how's that strategy will be successful very critical of. you sit down and talk. the headlines here on our chanter national the father of a russian woman imprisoned in the us for failing to register as a foreign agent says that she's being treated as a pawn while her lawyer says the case was an extra could be linked to the political climate in the us. where his activities in the us were illegal. in and of themselves but she got caught up in this and she rushes to start. signing up for the twenty first century silk road china's belt in road form comes to a close in beijing with sixty four billion dollars worth of investment agreed upon . and french news outlets joined forces to condemn the country's intelligence

service for something journalists about a leaked document on arms sales to saudi arabia. you can find those stories and much more over on our website my colleague kevin no one will be back with a full world news update for in about an hour's time and in the meantime it's. nice guys or this is the kaiser report now you know wall street always got the latest was bank she was saying apple and like the left i.p.o. controversy there a little stacy you know you were a participant and dot com one point first bubble and pop well there's. two point zero bubble. and perhaps pop snapp i.p.o. honeymoon in twenty seventeen gave way to investor lawsuits within ten weeks with

blue apron it was just seven weeks for a lift to stock has tumbled sharply sensis march twenty eighth launch it took less than three weeks for disillusioned shareholders to sue the company so apparently investors the left are unhappy to be down like twenty something percent and they have already lodged a lawsuit because they're claiming that the they overhyped the i.p.o. before the dot com experience i had in los angeles in the mid one nine hundred ninety s. i was a stock broker on wall street during the one nine hundred eighty s. when we had many i.p.o.'s and i.p.o.'s the ones that they're priced are priced in a way to get them out the door you've got to get them sold you got to get them out of the marketplace so there's a lot of hype but you know when i started on the last three when you had a prospectus for an i.p.o. you could not even have color photographs that was considered to be a deuce meant to just sell these days like in the case of facebook they made a major motion picture. about facebook during the i.p.o.

phase right so it's become entertainment and so people who don't like the i.p.o. for lift are like people who don't like game of thrones you know they expected a certain amount of entertainment they weren't delivered that entertainment it's about entertainment first and economics second well yeah because this is it is now more like a genuine casino when you go to las vegas you hear a lot of beings and pops and noises and you know all sorts of people serving you drinks in very skimpy outfits and given very low cost or free drinks and nobody walks away they're saying man i lost ten thousand dollars on the slot machines this sucks now they're like well that was so much fun but this is exactly what the markets are like these days generally speaking i.p.o.'s are not really suitable for the average investor they're. there are plenty of things to put your money in various markets that are suitable but the i.p.o.'s are a black box you don't know what the earnings are going to be that bad report is

first time as a public company so it's not really a hedge funds play in the i.p.o. space they do well or don't do well but that's their heads if you're not hedged to them run the risk of being racked of course we did cover it on kaiser report before they went public and the c.e.o. of lift was saying that will probably never have a profit we might never earn a profit so it was already there they were telling you we've been losing money billions and billions of dollars and we're probably never going to make any money but people still it's like hey let's go for it but you know over the easter weekend the i.m.f. tweeted out a link to their study from february that also we covered on kaiser report but until they tweeted it nobody seemed to have ever paid attention to it but they tweeted that their their ideas for extreme negative rates how to basically take some money from the ordinary consumer the ordinary citizen who is refusing to spend that

they're trying to save up their thousand bucks that they plan to retire on so everybody went crazy about this and it was back in the news and of course it could have helped when big coin then soared after that but here was a story from germany that i thought was really interesting good morning from germany where germans hoard more gold than the buddhist bank has in its vaults germans own eight thousand nine hundred eighteen tons of gold about six point five percent of the world's gold reserves a third is kept at home in the past two years alone two hundred fifty tons have been added just the ordinary citizens of germany have bought two hundred fifty tons in the past two years alone to scaling back this i.m.f. story another getting more open about their friend pushing negative interest rates and some a look to the. globe has two hundred twenty two hundred thirty trillion in debt and that has been the go to modus operandi say for banks to bail themselves out

