The Bitcoin Group, the American Original. For over the last 10 seconds, the sharpest Satoshi's, the best Bitcoin, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Andy Hoffman from Crypto Gold Central. Yes, on the loan panel, they better hold up my end of the bargain. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network. It's all up to you, you and me. Coming on to issue one coin base is exploring a crypto ETF with help from Wall Street giant BlackRock coin base is shown once again, if you're in the Bitcoin business, they'd love to do what you do from expanding into bit pays territory from going after Zappo with their vault product and from even moving into trading and fighting all the other trading websites with GDACs and now coin base premium or coin base pro whatever they change the name to coin base. It continues to show that they got here first and they're willing to take on everyone else's business. Andy Hoffman, what do you think about the coin base ETF? Will it be successful or is it just another nonsense from coin base? Coin base, so much positive and negative connotation. I mean, for the three years that I've worked with them, it worked with them that I used them and talked about them and all that stuff. They've probably done a lot more good than that. I mean, a lot more good. Just about everyone I know has been onboarded into Bitcoin because of coin base, sorry, they goes my camera again. They've done some pretty evil things and some very good things. For the most part, it's been very helpful to the cryptocurrency community and what they did with B Cash. It caused a lot of hassle, but the fact that this Bitcoin is still here and B Cash still stinks and coin base is still getting people on board. As for this particular thing, well, look, they want an ETF. Everyone wants an ETF right now and no one's getting one. I'm not even sure what this specific one is. I mean, is it like a basket? They were trying to do like a basket of different cryptos. They were saying on their website, they were going to have a basket type product, but this still sounds like a Bitcoin ETF. Just to get that done, Ethereum ETF, Litecoin ETF, whatever else coin base can get its hands to. They've shown that they have no loyalty to Bitcoin. Right. Well, I mean, get in line. We've had like 10 that have been denied. And frankly, the only one anyone gives a chance at getting approved anytime soon is the solid X, VNX, solid X. They're backed by the CBOE, which is kind of a similar government agency that also has Bitcoin futures. And VanX is one of the oldest mutual fund companies in America. So they are well-established names with ties to insiders. Coinbase is a bunch of venture capitalists that no one knows. They have a track record only a few years old. So why anyone would think that this particular ETF would have any chance is, I don't get it. Let's let this first one get done with solid X, VNX. And I was just saying today, I mean, look, September 30th is the theoretical date of the next decision. I gave I gave I said 20% yes, 30% no, 50% they just delayed to February because that's what they are allowed to do. And eventually, they'll be forced to have an ETF because other countries will have ETFs. Right now, I think that ETF thing is on the backburner. I think it's been fully discounted by the market as they know. I don't really care if we get an ETF. Although if we do, we're going to see all time highs quickly and trust me, the government is well aware that if they approve the ETF, that Bitcoin is going to become the giant thing that takes over the headlines and starts threatening the legacy financial assets, the second they approve. And that's why it's so funny that people think that they are going to. Yeah, Coinbase, they can do it whatever they want. They're not getting an ETFs anytime soon. I agree with Andy. I think that the solid X ETF is much more likely with the CBOE's history. Coinbase is just showing up like yet another dot com. They think they can do everything better and faster because they're younger, but that doesn't always work out, especially when you're talking about government regulations. I'd also agree that it's most likely they're going to delay the ETF. I don't have any inside information. I'm not reading a crystal ball. It just seems to like to me that they don't want to make this decision until they're forced to make this decision. And you know what? I will give Coinbase at least some kudos for speaking to BlackRock. I mean, BlackRock is the biggest venture capital firm or the biggest ETF provider in the world. I mean, if you can partner with somebody, look, they partnered with B Cash. That was a bad decision, but in the ETF world, if you can become, if you can convince BlackRock that you have something there, well, that's a good thing. Ultimately, I think Coinbase is going to get acquired by somebody. Maybe it is BlackRock, but BlackRock is the king of ETFs. I enjoyed the Facebook Coinbase rumors from a couple of weeks ago. That actually makes a lot of sense. Amazon's talking about becoming a bank. Coinbase is talking about becoming a bank and Facebook sure could use a bank as well. But yeah, I think Coinbase is way over shooting here. They're trying to be everything to everybody. We saw this as well with the New York agreement and Segwit 2X. They were so focused on lower fees. They were willing to dump the whole Bitcoin community out of the boat. That didn't work out for them. Now, when I look at their website, I still see a major failure. There's no easy website that tells you buy Bitcoin by $20 worth of Bitcoin with less than three steps. One, two, three done $20. It gets rid of this idea that you can only buy a whole Bitcoin. Their website doesn't do that. If anything, I'd say that their current website encourages you to buy the lower priced coins. We send someone to Coinbase to buy Bitcoin. They look at the price of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Bitcoin, Cash, and they buy the cheapest one because they can get the most of it. I will say about Coinbase, though. Look at all these exchanges out there. I have used many. I have opinions, varying opinions of them. Coinbase is still the only one that links your bank account and allows credit cards that I can see. It really helps in the small retail world. I guess all the other ones, they all take bank wires, which is fine. That's the best way to buy. You get immediate settlement. You can do larger sizes. The only ones that still do that and as a result, they're still going to get a lot of new business when the market takes off. While I still don't like their interface, they have a swiping, snapchat style