And the house Sargisway, it's a big common group. The American original. For over the last 10 seconds, the sharpest Satoshi's, the best big coins, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Gabriel Devon, from Future Rant. Hello internet, hello posterity. Tones from Liberty Life Trail. Hello everyone, hope you enjoy your Thanksgiving weekend. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network. Moving on to issue one, the state of the Bitcoin media. Coin Telegraph had an interesting article this week. Its original title was, One Coin, threatens to overthrow Bitcoin as number one currency. Now I'm sure after some complaints, they changed it to ridiculous One Coin, threats to overthrow Bitcoin. But the reality is, the article is really just a commenter who may or may not hold One Coin, who may or may not have an interest in One Coin going up. Coin Telegraph quotes the commenter extensively. Coin Desk had an interesting article this week. Steam its first fast, reveals the power of blockchain community. The article is the glowing praise of a steam up meetup. A steam up meetup, where they recently discussed their new cryptocurrency. The article is written by someone who claims to hold value in steam. Yet the price that the steam, the value of steam has gone down is not mentioned in the article. Coin Desk, as you know, was recently acquired by Digital Currency Group. The famed investor group run by Barry Silver. Meanwhile, BTC media acquired Bitcoin magazine. We've also seen a lot of articles pumping Z cash. What is going on in Bitcoin media? Is there a trustworthy source? Can we hope for more Gabriel D. Vine? Well, is the question, is there a trustworthy source? Can we hope for more from Bitcoin media? Is it over? Is it great? Is it bad? Yes, it's bad. It has definitely gotten worse. There was only a modicum of any Bitcoin coverage anywhere on the entire internet when I got into Bitcoin. An average of about three or four articles a week on the entire net that I was able to find. And the founders of Bitcoin magazine were incredible people. They really knew what they were doing and they made a very quality journalistic publication. Then they decided to move on to other things as people do, which is fine. But the quality standards that they set have been gravely undershot by the rest of the space. And now we're seeing a real, a much steeper decline as all of the media outlets have been, as you pointed out, captured by for profit enterprises that have their fingers and other pies. And really just are trying to use the clout that these even coin desk was good when it started. There was actual real coverage of the Bitcoin space for at least six months. They're using the mouthpiece of these outlets in order to advance their agendas as is really the classic conundrum of journalism to find somebody that is neutral in the journalistic space, in business. It's one of those things where the fourth estate really is kind of impossible. It's one of those problems of democracy that are truly untenable. Democracy is just kind of a janky, whatever, try to get the jalopey driving down the road with the steam coming out of it and then backfiring because of what they used to call factions in the 18th century. We now call lobbyists and journalism as the balancing the state. Oh, well, if the people are informed and the truth must out and the righteous will ascend to positions of authority, it doesn't really work out that way in the presence of scarcity. In the presence of the necessity of economics where there isn't enough to go around, you're gonna have those types of conflicts of interest. So I think it was kind of inevitable. However, I'm really glad that you've chosen this as the topic Thomas because the acceleration of the dissent is really kind of breathtaking. When you see an article like the Coindesque Steemit article, I really see it flies in the face of everything that Coindesque has done before that. They've done a lot of good articles, they've had a lot of good guest articles. They've been really on the up and up, but that article, well, it's great to talk about steam its community and I laud them for having a good community and people that are interested in writing blog posts and making a little bit of money for it. It's really irresponsible not to mention the downward trend. If you read that article and you were like, wow, this steam it's great, I want to go buy some and you didn't look at the previous chart, you just took on the information that you earned from that article, you would invest into a free fall. Now, I think it's interesting for writing blog posts and being a part of their community, but for investing is really horrifying. And someone like Coindesque has a responsibility, I think, to mention that free fall and to see a coin telegraph take on this one coin article and something that's so hard in this space, there's so many scams or so many new coins announcing a new coin is potentially announcing a new scam. It's a lot of responsibility. This isn't just music journalism, I heard a new band, I think they're good. People are investing in that band, they're investing in that music. So what do you think? Thomas, but I just, speaking of sponsorship and conflicts of interest, has Michelo contacted you at all for this particular episode? I mean, is there something that you want to let us know about before you mentioned the delicious refreshing taste of Michelo Golden Draft? It is, I'm in my brother's room in Sacramento. Oh, I see, a beer fan. The background is the background. Yeah, it's incredibly irresponsible. It's incredibly unethical. And it's just amazing that these people, like Barry Silbert, try to play the system. And it's interesting to see that he was one of the first people in traditional finance, one of these movers and shakers that actually saw the real potential of Bitcoin early on. And Kudos and props him, he deserves the profits that he's made off of his legitimate businesses, even something as conceivably could be considered risky or possibly scamming the future like GBTC, which is an investment vehicle where you buy these shares that have been issued based on their holdings of Bitcoin. So I mean, that's actually, I would say, maybe not scamming. But something like this, where he just buys up, they buy up the media outlet, and they just go on with the same graphics. And I think actually the designer, possibly quit, they have these, the coin telegraph has these cute drawings where they do illustrations of the people, and they have the Bitcoin with arms on it. And they were really actually amazingly good when the outlet first came about. And then that artist actually left. And I wonder if it was for an ethical reason. It makes me wonder. I've also heard, we can't really cover it from this side, looking at the articles. But I've heard lots of stories of people writing articles and not being paid, people writing articles and kind of expecting to be paid in Bitcoin. And then they have to get a wire transfer or something. So it's been a very weird space. But I would like to see it improve. I think that DCG tries to separate themselves from coin desk. I'm not sure how well that's working. There's also this big question with any of these altcoins. When you mentioned the altcoin, are you promoting it? Are you pumping it? Did you get paid in the altcoin? There's a lot of questions in this sphere. And I know a lot of people have been paid or a lot of people get jobs and things happen. But I know also that it's very hard to make money in the media. I'm not saying that this is easy or that their road was really simple and they had great options. But let's go to tone, Vey. It's tone. What do you think about Bitcoin and media these days? All right. So I am very, very unhappy with it. To the point where back in the day, I used to read every single article that would hit coin desk and coin telegraph. And I would pay attention to headlines and crypto coins news and Bitcoin magazine. And now I try not to read them at all. Like usually the only articles I read are the ones that we talk about as potential topics for the show. I go and read them. Or if someone tags me directly and points to an article, like what happened with Charlie Shrem, maybe that will be our second topic. And when coin desk grow, that was actually an event. I mean, it's getting so too bad. It's not just like articles. Like you raised a good question at which point are you reporting on the news? And at which point are you pumping scams? Meanwhile, coin desk is now, I mean, they have their big conference, the consensus conference. I was at it last year. I mean, there was maybe two or three speakers worth listening to. Everybody else is pumping nonsense. And they're charging like $1,000 to get in. On top of that, coin desk just did their first small event. And their speaker was Charlie Shrem announcing his venture. Yeah, exactly. That one, which is questionable as hell. We can talk about this as an entire topic. And in fact, we probably should. I'm able to talk about it after. So again, at which point are you pumping these ideas that are borderline dangerous in my opinion? And there's almost no investigator reporting going on. There's absolutely none. And that is, I guess I just came to this realization while listening to you and Gabriel talk about that. Wait a second. We were just discussing Aaron Van Veerdum and Kyle Torpe, who do do investigator journalism in