#263 — The Bitcoin Group #263 - Galaxy Goldman Liquidity - Price $37K - Flaws - Emerging Markets vs. Miami

The Bitcoin Group, the American original, for over the last 10 seconds, the sharpest Satoshi's, the best Bitcoin's, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Dan Eve, the crypto raptor. Howdy, all Bitcoin folks. Josh Shagalla from Vol Toro. Good evening, ladies, and gentlemen, good evening. And Arck from BTC IoT. Shabbai, and hello, all Gabriel D. Vine from the World Crypto Network. Great to be back all. Good to see you. Justin Newton from Netkey. Hey, everybody. It's great to see you today. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network, moving on to issue one. Issue one, Novogratz, Galaxy provides liquidity on Goldman Bitcoin futures. Goldman has restarted its crypto trailing trading desk earlier this year, and Galaxy expects to add additional investment banks as customers. Bitcoin's hitting the big time as Galaxy digital holdings will serve as a liquidity provider on Bitcoin futures for Goldman Sachs Group, as the security firm reenters the cryptocurrency markets. Dan Eve, will Goldman Sachs be more successful this time? This time, will they stay in the cryptocurrency markets? Well, if the prophecies are foretold, are to come true, and we are headed for the 250K region, then this is kind of a good time to be jumping back in. And although we've had a pretty tremendous drop across the board, it's obviously Bitcoin down from the highs of nearly 65. It's probably scared the markets quite a lot, but also tempted people back in from the perspective that it's dropped this much. It always goes back up. The one thing is that it seems to always go back up. So maybe it's a good timing to get back in and get people invested, and to provide those services because they're less likely to get caught out when if they're buying the top at 65, and now sat there with the customer base going, hey, what the hell happened? You can't be buying Bitcoin, and now it's 35K and going lower. So maybe this is good. These are big companies, and they lend English intimacy to it being a tradable asset. And you take that along with El Salvador and other countries, smaller countries, or the dollar-dependent countries, starting to seriously consider, or at least publicly talk about going Bitcoin, and they want to be in infrastructure, then I think there's a lot of big moves I think come in this way. Just like to remind everyone to give us a thumbs up down below. It's free. Justin Newton, your thoughts on Goldman Sachs re-entering Bitcoin trading. Yeah, well, look, I think it made sense when they exited the space, and I think it makes sense now that they're re-entering. And so, to talk about that a little bit, I want to talk about the things that are different now that may lead to them spending a little bit more time in the space, and it's actually becoming a permanent offering. So if you looked at crypto, the last time Goldman was involved, the market size was a lot smaller, and it's not just in terms of market cap, but more importantly, in terms of market participants. And the types of people that we're asking about investing in crypto was frankly crypto people. It wasn't mainstream investors. But one of the things that happened in this last cycle through crypto is it did actually start to attract the interest of more institutions, more family offices that are not ones that we would have traditionally thought of as sort of crypto focused. It sort of pushed out more into the mainstream of investment. The other thing that's different this time is that the infrastructure and the regulations are better developed. And so it's easier for them, for example, to plug into a player like Galaxy Digital that's going to be continuing to develop and evolve their tools for institutions over time and just kind of turn those services on in a way that they will have more protection with respect to technological innovation and a partner that can help to move things forward for them. Versus early on, all of these kinds of buildouts were more bespoke where they were having to build things that were custom to themselves when the rules weren't really fully defined and the products weren't really fully defined. And so those things, frankly, all of it, become expensive to maintain and important to throw away, frankly. If you look at what Goldman is doing in this way, you can almost look at it in the way that a traditional startup would work where they may launch a product initially, not find product market fit with it, go back to the drawing board and then relaunch a product that has a much higher likelihood of success because they were able to refine and tune what they were thinking on the product market fit. Well, I'm glad they tried again and I'm happy to welcome them back. Ben, Ark, your thoughts on Goldman Sachs. Yeah, I agree completely. It's a case of the infrastructure being built out now and these more sophisticated market participants feeling much more ease. You look at the price and I think the price now is reflecting sort of a lot of unsfisticated Elon Musk tweet tracing traders. But there is this huge move for these more sophisticated players to be involved in Bitcoin and crypto space in general. And the infrastructure is being built out for them and it's giving them an apparatus in which they can work within. So yeah, I agree completely with what Justin said there. I really liked the concept within the article. I think it said some good urban said that the oil is an extremely volatile asset. People are aware and they're like, hey, this is a volatile asset and that's true with Bitcoin. Just because it's volatile doesn't mean that you can't trade a thing. It shouldn't be part of mainstream finance and finance packages and trading mechanisms. So yeah, it's all good news and it's the right time for Goldman Sachs and they are going to feel a lot more comfortable in the environment which they're in now. And it's just going to attract a big name at Goldman Sachs again. Back of order, it's just going to attract more and more bigger players into Bitcoin. Goldman Sachs, that's the name that's printed on my Apple card. Gabriel, Devon, welcome back to the show. Thanks, Thomas. You know, this is just inevitable. Bitcoin is the darling asset of the cognizancy in 2021. I believe that Thomas and I spoke about this decade being the time when Bitcoin explodes into the mainstream and we're seeing that. No surprise that Goldman Sachs is trying again to bring their clients into the ecosystem. After all, Bitcoin is the very best collateral in the world. So as a basis for Galaxy to back these future contracts and stuff, it's not just for investment in Bitcoin specifically, but also, like I said, as a collateral or as a functional part of investment strategies by large headphones and such, it's a natural fit and in an inevitability. So yeah, that's the prize. It's like it. It is interesting to see how long it took them to provide Bitcoin for their clients. For so many shows, Gabriel, I and Tone and others were all here and we were like, why won't they offer this? It's an investment. Sure, it's risky. You could go up or down, but to not offer it to so many large value clients for years and years and years never made any sense and it's glad to see them starting to show some sense even if it's been a long time. Joshua Shagalla, your thoughts on Goldman Sachs getting back into the trading business. You know, the thing is that for me, I'm going to take the opposite. I think it's got awful. I think that really it's inevitable for sure, but it's got awful. These guys aren't just credit lines. They don't have massive credit lines. They are the credit lines. They can short this mother to the ground and then buy up the real assets. They can take free funny money that they can get tons of and basically buy up real rare numbers and they understand that this stuff has value. I mean, saying that Tether could do the same thing. Tether can just buy up real real rare numbers and make up fake ones to sort of do it with. So, you know, it's not like it's not happening anyway. I'm not saying that Tether are doing that, you know, just but they could and Goldman Sachs can as well. You know, there's been a long history of this, all the silver bugs talking about JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, all the big players, naked shorts selling the hell out of silver and finding ETFs where they can get access to the stock and of these ETFs and just basically naked short them to then buy up the real asset or to have massive short positions. So, I've got to say that, you know, this is a pretty important asset class to be into and if you wanted to buy up a whole bunch of it to have on the books, you want to play some of those games. Well, they are ready to play those games. So, I think this is kind of bearish news for the short term. It's bullish long term because they're going to buy it up and then pump it. But I feel like they're going to want to buy that stuff up and they've been known to dump on their own clients, by the way. If you can't trust a bank, who can you trust? Moving on to the exit question. Force prediction, JP Morgan's in Goldman Sachs is in, give me the name of another bank that'll be in next. Is it Wells Fargo Bank of America, Bank of England, Bank of some country? Dan Eave, the crypto raptor, name a bank or institution that'll get into Bitcoin next. I'm going to go out on a on a on a limb because why not and say something like HSBC, they're like a big international bank, they're kind of they're all adverse about the people and staff. So, and Bitcoin's for the people. So, it would make sense that they they'd open. I like that one. That's the one that had the slots that fit the suitcases for brief cases for money laundering. They designed the slots. That's a quality bed. They're great at money laundering and all sorts of other nefarious activities as well. So, they'll fit in like a dime. They'll fit in well here in crypto. Absolutely. Justin Newton, what bank or institution will accept Bitcoin next? Well, dude, you sort of gave me a cheating question because I know for a fact that exactly 80 days from today, the central bank of El Salvador is going to start exchanging Bitcoin on behalf of their citizens and