 Today's episode of The Bitcoin Show is brought to you by bit-pay.com and MtGox, m-t-g-o-x.com and tradehill.com and usgoldcoins.com, 1-800-HOTCOIN. Hello and welcome to The Bitcoin Show! This is episode 34 and what a week it has been. Today joining me is Adrian Jeffries, who you probably recognize the name, maybe not the face, but Adrian Jeffries is a reporter for the New York Observer and specifically their beta-beat blog, which is a daily blog about technology and specifically Silicon Alley, which is New York City. Welcome, Adrian. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. We're fans of you. We've never met before today, but we talk all the time because we're always in the Bitcoin realm. Tell me though, the reason I initially contacted you and I wanted to ask you to join us is because I wanted to find out what it was like as a journalist to be assigned a story about Bitcoin. But you corrected me and said that you weren't assigned the story, so tell us how that happened. Right. So it's actually hard to trace where exactly I heard about Bitcoin the first time. I subscribed to this tech newsletter called Launch, which is done by Jason Calicanus in Silicon Valley. They did a big story about Bitcoin that was really sensational and it was like Bitcoin, the most dangerous person-to-person project that could destroy the world. So of course I had to read that and then I read about it and then like everybody else, it was a fantastic, weird, cool, sticky phenomenon that I just couldn't stop reading about it and then some other sources that I talked to on a regular basis were asking me about it like what do you know about this? And so I got the feeling that there was some interest in it and I should write about it. So I pitched it and I pitched it for the paper. So I do most of my writing at Beta Beat, which is a blog about the New York tech scene, about news of interest in New York tech scene. But then I also do some tech stories for the weekly edition of The New York Observer. So I pitched this story for the paper because I thought it was interesting, because Wall Street obviously is of interest to everyone who lives in New York and this is like Wall Street finally going to be disrupted by the internet like the way so many other industries have. The record industry? Yeah, exactly, the newspaper industry. Oh yeah, absolutely the one you're in. Totally, so this was the original idea of the story and then it was just like it was so early that it ended up being more of a Bitcoin explainer and like this is happening and then there still hasn't been that much mainstream reporting on it although there's been a lot and I feel like it's still a ripe subject and I pitched another Bitcoin story which ran today which was about the next phase of the Bitcoin market which is this more sophisticated kind of derivatives trading which is a big step for Bitcoin because it frees up liquidity in the market and makes it potentially make more sense for vendors to actually use it because they can kind of adjust for the volatility of the currency. And I was surprised that they said yes because I thought they would say no that's too geeky we can't run two geeky stories about this geeky thing so close in a row. The one about derivatives, the current one? Yeah, the one today. But this is the second one. Oh you mean you pitched this because you've been writing stories every day? Yeah, this was right so I've been blogging about it constantly because I just have it in my news feed and there's so much drama all the time that it's always a great story. This is so popular. So I've had all of the blog posts but yeah this is the second big feature that I did a significant amount of reporting on. So this appeared in the print version? This was in the paper yeah. Bring up my laptop and show. I should have brought a copy of the paper. Oh well we can see it here. There it is full screen. So yeah this is Beta Beat as you can see from the observer and you've got a lot of things on today's headline. Pony up haters, how 4chan gave birth to bronies? Yeah we've got a couple of funny features today. That story is about this group of 4chaners who are big fans of the show My Little Pony. It's kind of a fun read. And the other big story we have today is about this diet craze that has become popular among entrepreneurs in New York in the tech scene. That's the iHack, the body electric? Right. The 4 hour body by Timothy Ferris? That's also a really fun read. There's fun stories on there. Mine is like actually probably the densest. The most serious? Yeah. Oh so you didn't write all those? You were at the Bitcoin? No. Yeah. You can't write everything. Right. Yeah. So this is the, see that's the rough trades, digital derivatives at the Bitcoin market as Wall Street Bankers take interest. Right. So what's been happening in the Bitcoin world? Obviously the big news, MyBitcoin.com obviously is rocking the world of Bitcoin and the third largest exchange accidentally erasing their entire wallet. Right. It's crazy. It's all about security. And what I've been saying is that, and it's affecting the price obviously, it's like going nuts right now, good time to buy. Maybe if you still have faith in Bitcoin, it's a good time to buy. A lot of people are losing faith apparently because of that, especially people who don't really understand, they're having trouble separating the idea of the security issues of where