that same energy thank you the pandemic has devastated much of the music industry with cancelled festivals live concerts and to worse the grammys reflected that reality with artists at the ceremony socially distance and wearing masks and also with many prerecorded performances. a groundbreaking ceremony and a reminder of the power of music especially during challenging times. al-jazeera. it is good to have you with us hello adrian fenty going to here in doha the headlines allows us era thousands of protesters have turned out in several rebel held cities in syria to mark 10 years since the start of the country's civil war the conflict has caused one of the world's worst humanitarian crises with more than a cough of syria's population displaced. the u.k.'s announced sanctions against 6 allies of syria's president bashar al assad they include his foreign minister and

close advisors the british foreign secretary says that assad's regime subjected the syrian people to quote a decade of brutality the security forces killed at least $39.00 people on sunday the worst day of violence in a month and a half long crackdown on the anti couth but state television says that one police officer was also killed scott hired has more from bangkok in neighboring thailand. despite that some protesters have come out today on monday after this after the announcement that those areas are under martial law now they are still coming out what we saw on sunday as you mentioned the deadliest day so far around 50 people were killed one though one within that number is a policeman that according to authorities in myanmar but the deadliest day we're kind of seeing that the repetitions of that the army taking a further step of their control of the streets in those debt districts 6 districts

in yangon and 5 districts in mandalay indonesia has become the latest country to delay using the astra zeneca corona virus vaccine of a blood clot concerns the drug firm says that its review data and that there is no increased risk facebook has begun labeling posts about covert 19 in an effort to combat misinformation content about vaccines will have labels with facts from the world health organization charges against a former ku leader in mali have been dropped on the 2 highest so now go was accused of ordering the kidnap and murder of $21.00 soldier has failed counter-coup in 2012 some go has still has support within the military which staged another coup last august toppling president abraham to become ok so there's the headline news feed here on al-jazeera inside story next.

how high will bitcoin go the crypto currency has just hit another record and demands on the virtual coins is only rising so could it one day become a real currency something we use in everyday life this is inside story. hello and welcome to the program today with me peter davi one man's pizza bought with 8 bitcoins in 2011 was worth just

a few cents way back then now that very small amounts of the virtual currency is equal to around 480000 u.s. dollars that's how much bitcoin the skyrocketed hissing and you all time high of $60000.00 as of saturday just to be clear that's one point so cold now worth $60000.00 the surge is mainly fueled by a growing number of institutional companies embracing this virtual currency is also thought to be driven by the approval of president joe biden's $1.00 trillion dollars stimulus package in the u.s. it's feared the pandemic relief bill will push inflation higher in effect devalued the u.s. dollar and the digital currency is seen as a good hedge against all of that but critics warn cryptocurrency is are a bubble on track to burst the money asset has a record of price swings falling sharply several times bitcoin has risen. well most 1000 percent over the past 12 months the value of bitcoin in circulation has

exceeded one trillion dollars for the 2nd time this year new york mellon bank mastercard and other big financial companies have ventured into cryptocurrency il on musk's tesla car manufacturer boss around $1500000000.00 in bitcoin and excepts payments in the virtual currency other smaller digital currencies are also getting a boost prices for a theory i'm light coin and stella have also soared this year. ok let's get going let's bring in our guests in new york we have john biggs a disservice moto a technology website in london we have glenn goodman author of the crypto traitor and in liverpool we have gavin brown a senior lecturer in financial technology at the university of liverpool gentlemen welcome to you all glen in london coming to you 1st why is there no stopping bitcoin bitcoin has been on a roll now pretty much since it was invented you know the trajectory has been

upward and every few years the price in particular has a stumble and a major stumble or that in fact every single time there's a dip it kind of gets to the point where a lot of people even in the industry are starting to question whether it's going to last in the long term but that always turns out to be a sort of false crisis and very quickly good news starts happening the price starts rising and everything gathers steam again and every time we get $1.00 of these booms which happen every few years there are more and more announcements that come along this time from financial institutions mainly and large companies like tesla that kind of reinforce the idea that bitcoin is being integrated into the international financial system the original plan of course was for it to be utterly renegade on the outside and everybody who was into it were kind of tech mavericks

