Transcript
The Jacobsen Group with Jon Jacobsen · Tue Oct 15, 2024
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Three, two, one, go.
Welcome to another scintillating Saturday morning on KXEL.
America's original 50,000 watt blowtorch, Karaming, all throughout the Big Ten.
John Jacobson here on The Jacobson Group, and tonight we've got our great guest stars, Pip Murphy and Sheila Murphy, the brother-sister tandem of political consultants, winning campaign strategists from
local races all the way to the White House as people are already voting in half the states of the country with our election less than one month away.
And we are sponsored on the great 1540 a.m.
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in that very volatile region.
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And we've got to really complement the LifeRunners, folks, because
They protect the life from womb to tomb.
And guys along the way, they help many expectant mothers as well.
Well, let's bring up the Henry Mancini here, our Decision 24 music, as we will call it.
And let's start with our McLaughlin group homage our round table.
It's Mike Shane, our super engineering studio.
Mike Shane.
who has his own inevitable ringtone that we will hear from later this morning.
Well, let's go into issue one on McLaughlin.
Issue one, the state of the presidential race.
Who wins it today if the election is held today?
I go to you, Sheila Murphy.
I believe it is Trump.
No, we keep an eye on contact with the
folks from all across Iowa who are going door to door distributing literature and they're all giving us the same story.
People that were Trump supporters but were very quiet and timid about it have had it.
They're coming out from the shadows.
People are a lot more open about it.
They want the signs.
They want to be heard.
They're speaking out in public places.
Something is happening.
Yeah, I sense that.
I sense that as well.
Kip, I'd like your take on this.
Next.
The late deciders, they're going with Trump because Camel had this nice honeymoon period, and she was the bright, shiny new object on the plate.
But then people realized she's not that bright, she's not very shiny, and that they'd rather go with Trump who they know does a good job, even though he may be a little brash and
And out there sometimes they know he cares about the country and they that he will do what's best for the country
John Jacobson here on the Jacobson group on KXEL beautiful Saturday morning a little bit after 7 30 I'm here with a great Mike Shane radio engineer for over half a century of excellence Let's delve into issue two
Guys, I've got to bring this up because this is late breaking and I think could be dispositive of the entire election itself in an incredible gas of such epic proportions that the mainstream media is desperately trying to cover this up.
We had the principal surrogate for Kamala Harris in Muswin, Michigan, their state governor Gretchen Whitmer, essentially participating
in what could be described as a blasphemous and sacrilegious ad that, among other things, mocked Catholic voters who are almost one in every three or one in every four voters in all of the Rust Belt.
It was egregious.
It was an unforced error of catastrophic proportions.
And Catholics are in an uproar.
Bill Donahue from the Catholic League called it for what it was, a direct attack on the Catholic faith.
Sheila Murphy and Kip Murphy, will this reverberate or will this die the death of media cover-up akin to the cover-up at CBS of the Harris interview response?
I think this will have some legs, but that will only be because of like this podcast and word of mouth.
The mainstream media won't touch it.
They won't say it was a gas.
They'll say it was stretching when we're trying to be...
two out there trying to be two with it and she just like all of Kim Walters lies they're just um vocabulary errors and that's what they'll that's what they chalk all of their mistakes up to is they're all bad and grammar i'm in the mid i was bad and grammar in in in grade school in high school but my teacher never let me get away with it
well and kip murphy i'll go further the difference between you and this whitmer stunt is that uh
You didn't have a woman kneeling down receiving adoritos on her tongue.
They're getting too cute by half and saying they were just modeling some other similar internet food type of skits involving issues advocacy.
But none of those were with a woman kneeling as if receiving food on the tongue.
And Sheila, I just think it is an outrage that frankly is worthy of the Ku Klux Klan.
And, uh, uh, ironic that I think now there are people out there informed, educated, intelligent voters who believe that the Harris campaign is running a clan campaign.
What say you, Sheila?
Yes.
Well, they are running a terrible campaign because they don't have any focused beliefs.
And Gretchen Whitmer thinks herself to be the coolest person on the planet.
Just ask her.
She'll tell you she's with it.
She's
She's cool.
She's doing anything TikTok suggests.
And I don't think that she thought this would hurt Harris.
I think she thought this would appeal to the young voters that are TikTok fans and would help her tremendously.
Because I think Whitmer, she may have just been elected to governor, but I think the people of Michigan are tired of her.
And I think she is longing for the national stage.
I think she thought this would be so great that she might get a cabinet position with President Harris.
Another bad step for Whitmer.
Well, and I would say that Whitmer probably had the worst record as the governor during COVID that anyone possibly could have had.
Very totalitarian in her attitude and very tone deaf.
I personally believe
that this is going to cost the Harris campaign the general election.
I do believe this story has legs.
Elon Musk and Twitter are carrying it hugely, as is the whole Breitbart lung of the conservative movement.