the space? There are few and far between. I agree. I like Kyle's work. And I like Aaron's work. They're very few and far between. But most of the people, they're just, you know, oh, we were trying to be neutral. But you're not neutral. If you're not doing any investigation, the big problem. If you're just mentioning something that's brand new, you're announcing it and you're giving your reputation to it, you're saying, this is interesting. I find this interesting. And then that jumps off from there. But this brings us to another debate. It's like people always like to say on their Twitter, they're like, oh, if I like or retweet something, it doesn't mean I agree or support it. And I usually reply to these people. To me, it does. I don't care what you think. I care what I think. So I am very careful as to what I retweet. I am a little less careful as to what I like. I mean, my view is if I hit a like button and someone else is tweet, that means I partially agree with it or I find it interesting. If I retweet something, I absolutely agree with it. And I want other people, unless it's like a straight up joke and it's funny, then I just want other people to laugh. But I don't understand the people are like, oh, just because I retweet something, doesn't mean I agree with it. It's like, no, it does. It really, really does. So I kind of have the same view on these articles. My bigger problem with it lately is letting anyone just right there. So like in this case of the steam at article, it says it right there in a disclaimer, or am I not saying the disclaimer, but like the author holds steam. So of course, he's pumping steam. Even if coin desk isn't holding steam and pumping steam, the author does. He says it right there. Thank you for highlighting. And let me share screen now, because I want to talk about the aftermath of that specific article. I of course commented right away about the price of steam. It looked like there was a specific day when we all heard about steam. And I even posted my email thread, how I heard about steam it for the first time, which was by market watch, emailing me to comment on steam. And I replied to them, I have no idea what steam is. I never heard of it. But I can comment. It's a scam. But then I said, OK, let me look into it. Then I looked into it. And then like 20 minutes later, I emailed them again. I'm like, it's a scam. Now that I've looked into it, I know it is. Did this on July leave? And the steam had it all time high by 20th. Ever since then, the dollar has done better over a 97-year span than steam it. I mean, steam it literally, the steam it did in three months, it's lost 9 months value. It took the US dollar 100 years to lose 95% of its value. And these are the same people. These all claim to be libertarians. They all want to print their own money. It's like they all hate the Fed. But now they all want to print their own money. I mean, the hypocrisy in this space is getting completely out of control. All the things that bother me the most. So I got into it showing them why steam it's a scam. Ryan Selkie's to the idiot asked me a very interesting question. He says, how much would you pay for the description to do that time-intensive research? And that was basically to my comment that, yeah, I do a lot of research to look for these scams. And I don't get paid for it. I would pay for that research. Well, I wouldn't pay anything what he should do is go to Goldman Sachs because for a fraction of the money that Goldman Sachs wasted with R3, if Coin Desk was doing real science, they could have charged Goldman Sachs a fraction of that, funded all of their journalism for like a year and still saved Goldman Sachs like $100,000 by telling them that joining R3 is ridiculous. Instead, Tim Swanson writes a bunch of articles on Coin Desk pitching R3 and telling them how great it is. So it's very, very questionable whether what the Coin Desk is doing more harm than good. Now on top of that, there was an inch, again, same article, the same Coin Desk article, the centrist who I am personally not familiar with, but he was the tech editor at Bitcoin Magazine and he straight up accused all of these media outlets, including Coin Desk of holding the old coins and then pumping the old coins. I mean, I have no evidence of this, but he's pointing out specifically Ethereum, New Coin, BitShares and Steamit and it says here, my behavior was very rare, it's common for blockchain media companies to accept advertising payments in the form of pre-mined old coins. I mean, he was an editor of a publication, so he would know better. He's actually one of the founders of Bitcoin Magazine and he has a lot of connections to Bitcoin media and Bitcoin companies, Silicon Valley, all over the States mostly. He knows a lot of these people personally, so. I mean, he's a pretty reputable source for that type of information, I would say. I mean, I can follow my Twitter, I'm sure I can reach out to him and talk to him some more for some details. I mean, I don't mind David Bailey buying out Bitcoin Magazine. I find him to be somewhat respectable in the space as far as Bitcoin Magazine goes, even though it's very ironic that the first cover of Bitcoin Magazine had Neo and B on it, that was kind of funny. I think that was the first and last company they featured on the cover. Ever since then, it was more like a general kind of playful cover. Now I did like the old Bitcoin Magazine when it was essays and it seemed like they really worked on the articles hard. Now, since they stopped publishing and they got sold, it seems like why Bitcoin is more of an advertising's promotions engine. I see it for free at a lot of the conferences. I try to read it, but the articles seem to read just like the ads. It's hard to go back and forth, but I'm not sure. I mean, they are good guys. I think they're trying to do the best for Bitcoin. But no one really knows on this if they're taking the altcoins, if they're getting the pre-mind, we just don't have any information. We don't know. Here's the thing, right? I can kind of believe his speculation. Here's why. If he was that high up in the media, he would have had a lot of pitches going his way, hey, can we pay you in these pre-mind coins? And if he was turning them down, and then like two weeks later, he's seen a bunch of new coin articles being pumped on another Bitcoin media outlet. He kind of knows he's like, oh, they took the pre-mind, right? So he kind of, he can gauge it that way, right? So I mean, I don't have that kind of source, but this is how I can see it from his perspective. Or on the same. Yeah, go on. So also on the same thread of this coin desk steemit article, Ricardo of Monero got into it. And again, I'm not a big fan of Monero. I think Ricardo is a decent guy, but he posted a pretty cool, just again, you can look at this thread of the coin telegraph thing between me, Ricardo and the status. And he pointed out how many articles were written featuring coins like Ethereum and Ripple and Litecoin and Dash and Orger. I mean, this was more investigative work of how many articles, how coin desk has written about all this stuff, including Zcash, like exclusive articles for these coins. And he said not one was written about Monero. And he's pointing out that because Monero never came to any, you know, asking them to write about them, no founders of Monero ever wanted to write these articles. I mean, when Vitalik writes an article about Ethereum, it basically your outlet is allowing him to pitch Ethereum. And that's been one of the problems in the space. I pointed out all the articles that ever mentioned Monero, and it's literally just a brief mention. And there's never been a single exclusive article about Monero. And I have to respect him for that. Whether I agree with Monero or believe it Monero is irrelevant, the fact that no Monero pumper has ever, you know, went to coin desk to write an article about Monero speaks a lot for the integrity of the project. So that's all I have to say, and that's specific article, as far as one coin goes, that's just stupid. And I think every Bitcoin outlet, I need to put all nodes of scam. It is insanely obvious. I spend absolutely no time on any, I spend absolutely no time on any media or channel talking about the scam of one coin, because it's so freaking obvious. If I ran my own publication, I kind of do my own blog, but it's not like a national publication. But if I ran like a crypto publication, I would make sure there was at least one article, maybe one article a month, just to make sure that the entire world knows my stance on one coin being a scam. That's it. Just one article, do a little bit of research, you know, point to something specific, and then point out that it's a scam, just so it's not record. But now allow me to play devil's advocate, because the commenter who wrote the article on coin telegraph, they really believe in one coin. So shouldn't we be presenting a fair and balanced opinion of one coin? No. Not one that's so freaking obvious, but it's ridiculous. Look, look. So if we presented a fair and balanced opinion of one coin, would we be helping the scam? Would we be helping promote something that would have people lose all of their money, like tens of thousands of dollars? Like people that can't afford that even. Well, wait, what was the first word in that sentence? If they're fair, if we present it fair and balanced, and it's clearly not, we're essentially