Cryptocurrencies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

technology the thing that will eventually make television so high-def I will no longer be allowed to appear on it and and I want to approach this subject carefully because discussions of any new technology tend to age very badly as this news report from less than five years ago shows the first users of Google Glasses surely will not be the last I think it'll end up changing our lifestyles you know changing the way we interact with each other and just changing the gesture instead of this it will be that yeah it wasn't though it was not that because for some reason people didn't mind doing this with their hands if the alternative was wearing a stupid robot on their face all day the point is it is dangerous to make predictions about where tech is going so that said tonight we're going to talk about crypto currencies everything you don't understand about money combined with everything you don't understand about computers the main currency you've probably heard about is Bitcoin it's been all over the news because last year its value exploded from around $1,000 at the beginning of the year to 9,000 by November to nearly 20,000 by December Bitcoin became such a hot topic that paparazzi started asking celebrities about it what Michael Keaton leaving a restaurant hey would you recommend buying Bitcoin you know what's funny I was just I got two different one guy said yeah you probably want to another friend of I said not like it's a bad thing they just don't know where it's gonna go I'm gonna say you do not expect conversations with paparazzi to be so nuanced hey cardi B what are your thoughts on the idea of universal basic income well it could go a long way to reducing inequality but I don't think the American people would support the tax increase necessary to fund it you can read all about it in my book card anomic s-- making Marnie Buddhist for a new American Century and this this was a traumatic shift it was just a few years ago you'd only hear about Bitcoin from that one guy in your office who wouldn't shut up about it let's call him Dan and the reason that we're calling him Dan is that Dan is the exact guy in our office who's been annoying everybody with his you've got to get into Bitcoin for years this is why we hate dad it's honestly not the only reason but it's the easiest one to bring up right now the point is lately more and more normal people or non Dan's have been getting into crypto currencies partly because they may have seen stories like this Dylan Fein is living the dream had their Mitsubishi Eclipse my windows didn't work my AC didn't work right I had to open my doors just to get food at the drive-through everything changed when he met a friend who introduced him to Bitcoin I turned 350 dollars into 12,000 he became a millionaire at 24 all by investing in Bitcoin I can literally put in a trade wait a few hours let the exchange rate fluctuate and I'm actually able to profit from the world's largest financial market in the world yes that man is apparently a millionaire now which is presumably why he's being interviewed on the most expensive outdoor swamp log in South Florida and despite the fact that Bitcoin has dropped by nearly half since the start of this year there is still a cryptocurrency fervour going on with people watching people like that guy get rich or hearing about others on reddit or Twitter and feeling driven to invest in crypto due to FOMO or fear of missing out now FOMO is a term that many of you probably already knew about but I'm 40 years old British and oblivious or Theo BOE so so with all this excitement and curiosity we thought we'd try and explain a few things tonight Bitcoin blockchain the technology that allows it to exist crypto currencies in general and I'm going to be simplify things a lot here so let's start with Bitcoin which is a digital decentralized currency that basically means Bitcoin only exists as computer code and there is no bank or government creating or controlling it I know that this is already a little hard to understand so I'll let this man in a Bitcoin suit give you a surprisingly decent explanation I'm a virtual currency worldwide you can send for little to no fees open source not controlled by any government corporation or individual financial freedom bro thanks bro that is a nuanced and accurate explanation of a complex topic delivered with the help of a man in a stupid costume and I would love to make fun of that except it's literally the entire business model of this television show I know you you may at this point be thinking but wait how do you make money from Bitcoin to which Dan would say he just traded on exchanges like any other currency and if you then asked well how does it have value Dan would reply how does any money have value man and then he'd say call me the brain for later because I just blew your mind to which you'd say forget I asked Dan you're absolutely gross I hate you but the problem is Dan is kind of right like most currencies the fundamental reason the Bitcoin has value is because people agree that it has value in fact at the moment it's really being treated more like a speculative investment than a currency think of it like beanie babies why is this beanie baby currently being offered for sale on Etsy at a price of $15,000 well because its owner thinks that someone will pay that for it and you know what that owner was absolutely right I'm kidding I'm kidding I'm kidding I just bought this at a yard sale for ten thousand dollars I'm not a complete idiot look what well a Bitcoin is very interesting as a concept there are still some complicated technical issues to work out before it can become a useable everyday currency just look what happened in January hundreds are in Miami this week for a Bitcoin conference but it had to stop taking Bitcoin as a payment tickets last week suggesting there are still some kinks to work out with the currency it's true a Bitcoin conference stopped taking Bitcoin which is a red flag since that's the one place you'd think it would be accepted it's like when I tried to pay for access to the Republican National Convention using Ronald Reagan's dusty skeleton boats everyone there agreed they had value there just wasn't an adequate network in place for the completion of our transaction but where the Bitcoin catches on or not many people believe that the really exciting thing about it is the potential of the innovative technology that it's built on and that's something called blockchain now normally if I wanted to send money to someone across the world a bank would need to verify that transaction and it could take days but with Bitcoin it is vastly faster because no Bank is involved and that is because blockchain technology allows a record or a ledger of every Bitcoin transaction ever made to be stored not in one place but across vast numbers of computers that is part of what people mean when they say bitcoin is decentralized and decentralization has a lot of theoretical advantages from speed to security the key point here is that this is a distributed ledger there is no central server all the other legends that we have all banking Ledger's all company'll edges they all sit and reside inside that company which means they have one point of attack they can be hacked JP Morgan was was hacked by cyber thief's not so long ago Home Depot target we've had all these companies get hacked