 Welcome to the Bitcoin Show. Today, we have a special guest with us. Live via Skype. His name is Jared. What's your last name again, Jared? How do you, oh, it's German. Okay. Bring up his name, will you? So we could, I can learn how to spell it. It's a German name. Where are you, Jared? I'm in Chicago. Chicago, everybody's in Chicago. All of our guests recently are in Chicago. So, Jared Ostmeier. Okay. Yes, yes. Okay, and the reason Jared is here is because everybody wants to know what you can do with a Bitcoin. So, the idea is, this is a great currency and all that, but if people say it's never gonna take hold until you can actually do something with it, you gotta be able to buy something with it. Of course, everybody wants to go to Starbucks and buy a Frappuccino with us with a Bitcoin. And we're all looking forward to that day, which I'm sure is coming soon. In the meantime, you wanna know what to do with it. What can you do to, you know, what can you buy with a Bitcoin besides alpaca socks? I mean, no offense to the alpaca farm. I mean, that's fantastic. It's wonderful, but there probably are other things people want to buy besides alpaca socks. So, we have a, you know, I created a site called bitcoinme.com, which is kind of like the Bitcoin for the everyday person. What you can, you know, and how to buy Bitcoin for a non-technical person, how to store them and back them up. We're gonna do a how-to video this week about that. But also, what can you do with it? Everybody wants to know. There've been attempts to create a directory. I even tried to get our promotathon team to create a directory of merchants that accept it. But there are probably hundreds of new merchants every day that are popping up that accept Bitcoin. But getting them all in one list is difficult because, you know, it's a major chore to create your own yellowpages.com for Bitcoin. It's a major chore and, you know, what's in it for the community. The other thing is that what I realized after I discovered Jared's little tool, which we'll get to in a minute, is that most people who are looking to see a directory of stores, merchants, both brick and mortar and online that accept Bitcoin, they're not really going there to shop. What they're really going there for is to browse and see what can you do with a Bitcoin. So they just wanna know. Like, give me some ideas besides alpaca socks. So when I saw this tool, I was very impressed. At first I didn't understand. Like, what is this? I didn't quite get it. It took a little bit, but now I get it. So when you go to bitcoinme.com and click on the buy, no, not buy, shop, click on the shopping tab, you're gonna see Jared's widget. So tell us the origination of this widget. Where did you come up with the idea, Jared? And what does it do? It started off with several midnight conversations with my friend. We were wondering where would Bitcoins first be used to make, to purchase and buy goods and services. And we thought it was going to be Craigslist. So what we did was we started, my friend did most of this. He started reposting items on Craigslist on his website, trying to just basically get free advertising to Craigslist users accepting Bitcoins, trying to jumpstart the economy. You mean, I'm sorry to interrupt, but you mean these are people that were advertising products for sale on Craigslist for Bitcoin. So he was just kind of aggregating those and putting them into his own site. Yes. Okay. And so, you know, this, I mean, the meantime was working on creating a, something like a Twitter feed for Bitcoins. Mm-hmm. And the idea kind of came together that maybe we should create a live feed that features merchandise that people can buy with Bitcoins. And so we started looking into ways to kind of automating this process so that we could scour the internet and find items for sale that people were selling that they could, and for Bitcoins. And then, you know, reposting this in this live feed is kind of free advertising, you know, for the seller. Mm-hmm. Okay. So when you look at the widget, what are you seeing, actually? Well, so I have this database that was generated by a web crawler that I wrote, and it's indexed about 10,000 items. And when you look at the widget, what you're seeing are items being randomly pulled out of that database and put up there on the widget as they scroll on down in a live feed. Mm-hmm. Now, we also have the ability to instantaneously add new items to that feed. So one of the things, I'm excited to have coming out in just a few weeks, is a feature where people can put up their own website where they're selling a particular item. Maybe it's on Craigslist, maybe it's on the Bitcoin forums, and that will appear instantaneously in the feed. It's kind of like Twitter, which is live, meets Craigslist, but for Bitcoins. You mean that they post an item on Craigslist? This exists now? This is already part of the widget? It's not pulling from Craigslist at this moment. That's something I could set up. Wow. It's just a matter of me adding the site into the list. But this widget is pulling from lots and lots of Bitcoin stores. So if you go to the Wiki trade page, you'll see about 20 stores that sell consumable goods for Bitcoins. And that's the primary source for this widget is getting its data. It's pulling items from those stores, it's crawling their web pages, and it's reposting it in the slide feed and to this widget, which is on your website. Yeah. Wow. Okay, so anybody with a website related to Bitcoin or otherwise can just, you can actually go to bitcoinme.com and click on the shopping tab and you'll see the widget there as well as other places. And you can just click on the embed tab and you've got the code that you can embed into your own website. Exactly. So the awesome thing about this plugin is that it's embedded right now in about a dozen websites and that's growing. And so when someone submits their website for me to index or when I find their website automatically through my web crawler, their merchandise gets promoted across a dozen sites. So it's great advertisement for them. Cool. And anyone can put it into their web page just by using this embed button. It's like embedding a YouTube video. Click embed, there's a line of code you copy and paste into your web page. So it's great for the economy. Anyone with a blog or any sort of web page can take this widget and help jumpstart the Bitcoin economy by putting it into their web page. Right. Exactly that. Jumpstarting the Bitcoin economy because