helping the scam. Like it, you are. I mean, look, I'm sorry, evolution is not debatable, right? The earth being over a billion years old, sorry, the earth being under a billion years old is not debatable. Well, like some of these things are just not debatable, right? I mean, you can save it for your hack websites. Flap. This is, and I've already been like accused of being a flat-erther, right? Look, I'm sorry, guys, the earth is not flat. This is not debatable, right? It's not on a real publication. You can't present a balanced approach in some of these things, right? When things are debatable, then you can kind of show both sides. But there are many instances where showing both sides is ridiculous. All right, we're also joined today by Chris Ellis. Chris Ellis, do you have any thoughts on Bitcoin Media? Welcome back to the show. Yeah, I can't wait to hear what you have. Welcome, Chris. I can't wait to hear what you say about this specific subject having been involved in media before yourself. Right, so what was the question? All I heard from somebody was that you guys were talking about this, so I thought I'd come on and say, my piece of work. We've highlighted a couple of articles. There was a coin telegraph article where they had a commenter on one coin and the commenter kind of wrote the whole article. They thought that one coin was really great and coin telegraph put it out where they're with this headline. One coin threatens to overthrow Bitcoin as number one currency. There was like a coin desk article where they thought that steam it was really great, but they didn't mention that the price did this. And then there's just been a lot of questionable things. Coin desk was acquired. ZCash was pumped. BTC media acquired BTC Bitcoin magazine and then recently coin desk started a new event series where they had Charlie Shrem. And we all think Charlie's cool and everything, but he launched a new product there, which is essentially kind of selling altcoins again. It's another, they're gonna put stock onto the blockchain and I'm not sure how legal that is. And Charlie's a good guy, but for gosh's sake, ZCash did get out of prison real quickly recently and I hope he's okay. I hope this isn't a desperate attempt to get back inside. But so we're just kind of talking about Bitcoin media and we're saying what's going on and what are our pins? And we acknowledge the difficulties that there's no money in this and that people are gonna offer you pre-mined altcoins. They're gonna offer you Bitcoin. It's gonna be real secret. We're not gonna tell anybody, you won't even look bad or lose your reputation. But a lot of people are losing their reputation and they are looking bad. So we're just kind of generally talking about the Bitcoin media. Okay, nice to people. These are work hard. There are some good people. So I can't believe one coins are scanned. Really? We gotta have somebody that supports an altcoin that's already been fair and balanced. When I saw the vortex tweet, Koshanine kind of commented on it and like put up the guy's email address, the guy that complained about the thing. The problem in media is that sometimes a lot of these official media organizations try to give what's called balance and unbiased views. And what they do is they believe that by giving everyone equal say that somehow they're giving a fair and balanced view. But they're not. The doing is they're giving 50% of a voice to a 1% of a population. Now over amplifying a minority opinion and a minority voice just because one person made a complaint to you. You don't just take pity on him and give him all of this kind of air time, especially if you look, you know, it's been more than five minutes researching one coin. Anyone can see that it's a scam. What makes it particularly pernicious is that it's a scam aimed at people that don't have the ability to understand this technology. They usually target people that are slightly older in generation who aren't very tech savvy and they're using all kinds of buzzwords that one can easily, you know, look up on the internet and do a basic kind of sanity check on. And so that's what for me makes it, you know, at least with a lot of these altcoins, they had purpose and they had some meaning behind it, like Litecoin, Feathercoin, Dogecoin. None of them scams, right? They all had, you know, good people that were running them that wanted to put cryptocurrency into the hands of many people. And in fact, many of those cryptocurrencies, like Feathercoin and Dogecoin in particular, did bring in new cohorts, did bring in new people into crypto and new people into Bitcoin, just like Ethereum, you know, I keep making the joke on Twitter. It's not mine actually. It's a guy on Whalepool Team Speak, but he said, you know, you can still buy Bitcoin with Ethereum, which is, you know, kind of funny for all those, you know, people that have had Ethereum and now it's going down in price because the project is, it looks like it's pretty much dead now. Hey Chris, Chris, I'm getting a guess. Yeah, can I comment on something you just said? It was interesting, right? So you said Litecoin is not a scam, Feathercoin is not a scam, Dogecoin is not a scam. I kind of agree with you. I mean, I think there are other consensus Bitcoin forks. I think they're kind of useless, but here's why, here's how I tell people why I don't think they're scams, because the creators of those coins are not rich and they want now, then actually have to get jobs, right? Well, like Charlie Lee has a job, what's his name? Jackson Palmer, I believe, has a job. I mean, these guys didn't create these coins to be rich. They kind of created these coins as an experiment and didn't become rich because they didn't pre-mind them. They didn't have any advantages, right? So that's like one of my big red flags. I'm like, did this creation of the coin make the creator insanely rich where he was instantly able to cash out? And when you look at all of the founders of Ethereum, that's exactly what happened. Yes, that's right. And in fact, many, many nice loft departments in shortage were funded by the Ethereum crowdfunding. I mean, the NA Gupta, for example, made quite a lot of money off the Ethereum. And I saw him kind of maneuver himself into the Ethereum crowd back in the beginning, because I was attending all of their networking events and in London, they were hosting quite a few of those. And I can see him kind of, you know, trying to angle for that job and then he kind of got the job. And at the time, he was promoting himself as kind of a new, though socialist, also a bit of a thought leader. He was sort of anti-capitalist. He claimed that he was working in disaster relief because he made this sort of thing called a Hexia, which is this temporary, actually. So it's a pretty good, so rugged structure that you can put for people, you know, or sensibly for refugees, right? People that are displaced. And you can put this thing up. It's made out of cardboard and it's got like tin on the outside, so it's like super cool on inside, if you know if you're in the desert scenario. And he had sort of been working on the thing for years and credit to him, it's a fantastic design. I'm not sure if he was the engineer behind it, but he was sort of spending a lot of his years just doing marketing around this thing. He was giving talks about it. But he hears the problem. It really, I mean, it didn't really get any traction. It really was used by rich kids, you know, a burning man. It never really took traction or hold in the refugee as, you know, sort of area in the displaced persons. Not because, you know, his idea was bad, but because the political reality was governments didn't want to fund, you know, a really innovative structure that would last more than 10 years. Right. They wanted, they want refugees to leave. They don't want them sticking around. So they don't want this really affordable, long-lasting structure, because that sends out a wrong message. That means that we might actually have to look after these people for long-term. Right. You know, I will say about the hexagurator that Gupta did invent it. And he was working at the Rocky Mountain Institute, creating policy books and documents at that time, at which did have something to do with disaster relief. But the fact that he was too naive to understand that the hexagurator would never be picked up by these organizations is a bit telling. But on the other hand, to say that it was only picked up by these hipsters and stuff, doesn't quite tell us the whole story because it has been growing a lot. And it's the type of open source design that could actually have a really huge future all over the world, but certainly not with disaster relief organizations, which as many of us know, are completely, basically what you might call fake. They're not formed disaster relief at all, they're to enrich the companies that supply them the things and draw wealth from governments. So just, I just wanted to clarify. Yeah, I think, yeah, thank you for clarifying that. I didn't, I wasn't quite sure if he actually built it, designed engineered it or whether he was just the marketing guy, but okay, so credit to him then. But what I saw was a transition where, you know, he, I'm just using this as a case study because he's been quite vocal and open about it on Twitter about his political sort of transition. He's working up from his dogmatic slumber. And he's now decided that