Hi, I'm Max Keiser.
This is the Keiser Report.
Oh my gosh, so much to cover, so little time.
Let's get right into it, Stacey.
Max, this guy, remember him?
Oh yeah, I do, yeah.
That's Jimmy McMillan.
For his party, he ran for governor in the great state of New York with the Rent is Too
Damn High party.
I remember, clearly.
What a fantastic character.
Well, there were some famous clips of him on stage in debate with Andrew Cuomo.
And he was like, the rent is too damn high.
I hear that hungry mother out here.
I can't do his voice, but he was very funny.
Anyway, he's kind of considered old school now because he went the legit route.
He tried to campaign to get rent control and reduce prices on rent and rent stabilization
and went the political route.
He campaigned and activism and that sort of thing to get politicians to help with the
whole rent situation that we're seeing across many cities in America over the past decade,
certainly since the financial collapse.
And here's the headline that is showing that there's a new wave of millennials on the scene
and they are not happy, but they're not taking it to the stage like Jimmy McMillan.
They're taking it to the streets.
A new generation of anti-gentrification radicals are on the march in Los Angeles and around
the country.
This is Yahoo Finance and they go out into the streets of Los Angeles.
They talk to Defend Boyle Heights and their sister group, the Boyle Heights Alliance Against
Art Washing and Displacement.
Boyle Heights, for those who don't know, is in East Los Angeles.
It's just above downtown LA, which used to of course be Skid Row, very impoverished,
very dangerous.
When I lived in Los Angeles, it was very scary down there, but now it's Hipsterville, very
expensive new apartments there.
It's changed beyond all recognition.
But now these Boyle Heights activists are seeing the signs of gentrification coming
to their neighborhood and they are fighting back more in a Malcolm X kind of way.
If Jimmy McMillan is Martin Luther King Jr., these guys are Malcolm X and they are taking
it to the streets.
They're basically forcing out art galleries and hipster coffee shops because they link
those two to gentrification and increasing rent.
The shock troops of gentrification are hipster coffee shops and art galleries.
Once they appear, this group and like the minded are pushing them out and they're doing
so in an aggressive way, right?
They are like committing vandalism basically, they're committing law-breaking activity
to push out in a hostile way, in an aggressive way, the gentrification as a way to stop this
rolling tide of high-priced change, right?
Avocado toast, many people talk about that.
But what we're seeing in America in the past 10 years especially is remember, when we were
children, it was depopulation from the city centers.
People were afraid of the danger and the violence, so they moved to the suburbs, the white flight,
and then now it's the opposite is all the millennial children of upper middle class,
mostly white families are moving into the cities, driving up rents.
Rents are very expensive for these families, the Latino and Mexican and black families
are being driven out by the high rents.
But I'll tell you how radical it is from what they themselves, these Defend Boyle Heights,
put on their blog when they were organizing a February 7th protest in Mariachi Square,
which is over there in Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles, and they said, gentrification
is not your next documentary topic.
Gentrification is not a trend for the woke wide web or for the detached subculture of
the left to consume.
It is a vicious, protracted attack on poor and working class people, and we are engaging
in class warfare that leaves our friends, families, and neighbors homeless, devastated,
deported, or dead.
So get with down friends and make shit crack.
So this is them inviting people out to the February 7th event, and they were basically
marching on an art gallery and demanding they GTFO, and so that the real estate agents wouldn't
come in and basically drive up rents.
Yeah, I saw the article and I read through the article.
So they're making the distinction between this particular campaign and previous ones
where they've been more genteel in those campaigns, right?
They hold placards, they do marches, and they try to get awareness, and we don't want gentrification.
And this group and others are saying that doesn't work.
We're getting more militarized, getting more aggressive, we're getting more militant, we're
getting more class war-like.
So they're engaging in vandalism and violence.
I mean, that's the bottom line, to push out the money.
Yeah, they're making it basically so that it's not...
Basically they're making it very impolite.
They're putting graffiti on these buildings.
