it which is not yet a trillion dollars. you also have the u.s. housing market added two trillion dollars last year again a lot of that is owned by the likes of blackstone and all these other private equity groups. so just putting into context this trillion dollars from five hundred people all right two thousand a financial crisis when sub prime became the buzz word of the year and many people lost their homes they vulture capitalist a private equity groups warren buffett they swooped in and they bought hundreds of thousands of units for pennies on the dollar and now they have become america's slumlord and yes they're making a nother two trillion dollar hit but the black community was completely disenfranchised and now they're on the streets of course because they've been made all of this by warren buffett and is felt the biggest gain in the number of billionaires was thirty eight chinese billionaires on the bloomberg index added one hundred seventy seven billion dollars and twenty seven thousand to sixty five

percent again that was the biggest of the forty nine countries represented a lot of it to do with the likes of tents and ali baba and all these sort of tech companies you saw the same in the united states it's jeff bezos and mark zuckerberg were the two biggest adders the gainers in terms of their wealth i think jeff bezos is now over her hundred billion dollars and that wealth the biggest loser on the list was prince our lead to bin tell all he's not a tech investor that has done very well in the past year and in fact no deal saudi oil well leads freedom denied after negotiations fail and this is quite a bizarre story because he's one of the biggest tech investors in many u.s. tech companies. silence no no the people of twitter are outraged you know they're often outraged about a lot of things the beltway media sources are very outraged about iran for example they very much love the people of iran suddenly and they care about them so much

they don't care if his guy ok even though he's a buffoon or whatever and you know all the things bad that you can say about him and a sat one of the saudi princes the fact is he has allegedly been tortured by trying to get. six billion dollars from him which he's apparently willing to do according to the articles we don't know how much of it is true but he is willing to give him six billion dollars but he wants to actually still be at least the figurehead of his company kingdom holdings that well you know here's a guy who's being threatened with torture being tortured threatened with beheading over there in riyadh at the luxury hotel the ritz and you know. you get towels nice scented soap and a threat of a beheading they will check into the ritz and they you know it's a special kind of hotel over there five star six star no stars you're dead but you know here's a story that doesn't get coverage in the u.s. because after all saudi arabia is the princess kingdom of the kind and beautiful

of ever benevolent meritocratic saudis who bestow their kindness upon milk and honey on the world not to be confused with the iranians who have never been violently involved in the altercation in decades and we've overthrown by americans in the fifty's but you know there are the bad folks the saudis are good they're benevolent they behead people with a what the purpose they do it in a way that's cruelty free even would approve of the way the saudis are going to be had well you know the thing is the thing that's so surreal about it is that twenty seventeen was definitely the year of fake news and what mainstream media determined was fake news and yet you see headlines on the likes of newsweek or washington post or new york times especially the new york times talking about this reformist prince mohammed bin solomon and that he's like this were great reformist he's quite handsome so he must be reformers he looks great he's

a reformist and yeah ok so you have to torture a few people to get their billions and a lot of the billionaires have transferred their holdings to mohamed bin solomon in the name of reform and this is supposed to be in. name of reform in the name reform they keep on calling reformist and yet don't even mention the fact that like when he bought this division chief for four hundred fifty million dollars or he bought. you know mansion in the south of france for something like three hundred million dollars. almost as soon as these guys transferred money to him he bought these mansions in the south of france the power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely and fell of the mention over their heads up saudi arabia these days is as corrupt as the day is long and he's just stealing money from folks and with us right to be heading but america is like that's reform meanwhile ok over in iran there actually are in the process of reform but that somehow evil and oh oh oh yeah and oh russia is bad we're not sure why there is

a hoax going around the rachel maddow just over but that can happen any longer so days we love also in this new year what's to look forward to is a wheel a state. not a real estate boom well it's partly it's actually tied to the real estate and away so in california which is the most one of the most liberal i would say most democrat that you could think of and all progressive and right thinking like where where. follow us like where the resistance we're so smart and we have all the smartest people here in silicon valley and jeff bezos and mark zuckerberg feel well maybe not jeff bezos but certainly mark zuckerberg talks about how he cares about all the people and stuff like that well did you know that california is also has the highest rate of poverty in cross the whole us if you add in the cost of living to what the incomes are you know many measures will say oh it's like mississippi or alabama those are the poorest people because the average income is like fifteen

