for for for the actual consumers rather than speculators sure well i don't think it has to be either or there are speculators and mask consumer adoption of the u.s. dollar both play a role speculators help with price discovery and of course consumers use it for as a currency so i think that's likely to be the trend with big point as well the difference is that the it's supply and demand right now and the demand is far outstripping supply and that drives the price up in these parabolic curves but eventually will will settle in valuation that is fair or for mass consumer adoption and run not get to that absolutely but i'm sure you heard the bitcoins kept ticks comparing this new currency a to a ponzi scheme or warning of a possible bubble and you know that you know like in the case of housing bubble or high tech bubble the problem was not in the actual you know asses that far behind

those industries but in the amount of speculation that surrounded itself it seems that the same thing is now happening live bitcoin a lot of speculators that draw into it well maybe i mean that's who knows what would really happen in and no one can even give you a good answer on why the price of a widely held and publicly traded stock like g.e. goes up and down on some days or so it's hard to predict wire how the big claim prices move in and what's underlying it whether it's a bubble or not is suggestive that at some point it will eventually zero i don't believe that to be true so i wouldn't necessarily call it a bubble in the strict sense certainly there are going to be price surges and corrections we'll probably see more of these along the way again as as supply and demand work themselves out as more and more consumers come into the system it's probably going to be a few years while that happens and that's one of the reasons why i caution people this is a very high risk environment. and it's really not ready yet for for your average

everyday investor to trust their savings to it in any way anybody who puts money into the system now should expect that they could lose all of it now what do you think is the fair prize of bitcoin unit at the moment what do you yourself buy it for nine hundred dollars sure i mean if if this technology reaches even a fraction of its potential then nine hundred dollars would likely be a bargain especially if it's used as a currency in the future now it's also possible the big question could have a extremely useful purpose if it was valued at ten cents just as a payment mechanism. but most likely it's going to be worth a lot more as as more and more people use it as more and more people see it as a legitimate alternative for payments online for international remittances and as a store of value but you do understand that the main condition. the main now are

incentive for people to see it as well as a bible of alternative would be to degree decrease the volatility of that market and that could only be done if you know not so many speculations were taking place i wonder if you think there is any non authoritarian way off reining in speculators and protecting those commercial consumers that see bitcoin as a currency share i would just as agree with the promise slightly i think will happen is that right now there isn't the. service layer built on top of the protocol yet the infrastructure to support consumer adoption in a in a mass way yet i think the precedent thing to mass consumer adoptions would which will eventually settle out the prize is building a solid foundation infrastructure for the system so that big point exchanges that are functional in countries around the world. world merchant acquirers like who's

testifying in the senate as well and of course secure storage for big clients for consumers who can't take the security risk on themselves. things like that so that's the infrastructure that needs to be built out first and i think is the infrastructure is built out and the new service layers for consumer services business to business services things like that that was what will level out the prize now one of the issues that was raised to be hearing over and over again is a question of what is required of whether it is a digital currency or a commodity how do you yourself answer this question it's both which is a little bit of a tricky answer i suppose what big coin is is it's a protocol for moving value across the internet and it's a protocol for a whole new global financial system and so currency is a part of that commodities are part of that securities are part of that all of those things can be built on top of the big question protocol so what i usually say

to regulators when they say well what category does this fit in well it depends on how you use big going if you use big going to create securities then you're regulated as. security if you use it to make commodities then you'll be regulated as a commodity and if you use it to transmit money then you'll be regulated as a money transmitter now part of the. peter is very aspirational breaking free of manipulative governments and corrupt financial institutions and i think the main thing that allowed the many of their wrongdoings to happen was the lack of transparency and they had to when it comes to bitcoin it's very difficult to come by any reliable data on what is an average value of transaction and what is the most common nature all transaction of whether it is driven by speculation by some shady deals or indeed by some you know legitimate retailer or. commercial

