CoinTalk™️

Brian Patrick Eha, who has covered crypto lobbying for Breaker, calls in to talk about the Senate Hearings. Part 1 here.

A first hand account of yesterdays Senate Hearing throwdown between Nocoiner Roubini and Procoiner Valkenburg (a former guest!) from Zack Voell (Messari) who was there. Zach's podcast The Coin Pod (returning in 2019 - subscribe!) Messari - Crypto News, Pricing, and Research

🐞 Bitcoin gets bedbugs 🌱 Weed is the new crypto 🎤 Tokenized Soundcloud rap 🎟 Aaron gets a CVL token sale ad in his Instagram feed 😴 Is Bitcoin stable?

🕳 Aaron & Mike Novogratz #callabottom 🧐 Tracking crypto by the BGCI (Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto Index) rather than BTC price 🎉 Con Con, the Coin Talk conference for crypto moderates 👽 Vitalik's brutal honesty 📉 The crypto crash is now worse than the Dot Com bubble

🍑 ViaCoin (VIA) related ass-eating 🤥 Aaron's reluctant turn towards ETH buying 🎭 Shapeshift, Changelly, and the end of anonymity 🌍 Tony Sheng (writer and Product Lead at Decentraland) talks about applying the ideas of Eric Hoffer's 1951 book "The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements" to crypto

Aaron and Jay welcome back on Brady Dale from CoinDesk to talk EOS, what "governance" actually means, and exchange-issued coins like Binance's BNB.

Chris Dannen, who mines and manages a crypto fund (Iterative Capital), talks about a research trip to Shenzhen and Beijing. Listen to our previous interview with Chris from June 2018. Thanks for our friends at Medium for helping make this show possible!

💣 Excerptoshi truth bombs and new revelations from the shadowy Nakamoto Family Institute ☠️ What happens to ETH after ICOs? ⚽️ eToro pays 7 English Premiere league teams in BTC

Jay & Aaron use the 1-year anniversary of the BCash fork as an excuse to review the last year in crypto: the winners, the losers, the narratives and the fake outs. Thanks to our partners at Medium.

Aaron & Jay read and answer questions listeners have emailed in.

💳 Vitalik says the future is $5-10 crypto gift cards 🇨🇳 The Bitmain IPO and Crypto Power Rankings 📞 Aaron and Jay seek advice from a Craigslist "Crypto Consultant" Thanks to Zach from nycryptoconsulting.com and to our partners at Medium.com where you can find all the best writing about crypto.

We talk mini-bounces, Bitcoin ETF hype, the Chinese mining business is a good business, and Doug returns from the World Series of Poker for a trip through altcoin nostalgia. Thanks to the Techeme Ride Home podcast for sponsoring the show! And thanks to our partners at Medium.

Jay and Aaron talk about the coverage of Augur assassination markets and Aaron loads up his Metamask account with REP to make a live betting market based on whether the Trump pee tape will come out. Then Aaron interviews @Coinyeezy and @NonDualRandy about making crypto products that people can actually use like Honeyminer, which you can use to mine with a spare computer.

Jay & Aaron download Augur, sync the ETH blockchain, and place their first bet on the decentralized prediction market. Download Augur

🇷🇺 Russian hackers used BTC to buy VPNs and domains 🛍 Coinbase goes on a shopping spree and "explores" adding ZRX, ZEC, ADA, BAT and XLM 🎰 Augur launches and we consider betting on some of the more skewed lines

A book excerpt ("Duality") purportedly from a memoir by Satoshi Nakamoto appeared online. Aaron & Jay do a close read and guess what the real Satoshi has actually been up all these years. Show Notes What Does Crypto Care if Zooko Is a Millionaire? (CoinDesk) Did Satoshi write this book excerpt? (Wired) Duality: An Excerpt (Nakamoto Family Foundation)