So there was like an experimental opera group that was supposed to be marching through the
streets of Boyle Heights, and this was in order to attract hipsters and bring in the
gentrifiers.
But they took their own trombones and other horn instruments and started like drowning
them out.
So they follow them wherever they go.
There's this one woman who is opening an art gallery in Boyle Heights, and she also has
an art gallery in New York City, in I think Brooklyn, in fact, where all the hipsters
live there.
And she herself lives in the Upper East or West Side of Manhattan.
And they surround her.
They travel across the US in a hashtag hood solidarity tour, and they go to Brooklyn and
surround her art galleries there and drown her out.
They taunt her wherever she is, so she stays out of Boyle Heights.
Now because this Boyle Heights group has been so successful, their methods are spreading
across the United States to other expensive cities.
As the article points out, as a result, like-minded groups in other cities, Chicago, Austin, New
York, have adopted the same hard-line tactics.
Their ranks are small and their methods are controversial, even within the communities
they purport to defend.
But their members are drawn from the most politically radical, economically anxious
generational cohort in recent memory.
Young millennials of color and their cause has the makings of a national movement, a
new, more militant war on gentrification.
So remember, these millennials are, as the article points out, graduating.
If they are able to go to university, graduating with massive debts, unlike the boomer generation
before them or the Generation X. They have these gig economy jobs, precarious jobs.
Their incomes are lower.
75% of those living in Boyle Heights at the moment rent, so they can't afford to own.
And now these gentrification classes moving in, able to buy these properties, drive up
rents, drive these people out and put in their hipster coffees.
All right.
So this belies two key American myths.
One is the melting pot.
And the second is the Harajio Alger myth of the bootstrapping of anyone can succeed in
America who works hard.
So this is a whole group of people, a whole generation in America, who's saying that there
is no melting pot.
We're not being assimilated.
There's no opportunities and we can't move up.
So their response essentially is to go into conflict.
And this is a major conflict.
This is a conflict across the country with a whole generation in a way that is becoming...the
response to this can only be as forceful as the hostility that we're seeing on the street,
right?
Well, JFK Jr. said it...well, not JFK Jr., but JFK himself said it that if you don't
allow a way for these people to be heard, then they turn to the street.
Basically violence and revolution becomes the only option for certain people.
So the article does point out that inequality in 2016, the top 1% made 87 times more than
the bottom 50% of workers up from a 27 to 1 ratio in 1980.
The CEO has made 271 times more on average than the typical employee, a 930% increase
since 1978.
So the trend has been worse and worse for them.
And this is now after decades of polite conversation and attempts for polite activism and going
on stage as Jimmy McMillan did and trying to debate Andrew Cuomo about the rent being
too high.
And he became a national meme and comedy.
Everybody's laughing about it, but the concern is very real for these people.
And regarding this woman, for example, with this gallery in Boyle Heights, they talked
to one of the women, Mesa, who she runs the Boyle Heights Alliance against art washing
and displacement bad.
Art washing?
That's a new one.
I get it.
It's art washing.
So when you see the gallery come into your neighborhood that's peddling, you know, high
end art from unknown artists, it's a sign that the neighborhood is becoming transformed
in a way that's unaffordable.
Well, you know the terms whitewashing or greenwashing, right?
Yep.
Bluewashing.
Yeah.
There are all sorts of whitewashing is basically provide like the UK does that all the time.
They have an inquiry and the inquiry is official and it's lords and ladies who run these inquiries
and they present a report that white washes the crime that happened by saying, well, some
terrible things happened and people feel really bad about it, lovey.
But like, so that's whitewashing.
Art washing is using artists to wash the community, to gentrify the community.
So artists are being used to get rid of all these Latino and black faces from the communities
is what they feel.
So regarding that woman that I talked about, the art gallery owner who has a place in Brooklyn
and she has this place in Boyle Heights and they're shutting down these art galleries.
So Yahoo Finance is following these group of activists from Boyle Heights.