is to get these central banks to the world to keep these banks from having to declare their insolvent like deutsche bank being a prime example but even at this level they've run out of runway they can't really float another hundred one hundred fifty trillion dollars worth of debt to keep these banks solvent so they're just going to take people's money take it out of their account doesn't negative interest rates that's what it is they just say hey you know guess what we just took money out of your account because the bank made to pretend like it's not insolvent but i say and they're going to continue to go deeper and deeper into the black hole of debt you know it without any and really there's not there's no checks and balances it doesn't stop them as though he can omics policy there's no law there's nothing to stop them there is a similar headline in the news as well this past week i don't have a right here but it was on bloomberg and it said economists are just figuring out that low interest rates help the economy or at least the stock markets but actually

seems to cause inequality when again you and i have been covering the fact of the can till in effect and richard cantillon by the way was born in the sixteen eighties so everybody's known for a couple hundred years now that it's free money to solve with zero percent interest rate. causes inequality because by the time it falls down to those who are being now going to be subjected to negative rates they're paying they're not only having negative rates on their savings on their meager savings but they're also having twenty percent interest rates on their credit that they're borrowing from the same banks being gifted as their zero percent that's naturally going to cause a wealth and income wealth definitely a wealth gap imagine that you run a blood bank and in one room are dead patients they've been dead since two thousand and eight j.p. morgan goldman sachs deutsche bank b.n.p. society generali just be say except are up and in the other room you have living

middle class people and the point of blood bank is to take blood from the living middle class people into transfused blood to the dead banks next door that they've been dead now for more than ten years well eventually the people that are in the middle class are going to start to suffer and suffer horribly and many of them will die and by the way they won't be getting any of the blood from the other middle class people to keep them alive all the blood all the plasma goes to the dead banks to make them look like they're animated in some way even though technically they are insolvent they are dead they stink to high heaven and they are in fact a devers well actually that segues well into my next headline here because here you have you know the germans are very smart about financial shenanigans a monetary shenanigans that go horribly wrong they've have a bad history with it and they know not to believe in central banks but in terms of

health and credit and that of course the us by the nature of having the reserve currency our our our citizens here we are the consumers of last resort and we have the huge amount of debt to keep the world afloat america has borrowed eighty eight billion dollars in the past year to pay for. health care it's no secret that medicare is expensive but the fact that so many americans are forced to finance it is problematic roughly one in eight americans needed to borrow money in some shape or form to cover a medical bill in the past twelve months on nearly twenty five percent of u.s. adults had to cut back on spending to pay for health care meanwhile sixty five million american adults avoided treatment for medical issues due to cost involved of course you won't see this in germany you won't see that in france or the united kingdom or anywhere in europe or singapore hong kong or anywhere most of the world do not have to borrow and go into debt to pay for health care imagine you ran

a blood bank that placed the word blood with credit because that is the blood of an economy and you have a bunch of dead banks in the one room and the credit. sellers are putting all of that into the dead banks the plaza that is needed to keep people healthy are there having to borrow ever increasing interest rates and in fact killing themselves to make the dead banks seem like they're animated this is a suicide culture to keep dead banks looking like they're not dead it's not even like they're committing suicide to keep somebody alive to feel like they have some existential connection to some power or the cosmic universe these banks are dead and people are blowing themselves up they're chilling themselves to keep dead banks for being animated and look like they're not dead that's the u.s. healthcare system is a pox on civilization absolutely we're going to cover that in our summer solutions

we're going to go over some solutions about this because there's been interesting studies just recently and if you go to my twitter stream stacey herbert you'll see i've been talking about it because a lot of it has to do with the monopolization we you know we say we have capitalism here but monopolies run almost everything or all of gaap liaison our telecoms. system there on the health care system but especially hospitals most places in the us actually only have one hospital group in the whole area so obviously your go most expensive treatment is in a hospital i emerge and seek care cancer care you know all that sort of stuff is done in a hospital and if it's just one group setting the price but and it's not just lower earners who find health care financially burdensome overall forty five percent of americans are worried that a major health issue could drive them into bankruptcy seeing how medical debt is the number one source still post obamacare