WIRED's Gideon Lewis-Kraus visits the crypto cave to discuss his cover story on the tragicomic scandal that is Tezos and how well-intentioned projects can end up just as troubled as scams. Show Notes "The Economic Limits of Bitcoin and the Blockchain" (Eric Budish, University of Chicago Booth School of Business) Gideon Lewis-Kraus Tezos (XTZ) Tezos: Inside the Crypto World's Biggest Scandal (WIRED, June 2018)

📚 The Fake Internet Money Book Club Vol. 1 concludes with a discussion of what a world run on the Bitcoin Standard would look like. Show Notes: @Saifedean The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking (Wiley, 2018) Saifedean Ammous' Blog My 133 favorite quotes from The Bitcoin Standard (Yorick de Mombynes, Medium) Enta Omri - Umm Kulthum

🇨🇳 The CEO of Skycoin claims he was kidnapped by his own Chinese marketing team and encourages investors to dump and rebuy. 💩 Bitcoin maximalists are sick of sh*tcoins. 🏧 Speaking of sh*t, Steve Bannon has come out as a coiner. 🦄 Would Bitcoin be better off if Ethereum had never existed?

Most of the miners you'll encounter are secretive and eager to discourage you from getting into mining. Not Chris Dannen–he's a former journalist and the author of two books on Ethereum who now runs Iterative Capital, a crypto fund that runs multiple mining facilities.

⚰️ Aaron buries his first love $SUMO 🧟‍♂️ The Monster ICO 💳 Are gift cards a money-laundering scam? Is everything a money-laundering scam? 🙄 What would stable Bitcoin really mean?

The Fake Internet Money Book Club returns with our second episode on "The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking" by Saifedean Ammous. 🥩 Why return to a "standard" at all? Why Bitcoin not gold? ⏳ Time Preference and Money 😂 Aaron accidentally invents the worlds stupidest stable coin

🤖 After Ripple fans were offended by Jay's suggestion that they are mostly bots, we asked the most reasonable XRP-fanatic we could find to tell us why he is so passionate about Ripple. (Thx, Kieran) 🔫 Should we move to Bitcointopia in the Nevada desert? 💉 Cansecoin is not real, but Jose Canseco's twitter crypto-calls have been DEAD ON.

🗞️ An interview with the Nathaniel Popper, who covers crypto for the New York Times ⛴️ The Consensus yacht party where they gave away 2 Aston Martins in exchange for watching an insane 23-minute Jaxx commercial 👘 Aaron's beloved $SUMO rebrands as $RYO and we are all the poorer for it

🏦 ZCash (ZEC) goes "good crypto" legit with a licensed exchange listing on Gemini 🎉 The Supreme Court rules that SPORTS GAMBLING IS LEGAL IN ALL STATES (sort of) 🙀 Jay visits Ethereal and witnesses Mike Novogratz bidding on a $140,000 cryptokitty

📚Fake Internet Money Book Club: Part 1 🌽 Safidean Ammous ’s The Bitcoin Standard 🚕 The Kang guide to taxi medallion speculation 🚽 How Michael Cohen got rekt by Uber

Laura Shin vs Ripple Inc.: Who the hell are these XRP Stans? Coins in Pop Culture: HBO's Silicon Valley ICOs Post-Apocalyptic BTC Spec Scripts: The Bunker with $10 Billion in Bitcoin (Bloomberg)

We talk to Brady Dale, who covers ICOs and more for CoinDesk, plus: the BTC-ransoming of aaronlammer.com Stephon Marbury's Chinese "sports blockchain" Kanye mentions Bitcoin and the market doesn't care Japan moves to ban privacy coins from exchanges the CFTC wants YOU to snitch (on ICOs) the IBM blockchain commercial that plays during the NBA playoffs as a form of torture.