people wanna know. I mean, when I first looked at it, I was like, okay, what is this? I was very, very busy and distracted at the moment. I was like, okay, I don't get it. It's weird. But then later, on a different day to more relaxed on a Sunday morning, I'm looking at my phone going, wait a minute, this is kinda cool. As I saw, I think the first thing I saw was something like a jar of Jiffy peanut butter go by and I'm like, what? You can buy Jiffy peanut butter with Bitcoin. So you click on the item and then the item drops down into the window below, which is really cool. You can read more about it and you can also click on the website that'll take you to the whole entire store that sells all kinds of munchies and snacks for Bitcoin. I didn't even know existed. So even those of us who think we know what's going on a little bit in the Bitcoin world, this is changing so fast. It's happening at internet speed. More and more merchants are coming online every day, every hour. So the idea that we can check in one central repository of all the types of things that you can buy with Bitcoin is really, really cool. Things are scrolling by probably 95%, you're not interested in and then all of a sudden you're like, whoa, I'm looking for that. That's exactly what I'm looking for. I had no idea you could buy it with Bitcoin. Let me support the Bitcoin community and the Bitcoin economy by supporting this merchant that sells Bitcoin. I think it's brilliant. And also the idea of Craigslist, although you never know what you might actually be accumulating on Craigslist because Craigslist is a kind of wild, wild west of advertising. A Craigslist at this point has been overrun with people spamming it. They're just throwing in the keyword Bitcoin. Right, yeah, that's a little bit of a difficulty. But at least that's probably why you haven't included it right now, right? Yes, that's exactly it. But all of the legitimate merchants. Now let's say Chris here who's doing our producing and live switching right now, hey Chris, he's setting up a web store. He wants to use a free open source. What is it, magenta, right? Free open source. Well, you're looking at that. Fusion. What? Volusion. Okay, so another one. All right, so some sort of a free open source web store. Now, obviously, he's got to find a plugin that will accept the processing and the shopping cart for Bitcoin and all that. But once he has a site up that accepts Bitcoin, how does he get his store and all of its items entered into your widget so that it appears everywhere? And also. Well, it may happen automatically, but if it doesn't, he can just go to the widget and click on, I think it's add item or add entry. And so he will be able to submit to that button. So he'll be able to submit his website. And if my web crawler hasn't automatically found his store, then it will be added in when he submits it to me. So anybody can get promotion in this plugin. There's no charge for it. Anybody can submit their website, their merchandise. So hold on a sec. I'm getting blown away by Skype calls here. Yeah. I'm gonna post this out. Oops, your people are guessing your Skype name. They're loving to play with the phone like little kids. Anyway, well, I'll take this break for one second to say two things. One, Joshua, can you bring me my glasses out of my leather briefcase so I can see the chat room? And also I wanted to say though, which I forgot to say the top of the hour is that today's episode of the Bitcoin show is brought to you by Ambivert Creative. Ambivert Creative is A-M-B-I-V-E-R-T, creative. C-R-E-A-T-I-V-E dot com, ambivertcreative.com. What they do is they create your corporate identity. So they'll design your logo and really slick, Fortune 400 style and give your company and your website that actually accepts Bitcoin and so on, they'll give you a real professional slick looking corporate identity. Logo, web design, stationery, you name it, everything from beginning to end, they create your corporate identity. And bitcoinbonus.com, bitcoinbonus.com is a way to get kickbacks for what you're doing already. You're shopping online at the major, major.com sites, big and small, actually all different types of sites that you're shopping at anyway. You're buying web hosting, you're buying shopping online at bestbuy.com, all these big, big sites. Just check it out, bitcoinbonus.com because when you shop at these sites, you will get a kickback paid to you in Bitcoin just for shopping and buying things that you're buying anyway. So it's brilliant, bitcoinbonus.com and bluecanarynightlight.com. Blue Canary Nightlight makes this cool little glowing blue canary nightlight, exactly what it says and very cool. Especially if you have kids or elderly people, whatever, it's a really slick looking nightlight. And yeah, they have a 10% discount for Bitcoin users. So the code is, is it 5% off? It says 10%. Anyway, it's 5% off, I guess. I've used this code. The Bitcoin Show One, which is TBCS1, is what it stands for. So use this code TBCS1 for 5% off. That stands for the Bitcoin Show One, I guess. TBCS1. And also, tradehill.com. Tradehill is the new 24 hour automated exchange site where you can buy and sell bitcoins quickly for cash and they have many, many ways to get money in and many ways to get it out and multiple currencies. It's awesome, the new kids on the block but they're really, really the most advanced online trading site right now. And if you get 10% off for life, I've used the referral code TH-R141, which stands for tradehill referral code. So it's TH-R141 for 10% off for life. So we thank our sponsors. And so back to the widget. So who did the coding? Was it you or your friend or both of you together? I did all of the coding, so. Right, you did all the coding, okay. Cool, cool. It was my, let me just back up a sec and say, Blue Canary, I believe is in that database. Oh, are they? So it scrolls by periodically. Well, all of these should be in there, shouldn't they? They should be, they should be. Yeah, if they're not. So it's growing, the database keeps growing and I don't have time to look at every entry nowadays. Right, right, there's so many. So let's see, when, okay, how do you, how do you, if somebody embeds this on their site, is there any incentive for doing that? Do they, is this like AdWords where they get paid for it or how does that work? So I want to be fair to, you know, website owners who embed this plugin. Like for example, I know several Bitcoin stores that now use this plugin. And, you