Visa Going All In On Crypto; Steve Wozniak Sues YouTube; The Twitter Attack One Week Later

This week: Visa is claiming that digital currency is in their DNA and Steve Wozniak is fed up with YouTube scams. Plus, Twitter got hacked hard last week – what do we know over a week later? More info @ Talk.Bitcoin.Tax Show Notes: (00:13) On Wednesday, Visa released a blog post entitled “Advancing our approach to digital currency”. In short, this blog post is meant to alert consumers of Visa’s “digital currency strategy”, and their dedication to embracing cryptocurrency. Overall, a good thing for adoption. Diving a bit deeper into the blog post, Visa mentions their existing partnerships with “regulated digital currency platforms like Coinbase and Fold” and “more than 25 digital currency wallets”. They highlight their history of blockchain technology research, and state that their current research goal is to develop “new mechanisms to improve scalability and enable offline digital currency transactions”. For reference, Visa’s research team consists of an impressive number of Ph.D scientists and researchers, with focuses ranging from cryptography, machine learning, quantum computing, blockchain technology, and a number of other tech-related concentrations; this well-versed research team certainly illustrates that Visa is serious about crypto and blockchain. The blog post also touts Visa’s involvement in shaping cryptocurrency related policy, citing their collaborative work with the World Economic Forum where they were involved in creating policy recommendations for a Central Bank Digital Currency. Finally, Visa states the key values that will guide their digital currency strategy: protecting consumer data and privacy while adhering to all applicable laws, remaining currency and network agnostic by supporting the digital currencies and blockchain networks that their partners and customers want, and utilizing their existing expertise and capabilities to shape and enhance their continued foray into crypto and blockchain technology. The blog post shows that Visa is serious about cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, a sentiment that is more and more commonly shared by well-known names in the finance space. It certainly wouldn’t be surprising to hear about some additional Visa partnerships with high-profile cryptocurrency companies in the near-future. — (02:21) Next up – YouTube scams are really annoying Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (and everyone else). So much so that he is reportedly suing YouTube! If you’ve spent any time on YouTube, you’ve probably seen some sort of video that is trying to scam you out of your money – whether you’ve realized it or not. The lawsuit that Steve Wozniak filed on Tuesday relates to “images and videos of Plaintiff STEVE WOZNIAK, and other famous tech entrepreneurs”… “that have defrauded YOUTUBE users out of millions of dollars”… “[using] images and video of STEVE WOZNIAK to convince YOUTUBE users that he is hosting a live “BTC” or “BITCOIN GIVEAWAY” event and that, for a limited time, any user who sends in their bitcoin will receive twice as much back.” At this point, these types of scams are commonplace – they’ve been around for a long time, and take place on various social media platforms. We’ll be talking about the big Twitter attack that occurred last week, which utilized a similar type of scam. The lawsuit actually mentions that attack, stating that “Twitter acted swiftly and decisively to shut down these accounts and to protect its users from the scam”. According to the lawsuit, YouTube not only refused to remove the scam videos, they also promoted them AND profited off them via paid advertising. Again drawing comparison to the recent Twitter attack, the lawsuit says that the YouTube scams have generated millions of dollars in stolen crypto, whereas the unprecedented Twitter hack only yielded around $120,000 worth of crypto income for the attackers. As we discussed on our April 24th episode, Ripple Labs and their CEO Brad Garlinghouse filed a similar la