards must have been one of the very best investments as far as Bitcoin advertising we're also doing a national Bitcoin radio ad that's airing on over a hundred radio stations around the country but I think the billboards got me even more attention than the radio ad itself yeah even though probably a tiny tiny fraction of people actually saw the billboard everybody saw a photo of the billboard and that's that's what as soon as I saw the photo of the billboard I'm like oh that's marketing genius that's just marketing genius because to because that made headlines in itself that somebody bought a billboard saying we accept Bitcoin it's like medici grill I mean they you know it's a it's a Mediterranean restaurant they just happen to be the first restaurant restaurant to accept Bitcoin and then they're all of a sudden they're being interviewed by routers and Al Jazeera English it's like oh my gosh this little little tiny restaurant is fantastic but boom they just blew up with they never dreamed of such media exposure you'll probably get more as a result of this show because you know I guarantee you reporters are gonna see this they're gonna go I want to get that guy I want to get that guy I want to talk to him I've got questions for him so chat room what what questions do you have for Roger about about the actual acceptance of Bitcoin or evangelizing Bitcoin any good questions what do you say to people who who say that you know Bitcoin is gonna have a crash that the bottom is gonna fall out and it's going to you know lose its value and so on I think it's pretty clear that that's not the case I'm with the recent hacking of Mount Gox and all the problems that were caused there the price barely took a dip at all and I think that that shows right now that Bitcoin is here to stay and it's not going anywhere at this point if Bitcoin we're gonna crash and drop down to nothing it would have happened last week and it didn't happen Bitcoin's on the way up up and up and I don't think anything's gonna stop Bitcoin at this point it survived this I can survive anything let me let me just take a really quick break and one more time thank our sponsors who if it weren't for these guys we wouldn't be here so please express your gratitude to our sponsors call them email them visit them and patronize them and thank them for supporting only one TV and the Bitcoin show and El show the Bitcoin in Spanish language every Wednesday at 4 p.m. Eastern and they are carpevm carpevm.com they will make the most brilliant video for your website whatever product or service service it is that you're marketing an intro to whatever you're doing they will create video marketing seize your market say it with video carpevm.com and messy grill as we talk about all the time great where authentic Mediterranean food meets modern flavor and accepts Bitcoin a messy grill me zee grill calm if you're in New York you're passed through New York make a special point to go there they had they had a story of somebody who was on his way to the airport he says no I gotta go to messy grill I don't care if I miss my plane I gotta see the place that takes Bitcoin and trade hill calm of course trade hill the online exchange that's getting all kinds of attention right now they've been very supportive with this outage and problems with Mt. Gox and they're very supportive of the entire Bitcoin community trade hill calm use the referral code TH-R141 and get 10% off all your trades for life and US gold coins you want to diversify your investments then buy some rare US gold and silver coins US gold coins calm our trusted advisor for excellent investments Andy Gauss a brilliant brilliant guy money expert extraordinary you'll you'll see him on Wednesday mornings at 10 a.m. here on the real world of money he's the guy who owns US gold coins is phenomenal so I have a question go ahead I wanted to ask you about since bitcoins are you know transparent to a degree by you providing your Bitcoin address for people to buy your your services and your hardware like do you have any concerns about privacy as far as people using the address and going to Bitcoin Explorer and finding out exactly how many transactions you've transacted well with the Magento plug-in it'll generate a unique Bitcoin address for every single transaction so people won't know how much money was sent to any address other than the one that was given for their own order so they'll have no idea how many other orders I've gotten that people paid with bitcoins or or any merchant for that matter so it'll give a very very large amount of privacy to the merchant and you know I think customers like that as well so that people won't know who they sent their bitcoins to so how do you do it again the what it is is let me explain this is a fundamental thing about Bitcoin a lot of people don't understand if you have a small store where you just have one Bitcoin address and everybody sends it to it then anyone can check the number of deposits to that address or if you have a donation like you were a charity and you publish a Bitcoin address then everyone can see how many donations went to it but if you have an automated system like like they're using where each transaction is separate it