#313 — The Bitcoin Group #313 - Crypto Rebound? - ETF Again - Merchants - BlockFi Bailou

The Bitcoin Group, the American Original. For over the last 10 seconds, the sharpest sitoshis, the best bitcoins, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Josh Kigala from thestandard.io. Ben Arck from LNBITS. Dan Eave, the crypto raptor. Good day, my friends. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network. Moving on to issue one. Issue one. Former crypto billionaire insists Bitcoin will soar to $250,000 a coin within the next 18 months. That's right. Draper is back again and this time, in addition to buying the Silk Road bitcoins, he's claiming the price of Bitcoin will come back and it will come back fast. Josh Kigala, what do you think about Draper's return and his gutsy $250,000 a coin in 18 months. Any time someone has a prediction, I say, whatever you recommend, whatever you reckon, it's just like your opinion, man. What I find interesting there is former Bitcoin billionaire or former billionaire, I'm pretty sure he's still a billionaire. I don't know about former. There's nothing really that's happened, especially over the last two years, all these billionaires became multi, multi, multi billionaires because they put their money in the right places. So I don't buy it. And in terms of his prediction, could well be, I mean, it's 21 million divided by infinity. So whatever you reckon, the price might be, it could be. 21 million divided by everything, really. It's all good when the old ones come back once again to say nice things about Bitcoin. Sure, I think we've missed Draper for a while. He hasn't said anything in a long time. It's interesting the way the media always goes back to the people that they know. They never go to somebody new and try to get a new idea. They're always like, we used to talk to that guy about hotmail. I bet he knows about Bitcoin. Can you ask your thoughts on Draper's prediction and the Bitcoin market? I think it's possible. I mean, we're almost hitting that bottom. You know, that's going on 10k, which I'm looking for, 10k, UK, GBP. And then I'm getting butterflies in my tummy. I just, I feel like something's brewing and then we could in fact be heading towards the bottom and then make people make us slow, you know, incline upward. I'm thinking maybe he's over shooting it back to 150, but I think maybe 220, I think is probably the number we should be aiming for in maybe 18 months or a couple of years. But it's simply what makes these like wild guesses on the Bitcoin price and everyone loves it. It's a high energy guy. Maybe he is a former billionaire, but if he's holding his Bitcoin and he will be back to being a billionaire, just look at the Bitcoin ecosystem. You know, we're at the same price level as what we're at in 2017 and the industry is so much more advanced and there's so many more projects, everything's getting easier. So now I think, you know, whereas when we were at the top six months ago, wherever it was, and I had this feeling like we'd been become overvalued because we weren't with the industry, hadn't matured enough. I'm now feeling, getting that feeling like we're heavily undervalued, which is what happens when, you know, the price drops suddenly. We are going to go under that actual value of what Bitcoin probably should be at and that's where we are now. So it will go back up. Tim Draper will be a billionaire again if he's not already like Josh said. And yeah, he's a fun guy. He's done very well on Bitcoin. He's even though he makes these wild guesses and estimates, like he should still be listening to because he's made some very good calls in Bitcoin space. And I think it's likely that he could happen, but to 20, I'll be the top. Obviously, I'm a permable and I never understand when Bitcoin goes down. I always think there's still only 21 million if the code hasn't been broken, if the protocol hasn't been broken, why is it going down? And the best explanation that I can give you is that a lot of people who don't understand what they bought saw. The price go down and then sold thinking that Bitcoin was broken or the 21 million coins idea was going to go away. Or just like I said, they don't know what they bought. They bought a hot new thing and it was supposed to go up and it went down. So they ditched out early, whereas most people we've talked to on this show and these kind of shows we've been doing here on the world crypto network and mad bitcoins for years and years. It's a general idea. If you can stick it out four years, if you can stick it out five years, no one's ever lost money who can last that long. But these people, they have short term horizons, they have short term thinking, they sell their Bitcoin, they drive the price down. And at least according to this article, they break our good friend Tim Draper from being three commas to two commas. And it's just not the same. You know, he just can't get the kind of spaces at a restaurant that he wants to get. And then he's like, well, I think that you know, long term is it's going to happen. But maybe 18 months is a bit is a bit short term. I think that bit partly because it still puts us about six months before the halfening. And you know, Bitcoin doesn't hit all time highs until after the halfening, right? That's how it's happened historically. So, you know, that's the kind of pattern that I'm, that I'm sort of, you know, seeing quite obvious. If you just look at the halvings and when the deal time highs happen, the fact that, you know, that I think they're estimating his wealth, the fact that he's not a billionaire anymore based on only the only the 30,000 bitcoins that he bought from the, the silver road confiscation in 2014, which puts it about six, 600 million, just over 600 million today's prices. So, but I'm sure he probably has more Bitcoin, right? Like he is, I very much doubt like he just bought that stash and was like, that's it. I've done, you know, he'd probably be buying more. He may have less than that. No nowadays, but, but, you know, that that's probably what they're using as a yardstick of saying he's a Bitcoin billionaire. So, I do find that the comments are very, they're very 2013 these comments that are on the article, like there's no such thing as crypto billionaire in FDIC money's proof. I'm a crypto trillian air. Nothing from nothing is still nothing. And then other people are harping on about the fact that you can't ever sell your Bitcoin. Like that's an argument I heard like years ago and it's clearly not true now. The means literally it's insane to, it's literally saying the sky is, what this is, the sky, what color isn't the sky? Well, the sky's a color that it's not usually, right? That's, that's, it's just crazy. Some of these things. And also saying like this one, another guy is like Bitcoin and crypto's remained completely overvalued. They have no intrinsic value whatsoever, do some research, except for money laundering or high risk gambling games. So yeah, very 2013 comments there. I do think I'm still with, I'm still with Ben that, that I think we're going to, I do think we're going to go lower. It's going to go, you know, I'm not, I'm not a predictor or prognosticator of prognastications and prostations and all that. But, but I do think it's going to go lower. It just seems like we're not there at like the weeping territory yet. Like there's still hope, right? And we've got to go past the, we've got to go past the hope stage to desperation and, and you know, and we're sort of, you know, we're still at the stage where it's bad enough that you can mock people like, you can put up a billboard saying, hey, crypto, bros, come work at McDonald's. We need to go past that so that it's offensive to make fun of Bitcoin people so they, they feel sorry for us. That's when you, that's when you know the turning point is, so I think there's still still some room to go. But the article itself is quite funny. It's essentially, it's like someone sat there again. Here's 11 Bitcoin billionaires who have lost loads of money. Ha ha ha ha. Well, that's the, that's the premise of the article. So it's quite interesting. But yeah, I think, I think we've, we've got a little bit to go and, and 250k, yeah, in the future, but maybe not 18 months, you know, I can't see 18 months, unfortunately. Well, at least we have something to look forward to now. Like Dan says, they'll be a point where they'll say, we used to make fun of Bitcoiners, but now we're worried that they'll all kill themselves. So we stopped. That's, that's positive, sunny lining. But I do agree with Dan. I think all the old fun is back again. Everyone who's ever been critical of Bitcoin is here to dump on it. But once again, as someone with a long term perspective on this, is it back to $300? Is it back to a thousand? Did it retrace, retrace 1200? Like Tone said for years and years and years. Oh, it's not a real rally to wait retweets 1200. Like over and over again, it's still 20,000. Like that's ridiculous from 300. Like if you bought one at 300 and now it's worth 20,000, are you crying about it? I don't think so. As I've said before with Tim Draper, we never should have, the US government that's owned by the people of the United States, never should have sold those 30,000 Bitcoins. We should have kept them and fulfilled the Smithsonian Institution's dream to have one Smithsonian in every state so that everyone could go to a decent museum. Sorry, Dan, I cut you off. Did you have more on Draper? I was actually just going to say so in 2017, I started doing interviews for it. It was shame on me, but it was an ICO magazine. I think it was literally called like the ICO Mag. And I interviewed like Vinny Lingham and Adam Draper, Tim Draper's son. I was in on the interview with Tim Draper, but anyway, so this was the first solo interview and it was at home and he was running a bit late. So I was like, I'm going to neck up here, confidence, need my confidence up. And I literally did the classic working from home thing, had a t-shirt on, I had like no trousers on underneath so I'm just walking around on my boxes. And like FNM blinded, not about him being late, but like, you know, just put yourself together, put you in this interview. And then I literally neck another bit and I sit down and as I'm putting the thing down, he's like just sat there staring at me, like looking quite amused in fairness. And I was like, oh, Adam, how's it going? The interview went quite well actually, but yeah, it was, it was, he's got, he's a really kind of interesting character actually there. Obviously him and his dad did a lot of investment in general Bitcoin