he's pro-capitalism and pro-free market. Apparently he's seen the light and he's just basically misunderstood, been misunderstanding the arguments for 15 years. And that was why he was, you know, kind of leaning left or center for so long. But that's not the real reason he changed his mind, okay? The real reason he changed his mind is because he was offered a lot of money. And he was offered a lot of money because, you know, he was this scam Ethereum. You had this potential, you know, money making thing. It was going to be Bitcoin 2.0. It was going to be all the rage, he was going to catch on and we were going to have that exponential rise in price just like Bitcoin. And what they were trying to do was recreate that same growth in wealth that Bitcoin had. And as I've said before, you can't copy it because you can't unlearn the lessons that we learned from Bitcoin's inception in its early years. So people keep trying to recreate the next parabolic market rise and everyone piles in. Anyone who's got a stake in any of these coins, obviously has an incentive now to go out and shil for those coins because they believe that in doing so, it will increase the price. But what you have to remember is that speculators not retail is. The difference between a speculator and a retailer is a retailer buys something because if they have find that it has real utility, they can use it. A speculator only buys something as a way of getting more dollars, right, as a way of increasing their purchasing power. They don't buy Ethereum because they really believe in Ethereum. They're buying Ethereum because they really want more dollars or they really want more Bitcoins, right? They're just speculating. And for me, when we were looking at this hack that happened in Ethereum yesterday, I was sort of, there were people with Stockholm syndrome going onto the Ethereum Reddit, going, great job guys, fantastic response. I bought Ethereum at $14 and I'm so proud to be part of this thing. I don't care if I'm under water and I'm just rubbing my head going, God, this guy is in an abusive relationship. He's just been, you bought the top. You bought the top of the market. I don't know what to say to you. I'm so sorry, but now what he's having to do is he's having to rationalize his purchase. He's having to think, so he's going to have to go out and say, okay, I didn't make a mistake. I didn't make a mistake. Look, you guys are great and it's just the weak hands selling. This is another common theme that you get in these altcoins is when they start going down in price is that people start coming out for us. It's the weak hands. It's the weak hands that let them go, the coins. And we will have our day eventually. And you do just kind of have to rub your head and go, oh my God, what has happened? And with Ethereum, like with, to some extent, with Steamit and all these people is, they're very good at PR and they're very good at generating, you know, articles because there's no money in journalism anymore. What they do is they get these young people and they get them to write for free. And the idea is that you get to promote something in return. Now, the way it used to work with these altcoins was that someone would contact you. I was contacted many times. And it's like, look, if you write an announcement thread on Bitcoin talk with your reputation and, you know, your post history, we will pay you, you know, 10,000 of these shitcoins that they pre-mind or plan to Insta-Mine. And obviously, I never even replied to any of these people, but the point is there was a market out there for that kind of shilling. And the casualty here is truth. The casualty is that we go online and we don't know what to believe because we're bombarded with all this information. And I feel like what's happening is that people, all people know is they want money. They don't know why. They don't necessarily have a specific dream or a goal of what to do with that money. All they know is they want to feel safe and comfortable. And so when they see these price charts, these IPO, you know, exponential price increases, they see an opportunity for them to get comfortable, maybe even make enough money to retire. They think, what if I just put my 401k into a bunch of these shitcoins and they all go up, you know, parabolic in price, you know, then I'll have so much money. And the problem with this is that everyone tells themselves a story about the future where they're okay. Nobody wants to think that things are going to turn out badly for them. And what you have to understand is that all the other market participants are thinking the same thing as you. And so long as you're all trying to do the same thing, probably very few of you are going to achieve that. You're probably all going to get burned. But in the point of view of, you know, people like Ethereum are one coin, okay, one coin is most certainly a scam. I don't want to make Ethereum out to be that bad. But the problem is that, you know, if you're a member of Ethereum and the foundation, think about the way that you haven't been able to look after your stakeholders because you decided to raise money with this pre-mine and this IPO culture. Right, think about the way that you can't reach out to that guy who put $14 in at the top and say to him, look, we're really sorry. Think about the fact that you weren't able to sell a project for fair value. You weren't able to do a fair value for value exchange where I make some software and you simply pay for it. The same way I go to a supermarket and buy a loaf of bread, a value for value exchange. Ask yourself why. Or maybe the thing you're building isn't worth it. Maybe the thing you're building isn't right. Maybe the reason consumers don't really want to pay you for the work that you're doing is because the work that you're only really willing to give you any money if they think they're going to get rich off of it. Do you understand? Do you understand that the only reason a lot of people put money into Ethereum wasn't because they believed in Ethereum. It was just because they thought they could get rich from Ethereum. And some people like Vinay Gupta did get very rich from Ethereum and he said that he had an epiphany and he said that intellectually he had changed. It wasn't anything to do with Intellect that made him change. It was because he had money now. And for so long he didn't have money and he was basically roughing his life out. And that's when I met him and when I knew him. And he was a good guy, a really smart intelligent guy. But what happened was he basically sold out. He basically decided, look, I want my creature comforts. I want my penthouse apartment. I want my whiskeys. I want my dinner parties. I want to live that middle class lifestyle. And that's it. That's all there is to it. But it's such a sad thing because these people, these developers really do go around thinking that people believe in their projects when they don't. Hey Chris, let me just jump in there real quick. Can I make a small case of why Ethereum is worse than one coin? Go ahead. I know. OK, so here's why, right? So Ethereum tried to replicate the success of Bitcoin like you said earlier with this parabolic rise in price. And in a way they somewhat succeeded. Of course, I've been trying to put this tweet all day. And it's actually this tweet is taking it like that. By the way, some of the tweets I do take me hours to put together and they take more research than like an entire day worth of coin desks articles. But I'm going back and I'm looking at all time high market caps for all these coins. And the $1 billion market cap has been the death of every single coin that ever reached above $1 billion. They've all completely collapsed. And there's only been a few of them. I'm going to send out this tweet probably tomorrow because there's no way I'm going to get to a date thinking we're longer. Because I'm actually going back and I'm looking at the history of all altcoins that made it past $100 million market cap threshold and the end result of all those coins. But because of Ethereum's temporary success, I'm saying temporary because Ethereum has absolutely no ability to succeed long term. It will be a failed project. We don't have time to get into why. I think it needs to be an article on that. I'm just being lazy. But the temporary success and what it brought, right? Because of all that pre-mine in Ethereum has created numerous co-founders of Ethereum that now had the money to form another set of garbage scammed projects that are getting traction from investors and even VCs to pile more money in. Ethereum is also the reason why the entire ICO boom is happening because how did Ethereum failed in the beginning like it was supposed to? We would not have had this entire ICO boom. So Ethereum is like this octopus squid that is responsible for the last 12 to 15 months of this sprawling wave of ICOs that are completely ridiculous. So I hold the Ethereum responsible for a lot of stuff and a lot of it will not come to light for maybe another three years, but it's all going to go down back to Ethereum. I mean, you don't see any founders of Bitcoin capitalizing on their fame. We had a handful of Bitcoin core developers that left Bitcoin core like Jeff Garzick and Gavin Andreessen and Mike Hurn. And as far as I'm concerned, they've somewhat been closer through a failure after that than while they were programming at core. I know Garzick is with