And one of the guys that they talked to, he's asked why they're stopping, why they're actually
going after art galleries.
That seems so barbaric, right?
Well, he said, three, five, six mission.
They're really smart.
In the past, they used to do black events, people of color events, empowering workshops
and trans people.
So that identity.
I don't give a f**k if someone is black or brown or disabled, if they're a gentrifier,
they deserve to f**king die.
So pretty harsh language there and pretty extreme, but this is the sort of militancy
and their determination to stop art galleries and all the amenities that the real estate
agents then use to promote their expensive luxury, $8,000 a month apartments in this
new complex.
What about Captain Crunch?
What about Cheerios?
Oh yes.
What about the Cereal Cafe?
In other words, in the East End of London, one of the signs of really terminal gentrification
was the appearance of the Cereal Cafe.
So hipsters were paying five, six bucks or pounds or a little bowl of Captain Crunch
cereal to have the feelings that they had as children to feel good again.
And so if you see a Cereal Cafe show up in any of these neighborhoods, you know that
that is a sure sign on the road to hell.
Well perhaps in London, but I think Americans are kind of beyond that because we grew up
with that.
This is avocado toast and expensive coffee, but here in Boyle Heights, remember they were
kind of shut off from the grid of Los Angeles behind the, I think it's the 101 freeway.
So they're on the other side of the freeway from downtown Los Angeles.
But now that downtown Los Angeles is now saturated with really expensive restaurants and hipster
cafes and art galleries and all that stuff, they're building a bridge, a pedestrian sort
of bridge over the river to Boyle Heights, which is only going to increase the gentrification
and basically make it a more hipster sort of location.
Well, it's a fascinating story about how this kind of pushback against the wages of hipsterism
have turned ugly.
So we'll see exactly if they can succeed.
History would say that they would not.
Exactly.
Okay.
So stay tuned for the second half, a lot more coming your way.
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The greatest job in the world.
That's as close to being a king as any job that there is.
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The Louisiana incarceration rate is twice as high as the U.S. average.
But secret is behind such success.
Welcome back to the Kaiser Report.
I'm Max Kaiser.
Time now to return to our conversation with Jameson Lopp of CASA, or CASA HODL.
You do the work there.
All right, Jameson.
Welcome back.
Thanks.
All right.
Let's continue down the path of, or the rabbit hole that is Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency
market.
And there's an interesting dichotomy here in this whole space.
You've got the open source developers who essentially work for free, the free open source
software movement, FOSS, going back to the cypherpunks and the whole history of open
source.
And then you have this image of crypto as being Lambo driving, 20-somethings, get rich
quick schemers.
And how do you reconcile these two, or will the market work this all out?
Yeah, I mean, I don't think reconciliation is necessary.
There's a very diverse range of different people who are in this market and are interested
in crypto, and they're contributing to it in different ways.
And so you do have some of those outrageous investors that are flaunting their wealth.
But I find that a lot of the really early adopters and developers are actually quite
the opposite, and you rarely hear of them, and they rarely talk about how wealthy they
truly are.
Right.
Well, let's return again to another topic we talked about, the Poloniex acquisition
by Circle, Circle backed by Goldman Sachs, we were talking about exchanges and potential
vulnerability there if you have big banks buying into those or controlling the big exchanges.
The pushback against that, of course, would be decentralized exchanges.
This is, can you talk a little bit about that?
What are the couple of names in the decentralized exchange space?
So one of the first ones that came out, I think over a year ago, was originally called
BitSquare and is now BISC, B-I-S-Q. But this space has actually developed so quickly.
I think there's dozens, if not a hundred, of different decentralized exchange projects.
Another big one is the 0x project, I believe, on Ethereum.
But I've got a link to all of these, of course, on my website, as I tend to do.
And this is an interesting development because I think it will allow us to get away from
these choke points.
And I'm not really much of a trader myself.
I did start doing a bit of trading last year.
And I found that as soon as I started trying to bridge back into fiat and into the banking
system, I started having a lot of problems.