This is not going to go away.
I think it will be the margin difference maker in Pennsylvania, in Ohio, in Michigan, and in Wisconsin.
Issue three.
Where did the FEMA money go?
The US puts a gazillion, the billion, the trillion, the million dollars every year into FEMA for not just wonderful multiple hurricane threats the United States coast land inexplicably after two large hurricane hits within the last 10 days.
FEMA says they have no money.
Where did the gazillion, billion, trillion, million
dollars go Sheila Murphy.
Well I think that FEMA was tasked by the Biden administration to take care of illegal aliens as well as they could to use their offices to take care of as many of their needs as they could so that it could quell anger from the American people and I think they forgot that natural disasters could occur.
and that money that they gave to the illegals would be needed.
And now I think they're like, oh, we should have thought of that.
No, the money's in other people's pockets.
Yep, Murphy, your take.
Where went the money,
Chip?
Well, a lot of it went to illegal aliens.
But see, they were counting on the inherent goodness of the American people and the inherent goodness of Republicans to not let their fellow citizens go down.
They thought, heck,
We'll spend all this money on on illegal aliens.
Give it to the cities and so that their mayors won't squawk so much when they're uh when they're butchered by because they're taking care of all the illegal aliens.
We'll give it to new york.
I'll go to all of the democratic cities
and
we'll give it to the democrat um um ngos out there that um are helping all these immigrants come in and pay stravagan salaries and then once uh
A disaster occurs, we'll just go to Congress and say, we need more money.
We have to take care of these American people.
And you're not going to let those people down, are you?
And
what's unfortunate about that is, what's unfortunate about that, Kip, is even though that money does need to be allocated, obviously, they'll go into a special session here and vote that money in.
It'll be signed by the president.
This will continue to cause hyperinflation, just suppose with a failed reserve board.
that in a crass and craven move, at the worst possible time to cut rates by half a percent, did that in order to reelect Harris.
We are now faced with a spectrum of massive inflation down the line.
Everybody seems to be in cahoots in D.C.
Issue form!
Mark Luther King said we should be judged by the content of our character, not by the color of our skin.
Incredibly, this week, Barack Obama panicking at the plummeting in the polls by Harris, such that Harris is now behind in all seven battleground states, hemorrhaging male voters in a worse gender gap than there is involving women voters.
Barack Obama basically appealed to all men, particularly African American black men,
to vote for Kamala Harris ostensibly just because of skin color.
Sheila Murphy is Barack Obama making us go backwards in time and is his appeal merely to racial voting going to further Balkanize America?
Well, it can't do that much to America because I don't think he has that much impact anymore.
I have heard too many people commenting on his remarks in a negative way.
Most men I know, even African American men, were insulted by it.
But I think what it shows us is that Barack Obama is spending all of his time with celebrities.
This is exactly the way Hollywood behaves.
Americans need to be lectured and instructed at every turn of the road.
So his first impulse was to lecture and punish.
people because they have to be taught the right way to feel and behave and act.
And all I heard from him was Meryl Streep in disguise.
Hip Murphy, quite a take your synth head.
Can you wrap it up quickly here with this
segment?
I think Sheila's entirely correct.
And I don't think black, white, Asian, Mexican, Hispanic, they're not going to vote
most
of them on scale.
They're going to vote on green, the economy.
Issue five!
Focusing in again on the Harris campaign, who is the most impactful surrogate right now that Harris has?
Is it Tim Walls, who lost the vice presidential debate so badly that
But the Trump team has now gained five points in the polls subsequent to the vice presidential debate.
And again, Sheila Murphy was correct exactly on what the mission was for advance and
how he
achieved it.
In light of that, is Walls the worst?
Or is a Gretchen Whitmer that is the worst surrogate for the Harris campaign?
Is it her husband, Doug Emhoff, who impregnated the nanny years ago and now is accused of slapping around another previous girlfriend?
Or is it Bill Clinton, the predator who they're bringing back onto the campaign trail?
Which of these VIPs is the most impactful surrogate for Harris?
Well, I think that it has to be Walt.
Because, you know, you never know something if this ticket were to get elected, something could happen to Kamala.
And this knucklehead could end up to be president of the United States.
And I think a lot of people now are looking at that aspect of it.
with a little bit of terror, because every time he opens his mouth, it's not only a lie.
They're used to politicians lying.
It's a stupid lie.
And they're not so used to stupid politicians lying like he does.
So I have to say, Walls is sinking the ship.
Well, Sheila, now look at the bright side.
Walls would get along very well with communists.
China, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
Oh,
they love
him.
That's why he was selected.
Yep, your take real
quickly.
You said all of those that you mentioned are very bad surrogates.
So the very best surrogate she has, at least of this last week, I would say, would be CBS News.
That's her best surrogate, the way they sliced and diced her interview to make her look good.
