 Yes, it is going to be amazing. You're right. Chat room. Welcome to the Bitcoin show. I'm Bruce Wagner, as I'm sure you know. Today it's you and me. We're going to talk. I'm going to talk to you, the Bitcoin community, about what's going on, and I'm so happy that you've joined us. Today's episode is brought to you, by the way. We have to thank our sponsors because I wouldn't be here to talk with you if it weren't for them. They're generous sponsorship of our show. First, Carpe Veeam. Carpe Veeam is C-A-R-P-E-V-M.com. Check them out. The video marketing. Seize your market. Say it with video. They'll help you make a professional video for your website to market, whatever it is that you're selling. And Mezzy Grill. Of course, authentic Mediterranean food meets modern flavor. Our favorite place. We eat there at least once a week, Mezzy Grill, M-E-Z-E Grill.com and TradeHill.com. TradeHill is the new online exchange that you can trade any currency, almost any currency in the world for Bitcoin and vice versa. You can buy Bitcoin, sell Bitcoin online with ease without leaving your easy chair. And if you use the referral code for the Bitcoin show, you'll get 10% off all your trades for life. They're a wonderful sponsor. The code is TH-R-141. That stands for TradeHill-Referral Code 141. That's TH-R-141. You get 10% off for life. We're so grateful for our sponsors for allowing us to be here today. Today what I want to talk with you about is the recent media coverage that Bitcoin has been receiving. At first, there wasn't any media coverage for the longest time. In fact, Wikipedia took the Bitcoin page down. As you may remember, if you've been in it for a while, Wikipedia said, no, there wasn't enough mainstream media coverage to verify that Bitcoin actually existed. Remember that? Well, now there's plenty of media coverage. The initial media coverage was very good, very interesting. Everybody was fascinated with this new technology. Now things are changing because, well, you can make your own theories as to why, but we can only guess. One of the first ones that really hit mainstream, as you may recall, is the Forbes article, May 9th edition. That's Andy Greenberg. He did a great article. He interviewed myself and Gavin Andreessen, and he really did his homework, and he really did a good job. That was Forbes then. Now, if you take a look online at Forbes, you'll see an article today, I guess. It's by Tim Worstall. It's called, So That's the End of Bitcoin Then. What I want to do is I want to just go through these articles in hopes of educating not only the public, but journalists, journalists who are reporting about Bitcoin, because I mean, maybe I'm a little bit hard on them, but I call it lazy journalism. If you're going to write an article about toaster ovens, you really might want to Google it, read a little bit, learn about what it is, because there's so many things that are just so off the mark, absolutely inaccurate. Let's look at this article. He says, So that's the end of Bitcoin then, or at least it looks like the end of Bitcoin. I'm just going to paraphrase, I mean not paraphrase, but I'm going to quote just a certain sections that I want to emphasize. He says, The initial problem leading to the price collapse was that one user tried to sell more than the market could absorb, for, of course, the value of anything is determined by the balance of supply and demand for it, thus the price crashed, and you can see a chart of how quickly it did here. What he's talking about is the Mt. Gox exchange and how the flash crashes, what he's describing. The problem with it, and it is technically accurate, the price did plummet, because one person tried to sell more than the market could absorb, as he's saying, but that's not the whole story. It's very misleading. My famous quote, it's not a lie, it's true, but it's very, very misleading, because that's not how it happened, really. Somebody didn't just decide to sell a lot of Bitcoins. What happened is one account was brute force attacked. That means they used a computer to guess your password, because somebody put in Apple Banana as their password, and they had $8 or $10 million in that account. They attacked the account, they got into the account, and they decided they wanted to withdraw all the money. The only way they could get out that much money, because there's $1,000 a day limit on Mt. Gox, as you may know, or $1,000 worth of Bitcoin. The only way they could get out the maximum number of Bitcoin for this thief was to devalue the currency. The only way they could do that was to sell all $8 or $10 million worth of Bitcoin, and at that point in time, it was $17.50. They sold all of it for a penny. Of course, they wiped out the whole order book, everybody got the Bitcoins they wanted, and they dropped the, it was a flash crash, it went right down to one cent. Of course, that's not the real market value of a Bitcoin. The real value of a Bitcoin did not change, because this guy did this. He's just a thief. So if you steal somebody's jewels and you sell them for a dollar apiece, it doesn't mean jewelry is now worth a dollar apiece. It's very, very misleading. That's not what happened. The other exchange sites were hardly affected at all. In fact, I just checked before the show, and Bitcoin on Trade Hill is like $16.50. So in spite of all this negative press and these really, really misleading articles saying that Bitcoin dropped, this is a devastating thing that Mt. Scott hacked. Go and get me wrong. This is really devastating. They had something like 90% market share of the online purchases and sales. However, the value of a Bitcoin has gone down from then to now by $1. From $17.50 to $16.50 approximately. You can go to tradehill.com and click on market data, and you'll see the value. He is looking up tradehill.com right now for market data of the real value of Bitcoin because Mt. Gox is down at the moment. It's, by the way, their opening up has been delayed. It was supposed to happen, and I think 11 PM Eastern time last night, but they're not getting the accounts verified quickly enough. They're understaffed, so they've pushed it back for 24 hours. So the last I read it would be 11 PM Eastern time tonight. Mt. Gox will be back up. All right. Very misleading that somebody decided to sell and the market value went down. That's not the real market value. That's just theft. All right. Then he goes on. This is a heading section. Bitcoins aren't secure. Okay. Again, I'm going to say that you need to be reminded that Bitcoin itself