residents. So, you know, this is a sovereign country getting into the game. It's a pretty big deal. That's pretty big. A little bigger than Goldman Sachs, but not quite as fun to make fun of. Ben or name a bank or institution. Go ahead. Yes, central banks and central and South America. I think Deutsche Bank and Deutsche Bank, where they get them. Are they on board on Bitcoin? Yeah, they're a big banking entity aren't they? They're in Germany and they're vaults of full of gold and they haven't got any room for more gold. So, Bitcoin stores pretty well. So, maybe Deutsche Bank as well. Deutsche Bank's in trouble all over the board. So, maybe it's kind of a bankruptcy protection plan. We were into Bitcoin all along. You should have trusted us Gabriel D. Vaan, name a bank. You know, I was actually going to say HFB2, but in the absence of that, I'm going to say Norway, the sovereign wealth fund of Norway. Finally, a Bitcoin place where we can do some skiing. Josh Shagalla, can you top Norway in a place that'll take Bitcoin next? Yeah, I mean, first of all, like Deutsche Bank, two days ago, Reng and friend of mine saying he has to now pay negative interest rates on his holdings. So, that's fun. You know, Zimbabwe. Bank is Zimbabwe. Come on, bring it on. All right, Zimbabwe getting some Africa on this show. Moving on to issue two, issue two, Bitcoin price falls below 37K, amid little hope of a definitive weekend bounce. Support may be at $36,000, but it may be temporary. One trader warns after a major Binance by wall is obliterated. Despite the Bitcoin conference, despite El Salvador, we have nothing but bad news for the price of Bitcoin. Let's go to Ben Ark. Will the price of what's going on with the price of Bitcoin? Why can't all this good news satisfy anyone? We even had inflation news. There was inflation fears. Still, not enough. Part of the suspicious part of me wants to blame Bitcoin money because I remember the last Bitcoin conference Bitcoin 2019, so similar, the Bitcoin market at the time, it just dropped. Everyone was still pretty high because we had relatively high price and everyone was kind of assuming that it was then going to tick up and it didn't just continue to bear down. So, it just feels like a very similar time. Obviously, the price isn't as much bigger now than they were back then. But yeah, I think we're going to be bearish for a little while, but even though we are, the price is being bearish. There is all this, I was just spoke about in the last topic. There is all these great moves and all this long-term bullishness and taproot, whatever else. The technology keeps improving and software keeps improving. It's not really worth paying attention to you just going to hold on and just write it out. The price of Bitcoin always goes up after conferences, except when it doesn't. Josh Nigala, what's going on with the price of Bitcoin? I don't even know why this is a new story. It's been bouncing between 35 and 40 and 30. It's been doing this for a little while now. It's just heading down. It's been overboard. It's now getting a little bit sort of, whatever. It's already very moonish, I would say, this price is very high. But I think it's going to go way higher and just hold on and enjoy the ride. Gabriel D. Vyn, the price of Bitcoin used to be more. Now it's less. What's going on? I thought something in this article actually did stick out to me, which is quite interesting. They were referring to previous cycles. It is interesting to see the parallel between 2013 and 2017, 2021. There's definitely 2021. It's exactly in between the two as far as percentage moves, including the altcoins. They were talking about altcoin slump, of course, even more serious than Bitcoin. To me, everything that we're seeing sets up a much bigger second half of the bull cycle in 2021. Possibly going into 2022, but I think not. I'm looking for a new alt-time highs later in the summer, certainly in the fall, and probably another blowoff top at some ridiculously high number. I did call correction to 29, and from 64. My call for the price, the spike at the top is $425,000, and then expecting another 90% drop from there, something around 75 after that. But I do also expect a another altcoin bubble to blow up after that or during that and crash as well, even 99% or whatever. That's my take to my prediction. Gabriel, divine with the hard numbers, the fixed predictions. Shout out to Joe in the chat, Bitt Brum, in Birmingham. He just happened to be here too. Dan Eave, your thoughts on the price of Bitcoin. It goes up, it goes down. It's always scary. It's difficult not to look at blockfolio all the time or just turn the alerts off. It's just the easy thing to do. If the price goes down, most people are still building. Most people still haven't gone bankrupt yet. They're still building infrastructure, and so that when the next wave comes along, there's so many more goods and services that you can use Bitcoin for. There's so many more people that know about Bitcoin. This time around, I was trying to remember specifically a stag job when on the in 2015, and I was trying to convince some mates there who were brokers at Lloyds London, and they just were like, it was just continuously taking the piss out of me about Bitcoin. I just couldn't win them over. He's recently gone and bought Bitcoin and Ethereum, so one of the guys. It does show that people are starting to pay more attention. The thing is a buying opportunity. A lot of people that were sat on the sidelines going, I didn't buy Bitcoin when it was $30,000. Those people are in the market now. They're waiting for it. They're edging, waiting for that further dip so they can buy it again. It's volatility that comes with Bitcoin. It will be up again eventually, and it will probably be back down again. We'll be back down again eventually. You just got to ride it like that famous little gif with the Bitcoin and the roller coaster. Sometimes it's pointing down. As long as you hold on type, and you don't need to sell when it's a low, so try and do a bit of planning and save yourself some hassle having to sell Bitcoin when your bro can Bitcoin's down. Or just try not to sell any at all and stack SaaS forever. Isn't it the craziest thing when it was worthless? I couldn't get anybody to buy it. Now that it's worth more money than anybody has, everybody wants to buy it. It just doesn't make any sense. Justin Newton, your thoughts on the price of Bitcoin. Well, I'm more of a technologist and an entrepreneur than a trader. So anyone who followed my trading advice would probably go broke. But to follow up on what the crypto raptors said, from my perspective, anytime the price goes down, it means that everybody needs to leave the resorts and get back to work. So it means that we can start building and making some progress. All right. Moving on to the exit question. You'll have to predict against the magical predictor, Bitcoin ball, Ben Ark, the price of Bitcoin this time next week, higher or lower. Lower for a bit and then eventually higher below. Josh Seagala. Lower. Gabriel D. Vaughan. The sentiment is bearish in the room today. Lower. Dan Eve. I'm with you, Katz. I'm going lower. I'm seeing some some reds, some good buying opportunities for those who missed the vote. Justin Newton, give us some green. I have no clue. So I'm just following everybody else. All right. Here we go. Remember, you have to ask the ball. Yes, there are no questions. You're not supposed to shake it, but we do anyway. It could cause bubbles. Will the price of Bitcoin be higher this time next week? Yes, definitely. Yes, definitely. The ball has spoken, not financial advice. Don't just trust the ball. Of course, it is easier than thinking. Moving on to issue three, Bitcoin has three flaws. And that could set the stage for other alternatives. It says a Cornell economist who got into Bitcoin just yesterday. Let's find out what his three flaws are. Number one, mining harms the environment. Number two, not so anonymous after all. And number three, doesn't even show up on CNBC's website. So I guess it's not that important. Gabriel D. Vaughan, what do you think about this economist who just found out about Bitcoin and is here to save the day? The third one is, oh, you just moved away. I'm just trying to remember what it was. It was so ridiculous, though, that I'm having trouble remembering. There was no third one. It didn't show up. It's at the top. No, it's at the top. Anyways, I don't know why you picked this article. It's actually really, no, no. It's important to recognize that the fear of uncertainty and doubt and just blatant lies are very much still with us. The disinformation campaigns continue with full force all the way up to the very top of institutions, banks, businesses, entrepreneurs. You've got people like Elon Musk spreading blatant lies. I think his angle is his entire business model depends on credits, carbon credits, and fake climate legislation. So he's just basically trying to take the Bitcoin angle on that. And yeah, this is a completely full of lies, BS crap that we've been getting in the media about Bitcoin since the beginning. And it doesn't appear to be letting up. So it's really fun because for people stacking shots, it probably keeps the price lower longer. The third point is that Bitcoin doesn't function well as a currency. Of course, you have to ignore the lightning network for this to be true. Joshua Shigala, your points on Bitcoin's three flaws. I mean, Bitcoin's got plenty of flaws. It's just doesn't matter because it's the parts of it that aren't flaws are freaking amazing. And basically disrupt everything we know about money. And so the fact that we can now have rare numbers, meaning you can have ownership of a real asset without any intermediaries and be able to take that worldwide and not have it confiscatable is so stunning. And that just doesn't matter if it takes a lot of electricity. We've said it before in this show, but PlayStation's on standby mode, worldwide take up triple amount of electricity and what the heck, you know, is he going to complain about PlayStation's. We better get amongst the gamers and tell them they're all crap because they're stand by gaming machines. They're all like, you know, using up so much power. The fact of the matter is, and