it's actually because there's one central repository of information the Bitcoin ledger resides on thousands of computers you can't hack that when you think about it that sounds great and because of the complicated process the network uses to verify records it is very secure now relax I'm not going to get into what that process is or how it works but I will share a really helpful really dumb metaphor for why it is safe the way I like to think of it is that a blockchain is a highly processed thing sort of like a Chicken McNugget and if you wanted to hack it it'd be like turning a Chicken McNugget back in with chickens now someday someone will be able to do that but for now it's going to be tough hold on that is an absolutely horrible thought so why is that reporter so happy about the idea because if anyone ever figures out how to turn a Chicken McNugget back into a chicken that chicken is going to be up he's going to spend the rest of his life suffering from PTSD and writing haunting poetry about the experience the things I saw buck-buck-buck or my body is whole but what of my soul so very basically that is the blockchain a database that is nearly impossible to hack or tamper with and which could possibly improve security efficiency and trust that is why big companies like Walmart IBM and JP Morgan haven't been experimenting with blockchain as a way to potentially share and secure data trend and translation transactions in a reliable easy to access way but it is still very early no one yet knows what blockchain is really capable of honestly don't worry if you still don't understand it most people don't dan thinks he does and sure he'll throw around terms like supply chain management and it makes me want to punch him in his face stop leaving printouts of reddit threads on my desk Dan you know I'm just throwing them away I am you the problem is there is no enough excitement around the very word blockchain that has become a magnet for investment reuters found that existing companies that merely added the word blockchain to their name saw their stock price on average increase more than three folds and one of them was particularly dumb Long Island iced tea renamed themselves long blockchain and guess what happens yeah their stock tripled Wow I'm just gonna say it to people who watch markets this seems so stupid it's not even worth reporting yeah well I don't care how stupid it is it clearly works that is why from now on this show will be called last bit tonight with blockchain even triple the ratings triple take that too so so now at this point you know basically what bitcoin is it's the future bro and why people are excited about blockchain it won't let people chicken up your nugs but you might still be wondering well what about all the other cryptocurrencies that I've heard about okay well the key software to create a coin is open source meaning that just about anyone can create one so they have done that there are now over 1500 cryptocurrencies that you can buy with names like tits coin trump coin jesus coin insane coin electro neum wax particle deep onion snow vo pluton new bits and clams a list so insane that you can't tell which ones are real and which are made up because they're all real I didn't make any up I tried to come up with a dumb name than deep onion and it just can't be done and look not all of these coins are like Bitcoin just hoping to be the next currency often times startup companies will sell a coin to try and raise money as an alternative to issuing stock and sometimes those coins are meant as tokens to be used for services that the startup might eventually provide kind of like the tokens at Chucky Cheese only virtual and not redeemable at a rat based food emporium it has become incredibly easy to issue coins so companies are doing it a lot initial coin offerings or icos raised over six billion dollars in 2017 with one company raising thirty five million in under 30 seconds normally when someone makes that much money that fast they did it by walking up to Bill O'Reilly sitting in silence for 26 seconds and then saying I recorded our phone calls but but the vast majority of people buying these coins are not paying much attention to the details of the startups they're attached to Theatre is responding to the huge fervor and there is a lot of it there was an entire online subculture of YouTube personalities and subreddits that have a cult-like devotion to buying these coins and if you stumble into one you'll find they have a whole shorthand one key term is Hodel based on a misspelling of holes this is a foundational principle don't sell when prices drop instead Hodel in the face of food fear uncertainty and doubt otherwise you might miss out when the coin moons or rockets up in value meaning you'll get rekt or lose money and never be able to afford the traders ultimate goal a Lambo which is short for Lamborghini because of course it is and if you are thinking that these terms belong in a rap video some crypto traders agree I ain't got time for the haters man we about to grow to a million tell me how you down with the cool and I've got to be honest there it is hard not to watch that and deep down one to be in the Hodel gang Hodel gang Hodel gang Hodel gang the point is many people are buying coins for no reason other than that other people are buying them and this mania has gotten to the point where even a coin started as a complete joke like dogecoin can rock it up in value it's named after an internet meme that was popular at the time a photo of shiba inu with colorful comments written in broken english around it as you can see now dodge coins total market value has almost doubled since the start of this year to over two billion dollars there appear to be no obvious reasons for this yeah that's because there were no obvious reasons the whole point of the coin was to make fun of how people will buy anything and then people did exactly that that is no less ridiculous than if you started a joke band after the beatles called the waffles that was all st. Bernard's and they went on to have 40 number-one hits and one knighted by the Queen this is clearly ridiculous but for investors it's also potentially dangerous because right now this market is essentially the Wild West and ripe for exploitation for instance it can be easy to manipulate the value of certain coins through things like pump and dump schemes regulators crackdown on those when they happen with stocks but they've been slower to act in the crypto market and that may explain where some groups have felt perfectly comfortable posting videos like this welcome to crypto calls a leading crypto currency pump room where we skyrocket the value of coins for six hours at a time for information about our weekly pumps including the the point we are pumping follow our telegram channel once released be sure to buy the coin as quickly as possible and everyone in the group has purchased the coin we will begin advertising it to other investors on social media during the final hour outside investors will fill our orders as they follow into the coin that we have increased in value 1000 to 2000 percent by the time the 4-6 hours is up everyone in our group will have sold for props crypto calls together we profit holy it's kind of destabilizing just a brazen advertisement for something that you could have sworn was illegal it's like watching a commercial and hearing hey do you not have a child do you