startups, you know, back then and before. So I can't remember boost, but is it boost VC? I think it was Adam Draper and Tim Draper, yeah. So, but yeah, nice, nice guys, very nice guys actually, a chat to you. 2017 is a really good analogy because you have all these ICOs, like a lot of scouting ICOs, a lot of liquidity which gets locked up. And then a lot of dumping on the market which then pushes the price a bit, coin down. And similarly, you have all these scams which are popped up with the pump we had. And then you have all the stuff on the market and then all the liquidity floods on you have this crazy crash. And then the market absorbs it. You know, there's inflation is going crazy. People are looking at Bitcoin seriously looking at Bitcoin. The, as I said, the general infrastructure in projects are far bigger now and there's more of them than there ever has been. So once that liquidity has been absorbed and then once people start looking at Bitcoin as a serious place to maybe just put their wealth as a hedge against all the crazy inflation, which they're experiencing in their real life. And they think that it's, you know, potentially at a low and they can make profit on it. And that's the thing that you can be the little driver for Bitcoin going up. But ultimately, like all these dumps is the you're building every cycle, you build up like more of the huddle of bedrock, the season veteran, Bitcoin veterans. And upon the bedrock, we build great things. So it's the only way it's up, baby, from here, I think. But yeah, it's, it's, it's just compounded dumping by people and by scams. Someone who's having to meet their financial obligations instead of selling 0.05 of a Bitcoin then I have and so point one of a Bitcoin every month. And then that just compounds and compounds and compounds until people start running out of their stack, you have to go back to work and that's happening right now. So I do feel like we're getting close to the bottom. I really do. And I think people are miserable enough for it to be potentially the bottom. And going back to that 2017 analogy. So the peak was what like 19,600 or something, which is $2,000 less than the price of Bitcoin right now. And just think about, well, for a start, the lightning network as it currently stands, like that wasn't there in 2017, you know, the all the infrastructure we have now, well, the business is accepting it. It's the price back then when you look at it was, was, was crazy. But now it's very much justified. I think as you pointed out, Ben, like the services and infrastructure that we do have now, it justifies that price we currently have. And it seems undervalued now. You've got this country to top Bitcoin. And then inevitably they are going to be looking at the stablecoin stuff. And as soon as you start building a stablecoin, it's up to Bitcoin and countries and start using it as medium exchange. It's huge. It's huge like the amount of Bitcoin which is going to get locked up over the next 18 months. So Tim Draper, you know, he could be on something. Cooking with gas, Tim. Well, Dan's just reminded me of all our old Tim Draper days. We used to go out to, I thought it was called blockchain university. But now I remember it was called Draper University. They named it after themselves. And they had a boost VC. They had a startup accelerator down there in San Mateo. And Adam Draper used to always mention in all of his interviews and his articles that he was going to build an Ironman suit. But it's been about five years and I haven't seen any flying Ironman from Adam Draper. So we'll just have to hold out hope that he's still working on it. I still think one of the best and there are many great arguments for buying Bitcoin. But one of the simplest arguments that you can think about is this 21 million argument as a collector, as a person that collects baseball cards, karaoke cards, NFTs, whatever it is. There's only 21 million. Every millionaire in the world can't even have one. Like if you could get your hands on one of these things and just hold on to it and not sell it, you have to assume it's going to be worth something in the future because of this collector's mentality. People just wanting to buy them, wanting to get their number of Bitcoins, let alone all the network effects and the technology and all the other things we talk about. But just this very simple idea that it's locked at 21 million and you could get your hands on one still, I think is very powerful. You guys ready to move on to the exit question? Josh Tagalli, you're competing against the travel Bitcoin ball. It's smaller, but it still knows everything. It's still also totally and completely balled. It seems to be something to do about predicting and being balled. But Josh, will the price of Bitcoin be higher or lower this time next week? Obviously, Tim Draper predicting $250,000 a coin. What will you say? I think there's generally in these downward motions, there's usually this upward motion, this what we're seeing right now. And people get so fearful of what just happened that they tend to wait for a little bit of up and then they sell, that's why after a massive collapse, usually we see a side was motion for a while with a bit of waves. And that's what I think will be down next week. Ben Arck, higher or lower? I think lower, but I think it's a good time to start doing the dollar cost averaging, start buying Bitcoin because you don't want to try and buy the very bottom because you're going to miss out, but start buying now. And then you will hit the bottom fairly soon. And then you'll start going back up and just buy, hold on to it. Like Thomas said, four years, lock it up somewhere in Cold Storage, and you'll be gravy. Everyone's saying lower, Dan Eve, will you make it 100% unanimous? Support? Yeah, I think we're going to go, I think go, go, well, in fact, no, sorry, actually, that's what I was going to say. I think we're going to go, I would think we'll be higher next week, just on, based on the current price now, but then it will be, it will be lower afterwards. I think this is a mini, mini bump, and then it's going to be a bit lower. There's going to be a bit more pain, a bit more blood in the streets, a bit more panic. And then, Did Kat Bansay? Yeah, did Kat Bansay? Did Kat Bansay? That's it. Yeah, that's, but even a dead Kat bounces. It receives some loft. You have to throw it really hard. All right, here we go. The magical Bitcoin predictor ball, the source of all truth. This is how you should make all of your decisions from now on, even messing up my focus. How fun is that? Here we go, we're shaking the ball. Will the price of Bitcoin be higher this time next week? No, a solid no from the ball. What's the minimums? There goes, there goes my optimism, I guess. But I have enjoyed this little like 5% bump or something that we had recently. That's been nice. Any kind of positive action is nice to see from the old Bitcoin. Moving on to issue two, ETFs are back again. Yes, we've got two ETFs for you. One ETF will allow investors to bet against Bitcoin is launching this week. As cryptocurrency has plunged 70% from its peak, that ETF. There's a second ETF being launched by Coinbase. They're calling it a nano Bitcoin futures via derivative exchange, whatever that means. And Coinbase will allow you to buy Bitcoin futures as well as I'm thinking a spot Bitcoin ETF. There was a strange treat by Bitcoin magazine claiming that Coinbase would be launching on Monday with a spot ETF. They quickly deleted the tweet. That's the most interesting kind of tweet. Let's go to Ben Arck this time. Ben Arck, what do you think about the ETFs? Will Americans finally be able to invest their stock market money in Bitcoin? And what about this short Bitcoin futures? Someone who hates Bitcoin can now short it into the ground. Will this hurt the price of Bitcoin or will all the ETFs cancel each other out? It's funny, isn't it? Years ago, we were like, ETFs are going to get Bitcoin ETFs. I can't wait for the Bitcoin ETFs. Now I'm like, oh, Christ, another one. Really? Can we have another ETF? Can I just leave us alone? Yes, every which way in which you can bet for and against Bitcoin, that will be an ETF. There will be on ramps for large investment firms to be able to easily offer and put whatever else. I'm not that glued in when it comes to how you would use something like this, but I was going to ask Josh about this. Could this help with hedging prices of Bitcoin by hedging your bets by using an ETF? Josh is muted because I'm muted to you. Anytime you can short something, it allows you to hedge your bets. But really, what are you hedging? Generally, you want to be hedging if you're moving Bitcoin, if you've borrowed some or you owe some Bitcoin to someone while you're holding it, and it starts to go down in price, you want to put a bet on the down so that no matter if it goes up or down, you're kind of equal. But in terms of the stock market, I feel like this is not really needed yet in terms of that side of things, but it also depends how that's all structured. I just thought about people having Bitcoin on the balance sheet, whether they could hedge against it in case it drops in propriety much. They can buffer out those drops, whether it's like a useful tool for people who just want some Bitcoin on the balance sheet, but they don't want to have the exposure risk of volatility. I think the main ones who benefit are Bitcoin miners. I've heard a lot of articles recently about Bitcoin miners being practically addicted to hedging because they need to cover both sides. Sometimes they're holding a lot of Bitcoin, so they can't always sell them as much as they want so they can use these futures markets to hedge. I know that they're local Bitcoin people or they used to, they were trying to hedge Bitcoin a lot. So obviously if you're buying and selling and you're holding Bitcoin for a period. We would do it. We use it a lot for Voltoro because when someone sells a whole bunch of gold, for instance, we have to hedge that and when someone buys a whole lot of gold with Bitcoin, we need to transfer that to different exchanges meanwhile. And so while we're holding that, because we've already instantly bought the gold, we have to make sure that we don't lose out on that. So we hedge it on a short while we're holding the thing because we've already sold it. There's all sorts of need for shorting, but why not? There's plenty of options to short Bitcoin already. I don't know why you need the ETF one. I think the ETF one and I find it interesting that the establishment doesn't allow any sort of spot ETF in there at all, but allows you to