we've said so many times on this show, but Bitcoin finds great sources of energy in terms of it not being so private. Well, there's privacy coming and some people think that that's actually a good thing. So if it was super private, the article would say, oh, it's anonymous as number two. So you can't get, you can't make some people happy. And the third one, whatever that is is also probably crap. Just leave it to that. Ben, Arck, your thoughts on the latest Bitcoin fard. I mean, is that superficial new understanding of Bitcoin when you're creating something which is truly digitally scarce without trusted third party, it's really hard and it requires a lot of patience to do it properly. And then yes, you can write papers on all these amazing smart contracts and, you know, social scalability and how we can use Bitcoin for all these other things than just sending transfer from one person to another. But to build all those things in a way, which is resilience and isn't a house built on sand requires a lot of patience. So when you look at a lot of the shick coins offering, you know, much more private alternatives or offering all these different smart contracting options, you know, their experiments and some of them work, but the house is built on side that they're not patient. They're built by impatient people. They want Bitcoin to work in a certain way right now. They can't wait, you know, five, 10 years for it to actually develop properly. And then as you learn more about Bitcoin, you learn more about the people working on Bitcoin, some of the problems they're solving, you realize that actually we are working to all these ideals, you know, true fungibility and privacy and the ability to run all these scripts and do all these other things within Bitcoin, but it just takes time and you just have to be patient. And it's the same with energy consumption. Yes, me sending value on chain to you does have a carbon footprint, but using the Lightning Network and sending many tens of thousands, millions of transactions using one transaction or using some sort of like side-chained off Bitcoin to send value for one person to another, can mitigate a lot of that, you know, carbon footprint and can make it much more efficient. It's just a question of patience. So we say that Bitcoin, you know, doesn't work well as a digital currency. I can't send other digital currencies like through the internet, a penny's worth of value to somebody else in a way which is truly private and in a way which where I can completely trust that the value which I'm sending to them is going to be secure forever as long as, you know, they look after their own private keys and what have you. So yeah, no Bitcoin works better. I mean, particularly if you think of legacy digital value transfer mechanisms on the internet, Bitcoin's miles leagues ahead of their capabilities. And then when it comes to the alternatives, the crypto currency alternatives, you know, they're that impatient solutions for impatient people and you've just got to wait for this stuff to be built properly, which it is. And that's why we're having things like taproot being locked in and that's why Bitcoin continues to progress and get better over time slowly and you know, properly. Justin Newton, your thoughts on the Cornell economist? Yeah, well, I mean a couple things, you know, first of the high level, it reminds me of an article from 1996 by a futurist named Cliff Skolnik who was talking about how nobody would ever use the internet. And so for example, you know, it's like way too slow to, for example, watch video online. I mean, would anyone ever actually watch video online? Probably not. You know, how the shopping experience online was terrible. Nobody would ever buy products online. And you know, you would never get your news online because you know, people deliver a newspaper to you every day and websites aren't updating that often in 1996. And so, you know, there were all these things where, you know, they were basically like looking at an infant and expecting it to be an adult and not able to sort of project forward where we got things were going. And I think that some of what Ben was saying here is, you know, people are sort of jumping forward. But to address some of the specific items in the article, you know, I think environmental concerns are real and they should be addressed and looked at. I actually think we do a pretty good job of that as a community because of the nature of mining, requiring it to go to low costs, resources and burning things is more expensive than not burning things typically. And so, you know, there's cost factors that come in there. I also, by the way, love the Bitcoin energy of the idea that they said you need to do more environmental mining and the Bitcoin community said volcanoes. That's pretty awesome. And I felt very like the Bitcoin answer to environmental mining. That was pretty excellent to see. You know, when they talk about the not being anonymous, you know, I would agree. I think the fact that every transaction is transparently available for everyone to view is a shortcoming long term. It's privacy affecting. It's not something that we want to have to happen. But it's something that the, you know, the Bitcoin community is actively working on. Right? When you look at lightning, lightning developers consider transparency of every transaction a bug, not a feature. And so, yes, today there's still some vulnerabilities where you can do things to trans transactions or look at them. But where with Bitcoin, if a transaction was missing from the blockchain, you would consider that a bug and immediately need to go fixed to make sure everyone could see that transaction. In lightning, they're seeing it the opposite way so that, you know, if I want to send money to Ben, no one needs to know that I sent it. You might be able to check balances online, but transaction activity will have become a will have gone away. When you add that into advances that are happening with taproot, you know, that helps obscure multi-sig mixers and other things like that, privacy goes up every single day in the way that it should. And, you know, the last of it not being a currency, look, there's challenges with it being a currency. The price fluctuates. Right? So if I am living hand-to-mouth and I need to buy my family food tomorrow based on what I needed today, Bitcoin might not be how I want to store my value, you know, because if it does go down 20 or 30% overnight, that means my family is going to eat less food tomorrow. But even in that case, I might want my savings account to be in Bitcoin because, you know, I know that the Fiat I have is going to be worth some, I know for sure that the Fiat I have is going to be worth some amount less next year. And probably the crypto I have is going to be worth some amount more next year. And so, you know, there's opportunities to utilize traditional currency and crypto currency side-by-side. As crypto, you know, grows and expands to become a more mature currency that does settle into those other use cases in the same way that now we're increasing transaction capacity. We're increasing privacy, you know, will increase stability as the market grows as well. Dan Eave, your thoughts on the three flaws of Bitcoin? So, I think there's some really good points raised there that the fact that, you know, not everything is flawless for a start, you know, you can't build a tank that's completely impermeable, but not really heavy, you know, there's some, there's a downside to that, you need it. If you want, you know, you've got to have to make sacrifices in certain areas. But the main thing is that Bitcoin is evolving, and although it's evolving slowly in some people's eyes, it's evolving a pace that's necessary to maintain its, you know, ninja uptime of 99.9999, whatever it is, percent now. The fact that, you know, the whole environmental thing, I think it needed to happen. And we probably a lot of people hate me for saying this is that it did need to happen because it's going to be a prevalent, you know, issue for Bitcoin until all this, you know, informations are, you know, amalgamated and they've got these, you know, these more studies in place that are from more, you know, studies that are believed by the non-believers, right? Because that's the difference at the moment. You've got companies like Coin Chairs, like Nova Grants is a company that producing studies, they want people to see that Bitcoin isn't actually, you know, energy hungry from, from non-reduables, but they're not believed by the other side because the other side produces a report and they look at things in an isolated manner. So the more the infrastructure is being put in place, the more the environment to the side has been criticized. It's kind of reached a point where now we're putting everything in place to say, right, Bitcoin isn't, isn't, it's power hungry, but it uses running of energy and it incentivizes it too. The anonymity, I think it was, I think it was just to say that if it wasn't, if it was completely anonymous, that would be number two. So there's just a flip side of what you, what you desire in a, in a, in a currency and some people don't want the, the private currency, they don't want the idea of anonymity and they, they, they, they, they, they don't like any encryption, everything should be open. And you're not going to satisfy everyone at the end of the day. And the fact that it's pseudo anonymous is kind of nice because it's in the middle, right, it's kind of, it's got more anonymity features that have been developed and also at the same time, it's not completely, you know, it's, it's not completely anonymous is, it is relatively transparent so that services like, chain Alice, niche can, can fish around and, and figure things out. And the other thing about it not being used as a currency, it's, you know, people don't know about lightning for example, they, they, they've only just learned about bitcoin and the problem is that when they, when they don't know about all the other, you know, the other extensions to bitcoin, they are reducing the footprint or at least sorry, they're making it more economical, well sorry, more efficient transactions more efficient by lightning. And they're not being fed that. I mean, what did this