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00:00Thank you very much for joining us. Let's have a round of applause for our two hour two debaters here. We understand. We do that we stand between you and a drink. So we're going to try . We're going to try and keep this one fun. And it's I think we got two people who can who can pull this off. Felix wrote a very thoughtful piece in four medium medium dot com on bitcoin and I believe April 2013 which kind of laid out where he stood on this why Bitcoin is a bubble. It's a thoughtful piece I recommended to you and in that you'll get a lot of quite a bit of what what how Felix feels about this to find out what Barry thinks about bitcoin. I think all you really have to do is open your ears very is a guy who's been on the conference circuit quite a bit. He talks to the media a lot . I talked to him a lot. I think he's been on a conference diet for the very happy reason that he became a father about almost a year ago. So I think he was promising to minimize the number of conferences. But I think in a in a month or two he's to back on the circuit so you will hear more and more from Barry I'm sure . But we've got good differing opinions that should make for a good. You know maybe we'll serve the drinks first then make it better but we're not going to recognize that. Felix always he already wins for the style contest. WHAT'S COME ON PEOPLE UP YOUR FOOD game. Know when I told him bitcoin was not a bubble he just turned purple. Very. Why don't we start with you. And you know let's let's take the positive side first. Why is bitcoin not a bubble. Why do why do you think this has legs . Well for those of you who have been here all day and I think most people have it's hard to not listen to these panels and not get excited not get inspired and not see the potential for bitcoin to really change the world from us from a financial services perspective and who knows what else. Who knows what Bitcoins can become. And it depends on how you define bubble . If you're talking about the bitcoin price we're down 60 70 80 percent from where we were before. So I would say that that kind of defines the fact that we're not in a bubble right now. But the reason why I believe the bubble has burst. We can't be on the bubble anymore. Yes. But the reason why ultimately I think that bitcoin is as transformative as as we all some of us think it could be. Is is because it is attracting the people who are on the stage today as an example . It's attracting the money it's attracting the passion and frankly the existing financial system. It's broken and people are looking for a better way to do things. And given the open nature open source nature of Bitcoin it's enabling innovation and disruption without asking for permission. And to me that leads you to believe that we're just at the start of a very exciting journey. So Felix take him apart. Well I don't. I mean this is this is just pure silicon valley utopianism isn't it. It's the it's the idea that wherever there's a problem there's some kind of technological solution. It's well. Yes . Well give getting my phone call solution isn't the revolution shall be coded. Well yeah it's this I and and I am just as frustrated with the inefficiencies of the global and especially the US payment system as I'm sure everyone else here is. And it's so incredibly tempting to say well it's very does. You know look look at all of these smart people who are putting a huge amount of money in the huge amounts of effort and a huge amount of intelligence into solving this problem. So you know clearly the technology exists. It's a proven technology that's been around for five years. And it's you know anyone with eyes can see what the potential is . Therefore it is all going to work. But this is not. This is not the way the world works. And the fact is that Bitcoin is a five year old technology. The fact is that I wrote my article basically two years ago now it took a little while before I could find anyone willing to publish it. And two years ago everyone was saying well yeah Bitcoin is the currency of tomorrow. You know we are going. We are going to be there just give it another six months. It's going to be amazing. And then back around when it was published in April 2013 we had that first sort of sport that was technically really the second spike forth . Well anyway it was one of those spikes. I timed it very carefully to hit the spike . And then that's been one since and people would look at the spikes as sort of some kind of proof that Bitcoin was working. This is this is the great thing about being married right. It's that you know if the Bitcoin price goes up and you're like Hey look it's working and if Bitcoin price doesn't go up well it's not really about the else elsewhere. So yeah. Well anyway my point is that you know you have a bunch of people saying two years ago that Bitcoin is the currency of the future. You have a bunch of people saying the same thing today and you will have the same thing. You know everyone's people saying the same thing in two years time in years time in six years time. I don't think it's going to zero but I do think it will always be the currency of the future. OK so Barry that's the beauty of the horizon right it receives as you approach Barry tell us if if we're not