short. And that really puts them down. And what sort of short is are they actually borrowing, physical Bitcoin? Are they borrowing real Bitcoin or is it for naked shorting? Let's see. It's a very interesting move. It is the market. Let's see what happens. I remember Elon Musk before he went totally crazy. He used to talk a lot about naked short selling as well as Patrick Burnett over stock.com before he went totally crazy. And I agree with their points on naked short selling. I do not support naked short selling. And I do think it's interesting, Josh, how much they dislike Bitcoin that they're willing to create these negative instruments to attempt to short it. They're probably thinking that there's a lot of Bitcoin haters out there and they could get their money into their financial instrument. And they just want the fees. They don't care which way it goes for the better. So it is interesting. It's always the negative side that gets more support. It's never the positive side of Bitcoin that's being supported. Yep. I guess for regulators like you done like Bitcoin, they're like, oh, cool. You want to make a shorting mechanism ETF against Bitcoin. Go ahead and go. It's easy to get approval. Dan, Eve, what do you think we've got two Bitcoin ETFs? One, you can store them. The other is at Coinbase. This is just the greatest time of our lives, right? I think a shorting ETF is just spiteful. Now, I can understand what you need. Lots of businesses would need to be able to short to hedge their position. You don't want to be caught by Bitcoin dropping. And then especially if you've got fear obligations, you need to be able to cover those. And holding Bitcoin and not being able to short and therefore hedge against it dropping, that significantly opens up your risk to failure and not being able to pay your suppliers and et cetera. So it's kind of needed. But it's like an, what's the word? Like an evil, an evil need. The evil you need, I don't know about it. Yes, it's evil. And necessary evil. But obviously, when I first started trading Bitcoin, I was trading on in terms of contracts with different CFDs. So I used to trade on like an eToro. And there was just something that felt so bad about shorting Bitcoin. I was almost like a rule. I was like, even if I knew it was going down, and it would put me through financial pain, I'd be like, I can't really short. I can't really short Bitcoin. And so it just felt dirty shorting Bitcoin. But some businesses will need to do it to survive, especially if they do want to open up their exposure to Bitcoin, they can't do it with just holding Bitcoin and not have any form of hedging to reduce the risk of dropping even further. And the fact is that it was, the regulators kind of don't want to approve the spot ETF. They're very wary of it because of protecting people. They're quite happy to open up shorts, which would help protect, not protect those who are already in Bitcoin anyway, like to a certain extent. So I don't know. I think it's a bit of a, it's a necessary evil. But at the same time, it's kind of a bit hypocritical of regulators to open up a spot, sorry, a short ETF. I just remember that every new technology has been shorted, when radio and television came out, everyone was like, let's short that into the ground. Then the internet came out and web pages and HTML and more is law. And they just sorted it into the ground. And then internet pornography came out. And I never got my option to short that. Like every way you were like, why can't we short everything? And they're like, well, not that one, sir. Not that one. It's the true only up, is it worth? Josh and Gulli, your thoughts on the ETF? Go ahead. Look, shorting for those, you know, that don't know, is an extremely important part of price funding. You know, you cannot just have a market that only bets on the price going up. That itself is a distortion. You need to equal that out. The young needs a young, you need to bet on the way down to. So it's a very legitimate and normal part of the market to find a true price. Otherwise, you don't really find a true price. You just find a little bit over high. So it is important. But like we mentioned before, naked short selling. The idea of short selling is you borrow, I'll borrow 10 from Thomas, 10 units, and I'll sell it. And then I hope the price will go down, and I'll buy it back, pay Thomas back, and hey, press the I'll keep the difference. Now, naked short selling is this thing where if you're a large banking institution, like JP Morgan Chase or others, such, and that ilk, will literally not borrow any of it, just sell stuff that they don't have at all. And this sounds unbelievable, but that actually happens. And in fact, it can be used as a really bad tool to basically destroy your competition. So if you're Amazon, you could go to your mates over at JP Morgan and say, hey, naked short sales, overstock, because they were sort of competition, right? And that drove, and you could really crush that price for a long time. And there's been very large rumors. In fact, there's been even lawsuits against JP Morgan Chase who doing that against the silver price, too. Keeping the silver price crushed. So there's lots of Tom Foulery. And in fact, if you look at the whole Wall Street, Betz guys, a lot of that, the bet against GameStop, was also playing with these players that were naked short selling. And they wanted to step in and just wreck them because they thought there's way more shorts than it should be possible right now, something like that. So I'm not sure of the full story, but I think I remember correctly, that was the case in that scenario, too. So yeah, but to end my point, there is a very legitimate reason people need to be able to short. And I think maybe if it's available now for Bitcoin, it's also a good thing. Well, and I do agree, Josh, if they're gonna short, they need to put up the money, they need to put up the security. The idea of having these naked shorts, which help the price go down, but don't actually have any money behind them is just insane. And there's many things about the financial market that people find insane, and they can't accept and they can't understand. And this just seems to be one more of those things where some companies, some people are allowed to take this bet without paying the other side. If you hear about this, it's just a normal person, you're like, hey, I don't like Facebook, I think it's gonna go down, I wanna short it. And then you go and do it, and you learn at least from my novice understanding, you have to pay like a little fee each day that you're short. So the longer that you're short against Facebook, if it doesn't dip quickly, your stack is getting smaller. And that keeps you from shorting, and it does reward people who buy value stocks that hold it long, and they think it's a good company, and they think it's gonna go up. It benefits them, but if you don't have to put up the security, if you don't have to pay the fee, all of that goes away. And then suddenly it's the same betting for and betting against a stock. And then it's like, at what point are we predatory just destroying companies because we can, and just monsters and whales going out? And like, it's happened recently, like with things like Luna, in back in the old days, a pay coin where they said it, we can keep it a $20 floor. And then anytime you hear that, whether they're like, oh, it'll keep it this thing, you know there's a whole bunch of people that want to bet against that, because that's easy money if they can knock it off the $20 floor, the same thing for taking Luna and it's a dollar peg, and knocking that off. It's almost easy pickings for them. But again, they actually have to provide the security with a Bitcoin, if you're gonna short it on a Bitcoin exchange, you have to actually provide the Bitcoin. So I think it makes a big difference if they provide the security. Yeah. Isn't it like, you think to short such a volatile asset as well, because like, and they're always in Bitcoin, there's some, like, one event, there's something comes up the word work, innovation, some incredible thing someone's working on, and then that gives it Bitcoin's, you know, ability to be able to rise and go up in value. But, but, but, but Fud always takes harder, right? Like Fud is, you know, negative events always have more of an impact than positive events. Well, I think that the target market here for these ETFs is not people that are buying Bitcoin on Coinbase or that are interested in crypto. I think these are haters. I think you're trying to motivate that hater market and get those haters in there to bet against the thing that they hate. And I don't think they're looking at fundamentals, Ben. I think they're looking at how much they hate it. And part of that comes down to these crypto people bought at $300 and they sold at 50K, like it was that easy. You know, right now in this huge downturn, everybody's got bags that are worthless sitting all around them. And they're like, oh, this is why HODlings hard. This is why you earn some money for being an investor, you know, if your bets pay off, or you lose a whole bunch of money from being an investor. And, you know, it doesn't always work out. But again, it's these people that are taking the risk that make the rewards. And these people on the sidelines that have been criticizing for so long haven't had a way to make money. But maybe they could put their money where their mouth is and just bet it all against Bitcoin. And we'll see how that turns out for them. I wanted years ago, I wanted to build a site called Bare River of Bad News, or something similar. And the point of it is that as soon as some news came out, it would be like that it could negatively impact a stock. It would be rated. And then like people could then go and short whenever stock it was. And I think what gave me the idea was it was when the 787 had the battery issue. And like it was like the fastest hundred pound I'd made. Like it was like rapid. I was like, red the article on BBC. And I was like, they grounded him. Boom! And just put like a quick short on Boeing and then cashed out. And I was like, well, it's really good. But I never got round to it. So yeah, Bare River of Bad News, or something like that. Because yeah, because you can make a lot of money off shorts, but it's just a really basic bad news about a stock. Maybe not, you know, obviously Bitcoin as well, but Bitcoin is, it's like a lot more to move it than a bit of bad news. I don't know, what's that? When what's that Kylie Jenner came off WhatsApp or whatever, you know, that would have been a great event to