interface. The cash app is pretty good. Cash app will let you connect to your bank account. I think they do a credit card, but again, what I'm looking for is that thing they have on the Apple phones where it takes a picture of your credit card. You don't even have to type it in. I want the easiest way to get someone to buy $20 in Bitcoin and instead they're giving people all this other stuff that just confuses them. It makes it more difficult. Good. While we're for Cash app, I've heard of it. I don't really know much about it. Good luck to them. Well, they've got Jack Dorsey from Twitter, so they're doing pretty well. He's their CEO as well. Twitter's the one that should buy Coinbase. My God, they've got this whole captive audience of crypto. They just have not capitalized on it yet. I'm not sure how they do it, but they really need to expand their focus on crypto because that's where the whole crypto community is. It's just amazing that they don't. Yeah, definitely back in the day, I know from people that I know that changed it, met with Twitter, and they were a popular tipping service on Twitter. Of course, they created their own internal ledger and they were kind of duplicating the features of Bitcoin. But I thought it showed a lot that Twitter would meet with them back in the day, but we saw nothing come of it. They haven't seemed to add a single Bitcoin type thing to their Twitter platform. Yeah, and we know Jack. And we know Jack Dorsey has said that crypto is the future, but he's juggling his role as CEO of mainstream companies with his probably a lot more deep-seated beliefs inside that crypto is the future. And he's such a wealthy man that it's not as big of a deal for him as us. And Twitter continues to have other problems with people visiting the site. They have problems with Alex Jones and Trump and so on and so forth. They have a lot of fires going in a lot of directions and they still don't even know how to really make money with Twitter. I think they've tried advertising and so on and so forth, but I'm not sure that they're really that profitable yet. Yeah. Let's move on to the exit question. Exit question. Will we see a Bitcoin ETF before the end of the year? Andy Hoffman. 20% chance and probably that's that's generous. Like he said, you know, unless their hand is forced, like let's say Japan came out with an ETF, then they would have to to keep up with the Joneses. But otherwise they don't need to create this. I can't see why they would want to. Basic government logic. There's no reason to approve until the deadline. The only real deadline is the last deadline. No ETF in 2018. Moving on to issue two Bitcoin blood bath. So called news from Goldman Sachs that they were shutting down their plans for a Bitcoin trading desk may or may not have plunged the price of Bitcoin. Everyone freaked out yesterday when it said that Goldman Sachs was no longer going to be planning a Bitcoin trading desk and the price of Bitcoin declined almost immediately. Meanwhile, a Mt. Gox whale may or may not have moved 100,000 coins from his cold wallet where it had been frozen for the last four years, unto an exchange. Many people believe that he opened a short on the exchange and then sold a breathtaking amount of coins, causing the price of Bitcoin to go down. The mainstream media responded by linking the price to this Goldman Sachs story, which was proven false a day later. In the Sachs CEO himself went on tech crunch and said, we get a lot of stories written about us and it's nice. But this one is fake news. Andy Hoffman Goldman Sachs is still into Bitcoin and the price is still down. We've not recovered. Why does the mainstream media keep trying to link the price to a news event as if it were that simple? Right. I've written so much about this in the past. I mean, if you go on my blog, particularly about zero edge, I just hate zero. I've had a love hate relationship with them for so long going back to precious metals. They were like the anti-precious metal site, but as soon as Bitcoin became big, they suddenly became pro-precious metals and anti-bid coin. They are essentially paid by their advertisers and it's a very guided, the material they have. But again, I always say beware of them trying to attribute Bitcoin's movements. Like nothing, almost no news event moves Bitcoin. And we've seen that time and time and again, the movements, it's so completely uncorrelated with legacy financial markets. It often is completely uncorrelated. Yeah, when the Chinese banned Bitcoin, okay, yes, that was a news event. When the Bitcoin unlimited, I mean, when that first started, the whole scaling debate, that tanked the price for a real reason you could link to a news event. And even the whole thing with this fall, this fall, this summer in August with the SEC denials, you can't really link it. I mean, look, the price surged beforehand, then it plunged violently when they delayed it. I mean, which we knew there were going, there's a lot of cross currents going on. I think that that whole meme that the price plunged in August because it was a denial of the wink of loss, which we didn't even know they were even applying. And we knew it wasn't going to happen. And then this solid X being delayed, I think that was kind of making up news after fact, just like this whole Goldman thing. Now, look, what happened with the Goldman, it was again, as it came out, as the price was falling, I'm writing on tweeting. Okay, come on, let's go news media, find something, and my motto in Bitcoin is don't look for bad news because you won't find any. And there wasn't any an hour later, nothing, nothing, nothing. And then finally, this UK business insider, again, this whole thing with Goldman Sachs, not having a trading desk, it was one media rag, not the New York Times or anything, something called UK business insider. And the guy writes, yeah, from sources, well known sources, this is definitely true, they're not going to have a crypto trading desk, but they are still going to look for crypto custodial solutions, which of course is, I mean, why is Goldman having a trading desk, a good or bad thing, like who cares? But the custodial solutions is the important thing, not that they've really done anything other than talk about it. And then of course, a day later, the Goldman CFO himself says, now this is fake news. Now, look, as I was tweeting, Goldman has been in the middle of every horrible thing that's gone on to financial markets ever. And certainly in my precious mountain world, and now in the Bitcoin world, you could say that they were an innocent bystander. I kind of think that there was some collusion going on here with this