know, when they're using my plugin, they're taking traffic away from their site to other websites. And so to help repay these sites, I'm implementing a new system where, where the more people that leave your site then the higher priority your merchandise gets in the fee. So I'm going to try and return traffic to you that's being lost because you embedded the plugin in your site. So in some ways, it's a way of discovering new Bitcoin websites. So it's just basically like a share and share, like if you, if I embed it into my site, then you're going to put a listing for my site into the directory and it's going to grow exponentially then. How do you, are you manually entering these? Are you approving them? How do you prevent spam? So okay, so some of it is, it does require a manual entry. System isn't 100% automated yet. And spam is definitely, so yes, so yes, some of it does require manual entry. Spam is definitely a problem. And to address that, right now, when I keep the plugin running in the background and whenever I see an item that's offensive, I remove it, but I'm also adding in a spam button. So, you know, people can flag an item to spam. And if it's flagged enough, you know, I'm going to take a look at it and, you know, you see if this seller is legit, you know, see if there's anything that's offensive about it, about what's up there and so then I'll remove it. So. Okay, so what's the most exotic thing that you've seen advertised there? Well, I've seen quite a lot of stuff advertised. I was just blown away by the variety of merchandise. Everything from peanut butter to web hosting, to video games, I almost bought a beer, I haven't yet. Yeah, I saw that beer. Somebody's selling beer, you know, by Bitcoin, so. Yeah. What, I mean, when you say offensive, like what's, does it have to be G rated or PG rated or PG 17, how do you decide? I would say let's, I'm going to keep this PG rated. PG. So I'm going to do my best to, you know, remove. Sort of like YouTube, the YouTube standard. You know, if someone's trying to sell a weapon, you know, I've seen that. Some people are trying to sell weapons, you know, that's getting removed, you know. Yeah, well, it could be legal, depends if they're licensed, I guess, but. The favorite thing I saw, it just cracked me up. Someone's selling, you know, states, like Porterhouse states. Yeah. Well, that's pretty, you know, there's that, isn't that the Oklahoma beef or something like that? Omaha, Omaha steaks, that's pretty famous. Mail orders, whatever. Who knows, there's absolutely no limit to what people can sell. I used to look at Craigslist. Exactly, yeah. So yeah, and what about things like that? I mean, things that are, I don't know, borderline, I don't know, like, I suppose you can kind of use the YouTube standard. If it's PG's okay, PG 17 really, probably, but nothing beyond that. I mean, a lot of it's going to be determined by the users and what they're flagging is spam. I mean, anyone, you know, someone may, you know, flag something that may not be too offensive, but if enough people flag it as spam, I'm going to take a look at it and I'm going to ask myself, you know, well, you know, maybe I should have this removed. You're right, right. Exactly. I'm kind of crowdsourcing this problem. Okay, that makes sense. So, let's see, what else? All right, so what's in it for me if I display it on my site is that I'm going to get listed. I'm going to get my site listed and- Exactly, and I'm going to redirect traffic to your site by promoting your site in the feed and giving it a priority status. Right. Okay, and then what about the advertiser? Can you just buy a listing? Can you buy more listings? Is that something that you're selling? As of now, I'm not selling advertisement on this. That said, maybe down the road, I may decide to do that. I'm not going to try and make money off this until, until, you know, some of these Bitcoin stores are becoming profitable. It just doesn't make sense. Right. So, it's so. Right. Until some of the Bitcoin stores become profitable. Well, how are you going to know when that happens? I've been in contact with some of them through email. Let me tell you. Some, some, some stores are actually, some of the site owners are actually pretty hard to get a hold of. Yeah, yeah. That's all right. So, I really want to hear back from some of these stores to know, you know, what kind of sales they're getting. Right. Yeah. Now that said, I, I can track what people click on in this plugin. So, if, you know, if you look at the plugin, you know, you can see that there are a set of buttons. There's, you know, learn more button. If you just click on an item, it's going to bring up a description of that item and you can read about it. Right. You can also click a buy button. And so, you know, I actually track these clicks. I don't, I don't put a cookie on people's browsers and follow them around on the web. But what I do is, is I, as I track these clicks, so I can see what items are popular. And so, I can see what people are curious about, what they're clicking to learn more about. And I can also see when people click buy now, when they click buy now, redirects them to the, to the parent site that where they can purchase the good. But I also register that. So I can see, you know, each day, you know, 20, 30 people are clicking buy now. And, you know, some of those are, you know, I'm assuming are serious about making a purchase. So, I think, you know, I think there's a, you know, sales that are starting to happen. Is buy now happening the same way? I mean, buy now takes you to the website, just if you, as the same as if you click on the link to their website, right? Or is that, does it take you? It basically takes you to the page where you need to go to buy that product. