#332 — The Bitcoin Group #332 - FTX Collapses - Crypto Craters - $3B Seized - Shell Mines Bitcoin

The Bitcoin Group, the American Original. For over the last 10 seconds, the sharpest Satoshi's, the best bitcoins, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Dan Eave, the crypto raptor. Hello there, crypto folks. Victoria Jones from Satoshi's page. Hi there. Josh Shagalla from thestandard.io. Put that cookie down. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network, moving on to issue one. Issue one. Why Bitcoin and Ethereum prices are reeling amid FTX bankruptcy, which was finalized this morning as FTX filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. We've all been talking about it on Twitter nonstop. It started when CZ from Binance posted that they were upset with FTX for lobbying against Binance. After the upset lobbying CZ threatened to sell FTX's FTT token, which as it turned out, Binance was a heavy investor in FTX, then acknowledged that they had possibly a liquidity problem as the story has developed anywhere from four to six billion dollars in liquidity missing allegedly. Binance then refused to invest in FTX. FTX filed bankruptcy. The Bitcoin price dropped at least 15% and is perhaps still falling. Ethereum down 25%. Many people saying it's worse than the 1929 stock market crash, the largest crash in American history. Dan Eave. Let's get it started. What do you think about SBF, CZ and the collapse of FTX? Well, I think after this year with three-hour capital block fire and Voyager, it seemed like there was going to be a pattern right. We knew there would be a ripple effect of anyone else that was involved. FTX went and tried to bail out all three of those. But no one really knew at the time that they also did the same for Alameda and that in the background to save Alameda, they then took as leverage by the sounds of it, the 1.5 or 1.8 billion dollars of FTT token that Alameda had from the ICO. It's all a massive cluster mess of craziness. It's just another scenario where you need to just hold onto your own coins. People are comparing or dragging Bitcoin specifically down with this whole mess and it's far from that. There's no comparison. Bitcoin, you are your own bank. This is the equivalent of buying something from a market and just leaving your stuff at the market, then the people in the market look after whatever you trade it there. Then the market gets robbed or whatever or gets set to caught on fire. The whole point of Bitcoin is that you put your money on and it, you can buy something on an exchange and then take it straight off and then be custard. It's the custodian of your own money and then there's no third party that's involved. It's just another story, unfortunately, of people losing a hell of a lot of money. There was also not just the users but the employees by the sounds of it. SBF convinced a lot of them to take stock options or to buy stock and like double your money overnight up to $250,000. He basically convinced them to invest in the company and said that they would be absolutely solid and risk management. There's so many tweets being brought up about how he was saying that they're completely backed. They're not leveraging other people's money and they're very risk averse and blah, blah, blah. It turns out, unfortunately, even his employees took a big hit. However, it sounds like when he opened up withdrawals, didn't they do it specifically for residents of the Bahamas where most of the employees were either based or had companies. Essentially, he let the employees do a bank run before anyone else could take the start taking their funds out, which is pretty messed up in itself to screw your customers. Obviously, it's kind of nice in a way that he didn't let his staff completely miss out. The whole thing is just crazy. If it was the employees that it bailed out, it could have just been his friends and Bahamas and himself maybe that he allowed to do that. There's also a strange withdrawal issue where perhaps they were allowing Tron withdrawals. There might have been some under the table money or something. The price of Tron on the FTX exchange went way up because it was seen as a way to get out. So maybe you take a hit buying Tron, but then you get to export your money. I'm told that at this time, all of that's been stopped by the courts and that whatever is left is going to be in a bankruptcy proceeding. It's not just going to be given to whoever logs in first. Yeah. I saw that there was a freeze, so eventually everything was frozen by the courts. Whether it leads to prosecutions, you know, I doubt it. Everyone seems to be able to open up these companies and just get away with basically running them completely into the ground. So we'll see how that pans out. But ultimately it's just another sad story of an exchange that's gone down. I'm sure there's going to be a ripple effect here of other companies that were leveraged with FTX that aren't coming out of the woodwork yet, but are yet to kind of to what was the coin multi coin or coin coin multi or something like that. Another 15% of their tokens, red FD or sorry, their assets, red FDX, which is, you know, is gone down in, in saying so there's going to be a lot of players big companies that are going to miss out. So even if you, I think the main thing is think about like this, if you haven't been hit by FTX directly, it's now the time to pull all your coins off of exchanges because there's a chance that they have been hit by FTX and the rest of the ripple effect. And you could be hit by as a byproduct of FTX going down if the exchange that you're trading on or you have Bitcoin stored on or other assets, if they are full victim to the FTX sort of shit coin, I mean, as they call it. So yeah, contagion is crazy. Dan is, Dan is calling for a bank run. Bank road. And it's not just the crypto exchanges. It's also the banks that funded FTX who have lost a lot of money who now have seen their stock go down and then perhaps they're insolvent. There's insure there's retirement companies that put all their money into FTX. And like Dan said, they left it there. They could have traded for Bitcoin or whatever they wanted, put it in cold storage, but they just left it there. Tom Brady. It's in Tom Brady, a bunch of fake stores. Perhaps 650 million invested into FTX perhaps large. Victoria Joe, welcome to the show. The most exciting week in crypto. What do you think about Sam Bankman freed and the collapse of FTX? Well, it certainly generated a lot of conversation. I have to say that. I don't think I've been watching YouTube quite so avidly. And I'm normally quite an avid watcher. So yeah, very, very interesting. I think the parallel you make or whoever made with 1929 is very interesting because of course, that was the stage when the Fiat system was unregulated. And of course, this is the kind of craziness that can go on once you have money that's kind of unleashed so to speak. And of course, the key thing when I was reading through the article that really jumped out at me, of course, was the word centralized. You know, the FTX exchanges, a centralized exchange. And of course, this is a big part of what we're debating and we're trying to change, you know, the difference between centralized systems and decentralized systems because of course, centralized systems are vulnerable to this kind of corruption and abuse. And so of course, by having all of the rules and the management of the system, decentralized like it is on Bitcoin. This is these are the two big differences that I think people are still