quickly, wow, wow, but up on the site and be like, short. So shorting's fine unless it's game Bitcoin. It's fun to chase those news events, but just as often you take it in the shorts because it as fast as it goes up, it suddenly goes down as well. So if you're not willing to sell and get that hundred bucks, you might have a hundred dollar loss on the other side and it just happens so fast. You're like, I'm a winner, I'm a winner. I am not a winner. I am not a winner. But let's move on to the exit question. Coinbase, the master of all business models seems to be in everybody's business, but their own. At one time, they were a simple website where you could log on and buy Bitcoins. Now it's become a veritable shit coin casino, including with my personal favorite shit coins, the NFT collectibles. As Coinbase continues to steal everyone's business model, will the ETF be successful? Will Coinbase finally get the precious fees that they've been looking for for so long? Or will Binance or another player come in and steal that sweet ETF money from Coinbase just like Cripsy and so many others have in the past? Josh Egala, what about Coinbase is this, the business model that finally works for the wayward company? I mean, I don't think they're unprofitable. I think they're doing extremely well. And I think this is one of the keys to being relevant in a regulated space is by regulatory capture. And so they will take this game and they'll pretty much make it impossible for anyone else to compete by over regulating or writing the regulations for the space and basically capturing it. And I mean, I'm just happy that it's a crypto native company. In the UK, what we're seeing is that the banks are in the pockets of the regulators and they're basically regulating startups out of the way so that banks can take it all. So the only people that can actually deal with crypto are like, you know, revolute and stuff like that. And this is really unfortunate because crypto was forged by startups. It's a great way to innovate in the space. And you get all of these people saying, we need more regulation, especially after big bear markets when really all the regulations are basically written by the old school guard and the establishment. Well, and there's nothing you can do if your stocks go down. A friend of mine who doesn't like crypto sent me a story recently where they said people who had lost money on coinbase were then gonna sue coinbase because they didn't say, oh, you could lose money on this. But it's the same old thing. You made the bets, you made the buys and the sells. Now be a big boy or a big girl or a big whatever you want to call yourself and take the responsibility, take the consequences. Ben, Ark, what do you think will coinbase finally find their perfect product fit, product market fit this time? Is this for shorting Bitcoin? Is this for shorting Bitcoin? Is it for having an ETF in general, just being so cutting edge to implement the ETFs that we've been talking about for five years or more now? Yeah, I think Josh is right there. I mean, this is why they continue to charge on is because they're incredibly profitable but eventually they will get usurped by some things in bad technology. I look forward to that day but for now they're just gonna continue to be profitable and do the regulatory capture stuff and increase them in upperly, holding and standing and yeah, they will continue to do coinbase, to be coinbase. Well, I remember their original business model of making money on the fees of selling Bitcoin does seem to be in trouble with strike, launching almost zero fees. And then I heard recently that Binance had actually gone there and they went to zero fees to buy Bitcoin. So competition does continue to drive that. I like that Chuck Muller, you called that like it, because people are like, why don't you just undercut coinbase and then just keep undercutting and then have this like, you know, this battle. And Chuck Muller's was like, no, I'm a chess player and I'm just going for the Dracula. I'm just gonna give zero fee and I thought it was nice, hold on Jack. Very good. Dan, Eve, what do you think coinbase finally gonna find success this time? Long lasting product, they're not gonna have to steal anyone else's model again. But I think they're, you know, as much as it pains me, they are pretty, they're seemingly pretty successful. I mean, obviously they've got shit coins on there, lots of shit coins. So they could, they could, if it all goes bad, they could become a poo museum or something like on the island white. It's the National poo museum of England on the island white. But which is dedicated, sorry, just to the, is dedicated to the collection of conservation and display of feces, which is like the shit coins displayed on coinbase. But I think, but by now they kind of pull back because of, you know, not being so brave around the regulatory side, coinbase have been kind of very compliant, right? Haven't they? So it does seem kind of that they've been cozying up to regulate is quite a lot. And that's probably gonna benefit them if they do want to, you know, bring out more, more products that are regulated. But yeah, I think ultimately that they are, I can be a bit pretty successful company. And when the next bull run comes around, you know, I can imagine they'll probably be number one on the, the app list again and not forgotten about as they are kind of, you know, now that we're in a bit of a bear market. I've never heard of a poo museum, but they did have a chamber pot museum in Prague. I looked at that. They said they had Napoleon's chamber pot. And while coinbase may be very successful, it sure hasn't done anything for their terrible stock price, which has been an absolute disaster from the beginning. And for these employees, some of whom have recently been hired told that yes, you will be hired no matter what. And then we're fired before they could even start work. So a bit of a disaster there, a bit of a growing pains if you want to be on their side. But I agree with the panel. I think coinbase will continue and be profitable. And I think regulatory capture is the best way to understand why they keep trying to go into so many businesses. They just think they could own them all and then use their strong lobbying and strong incumbent position and pile of money to keep anyone else out of their businesses, which is really classy, I guess, if you've read Peter Teel's book, Zero to One, and you think that all startups should be practicing to be monopolies. Oh, it's an interesting way to think. And if you're a peer, Teel's a good example because PayPal is the regulatory capture thing. They cozy up to regulators, but then also the regulators cozy up to PayPal because they were able to slow down the inevitable progression of a designated money by having something we're trying to replicate in some like cosplay way. And that's a similar with coinbase. I'm sure it's not just the coinbase co-zying up. I always saw much of the regulators that cozy up to Coinbase because they understand that this is another way for them to be able to restrict their coins growth. And one of the original ideas for PayPal was a coin almost similar to Bitcoin where you could transfer it and transfer it and pay for anything. And they quickly realized if they allowed PayPal the coin to be used off of their servers, you could buy anything with that coin. And in some ways, they would be responsible just like Facebook's Libre coin that never got anywhere because of the complexities with releasing a cryptocurrency. It's a lot easier to do it the way Satoshi did it just to release it to the internet as a white paper as software and then to just kind of walk away and whatever happens, it's a lot harder if you run a professional company and you have to take all the responsibility for what you made. Moving on, check out WCN clips. We've got 110 subscribers, but we need to get going on making some new videos. We've got Roger Vier promoting Dozecoin, Fidelity offering Bitcoin for 401Ks and the ape coin Dow Air Drops. I wonder how those turned out. All bet we predicted they'd turned bad and they did. Moving on to issue three, Ibex, on boards 85 merchants in Miami to the Bitcoin Lightning Network. Yes, merchant adoption is back again. They did that classic thing. They set the teams to the stores. They got the stores to accept Bitcoin. But now the classic question of the chicken and the egg, Dan Eave, will anyone shop at these stores that now accept Bitcoin and Lightning or have they forgotten to motivate both sides of the market? And will they see the success that we saw back when BitPay launched the Bitcoin Bowl, also in Florida, also trying to get merchant adoption, also sending teams to the business, but resulting in no sales for the merchant. Dan, Ibex, are we ready for merchant adoption now that we have the Lightning Network? Well, I suppose the difficult thing is, well, these businesses already existed right so that all they're doing is now adding a new payment channel. But the thing that you do have to do is get someone who's already going to the store, either who's already got Lightning or a Bitcoin Lightning or to get them to buy it. So they almost, it almost needs to be accompanied with a bit of a sales procedure, right? Like where they can upsell some Bitcoin and then, at the till, right? Now how they go, oh, if you are, by the way, or by the way, do you have our store card? Or by the way, have you heard of our Lord and Savius Satoshi and they need to roll out and get people to buy a bit of Bitcoin in order to then pay for their goods? But obviously that's going to be sort of long, long-winded. So primarily it's going to be maybe people experimenting who have already gotten to Bitcoin, they've got a bit of Lightning and they're like, oh, I'm going to go to this store because it sells, it sells whatever I need, but also I can pay for it in Lightning over Lightning. So I think it's going to start off a bit gimmicky, maybe not use so much, but it could be something that draws people to the stores. They may even get increased, what's going on? Foot print, from new customers who are visiting Miami, that's trying to be this Bitcoin city and they're like, right, whilst in Miami, you know, whilst it went in Rome, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, when in Miami I've got to go and spend some Bitcoin in a store because even now there's, it's been loads of conferences and there's very few that like you can, you know, you can go out in the street and actually buy something in Bitcoin and in fact, one of the only ones I really remember is in HCPP, there's like a