 I'm here at Cointelegraph. I'm Molly Jane and we're here talking to the crypto lark about everything that happened in cool and crypto this week. Hey guys, how's it going? It is the crypto lark and I'm super excited to be talking to the guys from Cointelegraph. Molly, how is it going? It's going great. Yeah, you guys might know me from our weekly Hodler's Digest, but I'm also here to talk a little bit about crypto news this week with crypto lark. Yeah, it's very, very exciting. And you know, I'm a big fan of Cointelegraph, I gotta say. I really like the articles you guys do and you know, you're one of my favorite journalistic publications in the crypto space. But you know, ball in your court, so what do you want to talk about today? I thought we would start talking about one of the biggest news pieces of yesterday, which was broken by our competitor, the Samsung coin. Coin desk. Yeah, Samsung coin is actually very, very interesting. I was looking into that story today and what it seems that Samsung coin is going to be is a, at least starting as a private version of Ethereum. So something like JP Morgan's Corum. I mean, we're still really scant on details of what Samsung blockchain is going to look like, what Samsung coin is going to look like. But from the few details we have seen, it seems that we are going to be starting with a private chain, possibly a public private hybrid, which if that is the case, will they be using the public version of Ethereum to see out into the world to have their private version at home where they can make their own blockchain like we see with so many others, like Icon, for example, that has a public and a private chain. So it's very interesting. But just I think the real thing, regardless of what they end up doing, is just how big it is that Samsung is going to be releasing their own blockchain. It's massive. It's happening, guys. It's crazy. Because I think some people forget it's the news passed. We got a decent number of views on the site. But if you think about it, this has been happening all year because there is the face rumored Facebook coin. The JPM coin is the only one where the company has come out in public and said, we are working on this. And now there's also these rumors of Samsung coin. So I guess I'm just curious how many other big companies have been working on this the whole time. There will be lots. I was surprised when Ernst and Young came out the day with Nightfall, which is this kind of private software to run on Ethereum. And they have a 200 strong blockchain developer team. Who knew that? I mean, for somebody, probably did. But I mean, that's impressive, right? And the reality is, is that what we don't think that Google has a giant blockchain team. Microsoft, we know, has blockchain developers. The question is, what are they cooking in their kitchens? And so will we see a Google coin? Will we see all these other big companies coming out? Yes. And does that invalidate Bitcoin? I hear some people already saying this, well, I knew this was going to happen. Therefore, all the cryptocurrencies that currently exist are going to be invalidated. They're not going to have any use cases, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that's just not true. We see the report came out the other day, the top $50 billion plus companies that are using blockchain, and half of them are using Ethereum already, and a couple are using Stellatumens and Cardano and other implementations. But most of it's on Ethereum right now. But that will start to diversify out as well. But Bitcoin will still have an amazing ability as this censorship-resistant global money. Some of the random altcoins are going to die, but they were going to die anyway. And I really am on the side of Brad Garlinghouse when he heard about the JPM coin where he said, why don't they just use the dollar? It's for internal use. Why aren't they just using the dollar? I'm a little bit of a Garlinghouse on that. So I guess we'll see what's going to happen with the Samsung coin, all these coins, but I wanted just to bring up to the next point. My favorite article of yesterday that Cointelegraph put out was a Bloomberg interview with John McAfee. The name is familiar to everyone, where last week John McAfee on Twitter had posted that he would out the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. And then yesterday he told Bloomberg that because of his legal problems with the U.S. and taxes, his lawyers recommended that he really not do that right now. And then of course Satoshi himself is really pissed off that he's about to be outed by McAfee. Is this even worth talking about at this point? You know, part of me kind of likes McAfee because he's just such a crazy personality and in that kind of like, I don't know, entertainment sort of avenue, I suppose. But the reality is that the only thing that really matters with McAfee is the McAfee Johnson eating line, you know, and everything else is kind of relevant when it comes to McAfee. Will he eat his Johnson or not? We all want to know. No, but honestly, does he know who Satoshi is? I don't think so. Maybe he does in an off chance. That's possible. McAfee also is just notorious for saying salacious things that get attention. It's kind of what he does. And I think the important thing to note here is that it doesn't matter who Satoshi is. We're all much better off never finding out who Satoshi is. That's one of the important things. We see how devastating it can be when you have people who are really personalities running these blockchain companies and the devastating effect that they can sometimes have on cryptocurrencies and knowing the identity of Satoshi, it's so big, Bitcoin's so big, it could be very problematic. So it's walking away with the best things Satoshi ever did. And I hope that wherever that person has gone or that team of people has gone, they stay away. Yeah, I definitely agree. So what else have you thought about this week? What stories have kind of piqued your interest? You know, one of the things I keep keeping an eye on is this IEO boom. I just saw that there was one over on, I don't remember what the exchange was, but some exchange, they had an IEO, which initial exchange offering, and they had $123 million committed to the sale. So I think they were running the model that everybody puts their money in, and then we're going to break it up based on a percentage of how much you put in whatever it is going to be. But that's an insane amount of money. I mean, I think there was only $5 million available or something for the sale, so everyone gets a tiny