crazy article getting spread virally. But the fact is, the price of Bitcoin did not fall $1,100 a day because Goldman was going to have a trading desk or not. There was something going on, otherwise, don't know what it is. This Mt. Cox Well thing, you just brought to my attention for the first time. I mean, did someone move 100,000 coins to exchange or something, or what they do? I think that the amount was 100,000, maybe to a personal wallet, and 15,000 coins went to BitTrek's or one of the major exchanges. Oh, well done then, as your answer. I mean, that's what happens with the Mt. Cox trustee we're selling. The day we hit bottom in terms of market cap February 6, that very day he sold 8,000. I mean, he sent it to the wall that day, and that's basically that volume traded. And then the second big smash that happened in May when we went from 10,000 down to 6,000 was right after he had moved, I think it was at 15,000, 20,000, something like that, 24,000 you move. So I mean, it's a high correlation if that Bitcoin will actually sold. All that would explain it, and all this conspiracy theory. It's large moves like this that make me question the value of technical analysis in this emerging market. It seems like Bitcoin is so new, and the order book is so thin that at any point a whale can come in by or sell and completely throw off the market. I don't think anyone had this in their charts. Did anyone say that we were going to drop this exact amount within the next three days? Sir, people have their overarching crystal ball thing. Oh, it's always going up, oh, it's always going down. But other than that, I'm not sure what they're actually adding when we see whales moving the market like that. 90, look, first of all, you know, technical analysis that a lot of the people have ulterior motives of why they have a call like this, permabairs, this permaboles. Most of them are hedge both ways that they're, quote, short term bearish, long term bullish. And they can always find one way to say that they were right. Of course, they selectively discuss the ones where they were right. But the fact is when you think about it, if you talk about on one end of the spectrum, you have King T.A. Fudster. On the other end, you have like this guy I've just been watching lately called Secret Trader. King T.A. Fudster is always negative. Secret Trader is always positive. So they both are constantly saying that they're right. But the fact is that King T.A. Fudster has said for six months, we are going to collapse below $6,000 the world's over. Whether it's, and this guy's newer and all the bulls, they don't just say, oh, we're going to go up below, they say, we're going to take off to the moon. Well, guess what? Every single one of them, not only is every one of them been lost because we've been range bound pretty much for the whole year, but because the violent moves within that range, anyone who's listened to their advice has been wrecked. I mean, to say like, like the price, oh, it went from $6,000 to $10,000. Oh, sorry. I mean, I had a bear call. It's still a bit, look, it's coming back down. No, it's a bear market. I was right. No, you weren't right. Just like the, you know, I'm talking about this other guy, the other day, he's like, look, we're going to have a giant move upward. Well, guess what? 24 hours later, we've got $1100. So again, again, people, you want to lose all your money, trade. You want to believe that these gurus know what they're talking about. Good luck to you. If they trust me. Look, there's not a single person listening to this broadcast that wants to work. Okay? Right? You don't want to work. You're not doing this for fun. We don't want to work. If technical analysis really worked, and these are the smartest guys, guess what they would do? They would make a bundle of money and go off on vacation, end of start. Well, and that also brings up the issue of skin in the game. A lot of these people are out there giving their advice, but they're not actively using it. And that's always a big red flag to me. Somebody tells you to buy something and you say, well, have you bought it? Did you make your move today? Like, are you happier, sad? Because you did this? And they're like, no, no, I just hold on my coins. I'm like, what? Or in King T.A. Fudsters case, he says, not only would I, I would never trade Bitcoin, because it's, I got too much other stuff to do. It's just, I can't follow it. I could follow the other things, but I would never short Bitcoin because it's too dangerous. But you should short Bitcoin because we're in a massive bull market. Oh, we just went to 10,000. Sorry. It's going to create, oh, we just went to 8,000. Sorry. And then he has the nerve to like, you know, yell at everyone, well, you should be a big boy and not trade. Well, you're the one telling everyone to trade. I mean, sweet dick, else. And the same goes for the bulls also that there's always a motive. But everyone wants to get paid. The fact is the only way to make money is to huddle over the long term end of story. And this last week of we finally broke out, everyone was so excited. And then the next day this happens and wrecked anyone who traded on the upside or downside. Guarantee it. Anyone. Well, and when you get involved in a market like Bitcoin, what you really make a bet on is the future. Either the future is Bitcoin or the future is not Bitcoin. So if the future is Bitcoin, you make a ton of money. If the future is not Bitcoin, you don't make any money. That seems like a reasonable investment to me. One way or the other, I'm going to win or lose. Whereas this trying to find the tops in the bottom, trying to predict what the future will be by looking at the past just seems like it's never going to work out. I usually get less at the top, less at the bottom. And I sell it all the wrong times. And I just, no one seems to be able to figure it out. And again, the people that are actually promoting this stuff aren't trading with it. Yes, I've been, I think that's better, but the ones who are in the highest levels of this, they just tell you what to do. And if you do it, who's the sucker? Like, yeah, and I've been following, look, I've been in the financial market 30 years. I mean, like real stuff, like Wall Street stuff, like everything, I followed everything. I know technical analysis, the main tenants of it. And I'll spend my whole day staring at it. I mean, I see how it works. Joe is speaking, I've never seen anything that worked less on Bitcoin. The reason being because A, it's super thin. There's a very, very small float out there. B, because they're adding all these new leverage products into it, which makes it even