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Now, I'm not, I don't want to become a, someone who sells merchandise. I don't want to become a Bitcoin store. That's too much work. I want to operate this web crawler and index everything that's for sale in the Bitcoin community. That's what I'm doing. So, what I'll do is I'll take people to the website where they can purchase the item. Mm-hmm. And I'm trying to work with some of these sites to reduce the number of clicks it takes to actually complete that purchase. You know, every click a person has to go through, you know, you lose a percentage of your user base. Exactly. And so, if I can work with some of these sites so that I can take them directly into a shopping cart where the item is already loaded and all they have to do is make a payment and put in a shipping address, that would be awesome. And I think that would do a lot for the Bitcoin community. Mm-hmm. I think so, too. Now, is there, do you have any way of categorizing these businesses? Since you already have the database, can you categorize them into a directory automatically? Or just, like if someone was able to just put them in a proper category so that you could go to a website and then browse by category. Is that in the works or does that exist yet? Good question. So I've noticed a lot of people building directories of Bitcoin businesses online. Mm-hmm. And I'm in a great position to do just that. I can take my database and build this directory of all the Bitcoin businesses that you can visit. I've given this a lot of thought lately. And I think, you know, having a thorough directory of every Bitcoin business is so critical to the economy. Think about it. If you're a restaurant in New York that's accepting Bitcoins and a customer comes and they make a purchase and they give you Bitcoins, what's the first thing you're going to do as a restaurant? You're going to cash out. You're gonna say, okay, this is cool. This Bitcoin, it's new. Let's see how much cash I can get for it. Because, you know, at the end of the day, you have to pay your employee salaries with a big green bag. Right. If there's a directory, a Bitcoin Chamber of Commerce where you can go and find other businesses accepting Bitcoins, then maybe you won't unload your Bitcoins right away. Maybe you'll say, okay, I've got some Bitcoins. I run this restaurant. I need some porterhouse steaks. So maybe I can reorder these porterhouse steaks for some Bitcoins. And all of a sudden you have a Bitcoin economy that's actually starting to work. And so to help get this started, the first step is to have a directory of all the businesses, a structured database that shows every business and what city they're located in, what their services are and reviews about them. And to that end, I'm working on a database and it's going to be publicly accessible. Anybody, any website, any web owner can use it. Anybody can contribute to it. Because this is so important to forming, let's call it a Bitcoin Chamber of Commerce, to help businesses find out where I can go to purchase goods and services that I need when I get paid with a Bitcoin. Yes, for sure. So what's the best advice would you say? I mean, right now when you start a business that accepts Bitcoin, I've read threads in the forum in the bitcoin.org forum that people are trying to brainstorm about ideas of how to generate traffic. Obviously this widget is a great way. If you just, you know, again, I mean, you can go to your site or just go to bitcoinme.com and click on the shopping tab and you see the widgets right there front and center now and click the embed code and you'll actually get an email address for Jared and if you need to contact him and you can also embed the widget directly and so on. But aside from your widget, what are the best ways that Bitcoin merchants are getting their word out that they exist? Like what are the alternatives? The Bitcoin forums are a great way to get publicity, to make other people in the Bitcoin community aware of your product. Of course, there's the Bitcoin wiki trade page, but both of these are unstructured. So, you know, they're not going to link themselves to a Bitcoin Chamber of Commerce. And so, yeah, but they are great ways to get your business known. So, you know, if you have a business and you're accepting Bitcoins, definitely post on the Bitcoin wiki trade page. Definitely make a post in the forums and make an announcement in the IRC chat rooms if you know how. And of course, with the, you know, we accept Bitcoin logo on your website. A lot of people, yeah, that's the main thing, of course. And you can, can you, I mean, if you're, do you have a spider that's actually crawling websites looking for that? And what is it looking for exactly? Because if you just have a logo, you can't find that, right? You have to have the word Bit, we accept Bitcoins. But I do have a spider that crawls the web. You do? Yes. You have a spider that crawls the web. Okay, how does that work? What websites is it crawling? So, basically what a spider does is it loads an HTML page and it looks at all the links in those pages and then we'll follow those. And I basically right now have to tag a website saying yes, this accept Bitcoins or no, this doesn't accept Bitcoins. And, you know, if it does accept Bitcoins, then, you know, I move it along to the next step in that kind of process, which is, you know, pulling out the relevant information from that website. That's a pretty complicated process. Yeah. A lot of engineers spend their lives working on these kinds of problems. I found a couple of easy ways to make this work. When I'm pulling out the relevant information from a website's hard and pulling out each item of merchandise is hard. So, you know, one of the tricks I employ is I look at all the web pages that belong to a particular website and I see what the differences are, you know. Usually every web page is identical, except for the very middle of the web page where the items for sale and I can look at those differences and pick out where the information is for each item. I hope that explains, you know, how it works. I think so, sort of. But in other words, just putting the logo we accept Bitcoins on your site is not enough. It's better if you actually include the words like we accept Bitcoins so that it's easier to find. Oh, definitely, definitely. And, you know, it's gonna help with, you know, Bitcoins are taking off. Everybody's searching for the, you know, with the keyword Bitcoin. You definitely want to put in your website those words. We accept Bitcoins. It might help get you some traffic from Google to your website. Right. And Bitcoin singular and Bitcoin plural, probably both, right? Perhaps. Or you're searching for both, anyway. So you get it either way. Yeah. Okay. Wow. So how much, first of all, how long has this been, have you had this up in existence? Is it brand new? It's a good question. It's fairly new. So I started working on this maybe a month and a half ago. And it was kind of in a private beta for a while. And then I started making some announcements on the form post a few weeks ago. And about a week and a half ago, it just really took off. People started using it in their