How blockchain was deployed to combat Chinese censorship in a #MeToo moment Whether Ether is a security (Preston Byrne) No, ether is not a security. (Peter Van Valkenburgh, Coin Center) Coinbase CEO just retweeted that 0x has done more for ethereum than any ICO. (Reddit) 0x Protocol: 0x is an open, permissionless protocol allowing for ERC20 tokens to be traded on the Ethereum blockchain. Fake Internet Money Book Club #1: The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking (Saifedean Ammous)

Poker shark / actor Doug Kim returns to the show PLUS: Cambridge Analytica-coin crypto-weed why alts hurt at tax time the mysterious hackings of crypto-personalities like Ian Balina

Alt season on college quads everywhere decentralized videos on DTube George Soros makes the dictator case for Bitcoin the Telegram ICO gets retracted what happens when companies HODL and prices crash James Surowiecki’s MIT Technology Review piece “Bitcoin would be a calamity, not an economy”

@Ledgerstatus, the only trader on Twitter that Jay & Aaron trust, returns to the show to talk about why the fundamentals on Bitcoin have never been stronger, the future of altcoins, and how he remains optimistic during downswings. PLUS: The Floyd Mayweather / DJ Khaled-shilled coin Centra is unsurprisingly a scam. Which celebrity ICO promoters would we trust? And a full breakdown of everything we got wrong in our blockchain episodes (thanks to the listener fact-checkers out there!) Ledgerstatus.com

Maaaaaaaailbag!!!! Plus the Satoshi Vision Conference and the creepy stuff that's getting logged for eternity into the Bitcoin blockchain (Mailbag starts at 21:00)

Aaron & Jay got into crypto as the market skyrocketed, then rode the crashes down. Now as they sit near break even, they discuss all the mistakes they made as amateur traders: chasing alt highs, panic selling the bottom, getting swept up in Twitter hype, and generally making the wrong decisions at every juncture. 😍😴 🤑 😳😳😳 😳🤢🤮

After failing to internalize the business/humanitarian potential of blockchain technologies in the last episode, Aaron talks to the reporter Adrianne Jeffries about her Verge article "Blockchain is Meaningless". @adrjeffries Adrianne Jeffries' weekly crypto column on The Verge Bitmain’s new $12K cryptocurrency miner might be useless by the time it ships (The Next Web) Blockchain is Meaningless (The Verge) IBM launches a cheaper platform for start-ups to build blockchain projects (CNBC)

Aaron & Jay try (and fail) to wrap their heads about the blockchain itself and how it could be revolutionary in realms outside currency. Can you believe in the blockchain but not Bitcoin? What do companies like IBM want with blockchain technology? Has anyone actually done anything worthwhile with the blockchain other than issuing coins? Thanks to Adrianne Jeffries whose Verge article '‘BLOCKCHAIN’ IS MEANINGLESS' inspired this episode.

Aaron and Jay are back on their bullshit for a late night chat about Coinbase's newly announced Index Fund (which includes a full buffet of the 4 Coinbase coins weighted by market share) and revelations that Mt. Gox's Japanese trustee dumped one of the world's largest cache's of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, decimating the market just as it reached an all time high. Plus a really stupid Bitcoin Cash (BCH) rap video.

Jay and Aaron talk about: what an ICO (initial coin offering) is and how they might be regulated in the future handicapping betting odds for the next tiny country to issue its own cryptocurrency And then interview Peter Van Valkenburg, the director of research at Coin Center which is the "leading non-profit focused on the policy issues facing cryptocurrencies."

Aaron & Jay try to wrap their heads around yet another scammy ICO—the Petro (PTR) issued by Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro. 04:25 Nicolás Maduro looks at Bitcoin miners 04:28 kimjongillookingatthings.tumblr.com 8:45 Coin Talk #5: Tether (USDT) is the New Disneybucks 33:33 The Petro Hasn't Raised a Dime (Alejandro Machado, Caracas Chronicle)