has always been secure. It's completely secure. It's unhackable with today's technology as far as anyone knows. Nobody has ever been able to hack it. Nobody knows how it could be hacked with today's technology. The Bitcoin network was absolutely unaffected. The value of Bitcoin was almost unaffected. It was just one exchange site, happened to be a big one, and really, really disastrous. I would be like MasterCard Visa going down. What would that do to credit card processing? It was major, major disaster for the Bitcoin world, yet the price was hardly affected. If you look at Trade Hill, the price is almost the same. So Bitcoins aren't secure, he concludes, as both the recent theft of this password problem shows, passwords are not secure. If you use obvious passwords, I lectured you guys the other day about this, you have to use long passwords. It's not convenient, and you won't be able to remember it, but I want your password to look like your Bitcoin address. It's got to be random letters and numbers and throw a symbol in there, and it has to be unique. It has to be something you don't use on any other site, because this is another disaster that's happened is MyBitcoin.com, which is a Bitcoin only, basically it's a web-based Bitcoin service, like Gmail is to email, MyBitcoin is to Bitcoin. So it's a real, real easy to use Bitcoin online, Bitcoin application, and we recommend it for anybody who's not technical. However, you've got to make sure you don't have a virus, because a keyboard capture virus will capture your login ID and password no matter where you bank, even if it's Citibank. So you have to secure your password. You have to use a computer that doesn't have a virus. I recommend you use Ubuntu Linux or Mac as a second choice, definitely not Windows. But do what you can to make sure you're using a clean computer when you're accessing online banking. All right. So passwords is an issue. Don't use the same password. About 1% of MyBitcoin customers have lost their Bitcoin because they use the same login ID and the same password for both. So he goes on, Bitcoins aren't secure. Then he says, Bitcoins are not liquid, nor a store of value, as the price collapse shows. And if they're none of those things, they're not going to be a great medium of exchange, either as who would accept them. So obviously this is absolutely false. They are an excellent store of value. The price of a Bitcoin has hardly changed at all. They're completely secure, and more and more retailers are accepting them every single day. Go to bitcoinme.com and click on the shopping tab. You'll see a scrolling list of things from peanut butter, to clothing, to electronics, to consumer goods, whatever it is you want to buy. All these things will scroll by. Amazing assortment. It looks like you're looking at Amazon or eBay, all the things that you can buy with Bitcoin. More and more retailers every single day. And including a fact, Amazon, you can go to tradehill.com and you can actually find an item on Amazon that you like. Take the URL, paste it into tradehill, and you can actually buy anything on Amazon with Bitcoin right now. So it's absolutely false that no one will accept them. It's absolutely false that they're not secure. And it's absolutely false that they're not liquid. You can sell bitcoins instantly on tradehill and withdraw it with a direct bank deposit, ACH direct deposit into your US bank account in dollars, or into your European bank account in euros right now on the spot within moments. So it's just nonsense. This conclusion, it's difficult to see what the currency has going for it. Okay. That's lazy journalism. I'm sorry. I mean, he doesn't even know what Bitcoin is. He doesn't understand it. Okay. The next one is, it's called Bitcoin Virtual Money Gets Hacked and Heisted, okay, by Helen AS Popkin. I actually, as soon as I saw this, I tweeted Helen, and I said, I'm not a fan of your article because it's full of inaccuracies. She replied and said, how many? But that's all I heard from her. She says, okay, did you hear about the $500,000 heist of online currency this month? That's true. I mean, yeah, somebody stole it. You have $500,000 with a cash. It doesn't matter if it's green paper or electronic digits on a disc, it's $500,000 in cash. Of course, someone's going to steal it if you don't secure it. It's your responsibility to secure your cash. Not only was the digital dough stolen, but the theft was followed by a major hack and an exchange website that led to precipitous drop in the currency's actual value. That is false, absolutely false. First of all, the theft had nothing to do with the crash, as I've already explained. They're completely separate incidents. Secondly, the crash, as I've already explained, had nothing to do with the actual value of Bitcoin. It had to do with someone stealing someone's account and selling all their Bitcoins for a penny. Did I explain why? The reason he had to get it down to a penny is that then he could withdraw $1,000 worth of Bitcoin if they're a penny apiece. He could get something like 100,000 Bitcoins, so that was his way of getting it out. Obviously, Mt. Gox and all the exchange sites have fixed this, so if there's a sudden change, first of all, the market will freeze. Secondly, all withdrawals will be frozen, so this is not going to happen again, I'm sure, unless there's a new exchange site that is not careful. But yeah, a precipitous drop in the currency's actual value is absolutely false, obviously. Bitcoin, the first decentralized digital currency suffered a personal data breach. Not true. Bitcoin did not suffer a personal data breach. Mt. Gox did. Mt. Gox caused value to drop from $17 to a penny, obviously. Not really true. The Bitcoin didn't change its value, just the flash crash did. And by the way, when Mt. Gox is coming up, they're reversing all the transactions back, which is a common thing in the stock market. Whenever there's a major, major error, major flaw in the system, they will reverse all the transactions to what it was before. That's what they're about to do. The actual value of Bitcoin did not change. If Bitcoin is a virtual currency, how and why can it have value, let alone lose value and be stolen? Okay, Helen, I'm sorry, you just haven't even googled it. You don't know. I mean, the US dollar is a virtual currency. I don't know if you know. 99% of all US dollars are digits in a computer. What's the difference? It's a virtual currency. If you bank online, it's a virtual currency. If you use a Visa, MasterCard, debit