i had a great education a good job and a family that loved me. i never had to worry about how i would eat and where i would sleep. i'm facing christmas alone out on the streets of london. oh you look to be honest. i thought the glory like. you know the slogan the still give up food for the home the stuff. that you don't really feel they can be. and then. the guy just came over to me saw me and gave me this book.

welcome back to crossfire where all things considered i'm peter remind you we're discussing bitcoin. here let me go back to you in cambridge while it is a fascinating concept these cryptocurrency if there is the concern of accountability illegal drugs arms and other kinds of illegal activity can stay under the radar of the authorities i mean i think that's a kind of a downside also you know when people talk about it is being a newfie out currency one day i mean you know people are buying big ticket items because they are avoiding taxation and things like that so i mean it kind of cuts both ways here i guess really the most important question will be if this kind of crypto currencies are successful what is the temptation of governments to step in

to regulate it and would regulation kill it go ahead. right now it's been very interesting to watch the migration of regulatory interest across this space mean first we had law enforcement with the rise of the so-called road in the online dark web so use of big coin take an interest in the sector more recently securities regulators and with the up swing in prices i'm sure tax authorities are kind of next in line to to start getting involved with regards to law enforcement question you know it's a it's a double edged sword for law enforcement because on the one hand you know you know these these currencies do enable privacy on dark web transactions but on the other hand law enforcement when they catch a criminal who's been using bitcoin and they get a hold of their wallet software they get effectively their books and they may have a good chance of recovering some of the funds and that's not something you get with the cash criminal where there isn't record keeping so you can use the block chain to prosecute cases and that has been done and law enforcement i think at least in

some jurisdictions is steadily becoming more open to seeing crime committed with with watching technology does give them advantage over cash crime ok it's a very transparent technology that's sort of amazing plus for jeffrey earlier this week there was a san francisco judge putting pressure on a company that trades in these commodities in these currencies here they want to see their books they want to see names they want to see transactions here what kind of threat is that tube it going or can big calling evolve with this kind of supervision and regulation from the outside because my sense is or maybe you can correct me over on the people that started this whole thing don't like the state they don't like authority they they really want to be on their own here we're going to see it encroachment on this kinds of. currencies and you know alternative financial mechanisms go ahead you know the regulation of the exchanges began in the spring of two thousand and thirteen so far as i'm concerned it was

a disaster. we would have been much further along without these a regulation is this is the main way the government can control because it's not actually controlling because what they're doing is controlling the traffic between national monies and crypto assets coming and going they can control that and the u.s. has some of the worst regulations in the world. crypto assets right now on these exchanges well you know but why is that you know jeffrey why is it markets are global why is that what a lot like is that situation exists in the u.s. well because the regulators are trying to force a modern digital technology into an analog old world style regulatory framework and it's not working and all this doing is driving the innovation out of this country and other places you know you can buy big climb much easier and a place like israel then you can united states or in brazil you know i've i've i've

been to exchanges all over the world most of them are very free and easy and there's a lot of entrepreneurship there in the u.s. it's all about command and control it's a huge mistake for american regulators to be taking this direction because they're just going to drive the innovation and the capital outside the borders but he went and crypto assets in general are global technology if they don't care about the nation state ok mitch you know address that issue there because i mean the all mighty dollar it's a threat to a bit calling it all these other things are a threat to the the global domination of the dollar and it's obviously something the u.s. doesn't want to have happen i mean you're. right we're talking about u.s. dollar germany and you know my view is us the days of u.s. dollar germany are our very limited look before the united states became the reserve currency i think in one thousand thirteen when they created the federal reserve which is a disaster that should be shuttered. the british sterling was the reserve currency

of the world for three hundred years now was the united states responsible with the petro dollar and going off the gold standard in the nixon era i would argue no i would argue that this is caused market distortion i would argue that the central bank policies in the last ten years have been more destructive than the good that they've provided because i don't see that we've created a growth for the trillions of dollars in debt that we've created now the as we saw in the last administration in washington big government is in right now so are our government is gargantuan and they want overreach with everything in every part of people's lives in america and to do that if you get an iron fist on the banking system and make people take away cash like one of the professors at harvard wrote a book to get rid of all cash make people put their money into the bank this is this is a very dangerous thing that's why people are migrating to other platforms so we're at a point in time in history that could be very pivotal pivotal as to how we move forward

with this but you know the media is controlled and if you look at regulation they don't regulate companies like amazon that dips their fingers into everything and every different business or facebook or google that have become oligarchies oligarchies and basically these are they're controlling the content that everybody sees and this is where the regulatory agency should be looking not to control people's currency movements or whether they want to buy gold or invest a bit in bitcoin they should look at controlling the facebook's the googles and looking at news the news and it is because news in this country has become opinion and political advantage see and this is a way for the liberal left to read. history which is extremely dangerous if we look mark thompson who ran b.b.c. during the jimmy seville pedophile scandal snuck out of london and came to run the new york times and people have forget about history and where people are and how they move around but the same establishment figures are running things well one