struggling to really understand. I mean, there's a lot of conversation at the moment about the dangers of CBDCs and people getting all whipped up about that. But, you know, not many people are inserting into the conversation. The fact that, you know, we've actually got a different choice here, guys, you know, the fact that, you know, we've got a decentralized system that doesn't involve any of this. I mean, of course, at the moment, the price of Bitcoin is being affected by all of the drama that's going on. But of course, it's because it's being corrupted by all of these altcoins and these centralized exchanges. And unfortunately, it's still contaminated by that. And of course, that's symptomatic of the fact that you've got an entire generation who don't know how else money works. So they've kind of, they thought, oh, Bitcoin sounds like a good idea. And they've tried to replicate the entire Fiat system with other altcoins and, you know, creating unregulated chaos in the altcoin scene and then completely oblivious to what it is that Bitcoin actually does that's different and how it changes it. And so, you know, I think this drama is a very salutrious lesson. And I'm very interested to see how it all plays out. Well, and I agree. I don't think it's a Bitcoin problem. It's not like the code's been cracked. It's not like the system has crashed. And Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin. You can send it to anybody you want to. You can even use the lightning network. I think this has more to do with traditional finance and traditional exchanges. Apparently, there are no rules from what we're learning more and more from inside this company. They were all living in a condo in the Bahamas. They were all dating each other and they were using customer funds to pay off bad investments that Alameda research had made using customer funds. Again, they had full access to them. They had centralized control. They're running their own exchange. I don't know how these kids got to be controlling this exchange. I do recall the shocking rise of sandbankman freed. I remember the FTX badges appearing on the umpires in Major League Baseball, the Miami Heat basketball arena sponsored by FTX. Their ads were everywhere. Personally, they bought Blockfolio. They changed Blockfolio into their application and suddenly they were everywhere on our scene. And I was sitting there the whole time and you have that kind of Malcolm Gladwell blink thing where if you're an expert and something looks right wrong, you notice and this kid with his curly hair and his lazy t-shirts and all these strange videos about how generous he was and how altruistic he was and what a great company he was building. It just never seemed right. It always seemed too fast. I never understood how this guy got ahead of Jesse Powell and Kraken or Brian Armstrong and Coinbase, all these established players. But there he was meeting with presidents donating millions of dollars to political campaigns, doing lobbying. All the things that you would think would lead to a positive business environment while the whole time behind the scenes allegedly they're using customer funds as their own piggy bank. Josh, Shagala, you are familiar with Bitcoin exchanges. Certainly, there should be some kind of rules to stop people from taking customer funds and doing whatever they want with them. Yeah, I mean, there are rules. It's not like there's no rules. There are rules. But yeah, to that point that you made, there's always, I've always found that fishy. How the heck did this guy come out of nowhere? This empire just came out of nowhere and then died out of nowhere too. It always seemed fishy. That's where I put my tinfoil hat on a little bit because I want to know who was pulling strings behind this kid. Well, and remember the background that they presented to us, they told us generally it was said that he was like a shit coin trader and an ICO trader and he made billions of dollars. In my head, that just set off flags. I was like, I don't know a single shit coin and ICO trader that's on the up and up. I think none of them want their name in the paper. Yeah, this guy is suddenly in charge of the biggest business in the world based upon these qualifications. Well, I just heard that he was trading genius and so on and so forth. But yeah, like how did all that liquidity get there? Who was behind this? And I feel like there's something fishy there. I don't know what it is, but it is what it is. But there is contagion already. Blockfire managed to get out of the whole three hours capital, this whole lunar fall by the skin of their teeth. And I even saw tweets from people that used to work there saying and then went to Celsius saying, oh God, I wish I never left Blockfire. Well guess what? Now Blockfire is hiring bankruptcy lawyers because of the FTX debacle. So there is contagion. I want to quickly talk about regulation. What I find really fascinating is that this clown world establishment was the heaviest talker when it comes to regulating more and more of this space. And for me, it reeks of this sort of Randian protectionist racket by right. If you are able to go in there and write the regulation, then you can sort of protect what you've built. That goes hand in hand with the where did the hell did this kid come from? Why did he all of a sudden? And why is the three names? It's only ever, it's only ever people that kill presidents that get three names. All three names constantly talked about. I don't know. It's just strange. But yeah, the thing with regulations is that it's funny that there is this really badly run business absolutely calling for some of the strongest regulations and wanting to sit at the table. And if anyone watched the debate between the absolutely astoundingly eloquent the Eric Voorhees compared to the twitchy can't string a sentence together, Sam Bankman fried. I like to call him nowadays is that it just it just reeks of someone that really can't sort of piece two and two plus together kind of like me right now. And and and there you have Mr. Voorhees just very eloquently going through every single philosophy that we've all talked about in the in the Bitcoin space of look, read the on these exchanges need regulation. But I think it's also up to us in the industry to call like when we at Voltoro invented the glass books protocol to have pure and utter transparency, the radical transparency in in the crypto space. It wasn't for no reason. It was because of Mt. Fox collapsing when you know crack and yeah, they use they use the the mechanism of the hashing the mercury tree that that Peter Todd and Gregory Maxwell wrote back in the day. But even that is too like techie. There are ways of making exchanges purely transparent. But it's some it's really a shame that we as users don't demand more from the places that we put our money in. And really it's about being antifragile. I think every one of these events allow us to step back and build better things. The problem is the governments come in with big bank interests and they write the next regulations. So they basically crush the little guy. It's already happening in the UK. The UK has basically allowed only large established players to get licenses. And the rest, well, they have to go. So it's just it's going to be a massive headache for new startups in the space that are wanting to put the wanting to code things. And this was the beautiful thing about Bitcoin. Anyone could write something and attach themselves permissionlessly. But we allow these exchanges to get so ridiculously big