they're storing their Bitcoin versus Bitcoin itself. The currency itself hasn't been affected, but the banks or the wallets or whatever these exchange sites and things being hacked. Human error. Human error. And human malice. Yeah, and human malice. Exactly. Possibly. That's why, like what I say is the three biggest things, problems Bitcoin faces in my opinion are number one, security. Number two is, what's number two? Security. Number two is, I forget. Number three is currency risk. Government intervention. No, I don't think, oh not yet. No. The second thing I always say, I'm like drawing a blank. Anyway, whatever. Wait, wait, wait, stop, stop, stop. Shoot. Anyway, I don't come back to me. So, security is the first concern, and that is because, like you said, malice, mistakes, even technologists have screwed up and accidentally deleted their wallets. Right. There really isn't an excellent way to recommend, especially for lay people who are not geeks. Right. They're the ones who are at risk because they just don't know how to manage it. And it's not, I mean, we, you know, you can create a how-to tutorial, but it's a very big project. And if you mess one thing up, even the technologists mess one thing up and they lose their wallet. So, it's dangerous in that sense right now. The way I look at it is just like the wild, wild west, we've discovered gold. There was a gold rush. And now we're seeing, you know, whatever, stagecoach heists and bank robberies and things like that. Right. We're getting used to it. Early adopters are like the early pioneers. A lot of them fell on the other way. I like them that far. That's good. That's true, right? So, either brave or foolish. Exactly. Yeah. So, security, oh, I know the second one. Finally, it came to me. The first one is security. The second one is liquidity. The ability to buy and sell it. Right. And this is where derivatives come in. Exactly. Yeah. So, security, liquidity and the currency risk, which means like merchants, you know, if Mesigrel needs 895 for that, you know, whatever, PETA, then they need 895. They don't want it to drop 10% and have it be 795 by the next day. It won't work in retail. And this is also where derivatives come in because you can imagine if the exchanges add some mechanism for negotiating like futures contract where you can talk, you can say, you know, I'll buy X of the supply using Bitcoins and lock in today's price of Bitcoins. So, you've been talking about... I'm creating the future. So, you've been talking to these people today, recently in the last days. What is the latest news on that front? You know more than I do about this because you've been in touch with people. About derivatives? Yeah, I mean the new exchanges that are already up or that are coming soon, that are in testing or whatever that are going to offer these derivatives. Right. What's the status of it? Well, I should make a caveat first and say that while I was researching the story there's just so much going on that I can't say with authority that these are the only exchanges doing it and this is the only... because it's possible that I just didn't find it because there's so much going on. But as far as I know, there are no exchanges that formally offer margin trading or short selling or some of these other derivative products that are mostly sticking to buying and selling and there's some advanced selling tools like being able to put in an order for a dark pool, being able to put in a kill-fill order where the order tests for buying bitcoins at some price and if it finds bitcoins at that price it fills the order and if it doesn't it terminates it. So that is available. But I think most of the major exchanges are saying that they're going to offer like usually options and margin trading which is where the exchange will basically spot you some bitcoins so that you can trade with... so that smaller traders can execute trades with much larger entities. And I think the exchange that's farthest along in this is Ruxon because they had a... or sorry, it's Camp BX which is the one that's based in Atlanta, the one that's based in the U.S. And so they're taking a real chance but I spoke to the founder and he said they had talked to the state of Georgia and to see how they could be in compliance with U.S. laws when the dollar is involved and he's confident that they can navigate within... That's key here. I forgot his name. He was a guest on our show the other day. Oh really? Yeah, I know it's hard to watch everything. So maybe I'm repeating what he said. No, that's exactly what he said basically. He said options are coming soon starting with margins and the example for people who don't know what that means basically his simple analogy was if you have 100 U.S. dollars in your account then you qualify for this then they would actually spot you another 100 so you'd actually be able to buy $200 worth of coins even though you only have $100 to start with. Right. But that's not available yet but coming soon. Right. And he was saying for that he was expecting to offer margin trading and short selling within four to eight weeks depending on how long it takes them to build up enough deposits that they have enough liquidity to spot people money. Right. So they might be the first to market with a formal exchange with derivatives. Of course there are people trading derivatives person to person on some of the over the counter sites and in