website. People started discovering it. So that was really cool. Yeah. And how have you seen a lot of growth in the number of businesses that are listing themselves? Yes, but not in the past few weeks. Not since, you know, not since I started my plugin. But over the, you know, when I first started looking into Bitcoins, the only Bitcoin site that I was aware of was, you know, biddingpond.com, you know, which is, it was one of the first, you know, websites accepting Bitcoins. And since then we've seen a lot more sites, you know, where you can post items for sale using Bitcoins. We've also, I think, I've seen double the number of businesses that have posted on the WikiTray page where they're saying we accept Bitcoins. Do you go there and look for new businesses and add them? I do, I do, you know, I have to check there to make sure, you know, my code is working. So I often go to the WikiTray page. It is the authority on what businesses are accepting Bitcoins. Cool. And let's see. Well, oh, I had a question and I thought I forgot about it. What is it that you would want to express to the Bitcoin community as far as the consumers? Is there something, like, for example, are there any brick-and-mortar businesses that are advertising or is it all online right now? There are some brick-and-mortar businesses, you know, right now, you know, offering home security, car detailing, and when they put, like, decals on your car. I can't, I don't have them off the top of my head, but yes, there are definitely brick-and-mortar businesses that are starting to accept Bitcoins. Yeah. And the directory, are you gonna have it, like, organized geographically as well so that if they're brick-and-mortar, obviously, if it's in Cincinnati, Ohio, it's really gonna only appeal to people there locally if they don't have a web presence, right? So you'll... Exactly, exactly. You know, one of the purposes of this directory is to help, you know, Bitcoin businesses find other Bitcoin businesses when they need, you know, to reorder supplies or whatever. And so, you know, geography is absolutely important. Right, okay. Now, that said, that's not something I have in my database right now, that's something I'm going to have to work really hard to play catch-up on, but I, you know, I started to realize how important that will be in the future for Bitcoin businesses. Yeah, especially like here in Manhattan, we have at least two restaurants I know of and two cell phone dealers, and so it's slowly growing. The video production company, well, we, here at OnlyOneTV, of course, we accept Bitcoin for advertising, and more and more, but I think, especially the big cities, I think that you'll find more, you know, a small but growing community of merchants that are brick-and-mortar, they're accepting it. That's a whole new thing, point of sale solutions and so forth. I mean, right now it's so simple that somebody can just create a MyBitcoin account and get a, you know, create a QR code for that Bitcoin address and put it on their cash register. It's really simple. Set up their MyBitcoin account to send them an email notification immediately. And, but, you know, as soon as you pay with Bitcoin within a moment or two, they'll get an email letting them know. So, that's the simplest way, but I know there are some cash register companies that are working on implementing solutions where it's integrated right into the cash register. And, you know, other things, like I was saying, there are some projects that are going to help facilitate, basically hold the merchant's hand through the whole process so that it's transparent, just like a credit card processing setup would be. So, that's gonna help a lot. A lot of people are just waiting. They're like anxiously waiting. They think that Bitcoin really needs the validity of being able to go and shop and buy groceries with it and all that, of course. And, you know, it can't happen too soon. People are just waiting for that to happen now, now, now, right? It's a slow process, but that will definitely help reinforce the value of the Bitcoin if people see that this is, you know, currency where they can buy and sell commodities. Exactly. Goods that they buy anyway, for sure. Yes, yes. Food, you know, clothing, you know, anything, video games, so anything you need, and a new computer, television, a refrigerator, it's all there. Yeah, is it all there right now? Like, can people buy refrigerators and TVs and all that with Bitcoin at the moment? Yes. Really, where? I've seen those in my plug-in. Yeah, I mean, you're talking about new or used? It really depends. You know, you can buy new Apple computers. It might have to be shipped from Germany, but you can buy new Apple computers using Bitcoins. Definitely, you know, you can definitely buy food new. You know, you don't want to buy that used. So... I know that there are... Like, Trade Hill, as the exchange site, they have, they're in the process of adding, I'm not sure what the status is right now, because they're, I mean, especially in light of this Mt. Gauk situation, they're getting bombarded with new accounts and it's crazy for them to try and keep up with. But they have, either now or in the works, multiple ways to sort of spend your Bitcoins directly through Trade Hill. So, for example, if you want to go to Amazon.com, you find an item that you want on Amazon.com, you take that web address and then go back to Trade Hill and paste it into a box there and you can actually take your Bitcoin with one click. It'll sell your Bitcoins in the US dollars and just buy an Amazon prepaid card and then buy the product with those, that prepaid card, the virtual prepaid card. So it's really all transparent though. You just put the URL in and click buy with Bitcoins and in effect, Amazon.com is now taking Bitcoin. Whether they even know it or not, doesn't matter. So they're doing the same thing with many, many of the major.com retailers. So that's gonna be a huge boon for Bitcoin if they can make that easier and easier. That will be awesome. That will be amazing for Bitcoin. I mean, it's so funny because ironically, geez, who knows? Maybe even iTunes can accept Bitcoin. Wouldn't that be ironic? You can buy an Apple computer and shop in the app store with Bitcoin in spite of whether, yeah exactly, whether Steve Jobs likes it or not. You can use Bitcoin for iTunes. Not that we recommend that, but that's the beauty of it. With more and more integration and more and more automation, more and more things that you can