more. It's almost like like a 2x ETF. And then of course, the fact that there's so much riding on it, like it's outlook. One day it's like it's going to change the future. And then the slightest thing come out or fun. And now it's going to die. And so you get these wild moves constantly. But the fact is that this year, you know, we had this giant move up. And this year we've been range bound. But the range has been extremely volatile. And everyone trading loses money. And everyone's still hotling. And you just hold on and wait. I mean, the bearer looked at the bear market to me and Bitcoin and did in February because market kept bottomed in February. In old coins hasn't ended yet. Interesting stuff. Moving on. Or actually, I was going to talk more. The media also just follows the leader. This Goldman Sach story, like you said, it went from business insider to every other magazine. And just following the leader, they don't know what to say about this. They need a new story to write every day. And it's a lot harder to write a story that says the price of Bitcoin went up and down. And we don't understand why it's a lot easier to just say, oh, the price went down because of Goldman Sachs. And if they heard about the Mt. Goxway, I'm sure they never heard that. That's a very esoteric thing that if they write articles about no one's going to read because the average person. So what the hell are you talking about? The Mt. Gox whale sent to his wallet. Oh, Goldman Sachs. Well, it is Goldman Sachs. We worship Goldman Sachs. If they say anything, market's changed ridiculous. Moving on to the exit question. Will Goldman Sachs create a Bitcoin trading desk? Andy Hoffman. Yeah. One day they'll create a trading desk. I mean, when they deem it most profitable. I mean, look, they're behind the scenes doing all kinds of things. They could say, well, first of all, they're venture capital firm, what? Poloniacs. They're talking actively about trying to find cryptocurrency solutions. Costurado solutions, of course, they are. They're preparing for the future. And when they deem it profitable, probably when there's the next big bull run, they will have a trading desk. They may have one right now that we don't even know about. They've trading desk doing all kinds of proprietary stuff that they don't tell you about. I agree. They will have a trading desk. Oscar, what's important here is to remember that all of these companies, all of these banks and even the countries are like dominoes. They can't trust each other. So when the first one goes, the second one has to go, the third one has to go, they all have to be in this. So they're just waiting for who's going to turn them over and go Bitcoin next. And when they do, there'll be a huge rush of follow on as everyone else gets involved. Did you know the World Crypto Network has its own audio podcast on iTunes? You can subscribe today and listen to all your favorite World Crypto Network shows for free on iTunes. Audio only great for doing things in the background, running errands or even driving the car. Check out the World Crypto Network podcast at iTunes and other places that have podcasts today. Issue 3, CNBC Reverse Bitcoin price indicator hits bullseye again. CNBC loves to talk and tweet about crypto. But the problem is, they're always wrong. People have started to take note of this and many are even betting against CNBC now. When the price goes up, they say it's going down. When the price goes down, they say it's going up. Andy Hoffman, why can't CNBC get this right? Why do they keep predicting the price wrong? Sorry if I'm laughing at this question. Why can't CNBC get away? I've been obviously CNBC has been a big part of my life forever. I've been Wall Street going back to the late 80s. I call them the Pie Piper. Everything that's wrong about the financial markets. You got Goldman Sachs and you got CNBC. By the way, CNBC with the record high stock markets has record low ratings. Because people wrote them off years ago. Everything about what they do is nefarious. They don't report it as it is. They are trying to get advertising so they prop up the most popular people, whether they're likeable or not. Of course, anytime in cryptocurrency where they really don't care, they just want the excitement, the price moves and they're all over it. It's falling. It's going to crash. It's rising. It's going to the moon. I remember when Brian Kelly was on Adam Maistre's show the first time back in October, the wall of institutional money. He seemed like such a nice guy. He'd been doing the show and I was like, I never heard of this. I haven't watched CNBC in years. Wow. Once you saw what he did a few months later and turned into this evil monster. I mean, absolutely destroying people left and right. I remember that ripple right at the top. He's giving a tutorial on TV. Here's how you send your Bitcoin to which one was it? It was a mix and sell it for ripple right at the top when ripple was like over $3. I mean, anyone who watched a CNBC is out of their mind. I don't, I doubt anyone in the crypto space does it all. It's probably all the older investors that come in at the end who read the New York Times in the Wall Street Journal and follow, I mean, Jim Kramer, all these guys stay away people, please. Well, and historically with Brian Kelly, I believe he created an alt coin called Nautilus coin. He started out as kind of a joke. He was just an columnist writing an article about how you could make an alt coin. And then there was some strange thing. They were going to trade Nautilus coin for some other coin and it all got pumped and it all went to the moon. So I wasn't too surprised when he turned to promoting ripple and all these other things. He has his own series of conferences and how-tos where he'll teach you how to trade badly. It just sounds all bad. But once again, if you're looking at the mainstream media, what else are you going to get? That's the best information that you can get right now is what they're putting out there. I was surprised to watch their shows when they started going all about Bitcoin. I was surprised how bad they were. If you go back to the early world crypto network shows, you can watch those and it reminded me a lot of that except that the people on the world crypto network knew what they were talking about. When you look at CNBC, they go back person to person and they're like, well, what about this? What about this? And they give you the hardest opinions they have and they're just dead wrong made up out of nothing. I love Ethereum or I love Ripple. These kind of things. I remember the one with Ethereum, the forgotten crypto you should buy that when