going to define a bubble as the price bursting or as the price having burst tell us why Bitcoin still has legs quite apart from this whole whole issue of prices which I know you know people on Wall Street don't give a damn about commodity prices or anything like that . But tell us tell us why should we shouldn't care about that . Well look I think the first two panels that did a pretty good job explaining that you can't buy Africa you can't separate bitcoin the currency from Bitcoin the technology and I believe Felix used to say that he likes the technology and he thinks the currency is crap. Well you can say that but tell us why the technology will work and what it what it will do at work. Well let me let me let me actually answer definitely you're dressed differently and that is that I actually agree with Felix that it's either going to be both a currency or technology or both going to fail and because you can't separate the two and the reason why I think that we're about to see some tremendous innovation and disruption in the space is because the price has a tendency and my general counsel is here and she will say any price predictions she's come shoot me. But the bitcoin price tends to have a habit of going through a series of bubbles in Boston after you have a bubble the price goes up to two to 10x it cracks 50 or 80 percent consolidated then it does it again has happened four times and the odds are from a technical analysis perspective is gonna happen again. And if it happens again you're talking about again two to 10x from the prices today. And the difference between where we are today and from the last bubble is Wall Street. Well look where we are. I mean this was this was not happening a year ago. This wasn't happening 6 9 months ago. And so we now have Wall Street. Note how any sort of genuflecting to these sort of Bloomberg seal of approval here you're sitting in Bloomberg best must exist. And and so we now have a sense of substantial amount of money and an interest in this space and it's massive in the sidelines waiting for the price to essentially level out. Great. Barry but tell me why should I swap my dollars for bitcoin and what can I do with it. Because technical analysis. Moon because it's happened before and the future is going to be like the past and in New York the price is going to go up and you're not seeing a Wall Street trader in the making. So look that's like the bull case the upside case of Bitcoin. It's fairly easy to identify in a rally. Paul very very smart investor wrote about a million dollar price target and I would never say you know that's the price target but if you think about what would happen if this company moves into the space talking about substantial upside but you can't say you know go buy Bitcoin and sell your Google stock it's all about you know put your portfolio allocation and I've spent plenty a lot of time in the gold space recently talking to gold bugs talking to people and I I tend to think that bitcoin is going to start capturing a large portion of the new gold money. And I would actually completely agree with Barry on this one. So if you think feeling over a different reason if you feel like gold bugs are incredibly sensible people who completely understand the modern economy and understand how it works and money and all of that kind of stuff then yeah you're in great hands. But Gary the mindset is exactly the same . Well I wanted to make this point that all of you in this room have fought very hard about what money is. And you know questions like this which normal people never think about. And if you think too hard about these questions you sort of take them to their logical conclusions and then what used to happen is you've used to used to wind up as a gold bug and now what happens if you take those questions to their logical conclusions . If you wind up like Barry that in that case are you actually a normal person. Well very let's go back to what. What me. What will help make those bitcoins useful and therefore valuable . Because we were joking a little bit before this you know use cases that make this commodity currency value valuable and you know I hosted a moderated panel at the Bloomberg Foundation's annual conference in Amsterdam earlier this year and we concluded that you needed some you know bizarre mix of really good use case for Bitcoin and kind of celebrity promotion and it ended up being a kind of like drug Web site that was promoted by Justin Bieber or you know Taylor Swift or something. But I mean very right now you know a very good use case for Bitcoin is is illicit it needs more attention. You know so why not. I mean what you know right but that's kind of B.S. that the main use case of Bitcoin is illicit. Well maybe that was three years ago . Everyone knows the main use case of Bitcoin is sitting on it and waiting for the price to go up. Yes. And so I agree with you and look the primary killer the killer app for bitcoin . Honestly it might just be green speculation but that's OK because if the monetary base of bitcoin today you're burying your light and charging a management fee for sitting on other people's bitcoin. Yes . I think there are a lot of management fees being charged in this room. You need to be careful of that kind of talk. All right Felix. But tell us you say you have