article say? It said like, they're being fed Ethereum's new upgrades, 99.995% you know, less, uses less power, more efficient. So they're actually being shielded other coins. They're not, they're not hearing about the, the, the infrastructure that's being built on bitcoin and learning about that and being taught about that by the, the economists, they're, they're being taught by someone who's just bought something Ethereum and it's like, oh, I'm in a position to shield, maybe I should. And I think that sadly, we're going to see a lot of new stations doing doing that. I think we're going to see a lot of sites that realize that they can have improvements. They look up to Elon Musk and see he's tweeted something and they're like, we can move the markets, you know, they remember they move, they move the markets at Bloomberg, just for fun. And so I think we're going to see a bit more of that happening where there's going to be a lot more manipulation, a lot more underhand dirty tricks from meeting the other coins, trying to out, you know, out environmentalize bitcoin. But ultimately, bitcoins came and queen all the same time. Exit question, if you had a magic wand and you could fix one of the three flaws of bitcoin, which flaw would you fix first? Bitcoin mining harms the environment. Bitcoin is pseudo-anonymous or bitcoin is not a good currency because of volatility. Ben Ark, which flaw would you fix? A pseudo-anonymous we want. We need a truly private, fungible bitcoin. Josh Shagala. Wow, tough question. Maybe, yeah, I stick with Ben there and the one. Justin Newton, mining in the environment, pseudo-anonymous or volatility, what would you fix? Yeah, number one is anonymity and privacy for me with a close second being the environmental impacts. It's starting to look like a full sweep. Dan Eave, what would you fix? I actually think that the environmental parts are already covered. And the volatility side, I want it to keep going up. So it's going to remain volatile as long as later people want it to nobody to keep going up. So I think, yeah, I'm going to anonymity. All right, anonymity, fixing the environment volatility. We seem to have lost Gabriel D. Vine, hopefully he'll rejoin us, but we are going to continue. Have you seen the new WCN Clips channel? Check it out on YouTube at WCN Clips. You could be one of the first 50 subscribers to WCN Clips, smaller version of this shows and other shows on WCN Clips on YouTube. Just search Google for WCN Clips. Issue four, emerging markets could be the next big frontier for crypto. A slew of politicians want to follow El Salvador and adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. At the same time, Miami's mayor looks to woo Chinese Bitcoin miners with low energy prices and clean nuclear power. And the World Bank has rejected El Salvador's request for help on Bitcoin implementation. What do you guys think is more likely and the better place to focus on resources, somewhere like Miami in the developed world that's looking to adopt mining and other things or somewhere like El Salvador or the developing world that is looking to adopt Bitcoin. Let's as well as we should talk about how they ask for help from the World Bank, which seems very strange. Justin Newton, you are actually there in El Salvador. So let's go to you for some on the ground commentary. You were part of Brock Pierce's delegation. What was it like? How did it go? Totally. I'm happy to share a little bit about that. First, I do want to say I'm excited about all the things that are happening in Miami as well. I think Mayor Suarez brings some great energy to things and really doing the right things to try and engage in a track the industry. But I will say if I was given one of the two to choose to focus on, it would be what's happening in El Salvador. For me, financial inclusion is a big reason that I got into crypto. I inclusion is a stepping stone to freedom. From my perspective, the things that we can do that make Bitcoin more a part of people's day-to-day lives and get it into hands of people that don't have access to traditional financial services, traditional banking and those kinds of things. That's why I got into the space is to do that, to build innovation platforms and to create that kind of change. Mining is awesome, but it's not quite that. It'll happen anyway. What's happening in El Salvador and what was happening on the ground? First of all, I'm really excited about the world. I think no law is perfect. Certainly, I've seen some commentary on the internet around things like requiring people to accept it or businesses to accept it, not people but requiring business to accept it. Things like that that do cause concern with some folks that are really focused on freedom and liberty. I think that those can be reasonable objections to look at. But I do believe that overall the bill is really, or the law is really powerful and really important in that it recognizes Bitcoin as legal tender. It gives it the same standing side-by-side with USD for people that want to hold it, that want to spend it, that want to receive it. It's actually like the first time literally that cryptocurrency isn't being treated as a second-class currency. From that perspective, it is super exciting. It's also very exciting that the government put a pretty short timeline when getting it done. If you remember in the bill itself, it said the government has 90 days to get that enacted, which means there's about 80 days, actually, exactly 80 days left now. Frequently, government will announce things and they never happen because they get studied to death without any forward motion. This feels like it's going to be different. I can tell you so just stepping into the meetings a little bit and I'll talk about this stuff at a high level. Every single government official that we met with, one of the first things they mentioned to us was how many days are left before implementation. It was really clear that across the senior levels of government, they are really focused on getting this done and getting this done successfully in a short period of time. They're not acting as if the 90 days is made up and it's just going to get pushed out and pushed out and pushed out. They're acting like the 90 days this is going to get done or they're not going to have a job anymore. That was really exciting to see. I would say another thing that I saw there, which I expected and we did see was they are clear that they don't have everything that they need in the country to be able to get this done in that timeframe. They need the support of the crypto community of the companies that are operating in the Bitcoin space, of the individuals that are operating in the Bitcoin space, to find the ways in places that they're going to be able to engage to help make this a success. It could be in helping with education, it could be with looking if you're providing Bitcoin services. Can you provide those services in El Salvador and what are the things that you would need for in order to make that happen? It's I know organizations like BitGibb are doing fundraising around helping to empower the El Salvadorian people to be able to properly utilize Bitcoin services. There's even stuff outside of traditional Bitcoin itself where they could use help like better internet penetration, some better smartphone penetration and things like that. There's a huge amount that needs to get done in a very short period of time and all of us are going to need to pull together in order to make that happen. The last thing I would say, because I know I'm talking for a long time here in a pretty rapid fire meeting, is one of the things I was really excited to see in the meeting was, you know, basically everybody that was there from both sides, whether it was the delegation or whether it was the people from government were focused on the issue of how do we make this a success for El Salvador and the El Salvadorian people and how do we make this a success for Bitcoin? And, you know, I wouldn't always say that I agreed with every word that came out of every person's mouth, but I definitely would say that every person that was there was trying to focus on creating a positive end result for the people of El Salvador and for Bitcoin and trying to figure out how we can collaborate between the industry and the government to help make that success happen. And so, yeah, I guess that's maybe some of the high level. Well, thanks so much, Justin, and we appreciate your first person perspective on being there and telling us what's going on. It's interesting to see. Dan Eve is Bitcoin more likely to succeed in El Salvador or somewhere like Miami in the developed world? Go ahead, Dan. Well, I'd like to see it help the development world. One of the things when I got into Bitcoin was that it was going to be a currency for the people and it was going to help the unbanked. Obviously, they're probably a bit priced out of normal transactions now, but when infrastructure is as that expands, it's being rolled out in El Salvador, it's going to have that impact. So, I'd like to see it have a positive impact on countries that need it. If it kicks off in Miami, big time in Miami becomes a hub, then it's awesome. That's brilliant, but at the same time, I'd love to see the smaller countries. Coming from one of the smallest minorities on earth in Malta, I was hoping that Malta, like Central Bank or wherever, would jump on it, and they were trying to become the block chain island or Bitcoin owned. That never actually happened. I think it would be a lot cooler if it was a small country. It's just the same. The World Bank have laid the slapdown really for what it seems to be a silly reason. It's almost like you're saying they don't want to help a country. They want to be able to help. Isn't that what World Bank's for? Being a bit fair and nice if you were to say if it was, I think, the primary reasons down to their energy consumption, but then if the US military alone was a country, then it would be 40th ranking country of energy usage. That's where do you draw the line as to what is allowable energy wasting and pollutants? A lot of that's fuel usage, for example, in terms of military. Those are fumes that are actively going out, whereas at least this energy comes from a lot from