Bitcoin, there was a Bitcoin store that we were mission to after the conference, but it was, you know, it was, it was something novel, right? You want to go, you've got Bitcoin, you want to go and use it somewhere. So same with room 77 after block show Europe in like 2018 and yeah, so I think it could help drive customers to the store. It's going to be slow, it's not going to be this stampede of people going to buy Bitcoin because largely it's going to be people who already have Bitcoin who just want to spend it somewhere. So hopefully it does have a positive effect. And if anything that the rollout is just really easy, so you might as well have it just in case someone wants to use it and then gradually that will grow over time. So as long as they don't have any kind of crazy charging, you structure, you know, fee structure of setting it up, then it's something that people can just merchants can just have and then people will gradually use it more and more. It is funny if you go to a Bitcoin meetup or a Bitcoin conference and you ask people, do you actually use Bitcoin? Do you have some on your wallet right now on your phone? Do you even have a wallet on your phone? If I wanted to send you 10 bucks or take 10 bucks off you, would you be able to do it? The answer most of the time is no. People look at you like you're insane for wanting to spend Bitcoin or thinking this should even be a function or activity with the coin. But once again, as we learned in the early days, if we weren't out there promoting it, if we weren't out there giving it to people and selling it and buying this and buying that, even if it was a horrible financial decision later on, like Dan mentioned the snack bar at HCPP, I'm sure I've bought a lot of $10 dinners there now that are $50 dinners and I only ate it once. I don't get to enjoy multiple returns from my dinner. But still, if you don't use the currency, if you don't tell people about it, if it's not out there being a currency, it never would have become the phenomenon that it is now. It's the early people selling it, using it, spending it, that made it possible. And the other thing I wanted to say is in Vegas, we have a saying, always tip your dealer. And I worry that these Ibex people aren't tipping their dealers. So first of all, they need a discount for the people that come in the store, like Dan was saying, get 5% back if you use Bitcoin. But beyond that, we need to tip the dealer. The cashier needs to be involved. Tell the cashier they get 1% or they get a dollar for every order or they get $5 for every order, get them to promote the Bitcoin, because they're the ones standing there all the time. And they don't care if they get handed dollars for a credit card or a magical, pay-as-y, wireless payment, whatever they have here in the UK and everything, it's crazy. But they don't care. But if you give them some skin in the game, you give them a tip, you could perhaps motivate more of these Bitcoin payments and get into a kind of thing where the person just doesn't naturally. Of course I want 5% off. Of course I want the cashier to get a little kickback. Of course I'll use that Bitcoin, even though it's confusing to me, I'll buy 20 bucks. I'll spend 20 bucks and I'll benefit by getting the instant discounts. Josh, Josh, what do you think? Bitcoin merchant adoption? Again? No, I think it needs to happen with Lightning. Lightning, I think I've said it before on this show, but I remember leaving Australia when Bitcoin was still very young. And coming back five years later and Bitcoin was still not really adopted much. A lot of people, a lot more people knew about, a lot of people would buy and invest in it, but it wasn't used as a currency. Yet in that time, Alipay was everywhere. And all of a sudden every store had Alipay, Alipay, and what's the difference there? And why? First of all, Alipay is stable. It's a big tool currency that people understand. But second of all, they have a large business development team that could go door to door knock on doors, get them. And by the way, if you accept this, you will give you this extra and we'll give you education. And this is really missing. And this is where companies like these guys or projects like Ellen Bits and everything that's attached to it and even BitPay, who've also now enabled Lightning Network, are really important because they go door to door, getting, educating the clients and Lightning actually allows for the tip your dealer type of thing. You can have that programmatically put in there to say, hey, here's this. And would you like to, you get 2% off or 5% off if you're paying Bitcoin? And by the way, the cashier gets a little bit. And the thing is with Bitcoin, yeah, people don't spend it all the time. But a lot of people, when they see Bitcoin, they'll just do it for the heck of it. And they've got a little bit of change in their pocket, especially when they use Lightning Network, they've got 50 bucks with you, 20 bucks or whatever. And then you're like, yeah, I'll give that a go. I want to do it. So you might just do it that once. But and you see how quick it is and how convenient then maybe you'll do it again. Ben Arck, does the Lightning Network need merchant adoption to succeed? I mean, I personally know and deeply respect the IPEX team. They were rolling out, well, they're the ones who are responsible for rolling out that six-week education program in El Salvador. They're the ones who, in my mind, are keeping our Salvador experiment going. They're a Guatemala based bank, which is just a neighboring country to our Salvador. And they're professional. They're excited about the technology. Super excited about the technology and their innovative. And everyone I've met from that team is just so cool. And I know that they spent, they sent, I mean, to their own cost, they sent three guys to our Salvador, sorry, to Miami, four months before the Bitcoin Miami conference to onboard merchants to accept Bitcoin Lightning payments. So people who went to the conference could then go to the store or could go to a bar, whatever, and then pay Lightning. And then it sounds to me like they've continued to roll out that scheme. Because Miami is for Latin American countries. It's a capital in their mind. It's part of Latin America. And if you look at the US, that's why most of it since it's come from, is from Miami down into Central and South America. So it's very important that they're there. And a lot of this onboarding is them just providing like an ATM. So people can convert cash to Bitcoin and then send Bitcoin back home somewhere like El Salvador and some of our Salvador can pay for their electricity bill or whatever else. So I'm extremely inspired to see Ibex on the ground doing the leg work onboarding merchants and supporting Bitcoin's growth in what it should be useful, which is banking the unbound, which a lot of people in Central and South America are as unbound. They don't have banking accounts. They don't have identities. So yeah, I'm extremely excited to see them and the good work they're doing. And I hope they keep it up. I would say that the two companies really stand out to me within the Bitcoin Lightning space who are innovative and who are just excited about this technology and want to do build cool, useful things is Ibex and Coinfloor in a Coincoin, Coinflor, I never remember the name in the base in the Al of Man. And they're very similar approaches. They've got good teams of just lighting dots man who are just building cool things. And Ibex for a good while they were using Galen bits as for one of their products, which was the PLS, they were talking about in this article. And now they've built their own POS, which is a lot like our POS in the lab bits. But that's cool. It's really nice for offering open source. So basically when our Salvador started accepting Bitcoin and all these companies had to accept Bitcoin, they needed a POS quickly. And Ibex were able to use Al and bits to be able to easily spin up this POS. And then now they've built their own systems, but you can still see that it has its lineage from the Al and Bit stuff. And it's super cool to have been able to have offering open source project, which was able to help them out of that particular point in time. And yeah, just a very exciting company and they're doing great work and long way to continue. And I know that actually Ibex and Coincoin, CoinFlore, I can remember the one that they've been recognized for the good work they're doing and they're having immense VC rounds right now. And they're going to get a huge amounts of capital and they're going to utilize that capital well. And this is partly why when you look at Bitcoins price and then it's comparable to 2017. And then you look at these sorts of companies and this is a bank, this is a legitimate cross-oval and bank, which is now engaged in lightning. And you see the amount of capital and interest was they're getting in the amount of people are recognizing the good work they're doing. That's what makes people itch about Bitcoin. Because they're going to make this work, man. Yeah, that's not just Bitcoin. It ripples into all sorts of areas such as fair and transparent voting systems, which I know Ibex have had some involvement in some of Latin American countries. And the innovation coming from that company is great and a long way to continue. Well, we're certainly in favor of Bitcoin education here. And a second Ben shout out to Ibex and others who are doing the good work on the ground with the Bitcoin education. But we must move on to the exit question. Do the people doing the Bitcoin education really understand the chicken and the egg problem of Bitcoin that you add? One side have to create merchants who are willing to accept the Bitcoin, but you also have to create consumers who want to spend the Bitcoin. And as I've mentioned cashiers who want to bring it up and maybe upsell you to some Bitcoin. Let's go to Dan Eve. Do they understand the chicken and the egg problem? Will they succeed in Bitcoin merchant adoption? I think they understand it and I hope they succeed. But that's just the way it is, right? You've got to, it's a two way thing. You've got to have both the merchant and the buyer that want to, that both have, well, at least the buyer's got to have Bitcoin and the merchant's got to accept it. But you've got to convince the merchant that if they don't already have Bitcoin, if they're not already kind of into Bitcoin, you've got to convince them that Bitcoin is a good thing to accept as a payment. So it's going to be a slow race, but it'll be worth it in the long run. And yeah, it's going to be, there'll