thousand dollars but then the costs there of a trailer is like twenty bucks a month sort of thing in california however real estate prices and rent prices have been soaring soaring soaring and it's complicated a lot to do with regulation so. there's a wheel estate because people are moving into their cars. upper middle class people actually a lot of people they say who work in silicon valley are living in r.v.'s are cars and now there's a you know. sort of a sort of new market like all these commercial space that their parking lots are empty overnight they're now starting to like lease out this sort of space to people who park their cars have a safe space there was really this shown the it was a classic from a few years back called they shoot horses don't think it's about the depression and people that are dancers on's and dance themselves to death and the irony of the title is you know they shoot horses right i mean they should do people should be

euthanized as just we shot because it's just too miserable so they're in san francisco if you mention these guys who are big technology companies and platforms those used to be considered utilities it's a utility we were under right as a society whether it's electricity or water you know access to the internet but there's been privatizing taken over by kleptocrats and now we're paying through the nose to give them a billions hundreds of billions of dollars meanwhile people living in their cars and eating dog food and i think the title of the film is appropriate they shoot horses don't they just shoot these people because they're urinating difficulty all over the place and we don't need all that mess in fact it's close to that if the opening paragraph of those article of more californians living in cars we'll estate boom is coming the cost of housing is so outrageous in california that stories that might once have seemed preposterous now seem completely unsurprising case in point in a scene straight out of a dystopian movie about a ravaged future earth homeless people set up an encampment at

a toxic superfund industrial site and oxnard saying they had nowhere else to go yes they're being driven out of places like skid row in downtown los angeles or you know other more populated areas residential populated areas. nimbys or you know middle class nobody wants homeless people in their parks their local parks or whatever so that first they were driven into the river along the river and los angeles and now they're being driven out from there to places like the superfund sites the homeless people without even a car these are the people who don't even have the luxury of a car to sleep and the people living in cardboard boxes so they set up camp on top of us a toxic waste dump. seen images and video of people living in some cities some mega cities and in the east the far east who are live on train tracks and a lot of people lose their limbs and their arms or their legs so this is happening

in america now is just a dystopian nightmare that's cooked up by max kaiser no you preface this by saying it's a dystopian nightmare i'm not the one bringing up the dystopian stuff you on. the dystopian nightmare but i'm going to be accused of being a dystopian you know goblin or something just because i'm commenting on the story that you're bringing up i'm not the dystopian dystopias tear i'm not that i'm just commenting on the dystopian is i'm ok first of all second to only make this point yo. russia said that they're opening up siberia to anybody who wants to move to siberia you get great farmland there it's beautiful country there's bears there's elk there's natural resources there's fresh water just move to siberia forget america done certainly warmer there than here i have ever just go as mark twain said he's never colder than a summer in san francisco and i paraphrase of course speaking of dystopian nightmares here is a dystopian algorithm this is zillow you know which is an app here

a website here in america that tells you basically house prices will tell you what the net worth of a house is or was yellow accurately predicted homeless count in seventeen of twenty five match ows based on how fast rents rose so low analysis published earlier this year examined the relationship between rising rents and homeless populations accurately predicted the recently released twenty seventeen point in time counts with the median absolute percent error of eight point three percent so the two areas that predicted accurately of how the increase of homelessness what rises in sacramento los angeles based on the rising rents and how fast they were rising and in fact the opposite is true as well in houston rents declined by it was something like eight percent and homelessness also declined by the similar amount so there's a direct relationship but you can tune in to zillow and find out how bad the

homeless situation are how likely you are to become homeless in the next year thank you that's a fantastic idea to make into zillow if you want to track almost sort america in real time or there's just don't be a nightmare will bring us and how to make littles of money stay tuned for the second oh hold on for ten more coming your way so don't go away. in two thousand and sixteen the panama papers show the world with a tax haven the secrets to trilling and united states dollars passed through most.