renewable sources. Even if it doesn't it's from far more efficient factories that would fair enough they pump out fumes, but on a wider efficient, while a scale it's more efficient than say the engine of a car or tank that pumps out fumes. It is a bit of a sad situation where the help isn't being offered, and it's not because of the environment. It's clearly because it's pocket lining. It's losing that control. That unfortunately is what Bitcoin was built to unsettle. It is unsettling it, and we're going to see hiccups like that. It wouldn't surprise me if, and you know, Derek said, we haven't had a sanction yet about the usage of Bitcoin, but that could come and it could be a big annoying thing. But a lot of people are sat in paid pockets, and yeah, the sanctions could, could well, you know, if they're saying, right, we're not going to help our Salvador with this roll out. Even just from a curiosity perspective, then sanctions could be next. It could be right, well, you know, we could have helped you and you know, you're going against our wishes, and therefore, you know, we're going to sanction you because screw it, we might as well pull the plug on everything. And that's the thing, if this is infrastructure that could help people and help them survive as well. There's having a monetary system that works for the people, it reduces stress a lot. It can prolong lives because it's, you know, there's less manipulation in the sort of inter-country currencies that could lead to hyperinflation and all sorts. So this is quite serious. It's not just money for the sake of it. It's infrastructure. It's what we live and breathe, you know, people work all their lives to accumulate this money. So, you know, it's very important. So to lay the slap down on El Salvador, I say shame on you, shame on you. And Arck is Dan Eave Wright, should the World Bank have provided technical support to El Salvador so they could switch to Bitcoin? He's absolutely right. That's a question of relinquishing control. They don't want to relinquish their control, which would be why also, why the US dollar would then hold half sanctions against a country like El Salvador, Panama, Paraguay. And this is why it's important that actually the Bitcoin does anchor itself somewhat into the US economy through Miami or any other friendly states or any other ways in which Bitcoin can root itself into the US economy. So it's then harder for the US to say right, anyone dealing with Bitcoin is going to have all these sanctions placed against. So because this is why it's a very appealing alternative to El Salvador, to Paraguay, to Panama, to a lot of these countries is because for, you know, a hundred years they've been trying to find a way to wiggle out of the US economy and because it's had a very negative effect on their country's ability to have autonomy. But then obviously that does then butter up against people who if someone or countries in power and they have control or the World Bank has some control over the world's economy, then they're going to fight against losing that control, which is why you have someone like I said in the last show when Trump came out and said that Bitcoin is an attack on the US dollar, it isn't an attack on the US dollar, yeah, absolutely, it's correct. And it's an attack on the US's wielding power through their currency, having the world reserve currency. So to go back to your question, yes, you know, I absolutely, it's a need of necessity. So I'm like, Dan, in the, you know, I live in Wales and I was really keen on Wales adopting Bitcoin and using Bitcoin within Wales, but we don't really need it, you know, because we have, we don't have a currency which is trying to control us so much. We're just part of the great Britain and our currency kind of what, but they're using some, you know, in South America, they're using someone else's currency and it is used to control them in a way which they need to kind of wiggle out of. So that necessity is there and that's why they're going to embrace Bitcoin and more and more of them now, El Salvador, you know, leading the charge more and more of them are going to join in. But in saying all that, it is quite important that the Bitcoin is embedded in the US economy. So the US can't, they're not a levy par sanctions against them for using Bitcoin. Josh, Shagala, I'm not sure what I'm hearing here. Devils advocate, can I call up Microsoft to get help to switch to Macintosh? Why should the World Bank help El Salvador switch to Bitcoin? It's a really weird request. I mean, to me, it sort of smells like they don't really understand it yet as much as what Justin said, but you know, there's a reason why Centoshi left because you're making big enemies by releasing the software. If you're the first country to, sorry about that, if you're the first country to accept this as illegal tender, you're taking a big step forward. You're pushing the chess board towards checkmate and for the World Bank to be involved in it anyway, what could possibly happen there? What really needs to happen is they need to ask the Bitcoin community to really step up its game in terms of lightning development. There is, you know, I got into this game in the early days and everyone in the early days was talking about how Bitcoin is something you can use, something you can pay with, you can have coffees with, you can, you know, all this stuff that we gave Roger Vershid about and fair enough we give him shit because he forked off and it is his own thing. And there's other reasons I mean, I personally don't like the fact that he tried to make Bitcoin cash seem like Bitcoin and trick people into using some of the coin, but the fact the matter is his arguments were, hey, you know, I got into this because I want to free the world and have real currency and it started to move into a store of value thing and it is, you can see it that we have cut out the small people that can't afford, let me say small people, the small economies that are earning two dollars a day. They can't afford a transaction costs that are currently on chain. So if El Salvador really wants to use this as a currency rather than a store of value for the wealthy of the country, it means that we need to get the lighting infrastructure across and the work that Benark does with Fiat Jeff is just so amazing and I really think you guys got to, if anyone's watching El Salvador have a look at LNBITs, it is stunning. What it can do, but yeah, that's my advice is ask the Bitcoin community for not the well-banked block. Yeah, I'm sorry to jump in out of order, but I got to say from my perspective, I think it is freaking awesome that the World Bank said no at the same time that the Bitcoin community voluntarily shut up on their own and said we're here to help. Yeah, there you go, spot on, spot on. Yep. That was a great contrast. Let's move on here to the exit question, international response, forced prediction. How does El Salvador end? Is there sanctions a crisis? Do they have to pay back loans? Or is everyone fine with it? Let's go to Justin Newton first. How does this end? Force prediction. I think we find a way to make it work. I don't think the loans get forced on collection. I think that they find a way to get the bill into law. I don't think that those organizations have the intent or desire to get that involved in the sovereignty of the country or to harm the economically challenged in those countries out of spite. That just goes so far outside of what they're the way they should operate that I wouldn't anticipate that they will in this case. And sanctions aren't relevant for this kind of thing. It's just not what sanctions are used for. But this does speak to why it's important that we get this rollout, right? That this doesn't become a haven for money laundering or for terrorism financing or for people that are promoting shick coins to show up and steal money from the Salvadorian people or all those kinds of things. But if we do get it right and we don't infringe on everybody's privacy and we don't let the scammer steal all the Salvadorian people's money, you know, I think that we this is the glide path up. Dan Eve, he's almost asking for a counter response. Will they make an example of El Salvador the way they made an example out of Ross Olbrecht? Dan Eve, what happens in El Salvador? No, I think they'd be too mean if they were to sanction. I mean, I could probably see the sanctions happening against a different country like maybe if Iran wanted to adopt Bitcoin and they'd be like sanction that. But a small note, you just seem like a giant asshole bully, wouldn't you? You would be hated by more than just Bitcoiners if you impede on the progress of a small country that's just trying to get out of the grasp of the dollar ultimately. And yeah, I think the world would stand up and say, yeah, this is BS, you know, World Bank sucks. And then maybe there would even be a knee jerk reaction to just suddenly start buying Bitcoin and be like, right, we need to out price these assholes. Dan Ark, the US's bullied small countries before, Vietnam, will they do it again? Oh, undoubtedly. They just look at the history. They're of course they're going to try and bully small countries for them. Bitcoin prevents that somewhat. If Bitcoin had no contact with the US economy, and there wasn't anyone in the US using Bitcoin or there wasn't gold and sacks, but integrating Bitcoin and using Bitcoin, then absolutely they were trying to have some sanctions. But this is why it's important that the work was to Miami, Governor wants to do with Bitcoin and integrating more into the US economy. It's important that they do that. But no, there aren't going to be sanctions for Bitcoin. I do worry about some of what's happened in our Salvador, like the Bitcoin Beach experiment is fantastic. Excellent work. It's really good. But I don't know. Obviously what we're doing with Alan Bitts, and that's been running for about a year now, is very much about micro custodianship and becoming a bank for your local community. And then within the Bitcoin Beach project, there didn't seem to be any mention of any of the work we've done with our software, which is completely free and open source software. It's been developed very organically. So it did almost feel like something of a