Now that's
going from beyond.
That's a great point, Kip.
Kip, you brought up a great point.
It's incredible.
But her answer to one of the questions was so bad and so incoherent.
They had to substitute in another clip of her speaking elsewhere in the interview to put into that segment.
Unbelievable.
It's
malfeasance on the part of CBS News.
Just total malfeasance.
As Michael Savage used to say, has the fourth estate become the fifth column?
Issue seven.
I go back.
Two weeks ago, Sheila Murphy saying that although points were left on the table, JD Vance's mission was to mollify suburban housewives.
And Kip said the same thing away from the demonized portrait that the media had painted falsely of Republican VP nominee JD Vance.
I said at the time that the minus 15 unfavorability rating that Vance had
would be mitigated and that his favorables would go up significantly.
Now, instead of 15 down, he's got a positive favorability rating.
How successful was the vice presidential debate for the Republican Sheila Murphy?
It was incredibly
successful on many levels.
It broke through.
There was this fear advance.
People did not know what he stood for.
And what he did most of all was present himself as an extremely intelligent and competent person.
And they're not seeing much confidence.
The American people are not seeing much confidence on the other side of the ticket.
And this has allowed Vance to get more and more interviews.
He's everywhere.
He speaks out clearly his abilities to articulate an issue of really coming to the fore.
So what the debate did was open a door.
and open it wide.
I
would
go ahead,
Kepp.
It also showed that he was a very human person, that he wasn't this character out there.
He had a family.
He loves his family.
He's got a good sense of humor.
I just heard pieces of him on a podcast he did this week on a fishing trip with some podcasters and his son was along and it was hilarious.
It was a lot of fun and it showed
A very human side of him.
He was someone who you go out and talk to.
Yeah, and he wouldn't mock your religious faith either.
Let's close out with final issue eight.
Election predictions.
If the election is held today, Jacobson starts first.
Trump wins Arizona.
Trump wins North Carolina.
Trump wins Georgia.
Trump wins Pennsylvania.
Trump wins Michigan.
Trump wins Wisconsin, Trump wins Nevada, Trump wins an electoral landslide of over 330 to less than 210.
Sheila Murphy, I go to you.
You know, John, I think your take on it is pretty close to accurate.
I know some people are worried about Michigan today, you know, after Trump, Trump's recent comments in Detroit, but
I think the people in Detroit understand that he's actually speaking of concern for their plight, and I don't think it will hurt him as bad these people think he will.
The only state you mentioned that I would have questions about would be Michigan.
But I do think that he is going to win all of these.
I have heard that operatives in New York, Democrat operatives in New York, are being pulled out of that state.
and sent to Pennsylvania because Pennsylvania is thinking.
And I think that is a key factor.
Yeah.
I
agree with you, John.
And I think he may actually win some states you didn't mention there that are on the bubble.
I'm thinking he has a good chance, I think, of winning Virginia.
He has a good chance, I think, of winning the popular vote across the board here in the United States.
Something a Republican hasn't done since 2004, I believe.
This is great stuff, guys.
This is really, really great stuff.
This concludes a wonderful segment that we've had tonight.
Mike, this concludes a wonderful segment that we've had this morning.
Be prepared next week for some further updates.
Want to close out with our standing room crowd cheering for our panel, including Kippin Sheila.
You're listening to the Jacobson Group on KXEL.
Good morning on this beautiful Saturday morning in September.
We all survive Friday the 13th.
I'm no Triska Decophobic.
We're not afraid of anything.
As a matter of fact, we are filled with hope.
and great inspiration.
We have people like Barbara Haymes-Bryans, the family legacy custodian of the awesome Haymes Homes family, two wonderful communities in Cedar Rapids, Iowa of manufactured homes.
Barbara, welcome back to the show.
Barb, talk about the Lone App.
You guys make it easy.
We sure do.
From the time a person comes in and picks out a home until we can close on a home, it could be eight days or less with the manufactured home because we have our own in-house financing company.
We also have access to financing through several national lenders and several local lenders, so we shop around to get you the best deal you can if a loan is what you need to purchase a home.
this is what's great to use the golfing analogy barbs got 14 clubs in the bag guys she's got many arrows in the quiver and barb another wonderful part of what makes you guys such desirable uh place to live is how safe you guys are talk about the community application
Everyone who applies to live in a Haymes community goes through a background check and a credit check.
It's a private planned managed community, so you have to be approved to live there.
That way you know when you get in your home you're not living next door to a drug dealer or convicted felon, but you're living in a nice safe neighborhood that your kids can walk around in.
And Barbara, what's great about the whole scenario is you give people an option for brand new, beautiful, affordable, spacious housing, but also you've got some really nice refurbished and pre-owned homes as well.
We have our own dedicated service crews that go in and refurbish, remodel, and re-engineer our pre-owned homes, top to bottom, front to back.