I'm going, no, it was B-Catch. It's forgotten. You should buy it when you mean it's forgotten. It was trading at like 10% of a Bitcoin at the time. Then you find out, of course, that the person who does the Twitter feed for CNBC, her husband runs the biggest B-Catch fund and is a buddy of Roger Bear. Then of course, there's the connection with Coinbase. And of course, you look at Brian Kelly's and Rand Hooner's. You look at their Twitter feeds, constantly promotions for altcoins. I mean, there's no doubt in my mind that they are getting paid like John McAfee light. You know, I mean, it's so blatant that obviously anything they say, you take with a grain of salt. I don't know if there was a connection with Ripple because it was just so weird. I guess it's a corporation maybe. But in the B-Catch, I mean, they're bad people. It's funny with Rand though because he does a lot of crazy bad things. But at the same time, he says a lot of really smart things too. So I kind of just watch him cautiously because he's one of the smarter people out there. But he's also a bit compromised, but nothing like Brian Kelly and the guys in New York, they are off the charts. I also think we should acknowledge they're in a tough position here. They don't know what they're talking about. There is no historical example to go back to. So if you really want to understand what's happening now, you can only really read the daily's, read the technology, understand the basics of what's going on. And then it's all up in the air. No one knows if Bitcoin's going straight to the moon or straight down. If it's going to be payments, if it's going to be holding value, if one of these altcoins is going to take off, all of this is so much up in the air and they just don't have, they don't have a chance. It feels like, but we'll just have to see how they go if they get any better. Yeah, CNBC is not going to be there no longer go to for stocks. And there's certainly not going to be a go to for crypto. Exit question, where should you get your information about crypto? If cable news is so far behind the days and Google news searches are full with nothing, but articles about the price, the price and the price. Andy Hoffman, where do you go to get your crypto news? Well, obviously, well, crypto network is a very good source. I'm not just saying it because of me. I mean, I'm here because I watched it religiously for starting in early 2016. There's a lot of quality here. But there are other places too. The thing is though, they are hard to find because there's a sea of bad information. There's so many people out there that are pumping things or tongue technical analysis. So really what you got to do is you just got to scour Twitter and find people. People retweet stuff. And that's really how I found pretty much everyone that, you know, whether I heard them on World Crypto Network or just got, you know, found their feed on Twitter. That's the best place to find good info. I would agree with that. I would say Twitter or YouTube, of course, on YouTube, it's very important to have a litmus test. You need to have some kind of standard of quality for who you're listening to, especially if you're going to go out and trade on that information, which again, we're not advising here. We're saying, you may need to be holding or dollar cost averaging. You shouldn't have more than you can afford to lose. And if you're like me, you're betting that it's either Bitcoin's everything or Bitcoin's nothing. That's an acceptable bet. But this trying to time the market is just going to drive you crazy. So check out Twitter, check out YouTube. But with a grain of salt, don't trust anyone, even me. And don't trade Bitcoin. Just don't do it. Don't trade all coins. Don't. I mean, if there's an all coin that happened to like, you know, I was talking about steam lately, well, then you, you how do that too? You don't trade any of these things. Exactly. The way to make money on these altcoins was to buy a bunch of them early, wait for it to pump and sell before it dumps. It's very hard to do to time all that correctly to find the right altcoin, the ones that's popular and so on and so forth. And if you're going to do that, that's a speculative investment. That's different than your Bitcoin investment, which I think is a little safer long term because of the size of the Bitcoin network. A little, I would say about a hundred times safer. It is. It's a lot safer. Well, but even that Bitcoin, it's up and down to. It's a long time. One term, long term Bitcoin is much safer than anything by many multiples. And it's better than the US dollar. I remember when I first got into Bitcoin, I didn't have a lot of money, but I put all my money in there because it just felt better to be off the US dollar. And I didn't really, I couldn't get anyone to take Bitcoin. And I had to shop with the dollar. I have debts in the dollar. But it was exciting to have my money in something that wasn't the government and that wasn't this fiat overprinted Federal Reserve notes. Right. Well, before I had Bitcoin, what did I have? Gold. I mean, I've always had a small amount of dollars. I had a lot of gold and silver. And then when Bitcoin came along, I decided it's better. And now I have no gold and silver, but I have a lot of Bitcoin. And I was always interested in gold, but never had any money. You're fully me. You'll be a happier person, although, for it's interesting. Yeah, worked out pretty good. I got a couple of pieces of silver. And I think there were half the value that I put in them. So, oh, well, and I don't even know where they are. But moving on to issue four, Iran, legitimizes crypto mining industry. The Bitcoin price spikes to 24,000 locally. This is exciting news from Iran. But this is also controversial news for Bitcoin. We've often talked about how Bitcoin doesn't, isn't controlled by the U.S. government or any other government or central bank. And here we see how Bitcoin has the power to disrupt not just payments and finance, but actually international relations. Iran is attempting to use Bitcoin and cryptocurrency mining to evade sanctions. As we know, Iran is under a lot of sanctions because of their nuclear program, as well as their position in the Middle East and so on and so forth. They are now trying to get around this by using Bitcoin and mining cryptocurrency. Andy Hoffman, do you think Iran will be successful? Will this new idea of perhaps questionable countries switching to Bitcoin or encouraging Bitcoin in order to challenge the existing ruling countries? Right. Well, I mean, this goes all the way back to the whole thing with the petrodollar. The countries are mad at the