be businesses that drop it, there'll be businesses that give negative feedback. They're like, oh, it's useless. We don't, you know, no one pays with it. But then there'll be businesses that do succeed with it. So it's just a matter of time and the spreading of the Bitcoin disease. Josh Higala, will it be all chicken, all egg, some chicken, mostly egg? What do you think? I'll earbeat it again. I think it's all about time. It just takes time and good tools. Chicken and egg problems definitely there, but at the end of the day, it's just time, it takes time. And there's a lot of people with Bitcoin now, what we need to do is get that into layer two. So it's easier, get people used to using that. I think there was a lot of friction in layer one to layer two. So people got used to doing layer one. That's why they're like, no, I'm just going to use layer one now, because that's what I used to. But I think this is actually one of the good things about, Ethereum, especially is that they're kind of open to layers two, quite reasonably. They're just like, oh no, but layer two is the way to scale. And so a lot of people that were in like, for instance, the BCH camp would end up over on Ethereum and then start to realize, oh, they need layer two. Now we understand why Bitcoin needs layer two. And here we are. So I think it just takes time. People get used to learn about it, do some transactions on it, realize how good it is, or realize what good wallets there are. And then the chicken egg problem turns into chicken egg. And that's pretty good as long as they leave the shells out. Time is such a responsible answer there, Josh. We're a lot more like Faruco Salt in the Willy Wonka movie. We want it and we want it now. That's it. Now I asked for it. I want a golden ticket now. Ben Ark, will they solve the problem? Do they understand the complexities that they are up against? 100% like they have consumers. They have an entire country of consumers. And it's how do you do the remittances from Miami to our Salvador? And then the other countries which are also going to start inevitably using and accepting Bitcoin, such as Guatemala. What are the paying points stable medium of exchange? How are they going to solve that problem? And I know I've actually been doing some research into this. And it's stuff which when it comes out can be that black one. So absolutely understand the problem. I mean, they have the consumers. You know, they're just going to facilitate the consumers to be able to move all that liquidity to their friends and family south of the border. And so when you look at these other projects, which is a theory, when they focus on building these financial tools and assets and whatever else. But we're banking the unbanked. Like that's what Bitcoin's for. That's what we're using for. So what lightning's for. And there's a few problems. There's no problem which Bitcoin can't solve with enough time and enough great minds tackling those problems. And I bet so a group of those great minds. So they don't they're doing. Well, I got to say you guys are very positive. And you're making me a lot more positive on this issue than I was when we started. I wasn't quite sure that they'd be successful with their education. But maybe you guys have turned me around. Maybe we got a chance at this. Maybe we'll think it's as well. So that you have all this talent, all this unlocked talent. And in someone like ourselves, OK. So you have this thing, which is mandated by the dictates or whatever it's bad. But you then have a bunch of people who they're using the rest of the, and they're using that for payments. They don't want to use the rest of the payments for whole or historical reasons. It's their stable, but whatever. They want access to digital payments. The fruit seller wants to be able to receive digital payments and then be able to go. I buy a Starbucks like a normal human being, how to use a banked human being. You can go pay with a digital payment for their Starbucks coffee. Like that now exists in our Salvador. And part of what's great about this whole thing and with IBEX as well is then focusing on the educational program, it's a six week program, which they're going to roll out to 17-year-olds in our Salvador. And they're going to teach them all about the technology. You know, how to sub-nodes, how to build services, how to do this, how to do that. And what I think about the things I built, and a lot of it was based from one bar in Berlin, you know, Room 77, a lot of the good ideas just came from having something in the wild, being used for payments, and many think in entire countries are using Bitcoin, the use and Lightning Network, and then all that amazing data, which we're getting back, which we can use, is information to build useful and cool things for. And it's extremely exciting. They're then to have like swathes, thousands of, you know, young, inspired kids, 17-year-olds, whatever. You want to then, you know, start developing, working on Bitcoin. It's great. But it's a real opportunity for some of those countries as well, so. Well, I wonder if we will finally reach hyper Bitcoinization, as I guess people like to call it, or as I used to call it, total Bitcoin adoption, TBA. I thought that was much better, but no one else agreed. Moving on to issue four. Issue four, BlockFi has just signed a term sheet with FTX official to secure a $250 million revolving credit facility, providing them with access to capital to further bolster their balance sheet and platform strength. Yes, Sam Bankman-Freed, I think that's his name, the owner of FTX is back again. And this time, as it says in some of the comments on this Twitter thread, he's bailing out the same people he caused to crash the lenders over at BlockFi. Josh Shigalla, what do you think about this incredibly generous offer of a $250 million revolving credit line? Is it kind and he's saving the company? Or is he helping a company with a bad plan, a bad business strategy who got themselves into trouble? Is he helping them get into more trouble? And what about this Sam Bankman-Freed of FTX who sponsors everything, everything except the world crypto network? Josh Shigalla. Salaman, Salaman. No, I mean, he should be sponsoring this network, absolutely. I don't have a boat yet. You know, I have a boat captain's hat, but no boat. Oh, yeah, that's needed. That's needed especially because treasures don't flow. It's interesting, because for instance, JP Morgan, JP Morgan bailed out a bunch of banks in the 30s to save them, knowing that it's basically good for him because it built out his network of banking facilities as well as buying up pennies on the dollar and realizing that the underlying value is actually the underlying business is actually pretty good. It's just that they screwed up. The underlying business for these credit facilities are actually quite good. They're usually over-claderalized. But seemingly centralized issues causing maybe fractional reserving is causing issues. Once again, I'm not sure. This is all just an opinion. But really, this is why I'm a big fan of decentralized finance where it's programmatic. There's debts of programmatic. So it's totally transparent. You can see what a smart contract has in it locked up. People can choose to lock up how much they need and to generate or to borrow how much they need rather than letting some company do a whole lot of total degen style investing on behalf of their creditors and then screw it all up. I think the case in a lot of these companies is they actually bought staked ETH, which is obviously not liquid. It's staked. It's not moveables. But there is a synthetic called LIDO or LIDO, something like that, ETH. And that was able to be traded. The problem was that Celsius had such a massive position in that that they literally didn't have enough liquidity to sell. And then this company, I don't know all the ins and outs, but I think they had a position in there as well. And so, yeah, these bear markets really show the people that aren't running their businesses properly. That's what it comes down to. That they show the businesses or the startups that are really not competent with holding treasury and diversifying properly. And so, yeah, we'll see. I don't think there's anything wrong with this. I think this is a very smart move on behalf of FTX and going around basically snacking on bad management and good businesses. It is interesting, Josh. I don't know if they had a fractional reserve or maybe they just weren't ready for the downtrend. Maybe they were hotling too, got caught like the rest of us. Ben, Arck, what do you think about FTX stepping up to bail out BlockFi? I mean, I rambled a little bit on the last topic. And I know nothing about this topic. So I'm just going to listen to my peers and my colleagues and all their wisdom and learn more about the topic. Sorry, I don't know much about BlockFi. But I mean, I looked through Reddit at the post and actually, sorry, I look through the Twitter feed underneath the announcement. And it was lots of people just saying, does this mean you're insolvent? So I'm assuming that they're having financial trouble and that's why they need the money. But yeah, I know too little about it to be able to implement a thing of value. Yeah, nobody ever loans you $250 million when things are going good. Dan, Ardeneev, your thoughts about BlockFi and the exciting bailout from FTX? Well, this is another, I think so. After the lunar fiasco and that sort of impact on landing and locking up funds and being able to stake in the Bitcoin and crypto, this is kind of another big negative event. I think this was the block five on specifically. If I'm not mistaken, it's something to do with exposure to three arrows capital. And I think Voyage digital also had a, and in fact, they're also bailed out by FTX. And I think it was like $100 million more. Like it was $350 million. And I think that in general, there's definitely a problem selling with Bitcoin. I remember when you interviewed Trace Mayor in Unconfiscated on 2019, about he was talking about the re-hypothication issues. So the fraction reserve lending, like, you know, isn't as bad as an issue as a hot re-hypothication. So the Bitcoin just gets to one place and goes to another and goes to another. And then everyone on the train ends up screwed. So I think that Josh made a really good point about the transparency. There's still hackable, there's still vulnerabilities whatever, but the transparency of smart contracts enables more automation so that there's more guarantees of, you know, especially when it comes to collateralized lending. More guarantees that there's