Inside and out, we use a 96-point checklist to refurbish our manufactured homes so you know that if you're moving into a used home, it's still a great, affordable, safe, beautiful, attractive home.
And you continue to refurbish these on an ongoing basis.
Here with Barbara Hames Bryant at Hames Homes, the Homes People, there in Cedar Rapids.
Barbara, after you've got underwriter review and approval,
There's the closing and the community sign-in.
It's a beautiful touch, but the community manager there at Hames further explains the guidelines and answers questions.
That's right.
John, everyone agrees to a common set of living standards at Haymes Homes.
And the community manager is not only responsible for making sure the rules are enforced, but also making sure that every resident is happy living in a Haymes community.
And you've got that data plate that you show them in the homes.
That's an information summary that is unique to each manufactured home.
And then you also help them with maintenance rigumation.
with maintenance regulations and such, everything from furnace filters and when to check the heat tape.
You know, there's a lot to owning a home, any kind of home, including how to change batteries and a smoke detector of furnace filters, as you mentioned, and, you know, keeping seals around windows and doors.
Oh, snug and comfortable when it starts to get a little chilly outside.
Barbara, I was just back for my 45th high school reunion a few weeks ago and of course I always like to drive by your beautiful facilities, your beautiful homes there when I come through town.
Barbara, hard to believe it was 45 years ago, your great father and mother with this beautiful music we're hearing, Cracklin' Rosie, made famous by Neil Diamond, those early TV ads that we are going to bring in to the Iowa Broadcast News Association archives, some of those early commercials up from then, WMT Channel 2.
We're going to be really proud to add that to our Iowa Broadcasting News Hall of Fame.
Oh, and for your listening pleasure, anybody who would like to go look at our old commercials for old times sake, you can go to our website and go to about us and our commercials and you can watch those corny old commercials.
They're wonderful.
They are, they are epically awesome.
I have done so.
So Barbara, that was our appetite.
How do we find you by internet, by phone, and by physical location?
Most of our customers find us first on the internet.
or you can visit us in person seven days a week.
We're open today and tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday, seven days a week at the corner of Wilson Avenue and West Post Roads, Southwest.
So that's Wilson Avenue, West Post Road, Southwest.
Or you can call us on our Marian Legacy phone number 319.
377-4863-319-377-4863.
We have had that phone number for 55 years since 1969.
Put it on your speed dial, because we've got beautiful homes we want to show you.
And they are affordable, and this is the time now.
We've had a slight dip in rates.
This is a good time to take a look.
Barbara Ames, Brian ladies and gentlemen, our studio audience on their feet as always.
Barbara, between you and Curtis and Clint, you're a trifecta of radio excellence.
It's always a joy to have you on the blowtorch here, 50,000 watts, caroming across North America.
But mostly,
in Cedar Rapids, Iowatha, Robbins, Marion, North Liberty, Tiffin, Iowa City, Waterloo.
Get down to Hames Homes, folks, and look up Barbara Hames Bryant.
Thanks, Barbara, for joining us.
It's my pleasure, John.
You have a great weekend.
You too.
God bless.
Talk to you next week.
If you're enjoying this KXL podcast, then we invite you to listen to KXL's great programming in real time, too.
You can hear us on the radio, statewide at AM 1540 and in the Cedar Valley at FM 100.5.
We stream live on the web, not only through KXEL.com, but also through our free KXEL mobile app.
And Alexa knows how to find us too.
It's where Iowa comes to talk, News Talk 1540, KXEL.
Economics is the study of human choice in the world we live.
Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.
By investigating faith in economics, we can learn how they lead to human flourishing.
This is the Faith in Economics podcast, a presentation of the Gortney Institute at Ottawa University.
Welcome to our show today.
I'm Christopher Giantsal, producer and graduate assistant for Gortney Institute, joining us today.
Dr. Russ McCullough, the founder of Gordney Institute and Wayne Angels Chair of Economics.
Dr. Justin Clark, the Bernard Family Professor of Philosophy and Ethics.
Dr. Jacobson, the Gordney Professor of Economic Education and Research.
Finally, the Gordney Institute Assistant, Kevin Uvedici.
All right, so we're going to talk a little bit about Bitcoin in a little bit different way today.
Who knows where we'll end up going with it, but oh, about...
three, four years ago we held a book club on Bitcoin and we all got kind of excited.
We gave students got paid their honorarium in Bitcoin for participating in it and I ended up getting
into bitcoin in kind of a longer position.
I kind of toiled over this with world GDP and if it becomes a global currency and so anyway I became long-term bullish on bitcoin that I think it's probably going to get to 100 grand eventually but I had a long-term horizon and I didn't put very much money into it to be honest with you because there's so many variables and unknowns with how governments will treat it and whatever so there's some risk involved so
I say that all because I bought, I went to Coinbase.