U.S., particularly in Middle Eastern countries like Iran that have been sanctioned or the Russia. So they say we're going to go around the petrodollar. We're going to use rubles. We're going to use gold. And they've been trying for years. It's not easy to do. And no one's really succeeded at it. And a lot of people have said they're going to do it like, say, Iraq or bomb. This has been talking about gold. So and crypto is such a more nascent industry and much smaller than gold. So to say that Iran is going to disrupt the more, I mean, this is just a rant. I mean, one thing of China said we're not going to spend dollars. We're going to use Bitcoin. But China has all the gold in the world. They still haven't done it. So it's just, it's a non-story. Look, all every country ultimately is going to want to own Bitcoin because it's going to appreciate value. And it is a way of getting back at the U.S. Gold has failed at that. And in the age of Bitcoin, it definitely has. I mean, it will fail at everything. Gold is done. So this will be something for the future, but not anytime soon. First, the governments have to acquire substantial Bitcoin reserves. And it becomes much more valuable as an asset class before it's going to have any geopolitical impact. But it will in time. I'm not sure it's a non-story. If I was China, I would be sitting on the sidelines curious to see the results of this experiment. I see it as a test case or a test lab to see how Bitcoin and cryptocurrency mining could change a country like Iran and could challenge the whole global order. So I think it's important, but probably not as much as say Iran adopting Bitcoin as their official currency. Or like you mentioned, a country like Iraq or Venezuela selling oil in Bitcoin. Previously, any country that's ever sold oil and anything other than USD has been promptly invaded. So that would be a more dramatic turn to the story. The whole thing with the, it's so silly why anyone would think that Bitcoin has much downside here is central banks remember they print money, right? They buy stocks, bonds, countries, they buy whatever they want with with printed money. I mean, there's no doubt some are buying Bitcoin now. I mean, I've said it all along. I cannot believe the Japanese are not with all that debt and the fact that they are probably the most crypto receptive country in the world. I mean, they're not stupid, they're printing some yen and buying some Bitcoin with it. And ultimately all the countries, well, they don't have to watch the experiment. They can they can own some China could just confiscate some, they probably could have taken some of all these exchanges that were closed. Or they could just buy prints and you want them buy some. So ultimately, everyone's going to do it. It's just a, I mean, some are definitely doing it now, but it's only a matter of time before they all start really doing it. And then we could see the experiment in real life when they actually have super valuable reserves. Exit question, which country that is a little questionable will try Bitcoin next other than Iran? Well, probably not Venezuela because they want the petro to work and they also don't have much money. I mean, you know, Venezuela is broke. There's all kinds of countries in, you know, I mean, Greece. I don't know. There's just so many out there that are candidates, obviously Bulgaria because they saw their national debt drop dramatically because they accidentally see some Bitcoin. There would be a good candidate who says, yeah, we have some extra money. This is great. Let's buy more. Maybe one day we'll change the power structure of Europe by being wealthy. So yeah, I mean, it'll probably be something that will have a left field, but I still believe that Japan has the most to gain and the most ability to understand what they're doing. While I don't think it will trickle down to the people, I believe the government of North Korea has the most reason to get into Bitcoin, especially their leader or leaders at the top. There's never been a way, better way to steal money from the people, hold it in something small like a treasor and plan for the day when you have to flee the country. It makes sense. It's perfect for them. Every dictator. Yeah. Like Iran, completely oppressed sanctioned. This would be a great way to get a South Korea, that big, big, little South Korea is probably going to be buying it too. Maybe the two of them should unite and become the most powerful country in Europe and Asia. But yeah, North Korea, look, any of these depressed debt-ridden nations, why not try it? And especially for any of these corrupt leaders, if you have to flee, you can't take the palace with you. You can't take the antique furniture with you. Gold bars. Gold bars. Too heavy. Too many men needed to move around. Plus people know it's valuable. They see you with a stack of gold bars. They're like, this guy's got some money. It's gold bar time. But they see you with a Bitcoin or a treasor in your pocket or somewhere else that you're concealing it. And I think it's a great new exit strategy for dictators everywhere. Once again, Bitcoin brings us good things. It also brings us bad things. But that's not to say these guys wouldn't eventually be caught. Bitcoin's pretty traceable now. They're usually not so great at that. But still, being able to extract so much value from a country and then just move across the world and bring that value back to the country. Yeah, was it the Saudi prince who they banned? You know, it was worth billions. And then they somehow, like, not, they just kind of kicked him out of the session and put him in jail and stuff and took his assets. If he had some Bitcoin, then he's fine. That's the other great part about this. We were talking about Bill Cosby and he might be hiding his divorce for his money from his divorce. So in the theory, he could be locked it into crypto, be the only one with the password. And they have to put him in jail to like sweat the password out of him. Otherwise, the entire divorce structure in the United States goes away because for the first time, you can actually, we're not sure if it's going to work yet, hide your money from a divorce. Yeah, that's Adam Ister has been talking about that forever. You can, it's not just hide it from a divorce, it just hide money. No one knows about it. That's the beauty of it. It can't be confiscated. You could just say you forgot the password or you sent it somewhere to buy something. It's not even your money anymore. It's pretty easy. So we did the exit question. We're moving on to special issue issue number five. Bitmains, ant pool activates controversial asic boost for faster