So at some point, hyper-Bitcoinization, term coined by Daniel Kurowitz.
So everything is Bitcoin, Bitcoin in, Bitcoin out, everything's priced at Bitcoin, we're
heading to a Bitcoin world.
Is this, you think we'll get there?
It's interesting, especially with this development of Lightning Network, second layer stuff, decentralized
exchanges.
I actually think that even if Daniel is incorrect on the fact that Bitcoin will be the one and
only blockchain, you could actually reinterpret that as all of these crypto assets essentially
become Bitcoin, as it becomes seamless to transfer between one crypto asset and another
just a click of a button, then it doesn't really matter so much whether you're using
Ethereum or Litecoin or Bitcoin on the back end.
It's just crypto.
So it's hyper-crypto-ization.
Let's return to something you mentioned in our previous conversation, talking about Bitcoin.
And you mentioned there's a talk possibly of 50 forks, we're talking about the forks
and the scaling and the contentiousness of it all.
Now, that sounds crazy.
So what do you see, 50 forks, talk a little bit about this.
It's the me too effect, and in fact, this is not the first time we've seen this.
In Bitcoin, I think back in 2012, 2013, we started seeing an altcoin explosion.
And a lot of that was due to the fact that software was developed to make it very easy
to create altcoins.
And so all of a sudden, everyone who has just a little bit of technical expertise and some
marketing savvy can create their own.
I think you know a fair amount about that yourself.
Sure.
Yeah.
Well, there was a site there.
You could just go to the site and plug in the specs and create an altcoin in five minutes.
Yeah.
And so it's the same thing now with these altcoin air drops or Bitcoin blockchain forks,
however you want to call it, is that the first few of them were very difficult to do.
You had to have a developer that could really get into the code, create their own new protocol
changes.
But now you just go to, I think, forkgen.io and fill out a form and you've got your own
fork.
What's the most quantum computer-resistant coin out in the marketplace today?
We all know it's Maxcoin, Jameson.
I don't know why you're not spending more time developing wallets from Maxcoin.
Jesus.
All right.
Let's get back to the topic here.
So speaking of manias, 2017, we saw the ICO hysteria.
I see that Steven Seagal's ICO, Bitcoin, spelled with two I's.
I want to know how to pronounce that.
Really?
Bitcoin?
He had to put in a certain kick.
What does he fight with?
Aikido, I believe.
Aikido.
Yeah.
Thank you.
So he got a cease and desist order.
You warned against ICOs.
You were kind of raising the red flag there.
Do you think this ICO trend?
Is it over?
Where is it going?
It's weird.
I mean, I think one of the reasons why there was so much hype is because the markets had
been inflated a lot last year.
You had a lot of crypto-wealthy people who are now saying, hey, where can I put my crypto
and keep it inside of the crypto economy, but also try to find the next big thing.
And so as a result, there was a lot of demand for investing in highly risky projects with
the hope of a 10x, 100x, 1000x return.
And now I think we've already seen that about half of those ICOs have already shuttered
and failed and probably going to see the vast majority of them fail just as the vast majority
of startups fail.
Right.
And so if you're somebody out there and you're crazy enough, I mean, interested in looking
at some of these, what are some of the metrics that you look at?
Is there any way to evaluate these?
It's tough.
I mean, I tell people that it's really like angel investing.
And so sure, there has to be a decent idea, but if you really want to do your due diligence,
you have to look at the team.
You have to say, can this team execute this idea?
And are they trustworthy enough that they're going to be around and put in the effort to
execute it?
Right.
And a lot of times, if you do any due diligence at all, you very quickly run into all kinds
of red flags.
The lights are on, but nobody's home type of thing.
All right.
So now let's talk about sovereign cryptocurrencies.
You've got Venezuela, Turkey, Iran.
The countries are starting to look at this as a way to solve some of their issues.
What's that trend all about?
Where is that going?
Do you think?