libertarians those kind of people but this time around we're seeing the big banks the institutions start to embrace bitcoin and try to bring it within the fold kevin bohn in liverpool why is it so attractive to tesla as opposed to only being very attractive to the big institutional investors you know i think in some of the tesla perspectives i mean probably one of the key angles there is the very nature of their products in a target market quite forward looking organization. and the idea that they're looking full you know the next generation of currencies potentially you know currency that they're willing to accept payment for their goods and services for is quite quite a nice step from that from a kind of marketing and p.r. perspective but i think more than that you know what testers represents you know what they've seen with that fits this is the idea that if you've got syphilis us dollars or similar feet currency on your balance sheet you can actually exchange some of that money in return for something that say might be quite actually used to calling us what we call was like a reserve asset or treasury reserve asset now based on the pictures that tesla did

which was one and a half 1000000000 in january of this year depending on the exact timing and depending on how hot how long they've held that position for if it's all you know it's likely that they've made anywhere from between half a 1000000000 to a $1000000000.00 on that single trait in between a $4.00 and $6.00 week period which you know just to put that into context is more than a they made in terms of profitability from selling cars in the entirety of 20 twentieth's about half their research and development cost so you know certainly a very street move and certainly a move where you know when we look to people like elan musk you know they're very vocal in terms of crypto currency in particular and that around it coined it it's obviously a relatively decent match in terms of districts e.g. compatibility between the currency and obviously from the perspective of the the organization as well john in new york can i ask you a question the last time by felt i should have asked the last time we chatted about bitcoin i think it was about 56 weeks ago now we're calling it a currency is that. wrong i mean it's not a currency it isn't underpinned by anything that's real coinage notes gold silver

should we actually be calling a commodity why not i mean look there's lots of other pie in the sky stuff that's that's given value you could also say that many commodities don't have implicit value gold doesn't have an implicit value outside of us a few elect uses electronics and then also you can where right it's a store of value let's say and that value is created by the system that runs it right now right now the big quote is basically. priced against the difficulty of obtaining it which is which is basically what everything else says right so mining these things is very difficult buying these things is actually fairly difficult and there are people out there who don't want to sell it unless you pay them the x. the equivalent of like a toyota corolla to get one. during goodman in london goldman sachs is investigating it set up a team of specialists i guess is investigating how to serve this sector so

you have banks institutions for the sake of this question goldman sachs started by a mr goldman and a mr sachs and i could go and point to and talk to real people partners in a big institution but i can't go and find the partners who set up bitcoin i can't go and find head of finance head of h.r. head of p.r. and when the market like something it gets bigger and simpler but doesn't necessarily get safer for people who want to invest in it the beauty of big calling and the whole point of it really and the reason why it's started gaining popularity all those years ago is because it's so-called trust us right you don't need a c.e.o. in charge of it you don't need somebody to make key decisions about who gets the money when and where because it was all written in the code by the mysterious

founder of moto we still don't know who that guy is but he wrote the code so it doesn't matter who he is the code is sacrosanct right and they've only been minor changes to it since because it was invented and that was with the consensus of the big korean community a big point network right but the code itself governs everything and. the point is you don't need to complain you would never need to phone up the c.e.o. of bitcoin and say my big calling has gone wrong because the beauty is because it has never gone wrong because it has never been hacked all of the problems that you've heard over the years to do with bitcoin are by and similarly companies people and companies who are kind of of attach themselves to the side of bitcoin you know trading platforms and that kind of thing. and and scams plenty of scams have grown up around as well so you know those sort of and series services i have see those are the stuff and you can complain to them if they rip you off but big