power grab, or they wanted to, there wasn't even a credit, or there was nothing on the GitHub account, but the name of the software is trying to run for the micro or the community banks. But it just seemed a little underhanded. I didn't like that. So I do worry that it's open to corruption. Like everything is open to corruption, isn't it? So it's important that all the options are made available to people in our Salvador software-wise. And it isn't cornered by a few chosen tenacrats. Josh Jagala, we're switching it up. What do you think about what's been going on in Miami? Also, they say that they've got clean, nuclear power. That's a whole separate issue. But we've really got to hand it to the mayor of Miami here. He's really pulling out the stops. And no idea is too small to try to promote Bitcoin and to get it happening in his city. Josh, what do you think about Miami? Yeah, look, anytime governments want to get involved, you know, good on you. The fact of the matter is we don't need them. We don't need any of these bureaucrats involved. Bitcoin is Bitcoin. If anyone wants to get it, there's free and open source software. You can jump on your phone. You can start to start open a wallet. You can have a full-node running. You don't need it even in our Salvador that don't need the government saying, oh, you can pay your taxes in Bitcoin. Yeah, okay, great. We, you know, anyone in our Salvador can always has been since 2009 being able to use Bitcoin. And so, yeah, I mean, it's good that, you know, maybe they'll try to get some mining across over from China to decentralize that a little bit. But the fact of the matter is, it's kind of mining is always going to find cheaper sources. So if you're cheaper for now, maybe they'll come across, it is hard to move factories. And I say factories, miners, very, very easily. But yeah, it's always going to look for the cheapest source of energy. And maybe if nuclear is that, it is quite expensive to hold the waste to secure the waste. So there's better ways. For instance, you know, hot rocks in the earth, volcanoes. But honestly, geothermal is the future of Bitcoin mining. It's just an unending amount of power under the earth. So why not use it? It is very funny when we got into Bitcoin. We were trying to do things like get your brother involved, get your cousin involved, get your sister involved, maybe your neighborhood. Right. Now it's like JP Morgan's involved. Goldman Sachs is involved in now El Salvador, country size people are getting it. That doesn't mean it's too late. There's a lot of new people getting in on clubhouse and places like Black Bitcoin, billionaires and all kinds of other chats going on on Twitter. And people who just went to this conference and just got in yesterday, there's still a chance for you. It's just a lot harder because our cousin is now El Salvador. And our brother is Miami and they're huge, right? And they have more way more money, especially our cousin Goldman Sachs. But let's move on to issue five bonus issue. The El Salvador delegation was led by Brock Pierce, who declared it an official delegation of Bitcoin ambassadors to El Salvador to educate the government about how Bitcoin, blockchain, and technology can create a brighter future for everyone in their nation. This delegation, according to Brock Pierce, is the first to visit El Salvador in an official capacity since the start of COVID lockdowns. And Brock is glad to be making history together. This delegation was covered in the newspaper. A bit of an interesting story here as it was noticed on the new internet that the newspaper was only in some versions of Noticia. At first, it was seen as a conspiracy theory. But later in the day, thanks to Justin and others, we were able to find out that there was a separate printing of the newspaper. And according to this, there's a long island local version of it. And there's a version of it in El Salvador. So it's two versions of the newspaper. However, there was lots of talk about conspiracy theories and whether or not this group should represent Bitcoin. Of course, we know the real story here, provided by Fennep. So let's go to Justin first just to try to get some of the conspiracy theories out of the way. And then we'll just talk in general about the Bitcoin delegation. Justin, just simple questions, were you paid by Brock Pierce? Did you ride on the private jet? Let's start there. I was not paid by Brock Pierce. I was, did not ride on a private jet with Brock Pierce. This is getting less fun already. I'd start out much more fun. I paid all of my own expenses. Well, netkeep paid my expenses with respect to the trip. I've received no promotional or other fees related to the trip. Yeah, no, I did you get a special coder ring for representing Bitcoin or a key to the city or any other kind? No, you know, it's none of that stuff. But I mean, I guess I can quickly speak to some of that controversy because I know the word official freaked a lot of people out. And I totally understand why it did. I think it makes sense that it did. What official referred to was frankly the way it was viewed from the government side. We were brought down there as a delegation that was guests of the government, where from their perspective, we were considered what was called an official trade delegation. So we were not saying we were the Bitcoin officials, that was not the intent of what anybody was saying there or that, you know, we were the only people that could potentially represent Bitcoin in the same way that when a US trade delegation goes to another country, they're not saying that there are the only companies in the United States. You know, what it really was was, you know, late last week, the idea behind doing this started to come together after Brock had a chance to meet with the ambassador up in DC. I frankly don't know the details of how the meeting came together itself. You know, I found out about it. I think through like a WhatsApp group I was in, where there was a pretty open invitation for people that would be interested in helping out to show up. You know, there were only maybe about 35 or 40 people that were able to really drop everything because, you know, as a Friday of last week, this still wasn't finalized. And so really it was, you know, between Friday afternoon, you had to know that you could be, you know, in El Salvador on Tuesday or Wednesday, to be able to sit down with the government all day. And so what this really was was a group of 40 people, which you're right, the whole world didn't know in advance that it was possible, but that of the people that knew were able to really drop everything, make this a priority to try and work with, you know, El Salvador to try and ensure that this Bitcoin law is a success. Well, I also want to push back against some of the conspiracy theories. It's fun to be all reactive and Bitcoiny and smash it down. But like Justin said, there was a ticking clock here. There's a 90 days to try to write the law. And as far as Brock and the people he choose chose, I trust them enough to talk about Bitcoin. I'm sure they promote their kind of company too. Why not leave behind some business cards? That's cool. But the facts that they gave them on Bitcoin on the blockchain were probably accurate. They probably helped them. And I believe they're well meaning as far as if they were chosen by Satoshi or that kind of thing. It is really funny how it works in Bitcoin. Even though we've gotten a lot bigger and we have giant players like Michael Saylor and Mark Cuban and Elon Musk and all this, you still kind of have to choose yourself. It's still really the Wizard of Oz out there. And I saw another chat the other day on Twitter spaces with Michael Saylor and Perianne Boring. And they were talking about the Bitcoin mining council, which is another controversial issue around here. And in the same way, you know, why was Perianne there? Well, you know, five years, maybe seven years ago, a long time now, she started the, I don't know, Center for Digital Currency. It's like, the digital chamber of commerce. Yeah. The chamber of commerce. I remember it's Center for Disease Control. So it's confusing. But yeah, she started that years ago. It was well meaning. She wanted to lobby Congress for Bitcoin and digital Congress. She had experience doing that. She chose herself. And now she's doing well. She's representing in the meeting the same thing for Brock and the people he took with them. They chose themselves. They're business leaders and other things. They wanted to represent Bitcoin. I think they did it pretty well. I think there's definitely like Justin said, some controversy because of the word official. But that is a diplomatic language versus like a Bitcoin official. And there's some confusion. Brock's, I think he's still the president of the Bitcoin Foundation. But I'm not sure if the foundation is still going. It's always confusing to see where Brock is. The last time I think I saw him, he was on John Oliver show getting lambasted. Pretty bad for EOS. And then he distanced himself from that project. But I guess he's back to Bitcoin. But all that aside, what are we going to do? Not send anybody, send a bunch of scriptkitties, send some angry internet chat. But Peter McCormack could have worn a beast Bitcoin t-shirt. That's all I'm saying. But Dan, Eve the crypto rapture. What are your thoughts on the official Bitcoin delegation to El Salvador? Yeah, I mean, obviously you've loved a lot of people out the wrong way. You know, the term official, they're like, you can't represent me. You know, I speak for, but you know, you made a really good point, which is, you know, you vote for yourself. Like that's the whole point about Bitcoin is that it's open source. And these people elected themselves to go to a conference where they met the president of El Salvador who then by chance, they're invited to talk about the Bitcoin infrastructure. So this is all opt in. Like if you want to be the person going to represent in Bitcoin, then go to the conference and get in there and get in the conversation. Don't just sit back and moan about it and go, be the person that does it. Put your money where your mouth is. That's that's how you do it. That's the joy of Bitcoin is open source. If you want to, if you don't