Aaron and Jay talk about Robinhood, the Telegram ICO and the TON token, and then bring on Maria Bustillos to talk about the Civil project which aims to bring the blockchain to journalism and includes her Popula publication. 8:32 Brokerage App Robinhood Thinks Bitcoin Belongs in Your Retirement Plan (Max Chafkin, and Julia Verhage, Bloomberg) 10:45 Bitcoin Thieves Threaten Real Violence for Virtual Currencies (Nathaniel Popper, New York Times) 21:19 @EricWl "Just looked through the Telegram ICO 132-page whitepaper for their TON Blockchain. Essentially a 100% premined, centrally issued, unbounded supply, PoS sharding shitcoin. One of the worst whitepaper I ever read. Full of blockchain armchair guessing and baseless estimates. 0/10." 29:40 Popula

Aaron & Jay go inside the privacy altcoins Monero (XMR) and ZCash (ZEC): what coin fungibility and anonymity really mean how privacy coins differ from Bitcoin—and whether Bitcoin might add those features as a secondary layer in the future whether the association of Monero with dark net markets and money laundering is good or bad for price (and ethics?) how academic research led to defining privacy features of Monero (Ring Signatures) and Zcash (ZSnarks) and how they work (actually we don't really understand, but we try!)

Adrian Chen wrote the first article about the darknet marketplace Silk Road and Bitcoin, causing the price of BTC to go from $10 to $14. Adrian discusses: why he never has owned a single Bitcoin his investigation into Satoshi Nakamoto's identity the misperception that Bitcoin is anonymous *whether crypto has scrambled Jay’s brain Plus, Aaron shills his bags HARD. 7:30 Bitgrail hacked 7:33 Nano (XRB) 14:03 "The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable" (Adrian Chen, Gawker 2011) 17:33 BitcoinTalk forum 24:41 @AdamBack / Wei Dai 25:16 @JiaTolentino 28:28 @NickSzabo4 31:42 Bitmex 45:02 Tor 48:30 "Suspected AlphaBay founder dies in Bangkok jail after shutdown of online black market" (Washington Post, July 2017) 55:01 Bail Bloc 56:29 The New Inquiry 1:04:53 [Dogecoin (DOGE)] 15 1:05:36 Catbreading

On the official podcast of Bitcoin crashes, Aaron & Jay: listen in on CFTC Chairman J. Christopher Giancarlo's hero-making comments to the Senate try to understand why exchanges like Binance are so opaque during downtime (even if they didn't actually get hacked) consider the first prediction market on the Augur (REP) platform which is a bet on "whether Augur will get hacked" 13:20 Forbes' First List Of Cryptocurrency's Richest: Meet The Secretive Freaks, Geeks And Visionaries Minting Billions From Bitcoin Mania (Forbes) 14:33 @CZ_Binance 16:01 Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money (Nathan Popper, Harper 2016) 19:16 Augur (REP) 19:30 Augur Ahead? One of the Oldest ICOs Is Almost Live (Coindesk) 26:37 Giancarlo defines "HODL" for the Senate 33:51 Giancarlo discusses whether Bitcoin is a commodity

Aaron and Jay answer some Twitter questions at the entire crypto market crashes before their eyes, then find some solace in an interview with Bitcoin veteran Jameson Lopp. @Lopp Lopp.net Show Notes (1 hr) 13:08 The Worst Crashes in Bitcoin History 30:35 Lightning Network 35:37 Statoshi 36:23 BitGo

Aaron and Jay try to understand how Tether works and whether its collapse could bring down the entire crypto house of cards. Plus the Coincheck hack and some listener questions from Twitter. (Since this episode was taped last night, it was reported that Tether and Bitfinex had received a subpoena from the CFTC on December 6th.) "U.S. Regulators Subpoena Crypto Exchange Bitfinex, Tether" (Matthew Leising, Bloomberg) 7:50 Tether (USDT) 17:09 Tweet by @Nouriel 25:13 "Japan’s Cryptocurrency Whiz Kid Faces $530 Million Reckoning" (Takashi Mochizuki, Wall Street Journal) 27:04 Stablecoin (SBC) 33:47 "More than 1 million people sign up for early access to Robinhood's new crypto trading service" (Evelyn Chang, CNBC) 36:42 Tweet by @PeterLBrandt 44:32 Oink's Pink Palace 46:09 The Silver Jews Thanks to our partner Medium! Read a transcript of every episode at medium.com/cointalk