card, PayPal, it's a virtual currency. So of course, of course it can be stolen. Of course it can have value. So how can it be stolen? I mean, this is crazy. That seems like something a child would ask. I'm sorry. Bitcoin has real currency value outside the virtual environment. And on occasion, the value has at times been higher than the US dollar. Yeah, that's interesting. Since February 9th, October, we call it parody day. When Bitcoin reached a US dollar value. What was it? Around the end of October, correct me if I'm wrong, chat room. The end of October, it was about six cents. And now it's whatever, 1650. On February 9th, it was a dollar. That was the day it reached a dollar. It's been above a dollar ever since February 9th. So it's just so misleading to say, on occasion it's reached over a dollar. Okay, moving on down, what can I buy with Bitcoins? She's got a whole section. What can I buy with Bitcoins? Well, illegal drugs. That's her answer. That's what you can buy with Bitcoins. Do you know how many people I know use Bitcoins every day? Tons and tons and tons of people are into Bitcoin. Nobody I know has ever bought illegal drugs with them. Nobody I know has ever gone to that one website that a couple kids started on a hidden secret network and bought illegal drugs with it. Do you know how many people I know use US dollars and cash? Do you know how many people I know who have bought illegal drugs with US dollars and cash? It's absurd. Nobody has to see that it's absolute absurdity to blame the currency for something that one person bought. I know it's not one person, but no one I know has admitted to me that they've ever bought anything at all illegal with it. So I think that if that's really the issue that anybody has with Bitcoin, they really need to start looking at banning US cash. The US dollar issued by the Federal Reserve, the green bills, they should look at banning that first since 99.99999% of crimes use, transact in US dollar cash. It's ridiculous. It's like banning a telephone because it could be used as a crime for a crime or banning cars because they could be used as a getaway car. Everybody has to see how ridiculous that is. It makes great headlines. It's like, ooh, that's the drug dealer's currency. No it's not. Nobody I know uses it to buy or sell drugs to my knowledge. Of course, they might not have told me, but I doubt it. Bitcoin is the people's money. It's the currency of the people. It's a global currency. Everyone can use. You can use it no matter whether you live in Uzbekistan or Cairo or Sweden or Australia. It doesn't matter. It's all the same. It's global. It's like email. It's like the internet itself. It's really about freedom from the tyranny of the world banks who control everything. We all know that. All you have to do is go to Google Video and do a search for money as debt. You understand that money is being used as debt and debt is being used as a modern form of slavery for individuals and for nations. People are over it. People are fed up. Then the government bailing out these institutions? No. I think that's over. She goes on and says, you can trade Bitcoin for real world money at Bitcoin exchanges such as the hacked Mt. Gox. But as mentioned earlier, it's not worth much right now. Yeah. Only $16.48. It was $17.50 right before Mt. Gox crashed, the flash crash, and now it's $16.48. So yeah. Not much right now. Remember, it was $0.06 in October, $0.16.48 now. Show me an investment that has doubled since October. Just asking. Okay. Not worth much right now. Welcome everybody's trying to buy Bitcoin and nobody I know, almost nobody I know is trying to sell. The only people that I know that are trying to sell are people who are testing the system. I have a friend who bought $3,500 worth one week later, not from me, but from someone else to the local exchange things. You can actually, there's a thing called btcnearme.com and you can go there, type in your zip code and it'll give you a list of all the people that are in your area that are willing to buy and sell Bitcoin with you. And you can actually meet them and do it, you know, face to face. There's no trust involved because they're giving you cash and you're giving them Bitcoin electronically through your phone or your laptop or vice versa. So you don't even have to know them from Adam. But anyway, he bought $3,500 worth of Bitcoin and then a week later, he sold it for like $10,000 and he just got the envelope of cash. I saw him. I was there. He got the envelope full of cash from the person. He didn't even open it, didn't even count it. He just looked at both of us and he goes, okay, now if I give you this right back and buy more Bitcoin, can you buy it right away? That was his question. So he's done that like three or four times and the only people that I know really in my circles, which is pretty big, I'm pretty connected to the Bitcoin community, I would say, right? People email me and send me stories all the time constantly. Only people that I know they're actually selling it are either one of two things. Either they're really, really hard up for money and they need to pay their rent right now or they're trying to test the system. Get the cash back out, put the cash back in and see how well it works. All right. So her next section is how the heck do you steal virtual money? It just doesn't even deserve a comment. How do you steal virtual money? How do you steal electronic money now? It's absurd. It's absolutely absurd. So sorry, reporting fail. The next one is this one really upset me because this gentleman, actually Daniel Roberts, reported this for Fortune. Not the actual print magazine, just the blog online, fortune.com. But he interviewed me. He called me up and he wanted to interview me one morning. And I gave him the interview. One of the things that I had said to him was, please do better than Business Week did. I mean, Business Week did okay, but they got a couple things not so okay. And I said, you know, do better. Check your facts. Have somebody read it before you publish it. You know, you don't have to give them any permission to change anything, but just at least have somebody read it to make sure it's accurate. He said, oh, no problem. We're not like Business Week. We check our facts, you know, we check our facts. We know what we're doing. We're professional and all that stuff. I'm kind of a story like that. Well, all right. So I gave him quite a bit of time on the phone and he came out with this article. He gave me the link later and, oh my gosh, I was