Matt Rosak and the whole block team, but Matt Rosak is a VC himself. So they're obviously funded, but Gavin Andreessen's project after that have been a mess. Mike Hurn came to our three afterwards after the failure of Bitcoin XT. And that's been a mess. Like no one has been able to really capitalize off of their Bitcoin fame. But you have all of these Ethereum people that are literally walking around with this label co-founder of Ethereum. And that's actually bringing them fame and more money, which is all going to come crashing down. I don't see Bitcoin failing anytime soon. Hopefully, SegWit will get passed and will have a lot more stability and scaling going forward. So I'm going to keep my fingers crossed until we get to that part. But other than that, so that's my case for why Ethereum is worse than one coin. One coin is just one MLAB. Yeah, a bunch of people are going to lose their money, but at least it didn't like sprawl out of control onto other sections of the world. Well, that's a very good case. And I can add to it here. I mean, I made quite a few tweets yesterday about the Ethereum hack. I learned about it because I was on the Whale Pool team speak and Phil Potter from BitFinex came in and said, look, the Ethereum private Slack channel that they have with all of the exchanges or the exchange operators have come on and told us to halt trading on Ethereum yet again because they're a network consensus issues. That was what we knew. And he was basically reading out. And I was reporting on Twitter what was being said in these private back channels that Ethereum have. Now, if you're a good shit coin, if you're a good, what's called a blue chip shit coin. So you've got big backers behind you and not to some shit coin. You've got some legitimacy landed to you. What you'll have is what are called a good PR team and good back channeling. So you'll have lots of people working on Skype, talking to the moves and shakers in the industry. And you're able to get algorithmic traders you're able to get market whale bots. And we've seen throughout Ethereum's history this historical price level defended. We're now down at 0.12 bit BTC. And the reason why this price level has been defended so rigorously is because it is the $1 billion market cap price point. Now, Ethereum currently is sitting just about 15 cents shy of the $1 billion market cap. So it's just hovering under there. And what we've seen before, the reason why we're so suspicious of it is because of the order book and the manipulation that takes place on the order book. So whether or not Ethereum foundation or anything to do with this, I don't know. It's all speculation. I would be surprised if anyone Ethereum didn't know that this was happening at the very least or whether or not they're actually involved in it. It could just be somebody from outside, maybe somebody at Poloniex, who simply I'd an opportunity and has some kind of back channel communication with the developers. But what happened was just after the attack, the order book was looking very thin, orders were being pulled from Ethereum, you saw that there was a flash crash here on the left of the screen. But what followed in the hours was the order book started to fill up and it actually went back to higher levels than it was before the flash crash. So we went from having 300 bitcoins that would take the price down to 0.012 to 609 bitcoins that would take the price down to the same level. And why is that significant? Well, the reason is is that if you actually look at the ticker and we're looking at a five minutes for a very low time frame here, you'll notice that the volume along the bottom of that image is very, very low. There aren't very many transactions. You've got a few high volume candle bars where the price of the pet somebody is what's called crossing the spread. That means they're making a market order. The price only moves in a market. If somebody crosses the spread and actually takes a bid or an ask on the book. Now what was happening was the market makers were stepping in. They were putting stacking up large bids at the front of the book and layering them down in order that noobs and maybe trading box, algo trading box, would simply have be forced to up their bids, forcing the price of Ethereum up on this artificial curve, preventing it from dumping down. Because if people see too many bids on the book, they might hesitate before they start selling. They might think, well, maybe I'll wait and it'll go up a little bit and I'll get more from my money. And this is, we've seen this over and over again and there are a few guys on Whalepool who started the audit bit better than I have who are able to see when these kind of alchorismic bots start coming in. We saw it on the price rise up. We also noticed on the rise up to, you know, over $10 on the Ethereum initially back in February that the pumps that were happening were being timed with media press releases. So the speculation was, and again, I don't have any proof for this. I'm sort of taking a non-random guess based on the people that I know in the space, is that people, whoops, I don't know what I just did there, it was that they were basically timing, they were basically timing the articles with the price action on the exchanges. That there were market makers on the exchanges that were hitting the market by, as media was coming out, in order to stimulate a follow-through in a momentum in the trading. So more people would come in and they would start buying and then more people would end up with what's called a narcissistic rally. People are only buying because they believe with the same information that somebody else will. And it's, none of this is illegal, I don't think. I think it's, you know, the corruption can be a very subtle thing. I think it's just a lot of unspoken, tacit agreements like, you know, our publishers to Ask Cool and maybe your guys will like do something over there, but I don't really know anything about that. I don't want to know anything about that. And it's just, see no evil here, no evil speak, no evil. And they just allow it to happen. And that kind of corruption is very, very subtle. And I think where Benay is, I don't know whether, you know, he's going to do good things with this VC firm. I really hope he, I sincerely hope he does. But I don't know that, you know, the VC market is really going to be interested in social impact projects. I've never met a VC who would ever give money unless he believed that, you know, he wasn't going to get five times the return. You know, Benay is, Benay is focusing on AI, VR drones. He's doing pretty traditional, you know, futuristic tech VC right now. I don't think he's got a social angle in there at all. I think that he wants to, I think his kind of rhetoric is, you know, we want to, energy is to well, solar too. So he wants to, he wants to get a lot of money and be able to create super cheap tech that he can, you know, maybe eventually help the poor with. I don't really know. But that's not his point with the VC upfront. That's for sure. Let me, let me get back in on this real quick because I only have 10 minutes. I got to jump off. I have another, I have to do a new interview with money radio, one of the stations. And in about 30 minutes. But I'm not sure how we got on the Ethereum project, but I'm going to slightly change topics back to what we were talking about earlier because I forgot to mention it when we were. And this was one of the articles that Thomas was saying about ZCache, how ZCache was pumped right on, again, going back to CoinDesk. And the ZCache is a very questionable one because of the disclaimer right down here, that's the subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which has an ownership stake in ZCache. So to me, this is very, very problematic, but here is the biggest problem with this article, right? And this is where CoinDesk is not paying attention to something. If you read this article, remember this was pre-ZCache launch and they've had our article since. Here's the crazy part. Comments to this article. And you see the 49 comments here? I would say at least 45 of these 49 comments are negative comments to this article. And to me, that clearly states that CoinDesk isn't listening to their readers when like 95% of your comments are telling you how bad this article is. See, no mention of problems with the trusted setup. People are, CZCache equals zero coin. Let me see here, Genesis mining saw in contracts. I don't understand any of it. Well, if they just read comments to their own articles, they would understand that they're like losing the community with what they write. And I find that saying anybody wanna comment on a real quick and then I wanna do my story of the week before I have to go. Yeah, I will. I will just quickly. Yeah, the ZCache, the way we got into Ethereum is we were talking about the corruption in the media. And I was, you know, because essentially I consider Ethereum a PR firm more than a tech company, right? It's basically a couple of tech guys who has been shown in the last 24 hours on, even that competent, they're fighting with each other on Reddit and on Twitter about putting, deliberately putting a bug in the code just to make it force consensus. The reason we got on to it was because the way they manipulate the PR, ZCache was the same thing. It got pumped. I saw it, I was, you know, I was hearing about it on the team speak, you know, people