some respect for the Bitcoin as a technology right. Right. So what's wrong with a bubbling firm fermenting slightly crazy eco system where people try this. They tried that and maybe on the end comes out you know a better payment system. I mean I'm all in favor. OK. So yeah I'm I'm all in favor of that. And I think that we recently I mean I don't think we're in a bubble right now in terms of the Bitcoin price . We clearly aren't. It's been flat going down. Forget the price but something nice about it. We are in a Bitcoin bubble or towards the end of a Bitcoin bubble in investment in bitcoin and we've had hundreds of millions of dollars suddenly going into equity in bitcoin companies which was definitely not the case when I wrote about this two years ago. That's new that pay for a lot of smart people to do a lot of interesting work in this space and the technology is becoming more robust and we don't have you know every single wallet company in Mt. Gox and everyone else going bust anymore those. I think we probably touch with fingers crossed past the days where you know just companies go bust at least the big ones. I think I'm not sure about that but I think I think it's OK if companies go bust but when they take their customers which they always do on eBay it's very rare for Bitcoin company to go bust without people losing money and I think that you know the value of consumer losses in bitcoin failures Bitcoin corporate failures is another case of millions of dollars. You purport to to agree with to think that it has potentials technology so it's going to look as a nice thing I'm going to say is that all of this money from overseas is doing wonderful things for payments technology and for quick crypto currencies. And I think that ultimately I hope to see a world where this crypto currency technology is going to get implemented globally and do wonderful things. So very. So let me get back to your first question which is you know what's the killer app and so right now that I believe here in the U.S. the killer app is greed and speculation and the reason why that's OK is because all of the stuff we've talked about today about what Bitcoin can do this new payment rails remittance and all of that. It's not possible when the total value of bitcoin in circulation is five billion dollars and we have one hundred two hundred dollars trading per day. It's just simply not possible. So the reason why it's OK for a group like mine to create a vehicle that is buying you know we're at almost 1 percent of the Bitcoin outstanding and sitting on it is because we're reducing supply creating demand which will propel the price higher which is likely going to increase volume and velocity which is going to make it possible for all these things to happen. But what's going to make it exciting for the average person to use anything on coins increases velocity. No I'm saying that the price going higher will likely draw people like you writing about it which is going to get more people to speculate on it which is going to result in more volume velocity . I know you're going to write about it again especially the price goes up to Dax. So so what is the key. What's the killer app beyond kind of green speculation. I mean I think we're going to see a killer a gaming app come out something that uses Bitcoin somehow some way . I think that we're going to see something micro payment related that's going to come out that's going to be kind of a killer use case. And look I've invested in 40 companies now and the things that are happening behind the scenes that nobody is aware of. It'll blow it'll blow your mind. And I disagree with Felix that we're at the peak of this bubble. We're at work just the beginning of this. I mean it's you know these CEOs. They don't necessarily pick the right companies although the ones who've gotten involved in bitcoin tend to but they certainly pick the right trends the right industries. And there's only been 400 million invested in the Bitcoin ecosystem this year which again is for forex the previous year. It would not surprise me whether for a billion plus next year and all that money for the past. I noticed that I will take that bet and hope you get to the end. So what has been happening for the past 12 months which no one is seeing is that these companies have been hiring the best talent out there to build products to make it easier to buy bitcoin and hold Bitcoin use and no one has seen yet the fruits of that labor. And we're gonna see in 2015 I think well or somebody said 2015 will be a big year . It's going to be a really big year for bitcoin. OK let me let me ask you both to talk about something which Felix touched on this. No payments technology is ripe for disruption. Oh you know this is a sort of no I say this by way of saying this is a city is not safe. Actually it is a thing which is broken but not all things which are broken can get disrupted. Explain like that. I mean the subway system in New York doesn't work very well but that doesn't mean that it's right for disruption. Okay. There are things which just don't work very well. And if they do become better they become better incrementally. And it is theoretically possible and I'm sure most of the techno utopians in this room would love the idea that you could have some technological deus ex