calling itself has never been hacked it is trustworthy kevin brown in liverpool on that idea of being trustworthy it's got to be trustworthy if it goes more mainstream as we're having this conversation the biggest u.s. crypto currency exchange is talking to has applied to the nasdaq to be listed on the nasdaq so it will then move away from the point that goodman in london was making it will go away from being a road from being a rebel to being kind of hof in half out of being mainstream yeah sure nothing jammed at the recent one x. your distinction between the underlying asset currency or whatever and it's not something which to use of between itself. that's the stakeholders the market access you know the brokers the exchanges the investment bankers the ises the traders you know retail investors as well as institutional investors all of these institutions are what are looking for regulates reproval and regulates re adoption if you like i

guess the difference we have we've we have big coins that the asset itself is an essential thing you know has been sent before it doesn't have a board threats as it was not exactly right is doesn't have a h.q. doesn't have a board of governors in this traditional sense of a kind of boat or structure that you'd normally have with a traditional so it's really act as around equating terms of the ecosystem and that of the broader kind of threats or current space who are looking see that sort of approach as he centenary is going to be the nasdaq or the types of institutions to try and get that regulates the approval and this is this is something that we're going to criticise banks not see quite a lot when he talk about this this need for institutional adoption i mean just a just a pretty into contact you know decline at the moment as a passenger in dollar mark you know it's now worth more than the russian ruble it's worth more than the time bartz and. with just over 20 percent of the value and steering so it seems to become a kind of risk free asset on the kind of ranges and dog of the financial system and he's now moving into the sort of institutional norms that we might come to expect

that expect them all mainstream. new all these cryptocurrency is whole make a virtue all of doing the thing they do which is they operate in parallel to but out saeed's all of government or central bank control is that a good thing or a bad thing and if they move mainstream they've got to stop doing it obviously assure some in the going to be regulated and remember these crypto currencies actually don't do much better than the normal banking system does i can swipe my card and switzerland and it'll pop up on my phone instantaneously even though everything is based on us. you can't do that with crypto so a lot of the features of the current banking system that took hundreds and thousands of man hours to build out over the past 50 to 100 years are available with crypto it's a it's very very nascent it's very very simple my view is that all this stuff goes

underground and it disappears behind the scenes in the i.t. and the i.t. labs the major banks and they basically strip it for parts and start using it for themselves all this talk about creating mainstream usage and implementing it so i don't i go to cross the street to the bodega and i buy a sandwich with bitcoin it's not going to happen there are methods that you could use associated with that but all those methods have to be regulated you're going to be in a situation where a vast majority of the stuff requires know your customer information i have to send my picture at the sun no d.n.a. samples and also the crazy stuff to these exchanges just to do business with them and it's only going to get worse unless it basically said get subsumed in the entire banking system and all these images that you're showing right now the big question a.t.m.'s and also the stuff goes away because. as it stands the current system and as they said the players are the worst the worst actors in the space because it hasn't been hacked but plenty of people have been hacked and scammed and

and ruined by playing in the space kevin bohn in the pool just to get back to that point you were making earlier governor of the the percentage footprint that bitcoin has with all the major currencies around the world there has to come a point is there not because of that when the feds finance ministers central banks etc we do want to get involved because if anyone anywhere in the world particularly now because we'll have to pay for covert somehow probably very probably via taxation at some point if somebody some place ends up with a big pot of money that's getting exponentially bigger and bigger and bigger every finance minister around the world are going to say oh hang on i'd like some of that to pay for coronavirus or to pay for a war or to build on and sell them to somebody else something has got to give i think you know you mention that sachs asia needs it just the grades context the global financial crisis want to keep responses of all central banks is that it

quantitative easing that often people describe it as printing money it's not quite recently expanding the money supply and back in 2007 see there was 9 that hopeful expansion of the money supply was about $2.00 trillion dollars now just to put that into a concept you've probably seen recently with the original u.s. response that was just short 2 trillion dollars in the kazakh just over a year ago and another $1.00 trillion coming through today by an administration so what we've seen is that over the last decade plus and an expense rates by i close it again is this reliance on quantitative easing on every that's been missed the main ministry mechanism in sense of actually responding to a crisis and trying to manage the broader economy and i think something that was mentioned before was the idea that you know that is the that's the type vaulting misplaced quite nicely incipit you're kind of just a cation potentially considering something might be one which is which is fine. night by by design you know big queen has been treated zine it's not designed in terms of its monetary policy it doesn't have one in the sense that he's managed by a central bank or a currency board or