that and then we don't demand transparency from them. And when stuff like this happens, we're all surprised. But the fact the other funny thing is the other interesting thing is that Sam really and you touched on it before Dan and Victor that they they allowed behind the players to withdraw. Okay. So they're not going to have like really angry people coming and fire bombing their house. They're not going to have like, you know, people at their windows at night because well, they got their money. The US regulator has massive teeth. They have global police force that go around picking you up. So let's also let the US, you know, get their coins out. And again, wreaks of self protection rather than something good for the for the user. In terms of the wider market, I don't really understand. I know that you mentioned the 1920s there, but really it's not made that I've been surprised at the market. Bitcoin dropped a K. What did you do? That's not the biggest deal. Ethereum dropped from one five to 1000. Bigger, but it's now back up at one two. I've been really surprised and I think what's happened is, you know, yeah, we've got contagion coming. We've already had a long winter behind us. We were already starting to feel those warm fuzzy rays of spring, crypto spring coming. And in crypto spring, really, it's the hardest of hard that have been through the winter that have held those coins and they're not going to let go. And even the calamity that we're going through right now isn't giving these people an excuse to let go. Yeah, of course, there's always trading. There's always volatility. There's always shock, but I'm actually surprised how little it moved. So that's my take on the SPS. Well, traditionally in the mainstream media, they use three names when identifying an assassin to reduce confusion. So if it was John Doe Smith, you don't piss off all the John Smiths in the world who don't want to be confused with an assassin. I suppose in the same way, you don't want to be confused with San Benjamin Fried if your name was fried or, you know, something similar. But let's talk some more about these people living in a condo dating each other in their 20s and 30s and taking everyone else's money to solve their problems yet going around to all these YouTube shows saying he's the most generous billionaire. He's the richest guy taking all these pictures with all these celebrities and especially politicians. I want to ask the question is Sam Bankman Fried a psychopath as well as these people who are around him who are supporting him? Do we have like a new psychopathy where people don't care about ruining people's retirements? They don't care about Mr. Wonderful from Shark Tank having allegedly a billion dollars in here. Tom and Jazeal having 650 million invested in this thing and they're just in retirement plans. They're users, small people, big people and they just take their money and just keep living their lives by and Lamborghini's whatever they're doing. Dan Eve, what's wrong with these people? Like at their core, is it just the money? They just wanted more money? Well, I think with SPF, I'm going to admit I was fooled. Like I thought this guy seems really down to earth. He's not like the kind of, you know, like arrogant kind of the profile that's fit one of these, you know, billionaire overnight people. He had a plan to give loads to charity and I thought, oh, he comes across this kind of, you know, quite nice or maybe in actual fact, he was just too much of a nice guy. Sounds like he was around, you know, he wasn't making decisions by himself. He was in a house of people that had a lot of influence over him. The fact that he went out and like disregard, oh, it did not, he disregarded, but like I didn't even consult with stakeholders of FTX, like any investors or any of the major stakeholders about just basically throwing money at Almeida. It sounds, Almeida, it sounds insane. And it sounds like the sort of thing that would happen if, you know, if, and I'm not trying to make excuses for him anyway, because what he did was crazy. But it sounds like the sort of, there's almost like I can envision some like, some one of the people in the house was like, one of these evil like say, you should go and give the money to Almeida. You know, and he's like, oh, I don't really know if I should do that. I don't know, you know, and he's like, yeah, well, you're saved of it. You'll save the industry. You know, it doesn't, I don't know. He just came across as someone that wasn't like the, the rest of this, the kind of, yeah, billionaire overnight people. So I'm really, I'm really gutted that I was taken for a ride. I was like, oh, this guy's like, you know, doing loads for charity. This sounds like a really kind of, you know, a reasonable face of a crypto exchange that you want rather than someone who's like, you know, playing to the crazy, not crazy route, but you know, I mean, just, I don't know. Yeah, I was taken for a ride. WSBF and, yeah, I don't know. I think that ripples are far and wide. We haven't even seen the effects just yet. But you know, Bitcoin's brilliance is its resilience. And you don't need, you don't even need an exchange to trade Bitcoin. You can find people on the street if you really wanted to. So yeah, so there's just another side just take your keys off the exchanges, take your Bitcoin off the exchanges and don't rely on centralization. The whole point of like Bitcoin was to, was to, you know, mitigate the risk of centralization in third parties. And you know, we get this lesson time and time and time again. And you know, unfortunately, the news miss out. Well, and as Josh was saying, this could have been the greatest thing ever for Bitcoin, right? Lobbying with the politicians, he's donating money to the politicians. He's getting on their good side. He's even siding against CZ and Binance a little bit, which is obviously biting the hand that feeds you a huge mistake in retrospect. But if you're looking at it from a lobbying perspective, he's trying to present himself as the American exchange that's going to follow the rules, whereas CZ left Malta, he left China. This currently in the Cayman Islands or something, Binance doesn't have a permanent home. They're a very interesting organization, let's say while we wait for that one to unravel. Looking at his background some more just from Wikipedia right here, his parents are both law professors, not just law professors, law professors at Stanford Law School, one of the greatest schools in the country. He was assumed was raised right. He was raised by lawyers who's raised not to break the law yet here. Just dipping into company funds, a clear violation of the separation of company funds. He had his own money. He could have done whatever, but he needed these company funds to fix his other mistakes. He also has a really interesting thing I'd like to see if Victoria has more to say on this. Sam apparently believed in something called effective altruism, which is a research field and practical community that aims to find the best ways to help others and put them into practice. So it was so strange. All these videos about how he's given to charity and what a nice guy is and how he's it down to earth, billionaire, maybe multi billionaire at one point. And all of this is either false or a front or intentionally false, which would be much worse. Yet these two lost law parents like these incredible minds, no doubt. And he must be clever as well. What happened here? What failed in this guy's life, Victoria? Well, I think it's just a reflection of