machina come down and completely replace the payments rails of the United States and indeed the whole world is not doing lap. But here it's getting thick. Very talk to us a little bit about that. I know that your your faith in the technological Yvonne man I mean I've heard this argument before the quantity of brainpower invested in in bitcoin even these these metrics of you know data pulls from from bidder . Scuse me. Yeah yeah. Explain to me why that's not just fantasy masquerading as faith. Why I think most people that bitcoins means recognize that here in the US we have a pretty good from a payments perspective you know credit cards and Apple Pay. I mean really the story will likely be international be overseas it'll be kind of how Bitcoin enables people with a mobile device as talked about earlier to kind of get connected to the world and to purchase goods online and whatever the case may be. So I kind of agree with that although I do think that Apple Pay You know like thinks is right. I would spin anything as positive . And so the way that I talk about you know I think about Apple Pay is number one it is gonna be a catalyst for a lot of hardware investment where merchants and people are going to accept Apple Pay. And so you're gonna have them investing in technology and point of sale type solutions. Ultimately Apple will likely open up the fingerprint reader and the NFC antenna and the world is already I think majority kind of Android. And so if anything Apple is going to kind of train consumers to kind of think about their mobile phones as a kind of a wallet and all the merchants are going to have to accept both IAW as well as Android. And as soon as Apple opens up the NFC chip and or the antenna and their fingerprint reader every single bitcoin Cup is going to build a really kick ass application and to take advantage of that of that technology I'm going to change topics now because Felix can you apply your curmudgeonly attitude towards the question of regulation is this Does this portend good bad things. Is this so irrelevant that this is some hopeless underlying that this is something where I have changed my view from two years ago two years ago I met most of the official sector noise surrounding Bitcoin came from places like the FBI and they were like it's unconstitutional to print your own currency and we will crack down on anyone who attempts to do that. And I thought that there would be genuine regulatory opposition to Bitcoin. And I think we have not seen that and if anything we've seen you know what we've seen today which is regulators are sitting on panels and making more or less friendly noises so that you know better than what I thought we'd see. But at the same time the one thing that we learned in the financial crisis that the regulators have taken more completely to heart is that if there's some financial innovation some complex technology something which promises to be really and but you don't completely understand that it will probably blow up in your face and make you look really stupid and possibly bring down the economy with it. So people are regulators in particular are incredibly risk averse . And the one rule they know is if I don't understand it I don't like it. And I'm sure there was some very very smart people here who would love to sit them down and you know walk them through the technology but no it's got to be easy to understand to people who aren't completely invested in this. And I just don't think and I think we saw this actually on the channel on the panel today. I just don't think the regulators are comfortable enough with the technology now or that they will be all of them willing to become sort of captured by you guys in a sort of educational way. This if it's they there's no upside to them of trying to persuade this is something that they understand because frankly it's really hard to understand bearing. I used to think that regulation was the biggest risk for bitcoin. I actually think that was the biggest opportunity and it's not the regulation of the bitcoin industry that gives the opportunity. It is what the regulars are doing somebody else. And you know I spent a lot of time meeting with banks and broker dealers and MSD and they tell you how difficult it is to be in business and to innovate and essentially what's happening is you have a bunch of regulators both the federal state level and globally who are trying to figure out what the heck to do with bitcoin and means nothing is happening and nothing is going to happen because to Felix's point there really is until something blows up and hopefully that doesn't happen for a while . There's not that catalyst that's going to force action. If so what. Mt. Gox split me six months and it certainly isn't. So what you're gonna see is the existing rules and regulations are going to hold back the incumbents from doing anything creative in fact. Anybody who reads the FTSE I think was on Saturday there was a whole article about all the banks getting out of remittance in the emerging markets because it's just too difficult to be in business places . So Bitcoin is going to jump all over those types of opportunities and so we're going to see is the incumbents being slowed down by rules and regulation and then bitcoin. Basically they're saying look we're gonna go build