in the amount of time that we've been in panama papers exposure that's what it shows a lot of money it really is. journalism it's an act of journalism looking at things that people want to keep secret and asking why would they want to keep these things secret. millions of. documents were examined. me all the people which basically have tried to get an advantage out of this sort of newspaper. and probably other politician which were. other politicians the media were quick to find their targets such as the kings of morocco and saudi arabia the president of argentina several prime ministers. and russian president vladimir putin of course. oh my god i've had so i have sued so many newspapers for defamation some things don't just happen by chance it was

very striking there were one american special a lot of people from the brics countries specially brazil russia and china that this special project reveals what was missed in the media coverage. the panama chronicles. a cursory glance at the media environment could easily give you the impression that the vast majority of journalists studied psychology at university so many are convinced donald trump is not mentally fit to be president journalist suffering from trump arrangement syndrome. infinitely. often. if from.

welcome back to the kaiser report imax keyser time now to turn to entrepreneur pioneer innovator the nelson mandela of bitcoin charlie shroom entirely welcome back it's good to be here as usual fantastic to have you back on you know we're just starting twenty eighteen but let's look back to the twenty seventeen period it was i guess what some might call that netscape moment in the history of bitcoin remember back in the dot com days in one nine hundred ninety six the internet exploded with the browser netscape went public there was that s. curve of the adoption rate the hockey stick moment is that a fair assessment of what happened in twenty six seventeen i was only seven years old in the moment you just described but i read about it and i studied it but i think we're not there yet i think cryptocurrency still has a long ways to go before we really hit that mass adoption right now a lot of people are just speculating and really not understanding it fully it's

utilities and it's really value add propositions are not there yet but we're definitely like in like the move upwards but we're definitely not a hockey stick yet we're at the point where it's a kind of turns up where it's all we have a ways to go up there and let's review some of the highlights and get your take on it. some of the means some of the talking points if you well there was the emergence of the store of value versus medium of exchange debate and this is actually something that's new in the history of bitcoin because remember in the first few years starting i got involved twenty eleven it was always considered digital cash means of exchange this idea of a store of value was always in the back burner but in twenty seventeen it exploded on the scene and drove the price appreciation where do you were do you come down on this for any and the crypt a car and he said to succeed it needs to be both and it's to be a medium of exchange and needs to be a store of value. basic economics will tell you that without one you can't have the other big point is trying to to walk on that fine line where it remains

a store of value and it also remains a payment system and the only way it remains a store of value and a payment system is that by having an extremely secure chain a censorship resistant chain where no one no government no corporation can to freeze anyone's money can reverse anyone's funds and you need to be super secure and pick one and still doing that yes the fees have gone higher but the price of big quinn has gone higher to. a lot of these other ones like be cash and ripple an accent or a they're not really blocked chains because they're not censorship resistant there are very few that are in control of it for example. there are a few people that are in control of b. cash if you broke into his house and you stole all of his b. cash he would figure out a way that few people would figure out a way to reverse the b. cash chain and take all his money back it's not actually censorship resistant it's not actually a change where no one can reverse it no one can freeze it if they can't do that and

there's no point of actually having a block chain i was joke what's the difference between be cash ripple and others and a google spreadsheet the same thing all right let's talk about be cash or because in cash for a second of course this has to bring up the name of roger there and you know rogers a friend of ours you know i met you and roger for the first time in new york city i think was twenty thirteen or so he took some photos down in silicon alley in new york city and he's an investor in your your first company and he's a pillar of the community one might say he's a character he's hands which community we're talking about but so what why what exactly happened there because first of all my take on it was that using bitcoin in this all calling is tantamount to. you know not not a copyright issue but a plagiarism. issue and that seems like dirty pool yeah i guess i guess the way to look at it like you just started with the name of it right be cash vs big cash i