how easily people can be jubed, isn't it really? I mean, people are easily fooled by people who seem to be nice and kind, but behind the scenes can be very different. And by the same token, you know, some people who can seem quite rough and unreasonable. And dare I say it, people like Trump, you know, and if you actually dig down, I mean, I'm not going to get political and I know that's controversial. But if you actually dig down and actually analyze some of the things that he does, you know, some of his actions may have more integrity compared to some of the things he says, but of course, everyone gets really irate about the surface of what people say rather than actually look at their actions. And often that's that's a good determining factor. And of course, you know, you've got a whole host of you've got a whole media organization that's just trained people in propaganda, you know, propaganda is a very real thing. And you know, people know how to manipulate the media. And so if he does have a strong background, strong professional background, it's easy to see how he could have links to people who would show him how to do those sorts of things properly, also links to people who could give him funding to get started. And you know, it's not necessarily who he's linked to, but maybe the resources that he has that has led to him, him rising so quickly. So yeah, and people really need to learn not to take things at face value and do a bit of digging. I mean, I haven't actually heard about him until this week because I'm, you know, I'm much more focused on just the Bitcoin space than what's going on with the cryptocurrencies. I mean, you know, it's bad. But of course, people get easily sucked into it. I mean, they're taught how Bitcoin's great. And the first thing they do is figure out, you know, well, I've heard XRP's even better. You know, it's like, Prometheus, you know, God's gave Prometheus fire and so on. But we need pink fire or we need purple fire with sparkles. So, you know, so everyone's gone nuts. They were trying to find a new different fire. And it's like they don't know how to think critically or have any kind of discernment. And so is it surprising that things like this actually happen? I mean, it boggles, it boggles my mind because, you know, I never would have imagined. I mean, obviously I heard about the, the Mt. Gox thing when that happened. But you would have thought we would kind of kind of learn to lessons from history. But it's amazing how long it takes human beings to figure this stuff out and actually change their behavior based on what they've witnessed. So yeah, I mean, part of the course really, I mean, it's a, it's a tough lesson. But eventually we have to learn it, you know, not everyone can be trusted. You can't take things at face value. You need to be more discerning and have more critical thinking skills. Well, and Mt. Gox, we can see that as a failure of an amateur. And maybe he was even set up to fail. Maybe he had an exchange that didn't have the money that it said it had. We don't know. But this guy is supposed to be a professional, right? And as Dan always does, I want to reference a South Park episode here. There's a South Park episode about Mexican Joker and they say, well, if you do this to them, if you put them in prison, if you treat them horribly, if you do all this, you're going to create a Joker like you're creating a super villain. And I look at this guy's background and maybe his parents were both very busy at work. Maybe they didn't pay attention to him. Maybe they didn't speak to him. Maybe there's some kind of academic failing here that I'm not seeing from the outside. But I just don't see how we get Mexican Joker from these two Stanford law school professors. Just unbelievable. Josh Shagalla, what do you think about the Mexican Joker? They even had the names on the umpires, the people who decide balls and strikes, the source of authority and all of major league baseball playoffs, world series, FTX. They sponsored fortune cookies. I want to go over this again. I think this is amazing. Obviously, I'm in Sacramento in Las Vegas. So I've had different fortune cookies, different Chinese food. I think they went directly to the fortune company factory. They got the front of the fortunes changed. They say like live life, one block at a time, stuff like that. Every learn a new dose trick, you know, that kind of thing. Bitcoin references on the back. It said FTX, the greatest marketing I've ever seen. I was telling my roommate, I've only seen, you know, learn Chinese and lottery numbers on the back of fortune cookies. These guys broke through. There's obviously some incredibly smart and talented people setting up all these marketing deals doing all this work. They got Tom Brady, but it ends in this just complete shit show. And again, I don't think it's Bitcoin's fault. I think that they use customer funds inside their organization. It sounds like the people in the lower levels, they knew about this. They knew that there was only about five people and they're all dating each other who had access to the customer funds who knew about it. And maybe some of them should have blown the whistle. Maybe there's a failing of the internal company culture, but a lot of companies have this where there's a certain cabal at the top that are running these things. Even now we see with Twitter, they've removed all the managers and bought in two or three people to run it from the top. We have no idea what they're doing. Neither do the people that work at Twitter. Josh, you go, what do you think? Is he a psychopath? Was he raised wrong? Is this a failing of his parents? Obviously, they'll have to take time off work from Stanford Law School to go visit him in jail in the future. So I plan for that. Yeah, I mean, I think it goes back to the YUS and Bahamas first. I think his parents are probably giving him some good little tips there on how to maybe negotiate this. But really, you mentioned before that Mr. Wonderful, the guy that just entered the crypto yesterday and yet is the expert somehow and is pulled out on all these panels while old school Bitcoin is like ourselves, left to do Zoom calls with each other. So look, I've read this article of how Sequoia Capital, apparently the smartest money in the room is sitting there while Sam Beckman-Fried is pitching to them while playing some game. And they're all like, wow, he's so good and they're all applauding him and saying how great he is because he just doesn't care. And of course, and they show it in with billions. And you've got to think, guys, you're literally doing what, well, it's funny, it's sort of human, right? When everyone is in euphoria, when the markets are in pure euphoria, then everybody is a winner. Everyone's so clever. Everyone's just throwing money at each other. And so this idea of dumb and smart money is really not that different. I've seen it with VCs. When it's a bear market, they're like, oh no, crypto, it's pretty much gone. I'm pulling out. I'm not. Now, when it's summertime, they're all just showering it, all sorts of startups are getting all sorts of money. And so I don't feel sorry for the Sequoias and the Mr. Wondafors and even Tom Brady and the book, like they have very good people to manage their money. They're not sitting there deciding where to put their money. And look, we need better people in this space that actually understand risk management and don't throw billions at kids that have a weird key swapping party house and enjoy other people's money. It's just wherever there is