Bitcoin mining. But both Andy and I were scratching our heads at this one. We thought that segwit deactivated asic boost. I read a couple of continual articles here to try to get more information about this. They say that perhaps the over version is easily detectable and the covert one isn't. Perhaps bitmains has just switched from covert asic boost to over asic boost. In general, I believe this story shows that bitmains is in quite a lot of trouble. They do have what could be one of the world's biggest IPOs looking ahead of them. But their decision to sell 50,000 Bitcoin in exchange for a million B cash continues to not turn out well. And now they have old chips, a failed AI program and their chip designer quit. Is bitmains in dire straits? And are they so desperate that they're using this asic boost cheat to boost their mining farms? Andy Hoffman. Yes. Wow. So they sold 50,000 Bitcoin for B cash. Wow. That might be the worst trade in the history of financial markets. I wonder how much. It's directly bad. And it's a violation of their duty to their stockholders or their investors just to blindly make this crazy bet on a new currency when you have this Bitcoin. Well, when they were a private company, they could do whatever they want. But that's the whole point. If you want to go public, there's going to be some changes. And for that record, for that matter, I wonder how much Bitcoin that Roger Bear could, you know, he says all kinds of things. How much of his stash will be presented to stash to the actual sell per B cash, same kind of thing. But that's another story. So, OK. So bitmains. Yes. Again, the whole thing with the IPO. If you want to go public, you have to, as we know, disclose your books and get a board of directors and have shareholders that, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if I know that they have financial issues. Anyone who's looking at that balance sheet is looking to go in the IPO. Realizes that one of the biggest asset is unbelievably illiquid. You cannot sell that B cash. You can't. I mean, you can drive the price down to nothing by doing it. So that asset doesn't count. It's a discounted asset. And so that's going to be a major issue with getting the pricing of this IPO. They may actually kick G-Hon out. They may say, we're not giving you money without this because he is not proven that he's a genius. He's proven that he once did great things, but as we said in the last show, he's squandered it. And then, of course, you have market conditions. If old coins are getting crushed, if Bitcoin does not act well, there's no way that IPO is going to get done. And bitmains will be in significant financial straits and will have to be sold in a fire sale basis. So it's interesting to see what will happen with Bitmains. They really need a big bull market to save them right now. And right now, they are not getting it. As for this ASIC booth thing, like you said, we're both talking before this. I mean, we spend a whole year talking about the scaling debate. They just want to have B cash and not have segwit because they can use ASIC booths. But now they are saying they are using it, but there is segwit. So I'm completely baffled. I'm sure it's obviously not a big issue like the Bitcoin that we couldn't care less what Bitmains doing. But I'm baffled. They, like you said, I guess Bitmains is desperate to do whatever they can. I just don't even understand how that would work. Absolutely. I think this is an act of desperation. They're trying to get the most money they can out of these old chips. Samson Mao has been dragged them through the mud all over Twitter saying they've got a library full of old chips. They haven't made a new chip since 2015. The e-bang manufacturers have smaller chips. I remember smaller chips, less heat, more instructions. You can fit more of them on a board, so on and so forth. They have serious technological competition coming in. Plus the bad B cash decision. The real question is going to be when do they sell that B cash and who sells first? Will it be G-Han? Will it be Roger Fier? I don't know if Craig Wright, supposed Satochi, has any B cash or if he's going to sell. We have to watch for which one's going to betray each other first. Certainly if BitMain does become a public company, it would be hugely irresponsible to continue holding all that B cash. They'd probably have to start dumping it slowly five or 10% a week, something like that. Try to get their money out of it. Of course, any major dumps by BitMain could collapse the entire B cash market. I don't know how they're going to get their money out of there. If I took over that company, I'd be selling some of that stuff right away. The IPO was proposed for September. That doesn't mean anything. It can get delayed indefinitely. For all we know, a lot of this craziness in the market is still then desperately trying to get more liquid in front of the IPO. We don't know that, but it's very possible. They showed their books, they showed their books, the eyes of the end of January, March, since then things have gotten vastly worse for their books. We talked before about this whole, they're not a chip company. They're done with that. They're competing with the Samsung's in the world, which are laughing at them and many other companies. They're out of that business. They're pretty much all they got left is their mining market share and they're hampered by this capital need that only outside money is going to give them. My guess is what's going to happen is they will get the deal done, but it will severely hurt them. They'll probably have to change their management. They'll probably be forced to sell the B cash at a huge discount. They're not going to dump it on the market. It'll look like what Bitcoin looked like the other night, but all the way down to nothing if they tried to dump it. They'll probably find, let's say it's worth, okay, let's say they have a million B cash. It's worth $500 million now. They'll say, look, we're going to go public in part of what we're doing is we're going to get liquid. We're going to sell it for $0.50 on the dollar. We'll find someone to give us $250 million for our million B cash, a 50% discount. Anyone who's a bag holder who's still investing in this piece of crap is going to get a 50% haircut. Or if they're lucky, you have a big Bitcoin bull market, save them. Could happen, but Murphy's Law says that when you're trying to get your deal done, it's unlikely that will happen. So they'll probably be forced to downsize more in you. Bitmain, just another, it'll be an historical, interesting historical story about Bitcoin, how they were once the most powerful and