hundred sixty companies used to control the media now it's down to six in can one of the things that can cambridge one of the things i find appealing about bitcoin and i'm i can't say that i'm an expert on it by a long shot it seems to promote entrepreneurial ship which i think is a really good thing again you know people that want to get out of the system away from the system the way from regulation is it fair to say that this is crypto currencies would be good for innovation. i think absolutely i don't think anyone doubts and i think actually you know it's is you know i think people can argue about how bad the regulation is but in certain markets there's been a very pro cryptocurrency attitude because of the innovative aspects of it and people are taking a much lighter touch in switzerland in the u.k. even in elsewhere because of the amount of investment that's coming in because of the you know faster cheaper better ways we can do things with this technology and not just the technology itself but also the new funding channels that are opening

up i mean the i.c.a.o. phenomenon which we haven't really talked about is is on the one hand scary because there are some projects out there that you know clearly are fraudulent but out at the same time you're also opening up access to early stage technology to seed stage technology to anyone around the world with an internet connection this used to be something you had to be a rich p.c. be able to do now if you have a computer have a little crypto currency you can invest in early stage technology that has a lot of risks and it also has a lot of opportunities it's personally for me i think an exciting part of the story in an image you know i'm glad you brought that up ok jeffrey go ahead jump in not just i'm glad you brought up this point about the i.c.a.o. because they've been kind of smeared in the financial press as being discussed that it's true there are some there's some rackets out there but the truth is that this is an amazing innovation yeah that allows people to raise any business to raise raise money from anybody without using any financial intermediaries that mean that they're the amount of innovation that capital that's going to unleash on the planet

earth is beyond belief i mean it's inconceivable what the i.c.l. market could do to transform the nature of capital markets themselves over the next ten years mitch go ahead jump in. the issue the issue with the i.c.a.o. market as i see it it's an exciting market but it's the wild wild west in early days and what's going to happen is that the the propaganda bullhorns of the media and advocates for the j.p. morgans and the goldmans who are being infringed upon when these offerings come out and they're not going to get their fees so what will happen is they'll make an example out of one that fails like the media the have you know blow it up into a epic proportion this is bad you're going to get ripped off don't do this give us your money only invest through something that we vet for you so there will be winners and losers and you have to keep the perspective like i said at the beginning there's perspective and risk and reward and don't you know don't go out

mortgage your house and put everything in into bitcoin or i.c.a.o. but look you look at this is as a portion of your portfolio and have a diversification in your portfolio and when you when you go into a high risk thing like an i.c.a.o. do your due diligence do your own homework and like i say in my book don't ever invest in anything that you don't fully understand if you don't fully understand it and you invest in it then you deserve to lose what you lose but you know if you give it your best don't put all your money into it don't put all your eggs in one basket diversify put a little bit into it and if you take a loss on that and you make a profit somewhere else then you can balance out but your payout with some of these is going to be exponential as we we've witnessed before the problem comes in when you try to harness the volatility ok gary as we go back to you came in to give you the last word here what does bitcoin and similar currencies what do they have to do to create confidence in people that just see it is too risky what may be one or two steps they need to install. well i think you know similar to the mid to late ninety's during the dot com. we're in the infrastructure building phase for crypto

currency crypto assets i mean yesterday we had three major exchanges experienced significant problems two of those exchanges are going to be relied upon by c.m.e. for their futures market that simply can't happen you know on a regular basis like it does for this market to be taken seriously by institutions to be trusted by a broader class of individuals so more capital markets infrastructure is needed the right balance of regulation is needed and i think people absolutely need to understand that this is a you know it's still very early stage very volatile i agree with you know the comments that have made about only put into this what you can afford to lose because it is still very high risk ok well it's been an interesting ride i'm sure we're going to see a lot more ahead that's all the all the time we have gentlemen many thanks to my guests a new york atlanta and in cambridge and thanks to our viewers for watching us here at r.t.c. a next time and remember. los

angeles the city of luxury and fame but also an alarming number of people living in the streets. the simple fact in l.a. he's there's just not enough shelter even if people on the streets right now decided to come in there's nowhere to come in it's been a struggle. this man phoned his own reason gone to the problem and constructed dozens of tiny homes for people in need of shelter when you have nothing in order to go. you know having something like this may as well be a castle do the authorities accept such to lucian tiny house on a city parking space is not a solution. someone monitoring the site. otherwise it will be a free for all there

a better alternative to end the homelessness crisis. the number seventy nine that's unique attributes that make it great for money. with not more than a vacuum it has got forty years of history to it and through all these technologies it's a unique protocol and it is attracting a huge amount of capital for for the for this achievement and you can't say that you can simply go out there and create another one there are competitors of course just like there are competing species on planet earth for energy and survival but there is only one. that is at the moment before. hello my name's peter and i've been living in bushnell for about seven years and this is a film about just some of the crazy things i've got in the time. i

need. to fit. in the evening.