IRC. There's also a site that I found called BitOption which was live for a little while and they offered a couple features I think they had short selling available but then they took it down and have made an announcement that they're working on for some reason they had to take it down they had some technical issues and they're like working feverishly to get it back up so they could be first. Interesting. So you mentioned Ruxam and I know that's is that in alpha, beta, invite only or what's the status? I think it's still an invite only. I think I have an invite but I haven't had time to look at it but I will. Yeah. So have you? Have I used it? Have you checked it out? Yeah. I've checked it out. I have an invite if you have an invite that's good because I think they're extending some lifetime discount to beta users and actually right now there's no fees I think still. Can you use a lifetime discount? Yeah. I haven't bought Bitcoin on an exchange. I bought some Bitcoin in Mezzagrill which have since disappeared but I might try it out. No plans to make Bitcoin investment right now but it's a possibility. Yeah. So have you talked with Ruxam about what types of options they're going to offer? I have. Yeah. And they've said somewhere on their website they say they're going to offer options. When I spoke to the founder he said much the same thing. They're looking for more liquidity in the market. They think the Bitcoin economy needs to get bigger as a whole before they start offer derivatives trading and he actually had sort of an opposite view where he thought that more people needed to start using Bitcoin before the financial like sector of Bitcoin you know evolves further. Using it in what sense? I mean just for normal purchases or just investments or both? Right. Just normal purchases. Oh normal purchases. People using it as a currency and getting faith in it as a currency before there's more trading of it. Yeah. I remember Camp BX saying that they're not going to allow everyone to do this margin trading it's going to be based on you have to have a minimum balance and some experience or like track record they're not going to just let a novice come in there and do it because they'll lose their shirt. Right. Somebody has to sort of prove that they have a little bit of experience and they know what they're doing. Right. Because it seems dangerous. You know because if you if Bitcoin falls like it has this week you know all it takes is some bad press as we know and then all the people that are a little squeamish just run right and that affects the price but in the end it seems to always kind of come back up it's we'll see the future the future is unpredictable but so what else is going on like have you talked to the people at the Polish exchange about I have not gotten in touch with them they said something publicly and I read the discussion on Hacker News I don't know if you're familiar with this forum so that's where I got all my information about them I haven't reached out to them I think my understanding is that the owner of the exchange had it hosted with Amazon's cloud hosting service and then he was switching servers and apparently Amazon when you turn off your machine will delete everything it's like an incentive to keep your servers running all the time and so this guy I guess didn't know this or just screwed up and 17,000 bitcoins are now permanently gone from the Bitcoin ecosystem is my understanding yeah that's what I heard too and then I think he was trying to sell the domain for the amount of his loss and some people were saying that would be to compensate people for their deposits it's just so free different things about it like Ed and I's loss with my Bitcoin was greater than that greater than the third largest exchange it just blows my mind and the fact that somebody who's technical enough to run an exchange the third largest exchange can make an error like that I mean it's just human error and these are very very technical people obviously in hindsight it's so easy to criticize but the most technical people can just make a mistake or misjudgment usually they don't it's not really making a mistake but it's a misunderstanding about how something works like the guy that lost I forgot what it was you know $400,000 worth of Bitcoin at one point he had followed all these steps and his mistake was he misunderstood the the way the client worked and that you have to have the client closed before you copy the wallet file in and out a lot of people don't know that and as I understand it this was the story that he actually had it open and he copied it out and then somehow close it and then the backup then he deleted it he did a secure wipe of his hard drive to secure it and then the backup didn't work after he had put the coin in it so not the proper misunderstanding of how the software worked and not the proper testing obviously you test it with a millionth of a cent a few times in and out so you know for sure what's happening before you put all your money on it of course and also splitting it into multiple not just one wallet several you know four or five different but these are things that you know super technical people are making mistakes and losing the bitcoin so the average freddedmarge and Toledo who can barely work a mouse I mean is there any hope for them at this point you know that's the question yeah well that's the thing about bitcoin there's no