Well, the main reason that I find it interesting is from a standpoint that at least some of
the countries that are doing this are under economic sanctions by the United States.
So this may be a new type of play to try to skirt various economic sanctions.
Whether or not it's going to be successful, I'm very skeptical.
I don't know why anyone outside of those countries would want to invest in them, given their
history.
Right.
So overall, not a real positive kind of take on that.
Let's go back now, back to the drama.
I kind of missed the drama of 2017 now.
The summer of 2017, it was really an intense time.
I think because actually, Bitcoin's faced a somewhat existential crisis.
Is that fair?
I mean, it was really touch and go there for a second.
We've got a couple of minutes.
This is very dramatic stuff.
Take us back to that moment.
What was the triumph ultimately that happened?
Yeah.
I mean, it was really the culmination of years of frustration and contentiousness.
And there was a lot of game theory that was being experimented with the SegWit2X versus
user-activated soft fork, which eventually created the Bitcoin cash fork as well.
And so we had all of these things, parts of the system moving.
And we all knew that we were heading towards some major event.
We didn't know if it was going to be cataclysmic or a great rejoicing and celebration.
The community was really interesting.
So you had the emergence of some interesting media.
You could call them media crypto personalities.
The World Crypto Network, which I watch all the time on YouTube, and Tone Vays, and The
Vortex, and Jimmy Song, and these people really kind of distinguish themselves as being the
voice and yourself, kind of the voice of the spirit of what the Satoshi and this Bitcoin's
all about.
So you had a real kind of antagonist emerge with Bitcoin Cash, and Roger, and Jihan, and
even John McAfee, to an extent, emerge as something of the antagonist in this drama.
And did those guys ever prove anything with Bitcoin Cash?
Well, I mean, they proved something very important, which most of us already knew, which is that
anyone can fork off at any time without asking for permission.
And it's actually kind of weird that it took them so long to do that, to finally realize
that they weren't going to be able to convince or coerce the rest of the system to go along
with what they wanted.
Instead, they had to do the voluntary thing, which is to leave and convince as many people
as they could to join them.
And how is that project doing now?
It exists.
They're mining it.
Transactions are going through.
But from any number of different metrics, it's another altcoin.
I mean, I think that Litecoin and Dogecoin are doing better in terms of transactional
volume and fees.
If people like Bitcoin Cash, then they should use it.
OK, fair enough.
So we've got a minute or so.
I just want to dig down a little bit into your new project.
So it's called CASA.
You've got multiple hardware, different hardwares.
So for example, when the Winklevoss twins said that their security protocol was to break
up the private keys and put them into safe deposit boxes in different banks around the
country, that's kind of the approach, isn't it?
You're going to have multiple hardware wallets.
So I have two or three phones or iPads or whatever.
And these are now going to be contributing to a multiple hardware security platform to
give me the true ability to be outside of the banking system, be my own bank, with the
highest degree of security.
Right.
So we're approaching this from a standpoint of saying, we believe that you should consider
your threat vectors to be everything from a common thief who might break into your house
to a sophisticated attacker who knows a lot about you and wants to take you hostage to
a nation state attacker who could even have the ability to go into banks and coerce employees
at banks to open up safety deposit boxes.
What is a $5 wrench attack?
That is an attack where you are vulnerable because you have enough private key material
on your person that someone can just physically hurt you.
With a wrench.
Right.
With anything, you know, until you get mugged.
You get mugged.
Yeah.
Right.
That's not good.
Anyway, thanks for coming on.
Great to have you.
Love being here.
All right.
Well, that's going to do it for this edition of the Kaiser Report with me, Max Kaiser and
Stacy Herbert.
I'd like to thank our guests, Jameson Lopp now at CASA.
For some reason, they're saying CASA HODL because someone else has CASA, some squatter.
And if you want to reach Jameson Lopp on Twitter, it's at Lopp.
It's a treasure trove of information.
You'll be the best on the web.
If you want to reach us on Twitter, it's Kaiser Report.
Until next time, bye, y'all.