So Coinbase is one of the more popular places that you can purchase Bitcoin.
They made it really easy.
I mean it was like I connected my bank account and before you know it I could be buying Bitcoin or Ethereum or anything else under the sun basically once I established this account.
And so
there I said I dollar cost averaged into buying it which means I didn't want to buy all that I my total amount in one shot so over the course of the next six months I bought up to the total that I that I have and again it's not a lot of money but I'm not going to share it with you seven million dollars and so
I've been sitting on it and then Dr. Clark over here, our least resident master of Bitcoin and its related items.
We talked about having a bitcoin wallet and so what a wallet is is kind of the equivalent of carrying a cash wallet so your bitcoin is stored in a protective device called a wallet that's locked down and you have this key code that you have to keep very protected and.
Um, it's kind of got this little mysterious feel to it.
And so I'm like, all right, I gotta, I gotta go off the, you know, off the radar and just hold this stuff like cash because I'm a Dave Ramsey guy.
I like holding cash.
And so I kind of similarly wanted to be in, let's just say full control of my own, of my own Bitcoin.
And so Dr. Clark referred me to a wallet that I purchased probably two years ago.
and so it sat on my kitchen counter for about eight months and then over the summer at some point I I begged Dr. Clark if he could hold my hand a bit doing it and he gave me words of encouragement and talked about the you know process a bit more and and so basically this was just something I backburnered because there's really nothing
you know my value of bitcoin was still the same the bitcoin value is the bitcoin value it's just a matter of where you're storing it so I finally just this last spring um decided to all right I'm really gonna sit down and do this I think school was out it was May and uh
I had this thing, I got the directions, I got words of encouragement from Justin and sat down to do it and then you got this key and you know, make sure there's no cameras around and so I was in a private place and I'm doing all this stuff that kind of reminded me of a cracker jack box like little...
investigation or maybe at the bottom of a cereal box you know the kind of this one.
Decoder ring type of thing and I'm coming up with these key words that the device is giving me and I'm writing them down and and so I'm kind of excited and I'm finally gonna get this done and then it comes to the part where I have to
have the device, which is connected to my computer, basically talk to the Coinbase app.
So then I log into Coinbase, which I hadn't done very much, but I got into there and I started to upload it.
And again, this was now, I think, I mean, let's say June.
And I get this thing from Coinbase that says, sorry.
In an effort to protect you, we've locked down your account and you won't be able to do this until September, it'll become unlocked September 19th.
And I'm in June.
I'm just all excited about doing this thing.
And I'm like, you got to be kidding me.
What do you mean you got to verify?
Well, it turns out I had to go in and try to validate myself through different verifications that they had.
And so
I spent a good hour or two looking online myself how to do this and then I called coin, I went to the Coinbase site and fussed around with that.
Finally got on board with a Coinbase rep and they said, oh, well, yeah, you have to take a picture of yourself with your driver's license and brought me to another website where I had to register like my social security number and other private details that I wasn't.
really comfortable with.
In fact, at one point I stopped the process and I went to Justin and I'm like, is this, does this sound right?
Or is this some sort of black web, dark web site, like collecting my data now or something or at a minimum the government, which is probably true.
you know, collecting enough information to get this set up.
And he's like, you'll be fine.
Again, some words of encouragement.
And you're almost there.
And so I, so then I had another three day waiting period.
And of course, I'm busy with other things.
So about five, seven days later, I get to trying it again.
And then once again, the code wouldn't hook up with the device.
And there was one more hoop to jump.
And so I kind of let it drop.
I still haven't actually got it to this wallet.
And I'm really looking forward to getting it there, but they make it such a pain in the butt.
So the moral of the story and the reason for the podcast, other than me getting things off my chest and I'm finding this therapeutic, is that these businesses like this make it very easy to get into their system, but make it a lot more difficult to get out.
And so Justin, maybe I think first throw it to you and you can clean up some of my language and maybe how the wallet works or whatever's whatever's on your mind.
I'm sure I've misstated some facts about how this thing even works.
Well, is that all the time we have for
today?
Yeah, that's it for today.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I think it's worth maybe backtracking and talking about what spending exchange is, what a wallet is and what the Bitcoin network is because those things get bleed together in people's especially people
Maybe aren't familiar.
So the Bitcoin network Bitcoin runs on nodes and Miners and those are just distributed all across the world That's that's where Bitcoin transactions take place and bitcoins are generated by mining bitcoins So that's where bitcoins come from most people.
However, don't get their bitcoins by mining bitcoins
with their computer anymore because now you need specialized computers, A6, to do this kind of thing.
And in the very beginning, of course, you could mine Bitcoin on your personal computer in the background, and that's how it bootstrapped itself.
So most people, instead of gaining Bitcoin by mining it, they purchase it.
for currency on one of these Bitcoin exchanges.