marketplace and i wonder whether you have those asked timothy yourself whether you know what is the distribution here knowing people work on that i mean i couldn't repeat to you know the actual numbers around or if i would even have them or access to them but mr america with all due respect you're work for an advocacy group so. you know you're made main goal is to promote this currency and yet some people share say that speculation them began some shady deals account for a lion's share of the transactions do those statements have any credence to them i don't think so no and that's what they're doing now so we want to know you said that you don't know the distribution budget is same same you deny that speculation accounted for significant share how would you know what i didn't say speculation didn't count for a share of the price i think there are a lot of speculators in the market place right now but there's two levels of

knowledge so there's knowing that you have this public and transparent block chain where all the information is available to people and anybody can data mine and look at that and see what top name but what you're talking about is information that they would be collected by centralized points exchanges and things like that because if there were to be shady deals it would happen at that level not probably in the public block chain so that information is not as publicly available but that also mirrors how the traditional financial system works as well if there are shady deals happening in the nasdaq now the nasdaq would have that information but it wouldn't be broadcast across the ticker tape but i guess before we cheer be spread of these digital currency around around the world to be better now how it's being used at the moment isn't that a fair point and certainly certainly and transparent companies and honest brokers are releasing that information so companies like. the merchant inquirer. and others

as well they release a lot of their data publicly because they want to build that trust in the community and then more people want to use their service and when people go to consumer web sites and they see that icon there if they see the coin base icon soon the circle icon will know that those are trustworthy companies if companies want to keep their books closed they're entitled to do so but they will not build trust in the in the end consumers so i would necessarily want to go to a coin exchange that wasn't very transparent with that type of information and also say the dutch where regulations take the fact so those services are regulated industries if you're running a big clean exchange that's highly regulated so you have some transparency and accountability built in right there but i would assume that that transparency and accountability would be a pretty limited at this point of time you just mentioned some of the shady deals

that may be going on in actual financial markets and when old news or putting that many of the people who use big kind so far have been contrary hacking attacks and. pretty frequent and i heard you saying that that is essentially you know up to those people that very they should have trusted people that they trusted or they should have been more disciplined vigilant about their security and i wonder if. we'll all to make me sad its users its mass users for the same kind of chop that bank clients fell for and that is you know a couple of smart by the inscrutable and scrupulous guys capitalizing on the illiteracy in this case digital illiteracy of of the masses and that's actually a very good comparison so one i agree with you that that's a problem and that's why again i don't think that we're quite ready for a mess. consumer adoption of decline because these security issues need to be

worked out and they need to be worked on two ways in on the one hand we need to develop better software and services that put better tools for protecting decline wallets. and distribute those to individuals who want to use them without having to trust a third party like a bank in the first place on the other hand we need to build out the infrastructure of the trusted infrastructure so that people can feel like if they're not comfortable securing their own big points there's a safe place to put it and likely it insured place to put it i think that's very important and it's a very important point and that will be a critical juncture before we get to mass consumer adoption is saying so essentially what you're arguing for is the creation of some sort of digital bitcoin banks is that right yeah that is i think that's what you're going to see if if if the banks themselves don't take the opportunity to deliver those services so it would not also not surprise me if you start seeing that the existing banks. come in

to this picture and fill that gap at least to some degree by themselves and the question is of course whether they consumers can trust banks where they've doing that but mr america we have to take a short break now when we come back big question has been touted as a new currency capable of traversing borders and government regulation but the question is will governments allow it to happen that's coming up in a few moments on well the part.

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torch is on its epic journey to such. one hundred and twenty three days. through to some nine hundred towns and cities of russia. really fourteen thousand people or sixty thousand killings. in a record setting trip by land air sea another space. olympic torch relay. on r t v dot com. welcome back to worlds apart we are discussing bitcoins rise and spread with patrick marg general counsel of the foundation mr mark. going back to that landmark senate hearing here got a pretty favorable the reception from the low makers on monday and contrary to what some may have expected bitcoin wasn't accused of being you know the currency of

choice for online gamblers and drac traders and. i think many officials actually pointed out that crime had been the issue during the early days of credit card great cards and online payment systems i wonder if you were surprised by how friendly and accommodating the lawmakers seem to be i wasn't surprised at all but i was i was very pleased we've been working with these same lawmakers for months now. if there's one pattern that i've detected over time dealing with law enforcement regulators policymakers it's that the more those people understand the technology the less afraid of it they become and the more they embrace the potential for great societal good well well you know in some circles it's called low being bad at the same time they're low makers didn't rule out the possibility