positions are going to be able to be funded if something actually bad happens that debt goes bad. So it'll be interesting when we see more of that happen in Bitcoin. I know there's companies like Sofarin, for example, that do Bitcoin loans. And I think they do a virus cane and virus that and the other. But as we see smart contracts move to, on Bitcoin, more ethereum-like, you know, DeFi products where you can securely have your Bitcoin and use it collateralized. And it's not going to be susceptible to someone else's crazy hedging or hedging, but they're some other company. In the hands of another company, right? It's locked in a smart contract and you can borrow against it nice and easily, rather than it being in the hands of someone else. And you're not knowing where it's going to go because it's determined via a smart contract. So you know what the outcomes are going to be. There's obviously people comparing this to the financial crisis and saying, oh, rabble, rabble, rabble, this is Bitcoin was born out of the financial crisis. And now, you know, crypto and Bitcoin is just another, you know, a bailout sort of situation, but it's completely different, right? There happens to be a bailout of companies with bad behavior. But the thing is that Bitcoin is the money that is good. Fear is the money that's bad and all these other crazy ass debt instruments that we had, like they've created default swaps and whatever that caused the 2008 crisis. So, yeah, whilst you can make comparisons, they're very, very vaguely analogous. You know, the fact is that Bitcoin is, is, is, is, it's some money. And so it's a completely different, you know, story altogether from traditional, you know, a bit, their bailouts, that's the only similarity there is. And it makes perfectly good sense for a company that's got lots of money in the bags to sweep up businesses that were doing good. As again, as you're saying, they were doing good. They had a good underlying model, but they just stuffed it up through human error and through over, you know, from not managing their risks. So, yeah, I think it makes perfect sense. And also it restores a bit of faith in Bitcoin and crypto. It's not this complete wasteland of Wild Wild West, where no one cares about anyone else. It's complete sharkville and FTX is happy to see all the competitors completely die and for them to rise out of the ashes, you know, it's good for the ecosystem that, that, that, that we actually, you know, work together in usurping cash and fear money around the world and replace it with something more solid and more predictable and predictable via code. Let's move on to the exit question. FTX and crypto.com set the world on fire recently with an unbelievable advertising spend, FTX sponsoring every single umpire in Major League Baseball, FTX sponsoring their own arena in Miami for the Miami Heat, and a Larry David Super Bowl commercial among others. Meanwhile, on the other side, crypto.com, not to be outdone, sponsored the Los Angeles Lakers arena in Los Angeles, the crypto.com arena, as well as having the famous and now perhaps regrettable Matt Damon commercial, which seems to be the end of all positive news about Bitcoin. Josh Legala, who won FTX or crypto.com? Well, I don't know. I, the thing is, you know, when you, when you're, when you're doing really well, I think it's great at the spending marketing and, and they're, they're very profitable business. What I'm more worried about is startups in the space that raise money and then have parties before like huge parties and stuff before they've even got a product. So, you know, if there's a wildly successful business and you can do sort of ego marketing spend stuff by going around sponsoring, I don't know, arenas and things. Great. Go for it. You know, it helps out. One thing I do remember is Bitpay back in the day, calling it, you know, the Bitcoin Cup or something. I don't know what I want. The Bitcoin ball. The Bitcoin they could have called the Bitpay ball, but they wanted everyone to invest with them. Yeah. So, so that was one cool thing is that they actually, you know, it went with Bitcoin rather than Bitpay. And, you know, I just hope that, that, you know, actually one thing that they should be spending money on is education rather than just weird silly ads. Like really get people educated, get them learning, put money spent into boots in the ground, business development, getting people accepting it, trading it, you know, not just speculating and stuff like that. So that's what I would like to see. And so that's a weird answer to your question. Education, that's not as exciting as a super bowl commercial. Ben Arck, who's the winner? FTX or crypto.com, Matt Damon or Larry David. This is, this is again, going back to YBX, like they could be just doing these fantasy things. They could be pouring some of that. So they got huge capital. They could be pouring into these fantasy ad projects, but they're not the building stuff, which is great. But crypto.com, like I, just because they had the coin crypto.com, I put like a couple hundred bucks into it, because they said, well, that's innovative, you know, and I want to say, they're called the coin, like the dot com. And they also got crypto.com, so they're probably going to do all right. And then I logged into my account and I had like, is like thousands, like, you know, $3,000 worth of money. And then I was like, oh, wow, cool. This would be my new shit coin stash. I'll speculate with it. And I tried to lock back into it recently. And my account's just gone. And I'm like, okay, well, don't crypto.com, like, you know, this great international player and this incredible technology, like, where's my account? Like I was logging in with the same email. And then I went through my, I was like, I'm maybe I'm crazy. And then I went through my email. I had all these emails from crypto.com. And I was like, no, this is the email I used. And now I had to create an app created in my balance is zero. So I sent a message to their support team. And then I like, if I can help me ask for this, this is scammy, crappy shit coin exchange. But I know there is like three grams worth of crypto.com coin on there, whatever. So I should probably try and chase it. But yeah, I was just reminded that, you know, no matter how cool up you are, Elf, the main name you have, you're still a shit coin exchange in your technology sucks. That's a very reminiscent of when Ripple used to offer self-hosted wallets. And they gave me, I don't know, $25 in Ripple. And for the first time in a long time, I was like, I'm going to leave that there. I'm going to keep that in Ripple and see how it goes. My big $25 investment. And sure enough, by the time Ripple had gone to the moon, and I came back to check on my, you know, valuable $25, they decided to cancel their self-hosting wallet program. And they'd sent me an email that I didn't read, that told me how to get my account and my $25 that they gave me for free was soon vaporized. It probably would have been $125. I could have gotten all the pens and pencils that I wanted. But yeah, I've been there, Ben, that it's strange when you have an account and you think you own something. And then you don't own anything at all. So like a trace mayor said, own your own keys. Keep your Bitcoin and your other coins off of those servers. And then you really own something. But D-Trace-Mah, God bless, Trace-Mah, bringing back. He was a good guy. It's too bad they had to use good Medicaid him and throw him under the bus because he liked an alt coin once. Everyone likes an alt coin once. It's a shame. You should come back. It was cool. It was a member-wimble coin. Yeah, I mean, a member-wimble was good technology. And like Trace-Mah, he was like privacy on the chain. When he privacy on the chain, he used to be funnigable. That was this thing. And you know, he just showed me a great speech about the network effects of Bitcoin. I mean, I always talk about collectibles and other things, but he just nailed it so well with those network effects. And it was a wonderful speaker for Bitcoin. He was. And lightning, sorry, member-wimble is now on Litecoins. Yes, but they burned him down. They made him feel bad and now he disappeared. Dan, the member-wimble was sorry. Number-wimble as well. It was a lot of Bitcoin core developers. And lightning developers are very excited about number-wimble was dropped in there with Slack in the middle of the night by Voldemort or whatever it was. And they used these Harry Potter names. And it was all very and now on. And it's great concept. And yep, it's been Trace-Mah. $157, volume. I think it was Tom. Tom Marvel also riddled with something, which is Voldemort. But Dan, Eve, would you rather have FTX Arena in Miami or crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles? Who won the marketing battle of the century? Oh, I don't think the clash of the marketing titans has finished yet. There's, you know, we're just in bear market. There are things are going to be really heating up again when we get back into the harvining coming up. And everyone getting ready to build up their customer base, you know, back, back. I think crypto.com, they've got that card thing, you know, the way you get Bitcoin back or crypto back or whatever for spending, which I think is a good idea. Although it does cost you, you've got to kind of lock up funds. And I think ultimately, the showing over until Matt Damon sings. And it's never too late for some more great Bitcoin advertisements. And I hope we'll see them in the future. I just had a recent thing where I was flipping through channels and I was watching some motorbike, motorcross racing. And sure enough, in the background on a bunch of the signs, some company who was a Bitcoin company had put the Bitcoin logo and their name all over the race. So even if you're just watching some random TV, you can't get away from Bitcoin. And it's still a bear market. So there's still marketing going on out there. Congratulations to both FTX and crypto.com for spending a ton of money. I think the real winners are anyone who collected the money, whether it was for the stadium sponsorship or the television ads or even just making the television ads. A lot of people got paid up and down the lines there. So shout out to anyone who got paid. We're running out of time. Josh Sugalli, do you have a prediction or a story of the week? Go ahead. I don't really know predictions or stories of the weeks. All I have to say is that, yeah, we're just, just keep building, you know, that's what we're doing. Through this bear market, don't lose sight of the actual evolution of