Coinbase is probably the most well-known.
There have been a bunch of other exchanges before, like Mt.
Gox is probably the most infamous one.
It was like the first one to fail horribly.
Mt.
Gox, it might seem like a weird name.
It's actually called Mt.
Gox, so it stands for Magic the Gathering Online Exchange, MTG-OX.
And Magic the Gathering, for those of you who aren't... Who played sports
in
high school.
Like
me?
I
don't know whether Dungeons and Dragons players look down on Magic the Gathering players or whether it's the other way around, but they're in the same... It's kind of a fantasy role-playing game with cards.
And some of these cards are worth a lot of money.
So what was his name?
The guy who ran at Mount Gox.
I'm forgetting his name.
But he set up this online site where people could buy and trade Magic the Gathering cards.
And it just turned out that after he'd set it up this way, people started using Bitcoin for this.
And then people started trading Bitcoin on the site.
And then Mount Gox.
was being used as a kind of exchange where people were purchasing and holding Bitcoin on that exchange.
And that's different from holding Bitcoin, you know, what we would call like in a cold wallet or in an offline wallet or off an exchange at least.
And when you're doing that, you're really kind of, so when you're holding Bitcoin on an exchange, somebody else has your Bitcoin, right?
The way Bitcoin works without an exchange or the way the Bitcoin network works is that there are a bunch of different Bitcoin addresses and each one of those addresses has a public and a private key the public key is essentially The like your email address and so it's something that you can give to everybody else and they know where to send your funds and the private key is The password that allows you to spend any funds that are in the wallet
So essentially, you need the private key to send any Bitcoin.
You can distribute the public key to anyone you want, because that's just like your email address.
When we get all of our spam, anybody can grab our email address and send us them.
You'd be really happy to get spam Bitcoin, right?
Just Bitcoin that you didn't ask for.
But since that's the only thing coming in.
You don't have to worry about who has your public address, except for the fact that they can see what's in there if you have a public address.
So there are reasons to hide your public address if you want, but it's not really a security issue in the sense that if anybody gets your private key, you're in big trouble.
So when you're talking about these past words, what happens when you make a wallet?
as opposed to holding coins on an exchange right when you hold coins on an exchange you usually use you can do a password you know my you know you're my coinbase password is password right you can have that be your coinbase password it's a stupid password to have and you'll probably get hacked right but you can't have that be your private key um your private key is a really long string of uh of integers and alphanumeric code together and
You can have that represented by numbers and letters.
Yeah, for those of you who played
sports
and high school.
And so instead you get a 24 word seed and those words in that order will generate the really long private key.
And that's really the secure way to store your Bitcoin is where you have that private key.
Right?
Now you can write that down on a piece of paper and then you could log on to the internet and open up any like generic Bitcoin website or like download a Bitcoin client and from your computer you could spend your Bitcoin from your private key using this really long password that you have.
That's slightly less safe, though, than doing what Rust did, which was purchase what's called a hardware wallet.
And hardware wallets, really, they're computers.
But what they are are single-function computers.
The only thing they do is sign Bitcoin transactions.
And they sign Bitcoin transactions with your private key.
and they are set up so that you can attach them to a regular computer and they will sign the transaction with your private key and then send that sign transaction to the Bitcoin network without ever allowing your actual private key, the key itself, to touch the internet.
And so that's what you want to avoid and that's what you don't avoid when you type your private key into your laptop
to
spend.
So the reason you have a Bitcoin wallet is to keep your private key from ever touching the internet.
And so I tend to think more like your Bitcoin public address, like that's your wallet or whatever.
The hardware, what we call a hardware wallet is really just the computer that prevents you from ever entering your ATM code anywhere where anybody can see it or something like that.
Now, what Russ pointed out is
Geez, you know, I can't buy Bitcoin and get it sent directly to my private wallet.
I have to do it on my computer through these exchanges.
And when I do that, they want pictures of, you know, the configuration of moles on my back to
make sure it's me
or whatever, right?
And that's right.
It didn't used to be like that.
When I first bought
You
want to jump
in?
No,
I think we should talk about the ways that it's changed because I've had experiences with that.
Yeah, that's probably a good spot for a second.
Yeah.
Okay, so
let me just say, like, give us the clip.
What it used to be is you could just buy Bitcoin on Coinbase anonymously.
Set up, you know, I'm going to make my user handle, you know, Bitcoin turd 87 or whatever, and
my
password is going to be password and, you know, all CoinBoys.
base cares about is that you used to even be able to buy Bitcoin on credit on Coinbase, right?
They don't allow you to do that anymore.
And you can buy it with a debit card, but you can't purchase it.
I don't know that.
That wasn't how I bought
Bitcoin.
Yeah.
And so you could anonymously leverage an enormous amount of credit and just send it after.