then they kind of lost it and other people became more powerful. Exit question, who will sell their B cash first, Roger Vier or Ghan and a Bitmain? It probably will pool the efforts. Like I mean, everyone knows their partners. If Bitmain is going to be selling their 50 cents in the dollar, wouldn't surprise me if Roger Vier says, yeah, let me in on this block trade. He obviously has less than that Bitmain does and they may all do it. That's how it works on Wall Street. You do a block trade. You find a bunch of sellers to do a one time block trade in the illiquid market. So I have a feeling that if something like that happened, a lot of the B cash wells would want to be a part of it. And you know what they'd want to do with their B cash? Convert it to Bitcoin. There's some disagreement with the chat here. People are saying, Ghan will sell first. I disagree. It will be Roger Vier. But Ghan currently is locked because the companies in IPO, so I don't think they could make such a large sell or a change in their attitude and strategy. But once the IPO is approved, Roger Vier will see the writing on the wall and ditch his B cash, the immortal survivor sneaking in and out of this market. Like Andy said, I don't think he sold all of his Bitcoin like he said he did or a significant portion. I think that fortunately, unfortunately, whatever way you want to think, Roger Vier is going to be fine in all this situation. But I agree with Andy. Bitmain will be this horror story that people tell their children, an incredibly popular company in a great position, incredibly valuable, throwing it all away, disagreements with the chip designer moving into AI too quickly and failing to develop a follow up to their ant minor. Just a typical Shakespearean hubris story. Money and greed. The fault dear Brutus lies not in our stars, but in ourselves. Moving on to the end of the show, predictions or a story of the week. Andy Hoffman, are you ready with a prediction or a story of the week? Yeah, it's so funny because I have so much going on. I always forget that I have to come up with this, but I have something. Look, the old coins are right now in a raging bear market. I mean, they're pretty much just about all of them are near their lows. Bitcoin is not in a bull or a bear market, but it's certainly closer to its lows than its highs, much closer. And yet, the interest that I'm seeing in things I do is rising. I mean, my consultations pretty much died for a few months. Price is the same as it was back then, but I'm doing a lot of consultations now. My Twitter feed will stuck at the same level for, it will stuck at like 13,500 for months. And all of a sudden, it's gone of 500 people in the last, I don't know, two or three weeks. I'm guessing if you looked at the number of searches on Google and stuff, I haven't looked at it starting to rise. I just think people are getting jaded by what's happening. They're starting to realize Bitcoin's not going away. And there's just showing more interest. I just, it's a good early sign in my view that interest is returning to this space. Well, I share hope so because I was a disheartened to see that the Google searches were down two thirds. That's quite a lot. Also, of course, views have been a little down here at the network and so on and so forth. We continue trying to make great content and we appreciate it a lot when you guys support us by giving us a thumbs up or a share down below as well as subscribing, tweeting about us, leaving timestamps in their comments, even leaving comments. All of these things help support the show. And we had a really great show this morning, Bitcoin talk show. We do a little live. It's kind of like a radio call-in show. I've been doing it for a couple months now. And this morning we just had a great call from Venezuela. So if you want to check that out, go to Twitter, slash mad bitcoins or right here on the World Crypto Network. It's around an hour and a half into this morning show. But the caller from Venezuela told us all about what was going on there about his main complaint, which I want to echo because this is what he called into tell me is that he is upset by the dash people who are trying to sell dash in Venezuela. A lot of his friends have mined dash and then lost their money. Other friends have held dash and lost their money. He sees it as kind of irresponsible what they're doing, claiming that they're so successful in Venezuela and trying to teach these people who are in a desperate situation. This is not the kind of people that you need to be saying Bitcoin or Bitcoin cash or maybe would you like some ripple. These people need something that's going to hold value as their currency is in a complete free fall. The government keeps printing it. You get paid on Friday. You want to spend your money immediately to buy food or things that don't go bad, can food, things like this because the value of the all of ours dropping so much. It was really informative to listen to a direct source who was there. I think I got to ask him some good questions and I asked him to call back in next week or maybe a few weeks later. Hopefully we'll be able to continually get you updates from Venezuela on the call and show anyone in the world can call in. I've been doing the show every day from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. Pacific Coast time. Check it out right here on the World Crypto Network. I think that's about it for the show. Anything else you want to say in closing? Where can people check out your work? No, just Andy underscore off and underscore CG of course, cryptogoldsensual.com. We'll just keep fighting the fight and putting up the good information. I really think that the tide is turning in the Bitcoin world. I think there's a lot more recognition of it. We're about to hit a 10 year anniversary of Bitcoin network running successfully. I've never been more bullish about what's going on at Bitcoin and I never been more bullish about holding it at these prices. 10 year anniversary for Bitcoin coming up and of course we have the five year anniversary of the world crypto network coming up in February. We started this back in 2014. I started mad bitcoins the year earlier in 2013. As always you can help support this show by donating Bitcoin or any of the altcoins accepted by Trezer to the QR codes on your screen right now. Thanks to everybody for giving us a thumbs up and a share. It's been very active in the chat. I've only able to watch part of it but we have around 220 live viewers which is really great for this show and for a Friday. Thanks so much for checking in with us. Be sure to subscribe down below and until next time. Bye. Bye.