so upset. Oh, and by the way, before the interview, before the interview, he said, you know, when I was telling you, he says we check our facts and we're very accurate. He said that people may not agree with our stance on it. People might not agree with our take, our spin on this story. But, you know, we want to make sure that we're accurate with the facts. So that kind of, that's before the interview. So that kind of like laid a little hint that maybe he was assigned this project and said, I know you don't know what a Bitcoin is, but I want you to have a story ready by, you know, XPM tomorrow. And it's the topic is Bitcoin and the stance is it's terrible. It's illegal and no American should ever have the option to use it. I don't know. I mean, it seems a lot like these stories are assigned, saying, do something about Bitcoin and make it negative. I don't know. That's just what it seems like. That was my feeling. When I read the article, you know, it was just full of inaccuracies. And I did email him and I told him about these. You know, if you, if you read the original article, he's changed a couple of things, but not much. You know, first he talks about Missy Grill accepting Bitcoin. He never apparently never even visited Missy Grill. I don't know. Apparently not. He says they sell burritos. They don't sell burritos. It's not Mexican. It's Mediterranean food. As you know, they're one of our sponsors. You've probably been there. They don't sell burritos. Okay. But this is just starting off on the wrong foot, right? He goes, although so far not a single customer has paid this way, referring to Bitcoin. That's absolutely not true. I know dozens of people who have paid for their dinner there with Bitcoin. In fact, you know, we had just like a couple of nights before he actually interviewed me. That's absolutely not true. Next, I mean, and wherever he got his information, it's false, okay? It's absolutely false. And you really should check your facts. I was told by the owner of Missy Grill, he never even spoke to him. Never, not even once. Okay. Number three, quote, and many of its uses have nothing to do with Silk Road. Talk about Bitcoin. And many of its uses have nothing to do with Silk Road. Wow. What a surprise. True. That's like saying many of its uses of US dollars, green back, Federal Reserve, green paper bills, many of their uses have nothing to do with buying crack from a drug dealer. It's absurd. Why would you have to say that? Nobody I know has ever told me that they have bought drugs from anybody. Couple kids start a website and now it's the currency of choice. It's just ridiculous. Nobody uses it for that that I know of. It's absolutely irresponsible reporting to say that. Blatantly misleading that anyone uses Bitcoin for such things. Very, very few people as a percentage wise. And like I said, like I said, 99.99999% of drug deals are done with US dollars paper currency. So, and then he goes on, let's see. He says, in simple terms, here's how it works. He's explaining how Bitcoin works. In simple terms, here's how it works. You download, after downloading a desktop software client, the most popular one is Dualla. This is not even a complete sentence and it's full of untrue things. There is no need to download a desktop client. Like I said, you can just go to mybitcoin.com and click sign up and now you have a Bitcoin account, a Bitcoin address. You don't need any desktop client installed. Secondly, Dualla has nothing to do with Bitcoin. That's like saying PayPal. You download a PayPal to buy Bitcoin. That's nonsense. It's absolutely nonsensical. Dualla is not even a desktop client. Dualla is not a desktop client. It's a website and Dualla is similar to PayPal and neither one has anything to do with Bitcoin. Whatsoever. Except that you could use that. That's like saying you download a Mastercard Visa and you buy Bitcoin with it. It absolutely makes no sense. So anyway, Dualla doesn't have anything directly to do with Bitcoin at all and it's not a desktop client and you don't need a desktop client for Bitcoin. Then he goes on. Each Bitcoin is associated with a URL where the users can see the entire history of the coin's use, including every user that bought or sold it. Okay, no. That's extremely, extremely misleading. It's just not accurate. There is a URL. There's a website called Blockchain Explorer where you can see sort of a scrambled serial number of a transaction, but you can't see any users, much less any users that bought it or sold it. First of all, it is not an it. Okay, the blockchain, for those who wanna know a little bit about how it works, it's a shared file among all the users. The blockchain is not like a string of dollar bills with serial numbers, all scotch tape going on and on and on. The blockchain is more like a series of checks, but the only thing they have is an account number from and an account number two and like a Bitcoin dollar amount, right? And that's about it, okay? And the account, you can get a new account number as many account numbers as you want. So that's why they call it pseudo anonymous because if you get a brand new account number for every single transaction, you can make it pretty anonymous, about as anonymous as cash. But you certainly cannot see any list of users. You cannot see any record of a single Bitcoin and it's just absurdly misleading. Let's see, what else? He says, Bitcoins have volatile ups and downs, but never a full crash. Once again, they don't really have, I mean, I guess it's volatile to a certain extent because like I say, Bitcoin value goes like this. It goes up, it reaches a high and then it goes down. All you have to do is look at the charts, I'm not making this up. Just look at the charts and don't quote me, but look at the chart of the history, the Bitcoin, it goes up and then it goes back down. Then it goes about 60% back up and then it levels off. Then it goes up and then down and then up and down. So it goes up and down and up and down and up and down on its way up and this is pretty much how it's been since October. Like I said, look at the chart yourself. That's where the data is. But you can see that even though it's sort of volatile, I call it vibration on the way up. Even if you, most of the time, it seems if you buy high and you end up later selling low, you still sold it for a lot more, twice as much as you bought it for in many cases. So it's not really that volatile and it's never had a crash. It's never had a complete crash ever. Just little dips, it's actually just little dips. You