do with Bitcoin. I think people are gonna really appreciate it. There is a problem of people not wanting to spend their Bitcoins. People who buy Bitcoins and then they see the value. Like right now it's in this really weird little dip. They're on sale. I say this is the best time to buy right now if you can because of the nonsense about trying to tie it to drugs and all that craziness. Nobody that I know has told me that they've ever even visited that website and bought anything at all. So I mean, I think that that's just overblown BS, but, and we all kind of know that. And I hope the public recognizes that. Trying to ban all cash because somebody's selling drugs in the hood, that's nonsense, it's absolutely absurd. But because of that, it's making press. It makes for flashy headlines, whatever. But because of that and also because of this disaster, disastrous problem with Mt. Gox at the moment. I think anybody who's a real nervous jittery buyer, investor or whatever, they're jumping out because they're panic selling. And so that's why it's in a little bit of a slump. But normally, as normal as Bitcoin has been in the last six months, it just goes up and up and up, doubling or more every week. So the thing is that when people have Bitcoin, they tend to not want to spend it. And they don't want to sell it, they don't want to spend it, they want to hold onto it. So at first, there was a lot of talk of merchants not wanting to accept Bitcoin because of its volatility. And I think that's really not an issue too much because you accept Bitcoin and usually the price of the value goes up and who doesn't want a currency that's value's going up. On the other hand, as long as you're gonna hold onto it for a reasonable amount of time, but if it's 24 hours of course, then now you're day trading. But there are point of sale solutions that are gonna address that where you can actually buy with Bitcoin $12.50, whatever the item is, and then the processing actually will receive the Bitcoins and sell them on the market for that rate instantly so it guarantees the merchant that dollar value at that moment. It worked very much like credit card processing, so that's gonna solve that problem, I think. But the other side of it is a bigger problem and that is people who, everybody says they want all these options to shop with Bitcoin, but do they really? Do they really? Because when you have Bitcoins, do you really want to spend them? I mean, I don't think I want to spend a Bitcoin on being a butter, I don't know. I mean, I'd rather spend the cash in my pocket and keep my Bitcoins. So I wonder, have people talked about that? Maybe that's a problem for merchants that sell for Bitcoin that people don't want to part with their Bitcoins? It definitely is a problem. Right now, with the volatility in the Bitcoin market, there are some people looking to unload and inevitably some people will unload by purchasing a commodity and that's good for the economy. But it definitely is a problem. I want to hold on to my Bitcoins, I don't want to get rid of them yet either. So it is tricky. Yeah, basically shopping with them is another way of selling them. I'm sorry, say that again? Shopping with Bitcoins is sort of another way of selling them. Yeah. I do want to point out that one reason I did decide to go with the feed for this plugin is because I believe it will help stimulate impulse buys where people see an item all of a sudden that they want out of anticipation of what's coming next in the feed. They'll see something, they'll click buy and hopefully they'll spend their Bitcoins and help get this economy moving. Right. So when you say a feed, do you offer like an RSS feed or is this an API or something that people could use the information in another way besides just the widget? I'm looking into, I've looked into making a feed. I just need to find the time to do it. I do want to make a large part of this system open. I don't want to keep it closed off. I want to make it transparent. I want other people to be able to use this data. That's one of the reasons why I'm going to be putting together a directory listing of all the businesses. The database that powers that directory is going to be available to everyone. That said, I haven't decided what to do with each individual item of merchandise that I've indexed. I think I will offer that in an RSS feed so anybody can put it into a live feed. I just have to look at the, to be honest, I'm unfamiliar with the RSS protocol. I have to look at that. I'm sure it's really simple, but it's just a matter of me reading through the RFC page. So. Right, exactly. The people are asking about the, to comment on the anonymity of using Bitcoin. That's a very general Bitcoin question, but a lot of people are confused about that, especially the media. The more things they read in the media about it, the more confusing they, it is, the more confused they get. How would you explain how anonymous, like if someone says, are Bitcoins anonymous? How would you explain that? So I'm actually reading some of the papers, the academic papers on Bitcoins right now. I haven't gotten through all of them. My understanding, I could be wrong, is that you can see pretty much every transaction happen. You can see every transaction, yeah, every, you can see the money move around in the network, but you don't know who owns each account. And so if you know what you're doing, you can be anonymous. But it is in some ways a transparent system that you can see money flowing around through the Bitcoin economy. So transactions can be seen, anyone can see those, but you don't really know who owns what account, so. It's almost like a public, like an online forum post where you can see every post. You don't know who posted it, you just kind of know the pseudonym. So it's almost like, what do they call it? It's an institute of the internet, you know. Yeah, exactly. So you can see everything, and like you can actually, we were talking about this before, you can actually verify, we're talking at lunch. By the way, that's the reason, I didn't tell people, but that's the reason we were delayed in our broadcast today, because normally it's at 2 p.m. Eastern time, and something happened on the way to work today. I got a call right before I left the house, and this Bitcoins had, I hadn't seen him in months since January, when Bitcoin was whatever it was in January, and he said, I wanna meet you for a cup of coffee. I'm in midtown, and I was like, okay, it sounded really