a personal bankruptcy filings in the country that's not shocking what is surprising however is that thirty three percent of households earning at least one hundred eighty thousand dollars fear that a medical event can up and their finances completely and they can because it does if you have those drive by doctors in the emergency rooms in the hospital you know the banking sector which is the insurance sector they conspired to send somebody in . outside of your network to inflate your bill to like forty thousand dollars so nobody is especially if you're only on a hundred and eighty thousand dollars if you're one on one hundred eighty million dollars you don't mind but one hundred eighty thousand dollars is still thirty percent of your income on a drive by dr so the banks are owned by the monopolists that are connected to the banks so let's say you need an appendectomy and you're about to die so you go to the hospital and they say doctor doctor i need an appendectomy i'm about to die they say do you fifty thousand to bail out j.p. morgan like now it will operate as right now gone right and you're like well i mean

to have my brother's taken out i guess i have to give j.p. morgan or goldman or wall street fifty thousand dollars some studies to make them at dead bank look like they're not dead ok then you give the fifty thousand dollars then they you know will go in there they'll remove your appendix and do a sloppy job more than often than not i know mad happened to me as our bill scar the guy used a separated bread knife. it's like all. right i mean what a joke it was a sort of baking bread down in the corner and not trying to perform appendectomies anyway so to wrap this story up and tie it to the on going for stories is you know you have people subjected to this health care system where you might suddenly even though you're paying thirty thousand dollars a year in premiums you might suddenly get hit by a drive by doctor who load you up with a seventy thousand dollars bill so you're going into the casino and hoping to win big time on a lift i.p.o.

where the numbers don't add up but hey you know you're going to roll the dice and hope to make them become a you know rich enough to afford your medical care in the meantime the germans know best they're buying gold of course the germans are buying gold to keep themself whole. anyway we'll take a break when we come back much more coming away don't go away stay right there. be neat politically in falls. from. but ideally to normandy for. the in. giving political guidance to the process so basically what i'm waiting for these and other political impulse ideally spending from the moment equal. to facebook and google started with a great idea and great ideals unfortunately there was also

a very dark side. they are constructing a profile of you and that profile is real it's detailed and it never goes away turns out that google is manipulating your opinions from the very first character that you type into the search bar it will always favor one dog food over another one comparative shopping service over another and one candidate over another they can suppress certain types of results deiced on what they think you should be seen if they have this kind of power then democracy is an illusion the free and fair election doesn't exist so the more road we give them the sooner we're all.

welcome back to the kaiser report i'm nice guys are timed out to go to sergey cutler he is the c.e.o. and founder of bit refill which is a crypto bit going company i should full disclosure tell you that we are making an investment in this company as it hits the market on bank to the future and we'll be talking a little bit about that but first surrogate welcome thank you and i met you at such a she round table all in february and we got started to talking about that refill and it's an interesting story because you know we've been through what many call the crypto winter and during that period of time a lot of companies have a lot of challenges some of them haven't made it through trip i want our bit refill has been busy busy busy and growing and expanding and and doing really great things so tell us a little bit about that refill what we're trying to do you know the the vision of big corn was was never the it was going to be corn is there sent between exchanges

that in itself is cool but we're trying to it's not what we nobody here showed up for that i think we all showed up for a vision of internet money where billions of people are transacting into you know paying it show they're getting paid to buying stuff and so on and so a bit truth of those is that we enable people to rely on bitcoin as money by making sure that they're able to buy whatever they want with their coins yeah this is interesting because you know one as you point out back in the two thousand and eleven twelve and thirteen it was big coin was going to be the pay pal of benaud crypto and it was about being able to use it to buy stuff and then at around twenty six teams this idea well you know actually it's best to use cases as a store of value for its digital gold and you have a lot of dissension in the ranks in the big going community in the crypto community had. for acts of big quiet and people claiming that this is what is for us actually for spending and buying

