00:00

And what you think happened here. Well I mean totally attributable to China or something else where China seems to be a factor in it. But the question is whether or not there's something fundamental to what I think we have this instinct as you know people who won't understand markets as if there's something clearly fundamental to it to work with the bitcoin market is a very volatile place. It is still very illiquid compared to the rest of the world. So there's there's demand out of China. That much we know. We're certainly seeing a lot of it happening. We've seen the price. Actually there's a big differential in the premium that people are paying for bitcoins in China versus in the rest of the world which again speaks to the fact there's a lot of demand. What's driving that. Well you can get fundamentalists and say well this is actually because you know people are worried about the Chinese economy . Capital controls maybe Bitcoin is an escape around that. But look there's also this talk about a pyramid scheme that was being run this MMN pyramid scheme that now is now accepting bitcoin and all of a sudden you know you had a route through bitcoin to get to this pyramid scheme. Chinese gambler like investors and you don't need many of them write a gigantic country to just a few of them to get interested to move the price. But clearly you know the fact that you can now get back into buying Bitcoin with directed posits is smooth the the way into the currency. So China's a big factor. There's other things going on as well. Europe the EU recognize that it is a currency which was a bit of an about face and a positive one for those who think that bitcoin is the future. But more broadly there's just a lot of interest in block chain technology the underlying technology which may or may not be based on bitcoin it could be used in some other crypto currency or no crypto currency at all but there's kind of a halo effect that that spills over to bitcoin if you want to get exposure to this currency it might make some sense to buying it. So it's probably a lot of all those things going on but it certainly was a bit of a wild jump that we haven't seen for some time. You know I wouldn't have you react to something that Jamie Diamond said the CEO of JP Morgan he said quote There will be no real non controlled currency in the world. There's no government that's going to put up with it for long. The technology will be used may be used to transport currency but it will be U.S. dollars. I'm curious sort of where we are with bitcoin right now for so long it was perhaps novelty is putting too little upon it. But I mean is it catching on or are our governments . You mentioned European governments are people beginning to take it more seriously. Well I think that this kind of misses the point. I don't know. I think for too long we focused on will the big yes dislodge the dollar. The most important aspect of bitcoin always was its underlying technology in the payments protocol it created the capacity to use that ledger in various ways. The question is will people design versions of that that don't use bitcoin and there's some argument for that or is there a real use case of Bitcoin itself . And in fact I do think there will be in the future world of of all of these unforeseen markets a lot of demand for bitcoin itself. And so it's just very early to say that the existing financial system the dollar based financial system is just really inefficient at dealing with a lot of what's needed in a digital economy whether it's the transfer of funds overseas or micro payments that may be used to pay for Internet of Things interconnected gadgets and things like that. So there's a lot of people thinking that ultimately bitcoin is going to play this role as the intermediary currency within the broader digital economy which you know is a is a great use case. It doesn't mean that Mom and Pop are going to be using it to buy their groceries. But the most interesting thing with all due respect to Jamie Diamond is that aspect of it the actual use of the technology as a means to a disintermediation and make more efficient our digital economy rather than whether or not the at the end of the day you're putting your savings in dollars or not it's just to me not a particularly interesting conversation . Just lastly and his is last 30 seconds I want to we focus so much on Bitcoin. Are there other virtual currencies that you're interested in that are doing things. And where do you get these other digital block chain initiatives that have or do not have a crypto currency connected theorem is by far and away in my mind the most interesting competitor to Bitcoin in that realm. So that's one to focus on there. They're thinking about using the block chain to do all of these non currency type of applications and that's what's interesting about them but they do have a currency called Ether. Other than that there's a lot of interesting initiatives being built around different versions of either on or off bitcoin block change. But there's just too many dimensions .