buy in the dips, when it goes down, you don't go, oh my God, oh my God, it's going down, oh my God, it's going down, let's sell. And then it goes up and then they're like, oh my God, it's going up, oh my God, it's going up, buy. If you do that, you're not smart, I'm sorry. You don't buy when everybody else is buying and it's high and sell when everybody's selling is going down. When it goes down in the dip, that's when you buy. I say, Bitcoin's on sale, they're having a sale on Bitcoins today, not today, it's 1650. So it's sort of on sale because the Mt. Gox thing is probably is a good time, but whatever, I don't give financial advice as you know. But anyway, obviously, who doesn't know, buy in the dips and don't sell. And if you're going to sell, sell in the peaks, not in the dips. And don't wait until you're desperate for the money either, hopefully. Anyway, what else? Now there are even other Bitcoin-like currencies such as namecoins which are bought with Bitcoins used to pay for domain hostings. Some traders believe the biggest potential in the limitless creation of these e-currencies. You know, that's the thing that namecoins is a completely separate system that is exactly that. It's designed for domain name hosting because there's a problem with a centralized system of DNS, domain name hosting. And they want it to be absolutely distributed. And the problem is that you have to be able to buy registrations of domain names. To my knowledge, the latest information I have is that namecoin is being generated but it's not a currency. And the idea behind the system was to register domain names. So, you know, it's not ready. It's not ready for prime time. It's totally alpha as far as it's used for that. Yes, you can create an infinite number of currencies. If your name is Billy Bob, you can create Billy Bob coins if you want. It's open source software. Anybody can take it, modify it, change the name and start your own blockchain. The question is, who's going to buy and sell using Billy Bob coins? I don't know. There's something to be said for being the first to market with any kind of a product or item. And so, it's like a nightclub on Saturday night. Everybody goes to this club because everybody goes to this club. And everybody goes to this club because everybody goes to this club. Everybody's using Bitcoin because everybody uses Bitcoin. Everybody uses Bitcoin because everybody uses Bitcoin. If they start Billy Bob coin, then who's going to use it? I don't know. It could happen. It could definitely happen. Then if you see that happening, it might be time to get into it. Who knows? Just keep your eye on what's going on. Read the news. Go to Google News and go to Google News Alerts. Google the word news alerts and put in a search term for Bitcoin and you'll read everything that's happening in the Bitcoin world. Next, he says, at the moment, Bitcoins can't really be used at any mainstream retailers. Obviously not true. Amazon.com, by any product in Amazon.com via Trade Hill, as I said. And you go to bitcoinme.com and click on the shopping tab and you'll see all the items that are scrolling by and the list is just getting longer and longer and longer. Those guys, we interviewed them a couple of days ago on the show and he's having such a hard time keeping up with all the new sites that are springing up every single day that want to accept Bitcoin. Who doesn't want to accept Bitcoin? Because the value of the currency keeps going up over time. So would you rather have a dollar bill, a US dollar that has lost 96% of its value since 1913? Did you know that? In 1913, that's when they created the Federal Reserve by the way, the private corporation bank that's not part of the US government. And if you doubt that, there was a big case where an employee of the Federal Reserve was in some sort of an accident and they had some sort of immunity for federal employees, but it was proven in court that they were not a federal employee. Why? Because in court, they proved that the Federal Reserve is not part of the federal government. That's the big lie, the big secret. The Bernanke or whoever will be on TV on a Sunday morning show and they'll say the Federal Reserve unlike other branches of the government. What? It's not a branch of the government. It's just blatant, blatant. If not lies, mistruths. It's absolutely misleading. So, to go on. According to the Wiki list of businesses that accept Bitcoin, you can currently buy real goods and services, but not exactly talking about Amazon. Well, yes, we are talking about Amazon. I just got done saying, you can use them through Trade Hill. Trade Hill is not just converting Bitcoin to Amazon money. On Trade Hill, you can completely make the purchase using only Bitcoins, basically with one click. You just go to Amazon, find the item you want, take the URL, paste it into Trade Hill and you can buy it with your Bitcoins. Because one click, it takes your Bitcoins, sells them for the exact number of US dollars, buys the prepaid card behind the scenes and makes the purchase all with one click. Effectively for the customer, it's the same thing as clicking buy this Amazon.com item with Bitcoins. Okay, then he mentions Burritos at Mezzie Grill again, which they don't sell. Then he says, if they really wanted to ensure that they aren't losing money from sales paid with Bitcoins, they'd have to watch the exchange rate closely and adjust their price every single day. Well, this problem is being solved right now with a whole bunch of new startups who are doing services for merchants. They're doing hand-holding from beginning to end for a merchant. So if you're a store, I mean, right now it's super easy to accept Bitcoin. If you go to bitcoinme.com and click on accept, there's a real simple little kit you can download that you can put the emblem in your window and it shows you how to create a QR code for your Bitcoin address and accepted to the cash register right now today. Okay, super, super easy. But for merchants that have like a high volume and they expect a lot of Bitcoin coming in, there are new startups that are going to be doing hand-holding for the merchant from beginning to end and they're gonna offer things like this. If you're a merchant that needs cash flow, you need US dollar cash flow to reorder your products every week. They will, you'll click, if I want to buy lunch for $15, I click, it'll take the exact number of Bitcoin that it needs for $15 out of my account as a customer and then it will instantly sell those on the market into US