generates a brand new address for every single purchase so if you check that address you're only going to see that one purchase and so the address is unique for every transaction or for unique for each customer every transaction every transaction is unique got it yeah so it's like a throwaway address they just use it one once and then it's gone and the system maintains it so it's it takes a little bit more automation that's why they have a plug-in for this magento got it it's all made it great very slick wait I knew that we knew this was coming we just didn't know how fast it's a great coming soon yeah and this is this has got to be fantastic for magento too because as a project they're probably going to get a lot of people migrating to magento specifically because of that plug-in it's a real synergistic thing right and people using the Android app in conjunction with it and so on I think so right now it costs thousands of dollars and hours of work to be able to accept credit cards as payment with bitcoins you can be up and ready in just a few minutes so what what what is his name in the chat room wants to know how many orders have you done using Bitcoin coming up on 20 around 20 I would say at this point around 20 and how long has it been since you since you began accepting Bitcoin maybe two months now two months that's pretty good 20 and two months when you just started I mean this is a brand new thing did you do the bill the billboard right away when you started accepting the point the billboard took I don't know maybe two or three weeks to get the design and then order the print and get everything together but we started on it pretty quickly and so you must have been contacted by a lot of people in Silicon Valley saying hey what's up with this Bitcoin thing how's that working out for you a lot of other local businesses that we do business with started contacting us and saying you accept Bitcoin and I said sure didn't even know what it was at that point but they saw the billboard and then they contacted us asking us about it so isn't that cool I think the the sign itself really catches people's attention where it says you we accept Bitcoin peer-to-peer cryptocurrency yeah kind of here here to peer cryptocurrency they think oh my gosh what is that right something straight out of the Batcave yeah it's about building the critical mass and reaching that tipping point we need to buy a billboard in Manhattan don't you think maybe it's been done won't be received so much attention so let's see what do you what do you see as the the future do you do you have any predictions about really cool new developments when it comes to merchandising or you know retail sales accepting Bitcoin in the coming months I think in the near future we're really gonna see Bitcoin become one of the major currencies in the world right up there with the you know the dollar and the euro and the yen and pound sterling you're gonna see Bitcoin right up there with it and it's gonna make international travel just so much easier because you can just pay in bitcoins anywhere in the world and not have to deal with any sort of currency exchange companies well how long do you think that's gonna take before it's really kind of treated like a like an equal player at the table with with the dollar and the euro I would guess we're talking about just a couple of years maybe less than five years even the world changes really quickly at this point and Bitcoin is a world-changing technology you're a man after my own heart that's exactly what I would have said and what is your prediction on the value of Bitcoin this is gonna be an interesting one what do you think it's gonna be by the end of the month and then six months out and a year out give me those three guesses by the end of the month I would think we only have what three days left maybe 20 something dollars I think from there it's it's it all depends on the exchanges at this point a lot of people that I know have been trying to buy bitcoins and they complain oh it's so difficult to get bitcoins you know I'm a smart guy and I had such a hard time how is the average guy gonna be able to ever figure out how to buy bitcoins and once that problem solved I think we're really gonna see the Bitcoin price skyrocket and I think it's in the very near future we'll see multiple hundreds of dollars of Bitcoin and then thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars per Bitcoin and I think that's coming sooner rather than later don't blink or you're gonna miss it tens of thousands of dollars what do you think it'll be in a year a year from now June of 2012 yeah I would guess over a thousand dollars easily wow by Bitcoin no we don't give financial advice as you know we just say up up up up but it's an exciting thing it is amazing and thank you so much for for taking the time out of your busy day running a big company and we really have enjoyed this chat we have to have you on again for sure my pleasure thank you so much for having me thank you and check out memory dealers calm for all of your memory and optical networking needs right yeah check it out memory dealers calm and they accept Bitcoin thanks guys we'll see you for our sponsors to same time tomorrow