want somebody else's then kidnappers corner is the group for you here a kidnappers corner we take children that are not ours and bring them home with us it's easy-peasy toddler cz and look pumpkin dumps are just the beginning here there are dodgy companies everywhere some of which just look like old school frauds with some crypto sauce poured on top take a bit connect at one point it was worth around three billion dollars now big connect told investors that if they handed over money they could get returns as high as 40% a month and a rate of return that high may immediately seem suspicious to you but remember the market was soaring and picking X had excited investors like this guy who spoke at one of the conferences [Music] let me tell you that we are really changing the world as we know it the world is not anymore the way used to be no no because [Music] I [Applause] yes the last time I saw someone that irrationally exuberant about a major commitment he was roughly seven years away from divorcing Katie Holmes yeah I don't blame him for anything there he's got a good head on his shoulders you stay clear Tommy stay clear my boy now that man that man's passion has become famous in the crypto world as well as his conviction that the business he become involved in was 100% legit this was gonna be a scam again then I said to myself in thousand Dossett ding you're right on her you know Taylor Oh women I'm all right always nagging you not to get sucked into get-rich-quick schemes leaving your marriage in the state of financial ruin now this will not surprise you big connect essentially collapsed regulators in two States issued cease and desist orders and bit connection reporters who've been labeled a Ponzi scheme by many in the industry something nobody had any reason to suspect from their promotional material except that it featured this actual illustration of their bonus system which seems to just be a picture of a man coming up with the idea for a pyramid scheme I am NOT saying that every crypto poin is a scam just as I'm not saying that every blockchain company is what I am saying is in a speculative mania it can be incredibly hard to tell which companies are for real and if you want a good example of this just look at block one it's a start-up whose coin offering has so far raised one and a half billion dollars which will go toward developing a new type of software project called Yost now just for context it took Facebook seven years to raise a billion dollars from investors it took over five years Yost surpassed that in around nine months and that is despite the fact the Wall Street Journal described block one as a software startup that doesn't plan to sell any software and describes what it's certainly a digital token is having no purpose and while the company's sister Els will be the most powerful infrastructure for decentralized applications which they say will be usable it it hasn't lost yet so you sort of just have to take their word for it and they do talk a big game everything will be better faster and cheaper everything will be more connected everything will be more trustworthy everything will be more secure everything that exists is no longer going to exist in the way that it does today everything in this world is about to get better oh please douche everything that exists will no longer exist in the way that it does how the is Yoast going to change this iguana how is how is a OS going to both alter and improve Susan here Susan is enough now now that that sleepy creepy cowboy from the future is named Brock Pierce he began his career appearing in The Mighty Ducks and in gushes a gaseous commercial as a child who turns into a banana well that that banana then got involved with some very unsavory figures just Google Brock Pierce scandal is all I'm saying there and then he teamed up with yokes to help promote their not yet a product he actually gave a speech at a tech conference last fall and I want you to remember as you listen to every word he's about to say the company he's describing has raised 1.5 billion dollars this is a chesty he'd ruin that I'm wearing which is the logo of Eos the chesty he'd rune is the sacred geometrical shape of the heart and if you're gonna bring a technology to the world that has the potential to change everything it's good when you do it with intention and that seems like a good place to begin this was my wedding at Burning Man last year an entirely unicorn wedding all the groomsmen wear the color of the rainbow plus pink all the bridesmaids the color of the rainbow plus pink and my best man was a woman dressed in black cracking away okay stop Brock stop because I was already out at Chester he drew and I simply refuse to believe that a man who has the time to organize a unicorn wedding at Burning Man should be trusted around one and a half billion dollars if someone turned up to mow your lawn and gave you that exact speech he would tell them no way I don't trust you with my lawn he's just gonna organize a warlock quinceanera on it look look here is the thing at the start of this piece I said that I didn't want to make predictions and who knows maybe eoqs is going to be the next Google I don't think it is and I certainly don't think it can be worth over a billion dollars at this point but I could be wrong I'm absolutely not but I could be the point is if you choose to invest in the cryptocurrency space just know that you're not investing you're gambling which is fine but you should know that that is what you're doing and prices do go down Bitcoin could eventually be worthless or it could be worth billions and adopted as a new global currency although if that does happen I for one will not experience it because I'll be in an underground bunker trying to avoid Dan's smug little face for the rest of time I hate your belts more than anything else in that photo the important thing to remember here is that this is a brand new very complicated space and literally nobody knows how it's going to develop so you need to be careful and I know that sounds boring caution is a tough sell when you're up against bit connect and hold or gap which is why I have invited a special guest to help make that message a little more exciting [Applause] I really so grill right now to be saying this super excited honking don't imagine my moment with all of you because tonight we're going to be talking about okay you've got to tell me more about this responsibility did this mean I shouldn't just throw everything I own into cryptocurrencies now it's raion that's right I shouldn't know the crypto market is extremely volatile and insufficiently regulated they talk they don't if they pumping down the puppet of their company popping it and double it in the W and their permanent issue they've opened up and they pumping it dumping they dumping a puff all the time and they don't yes that's right the belt yep listen upbeat design chuckle coins investing in crypto could be like getting in on Google on the ground [Applause] when you say that that that sounds absolutely great it could be like getting in on Google glass on the ground floor and that's what not to be and one story did that was a single that was a single story so let's break this down what is the big lesson never invest anymore that you are willing to lose and if you do don't just blindly hot okay instead you have to be extremely careful okay how to betray us Todd playful game okay [Applause]