money. And this goes to show how crypto has become money, Bitcoin especially. But also the stablecoin space is that where there is money, there is fraud. There always is because fraudsters try to get the money from you. So the way we need to look at it, we need to step back as an industry and we need to come up with it. Like I'm a big fan of technical regulation. I really like it. I think this is where the DeFi space really accelerates because there's nothing you can really do to regulate the DeFi space. You can, you can just ban it all together in a certain country, but effectively you can't do much. There's smart contracts running in the cloud. But really what we're doing here is, and we're seeing the space evolve where as soon as there's a hack, there's people building the next version that's better and there's better systems in place like code auditors that look for these sorts of vulnerabilities and build around them. Plus there's best practices that start to come out and say, look, I don't support them because they don't do XYZ and that's why this other contract failed. So really, I'm saddened to say that we as an industry have failed to call out exchanges. And I remember back in the day when Bitcoin was just a very small bunch of people on Bitcoin talk forums and we would call out the smallest things. As soon as the hash rate got too large in one pool, we'd all be screaming and shouting, everybody pull your hash rate, these are also getting too big, whatever. Never hear any of that anymore. You don't hear people calling out exchanges for not showing transparency. I'm hoping that after this calamity, that's kind of what will happen and that people will start to demand that proof of keys and this sort of thing. And I've seen that going up in the trending on Twitter. So I think there is people calling it out, but it's the problem is is drag. And they're found out by lots of other calls of you just ubiquitous fraud, like everything that's not Bitcoin is fraudulent. And then people just don't listen to the actual true warnings there there. You know, they forget the proof of keys, they forget the keeping money on exchanges and proof of transparency of funds because it's drowned out by people going, everything's a scam, everything's everything is that's non Bitcoin is a scam. I think that that has, you know, I must admit, I think it does have a slight negative impact. And that if we didn't blanket everything that's non Bitcoin is just a complete fraudulent scam, then the actual warnings would get listened to. You know, that kind of boy, you cried wall situation, whereas if you just hear people going, that's a scam, that's a scam, that's a scam, then you, you know, you're either going to idolize this person and just listen to everything they say or just think, oh, that's just BS, right? You know, not everything can be a scam. So, you know, I'll make, I'll, you know, I'll listen less to the experts and because I don't agree with everything I say. But it's baddest. It does sound like there was a lot of whistle blowing going on, but blowing each other's whistles. And not very late. I think we're still seeing this go on right now down on Twitter. A lot of the Bitcoiners are taking this chance to attack all the altcoins and the shitcoins and to blame them for this. When I see this as a straight up black box exchange problem, no one knew what SPF and his people were doing. They didn't know they were bailing out Alameda research. They didn't know they had access to these funds. It didn't matter which coin it was or if it was this or that coin, it was, it's an is centralized exchange problem, which like Josh, we've spoken out against before over and over. But I also have to call out the media here because the media paraded over and over and over again for the last year. How Sam Bankman freed is a multi billionaire, $22 billion. Yeah. On paper, even if he tried to sell one billion of that, it would have tanked the market and absolutely destroyed it. You cannot sell. And it's like, I'll make a $100 billion, a $100 billion token, sell one to Thomas here for a dollar and call myself a 100 billionaire. Like it's just dumb. And I just don't understand why that got paraded over and over because I think that's also part of the part of the, I can just go into Sequoia, play a video game, fart and say, yeah, what we're doing. This is my pitch. And they'll still go, because they've heard over and over again, these kids are billionaire genius. You know, so it's, I think calling out this nonsense that someone's a billionaire because they've got a bunch of illiquid crypto is, is just, just stupid. I think there's also a bit of the Boris Johnson going on here where he keeps showing up with the dishevelled hair and the t-shirt, though allegedly he's a billionaire. And we're just supposed to think this is kind of quaint and just kind of clever. I also want to talk back about Mr. Wonderful because I went to that Web 3 conference in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago. And everyone followed Mr. Wonderful from room to room. He went to the little podcast room. They followed him there. He went to the discussion room. They followed him there. And Mr. Wonderful with his $1 billion allegedly sitting in the FTX exchange went around telling everyone exactly what people used to say in 2014. He said, we need more regulation in this space. If there's more regulation, we would get more, you know, financial money. The big money would come in all the time unbeknownst to him. He should have been quoting Trace Mayor. He should have been saying, not your keys, not your coins. And I want to spread a little of the fault here on to the users. It's called an exchange. So what is an exchange for? You take your dollars or your pounds or whatever. You buy your Bitcoin, your Ethereum, whatever you want. And then you take it off the exchange, right? It's not a bank. These people thought that all you had to do to buy Bitcoin was exchange it and then leave it on the bank. This is disastrous for them. The retirement funds, Tom Brady and Giselle, Mr. Wonderful for the cost of a treasurer and a little bit of research. They could have been sitting here shrugging their shoulders saying, well, Bitcoin's down a little bit, but at least I still have my keys. At least I still have my coins. And that's true for the altcoins as well. Go ahead, John. What's that? Oh, sorry. I was just going to say that there wasn't that. It's not even comparable to a bank because, you know, dare I say, at least with banks, there are certain guarantees that you have, like in the UK, it's up to 80K per bank. Well, you don't have any of that with exchanges. There's no guarantee, there's no insurance fund, there's nothing apart from maybe the Binance Safe-Who fund. But, you know, who knows if that's even real? Most exchanges, let's be honest, there's smoking mirrors, even if they're just, you know, the Bitcoin trading volume, right? On some exchanges, unfortunately, it succumbs to the trend, the exchange, using, you know, a watch trading in order to fake bigger volumes. So we know that the exchanges can't be trusted, but what can be trusted is the blockchain to hold your coins so that if an aferious actor or even someone that's, you know, that's just a great a fool or what you call it, a full guy, like Sam could be a full guy, right? Like as Tom as Josh said, when they had them in the meeting, he was just like playing a game and just really blasé about it. There's almost like someone pushed him into it and was just like, oh no, I'm not making excuses for