little sliver of that based on what was committed. But $123 million were committed for this IEO. It's absolutely crazy what's going on. These IEOs are coming out, they're hitting valuations of 10, 20X. I think, well, maybe it's been a good one, I thought it was about 20X, 16X was another one the other day. It's crazy. It's crazy. There's a lot of money, but the thing to remember is that a lot of these IEOs are really small percentages. You might see like they're selling 5% of their tokens or something, and then the private investors have got 75% of the tokens, and the team's got another 20 or 30. And so there's those dynamics that also come into a lot of these IEOs. But so long as IEOs keep making multiple X's and returns, they're going to continue to be insanely popular. And as of yet, we've only had a couple of IEOs that have come out on the smaller platforms that haven't had that 2, 3, 4, 5X kind of effect. I mean, my first thought when I started reading about it, because I've been in crypto for about a year and a half, so I kind of have a fresh outlook on things because I don't have the finance background, is that IEO, ICO, I know that they're different obviously, but at a certain point I can't help but see the same future for IEOs like there was for ICOs. And then after IEOs, there's going to be another one. There's going to be another one because people are always going to have the hype, which I know is a buzzword. And I'm not saying anything as a bubble. Of course, I'm staying away from that term. I'm just... It's all of life's a bubble, life's a bubble. I guess I'm just interested to see how the IEOs play out because I have yet to really fully understand, okay, like there are obvious differences, but it's heart. What is the true difference between the way that these models are all evolving? Maybe this one is better. Maybe this one is more regulated. Maybe this one is more regulated in the sense where it's not... The security laws aren't being kind of treaded on as much as ICOs are, but I think this is kind of a wait-and-see thing because it's still very new. I mean, everything is very new. Yeah, absolutely. There's a couple of interesting things that do come to play here. One is that I think for investors, it's safer for the investor. We've seen so many scams happen when an ICO is independently running their ICO. I mean, their telegram groups get hacked, their email lists get hacked, the website gets mirrored. All kinds of crazies happen. Millions, millions of dollars have been lost via hacking of ICOs. So actually having on an exchange, that is, they have whole teams of people there devoted 24-7 to keeping hackers out, it's a much safer place to actually be investing in that IEO. For the ICO themselves, they also have the advantage of only having to pay kind of one... Well, I think what I think is generally a smaller fee because from what I know from the teams I've talked to, running an ICO is an incredibly expensive thing. You have to pay per person for KYC. You have to pay security teams. You have to have all this stuff going on and it can cost a couple million dollars to run an ICO, but it can actually cost much less to run an IEO on a platform because they're already taking... They take care of the KYC already, right? So that's already done. You don't need to pay for that service. They take care of the marketing and all these different things. And of course, you bring in the business by getting people excited because you're putting your IEO on their platform. So there's that, but then you got... We're re-centralizing everything, whereas it before was more decentralized, but then you had gas wars and... So there's trade-offs. Overall, I think the IEO movement is a very positive thing that even though we're going to see some really kind of wild west kind of stuff happening probably in the first year of IEOs, I think it will become more of a normal thing as we move on. We'll have better terms for the investors, et cetera, et cetera, as the market kind of grows out with IEOs. But I think it will become the new thing in terms of ICOs. No, I don't think you're wrong about that at all. I guess my last point, again, this is more my human interest story because I'm in crypto for these kind of funny stories as opposed to the blockchain technology myself. We covered a story this week where an ingenious man, I don't know what else to say, decided to start guessing private keys. It's basically trying all the passwords. I haven't experienced this myself because I was on Neopets as a kid, and my friends and I once typed in the name, something like toilet in the password 123, and we got onto someone's Neopets account, hundreds of Neopoints, and we stole them. It's basically their fault for having such a ridiculously easy password. We're Neopoints, but this is Ethereum, and so this research has uncovered that some guy started guessing all the easiest private keys. Not just one and one, two, three, but he ran some numbers, no hardcore hacking stuff, but they've discovered that about 45,000 Ethereum were all funneled from these easily-guessable private key accounts to one wallet over years. I don't know, I just, this story is fascinating to me because you don't think of a private key as something that could ever be guessable, but this week we found out that it is. Yeah, well, I mean, it's interesting because that story, the private keys that were guessable were guessable for one of three reasons, and if you're using a dependable wallet service like Ledger or Exodus, or my ceiling, many of these people, they have really good developers, they have very professional wallets, right? The three things were that malicious code, right? So it was being captured via this, that was something that was there. One was that developers had messed up the codes of wallets, so they actually had shorter addresses than normal, which were much easier to break into because the normal address is nearly impossible to guess. I mean, the guy, I think he gave really good analogies that it's like taking a grain, one grain of sand from a beach and then putting it back out somewhere and asking your friend, like, hey, can you go find that, that grain of sand? I've hidden it, I've hidden it on one of these gazillion beaches, so good luck, right? We were here with Crypto Lark talking about everything cool and crypto this week. I'm Molly Jane. Remember to like, subscribe, and hodl. Thank you so much for having me on, guys. An absolute pleasure going to talk with Cointelegraph. And of course, long live the blockchain, guys. Cointelegraph, like, subscribe, and hodl.