shit and then we will ask for forgiveness down the road if we need to. And eventually the regulators will figure out how to kind of regular around the edges and then ultimately I think what we all believe is there is a world where people just stay in bitcoin but it doesn't scale because this is actually exactly what the banks did right . They all saw a lot of opportunity in remittances. They invested huge amounts of money in remittances. They built up the infrastructure to make remittances easy and cheap and then suddenly they wound up getting cracked down get you facing the crack down to the point at which they said fuck it let's just get it we're giving up that annual look at the big that going gonna happen to anyone who we could scale. I completely disagree because look at the differences they had to build these services on. On decades old infrastructure and close off systems that relied upon all these intermediaries and intermediaries and friction points and so what Bitcoin enables is the elimination of all the all the people that make it difficult and expensive to be a remittance company. They don't have to be involved in the transaction. And frankly I'm nice to hear your your skepticism here because I mean it's it's well established among the regulators that they they're not crazy about the payment system either they think it has terrible inefficiencies they're hamstrung by the fact that there's a you know there would be a bloody civil war within the financial services industry if they started to favor one side or the other . So I dance around it but there is one thing which which is well-known in the momentum of this industry and quite not very well known in the bitcoin industry which is that the private remittances really doesn't matter. We have seen over and over and over again people looking at how expensive it is to send money back to your family abroad and saying This is ridiculous . I can do it for you of that and coming and saying look how cheap it is. And then no one use for them they keep on using Western Union or whoever they would feel like. What if that remittance company could integrate block chain type technology. And then the world would change then of course it wouldn't. It's just it's just that that business would become more profitable. It might even drive down. I mean it would drive down the price for consumers. But you know this is what I'm saying that consumers are not chasing lowest prices. They never have done in the history of remittances. This is not a wave of their own operating costs . The remittance providers are well so remittances profit margins in remittance business are so enormous that you know if save an extra five cents on their remittances big deal very yes. Her remittance. Yeah yeah. I mean picking up nickels in front of a steamroller . What. I mean do I have to respond to that. I mean if you like your beer you were you were ready. I mean there's 500 billion dollars a year sends and remittance and you know to 79 percent to second ATM fees. So there it is you know 30 40 billion dollars of incentive for people to figure out a better way to do it. And I agree with Felix you know the people who are sending or receiving money their first you know kind of like thought it's not OK what's the cheapest way to do it because it's like two options. It's like watching your money grab. And so all of a sudden now that there are gonna be options and very well-funded startups that are going to get to these people they're gonna say well wait I can send money over Western Union and it'll take a day or two and it cost me twenty five dollars and fifty dollars or I can send it using x y z company. And it's instantaneous. And it's basically 1 percent. They're gonna flock to that to that to the Bitcoin company. So gentlemen with the with so much so many lively words having come out of you over Bitcoin one point oh if I say Bitcoin 2.0 and the tremendous potential for that. Felix what sort of outrageous things can you say to them . Well just not not to point and then you get rid of that fine that's bitcoin. I think I think that optimistically speaking what we're going to create here is an open source technology which is going to be incredibly robust and that people are going to be able to build great things up on top of that. And I'm not saying that you know the various ripples and still is in that kind of thing you're going to work we're going to take off but I am saying that we're seeing an ecosystem of technologies being built up as we're talking about the amount of just intellectual capital which is sitting and getting right now around Bitcoin and around crypto currencies. And at some point the the problems with bitcoin itself you know that the size of the block chain and the number of transactions you can do per second and trust issues. You know I think the idea of having a separate currency in general is just a completely it's a dead end. I don't see it but I think if you talk like this please if you can use these technologies to facilitate payments internationally you know using our existing currencies then I think there's real promise that I was just hanging out with a friend of mine who lives in Sweden. When we started up a backgammon game as you do because why not. And we were trying to work out what the stakes were. And