barrier to entry and that was something that I said in my story today was that it's attracting a lot of people who know just enough to be dangerous you know like me I thought I knew enough to go ahead and buy some bitcoin and then I ended up losing money for myself and the couple people I had taken orders for so it's like and that's true on the technical side I think and also true on the investor side because a lot of the people I quoted in my story were like you know people working toward a Ph.D. in finance or someone who had worked on Wall Street in like a foot soldier kind of position or people who worked like tangent to the finance industry and it was like yeah you know you're pretty familiar with it but you know with Wall Street it's so professionalized and people have you know higher levels of knowledge and more experience and also you know more people because you're working with firms and they're checking each other and then so you're kind of doing it so low it's really like being a pioneer after you're just you're absolutely like a scout going ahead of everybody else and you're on your own in a lot of ways and everybody else is going to learn from your mistakes exactly in a big way are you know the I guess that's what it is with anything brand new and so you're I mean it's considered a feature the fact that it's you know Libertarian and it's the people's money obviously that all falls on your shoulders so you know if you're a high tech geek and you know the ins and outs of it you know even then you can make mistakes mostly those people are secure but even then you can make mistakes so you know yeah that's my concern is obviously it's not going to get adopted widely until we solve the number one problem security you know that has to be solved and security like you say from yourself security from yourself making a mistake technically and security from the bad guys who are trying to steal it and security from just you know lost mistakes anything so I think this is actually going to be the next evolution of the bitcoin finance industry is people who will like a ratings agency kind of something to fulfill that role so you can know who to trust and who not to trust and then places like Camp BX where they're prioritizing being above board and being accountable and having you know they have like a picture of their office on their website like we have an address you can come find us if you need to go visit and see if it's real but actually they're going to be here though right they just took it from google engines yeah right just a random building from Dubai or something like that no they've been on the show they're actually going to be here which is actually a good time to plug is it three weeks from today it's the bitcoin it's two weeks from today what am I saying two weeks from today it's the bitcoin the first bitcoin conference in world expo which is going to be right here in New York City we're sponsoring in here only one TV in the bitcoin show and it's going to be August 19th through 21st so there's going to be like a little pre-conference festivities on Thursday the 18th if you come in early and then it's Friday the 19th all day Saturday we're going to have some amazing keynote speakers in there we're actually confirming a lot of them today Gavin Andreessen of course is going to be here and there are three or four other really big names that I'll be updating a little bit later today but if you go to bitcoinconference.com you got that up there bitcoinconference.com I think it has to be all lowercase there's some glitch there but anyway bitcoinconference.com all lowercase you'll see all about the conference and the program speakers and you can register it's two bitcoins right now for admission which is like nothing cheaper than a movie in Manhattan register today and you got to book your flights today too because it's two weeks out but then there are still tables available there are vendor tables now we're actually going to be moving the venue to a larger place so that'll be updated by probably by the time you're seeing this so go to bitcoinconference.com and register today you can pay by bitcoin if you don't have bitcoin just call us and we can make special arrangements to register you and accept cash at the door and so on so anyway so that's cool that is going to be people by the way people are for sure flying here from China, Africa Central South America, the West Coast Australia, London everywhere just looking at my story today and seeing where the traffic was coming from it was so much more international than anything we usually do it really makes it it drives it home that you know how we're always clear that we're not a local show or a national show we're a global network because the internet just is and bitcoin is the global currency it's just you know there are statistics but you know a minority a pretty small minority in the big picture of things of users are in the United States it's totally global so eventually I think people will start thinking of things in terms of the price of bitcoin if they're really into it you know and the price kind of stabilizes or whatever so more some people are already thinking in bitcoin terms like well that would be too bitcoin or something they know right away you know everyone has an app on their phones mine is broken now but as long as it's not changing every hour that's the craziness but I'm bad pressed so yeah