understand everyone has the right to name whatever they want whatever name they want but in essence what won't be cash did was a big cash was they took the name of a brand that they don't support anymore and then kind of counterfeit it and created their version of it or what some people would say is a knockoff ok so a lot of controversy about the in c. and b. c. you know they got into the crypto space just in twenty seventeen and they started reporting on bitcoin cash without taking any consideration whatsoever of these what would be you know minor little difference in business points that they are supposed to be aware of so it's like if i have an apple product and i think i want to you know copy all of apple's products just change a little bit change the color or change you know the size of an i phone but every other part i'm going to copy exactly the same thing but i don't support output anymore i'm going start a whole new company i'm going to call it apple plus you can't do that because copyright laws forget about that for a second but that's let's lay in like you laugh at that we write this to be clear

the big going to name is not covered under a copyright you know because it's in the public domain or a source and there is no corporation behind it but as far as ethics go this seems like a clear violation of business ethics and from the community that is a spouse in that they understand the vision of the toshi and that they have moral high ground here and yet it's undermined by their actions in a very simple way and so yes or no bitcoin cash is less or more secure than bitcoins extremely less secure it's extremely secure there are very few people that control more than fifty percent of all they actually power and that is extremely extremely insecure it's an attack on because in other words they're stealing ashing power i don't mean to stealing ashing power because anyone can choose which blocks what they're hashing power on to one of the end of the day

. but it's not the game in other words you confuse the market and end up with national power by illicit means. one could definitely make that case and is that going to be a problem going forward twenty eighteen i think. be counts for us is a big argument and debate is not going away any time soon all right let's change subjects little bit here so the big crypto market is reaching into the sovereign state and you've got countries like israel coming out and saying hey we're going to introduce crypto shackle but. ok there's an obvious problems. and there's maybe some benefits to it what's your take on that kind of doing the same thing that be cashed it right like it's not really a crypto currency if they control the database people forget the dollar was already digital currency before because it came out we have dollars in our bank accounts we have dollars you go online and i send a transfer for me to you that's a digital currency but what is a crypto currency is digital currency that's backed by and controlled by

cryptographic functions and mathematics a block chain one where one person or one entity can't control the ledger that's what a crypto currency is so that digital shekel digital dollars a kind of there will be cash and they're just all work crypto currency but they're not really their business i think same issue again it's not really a crypto currency the point i think was made by me not so long ago that any state that comes up with a centralized version of a crypto coin is it's an oxymoron because it's going to be less secure because of a single point of failure exactly there's no point they can still print on demand that it's an issue on demand it's not transparent they can freeze they can reverse if that's the case what's the difference between the current digital system versus the one that they they just rebranding it it's isn't it's the same thing let's talk about scaling scaling but going scaling going forward twenty eighteen and a couple of things on the horizon lightning network is what we're hearing a lot about even bloomberg is covering the lightning network and scaling issues of

bitcoin so a couple of questions first of all is the scaling proceeding in a way that you feel is. is organic and wholesome and makes sense and without political subterfuge or corporate subterfuge and second of all what do you see on the horizon as the next scaling benchmarks that will be achieved and needs to happen faster. right now with scaling if you go back to the to the big point cash vs the coin situation and when you make when you make blocks larger you reduce the security you would do when when blocks are larger. you can't have as many people running nodes and mining the coins so you have less people doing that and the chain becomes like those the opposite of decentralization it goes into the centralization so anything going toward centralization it defies the ethos of and that's the trade off so how do you keep it centralized you keep blocks small and then you create multiple layers now you look for who would be the people that would be operating on

the second layer is to start the people that are transacting on the change the most base pay and all the exchanges it's like when you have a two lane highway but fifty percent of that highway is being taken out by a few different trucking companies so you say hey we'll create a secondary highway just for the trucking companies to use but the trucking companies are on purpose not using those highways because they want to maintain the congestion on the original layer. so you mentioned that you feel the scaling a bit boy and it's a misnomer to say it's calling couper because then you're setting up a false dichotomy there is no such thing as a grower versus non core a but there is only one bitcoin but that you felt that it was going along slowly what why is that and what could be done to improve that if anything companies need to implement faster for example block chain to implement what segue faster because said what is the introduction to lightning networks when you implement the