Now you're sneaking into second half.
Yeah, right after it hit your account.
And a bunch of things happened, most of this happened following I think the 2017 boom and bust in Bitcoin.
And maybe we should talk about how we ended up in the position today, which I think Russ is correct in pointing out that
Getting your Bitcoin off these exchanges, which is the only place that you seem to be able to get them seems a lot like trying to get money out of draft Kings after
money
That's
another area that I can get into
should get like but draft Kings is set up especially to prevent you from being able to do that right once your money's in the system I want you to gamble it until it's gone And we can talk about maybe what the similarities and differences are in the draft Kings model versus the Coinbase model and why
Coinbase has started to look more like GraphKings.
All right, sounds good.
We'll be back in just a bit.
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So we're back and want to continue on with how things have changed with Bitcoin and maybe even bring in some other services with this, creating barriers to getting your money.
Peter?
Yeah, so I think I can speak to this.
I probably first started buying Bitcoin.
Gosh, it was like early 2010s.
But I didn't buy a lot.
At the time, I was working first job out of college in banking.
My budget was like one half of what it is right
now.
So like we were putting away like a hundred dollars a month in savings is how much we ended up having left over.
So I didn't buy that much, but I started buying a little bit.
And I remember what it was like to get Bitcoin at the time.
It was sort of the Wild West to assert to a certain degree.
Now there are still exchanges when I started buying Bitcoin.
And so I remember the big ones, Coinbase still and then the other one.
Man, Bittrick's sounds familiar, but that's not right.
Binance was the other one.
Binance is a big
And so, no, no, I think, so what happens to Binance, I'll get you in a second, but...
Basically, you could just buy on these websites and move between them.
And I did.
And the reason I did that is Coinbase really only sold the major crypto currencies.
And when I started, I was a fool and decided, oh, I'm going to buy all these other crypto that are going to be big.
Which, by the way, I actually did decently with one called Cardano, which was made by the same person who made Ethereum.
And so it ends up being a decent currency.
And that's why actually, even today, it's still pretty well regarded.
But I also bought some other ones that weren't good.
I would exchange from Coinbase to Binance because Binance let you buy more.
And something like, I noticed things happen over the years, since I would occasionally like check on these things.
It's like, I would log in the Coinbase and it would say, oh, now we need like your address.
And you know, I started off small.
When I joined, I still needed my name in there.
So I needed my name in my email.
But then they asked for my address.
And then they asked for my social security number.
And then when I log in, it's like, you need 12 forms of identification in your blood type.
And it's like, this, so.
That's what happens on Bitcoin or Coinbase.
My assumption is that a lot of that was due to legal pressure, and I still think that's true.
We'll talk about this in a second, a DraftKings aspect to it now, where Coinbase has realized it's in their interest as the incumbents to hold their position by having these high barriers to exit.
Part of it is again like that a lot of people lost money as Justin pointed out and when that happened there was sort of like a lot of murmurs about like ooh maybe we need to regulate Bitcoin because people made mistakes and that's Bitcoin's fault.
And so I think what happened is these exchanges preemptively started self-regulating a little bit now I think there are actual regulations in place too but I think.
Coinbase, for example, has stayed ahead of the regulations in terms of what's required of them.
One way that we know that the regulations have happened, though, is Binance, for example.
The original crypto I had on Binance, I had to like in a hurried move exchange over to Coinbase.
I had to convert it to Bitcoin, exchange over to Coinbase because one of the things Binance had to do is they had to create a new platform within their own company for members of the United States or citizens in the United States.
So there's now Binance and Binance US.
And the reason is because the regulations were so much more in the United States, the financial regulations, that they didn't want to hold most of their customer base in Europe and Asia and these other countries to these standards.
So they just created this entirely new platform.
In fact, there was a cutoff date after which you weren't allowed to log in at the US anymore.
That's why you had to hurry and get your stuff off there.
And so crypto has been an interesting journey.
And now, and maybe this is a different topic that we'll get into, I asked my class the other day because I always do an exit, we talked about cursinary and entrepreneurship,
which is
all about arbitrage.
And I try to explain to them in management class, well, why is it that on all these different places that you buy stocks or buy assets that they're all the same price?
because a lot of times the mental model people have is like there's some central price computer and it sends the compute the price to all the different networks and that's not how it works this prices are spontaneous and so how are they the same and so I'm describing arbitrage and I this is the first time this has happened I asked my class how do you so where are some places you can buy Bitcoin expecting people to say like Coinbase or some other sometimes people bring up international exchanges the first answer I got was Robinhood
So things have even devolved, you know, Justin I think is not a fan of the idea of like keeping crypto on Coinbase and you don't really own your crypto if that's on Coinbase and there's truth to that.
But you can transfer your crypto out on Coinbase.
When you get into Robinhood territory, you don't even have a key to transfer out, right?