it. I just, he just seems like too soft to be someone who's, who's really an aferious, right? And it could have been a big set up of like, let's just use this guy who just agrees to everything. He's even dumb enough to give all his money away if he makes some, you know, we'll just like make trades off the back of him. But ultimately, yeah, you know, you don't need that central point of failure. So just hold your own money. Don't don't ever rely on a bank. Don't rely on an exchange. And let's face it, exchanges are worse than banks like they're worse than banks. So because that you don't have those guarantees in place, unfortunately. Well, and we used to have really skeasy exchanges. Does anyone remember BTC-E? We never even knew who was running it. Oh yeah, angsters from this country or that country. And you knew if you left your funds on BTC-E, they're probably taking them and gambling with them, right? Like, like, I'm dancing. They're probably wash trading. They're probably buying assets on their exchange to pump up the price. And your money's now a part of that. I suppose this blindly trusted FTX to not do that. Go ahead, Josh. Sorry, especially if the exchanges built by traders, which good exchanges usually are. But the problem with that is that you get a good exchange. But it's built by traders who are gamblers. Just in a nicer light. Like, gamblers is a bad light. Traders. Oh, that's a good light. Yeah, that's very effective and reputable. But one of the things, I've run Voltor, it's an exchange. It's not super massive exchange. It's more of a proof of concept really to show the Glassbooks protocol. It was also to be the first exchange to implement the Lightning Network. It was the first exchange to do Bitcoin and physical gold. But no matter how many times I tell people, please, use the exchange by the gold or trade the gold back to Bitcoin and get off. Don't use us as a wallet. The good thing is, I mean, we've never been hacked since launching in 2015. But we also never lost customer funds. Why aren't we mega rich? Because we just do what we're meant to. We don't speculate with customer funds. It's just sitting there. But don't use exchanges as wallets. That's just go there, buy it and get off. The last thing I saw here, probably, I'll mention that. How do you use an exchange without putting money in there? Well, that's also a really interesting question. And when we developed the first implementation of the Lightning Network on an exchange in the world, the big use case that came out of that is, oh my god, now people don't need to trust us anymore. They can see an order in the order book and use Lightning Network to grab it. So they don't need to have their money on Boltoa. They can actually have it there because it's so quick, they can go, I'm going to put my order in at this, bring up a QR code for the Lightning, sender and boom, it's done. It's just amazing that then that trade's done and it's over. There are technological solutions for some of these questions. And really, we need to embrace those. We need to embrace these sorts of technical solutions when it comes to transparency, when it comes to instant exchange. But my big thing, I really love it. I love automated market makers. I love DEXs. I just think they're fantastic. Yes, they're mainly built on Ethereum, which is very, very hard to scale. But they're trying their best, technologically. This is a really interesting use case. I mean, the invention of the automated market maker is so amazing. It passes, passes a lot of people. But it meant that it removed the whole audit book concept, which was also a very, very big step forward to having decentralized exchanges with minimal code. I really do like the automated market maker. It also means that people can, you know, when you put your money in a bank, you really have about 15 middlemen before you get to the market maker. And that's why you get such little interest in DeFi. You can just put your money in an automated market, make yourself. These decentralized exchanges are really, really fantastic. They're only going to get better. And I'm really looking forward to the future of these. I think they're a big step forward, rather than trusting a bunch of clowns in the Bahamas. Well, there's also the, go ahead, Victoria. No, I was just going to say, I think that kind of technology is really the answer, rather than regulations. Because of course, part of the problem with regulation is you need politicians for that. And, you know, which is expensive, it also takes a lot of time. And you also get a load of unintended consequences. I mean, as an industry, you know, we've got the technical know-how to not really have any of those people involved. And really, it's a race against time to kind of get there, really. Because the whole idea of Bitcoin itself is that you're meant to be disrupting the exact, the whole Fiat system. And of course, the Fiat system relies on the politicians. So you can't really disrupt the politicians and expect them to be the solution to the fact that, you know, the technology isn't working. So, you know, we have to figure this out ourselves. I think, you know, in the short term, fair enough, the regulations might help. But eventually, as the Fiat system crumbles, they won't have the money to be able to enforce any of the regulations. So they're going to become pretty worthless anyway. That's the way I would see it. Well, and you want to make sure the same thing doesn't happen with a decentralized exchange. You don't have a decentralized exchange where they have access to all your coins and all your keys, and they can just spend them on whatever they want. I think we also have to go back and say, why are these people leaving their money in exchanges? And sure, if you're a trader and you're a day trader and you're like, okay, I'm selling this, I'm buying that, I'm selling this, I'm buying that. You're very active with it. Now, we've talked in the past about how traders in the old days, anyway, used to take their Bitcoin and their Litecoin and whatever else it is off the exchanges at night and put it on their own cold storage so they could sleep well. And apparently, people aren't doing that anymore. These retirement funds aren't doing that. And part of it is because they don't really believe in Bitcoin. They don't really believe in Ethereum or whatever it is. They're buying, they believe and trust these centralized exchanges. They trust SBF or Brian Armstrong or Jesse Powell or whoever it is that they're not going to just run off with the funds. They trust that more than they do trying to figure out what a hardware wall it is and what Bitcoin and what the blockchain are. When really, we know as Bitcoiners, people who listen to Trace and so forth, not your keys, not your coins. And it's funny. I've worked at a couple of Bitcoin companies. I don't want to throw them under the bus here because I do think this is a user problem where people also left their funds, their Bitcoin for no reason. We were at BTC Jam. We're doing loans. People would just leave funds on the platform. Same thing at purse.io. We were doing discounts for Amazon. People would just leave their funds on the platform. And I don't know why they're doing this. I don't know if we need to start. I know it's unlikely. But if you were Coinbase and you're like, well, we should get out of this custodian thing. All right. This is pretty bad for us. Here we have the lock down vault custodian. That's pretty good. But just people leaving coins here that could be stolen with a username and a password