January 15th from Miami: This was another on location episode from the Miami Hackathon. On this episode I was joined by a few guests starting with Alena of Satoshi Labs, Austin Alexander of Kraken & Doug of Bitstop. Here is the TLDR:
0:00:03 – Miami Hackathon Recap: Great event, maybe I will enter the actual competition next year. My presentation on opening night should be posted to the web in the near future.
0:12:00 – China Looking to Regulate Chinese Exchanges: I do not believe in the correlation between the Yuan & Bitcoin so when China did not devalue a lot of traders got caught on the wrong side of the trade. As the market was recovering from this event, the Chinese Regulators came in to investigate exchanges causing panic selling in addition to the fall a few days earlier. The leverage has already gone down but we are still waiting on the official words.
0:33:00 – Bitcoin Digital Gold?: This discussion had a lot to do with Roger Ver’s recent tweet that Bitcoin should not be used as store of value but as Medium of Exchange. This once again starts a frustrating discussion which we would not be having if SegWit was adopted.
0:57:00 – Blockchain Without the Bitcoin Hype in 2017: I think the hype is definitely going to end and it’s probably due to people like me who have been adamant about not calling things a Blockchain when there is no PoW. (This was a long discussion and I come in at the 1:30:00)
1:50:00 Lightning Alpha: No opinion because we need SegWit so I have no idea how it is going to be tested. The good news is that with Lightning around the corner the statements by Blockchain.info that Lightning would take years are very wrong. But without segwit there can never be any real testing other than TestNet and perhaps Litecoin.
2:10:00 – Brian Armstrong & Coinbase now like SegWit: This is frustrating because Armstrong has been trying to fork bitcoin for years now.