You own like a share of a fixed stock of Bitcoin value.
And the only way you're getting your money out is if you're selling it.
You don't even touch the Bitcoin ever.
You can't even in theory pull the Bitcoin out of Robinhood.
You can only cash it
Really?
I'm pretty sure.
Yeah.
I could be wrong about that.
But unless Robinhood built up a whole
And maybe Kevin or Chris knows better, but unless they've built up a whole like, you know, Bitcoin address storage system, then I doubt it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And Coinbase too would allow you to me to convert my Bitcoin to cash and then cash out.
Of course, I never went down that path because I was trying to go straight from just transferring my Bitcoin from one location to the other, which that's.
Fundamentally different than right transferring it into American dollars and then there's a transaction and they record it and whatever I'm just trying to trans flexible and it's a taxable event Yeah, and I'm just trying to move it directly over some still and I just got some weird thing the last time I touched it Which was so long ago.
I can't even remember but I remember being frustrated.
Yeah, so should we talk about like
the regulation side of things?
Should we talk about sort of the Draft King side of things?
Where do we go
next?
I mean, I know the regulations that prompted these changes have been in for the enforcement of KYC AML legislation, which is know your customer anti-money laundering.
Okay.
And the know your customer is they actually need real information on who this is.
That's why we're getting all this blood type and details.
The
reason they need to know your customer is to make sure they're not doing any money laundering.
It does make it onerous.
It makes the on and off ramps to Bitcoin to get Bitcoin more difficult.
And then it makes the on and off ramp from where you actually, you know,
pay for your Bitcoin to actually taking custody of it, that's difficult.
Which is what
I'm trying to do.
Yeah, and I tend to think of like the custody thing.
I think in the early days, it was really more important to have self custody of your Bitcoin.
I tend to think of it now like it's something that you ought to do.
But the fact that
a lot of people do take that extra step in self-custody.
That actually protects the people that don't self-custody.
Because it helps keep platforms honest.
I think the majority of people in Bitcoin tend to be, they kind of got into Bitcoin for reasons that would also make you want to self-custody your Bitcoin, right?
the same reasons that usually got people into bitcoin in the early days bitcoin was like wildly you know it was full of people who had read some austrian economics
which is
a really small subset of the population right so yeah you know people who are really worried about inflation or you know they would talk you know at length about fiat currency and and these are people who uh
You know like gold like the stability of gold and you know with thinking Bitcoin as digital gold and all of these characteristics are reasons that would make you also want to say and but yeah keeping in inventing having Bitcoin and then keeping all your Bitcoin on Coinbase.
That's just.
That's just creating the same problem we have.
So might as well an extra couple hours and get it off.
Yeah.
So, I don't know, any last words on today's topic and maybe we'll decide if we want to roll into something else here on another episode.
Yeah, real quickly.
There's a pretty easy business model for Coinbase to just monetize your sending it to a random address, which is that they charge a transaction fee.
I actually think it is government pressure to make it.
difficult to take your money off of Coinbase.
I think that's exactly what KC, KYC, AML laws do.
They make it difficult for you to do the thing that you're trying to do.
I think that you are highlighting, look, that this is another way that Bitcoin exchanges could
in a sense fail, right?
What they're doing is not serving Bitcoin.
But we've also seen exchanges fail, we've seen more exchanges fail, where exchanges become insolvent.
And so that's happened a bunch of times too.
And what I think the danger is, one of the dangers is pitching these solutions, exchange solutions,
and exchange regulations as a remedy for the first problem while instantiating the second problem.
We're going to solve the liquidity issue and that these exchanges become insolvent.
We'll solve that by putting in all these regulations, which again would maybe go against what the vision of Bitcoin was.
But
about the vision of Bitcoin, I do think there's a kind of tension
where a lot of people want Bitcoin to be a kind of currency where it would be the thing that you purchase things with and they also want it to be decentralized and they also want it to be a long-term store of value and those three things might
Becoming a part yeah, and it might be the case that what Bitcoin is doing and I mean I think this would be my trajectory for it is that it's turning more into a long term store of value rather than.
a currency in the sense of we are making transactions on the Bitcoin network.
You can build layers on the Bitcoin network to make that feasible, but right now a transaction takes, you know, if you want to watch it go through three or four validations, that's going to take 30 or 40 minutes, which is a long time if you're buying a coffee.
It's not a long time for a Western Union transfer.
It's actually a really, really quick
time to transfer money by something like Western Union and it's extremely cheap.
So I think you're seeing Bitcoin take advantage of maybe some of the areas where it has this real advantage and maybe abandon the attempt to be like an actual global currency by means of which we mean the thing you actually spend when you're buying a
coffee.
All right, well, this has been a production of the Gorton Institute here at Ottawa University.
And I'll leave those last words with Dr. Clark, our resident expert on Bitcoin.
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