urgent, and I'm like, okay, I have a time for a cup of coffee. So, but that ended up being like three hours because he dropped this Bitcoin bomb on me, and I can't really talk about it right now, but people tell me things, people tell me all kinds of things about new ventures and new ideas and things that they're working on, but non-disclosure, you can't tell anybody, it's a harsh secret, but I'll tell you, it's really fun to know the things that I know that are coming, but this is a really big one. I know I'm such a tease, but the thing is that I just really can't say anything about it, but it's a new idea for a new type of technology that is really the hottest thing since Bitcoin. It really is itself. It's an idea that is, it's on the drawing board right now. This guy's thought of it, and he's got some people on board with it, some of the real key people on board with it, and the thing is that you see all these discussions and all this stuff about the problem or problems that Bitcoin has, and all these people trying to work out the solutions. What's the best way to fix this problem? But nobody's thought of this. That's what's really exciting. Nobody has actually thought of this, and it's like, oh my gosh, it's so obvious in a way when you look back at it. But anyway, that's why I was late today. So what, and you'll hear more about that. Stay tuned to the Bitcoin show. We'll release as much information as I can when I can. But that kind of is a good segue to lead in with what do you see as the biggest problem Bitcoin has as a whole, the Bitcoin economy? What's the number one problem that needs to be solved? That's an okay, in my opinion, I think for the Bitcoin currency to take off, you need to see it being used to purchase goods and commodities for it to become legitimized in the eyes of the average person. They need to know that they can buy goods and services with this currency, and that people are actually using it to buy goods and services. And so I think that's a problem that will solve itself in time. You know, I think there's what, 60, 65,000 people that were on the empty Gox database. That's not that many traders when you come to think about it. But did you read in the forum, they were talking about how the number had doubled in just a few number of weeks. Like it had gone from 30,000, something to 60,000 only in the last month or a couple of weeks or some crazy number. Like it was just exploding with how fast the community has grown. Hopefully with the addition of more people buying into the economy, we'll see the price become more predictable, the value of the Bitcoin become more predictable. And that will hopefully alleviate some of these problems of buying goods and services using Bitcoins. But also I really love what you were saying about Trade Hill and what they're working on right now. I think that that's going to be awesome. Exactly, yeah, that is terrific. So, but you see the number one challenges, businesses accepting it for day-to-day commerce. I don't see that, yes, people need to see it being used to buy goods and services. I think the Bitcoin currency has to become something more than cryptographic keys traded at some of these exchanges. It has to become a currency that's used just like in the other currency, so. Well, I mean, the thing, it's not, it's hard to say. It's like cash, so what is cash being used for? Because it is cash, you can say, you can see what businesses accept cash, but you can't see everything that is handled in cash. So there's a whole underground economy that happens in cash as we know, but we don't really know. There's no public ledger of that. So all sorts of private, personal things, not that they're illegal or they're even secret, but if we get a lunch and Chris puts it on his visa and I don't have cash, whatever, I give him Bitcoin or cash, whatever, it's the same idea. There's no record of it, there's no receipt, there's not traceable in my big brother bank and whatever isn't watching exactly what I do. So the thing with Bitcoin is similarly, if you've got the Bitcoin app on your Android phone or you've got my Bitcoin in your browser, you can send someone a Bitcoin just over lunch for anything, absolutely anything. I owe you for babysitting, whatever, it could be absolutely anything. So this whole underground, not really underground, but off the books, ability to transmit money that's just so empowering and we don't really know, I guess we know how many transactions are happening. One of our hackathons, one of the guys came in and said, did you see this? He just spotted this transaction in the blockchain that was like, at the time it was like the equivalent of like $700,000 in one transfer, one block. It's like, that's so cool. You wonder, what was that for? Did somebody really buy something for $700,000 or did they just move it from one place to another? It's just very intriguing, isn't it? Yes, it is, it is. It's kind of like seeing the bank records for Citibank with the names removed. It's like, wow, I wonder who had that much money and what they did with it. I'd like to go back to the point you were saying that Bitcoin solved a problem of, how can I give you $5 online as easily as I send an email? And the Bitcoin currency is really, it's so different from like using a credit card. A credit card transaction, it's backwards. You're giving out your credit card number. You're giving out the keys to your bank account. Exactly. It makes you dependent on the bank as an escrow service. It's ridiculous. And you know, Bitcoin solved all of these problems. It's a wonderful currency. Yeah, it's exactly. It's kind of like giving someone, like publishing the keys to your house and then, you know, if anybody comes in you have to throw them out, you know, if they're not welcome. It's so the opposite that, yeah, Bitcoin is the way money should have been designed. It's just so brilliant that you get an address and the only thing you can do is send me money and that's that. And you don't even have to publish a name that's attached to that address. So yeah, it's really brilliant. The thing about it's being anonymous though, people have to realize that it's not really anonymous by default. It's... Yes, by default. By default, it's not anonymous. You can absolutely see it. If you put a donation address on your website, for example, if you have a website and you put a donation Bitcoin address, everyone can look and see how many Bitcoins have been sent to that address and when they were deposited