were saying, there were lots of, you know, big players on Twitter are starting to push this thing. And we saw that big rise up to 0.025 or so, 013. And potentially I've been told, we'll be pumped to 025, please don't act on that. That's not trading advice, financial advice in any way. But those were the rumors. And so that was just evidence for me of these kind of back channels that take place between insiders in order to manipulate perceptions of the front end to get people to buy it, like with your $14 or buy ZCache at the top when it gets to 025 in a few days or whenever that happens. I agree with you. And we've been talking about Bitcoin media. And I think we're heading towards the end of this show. Is there anything that they could do better? I think this is a really tough issue. There's all this money available. If you get in early on the pre-mind, maybe you'll sell at the top. Everyone wants to be rich. All of these companies advertising is very low. Advertising is going to be the same kind of thing. They'll maybe buy some banner ads, but they're going to want an article. They're going to want an event like Charlie Schrem got. I don't see how they can improve going forward. And then on the other hand, the community doesn't seem like they want to pay for good articles. We have some people that are doing good work. I'm not sure they're getting enough donations. People could use something like pro-tip to reward people. But what's the way forward? What would you like to see in the future of the Bitcoin media? Let's just go down a line, Gabe. Now that we have lightning coming, I wonder if micro-payments might start to become a bit of a thing in the space. I mean, of course, it's still a small market, but by the time we have usable lightning implementations in say, well, I said it has to activate, of course, in order to fix the malleability issues. Maybe mid next year, it's conceivable that an outlet could maybe gain some traction just among the community, doing it for fun. Bitcoin is an enthusiast who want to kick down 100, 200, Satoshi, whatever, just to read your article. It could be an interesting, it could be a viable business model within three years. So that's obviously a big point. As I mentioned before, before Chris came on, there is an inherent problem with for-profit journalism and in a democracy. And you're just going to have, it's caveat emtory. We're heading toward a multipolar, decentralized world. And individuals are going to have to take responsibility for their own information intake. Tony, what do you think about that? Oh, man, this is so hard. And I'm going to throw something really crazy out there, like this crazy idea. So what I've been saying for a long time, the best thing a VC in the Bitcoin space can do is collect a bunch of money. Let's say a VC collects $3 million to invest in Bitcoin projects. What I advise a VC to do is to spend 1 million of that and buy Bitcoin and then spend the other 2 million of it slowly promoting and teaching why Bitcoin is important. Not all coins, not the silly projects, Bitcoin itself. It's its own killer app, just Bitcoin. Maybe fund some good wallets, independent wallets. So if I extrapolate this idea base, and this is going to sound very, very crazy, again, you find a way to pull together a bunch of money. I mean, yes, there are some expenses to running your journalist site. You are going to have to pay some people for editing. And obviously, to get the servers running and stuff like that and to some developers to prevent those attacks. But you get this pool. And then you try to find, again, you focus on Bitcoin. You don't focus on your shit coins. You focus on Bitcoin, you do investigative journalism. And what you do is there are people willing to do the work because they want to get their name out there and they want to do good work. And like I was doing it very, very cheaply back when I was writing for coin telegraph and stuff like that. I didn't even care if I paid, I did it because I wanted to. And what they can do is, because we all know that Bitcoin is going to go up in the future. You don't have much money. You commit it. You basically lock it up in Bitcoin for like five years. And then you do pay some of these people for the work, but you pay them at a much lower current price as a multi-sec. Something like, I know some of this technology is in there. Yeah, we can help put it together. You kind of like paying these people, but they don't get paid right away. They kind of get paid in equity. It's kind of like, you know, you get paid in a company's equity. But in this case, you get paid in Bitcoin's equity. They're paying you a little bit of Bitcoin today because they only have a certain pool of money. But you don't get to use that Bitcoin. You don't get to keep it right away. You have to wait like two or three years for it to mature. So basically incentivizing people to write articles. And again, I'm just thrown shit out there. I just came up with this like five minutes ago. I haven't really thought this through. But find the way to pay people to do good work. And they get paid in Bitcoin that they can't touch for years. And it's in some kind of a multi-sig that they get automatically or something like that. Maybe get a third party involved that is trusted as a multi-sig. So basically people are being paid in equity, but they're not being paid in equity of the company. They're getting paid in equity of Bitcoin. I mean, I need to think this through a little more, but just a crazy idea I'm throwing out there on video. Yeah, I'm worried a lot of people need to sell their money right away to pay bills and stuff. But if they could do it as a side project or something, it might work. All right, Chris Ellis, what do you think about that? Yeah, the problem I have with that is that, obviously the majority of the population across the world can't afford to just have money put into a multi-sig. I think some critics of Bitcoin might obviously question the assumption that Bitcoin, we all know Bitcoin's going to go up. Some of people still think it's going to go to zero. But assuming that that is the case, I think what needs to happen is market to conversations, it's the old saying, people, we need to understand why consumers are not paying for truth, why they're only paying, why they're sitting inside of these filter bubbles in these echo chambers, where they only want to hear views that are agreeable with theirs and why they don't want to pay for content, because perhaps they don't have what's called the endowment. In fact, they don't see what goes into making the content, so they don't see why they should pay. People pay their ISP bills, so they feel like everything on the internet is paid for, because they paid for their ISP. But when you pay your ISP, you're only paying for access to the internet. You're not paying for all of the other online activities that go on to putting the websites together and the videos together, like real people, with real needs and real living costs have had to come together to make this video for you today. If you are not paying for it, well, really, how is that different for you to just walk you into a shop and picking something up and walking away with it? Well, the only real difference is that it's not illegal and the social sort of agreement that we have with people here on YouTube is that we do this stuff for free at the point of use. In exchange for some kind of social capital, maybe our reputations get a boost, maybe we get some consultancy work because somebody sees us online, airing some opinions about a complex subject that they feel they need some knowledge from, and that just isn't really viable when we have fixed costs of living. Like, I can't go to the supermarket and start haggling in the go-shaying with the checkout clerk, right? Because they have real scarcity costs that they're involved in, right? They've got to make, you know, ship all this stuff from the prime markets via the distributors to this store so that you can eat, but they can't start haggling with you and say, well, look, you know, rather than pay for it, maybe we could do a deal where we do some favors for each other and have what's called a, you know, a contra-economy or a kind of shadow economy because they've got net present value, they've got cash flow that they've got to think about. And so I don't, you know, I think the biggest problem with journalism right now is that the most important views, like this North Dakota thing that's going on where people were actually putting up imagery from drones showing the police using water cannons against these protesters in North Dakota. Many people didn't even see it because it wasn't being broadcast on mainstream media, but people on social media were publishing footage, showing what the police were doing and were eventually able to get past some of the filters on Facebook so that it started sharing up on people's news feeds. And the problem with that is that you can't put a price on truth. Everyone needs the truth eventually, even if they don't want to hear it right now, we all need to know what the truth is. You can ignore the consequences. You can't ignore the consequences of ignoring the consequences, I and Rand. It's difficult, I think, in a world where there's so, you know, police are everywhere and justice is nowhere to be found where everything you hear from the mainstream media is the opposite of what is actually