dollars, guaranteeing the merchant that number of US dollars and then automatically nightly deposit those US dollars into the merchant's bank account. Basically it works just like MasterGuard of Visa and by doing this sale at the same moment as the receipt of the Bitcoin, they're guaranteeing the actual US dollar amount and that's important. But if your cash flow is really tight, that's important. If cash flow is not tight and you wanna go ahead and use that money to invest in Bitcoin, just leave it in Bitcoin. Who knows, it could be worth twice as much next week. That's not gonna happen with the US dollar, as we know. It's never been a week that the US dollar, you receive 100 US dollars and by next week it's now worth 200, not that I know of, that's never, ever happened. Let's see here. Okay, he says here, if the USA wants to shut it down, referring to Bitcoin, he's quoting me. Wagner reasons, the internet has a way of detecting censorship and rallying around it. Okay, he's quoting me. The quote, the internet has a way of detecting censorship and rallying around it. They could block Bitcoin transactions but it would be censorship, unquote. Okay, not true. I did not say that, okay? I said to him in this email, I said, these were two completely separate unrelated statements. I think what I'm gonna have to do is I'm gonna have to insist that interviews are recorded and then we have a legal contract saying that I have final cut because this is nonsense. I didn't say that. He took two completely unrelated statements and combined them into one. The first one, what I said, if I remember, was if censorship happens on the internet, by its nature, sees that as an error and routes around it. And that's not even a quote from me. I was paraphrasing from someone else that I read somewhere. But he tied that into a completely separate statement that happened several minutes later where I said something like, most likely, no, the US government could not completely stop the Bitcoin network. If you research this, you'll know this. To my understanding, the only way the Bitcoin network can be stopped is to completely stop the internet. And the only way to completely stop the internet is to make it illegal and confiscate 100% of the computers and smartphones. Even then, as long as two computers exist in any other country on earth, the internet will still exist, and thus, so will Bitcoin. If the USA decides to vote for internet censorship, I also said this, if the USA decides to vote for internet censorship, like they have in China, although they didn't get to vote, like they have implemented in China to a certain extent, it will not slow down Bitcoin at all. File sharing of copyrighted material is legal. It's explicitly legal in many countries. In the US, it's not legal. But either way, it hasn't slowed it down. It's just a fact. It's just absolutely a fact. But that's what I actually said. I'm quoting him again in another section. But in fact, because users all have identifying web IDs, the government could rather easily identify users today, make it illegal to operate a Bitcoin node and drive users away with the same scare tactics that content industry uses on illegal downloaders and censorship protests or not, there isn't much American traders could do. OMG. That's 1000% inaccurate. Bitcoin users do not have identifying web IDs involved in Bitcoin, not at all. First of all, you don't even have to download any software or be connected to any nodes. You don't have to run a node to use Bitcoin. That's ridiculous. Only like 2% of the Bitcoin users I know actually download a node and run it. Secondly, let's see, what else? Even if it were made illegal in the US, it would most likely not even cause a blip in the Bitcoin network. It really wouldn't. It's been a while since I checked, but on the bitcoin.org site, it was like 12% of Bitcoin users were in the United States. I mean, it's just, it's not gonna even cause a blip in the Bitcoin network actually. If the United States decided to ban the internet, seize and confiscate all computers and smartphones and absolutely outlaw electricity, it wouldn't cause a blip in the Bitcoin network. It really wouldn't. The reality is, I'm quoting him again, the reality is that a currency that has no regulator, trades on an open exchange and can be easily stolen is one that won't sit well with lawmakers. Okay, since when do we care what sits well with lawmakers? Aren't lawmakers working for us? Aren't the people in charge of this country? Last time I checked, this was a free country and we were able to vote, you know? And the lawmakers actually were supposed to represent us, no? What am I missing here? Who cares what sits well with lawmakers? What sits well with the American people and the people of the planet Earth is what matters. So the lawmakers better take heed and listen to what the people want. How about that for an idea? So whether Bitcoins are a risky investment or not, expect Uncle Sam to keep the average American consumer from ever getting to make that choice. Really, okay, he must have some inside information coming from on high that none of us are privy to. So I say this conclusion really sounds like, I told him, I said this conclusion really sounds like you were told what to write in this article and you were told what conclusions to make. The word misleading seems to be a real key concept to this article and again, the clock is ticking on Bitcoin by Daniel Roberts. That's very disappointing, very disappointing and they call it Forbes. It's just like, I can't believe that's associated with the same company. So let me take a quick moment to thank our sponsors once again. I realize that this is a total monologue today and we don't normally do that. We have fantastic guests. We have a lot of fantastic guests coming up this week too, really, really major announcements but this media attention is so important. I want journalists to pay attention. Use Google, ask an expert. Sometimes the experts are too geeky, they're too technical and you don't understand what they're talking about. Well, talk to me, talk to somebody, talk to Gavin, talk to somebody who understands what Bitcoin is but before you just go off and have a two hour deadline and write a story that doesn't make any sense, it really doesn't make you look good as a reporter. It really makes you look bad. Okay, so I got to call some of these people out. So anyway, I want to take a moment really quick to thank our sponsors. I wouldn't be here with you right now if it weren't for them. So