a cup of coffee etc but what you guys have done is they've kind of like brought it all the way back and said you know what the problem is not really that merchants are not accepting it this point so much it's that we need to make it easier for users to spend their big call and it kind of looked at the problem in a new way and in so doing i think i've solved for the most part this whole bitcoin used as payments problem so if i'm not mistaken. it's kind of like you're in the gift card business if you will our voucher business i think one of your biggest customers as hotels dot com and so i can actually go to your site and i could. buy big coin for a voucher on hotels dot com and i go to hotels dot com i can spell i can spend big money right but that's pretty much to the bread and butter of the business that is the burberry and you've got one thousand mark since now who are signed up right and

we're expanding quickly correct now where mostly most of our merchants it is in the u.s. and u.k. but there we have a pretty aggressive plan for for covering the road with with gift card support that country by country doing during the rest of the year and but refill it actually takes a fee for the transaction in most cases that the gift card of the customer and buys from us even if it's a hundred dollar gift card and it costs hundred dollars but we actually bought a ship and that's also what about heartless for a second a car saddlers and this is the idea that well because people are skinflints they're not spending their money they want to hold on to it because the price is going higher i believe if i've read your tweets and your blogs and your comments correctly what you've noticed is that no matter what the price is there is a subset of people who want to spend their frickin bet on right and ok the price could go to ten thousand one hundred thousand a million it just means that that ratio of people within that subset are going to be spenders

a big going to need notice that throughout this bear market there are still people looking to spend but going correct completely unchanged in fact with growth three or four x. during it during this year asking about hardliners and so on is the wrong perspective and the way we see it is we're looking for people that have course to spam and someone who just bought a thousand dollars worth of bitcoins as an investment they're not going to you know go and buy stuff with it the first thing they do. but so people with going to spend are people look the simplest example of someone who's getting paid a bit couldn't write their whole salary is a big question guess what they're going to be spending but couldn't because that's how life is you buy stuff with it right though this is a simplistic example and there's other cases in the in the bitcoin economy people that are trading the participate in different from programs affiliates and so on the earnings that way but but also people you know who started all this on theirs and the bought one thousand dollars of bitcoins you know three four years ago and i

was worth quite a bit you know what they also coined spenlow and they are suddenly you know both feeling rich and being rich and we offer them a great experience to buy things with the coins so i think looking at it from that perspective is a lot better than trying to resist the question of hobbling or not hobbling it like but it will do what they want of course you know if if if if you think the big going to go up in value and you want to hold it do it make it as fine there are going to be people who want to spend their big client and the price goes up just means every more because you spend and so this is about your business or you could call to get car business but not everyone uses as gifts but it's just a structured in that way and so you are basically have a relationship with all these merchants and if you want to go spend a big point at those merchants you guys a big call and have the way to do it you get a code for that merchant you go to happen and go and you've just spent your big

going and also you have a technique or your strategy is zero confirmations just on the tactical side you know because it is something where some merchants or some folks will want to wait for five or six confirmations before they totally accept the payment you say we've got zero confirmations which is that kind of innovation in the space if you well and speaking of innovations so you get there so it's a deep thinker and a technologist and a whiz kid you have jumped. on the lightning network right away that's captured the imagination of bitcoin world but those in the audience who don't know what lightning network is what is it now are using is the likely network very simply is a way to make bitcoin transactions no fast and cheap and good sort of with a nice user experience and technically how it's built up i think it's it's not as interesting it the important part is that it gives people these benefits it's what

