Author: CoinDesk

The best Sundays are for long reads and deep conversations. Earlier this week, the Let's Talk Bitcoin! Show gathered to discuss the US tax treatment of "Virtual Currencies" and how scams find a home wherever opportunity exists, at least for a while.

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This episode of Let's Talk Bitcoin! is sponsored by Brave.com, eToro.com and Purse.io.

During our first segment, we'll discuss:

Virtual Currency Tax Fairness Act of 2020: The proposed legislation would exempt capital gains taxes if any individual transaction results in a capital gain of $200 or less.  Previous versions of the bill proposed a $600 cap. If passed, it would take effect in the 2020 tax year. Link -  H.R. 5635

The IRS has a question for you: Tax filers in the U.S. are being asked if At any time during 2019, did you receive, sell, send, exchange, or otherwise acquire any financial interest in any virtual currency? Link -IRS Form 1040

Yang proposes "Digital Asset Regulation": U.S. Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang wants to Clarify the tax implications of owning, selling, and trading digital assets.    Yang says clear policy will allow businesses to invest and innovate in the area without fear of a regulatory shift. Link - Yang 2020

Later on, we'll dig into the "why" of scams as we begin a longer conversation on the topic.

Three main points on scams:

• Ponzi schemes thrive in disrupted spaces with uncertainty, poor credentialing, and poorly understood complexity
• The crypto currency space has these attributes
• The underlying appeal of ponzi scams (and bitcoin) comes from the mythology of redemption, getting something from nothing, the genie in the bottle, etc

Links:

• How MLMs Use the Psychology of Influence
• The Cult Psychology Behind MLMs

This episode of Let's Talk Bitcoin! is sponsored by Brave.com, eToro.com and Purse.io.

Photo by Fernando Venzano on Unsplash

This episode was produced by AP's Don and Ned. It featured discussion by Adam B. Levine, Stephanie Murphy, and Jonathan Mohan.

Music for today's episode was provided by Jared Rubens, From Ether and Gurty Beats, with editing by Jonas. 

Would you like to Sponsor a future episode of the Let's Talk Bitcoin! show? Do you have any questions or comments? Email adam@ltbshow.com

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Bitcoin is on a 7 week upward trend. Having already smashed through its $9,000 Vegeta memes, it is now inching closer towards $10k. 

On this episode, @nlw is joined by Kraken’s Dan Held to discuss how bitcoin has changed in a number of ways since the last time we were at the $10,000 price level last year. They look at:

• Narrative - Speculation around bitcoin as a safe haven and the role of the halvening continue to shape the conversation
• Infrastructure - The tools for how people can interact with bitcoin - from lending to derivatives - have never been broader 
• Audience - Institutions are no longer just around the corner but actively participating in the market

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That’s the way Meltem Demirors described Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard’s remarks at Stanford yesterday. For the first time, the Fed has said that it is actively researching and experimenting around digital currencies and distributed ledger technologies. This is a change in tone from a Fed that, when asked previously, has more or less dismissed digital currencies. 

On this episode, @nlw looks at Brainard’s speech, along with: the latest from Japanese lawmakers proposing a digital currency to counteract the influence of a forthcoming Chinese digital yuan; a Bank for International Settlements digital currency working group with 6 major central banks; and the potential implications of CBDCs on bitcoin. 

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If venture investments and acquisitions provide a window into the sentiment in markets, boy did we get a big dose of information today. 

Today we look at investments in the world’s best known developer of the Lightning Network; a new prominent corporate investor for a tokenized securities platform; and Square’s investment in a real-time payments company. 

We also look at a set of acquisitions, including a ConsenSys acquisition poised to get them in the $3.8T municipal bond space; a Bakkt acquisition poised to get them ready for a consumer app that includes more than just cryptocurrencies; and an attempt by Bakkt-parent ICE to buy eBay for north of $30b. 

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As claims of election tampering, fraud, and other dubious activities fly around the botched Democratic Caucus in Iowa, trust in our public institutions continues to crater. 

The question of trust and censorship are at the heart of our episode today. Handshake is a new protocol for uncensorable web domains. The goal is to create a new blockchain-based Top Level Domain system that governments can’t censor or block. 

To explain why Handshake (HNS) matters, @nlw is joined by Tieshun Roquerre, the CEO of Namebase, a next-generation domain registrar for HNS. 