of regulating digital currencies in the future no wonder how much regulation bitcoin will be a willing to accept in particular from the u.s. government well again i think you have to focus on the uses right and not the protocol. generally you don't see protocols like t.c.p. ip that runs the internet or s.m.t.p. that e-mail is built being regulated directly rather the service providers and how they use those protocols are are regulated now it may be that as we go through this wait and see process which i think is the right approach for the government right now that there are gaps that develop or specific rules or laws that need to be changed to accommodate a new distributed global economy. the best thing that we can do in that scenario is create an open dialogue between the big point community and the federal regulators

in the states and also globally to discuss the issues as they come. and work collaboratively to come up with the right solutions while our this is a very politically correct answer i will push you a little bit on that question i was surprised to learn earlier that the year is ten zero election commission sad that bitcoin could now be legally accepted as political donations and the question i would like to ask is whether you see any potential for using bitcoin. as a political instrument for example for x. expanding the uterus influence around a wild and a fashion similar to each of the years dollar is now being used well that would be pretty far off in the future given just the the market cap of bitcoin today to have any influence on monetary policy. if we get to that stage and that is in fact we think that it will not supplant

a currency but it will most likely discipline central banks to to to to be thoughtful about how they manage their local currencies in this case it would be in a political currency in a global currency so to the extent that the u.s. could use it i don't know how they would use it any more than china or or or russia or any of the. other countries around the world i don't know that the u.s. would have some. inherent ability to. either manipulate coin or manipulate other currencies through the use of corn ok let me shift gears here a little bit when you talk about bitcoin becoming these new international currency do you think the u.s. authorities and the financial elite will just sit idly by and allow the bitcoin crowd to chip away at the power and influence that they're used to

having it would necessarily play out that way as you describe you'd have competing influences and i don't know that that's even a likely occurrence i don't know that big coin is going to replace any national currency. now speech into other countries some expert suggested that bitcoin is gaining popularity as in countries that have issues or problems for the national currencies for example some argentinians are believed to use bitcoin as an alternative to that national currency that is experiencing a lot of problems with high inflation there's also been there also been some reports about the iranians using bitcoin to circumvent currency sanctions i wonder how far you're willing to go in defending these. international status of bitcoin has been this is if the american government for example orders bitcoin to

suspend all of the ration in iran do you think that would be possible would have to comply with that well they would be nobody who could enforce that there is you know queen of software so nobody can tell software what to do except software the code itself and the code doesn't allow for that kind of control but mr murphy i think over the past few a few months i mean we heard a lot of news about using various cetera surveillance techniques by the n.s.a. and you know a lot of tech companies who i suppose also use all sorts of very secure a protocol to spy on the rest of the world so at least on the theoretical level there should be a possibility of there for some many people to fuse there's certainly a possibility for enforcement if you were to. break through sanctions in the us it's the office of foreign asset control manages that list if you were providing a service that allowed people to circumvent ofac sanctions. then there's certainly

an unfortunate case that could be made against you you could be. be liable for that for those actions but that's a different thing than saying preventing a big coin transaction the big claim turns. action on a peer to peer basis could happen from any two points in the world and nobody could regulate that piece of it but you know argentina and iran those are two very different situations and cyprus as well in the other situations you described it's not so much sanctions it's a matter of a flight to quality and this gets back to keeping central banks honest with the a a political currency like big corn what you'll see is if the central banks in a country devalue their own currency. the useful purpose of their own currency you'll see a flight to quality to a more useful currency like bitcoin now you mentioned that there is no central

authority to get quiet and. when we talk about that people in many countries are very critical of their financial at the origins of their governments but in many of those countries those institutions have at least some sounds of responsibility may and maybe not always but. they do care responsibility for the actions and for the value of their currency in bitcoin as he said there is no central authority so is there all to mentally any sounds of responsibility of there well it certainly is an experiment and again that's why i say that it's we're still in the very early stages of it so we don't know how it will shape it may end up being the most useful purpose for big coin isn't as a traditional currency it may be that it's more as a as a commodity or an asset class like gold a safe store of value some people think of bitcoin as gold two point zero so it may be that the useful purpose for big corn is