I think you're right this is the next era I mean the early era bitcoin was mining oh wow how cool is this the next one is wow this is the future let's invest in it and that still exists but now it's like oh wow we hit our first big road pothole in the road and that is security this is not going to work until security is solved but I know for sure there are a lot of projects that are addressing this that are in development that are coming real soon I mean there's something very public about this whole thing I'm all about security and open source security because then bitcoin itself is open source and so there's no security better than open source in my opinion Linux itself and you know the most secure operating system is the most secure software in the world is open source because all eyes can review it everybody can see it so these new open source super super clever sophisticated security mechanisms that are under development that are predicting within months really and when that happens I think confidence will be restored because people will see that okay wow this is cool I don't have to trust anybody I actually control my own bitcoins and a secured encrypted copy is backed up on the server of my choice and in multiple servers and things like that so even if Amazon S3 goes down or whatever you'll still have access to it so that's absolutely essential how have the views been like what's the reaction to these stories because I noticed like on the blog you're like blogging about bitcoin every day you're just like miss bitcoin yeah well there's so much news I think my editor made a joke to me about it about how much I was blogging about bitcoin so I might be getting bitcoin saturation on the editorial side but people will read it the bitcoin stories did really well the story today is our biggest story on the site and like I said all the traffic is coming in from all over the world and I'm getting emails a lot of emails from readers who want to know more that's cool that's really important well let me take a break really quick and thank our sponsors because obviously we wouldn't be here but the sponsors generous support of the bitcoin community the bitcoin show and only one tv so we want to thank first bitpay they call it bitpay it's actually bit-pay bit-pay bitpay is a really cool system for merchant processing it's basically kind of like your paypal checkout or google checkout service it also includes shopping cart integration if you have an existing shopping cart on your website or if you don't you just have a plain old website or blog or whatever you can have a blog where you sell t-shirts or coffee mugs whatever you want and they actually have a basic like a bare bones shopping cart that's an option that's built into and what it does is you literally just embed this code a code for each item and it handles the whole entire shopping cart the checkout only accepts bitcoin so you can price things in US dollars or bitcoin and it automatically handles the whole thing it gives the person a customer a unique bitcoin address and tells them the amount to send it to and it handles the whole thing for you it's really really cool and we actually are using it for the bitcoin conference so if you go to bitcoinconference.com and you click register now you'll see those buttons and QR code are coming from bit-pay.com they were actually guests on the show a while back and it's just ingenious I think it's a real innovative way to add bitcoin the other thing is that the merchant who puts this on their site they get paid in US dollars if they prefer or bitcoin either way so it's really slick you can just accept bitcoin and you get paid in dollars and you're done it's a no brainer so we love bit-pay.com and Mt. Gox of course everybody knows mtgox.com they have the you know they're the oldest largest bitcoin exchange site so you can buy and sell bitcoin without leaving the comfort of your home they have the vast majority market share so everybody's very familiar with Mt. Gox they've been hacked, they've had their challenges but they're resilient they could have run off with the coins like other sites have in the past and they didn't they've come back they have been guests on the show and they've shown their face and their name and you know where their address, where they live and all that so they're here to stay they're back with better security and we definitely appreciate their support and Trade Hill obviously the second largest exchange online where you can buy and sell bitcoins again with you know just by many many ways to get money in and out of it bank wire transfer whatever lots of different options you can buy and sell bitcoins online at tradehill.com and you can also they accept euros so they have I mean all the sites well I shouldn't say all of them but if you can wire money you can always have it transferred changed into US dollars if you send euros you can have it changed into US dollars but Trade Hill uniquely has its own market in euros so you can send euros without changing them into US dollars and they have an actual euro market which is actually beneficial because you save a lot of money on transferring the fees and transferring it into dollars and then back into euros so we thank tradehill.com as well and finally usgoldcoins.com which is one 800 hot coin US Gold Coins is Andy Gauss's business he's the host of the real world of money here on OnlyOneTV and this