money. The price might be down, but you can keep on building. And that's really what we're doing at the standard.io. And yeah, it's great where some of the best work comes out in these times, because it's just heads down and working. Ben, are you a prediction or a story of the week? Go ahead. Sorry if the week is, I was finally playing with hosted channels and it was blew my mind. And I loved it. I installed, there's a, so Anton and Ilia, who made the simple Bitcoin wallet and the Bitcoin Lightning wallet, which is the first Lightning wallet, phone Lightning wallet and still one of the best ones, but they made the simple Bitcoin wallet, which is a great Lightning wallet, really great. The, the, justice is kind of similar to, we're not similar, but it's kind of similar to what you're doing with the standard stuff. They're working on using hedging, which was interesting, the hedging story, on creating stable meet and week exchanges using like a fourth version of simple Bitcoin wallet, which is very interesting. Anyway, simple Bitcoin wallet was great about it, is when you install it, sadly it's only for Android, but when you install it, you automatically get a hosted channel. So what's a hosted channel, a hosted channel, is it's a Lightning channel, which somebody else owns, so it's custodial, but rather than, you know, other, so it's obviously you use something like Wall of Satoshi or if you use a blue wallet or something, they can technically like deduct funds, and there's no real way you can hold them to account. As with the hosted channel, you have like a cryptographic proof, so you can actually say that, you know, somebody ripped you off. So it's on that spectrum of custodianship, it's like a good version of custodianship in that, you know, if there's a node and you've got a hosted channel with them, then you can hold that node run into account, and if there's a big play like Alan Bigger, or something is offering this kind of service, and it's in their interest off one of these services, it's just a very useful function for the Lightning Network for you to be able to very quickly get inbound liquidity while you build up your channels and while you build up your network availability, so you can get inbound in our ban liquidity. So I played with Fiat Jeff's fork of, so in simple Bitcoin wallet, they have a thing called a Morton, which does the, it's like a light node, which does these hosted channels, and basically a Claire has this plug-in, so if you have a Claire, you can offer hosted channels to people and get some yield for it. And simple Bitcoin wallet uses that, so you instantly get this hosted channel, which you can then use to receive and send phones, but then you can also build up your own channels as well. So it's a really interesting way of just people instantly be able to use Lightning in a way, which is custodial, but it's not asked custodial or something like Wall of Satoshi, which is good. It's a great thing. Fiat Jeff's forked a Morton, and he's made this thing called cliche, and cliche is great, man. I did a YouTube video, and within like one and a half minutes of my awkward typing, I was able to download the light node, light knightly node, install it, and get a host of channel, and get inbound liquidity and receive an inbound payment, instantly. So for a service or a business which wants to engage with the lightning network, this is really easy on ramp for them, but they're still then have the ability to build up there, their channels and earn liquidity on channels. So it's just a great project. So cliche by Fiat Jeff on L&Bits infinity, so that's our go version of L&Bits. We actually have that built in, so you can run cliche. I wanna get on legend as well, it's super exciting. And again, I wanted to connect to a screen share. I can't, why can't I do screen shares? I couldn't do a screen share last time, we did a sucks. Anyway, there's a project by Anton and by Lea. They have a project called Standard Sats, which is extremely exciting, but it's got terrible branding and it's really like, you can kind of see why it's like flying in with the radar, because there's some sort of something we say, that publicize very well. But what it does is you have, so if you have an Clare node, you can install this plugin, which allows you to do hosted channels, and then you can install another plugin, which can do hedging to a collider and then some other exchanges. So you can have like a USD denominated so your Sats can be denominated in USD. So you can put $10 of USD in, and then the Sats kind of rebalance themselves. So as you've always got $10 worth of USD, essentially, you know, it sticks to the $10 peg, and the way it's done is through this hedging mechanism, very interesting. As a kind of bandaid, until something like the Stangio is launched, like a reliable, good stablecoin solutions, which is really so needed in our industry for people who want to use Bitcoin and these cryptocurrencies for medium of exchange. So extremely excited about that. And what's super cool about it is that I was chatting to the guys, and I was like, okay, so you've got like actual currencies on there, such as USD and then GPP, GPP, Euro, yen, that sort of thing, which you can peg to. And I was like, what about the Welsh pound? And obviously the Welsh pound doesn't exist. But like, you know, I could spin up in a clear node, and then in my local village, people could be downloading this wallet, use it as a host to channel on my node, and then it could be denominated in, you know, Cumbria coin or Welsh pound. And as a sort of like cultural, medium of exchange, it could be something like the Al Salvador Dallec, you could similarly use it, like you could have like, you could kind of spin up something, which is peg to the USD, but call it the Al Salvador Dallec, and it's their Sats, you know, a peg. And the mechanism they have in there, I mean, they're very transparent. They say, look, this is an experiment, but it's a very exciting experiment. And I'm also very excited to be, yeah, so basically I PR'd their project and said, can we get Cumbria coin in the Welsh pound? And they were like, fuck it, that's a great idea. Like brilliant, like let's have a non-existent currency, which exists on there, which is then peg to something like the British pound, which could be used as a, you know, medium of exchange in Wales. And we're actually using Sats, but it means that the Sats, although it's hosted, sorry, I'm going, Robert Singer, although it's using Sats, the, it will have the name of Cumbria coin or Welsh pound. So I think it's like an interesting, a very cool hack, and these hosted channels are great, and these light nodes are great, and I look forward to experimenting and playing with them a little bit more. Very cool. Dan Eave, a prediction, or a story of the week, go ahead. I have no story of the week, but my prediction is that this Sunday, although I hope the weather gets better, because it's peeing it down right now. But this Sunday, I'm going to see the Eagles for the first time, live ever, with my fan, so my, my sister and my dad and mom, we're going to go and rock out to the Eagles. Wow. And yeah, and so I'm really looking forward to it. And yeah, I was going to take my Bitcoin flag, because the last Bitcoin, the last class of Bria went to, I promised myself, I was like, I'm going to take a Bitcoin flag. This is before I owned the Bitcoin flag that went to Stonehenge. And I was going to be like, I want to be that lone nutter that's with, you know, with a giant Bitcoin flag, and just like I could go, and I wish I did, man, because now I could be like, other, you know, look back at videos and be like, that was me, that was me with the Bitcoin flag, a Glasto, whatever. But I didn't do it. I was going to do it at the Eagles, but unfortunately, it looks like flags are banned. So very disappointed, but I will be seeing the Eagles, which I'm really, really pumped about. So non crypto, but a tenuous link, actually, obviously I covered Hotel, California, a bit with hotel Poloniaxia, but yeah, but looking forward to it, because just, yeah, the Eagles are a great band, and it's going to be a cool little event. I don't have already had my little moment, but next week on the second of July, Avon Valley in the UK, if anyone is UK resident, then go along to Avon Valley, to the Bitcoin adventure. It's a one day event. We'll be great. If you Google Bitcoin event, Avon Valley, you'll find it. I'll be there. Hopefully, Dan will be there. And Roger from the chat will be there as well. Also, is that the lightning event a couple of years ago, and I've been to many events, but I remember chatting to Roger the lightning event and a couple of years ago. And we're actually also, I saw in Hotel Poloniaxia, but is it a sleepover band? Is it camping the Bitcoin? Avon Valley has, yeah, so it has, it's a nice family venue, actually, if you've got family kids, whatever, but you don't need to, they have a bar as well, so you can just be a, you know, a deck of an adult as well. But, yeah, it's a, they have like a campsite as well attached to it. It's beautiful, man. It's a really nice venue they've got going on there. And it's, it's, it's, go to that website and you'll, I wish I could do the screen share. You'll, you'll see us. It's, it's cool that these, someone who has like a venue like that is interested in Bitcoin. And wants to educate people on Bitcoin on this some great Bitcoin, UK Bitcoin is still going. I think people are quite scaring. It should be a great event. Hopefully we could do some video for WorldCraft Network, while we're there. Oh, screen share is turned on, Ben. You have a software issue. But yeah, Dan, Dan, I sure hope the weather improves for the Eagles. That sounds like a great concert. Be ashamed as it's rained out. My story of the week is I'm, I'm still traveling. I'm back in Paris. So I got some wine and everything. I just want to say cheers to everybody. Thanks for watching the show. Thanks for giving us a thumbs up, subscribing down there and for chatting in the chat putting up the comments later. We really appreciate it. We don't, you know, the show isn't monetized anymore. We don't put up the QR code. We don't want any donations. We just want you guys to watch it and to have conversations and ideas and thoughts about Bitcoin and other things. So we're excited that you're here, even if you're a smaller audience, we appreciate you more because we can have more interaction with you and you can really get more out of it. So bring to the show what you can. Give us some comments, give us some chats, thumbs up and stuff. And until next time, bye.