a little bit different in five years than what we envision today and of course there are the nonfinancial uses of big coin in the protocol as well so that it's very hard to predict the the the technology that will be built on top of this. now one country that is particularly interested in a bit quite nowadays is china and the world's largest bitcoin exchange if i'm not mistaken is likely to there there's also an increasing acceptance of bitcoin both. online retailers and even among physical traders in china and obviously china is so huge it can make i'll break any deal how crucial do you think china is for big quite expansion oh i think it's a really it's a very fascinating market and obviously there's a lot of growth potential there but it's also interesting is that it's a market where consumers have already. understand virtual currency they've been exposed to it there is the q-q.

currency. that. was issued there that had great success and was very quickly adopted so it's a culture that's acclimated to digital currency already. so didn't know that they have and we've seen we have seen a dramatic uptick in interest in adoption in that country and i think that's that's a great thing but it's also a country where the government controls a lot of internet activity is there any potential for danger here that the chinese government will try to use or against some sort of control over the use of coin to spread its influence anything is possible i suppose containing big coin would be like containing the flow of information across the internet and we do know that china has had success in doing that but not in creating new influencing the information that flows in and out of the country more they're able to block things

so i think the bigger risk is that if the government in china disapproves of big coin transactions it may attempt to block those the transmission of those trends. i think that's more likely than them somehow co-opting the system now and finally a lot has been sad for all of this program and. you know i'd be hearing about bitcoin possibly becoming the new international monetary stand there is more egalitarian last dependent on the will of individual governments something that's been put power back into the hands of consumers and sometimes it sounds too good to be true especially for somebody here in russia because you know we are very we have had our fair share of utopia here so. you know a couple of days ago people here even believe that sooner or later manny will

outlive its purpose and you know services and goods will be exchanged fairly and you know voluntarily but that never happened if i could ask you to put yourself into the shoes of the size rider what would you say are the biggest dangers of bitcoin while the biggest dangers i think the biggest danger is that it never reaches its full potential i think that would be the biggest danger and by its full potential i mean the protocol stays pure as it is and user defined. and. through distributed network with lots of individual participation. now i can see a future where there's centralization that happens of the network of exchanges of the payment processors and transaction processors known as miners in the system i mean those are those are possibilities and you know the foundation we spend

a lot of times thinking through those risks their likelihood and how we would address them. our mission is to make sure the big queen stays distributed and participatory and decentralized so any. thing that would throw in one of those three things regardless of the risks you seem to believe that it's still worth trying mr merkel unfortunately we have to leave it here this is all we have time for if you like the show please join us again same place same time here and while the party. we see that there are hardliners in the west including the u.s.

who seek to destroy up to this new environment and undermine our relationship in france much iran is always willing to pursue positive dialogue with the united states and the west in general. we are ready to move at whatever perspective arrangements they would like to put on the table. as long as they are based on equality of process and respect for the inherent tries so iran and its people afic i believe there is a window of opportunity at the moment but we have yet to see how serious the americans are about using it. the bit going barbarians are at they gain they have been at the feet of the american soul dollar reservists time take their bread and circus placing political clout tyrants mocking the ground regulators and party officials who hate any payment system which they can't jump up.

in which negotiations only a week ago the prospect of a deal with around tantalizingly close then the french played the role of spoiler for the great delight of israel nonetheless negotiations continue much is made of the technical side of the talks in fact this is a side show but these negotiations are really about is the issue of trust. god's is woman. is spread this weapons out there threats extremist factions. thinks. your post has. legs this. case.

coming up on r t in afghanistan tribal leaders gather for a momentous a vote at issue should u.s. troops be granted immunity in the country beyond twenty fourteen the future of u.s. intervention in afghanistan coming up. going nuclear suddenly democrats are changing the protocol to approve presidential nominees so does that mean a clear path for janet yellen and update from capitol hill on the push for the next fed chair and food lovers the way or in an attempt to tip the scale in favor of clear arteries the f.d.a. is about to take your trans of fats away we'll get saturated in the details later in the show.