segregated when it's technology you're setting yourself up for multiple layers so right now blushing that info is one of the largest on chain transactor is on on decline right now there's no reason that all their wallets should not be implementing segue it would be very trivial and fairly a lot easier in fact they decided to implement the cash before they decide which one of my good friends who was their director up there in their company i want to mention his name recently came to me and said like how angry he was about that that on purpose it's it's politics because right. as a big investor in blocking that info and he's probably i don't know for sure but it would seem like coincidently why are you implementing sec not why you're not implementing segway before be cash on cyber it's been around a lot longer and it would make their cost there they're losing millions of dollars a week by not implementing segway there's a. you know partition in the space between companies that are b.c.

backed and those who are not those who are v.c. backed by coin base pay i believe zappo also seem to be queuing toward this direction siding with coin base and operating unethically in many ways the debacle with their peak cash launch because of cash launch it's just smacks of manipulation insider trading and a complete breakdown in ethics isn't a v.c. money that's forcing forcing change too rapidly as me i was sure that space i'm not sure about but i'll say this markets are efficient when we allow them to be the market think when will will favor other companies over these centralized companies you see netscape you know. netscape was the biggest company in the early dot com but they're not around anymore so you can say the same thing about some of these companies that are not operating ethically right now so the market will decide and the market will favor the companies that are operating ethically and with integrity over the ones that are operating without one of the personalities to emerge

a twenty seventeen john mcafee who got the bitcoin bug recently within the past year or eighteen what he's just got the money but general much money ok fair enough and he brings this unique style to the space and he's launched room for because he's launched something recently point of the day where he's out there talking about an all claims of the day. the and the predictable result is that you see these enormous spikes in price and so what's your take on this well it's very simple he's charging on a no for a thousand percent guaranteed fact that he's charging twenty five because it's out front and fifteen percent of all the tokens like in order to make a coin a coin of the day that's a very strong charge charlie it's not like everything's going or it could be an exclusive fair or no it's not it's not it's not there it's hasn't really gotten traction but people someone asked him that runs a coin someone asked him and then he responded back and then the him. made a public made public the screenshot of it so he's saying it's public and then this

would be you know payola right which is illegal so of course there is no legal illegal in crypto it's no doubt regulation what we thought if i straighted with the the unethical with the with the business i think the issues i'm frustrated with the scammers all of that stuff all right should i cut it off there actually are out of time maybe even do not want to talk to me because reports to the right that's going to do it for this edition of the kaiser a part of me my skies are states you know like that get charlie shrem join to catch us on twitter it's kaiser report so next time i'll.

in the heart of the swiss alps this is a place probably more secretive than the pentagon more mysterious than the cia and better guarded than for knox ellis was customs are here permanently on the site is controlled by them and they impose the opening times for the opposite it is from his office the procedures in place of the strictest in all europe masterpieces by artists like pecan so and modigliani a camped boards and sold inside this warehouse that's where the report comes in it covers up deals which are naturally discreet commercially discreet felt but also discreet because they concern fraud for some of those paintings are linked to dark secrets nobody knows how many of these secrets a kept inside the geneva freeport says for pleasure and you'll never obtain an inventory of all the works in the freeport who knows how many there are three hundred three thousand three hundred thousand is it a matter of confidentiality only is it the world's black box of the art business.

unfortunately it appears that once people learn that you've reported in a sexual assault or may have been involved in an incident that they become scared of you instead of being scared of the perpetrator. you. thank you. thank you. thank you thank you i.

was. it was. a state of the art space sex rocket carrying a classified u.s. government satellite leaves the speculation about whether it made it into space with not all the usual information released. north and south korea hold high level talks for the first time in two years raising hopes of a possible diplomatic breakthrough. and also this hour the b.b.c. finds itself at the center of its own storm off of some of its journalists accuse the company of censorship. and i welcome sir arthur international live from moscow with me daniel hawkins for

over you are today thanks for joining.