we thought the big quote was all along but but then learned that maybe it wasn't entirely and lightning is is is that acknowledge it was sort of always envisioned that one day we will have at the knowledge that uses this this payment channels to to do translate a little bit of start lighting networking and she says if i find going to try to quote her here i'll buy do a good job in doing so but she said look big cohen is like the basic protocol the internet and on top of internet where many applications were built right so you have a big point is a basic protocol level technology and on top of that there will be applications and it's just to do payments you know just delighting that works and that's you know reminds me back in the one nine hundred ninety s. when i was in the technology business everyone sat around all day long asking when is video coming one is video coming and then suddenly flash came with. you tube and it wasn't necessarily the best technology out there but it was adopted quite quickly educate people videos finally on the internet to dig

a little bit deeper into what bit refill is doing you've got now what you call the thor products really became quite prominent during the lightning network trust's chain or pound l. and t. trust chain as torchbearers confronted liquidity issues so now we're going to we're going to drop down into a bit of a technical level here right but describe your product a thor product in the lightning network and tell us a little bit about that the way the life and the. like the network works is that there is channels between people and the channel surfing someone explain it as be on the accounting book right so you open a channel to you and usually in the beginning the money will be on my side that means that if i open a chance you can send money to you but you can some money to me not right away not until i sent them over to you right and this creates a problem because what if. where then to fight that a big part of creating this circular economy and bitcoin is for people to be able

to earn points to be able to that earnings both for big jobs and small jobs and whatever to get paid in coins and getting paid over lightning is difficult if you don't have a channel and so what the thought public does is that it lets people get a channel opened to them from us where one of the most connected notes on the like network with you know been. always first with all of the new technologies and so on so if you know you it's in a lot of ways it's like internet service provider if you think of. if you think of a nice be it interacts someone and it interacts with the whole internet with everything is as fast as home and so on but on the other end it connects to someone's apartment downtown right that's similar to what sort of takes the sort of well connected parts of the light the network and it connects it to your place and your place and so on ok so i hear some you know maximalist screaming in the faraway

land saying oh it sounds like centralization vs decentralization. is that an issues are not an issue is a non-issue it's always good to destroy for for more decentralization and so. thor is a non-custodial service so we don't know once the channels been set up we're out of the picture kit where we are a lightning node but we're not the we're not extolled in of the phones we're not the money service business but of things like that so it's still in a lot of ways it's as decentralized smoke services and in this base are but obviously we are a company break you know and the companies by definition isn't closed entity just like every other company in the space right so now what person what how much your business is is this lighting stuff down so. last month we hit the milestone of six percent of our of our purchases happening on the like network ok so many sounds

like something like you know netflix was in the cd business first and then they want a live streaming so you know your primary business isn't gift cards which sounds remarkably low brow but it's kind of a dumb solution to a very simple problem people spend their frickin decline right you're looking down the path or saying well you know lightning is kind of like are going to be our netflix point two or the next level do you think it will be the next thing the come down the pike and why not why lighting an outside change like liquid i think lightning is good enough. lightning is. the most sort of decentralized solution that we have a scale. from the perspective i think it likely will be enough but it doesn't really matter if even if i'm wrong and it is a change the becomes a big thing the show will support that's how gyal are you as a startup because that's really an important feature and we will go around saying

that we're the best in the world except encrypt the currency payments so. some people have challenged that but. in the world that's the thing cryptocurrency pain that sounds like a unicorn waiting to happen. we like to think that as an investor well how long before the unicorn thing hits because i want to be able to buy stacey another cup of coffee. and i think about that i would guess i could buy but anyway circuit thanks for being on the kaiser report thank you well that's going to do it for this edition of the kaiser part was me my guys are in states like to thank our guests surrogate cutler he's the c.e.o. and founder a bit re felt a bit re felt. yeah we own shares of the company if you want to catch us on twitter it's kaiser report and i stand by off.

because i live the good feel confident. leader. we have many things in this world and this is you know for everyone and why some people's minds so take our things all the power just for themselves.

is this a realistic prospect in ten years and you understand why it kind of creeps people out. there is there is what i call the creepy and the policy about a lot of these things is to get right up to the creepy line but not cross it i would argue that implanting things get into your brain is a is beyond me. at least for the most.