a monetary policy committee or anything similar that there are no people involved in that sense it's basically create toadies and was designed back in 2008 before its launch in 2009 and a silly thing that he's the key argument that for those individuals who are looking to potentially speculate on the value of a big coin asset i guess that the rudest thing is though is that obviously if we see more exhaustion going up i don't necessarily think we will i agree with the previous speaker from new york i see genuinely more of a response from the nation state we're already seeing the movement of the digital dollars in the u.s. we're seeing that some of the things happening in china very far ahead in launching their own central bank digital currency cities all currencies which usually great advantages of something like big point but now it's all been able the economy to get in power in some individuals but at the same time they're not willing to necessarily afford that the anonymity that that's going market decline will similar occurrences grantley individual let's go back to august and you know john biggs john can i ask yes let me kind of left field question. because there was nothing on

the telly here in doha last night i was watching one of my favorite movies terminate to 2 and it occurred to me thinking about bitcoin this morning is bitcoin the skynet of the world's financial markets maybe in 5 or 10 years' time because to pick up on that point that gavin was making it's pre-code it and it's wrapped up with this idea that you know bitcoin is going to do its own thing it's going to be outside the mainstream because it's smashing the privileged monopoly of the financial system of the banking system but that's not perhaps such a great thing to say it we might be talking about this in the past tense in 5 or 10 years' time there's a lot on track there i mean the idea that this is the skynet is kind of laughable it's just not strong enough it's not where did this the big question is never going to start creating creating terminator robots to send back in time and that somehow being facetious is just not the code just isn't smart enough to do any of the

things that we expected to do which is crush the. crush the economic many of nation state right so let's assume that at some point we we use the tools that big crime has given us and this is and we're using we're using that word but quite entertaining cryptocurrency is but you could also say theory m. which is a programmable currency to a degree and a few other currencies that are privacy based etc but just at a on a broader level if i'm a nation state right now if i'm a government what i want to do is i want to use these tools to digitize my currency to change the way it's bought and sold to change the way the volatility is managed etc and i want to move away from paper and i want to move away from from non digital means of money transfer being adding having a calving and cryptocurrency based. current nation state currency is vitally

important for a lot of these folks because it gives you instantaneous access to everybody's wallet you can see exactly what joe smith down the street has spent on i don't know a power boat and you going to you can see exactly what a organization is spent on feeding the poor for example so you're in a very very interesting position when you start using this stuff if you strip away all the things that the that and the cypherpunks love about krypto. which is essentially this false sense of anonymity and and the ability to move this money without too many bells going off at the i.r.s. or any other taxation office then you've got something fairly interesting and it's also kind of dangerous to the average person but again the average person is going to be taking part in the current crypto market. vast majority of people in the world don't actually understand or even care what's going on in the crypto markets it's great for folks who bought a 1000 of them i don't know and 202010 but it's not so great for somebody who is

still using a non smartphone to get i don't know crop prices somewhere in and central africa so help them ok and the only people are going to think to help them are probably going to be the government ok goodman coming back to you in london there we're now living in a time of kind of printing press economics around the world because as gavin brown in liverpool has correctly said we've got to pay for covert somehow that's going to be a multi trillion dollar pound euro whatever your currency is is going to be in the trillions for years and years to come you're clearly quite a fan of cryptocurrency is or this particular cryptocurrency fans like you all say the same thing they say it's a safe place to go it is akin to gold but it's not the kid in gold because if there's problems with the u.s. dollar that's why you have fort knox if there's problems with pound sterling that's why you have the bank of england because some place there are big lumps of gold