we started say well why don't we just play for bitcoin because you know we're in different currencies and stuff . And my life and his face my wife who knows nothing about anything just kind of got this expression on her face. Well not not. She knows everything about everything but not about rabidly bad family so you know what I think is she is entirely normal in terms of in terms of payment mechanisms right. She doesn't know. She doesn't think about what is a dollar. She doesn't think about what is a bitcoin. She just knows that she pays with a card. Normal people when they hear the word bitcoin and like it you get they get an expression on their face they don't know it they don't trust it they don't like it. If you can create technologies using all of all of this technology which allows people to just buy and sell things in dollars internationally then we're talking now I have to agree with Felix and once I my my my small children when they hear the word Bitcoin now they do know this canary. Yes. So today we have not at all talked about what is money and this kind of the status of the world's kind of currencies and and reserve currency and gold and all and we won't we have no time to talk about this stuff. But you know Felix point that you know that currencies are fine. I mean it's it's history has shown that governments destroy their currencies and an average twenty seven years. And the reserve currency status of the U.S. dollar maintains won't last forever. The pound was a great currency for a while and then it was taken over the dollar and the dollar taken over something else. So the kind of the perspective that everything is fine is a very U.S. centric view Euro view of currency and the reality is is if you live in Japan right now if you live in Argentina if you live in Venezuela and about 30 other countries you want to own anything other than your local currency because there's rapid inflation in Japan. It's just the start of of of this currency war which will turn into a trade war which will turn into real wars which is when countries and currencies get destroyed. So when you think about like where have the gas and then refill it became you know Rand Paul. Well look I mean I have. I mean you may have the wit and the intellect and the style but I have facts on my side . And and look there's a reason why you know Russia and China are all buying as much gold as they can and will say what you will about gold. And I tend to agree with you. I'm going to run an experiment. This may totally backfire. Put your hand up if you are 40 or younger 40 or younger could keep your hand up if you own gold back or plan on buying gold OK and then bitcoin. Hands up OK. So what we're seeing is as money transitions from the 50s 60s seven year olds who believe that gold is the ultimate store of value to a world where the wealth is going to eventually end up in all of our hands . There's a good chance that seven trillion dollars of gold some portion is going to move into Bitcoin over the next decade. And if that happens 5 percent of that moves into bitcoin you're talking about a 300 400 billion dollar just a store of value type you use case that's setting aside kind of all these other opportunities for bitcoin. So the search for a store of value that's essentially what it looks like classic purchase to all Silicon Valley entrepreneurs make the Silicon Valley View thieves. Well if we just get a very small percentage of an incredibly large number that will be a very large number. You can make you can put any you can plug any numbers in. Yeah I can I'll be the first to admit that it's either going to be that big number it'll be zero like bitcoin is either. This is and this is something which I want to ask you this is a conversation with we had two years ago. This is a conversation we've had . And you said that two years ago and it was true then and it's true now that there is this thing is binary it works or it doesn't. And so one of the interesting questions here is what is the probability that it works. And what's that time series . What was the probability that Bitcoin was going to work two years ago. What was the probability that bitcoin is gone one year ago. What is the probability that bitcoin is going to work today. And I have to say as Bitcoin matures and fails to actually get any kind of traction in the real world that probability is not going up it's going down. Felix what about you. You're saying bitcoin has failed to get traction in the real world. Yes. How can you how can you possibly say that it's that it's all or nothing. I mean we could. Well I mean we're not reading on this one you can now disagree with both of us. Yeah. Yeah. Jihye Lee to get to you. You know it's like why could we not dispense with bitcoin and take the technology and make a more efficient payment system. And that's essentially the concept behind rebels right. It's to create this hub that uses the block chain technology. But you know it's currency agnostic. Right. And so what that's I'm saying it's like the best case scenario and I went. But you know the question about Bitcoin with a capital B. What do you think. I mean do you think that there's a chance that we'll have some you know stellar base payments utopia in the future which doesn't involve Bitcoin as being worth lots of money. I'm