thank you, Carpeviem, Carpeviem.com C-A-R-P-E-V-M, stands for video marketing, Carpe video marketing, Carpeviem.com Seize the moment, capture it in video. They will help you as professionals write and produce the video that you need for all of your marketing. Whatever product or service it is that you're trying to sell and everybody has something to promote, otherwise there wouldn't be billions of people on Twitter, right? They will help you create a very professional video and you will look like a star and actually get sales out of it. So Carpeviem.com, we thank them for sponsoring the Bitcoin show. When you talk to them, thank them specifically for only one TV in the Bitcoin show. And Meze Grill, of course, the world's first restaurant, to my knowledge, correct me if I'm wrong, the world's first brick and mortar restaurant that also happens to have fantastic food. We love Marwan. Ask for Marwan when you go in. They're serving breakfast now too, not just lunch and dinner, breakfast, lunch and dinner. He never stops working. Meze Grill, M-E-Z-E-G-R-I-L-L.com, mezegrill.com. They're right here in Midtown Manhattan. We were wondering when they became a sponsor, how's this gonna work? Because they're a local New York establishment. I mean, our audience is in Bangkok. Our audience is everywhere on the planet. But as it turns out, they're getting lots and lots and lots of attention and everybody either lives in New York, I always say everybody who's anybody, either lives in New York or they come to visit New York, they pass through New York. And when you're here, find Columbus Circle. It's one of the most famous scenes in New York. You'll see the entrance, the famous entrance to Central Park and all that. We'll go three blocks or not three, but whatever. A few blocks south to Meze Grill. And you gotta stop in there for lunch or dinner. Authentic Mediterranean food meets modern flavor. Okay, then Trade Hill. Obviously our buddies at Trade Hill, we talk to them all the time. They're on top of this. They're true professionals who have started an exchange site competing with Mt. Gox, but friendly and loving to the whole entire Bitcoin community. They're extremely supportive of Mt. Gox and all of the Bitcoin community during this crisis that's happening. Tradehill.com, it's the easiest way right now to buy and sell Bitcoin online and it's a cinch. You'll get 10% off of all trades if you, and you'll also support only one TV. Support the Bitcoin Show and the Spanish language, El Show de Bitcoin on Wednesday, 4 p.m. every Wednesday by using the referral code TH-R141. It's on your screen now. 10% off all trades for life, TH-R141. Thank Tradehill.com for supporting us when you talk to them. So the next thing I wanted to talk about is one that I just received this morning and this comes from Australia. It's a tiny little article from, it's called The Courier Mail in Australia, but it's just an example. It doesn't matter how big time or small time you are. If you're calling yourself a journalist, I want you to act like a journalist. I'm sorry, I gotta call you out on this stuff. It's just some of the stuff that you guys are writing is absolutely nonsense. Now, I mean, there are some fantastic articles. Don't get me wrong. The best one I've seen from an accuracy point of view is The Economist. There's a blog article in The Economist. Tell me, chat room, what's it called? What the blog is in The Economist that did a great, great article about Bitcoin and they explained the technology behind it in really simple terms and they just did a fantastic job. Anyway, check out The Economist and do a search for, just do a search on Google for Economist, Bitcoin and you'll find it, but they did a great, great job on that. And then the other one is the New York Observer actually did a really, really nice article and I think they're doing another one today or whatever, they said they've received massive response from it. Bitcoin is the hot topic, obviously, in the news, but please do your homework, don't be sloppy. Here we have, I just had to call people out on this. I'm sorry, you know, I don't like to be negative, but come on, come on. All right, this again, the Courier Mail in Australia, okay? And this guy's talking about the ABC is investigating, I don't know if they mean ABC, that must be a company there. I don't know if it's associated with our ABC, but it says the ABC is investigating whether staff used computers at the public broadcaster to run a virtual money making racket. Okay, so apparently ABC is the public broadcaster in Australia, not American Broadcasting Corporation. All right, Australian Broadcasting Corporation probably. Okay, it's probably like our PBS in the US. Anyway, they're saying that this public broadcasting agency is investigating whether staff used computers at the public broadcaster to run a virtual money making racket. They call it a virtual money making racket. Australian website Crickey on Wednesday published an article on ABC Insider that alleged that an IT worker at the ABC was using the network servers to mine the virtual currency known as Bitcoins. The ABC said there are serious misconduct investigation underway in relation to this matter. Bitcoins are new peer-to-peer virtual currency, said to be hacker-proof, untraceable, not connected to any central bank. And it's peak, the currency has been bought and sold for as much as $30 US, but its value crashed this month after a cyberattack on the Bitcoin exchange, not true, not true. It crashed for a moment, which was a false crash. It didn't really crash. The real value still on Trade Hill and the other exchanges went from 1752, well, what it is today, 1650, okay. Critics say that the untraceable nature of Bitcoins allows criminals to buy drugs and launder money online. See, why do they have to say that? Why don't they want to say, critics say the US dollar, by its nature, allows criminals to buy drugs and launder money online. The US dollar, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard. I mean, it's ridiculous. Money can be used for these things. It doesn't mean that that's any connection to Bitcoin. Why do they have to throw this mud on something so wonderful, right? Bitcoin is the people's money and they have to throw criminal things on it and throw drugs on it. Nobody I know has told me that they bought drugs with it. And he goes on and on. His final concluding line is the racket was reportedly run from the ABC Innovation Division which deploys and manages abc.net.au. So it's a money-making