into that address and when they were taken out and then what address they went to. And so they went to another address and then where that many went to another address and another address and if there's this... It's almost like genealogy. So you draw this tree forms and then in the end there's a branch and there's like, oh, boom, this Apple store. You bought something at the Apple store with Bitcoin, but not likely, but anyway, you get the idea. So that could be tracked back to say who was the customer who bought something for 173.427 Bitcoin on this day and they could actually make that connection. If they have enough data points, then forensically, if you've ever watched CSI or something, that even cash is traceable. So they could forensically go back and figure out who it was. So if you're planning on committing a crime and using Bitcoin, I wouldn't. I wouldn't, just stick to cash. The Federal Reserve notes will do just fine, thank you. But it's not completely anonymous. Of course, people always try and figure a way around it and so people figure out a way to scramble their Bitcoin addresses and make it harder, but it's just easier just dealing cash. If a crime happens, people always figure out, how can I do something illegal? It's not the fault of the currency. The currency of choice for criminals. Yeah, it's a choice. People use it, it's how you use it. Exactly, but still, the currency of choice for criminals is US dollars, the paper US dollars. So stick to that, you're better off. But yeah, Bitcoin is actually, it can be anonymized because it is electronic and the easy thing about it is that you don't have to carry briefcases full of cash if you've got a large amount, you can literally just email it almost. It's easy and simple and affordable to send. There are no transaction fees and irreversible and all those advantages. What do you think about people right now today if people have accumulated or invested a large amount in Bitcoin, what should they, where should they store their Bitcoin offline to keep it safe, online or offline otherwise? You know, people need the digital equivalent of a safe. They need to have a computer set up using a secure operating system like Secure Linux or OpenBSD that only runs the Bitcoin software and a web browser that they can use where they only go to, you know, Trade Hill or one of the other exchanges. That is your digital equivalent of a safe, you know, an isolated secure computer system where you're not running any other software other than, you know, the bare basics. People need to realize that, you know, that just like you can't, you know, just like people leave money out on, you know, you can't leave your money out on the kitchen table. You can't leave a pile of money sitting on the kitchen table. You know, you put it in a safe. The same is true with Bitcoins, you know. You can always draw an analogy from the world of cash to the world of, to the digital world of Bitcoins. So the, what do you think about Bitbills where you end up with a physical implementation of Bitcoin that you can, then you have to secure it in a safe or a, you know, safety deposit box or bury it in your backyard or whatever. You normally do it again. It's an intriguing idea. I haven't really had the time to look into it yet, so. Yeah. Well, Doug is like one of the MIT student and he and his partner came up with the idea when they first heard about Bitcoin. And I think it's a great idea for the non-technical person who doesn't want to mess with a computer operating system at all. You can just like, here, here's a box of Bitbills, you know, just bury it in your backyard or put it in your safety deposit box, sew it into your mattress, whatever you would normally do with a stack of cash. But it really is cash like or like bars of gold or something because it is the physical object itself is what you have to protect. But that's one of those things that I think it's kind of a makeshift band-aid solution because it's, although it's great and it's practical for what it is, it also has one drawback in that you lose one of the benefits of Bitcoin, which is the fact that it's electronic and it's virtual. So we're gonna actually, we're gonna make a video, we're gonna shoot it I think tomorrow and we're gonna keep editing it and make, we're gonna have some experts review and make sure that we're accurate in this. I'm sure you can participate in that. But how to create your own secure wallet file on a clean, fresh installation of a system like take a brand new computer or an old computer, wipe it out, put a new Linux on it and create a wallet file with what do you call it, TrueCrypt and encrypt on an encrypted volume and then back it up to some brand new Virgin thumb drives and burn some CDs and stuff. So you have multiple copies of an encrypted version of your wallet and then use that address as your piggy bank address just to deposit Bitcoins into that for your savings. So we're gonna make a how-to video to do it yourself. So you don't have to trust all these cloud services and getting hacked and all that stuff so that people can, in the spirit of the true distributed nature of Bitcoin, people can back up their own wallets and be responsible for their own stuff. This sounds like a thriving business. People selling the Bitcoin safe, you know? Yeah, absolutely. People, you know, selling these online, specialized computer systems for keeping your Bitcoins. I think, you know, maybe it'll happen in a few months. Yeah, they could actually mail you a little, you just order for 995 or whatever, 999 Bitcoins. You order a little package and come in a FedEx box, right? Or UPS and inside would be like three CDs and three USB drives and a printed copy of the Bitcoin address or something. And you just send all your Bitcoins to that address and hide these objects. And actually, like you could take the CD and email the file to yourself to a few people's Gmail accounts and say just archive this file for me and be done with it. That think that's a great idea and it needs to be implemented into the software. Well, you know what, Jared? Thank you so much for joining us. It looks like we're out of time. Thank you, I'm honored to be on your show. Sure, sure. It's great. I think you've done a great job and we'll be watching for this widget to just explode. I think it's gonna be very, very popular. So thanks for joining us, everyone. And we will see you tomorrow, hopefully on time, two o'clock Eastern time tomorrow. Thanks for joining us. Okay.