underpinning a real currency and that's the thing i just don't understand about this how can it be safe for ordinary investors not big institutional guys who've got billions socked away but people like the 4 of us who maybe want to put 101520000 something or other into an investment and let it sit there for a decade those currencies on to underpin bite. gold anymore they used to be underpinned by gold but richard nixon broke the link between the dollar and the gold in and gold in the early seventy's and ever since then fear currencies have been exactly that they're just pieces of paper that the government guarantees gold is really nothing to do with them and yet we keep some gold but not very much in the u.k. in the u.s. they keep more gold but you know still not a great deal. the key point and. misc a lot of misconception is that i'm a huge bitcoin fan i have a certain amount of skepticism like you do about the idea that it will have

a takeover from the us dollar and from fear currencies but i think i disagree with john because he said it won't defeat the dollar and fear currencies it won't be the skynet the beats them but the current narrative amongst the big quite aficionados and obviously there's a huge number of them now is not about it beating the dollar it's about the dollar dying 1st and then because in filling the gap filling the void the narrative goes that the fed is printing huge amounts of money and so are other central banks and that this will cause a huge economic boom. later this year probably and then with the economic boom we get huge amounts of inflation and then they have to raise interest rates and then that crashes the economy and but the inflation is still there and then it's a crash is the dollar and the dollar has been overprinted and the dollar goes to 0 and and so do other fear currencies and what fills the void gold and silver perhaps

but also because in for exactly the same reason that it's kind of but it's still there at the moment is according to some of the narrative going to artificially low it so over at the moment is according to some analysts being held at an artificially low price because people have gone to gold and there literally isn't enough gold to subsidize the number of people that want to go there is a safe haven i want to move on to my last couple of points let's just go back to gavin brown in liverpool gavin what's the difference. between coing an adult called because everyone said in the ninety's in the northeast oh don't call me gettin make loads of money get out i'm not from a fiscal point of view sure that i see much of a big difference here let me say that i mean just to put it into perspective reuters did an awesome cool just at the end of last year which showed that the entire market value of all american tech companies most of whom originated in the dot com or just to the pre dot com era that total valuation was more than that in the entire european stock markets so that all listed companies across the whole of

your so i don't think it's necessarily true to make a comparison or to think about the commas as get in and get out because what we've seen is used as a sort of 20 to 30 year appreciation in but mean market value from a lot of these kind of unicorn companies that went on to say it's again a valuation in excess of a trillion dollars i think the thing with bitcoin is similar to what i speak as i've said already you know the 1st thing i would say is i don't believe in decline maximalist maximalist i mean the idea that one day we will become a crowd out will feed a currency and it's only when you actually agree with that type of argument that you can see you know even exponential gains from the current all time price high that we're in at the moment but equally i don't necessarily see big point disappearing you know i think there will always be an appeal for an acceptable currency type equivalent that banks the banks that allows people to move money without the need for financial intermediaries on their own banks i think the key thing though at the moment is that if you look at say something like that coin its capacity is very limited a lot of people use that argument against it for instance big queen typically

processes about 7 transactions per 2nd compare that to the visa payment network which is around about 223-0000 transactions per 2nd so between certainly isn't the money replacement that some people would budget to be today however you know if i were to take you back 100 years and we went to have a look at the wright brothers trying flight for the 1st time in some of criticized and said well you know that's never going to change the future because it's not safe they don't. on the contrary very many humans all that would have been through that time but i think what we're seeing here is the principles you know because it is still very nascent it's only sort of 12 and a half years old and yet it's already being talked about in mainstream media and he's already 13th a market capitalization on the entire list of over 150 currencies globally i mean as i said it's already surpassed the russian ruble and that's high boston is closing in on the swiss franc so it's no longer that nascent asset which is kind of isa terek on the fringes and he certainly something to be considered seriously o.b. that the future is still as yet to be written and and act and see arguments both

ways i guess i would sound very objective on that i think gentlemen we have to leave it there thank you so much for talking to us from new york london and liverpool they were our guests they were john biggs glen goodman and gavin brown and thank you to you too for watching the show you can catch the program again at any time for the website al-jazeera dot com and for further discussion go to our facebook page facebook dot com forward slash the inside story and also talk to us on twitter handle as i have a path inside story for me peter dhabi and the team here in doha thanks for watching we will do it all again at the usual time tomorrow until then.

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