and a 2FA or backdoor access. It's just a bad idea. Maybe they should send an email to the users. Hey, you've left some funds on the exchange. Please withdraw them. I don't know what they can do. I don't think they want to do that. But maybe that's what we need. Some people would stop using exchanges as banks. Well, I got to kick back against that a little bit there, Thomas, because large funds, retirement funds, all of these things, they, if they take the money off an exchange, well, they need to effectively trust their ID to the department. So there's trust somewhere. So why would you trust your dodgy ID department that doesn't really understand stuff as well as Coinbase who do this every single day and hold funds, right? So I can see an understand why, and this is why I've always said that things like countries and governments will find it very, very difficult to have Bitcoin on their balance sheet. Because you have to, basically, if it's a government, you have to trust that the government when they get voted out aren't going to basically take the Bitcoin. You're going to have to trust that security is good, but not too good that they screw it up and can't get into their own coins anymore. There's all sorts of problems with this stuff. And I'm not, you know, I'm trying to be a little bit of the, I guess, the Peter Todd type, where I just come in and, you know, say the bad things. But it's really true. It's not easy for corporations, funds to hold their own keys with minimal trust. Sure, it is, and it isn't. I agree with that, but at the end of the day, there's still a username and a password. And if it's a username and a password to FTX or a centralized exchange, it could be worthless. If it's a username and a password to your Bitcoin, like a passphrase or whatever, it's always going to have that Bitcoin value unless your IT department steals it. And I think we're going to see the same thing happen with countries coming up. Maybe if the world's coolest dictator was holding the password to all of his Bitcoin, we have no idea what's going to happen with that. I think we've talked this issue out. Do you guys have anything more on this issue? Anything we haven't covered? I'm fully sand-baked and fried. Well, I think we've got a two-part exit question. So the first part of the exit question is, what happens to SBF? Does he go to jail? Does he go to jail for life? Does he suddenly develop feelings and realize how much of other people's money he's lost? And then maybe he needs some psychiatric help or some assistance or maybe something bad happens and jumping off a bridge or something. And will the price of Bitcoin go up or down next week? Dan, you've two questions to exit. I think SBF, I think he's going to get away with it. You know, there's been very few heads that have rolled. I think there's going to be somehow he's going away with it. He'll be like, you know, I don't know. It just seems, you know, he's got parents that are lawyers as well, you know, right? As you said, they'll probably know a few tricks how to keep a little Sammy out of jail. And yeah, I don't know. Good. But you have evidence for bid the prison guards that he ends up in didn't invest in FTX or by a load of FTT tokens. So now I think you'll get away with it. And I think we are on a downturn. I think we can even be, I think 15 K next week. Eric and the ripples of this are going to go far and wide. I think by by next week there will be, you know, I think we'll hear of another bankruptcy actually. An one that's come out of the woodwork, there's a ripple effect of FTX. So yeah, I don't think the future's bright orange next week in particular. Well, at least we have a finally, we finally have a reason for your negativity. As for SBF, I don't know. He might see the inside of a prison cell. He might feel really bad about this. It's still tough to say. Victoria, what do you think? Will Sam go to jail and will the price of Bitcoin be higher or lower? Well, I mean, in terms of having a psychological meltdown, I think he's already been on Twitter starting to say, oh, I'm so sorry, and I didn't think this true. It's like, man, you're a billionaire. How did you not think of this out? You know, I mean, just goes to share. You know, having money doesn't give you any kind of common sense or intellect. So yeah, he should go to jail. I mean, if people like Russell, brick, end up in jail for running the Silk Road, then why not Sam, Bankman, what's it? I mean, going back to the three-name thing, I mean, Bankman is interesting. Middle name, isn't it? You know, who figured that one out? Was he born with it or was it his stage name? So for whatever he was put forward for. So yeah, he should go to jail, whether he will or not. It's amazing what money gets you these days and powerful friends. So it'll be interesting to see. But in terms of the Bitcoin price, I mean, I actually put out a tweet three weeks ago with the descending triangle saying it was about to go down even before all of this blew up. And yeah, and so I just retweeted it the other day, go, oh, I was three weeks off, but you know, here we go. I think it's going to be going down again for a while because there's a lot to unwind. And also, you know, just the fact that the Fed's taking liquidity out of the market. I mean, obviously a lot of people think that Bitcoin is an inflation hedge, which it is. But the Fed is doing everything that it can to try and reduce the liquidity in the system because of issues with inflation. We all know it's not going to work, but it's a question of when. And they'll keep doing that until something breaks. And I think, you know, Bitcoin is the price will go lower while they keep playing those games, unfortunately. So I think it's only fair that as Bitcoiners who understand the dynamics of these things, we warn everybody, you know, now is not the time to be putting your ex all in that basket. Always have some because you never know, but yeah, you don't want to, you don't want to be completely land on Bitcoin at this point. I don't think. It looks like according to Wikipedia, Sam Bankman freed is the son of Joseph Bankman and Barbara freed, who looks like they decided to saddle him with the hyphenate, which it doesn't seem they took on themselves. Josh Tagala, what do you think about SBF to see end up in jail? And will the price be higher or lower? I, you know, this empire has collapsed so fast that there's really no details. So I don't know, maybe he'll manage to find liquidity under the couch and pay, you know, most people back. We don't know. I think it'll take a little while to figure out everything they have. What did surprise me was CZ, but I think CZ is playing that sort of Elon Musk style Twitter game where he just shits all over it, tries to really do some major damage before he goes in and buys it. It didn't really work for Elon because it already signed the price, but I think it it could work for Binance. It could go so bad that they end up buying it down low because they know that there's liquidity there. There seems to be. I mean, yeah, so I'll be very, very interested to see what happens. As for the market, I do believe that the weekends have already left. I do feel it can go down a little bit, but I don't think it's going to be massive. I think people have shaken out all the weak paper hands and the diamond hands are holding strong. I actually get a feeling there'll be a bit of a pump. I mean, I'm going to go from contrarian on your ass. All right. Some positivity out there. It's not all negative. I for one am tired of these apologies. I'm