In this interview, they discuss: 

• What Handshake is 
• How a HNS domain is different from a standard web domain 
• Why uncensorable web domains are the next great blockchain killer app 
• How Roquerre became interested in the space
• How Namebase works

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Bitcoin and porn go hand-in-hand in this interview with Spankchain community manager Allie Eve Knox.

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Much of the Crypto Twitter conversation this weekend was dominated by talk of Twitter’s suspension of ZeroHedge. @nlw explores why the specifics of the infraction or the quality of the publication aren’t the important part of the conversation, and why he thinks we’ll see arguments for social media platforms to be turned into public utilities in the years ahead. 

Also on this episode:

• Debates around Ethereum marketing. Does the community need to spend more resources telling the story and recruiting new users or should the tech speak for itself? 
• What Brexit means for the crypto community - practically and metaphorically. 

The last section features comments from Ledger CEO Pascal Gauthier. 

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In “Libre Not Libra: Facebook’s Blockchain Project,” Andreas answers the burning question… Has he tried haggis? Just kidding… He shares his thoughts on the recently released Libra whitepaper, as part of a permissioned blockchain project spearheaded by Facebook.

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This episode of Let's Talk Bitcoin! is sponsored by Brave.com and eToro.com

Years of jokes about “FaceCoin” and “ZuckBucks” have finally come to life – sort of. In a previous episode, he talked about how some venture capitalists are monkeying around by downplaying the killer applications of open blockchains in favor of… bananas. Now he makes us wonder whether Libra will even survive to become a production network. Is Silicon Valley coming for banking? Will Libra’s challenges have any impact on open public blockchains?

This talk took place on June 19th 2019 at the Scottish Blockchain Meetup in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Follow Andreas on Twitter: @aantonop

Andreas's website: https://aantonop.com/

Andreas's live talks released in podcast form

Episode Credits:

Today’s show featured Andreas M. Antonopoulos, with a little narration by Stephanie Murphy and Adam B. Levine, as well as the live crowd and that guy with the great laugh about three quarters through. 

Original Photo by Anna Tukhfatullina Food Photographer/Stylist on Unsplash

This episode of Let's Talk Bitcoin! is sponsored by Brave.com and eToro.com

This episode featured music by Jared Rubens, Orfan and general fuzz. Production support was provided by Erica and Jessica, with sound editing by Dimitris of Sampi Media. 

Want to hear more of Andreas’s Live talks? Check out new episodes every week on Unscrypted, or just head over to aantonop.com . 

Have any questions or comments? Email me at adam@ltbshow.com. 

Subscribe to the new CoinDesk Podcast Network for fresh, insightful episodes nearly every day of the week

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On this special interview episode, @nlw talks with Sergey Nazarov and Kain Warwick, the founders of Chainlink and Synthetix respectively about: 

• The evolution and goals of Synthetix, a novel type of derivatives exchange where users can interact with any asset with a price feed. 
• The challenge Synthetix faced around spinning up their own oracles around price feeds
• The history of their collaboration and how Synthetix came to work with Chainlink
• Chainlink approach to building decentralized oracles for data such as price feeds
• Chainlink’s announcement yesterday about the new published price reference data for 25 oracle networks
• The state of the idea of decentralization, and how what was previously a concept is becoming operationalized
• One thing that gives them pause or scares them about DeFi and crypto and one thing that makes them excited for the future 

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The best way to fund open source projects remains a question, and one that - in the context of crypto protocols - has never had higher stakes. Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen live action experiments in a number of different approaches. 

Gitcoin grants used a quadratic funding program to match grants to technology builders and media creators in Ethereum 

After months and months of concerted community debate and conversation, Zcash will implement a new Dev Fund of 20% of the block rewards after the Founders Reward runs out in November, splitting it between the Electric Coin Co (7%), Zcash Foundation (5%) and 3rd party developers (8%)

A consortium (cartel?) of the 4 largest BCH mining pools tried to insist upon a 12.5% block reward diversion to a new dev fund, with a threat to orphan blocks that didn’t comply. The plan ran into a barrier when Roger Ver’s bitcoin.com backed away. 

Also in this episode, @nlw looks at the latest in CBDCs - including Japan’s continued hedging that they’re preparing for the possibility of needing to move quickly and Cambodia’s announcement that they will be implementing a CBDC this quarter. 

Finally, Andrew Yang took a few minutes yesterday to talk about cryptocurrencies and why regulation with the intent to stop them would be doomed to fail.

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