an investor in rebel and I think what they're doing to build a new correspondent banking clearing system is actually a really smart strategy and I think that they will potentially kind of rebuild what is essentially a kind of swift right now. And that can have success separate and apart from Bitcoin being successful. But generally speaking you know I think most of these alt coin attempts are pump and dump schemes and I do think that the site chain of development I think eliminates the need for most of them. But you know like I said before I mean in the Bitcoin I mean I think Bitcoin is a winner for a few reasons and it's hard for me to identify what is the reason why it goes to zero. But the black swan events are out there and I've got to tell you I mean I I was thrilled to see ISIS embrace gold over bitcoin. I mean I'm I'm not even getting it all. I mean one of the things that I was most worried about was something like that kind of creating this new narrative around bitcoin that you know you're funding terrorism. Honestly I mean I hope that we we destroy ISIS and we stop them in their tracks. But if ISIS doesn't go away and really does create a new currency using gold everybody who's buying gold and holding gold is you're supporting terrorism. I mean look honestly. So with the price of gold goes up to X you're increasing the money supply of of this group to X and so it's . I honestly think across a very interesting kind of regulatory conundrum because we're very focused on keeping money out of the hands of terrorism terrorists. And here you have you know I feel like Felix give us something to remember you by. Other than that purple suit. Answer the question. What are we going to be talking about. In five years when it comes to Bitcoin will there be a big man. I was so much fun we all we all got really excited about it. Okay so you remember. You know Craig Venter and sequencing the human genome and how this was all going to revolutionize medicine and you know we had that little . Exactly what we're seeing with the vaccines everyone for their part. But in the future I think that it could be on the internet thinking and I mean the point is that you. It's entirely possible to have an incredibly exciting technology which works and yet which doesn't fulfill its potential. And you know we don't have this wonderful world of personalized medicine where we've got Scarlet Fu genome and fix everything and it's all cheap and we're not going to get it either. That dream has pretty much fizzled and died at this point. And the real world is just much less tractable to utopian visions than you know the bitcoin people generally think. I think my parting comment to Felix is that you you do have the tendency to choose some of the more outrageous Bitcoin advocates as your foil but very tell us in five years what will we be talking about we want to buy so I tipped Felix over Twitter last week. I love this . I love that a thousandth of a Bitcoin is a tulip. Yeah. I gave him a dozen tulips over over Twitter. And. And like I mean Felix and I we've done this a number of times and every time we do this he has fewer fewer and fewer arguments. And I mean it's fine but it's not really. It's honestly not fair right. I mean but look I think in five years. Like I just went professionally reputational and financially all and I bitcoin. I'm starting I stepped on a sea of second market so I can build your currency group. So I've never been more excited more optimistic about the future here. There are risks but I think that that we're gonna be looking back five years from now and saying you know what I'm more on Felix was for selling the dozen tulips that he was given. But but look it's it's something that we all get excited about buying gold is boring. I think buying public stocks is boring but supporting this this this industry and this ecosystem it's something we can all be really excited you involved in in coming up with it tulip moniker because it is kind of genius taking credit and with that I think your moderator needs a stiff drink. I hope everyone is over there . Thank you very much for coming. And thanks to Barry and Felix . We're making a big flags with although although we do share your your desire for that stiff drink cart. How do we re-engage the just to complete where where we started we'd like to re ask the question that we had at the beginning I was like salt on the wound if you if you have your app and were were swayed by by Felix or were ever more assured by Barry please cast your vote accordingly I think I think we can probably extrapolate from here but I'd like to thank everybody for your attendance please . I will have the four hours of conversation about virtual currencies. I think by law we have to offer you drinks. So thank you everybody for your time . When I take down the slide that's it. Thanks everyone .

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Barry Silbert, Felix Salmon Debate Future of Bitcoin

Nov. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Barry Silbert, founder of SecondMarket Inc., and Felix Salmon, senior editor at Fusion Magazine, debate the outlook for bitcoin digital currency. Carter Dougherty moderates. The panel is part of Bloomberg's "Bitcoin: Beyond the Currency," event held Monday in New York. (Source: Bloomberg)