is not Bitcoin this is if you want to diversify your investments if you want to invest in something more traditional or you know spread your investment out and not keep all your eggs in one basket if you want to buy rare US Gold or Silver Coins as otherwise known as Numismatic Gold and Silver Coins this is your guy he's an expert and I can totally vouch for his integrity we've known him for a long time we started out as fans of his show he's like our money guru he's a monetary expert and then we became customers of his and now he's actually a sponsor and hosting he's actually moved his radio show over to OnlyOneTV so we thank US Gold Coins if you want to buy even if you just have questions about it he's very accessible if you're in the US it's so easy just call 1-800-HOT-COIN otherwise his website is usgoldcoins with an s.com and we thank Andy Gauss at US Gold Coins for his support so what else what else is going on is there what do you think is the next phase after we get through do you think we're going to solve the security problems you see that happening your prediction, your crystal ball I hesitate to make that call definitively I can see it happening I think it's kind of a test of this idea of like a decentralized pure animal market capitalism so I think if there is a demand for secure exchanges that are accountable and there's no and there's a way to do that without running a foul of national laws then I could see it happening for sure and what about liquidity as the second big challenge do you see that being solved in a new innovative way or some other way of saying out any thoughts on it there's people mining bitcoins still so the total number of bitcoins is increasing so there's a naturally that'll naturally add more liquidity I mean I feel like more bitcoins but what about liquidity in the sense of if I have bitcoins and I want cash or if I have cash and I want bitcoins I don't want to miss the grill but not this week it seems pretty liquid if you have bitcoins you can easily unload them it's just a matter of how much you'll get for them yeah I think if it survives this the security obstacles I think liquidity will come naturally and have you any theories on what could solve the problem of currency risk if a restaurant for example they operate on razor thin margins and they can't take the risk of the currency losing 10% of its value in a day or two so that problem of if I need $8.95 worth I need $8.95 worth except bitcoin and it's just bitcoin they need the cash the very next day and it's dropped 10% they're out of luck right well I think I can see this being solved as well because if the first issues are solved then bitcoin will be more stable and also you'll have some I mean like oil is another volatile commodity and so companies solve that problem with future contracts so I can see derivatives coming into play here and then merchants there are lots of advantages to using bitcoin so there's an incentive to do it I mean right now it's just kind of a novelty but there are you can avoid fees you can set up easy ways to pay internationally online so basically you kind of think that this will solve itself as it becomes more secure and more adopted so you're just going to keep going up yeah I guess I think the hive mind will solve all of this but I think also you like as a journalist seeing stories that are media driven which bitcoin is right now people may lose interest and if that happens then I think then the great experiment is over people get bored of it but so far it's been not boring at all yeah I mean do you think people have I mean do you think the bitcoin community is losing interest in it because of these problems no I don't think that's happened yet I'm saying this may be the biggest threat to bitcoin is losing its novelty and losing its interest because of the security issues no just because people are fickle and they're Facebook oh no it's twitter now it's whatever I don't know how emotionally or philosophically attached they are to this concept right well that was all the early adopters but now a lot of the people driving the speculation are I think a little more a little less committed less committed yeah interesting okay and so the how at the office when you sit around and talk about bitcoin the question of your coworkers and other writers do they what do they think of bitcoin they find it intriguing I mean I went to buy bitcoin and I was like alright who wants bitcoin my editor's like I'll take one what is it again oh I thought it was something for lunch yeah so their understanding is very shallow they they think it's interesting and they have some vague idea of its significance no they understand clearly that they lost it because it was on mybitcoin.com who bought it and do understand this wow so alright well what would you like to leave the bitcoin community with is there any follow me on twitter yeah yeah definitely on twitter what are you on twitter adr jeffreys adr jeffreys so at adr jeffreys and at beta beat at beta beat as well and beta beat.com betabeate.com right I'll be blogging about bitcoin for the foreseeable future cool well thanks so much for joining us thank you and thank you for being such a great source what was the word I used for you the other day indispensable me? thank you you are too we share tips and stuff keep together alright well thanks for joining us and see you tomorrow same time to be an eastern thanks