like the way it's coded, go and learn, like learn the code and start submitting on GitHub. It's all elective. It's self elective. It's everything is, is whatever you want to do, the energy, put in your energy to it and proving your work, that's, you know, you get rewarded. And yeah, so I think that whoever goes, there's always going to be people pissed off about, oh, they don't speak for me and they don't speak for Bitcoin. But, you know, and I think that there probably was a bit of side chilling there as there would always be people have their own little hidden agendas. You know, I'm not saying it's way too big, but you know, people are going to be like, oh, there is also this other coin, you know, but the fact is they were there for Bitcoin. They were doing Bitcoin, you know, they were trying to help the rollout of Bitcoin. And it's very time pressured. As you said, it was like under 90 days, it's just insane. So, you know, you don't have time to start putting some community vote in and then have all the arguments online about, well, I'm on my horse and be going there. And then you don't have time for that. You have you have to prove your work. And by going to the complities, by interacting, by taking advantage of opportunities, you're doing exactly that. So yeah, I just hope whoever represents or says they represent Bitcoin, obviously they don't actually represent it. But I hope that if they do, they say they do a good job. And they do a good job of it. And that's that's the main thing that that's yeah, that Bitcoin wins ultimately. So also, it was only a trip to El Salvador. It's not like a trip to Mars or the moon. You know, when Elon Musk calls out for the solar delegates, I hope we'll have a more international process or something for that for the rocket ride. Ben, are your thoughts on the Bitcoin delegation to El Salvador? Yeah, I mean, like absolutely well done for stepping up and taking the time to go out there and communicate about Bitcoin. But I do worry about Brock Pierce because he has been something of a master shitcoin or in the past and Shilla of his own bags. So when he tweets out that, you know, he's going to talk about Bitcoin and blockchain, I think, okay, there we are, there's the caveat. Bitcoin, you just say Bitcoin rather than the Am blockchain, put on the end. So that is worrying. And I think it's important that the Bitcoin community quote unquote, is worried about it and do also voice their concerns. So yeah, I'm just worried about technocrats trying to, I don't know, game the system in their favor and seeing it as an opportunity to benefit themselves as opposed to benefit El Salvador. So yeah, it's much openness as possible. And then, you know, maybe next time I, I wouldn't, I think it would be wise next time for a delegation to kind of be decided upon by somehow, by people, by the community, maybe I don't know, signing, I don't know how you would do it. But I would like there to be some warning next time. But then he's saying that, you know, El Salvador has had the likes of Jack Males and some of the blockchain folks over there and they've been chatting about Bitcoin for quite a while. So I'm sure they, they know already know quite a lot about Bitcoin. But yeah, Brock Pierce suddenly coming out of the woodwork and attaching himself to this kind of did get the heads on the back of my neck standing up a little bit. It's a strange thing with billionaires, isn't it Ben? Like, we want their help, but they're so different from us, you know, they have hundreds of millions of dollars. They're not concerned with the day-to-day life of paying rent and that kind of thing. And you, and on one hand, you have someone like Jeff Bezos' wife who's donated on oh, five or six billion dollars. You have the same thing probably going to happen soon with Bill Gates' wife donating all these billions of dollars. And then we have Brock who clearly created the EOS thing with his money and made tons more money. But what's he going to do now? What's he going to do with hundreds of millions of dollars? And I agree. I hope he means good things for Bitcoin, good things for El Salvador. Obviously, has his own companies and his own interests to support and to promote. But it is interesting with these billionaires, right? It's a different, again, Brock, a million dollar donation. Give me a grant. It's like I'm, it's like with this, this, I'm just going to mention again, this is this Galoy wallet thing. If you're talking about this Bitcoin beach project, I'll read you the segment from their genesis here on their GitHub because it really annoys me. But they talk about today's wallet certificate to enter the spectrum, either custodial, mange ban exchange, often large, or non-custodial. And there's nothing really in the middle. A custodial wallet that's open source of one can be deployed for a local community. And I'm like, what's selling bits? Well, we've been working on for this past year, but like a micro custodial solution for your local community. And there's absolutely no mention of it. I'm just thinking they're pushing their own interests there and not promoting other good projects, which have been working on this stuff for a while. That all that kind of annoys me and worries me about this whole El Salvador project. It's important that they have full access to the whole Bitcoin infrastructure and all this tools. I'm sure they will. I'm going to continue to engage down there. I'd love to follow up with you on how we make sure that we get what you guys are doing plugged in down there. Cool. Cheers. It probably kind of means that there's no commercial application of LNBITs, and they're just kind of looking for a corporation. Well, no, Galois, it's an open source project. It's just confusing as to why, I don't know, it's just confusing. There's an absolute no mention on the, I know that people from El NBITs have reached out to them. We're just like, why don't you just use El NBITs? It's what we fucking building. Well, let's hope for the best that they just haven't heard of it or like they're lazy programmers and they don't want to implement new things. I know that Jack Moller's friend of the show has been down there. And at the same time, he's promoting strike and what they do, but he's also promoting Bitcoin. So it is, it is a push and a pull. There is both sides to that. They are promoting their companies, but also helping people. I don't know, we have to go. I remember Dash used to be really popular somewhere like Venezuela. They used to take it in Burger King and all kinds of things like that and never heard the end of that. That just got to be true. I mean, someone said in the chat, those are Salvador's are shrewd or script or cladons god lesson. When BTC is, BTC is clogged. They'll just use B cash. I knew no, like as Roger Verbeen out there, yeah, I bet he'll be out there soon. Trying to flipping ruin the party. Well, there were tweets almost immediately after the first story broke about Tron becoming the next legal tender in El Salvador. They might have been jokes, but they might have also been true. You got this guy. He's got a country. If Tron offered him, I don't know how much millions of dollars, I'm sure he'd be fine with it. I, you know, how is he? Yeah, that scares me. In Tron and Bitcoin. Bring out the Bitcoin way it does. And there's even an idea from Max Kyser, where he wanted Bitcoin to maybe float the entirety of their $1 billion bill to the IMF and just pay it off cash and hand, which is a cool story. But it's also who are we paying this off for? Because obviously he's going to be in a sweet position if he could pay off that loan. But I think that's going to be about it for this show. Oh, we have one more. I have it in the thing. I'm glad I remember it was here on the Twitter. One more bonus issue. Wow. So Mark Cuban invests in some peak shit coin garbage. Obviously, without any understanding or research gets demolished on the road pole. And instead of taking responsibility for a drum decision, it's because of a lack of regulation. How many Bitcoiners warned you, Mark? How many Bitcoiners? For those of you who didn't hear Mark Cuban was involved in some kind of D5 project name, Titan. I've never heard of it. But it went from $60 to $3 cents in a matter of minutes as things often do when you don't do research. Cuban played it off later. He just took a flyer on it, meaning he didn't invest that much money and he didn't care that much. But still, he promoted it to you and he told you how good it is. It's John McCaffey all over again. So Mark Cuban, another one like Elon Musk that we wish was with us in the beginning and wasn't and only got with us later on to promote other projects like Ethereum and Types. Yeah, I mean, that's the really scary thing with a lot of these very complex contracts. Is that, you know, they need to be really well-ordered over and over again because someone will read the fine print and exploit it if it's available. This one looks like it wasn't an exploit actually. It looks like it just it lost its peg and once it lost its peg, it just almost instantaneously went to zero. So it wasn't officially collateralized, it lost its peg and it just blew away the, it blew away the, you know, their own token. So basically the whole stablecoin fell to the value of USDT or USDC that was behind it. So it was like 70 or 71 cents to the dollar and the value of the maddock piece just fell to zero. You know, it doesn't look like a traditional rug pull where, you know, the devs did something to change the contract or something else. They may have been the first to notice that there was an issue and pulled their own coins out before others did. But, you know, it doesn't appear that they actually, you know, did anything or like anyone hacked the smart contractor, did anything else like that. It literally just appears like the peg failed and everything fell over. And, you know, whoever figured out that the peg failed first got their funds out of maddock first and everyone else was left holding the bag. So it's bad. Reading article is this like, well, sorry, Titan, Titan is not maddock. Titan, sorry, sorry, sorry. The token was recently changing hands for rounds. Not point nor, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, three five dollars down from 65 dollars. Jesus. Yeah, but it's like person zero. I'm embarrassing than zero. Was there another project with called Ion something or a other than also iron, iron was the name of the stablecoin. Titan was the name of their own in game token. Yeah, there are Because my CTO was the one that said that there was some really small, easy to spot by getting their contract. But maybe there wasn't. I don't know. It may have been, but that wasn't what actually went wrong. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. It's just such an exciting space to invest in. And we're so glad that Mark Cuban is teaching so many people the lesson where you get into Bitcoin and everyone says, just dollar cost average into Bitcoin. You're not too late. You can still get a little bit. You can get a small piece of it yourself. And everyone says, no, no, no, I got to guide these altcoins. I get more units. I get a thousand doge or something. I get more right. And plus you've never heard of LGI or FFT or NFK, but I could lose all these. Those are the new things like no one knows about except me. I'm telling you about it. You should buy a whole lot of it. And then they do that and they lose all their money and they come back to Bitcoin. They're like, yeah, that little piece of Bitcoin I have is worth more than it used to be. Maybe I should get some more of that. And that's how altcoiners become Bitcoin or so Mark Cuban, you're moving along on your journey. We're rooting for you, Mark. It's never too late to become a Bitcoin or so let's move on to predictions or story of the week. Dan, Ev, are you ready with a prediction or a story of the week? Go ahead. I'm going to go with something really basic. It's a classic story of the week. It is non crypto. For the first time, my son pued in the bath the other day. It was really funny because I was sharing a bath with him. So yes, that's my story of the week. It's better than having the rug pulled on you in Titan. I don't know. It sounds pretty terrible. Hopefully next time he'll be going in the toilet and that'll be the story of the week. Justin Newton, that's hard to follow up, but do you have a prediction or a story of the week? Go ahead. You know, for me, I think the story of the week continues to be what's what's happening in El Salvador, right? When every major NGO is commenting on it, when the US government is sure to have a strong opinion on it and there's only 80 days remaining, every single day is going to have some kind of news happening. My favorite part about the El Salvador story is that now all the international relations people who have been mocking Bitcoin for years now have to pay attention. So a friend of mine's in that field and he's now suddenly like, well, this government can't do it and this government can't do it. And oh, it's bad for the environment. Oh, it's pseudo and all of it's just like the Cornell professor. They just got into it yesterday and they're going through all the same steps that everyone else goes through. I remember when I first heard about it, I was like, I'll just make a copy of that. I'm going to be rich. This is great. Let's do some more internet stuff where I can make copies of things and make money. And of course, it works out. You're not Charlie Lee. No, no, not today. Maybe next time. But let's go to Ben Arca prediction or a story of the week. Go ahead, Ben. Sorry. Yeah, I wanted to give a shout out actually to a dev who's been building some amazing stuff on, I don't know if I'm a screener. Or can you enable a screen showing, please? Yeah, I got that. Thomas, thank you. Yeah, even can see that can't make. So Vlad Stan, he made, he took Alan Bits and he turned, he made a, a browser extension version. So if anyone remembers, Tule, that project was great and useful, but it kind of fell by the way side, maybe because they developed it too early on. But having a browser extension for a lightning wallet is super useful. And he's taken Alan Bits and turned into a browser wallet, which is super cool. And I'm excited about it. And it's just all in all, a very capable, just a nice bloke like I'm making a new version of the browser wallet, which is, can you see me as well? Or can you just see my screen? That's a huge, huge, huge wallet. Okay, so I'm using this little M5 stick C for it, which is like a $10 device. And I need a, I needed just a function. So I could take just a simple function, because function, where I can just take Bitcoin JS and I can give it a master public key and address the sense of funds to and an amount. And then using mempool.space, because a lot of people can run that themselves now and the APIs really nice. It will then just, this function will just magically pick all the right UTXOs, you know, my, and then build this PSPT, which I can then send across this thing and sign. And it does like a nice little algorithm to find the best UTXOs. And I offered a bounty for that. And then Vlad Stan took up the project and he made it, oh, actually, it's private. So I probably shouldn't share it, but I can show you that the thing that's the PSP to create BT, create thing which you did for me for Bitcoin JS. But he didn't take the bounty, just said, oh, no, this one's on me. And then thought my project and like did an amazing job integrating all the code into it. So I think it's breathtaking the quality of developers we have on working on Bitcoin stuff. And all this stuff is free and open source like people are just doing it because they feel the urge to like they want to contribute something. They understand this powerful, liberating software. And yeah, I just wanted to give them a huge hour because I'm just so impressed with the work he's doing. And it's just super cool to have like building on a bit stuff and then helping me out where on this Bitcoin JS library. But yeah, just a reminder of the quality and of developer, not just ability wise, but then also personally on the quality of people we have in Bitcoin space, absolutely outstanding. That's very cool. And browser plugin is a great idea. That's one of the reasons people like Meta masks so much. Is it just runs in the browser there and they do all their little Ethereum swap trades and things through the browser? No. Yeah, well done. I got to take my add off to that as well. And by the way, if you guys want any help in terms of graphic design and stuff, UX got a new UX designer work. It's amazing. Yeah, all contributors are very, very welcome. All right. And Josh, do you have a story of the week or prediction? Go ahead. I mean, story of the week is just, it's definitely also a little and I'm really enjoying watching it as well. I didn't get to say earlier, but I think, you know, how you pick the people. It's always the type of industry. Yeah, they're unelected, but they elected themselves based on being successful in this free open source area of the world. And but yeah, I totally am with Ben that I wish some of the actual free and open source stuff also got mentioned and got invited along to the thing, not just industry titans that have managed to siphon lots of money off of other people. Excellent point, Josh. And as we head towards the close, just like to remind everyone to give us a thumbs up down below and to subscribe to the world crypto network. Wouldn't it be neat if we got more than 100,000 subscribers in YouTube had to send us one of those plaques. That would be pretty neat. You can also check out the world crypto network at worldcryptoneetwork.com created by DJ booth. You can see our latest video Spotify jukebox by Ben. You can create a jukebox for Spotify. If you had a bar or a cafe or some friends, you could charge them like 10 sets or 100 sets to play their song. They could request their song through the internet using this Spotify jukebox. It's all open source and it works with Ellen bits. We've also got some new interviews I did recently about NFTs. You can learn the history of Kiro cards by 2017 NFT project that recently got rediscovered in 2011. That's a pretty fun story. And shout out to Gabriel D. Vine for joining us. Sorry we lost him halfway through there. But on the left hand side, you can see here shout out to my assistant Marwe who's been tagging these episodes. There's thousands of them and she's going through the Bitcoin groups. We can see Thomas Hunt, tone vase, Theo Goodman, Joshua Svagala and Gabriel D. Vine, all on the top names list here. They've been in a lot of shows and Dan Eve and Ben Arck are rounding out the top 10 or so on the front page. So you guys can check out that action as the tagging is happening at worldcryptonetwork.com. And you can watch all these shows for free on YouTube or worldcryptonetwork.com. I even updated the podcast recently. So we're like almost up to date on audio stuff. So if you need to go on a road trip or something. But that's about it. Thanks again to Justin for being here with the full-time first person look and El Salvador. It's great to hear that. Thanks Justin. If you use some of this fun to be here. It wasn't a special jet trip and you weren't paid. And I didn't, you know, nothing I was saying that, but you just got to get out of it. I think I'm just going to answer it. I'm just going to answer it. I'm just going to answer it. I'm not going to get out of the front of that because it's not true. And, you know, the only way to do is ask people directly and they said, you with a newspaper, I see the first story and I'm like, this is a, this is crazy. Like did Brock Photoshop a newspaper? It's obvious that's going to be discovered. Like that's a horrible thing to fake, unless it's a joke or something. And then you had the other newspaper and I'm like, it's Justin involved in a conspiracy. Did Brock the newspaper give it to Justin to put it on the thing? And then you had the other page too. And then fortunately the programmer person came through with the information that there's different versions of this newspaper. It's not a grand conspiracy. But it was a fun, it was a fun 15 minutes or so thinking it was a grand conspiracy. Yeah, it's very reassuring that Justin was there actually. That kind of just calm some of my nerves. I appreciate that. Thank you. All right. Thanks again to everybody for being here. Thanks to Gabriel D. Vine. Sorry we missed you at the end. And until next time, bye.