racket. It's just, they have to use words like that. Racket, criminal, drugs, laundering. They have to do that because heaven forbid, cash could be used that way. So I'm probably gonna hear from a lot of people who buy drugs with it or something, but nobody that I know has said that they have. So anyway, what do you guys in the chatroom think? That is this reporting completely irresponsible? Do you believe these journalists, are they just being lazy or do you think that they're being intentional about their misrepresentation of Bitcoin? Either way, it's for you to decide. But I think that's a wrap. Thank you guys for joining us today and we're gonna be back with another fantastic show tomorrow at 2 p.m. Eastern Time every weekday, Monday through Friday, 2 p.m. Eastern, The Bitcoin Show, and weekly, Wednesdays at 4 p.m. Eastern Time, El Show de Bitcoin en Español. And by the way, before we go, I wanna tell you that, thanks guys, saying we did a great job, thank you so much. I wanna tell you, by the way, the only one TV network is onlyonetv.com is not just a Bitcoin network. A lot of people are saying, is this all Bitcoin all the time? But no, it's not. We're in a rolling launch phase right now. So I'm saying the official launch date is July 14th, which I kind of like pulled out of thin air. But the reason is because we're gonna, we're launching with 29 shows initially, all right? So out of these 29 shows, about two thirds of them are English language, about a third of them are Spanish language, and one of them is actually Chinese, Mandarin Chinese. So that's the plan. We're rolling out 29 shows, a wide variety of topics. Many of them are technology related. Some are like very, very mainstream, kind of like an opera, you know, super mainstream. Some of them are sort of boutique technology things like Ubuntu, the Ubuntu show, which is about Ubuntu Linux on the desktop, the free culture show, which is all about free open source software and free open source everything. Everything's becoming free open source now. Architecture, education, on and on and on. And the free culture movement is about like Creative Commons license share like things. And what else? The Android invasion, of course, is about the Android operating system. We have Webvid ProShow. The Webvid ProShow is for web video, it's buy for and about web video professionals. And that's actually gonna be about what we do. We're gonna show you behind the scenes, what equipment we use, what cameras, what hardware, what software, how we do things. And no, it's not perfect. It's definitely a moving target, but we're getting better all the time. I hope the audio is better today. And we're gonna teach you how to do what we do. Cause we're not all about like mind, mind, mind, mind hoarding information. We're about sharing. Our mission statement at only one TV, by the way, is to help as many people as possible. And that means masses of people in the most profound ways possible. And we do that by sharing information and knowledge, giving and receiving. And this is a community and building community. And this is new media. This is not old media. So you get a say and you get to participate in the community. We have the chat room always. We will always have it live chat room. And that's how you can communicate by Twitter, email, chat room. We're very, very accessible. You'll notice that you can call my phone and it was ringing the other day. Now I learned to turn it off. But we are accessible. If you call, I'll answer. We're about community. Other shows, about two thirds of the shows are what we call live to tape, which is what we're doing right now. This is live. It's broadcast streaming live on the web. And it's also recorded at the same time. So you can watch it anytime you want to. So the reason we do it live, even though probably only less than 1% of the viewers will actually watch it live, maybe even less than that as a percentage. The reason we do it live is so that we can get your feedback immediately. We can read what you're saying in the chat. We can respond to emails and Twitter and so on. We're gonna get more and more producers in here and it's gonna get more and more professional. Don't worry, it's gonna get better. As you can see, if you go back to the initial episodes, you'll see that it's getting better and better every time. That's my goal. My goal is not perfection. My goal is that today's episode is a little bit better than yesterday's episode. As long as we have continuous improvement, we know we're on the right track. I mean, isn't that everybody's goal and everything that you do? Okay, so back to this. About two thirds of the shows are what we call live to tape talk shows like this. Basically, it's a talk show. It's a different show, a different host, different topic, different theme music, and it's a different show. About a third of the shows are what I call FES, fully edited shows, the complete production shows. And those are on topics, all different types of things. We even have a sketch comedy show, which is gonna be hysterical. We were recruiting some of the funniest comedians from YouTube and from elsewhere. Comedy clubs and all sorts of venues all over the world, really, that are coming into work on this amazing sketch comedy show. It's kind of like Saturday Night Live meets Little Britain, except it's not on Saturday nights, it's not live, and it is funny. So anyway, it's really, really cool. A lot of amazing, amazing talent out there in the world on YouTube and in New York. We're right here in the hotbed of talent. So amazing technology shows and comedy shows and women's issues is one about women's issues that women should be talking about, but aren't taboo topics. What else am I forgetting? There's so many. Dr. Frugal has the Frugal show about bargain shopping, how to get insane bargains. I mean, he's gotten us cruise tickets on major cruise lines for, came out to like $35 a day one time. Yeah, $35 a day on one of the trips we went on. Let's see, what else? He got his American Airlines tickets to Spain for $130 each way. It was like 260 round trip, including taxes. I mean, he's a miracle worker when it comes to saving money. So you'll see Dr. Frugal on the Frugal show. I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot, but very soon in the next day or so, we're gonna have a list of all the shows that'll be right there on the website. So stay tuned and thanks for joining us. We love you and we'll see you tomorrow at 2PM Eastern. Take care. Bye guys. Yes, we do love you. Love you. Love you.