In this episode: -Aaron & Jay answer a provocative mailbag question as to whether they even fundamentally believe in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies -The crypto “long winter -Mining and electricity consumption -Ethereum’s hacky-sack mentality vs Bitcoin’s scorched earth =Buzzfeed tech reporter Charlie Warzel comes in for a new deep dive segment on the ERC-20 casino token Funfair (FUN). Send us mailbag questions: [email protected] @CWarzel 4:40 RaiBlocks (XRB) 11:19 "What It's Like To Be Absolutely Obsessed With Bitcoin" (Jay Kang, Vice News Tonight) 12:01 Report: India's Government Sends Tax Notices to Cryptocurrency Traders (Coindesk) 13:22 Local Bitcoins 22:32 Ripple (XRP), Tron (TRX), Verge (XVG) 24:09 "There Is Nothing Virtual About Bitcoin’s Energy Appetite" (Nathaniel Popper, New York Times) 31:13 "Satan’s Credit Card: What The Mark Of The Beast Taught Me About The Future Of Money" (Charlie Warzel, Buzzfeed) 36:00 "Bitcoin Boom is a Boon For Extremist Groups" (Craig Timberg, Washington Post) 41:00 Funfair (FUN) White Paper

The biggest Bitcoin crash in over 2 years has come and gone—and we still don't totally understand what happened. We talk hodling, panic selling, and why each successive crash in your own crypto history is easier (and funnier?) than the last with professional poker player and actor Doug Kim. @SweetJustice Just Doug on Facebook Watch 6:54 @Matthew_D_Green 27:27 Zoin (ZOI) 28:34 "A Theory About the Recent Crypto Price Plunge" (Matthew C. Klein, FT Alphaville) 36:11 Storm (Storm) & BLOCKv (VEE) 40:50 "Just Doug is one of the few good Facebook Watch series in a sea of clickbait" (Shannon Liao, The Verge)

An interview with Nathan Park, an attorney who has been active in crypto regulations in the Korean market, about: —why Korea caught crypto fever —the massive "Kimchi Premium" paid on Korean exchanges like Bithumb and its ties to Chinese mining and money-laundering —what to expect from Korean regulators in 2018 Plus San Francisco's crypto-rich and the J-Pop band "Virtual Currency Girls." This episode was taped Monday, January 15th and 11am EST. The Bitcoin Price Index was $14,066. "Everyone Is Getting Hilariously Rich and You’re Not" (Nellie Bowles, New York Times) "Japan has a new cryptocurrency-themed J-pop band" (Thuy Ong, The Verge)

Aaron and Jay ask one of their favorite Twitter trader @ledgerstatus what every crypto noob should know, plus C.E.S.' saddest product the "Kodak Kashminer," blockchain dentistry, Toshi serfdom and highlights from a Warren Buffett interview on Bitcoin. 3:30 Kodak Kashminer 11:48 Dentacoin 15:22 Toshi 27:02 Warren Buffett on CNBC 33:00 @Ledgerstatus 57:52 The Ledgercast 1:01:30 ledgerstatus.com

Introducing COIN TALK —a new show for crypto-noobs. An overview of the show, plus a bonus chat about Ripple mania, how Aaron became a Sumokoin ($SUMO) baron, and why Jay draws no distinction between altcoin buying and sports gambling. READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT HERE Show Notes 9:30 This Cryptocurrency Inventor Has Suddenly Become One of the World's Richest Men (Time) 9:48 Meet The Crypto Billionaires Getting Rich From Ripple's XRP (Laura Shin, Forbes) 9:55 @NathanielPopper: On the rise of Ripple. If this is a tulip fever, the fever has spread to chrysanthemums and poppies. (thread) 12:00 The Ripple Effect (Izabella Kaminska, FT Alphaville) 21:41 Sumokoin (SUMO) 23:00 HQ Trivia 33:00 I See You, $XRP (@TwoBitIdiot, Medium)