true, this or well in double speak. And you can't have this new wave of journalism if you've got a consumer base that isn't willing to pay for it. So a conversation needs to be had. A really honest frank conversation needs to be had between publishers and consumers because we're all the same. We all have to produce in order to earn a living. So in my role as an entrepreneur, I want to get paid, but in my role as a consumer, I don't want to pay. Well, something's got to give. We can't have it both ways. And we've been working on this show and we've come up with some apps like the Pro Tip App, which tips people in Bitcoin. But unless you tell your friends about it, unless you actually get somebody that you know that's got content online. And tell them to use Pro Tip, or tell them to use some of the other tools that we've mentioned throughout our time here on the World Crypto Network. I don't think that conversation's really gonna catch on. So it's up to you, at the end of the day, you've got to get people inspired because by watching this video, you've already shown that you are ahead of the curve on this. That's a good point, Chris, and a good point to end on. I really do think people have to commit to paying for the truth and paying for what they support and for putting the money behind it. Let's go to a game. Do you have a story of the week or a prediction for us? Yeah, I got a story of the week and it's very much on topic by Coincidence. It does relate to the media right now. Right now in the United States, there is, I'm not sure what the coverage is outside the country, but currently there's a massive firestorm about the WikiLeaks John Podesta emails. Not only did the John Podesta emails reveal all sorts of collusion between the Democratic National Committee and various media groups so that they were feeding, directly feeding propaganda to the media groups. Of course, we're trying to push for a Clinton win on the behalf of many powerful interests. Not only did it reveal that, but it also revealed an incredible proliferation of very strange jargon that has been conclusively linked to child prostitution rings, pedophile rings. And now the mainstream media is attempting to, it saw this storm coming when the week started to happen and they crafted their quote, fake news narrative in order to try to discredit alternate forms of media. And it's really absolutely hilarious to see them do that because the New York Times just admitted that they've been lying for years and said that they're going to, they promised not to lie so much. And of course, they're the first ones to come out with this shill article by some tech reporter, not at all investigative, trying to quell the interest in the quote, pizza gate stories. Pizza is apparently a child prostitution term for young girls. And that these emails are absolutely rife with child prostitution. They've linked it to two literal actual pizza shops near the capital in Washington, DC. And this is really interesting because, you know, several years ago in the UK, you saw some scandals which you've used to travel and the royals being involved with some scandals. But and then of course, the Catholic church as well with endemic child abuse. But now we're really seeing this sort of satanic malloch, I believe is the name of the being that they say that they're, anyways, this sort of weird rights and religious rituals that are absolutely dead clear. The weirdest language like, oh, that's so interesting. How you had a walnut on your hot dog. And then I went, you know, tell me what you think of the pizza there, you know, and there's all this money going to these pizza shops and the pizza shop owner went to the White House. There this story, mark my words, pizza gate is going to be one of the biggest scandals in American history when it all comes out. And I would not be surprised if there are dozens or hundreds of arrests of government officials all over the country. It's a huge story. It's not bullshit. Don't believe the mainstream media about this. I've looked into it. I've looked into the emails myself. I've checked out some of the quotes from these emails. And it's just obvious in any ways that the FBI has actually released, you know, as part of the Freedom of Information Act documents from years ago talking about these slaying terms for child prostitution. It's absolutely sickening. And it's incredible to see the mainstream media scrambling to try to frame it as an alt-right conspiracy when they're actually now being complicit in hiding these horrible crimes against poor children who are not only being used as prostitutes, but also being tortured and killed. Yeah, well, I will just slightly add on that. And I can always have like a premise of how this is going to end. Even let's say they arrest like one or two people, right? Because they're definitely not going to arrest all of them, right? Let's say one or two people go down. There will be another, you know, 300,000 page bill in Congress limiting sex and limiting prostitution and limiting all of these things, right? There will be a giant bill that's going to be like, if you are even caught texting with a 15-year-old that you did not even know was a 15-year-old, you should be held responsible and you will now spend life in prison. So they will triple down on what do you call them? Penalties on sex in general and certainly sex with minors. And all it will do is same thing as always, right? Like regular people aren't involved here at this moment. It's all government officials. You make laws so only you can break them. They will triple the laws on everything involved just so that the next set of politicians gets to break those laws while they now have another set of laws to put good people away for suspicion. So that's how it's all going to end in my opinion. It's going to end worse than how it started. Okay, so stay on the topic. I have to do my story of the week because I've exactly three minutes before I have to go and I'm going to share my screen for this because I want to share the article. Oh, but going back to that last one for a second. This is like when Sarbin's oxyly laws came in. Oh, we go to something else. When Sarbin's oxyly laws came in because of Enrod and they put in a 20 year sentence for anyone shredding evidence to prevent the next Enrod. And then 20 years later, I advise everyone to go Google what happened in Florida where a fisherman was going to be tried under Sarbin's oxyly to serve 20 years in prison because when they stopped him for a check on fish, they said well, some of his fish was a little too small and it violated some of the laws on fishing. And they initially counted 72 fish. And when they told the boat to shore, they then only counted 69 fish. So three fish went missing and then they tried to put him in jail for 20 years under Sarbin's oxyly of shredding evidence. So this is how these laws come in and that's how they end. You know, anyway. So my story in the week in case anyone's wondering because I'm sharing a screen why I have a little tab that's called porn and it's been spinning forever. That is not because it's trying to load a porn video. That's because it's an article from the independent about what happened in the UK this week. And this is in its titled porn websites in the UK will be banned from showing a huge range of sex acts under proposed new law. Now to me, this is a total Bitcoin story. So there's a couple of things going on here. One, they want to start doing a full blown KVC on anyone visiting a porn website, which is basically they will know exactly who you are creating major, major issues as we learn from the Ashley Madison hack. They also want to eliminate a lot of stuff. And one of them, you and I gave both found particularly funny somewhat where they're going to ban things including female ejaculation, which to me is kind of like the most sexist thing you can put in an article because they're not saying that about men. So I'm not exactly sure what that's all about. So they're actually limiting the kind of things that people can watch online with this bill. So this becomes an absolute Bitcoin story as I mean, you should read this whole article. It's really I found it pretty interesting. And what this tells me is that anyone going to a porn site in the UK will now be doing it through Bitcoin. They will basically the porn industry will start to adapt to the new laws just like the gambling industry started to adapt. And they will just switch to Bitcoin to avoid these, I mean, this is what the government does in order instead of making it easier to comply with the law, they're making it they're doubling down on the law. And now anyone without KYC, they do this with Bitcoin, right? So when you triple down on your laws, you basically make it illegal for everyone. And now they completely leave the system where you have absolutely no checks and no regulations. And if the entire porn industry routes through Bitcoin, then forget the sovereignty team thing. It won't even matter. You can have nine year olds doing it. Nobody would know. But what they should have done was went the other way around and made it easy to comply with the law just for the age restriction, maybe even lower the age restriction down to 16. And then you completely improve compliance. So to me, this is a total Bitcoin story. Excellent story. And Chris Ellis, do you have a story of the week or prediction? I'm gonna, I'm gonna head out guys. I