Channel: LastWeekTonight

Views: 15,609,633

Rating: 4.8231821 out of 5

Keywords: last week tonight cryptocurrencies, cryptocurrencies, bitcoin, blockchain, last week tonight blockchain

Id: g6iDZspbRMg

Length: 25min 21sec (1521 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 11 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/damnightmare]

I thought for sure he was going to introduce his own coin by the end of the segment.

[u/RobinHoodin]

I thought this was a fair segment. He decribed it well enough for a person unfamiliar with the currency to get a grasp of its pros an cons.

Not necessarily denouncing blockchain technology or categorizing the entire thing as a scam but also not straight up recommending that anybody invest in it and explaining how easy it is to fall into the cult-y aspects

Edit: Also nice to see Dan on the show. Cant remember exactly but i think he did bitcoin sketches during his time at College Humor

Edit: both r/bitcoin and r/cryptocurrecy also seem to find his breakdown fair. Weird.

[u/gamelizard]

the biggest take away for me was companies paying employees in company backed crypto. i get strong company script vibes from that shit. that better not catch on, or it needs to be regulated.

[u/joe727]

So that "Brock Pierce scandal" thing Oliver mentioned. In the late 90's/early 2000's Brock Pierce was a co-founder of a digital media startup called "DEN" which turned out to be a front for a pedophile ring. Pierce escaped charges in the US, but it's main founder Marc Collins-Rector got charged with sex with a minor and had to register as a sex offender. When Rector was indicted he and Pierce fled to Spain together and were arrested in a mansion where they were found with guns, machetes, and child porn.

There was a whole documentary on this called "An Open Secret" which unfortunately can currently only be found on Alex Jones' Youtube channel.

[u/APERSONLIKEME]

I like Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

But I like Last Bit Tonight with Block Chainever 3 times more.

[u/thenamesalreadytaken]

I never thought there could be an analogy between bitcoin and Ronald Reagan’s skeleton bones.

[u/CaptainPlummet]

#CRAEFULGANG

[u/moffattron9000]

In all honest, I'm a little surprised that they didn't create their own currency as a joke. Then again, someone already did that, and made a stupid amount of money.

[u/vyrusrama]

surprised the high energy consumed in mining wasn't highlighted...

it'd have been a goldmine of jokes & source material.