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The crypto revolution is seriously hitting its stride and there is simply no predicting just how big this emerging industry and ecosystem will be. Bitcoin seems to have attracted a lot of allies and friends to the digital currency.
The price of bitcoin next year is heavily anticipated but so is the next natural step. Nick Spanos, founder of Zap. No matter how low bitcoin went in the past, it always climbed back at least a few times stronger. These perceived downsides are being taken care of, while the upside for bitcoin is virtually limitless. It polled 1, UK adults on their knowledge and thoughts on bitcoin. LG : And is he just able to tweet like this and it's not regulated in any way?
Like no one can stop him from doing this or he's not going to get penalized or fined the way he might for tweeting for 20 years? You do that time. GB : Yeah. You know, we may have some securities lawyers jumping in the comments hearing me say this, but I don't believe so. In terms of bitcoin being as an independent asset, I'm sure that bankers are free to tweet about gold and how much they think it's great. And that sense, bitcoin is an independent entity from Musk and Tesla, but they do have a lot of influence over it.
So I should caveat that by saying, "I am not a lawyer. I've not looked into the regulatory implications of this, but no obvious red flags come up for me. LG : So what I hear you saying, Greg is that there is a certain legitimacy at this point to bitcoin, which has been around for years, and we're seeing more institutional investors get into it. Earlier this week analysts from RBC, that's Royal Bank of Canada, said that Apple should start buying and accepting Bitcoin, that they could unlock a multi-billion dollar business by doing this. Now there are some bank executives, most famously Jamie Dimon that have long been skeptical about Bitcoin, but even J.
P Morgan seems to be coming around to the idea now. So it is becoming more legit, but there are also still a lot of skeptics.
And what are the skeptics most concerned about with Bitcoin? I recall at one point he was calling it a fraud, and then he seems to have kind of toned it down a little bit. And I think he said recently, it wasn't his cup of tea, so. GB : So perhaps we're reflecting some of his friends maybe getting more His friends at other banks getting more interested or kind of accepting the legitimacy of Bitcoin.
Retirement Planner. What movies have some of the best VFX ever? You know, basically as they put it out in their filing where they had said that they had done this purchase, they said basically, "We can make money off of this. LG : [Laughs] Oh, Snackfight. Maybe we should stop podcasting now, we might be driving it down.
I guess I have a little bit of a philosophical answer to this, which is that the things that we choose to become sort of legitimate assets, like things that we say are going to stick around that we can invest in. Like, this is always a sort of fraught and kind of a fraught territory that has a lot to do with just sort of the narratives and how we talk about certain assets, like there are certain inherent qualities of Bitcoin that make it valuable, scarce, and people are using it in different ways.
But then, I think that a lot of people come in with skepticism that, sort of why this thing, why are we treating this particular thing as the thing that is worth something? And that we're all going to sort of communally come around and, say is as an asset, gold has the advantage of thousands of years of people thinking it's pretty and shiny and it's inherently worth something.
Bitcoin only has 10 years of that history. So I could see that certain people in the banking world say, "This isn't a legitimate thing. Like maybe there's too much power concentrated in certain places. Maybe this isn't as secure as we think that it is.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon once called bitcoin a "fraud" and said he is more interested in blockchain technology than crypto. In this article. Millennials' embrace of Bitcoin could see it "crowd out" gold in the long term, JP Morgan writes.
So I think there's also skepticism of that. That like, "Hey, maybe this thing actually won't stick around for another 10 years, let alone 50 or a as some people like to think it will. MC : I'd like to ask about that energy equation. You know, the mining of the Bitcoin, the processing of the transactions, it requires a lot of computing power.
And therefore the currency as a whole has a pretty big carbon footprint.
Exactly how big that carbon footprint is, is up for debate, because proponents are quick to tell you that somewhere around 70 percent of Bitcoin's energy needs are filled by renewables, but either way, how should we think about the fact that an EV company intent on fighting global warming wants to start accepting a form of payment that is so energy intensive?
GB : Yeah, there's definitely some irony there. I guess I would start with that 70 percent figure that you mentioned, because that's a number that Bitcoin advocates will really tie themselves into knots in order to prove. It's a really, really hard number to pin down though.
Part of this is that the sources of energy that go into Bitcoin mining actually change all the time. So recently the value of Bitcoin has been going up a lot. So it's actually been requiring a lot more energy and we don't know where the energy is necessarily coming from. The other aspect is that throughout the year the energy source is actually changed. So sometimes you get more renewable power from dams. There's a wet season in China where a lot of miners will actually migrate physically to be closer to dams, and then it goes back to coal. But I guess, I was thinking about this the other day, looking back on a piece that I wrote, I think two years ago now.
It was about a town up in Montana, or not really, a town by Montana standards, it was Missoula, Montana. And so they were actually going through a vote to ban Bitcoin mining locally. And what was interesting is that the mines were actually purchasing power directly from a dam. It was exclusively renewable energy, but the reason why the town wanted to ban Bitcoin mining was because they said, "Hey, if you are using all the power from the dam, then we have to get our power from somewhere else.
We have to get it from this giant oil power plant halfway across the state. Is it on mining Bitcoin? Is it on server farms? Is it on plugging in your Tesla?
LG : All right, we're going to take a quick break. Before we go to break, let's do a quick Bitcoin check again. Ooh, it looks like the value has gone down a little bit. Elon, If you're out there, you might want to start tweeting. Just kidding, don't tweet any more than you need to. All right, we'll be right back. LG : In the early days of cryptocurrency, it was hailed as a game changer, a complete revolution of how money is spent.
Now there are a bunch of cryptocurrencies out there. Bitcoin is of course the most well-known, but we want to talk about other cryptos and blockchain tech and how we trade money in general. Greg, let's talk about Dogecoin. What the heck is going on with, what is Dogecoin and what is going on with it? GB : Oh boy. Yes, I guess first a little bit of history. So the origins of Dogecoin are actually kind of basic.
It relates to essentially that Bitcoin is an open source technology, which means that people can copy it, they can modify it, they can make their own coins. And so pretty early on in the days of Bitcoin, somebody did this and they decided that Bitcoin was a little bit inaccessible. It was a little scary.