gotta join another interview. Chris, I'll catch your story of the week after. Hope it's good. Bye. Thank you. Bye, bye. Cool. Yeah, well, I didn't plan on coming on the show. So I didn't really prepare or anything, but I do have an announcement that I wanna go into in more detail in another show more formally. I've been a pro-waking, we can't see you. Oh, there you go. In my screen show? Yeah, okay. So yeah, I was, I didn't plan on coming on this show. So I haven't really prepared anything formal. I just want to announce that. I have been approached by BitFinex, I-Finex Limited about working for them. And I would like to get your feedback and responses before I formally agreed to this offer. I have been speaking to Phil Potter on Skype and also on the Whalepool team. Speak that I talk so much about. And he basically wants me to join the team, shadow the team for a while. I've already sat in on one of their team meetings already to get to know them and to be basically a kind of community liaison officer as it were. So what this would mean is that, now saying Hackett is left a bit for Nex. Obviously, you'll probably know unless you've been living under a rock that BitFinex was subject to a very large hack of around $70,000,000 worth of Bitcoin. I think over 100,000 Bitcoins or so. I may be mistaken about the figures, but a large number of Bitcoins they were hacked for a little while ago. And they basically want somebody that isn't a PR or a kind of PR rep for the company to be able to speak to the community directly, answer questions candidly and honestly. And they are looking for somebody with a journalistic background who's a good communicator who can do that. Phil has approached me. I'm very flattered to be approached for this job. Before I take it, I would like to know what you guys think. Because I've never taken a job in this crypto space before. I've deliberately steered clear of being paid by companies, particularly coins, you know, that was talking me, you know, being bit-rather-ethereum because I wasn't, you know, offered a job at the foundation. Actually, I was being sarcastic when I made that comment some time ago. I had no intention of working for them. It would have been a disaster for my career. It actually turns out to have been the best decision that I ever made. But with this BitFinex thing, I feel like there is an opportunity. There's an opportunity here because I am second-tied of these hacks in the crypto space. I'm second-tied of people losing money. I'm second-tied of traders, you know, putting way too much money on these exchanges and then falling victim to these hacks. I'm second-tied of scammers, frankly, getting away with it. I want to get some clarity on what really went down with that hack, what went on behind the scenes. I want to get to know the team at BitFinex. I want to know why and understand why that they want to continue in operations, why they chose the decision to issue these bonds and these debt tokens, the BitFinex tokens, which by the way, have done, you know, reasonably well. They're now at 60 cents. They went down as slow as 10 cents. I was also a victim of BitFinex hack, not for a tremendous amount of money. I was made whole by these BitFinex tokens. When the hack was taking place, I was very critical. I'm on public record on Reddit as, you know, laying into saying quite heavily, I probably mirrored those comments on this channel as well. So I'm on record and feel came to me knowing that I'd been critical of them and said, look, I want you to just tell me straight what you think about this company, about what we're going to do. I want you to sit on our meetings. I want you to talk to all the people that work for us and I want you to report to the outside world what you see. Right? So here's, so there's a couple of issues that I need your help with. Number one, obviously, who's going to pay me for this? Well, BitFinex want to pay me for it. I am, there's a conflict of interest there. If I pay me, how can I be candid and upfront with you guys? That's number one. Second of all, is nondesclosure agreement. Obviously, they're a company. They've got company secrets that I want to share with everybody. How do I maintain my journalistic integrity and make sure that everybody out there, he is the truth, if there are certain embargoes on what I can say because of genuine legal sensitivities. So where I'm at at the moment is that I would be, it was a job title that I selected, Community EAs on, which means that I would not be a shill or a PR agent for BitFinex. It's not a long-term job. It's not a permanent position. It's a thing where I am brought in to deliberately oversee this. I want to know what decisions were made in that decision to use the BitGo walloting system, which led to the hack. I want to know what standards exist in that space, who's behind the generating of those standards, what decisions were made, what practices, what were part of this decision making. So that we can actually grow and learn as a community. It's all very well people demanding that BitFinex die and all of this stuff, but just demanding that one company out of many in this space dies, doesn't stop this from happening again in the future. Certainly, any company dying, doesn't stop the individuals of that company going off and getting jobs elsewhere and making the same mistakes again. I don't personally believe that anyone at BitFinex is a scammer or is responsible for it. I think they are well-meaning individuals that perhaps they made some mistakes. I don't know yet. But I think that on balance, they did the right thing by bringing the site back online, by issuing these tokens, because it gave people a very fast resolution to the problem. Everyone knew where they stood very soon, as opposed to MT Gox, where it was a long two and a half year drawn out process, where probably no one's going to get very much money back at all. So I'm interested in taking this job. If enough of the people that you guys have followed me and you donated money to me over the years feel strongly that I shouldn't take it, or that I should, but it should be on certain terms. Maybe you feel that the community needs to pay me for this job rather than BitFinex, so I can be truly impartial. If you've got ideas like that, I will listen to all of them. If enough people say no, don't do it, don't sell out, I won't take the job. Tell me what you think. You can find me on Twitter, at Mr. Crisellis. Let me just pull that up so you can see it. So I don't know how my bottom's heard on. This is me on Twitter. I'm at Mr. Crisellis. Tell me what you think. Do you think this is a good idea? Don't you think this is a good idea? Do you think BitFinex should die? Do you think they made the right decision in keeping that website online? I want to know what you think, because I want to feed that back to BitFinex as well, to give them the kind of the candid feedback that they need to sort of drive forward and hopefully make everyone whole after the attack. Very good stuff, Chris. Congratulations on the offer and congratulations to BitFinex. I think it's a really good idea that they're seeking out a potential critic to have them come in and look at their operation and report to the wider audience. I think that's a lot of both things. There are a lot of potential conflicts and things for you to work out, but I like the way you're doing in public and talking about it. Gabe, do you have a comment on that? Yeah, well, I was kind of talking about it with you guys on Slack. Yeah, I think that you want to make sure that you got a bit of an out clause both sides. If they're not happy with you and you're not happy with them, you don't ever have to be in a situation where you feel compromised and yet you still have to work. So maybe work out a situation where, hey, we can either party can stop the contract at any time and just you guys pay me up to that exact day. So you can come up with maybe even a day rate where you just, okay, I've stopped working with them and you can be completely honest with how that went down and be careful with that NDA, you know. Yeah, thanks. Very good stuff. And my story of the week is that, well, sadly, or whatever I'm also looking for a job. So if you'd like to hire Thomas Hunt, I'm gonna be sending out resmeasants on Monday where accepting sponsorship offers for maybe this show or Mad Bitt coins, maybe I could do that and make money if the audience wants that. Mikalobe. Mikalobe is interested. We've had some good comments from our friends at Uno coin. So we're looking at that as a possible option, but just in general, if you have a Bitcoin company you need someone to go out there and promote it. I'm all about the Bitcoin and I'd like to help promote your company and tell the people about your new product. And maybe you made a lot of Bitcoin, maybe you hacked a lot of Bitcoin or bought it early and you like the world crypto network and you like what you do and you just wanna donate, you know, $100,000 or $1,000,000 right there, that QR code you're the kind of person that keeps that money and your air bits wallet right there on your phone ready to send in case you accidentally put some extra zeros on something. But yeah, we take that, but just wanna put that out there and we're gonna be working on that project for the next eight weeks or so until we get a resolution on that. So, but we're out of time and it's Thanksgiving. So, gobble, gobble. Gobble.