tired of Sandbankman freed's apology. I'm tired of Carpellis's apology at a BTC jam when we did the BTC loans. There was some kid when Bitcoin was worth almost nothing who'd borrowed like 30 Bitcoin. And then when Bitcoin suddenly be worth thousands of dollars, this kid had no chance to pay the Bitcoin back. And every once in a while he'd log on to good old BTC jam and he'd give people a couple thousand dollars he'd earned washing cars or delivering newspapers or whatever. And he'd apologize. And everyone knew he'd never going to get 30 Bitcoin back. And now we have the same thing with a giant exchange operator, billions of dollars that we know he's not going to get back on the same week when Zuckerberg is a practically it tears because he made a bad choice to drive Facebook off a cliff into virtual reality land. And now that bad choice is leading to people getting laid off from their jobs. And they just cry and apologize. I want to go back to Willie Sutton who was a bank robber. And when they asked him Mr Sutton, why do you rob banks? He said, that's where the money is. So have some more bank robbers with a little class. You're going to jail anyway, Sam Bankman freed. You may as well tell the people the truth. You took the money. You wanted the money. You wanted to impress people with the money. Now let's talk to the Bitcoin predictor ball. Changing cameras. Here we go. Let's see if we can do it. So now this is the greatest predictor ball in all of history. It is both bald and true. It is always correct. Everyone knows that. Here we go. Will the price of Bitcoin be higher this time next week? Oh shaking it may cause bubbles. My reply is no. My reply is no. The price of Bitcoin will not be higher next week. Despite Josh's optimism, the magical Bitcoin predictor ball has spoken. Moving on to issue two. Issue two, which normally would have been a big deal around here. But I suppose not this week. Issue two, the Department of Justice seized $3 billion in Bitcoin found in an underground safe and a popcorn tin after Silk Road fraud. Allegedly, this user was an admin on the Silk Road. He figured out a hole in the back door where he could take out money. And then he stacked it and put it in an underground safe and a popcorn tin. He had billions of dollars yet he was living like a normal person. Any other week, this would be the biggest story and we'd be talking about it. Victoria Jones, what do you think about the $3 billion that the media is so excited to report? They found in a popcorn tin. Well, I mean, I have to say I read this article and the thing that left out at me was just like, you know, these fraudsters just get more and more imaginative at different ways in which they can think to defraud somebody. I mean, what was he, he'd deposit 500 and was able to get 2000 Bitcoin out. He's like, how do you do that? How do you figure that out? You know, I mean, Kudos for, you know, initiative and intelligence, you know, if you could maybe direct that on a better path your life might have turned out better. But you know, what a shame to with, you know, have such an amazing hall and hide it in such an amateur way. I mean, at least put it in a fishing rod for heaven's sake and then find a way to lose it. But some or memorize the words in your head. I mean, what a shame. And it's a little bit concerning that the US, you know, in spite of everything that we say about being able to hide Bitcoin and keep it safely, you know, if the US decides to target you, they've got a way of finding you and can hunt you down and can, you know, find your hiding places. And so yeah, it's a little bit, it's a little bit scary. But yeah, I mean, it reminds me of when we're at university, and it was like, as long as you're not in the bottom 5%, you're safe. So it's like, you know, try and make sure you're in the bottom 5% of people that, you know, the government wants to target and you'll probably be all right. And hopefully Bitcoin will survive and will have a new world because, you know, it's going to take time before the existing system is disrupted. And like I said earlier, you know, eventually when it is disrupted, you know, that the US government won't have as much power to do things like this as they could before. But then of course, you'll have other venture landings who might be able to use the same skills in order to track down people who've got Bitcoin. So it's a solitary lesson in different ways in which you need to protect your funds, whether you're a good person or whether or not you're a bad person. And maybe some of these criminals will create an inventive way for us to hide it better. And maybe that would be a good way of channeling their skills. Yeah. So interesting to see how it works out. It reminds me of the old Japanese saying the nail that sticks out is the one that gets hammered. And again, spoiler alert, the US government currently has around $3 billion in Bitcoin. Unfortunately, they will not use this money to build a series of news, Smithsonian institutions, one museum per capital city, 50 museums, 50 states, $3 billion. Instead, they'll auction it off to the highest bidder, probably someone like Tim Draper, who already has enough money. And if Bitcoin goes back up, as we all expect it will, the government will lose and whoever buys it will win. And we will have no new Smithsonian museums. Josh Jagala, what do you think about the $3 billion from the Silk Road that they found in a popcorn tin? Yeah. What I've really find funny about this is that the article is always about how the government is seizing because this guy defrauded all these customers. But it was the customers of a legal drug marketplace. So which is it? Government is an actual, are they actual legitimate customers that can be defrauded or is there now that you've now that you've taken the funds, are you going to pay them back? Are you going to find all the customers? Because you have the data, you have the data who the customers were, are you going to go and find them and pay them back? Come on. Be a be a be a be a good player. So I see all the all the customers of the Silk Road will soon be getting one of these cards in the mail, filled of strange Silk Roadian language. And then they can get on on the Silk Road bankruptcy auction. Nice. Nice. I got one of those too. So yeah, I mean, it's funny. I just see it as one criminal stealing from another criminal. It's just, I really, yeah, that's what it is. It's like Robin Hood, but not really because they're not going to make the exchanges. But yeah, I have all of 75 cents in Mt. Gox and they keep sending me all the bankruptcy information every time it's hilarious. I went and checked 75 cents. I'm hoping for my quarterback. Dan Eve, what do you think about this? Three billion dollars. He was living a great life yet all this money buried under his house. Worthless. I think, so what's crazy about it is that and very good point that the Victoria made is that you know, Bitcoin's we say it now, not your keys, not your coins. But if the US government get you, they're going to get your coins. That's like the lesson, isn't it? We've from from from the tornado, not tornado, well, tornado, questions, everything. But the other, the watch trading exchange, the the well pull mixer that was a while back, they got hundreds of millions from that guy. There was there's yeah, it just seems like there's the the razzle car. They got the billions off the razzle car lady and a boyfriend. The silk road bitcoins, the original silk road bitcoin that Tim Draper ended up buying. So yeah, it's it's it's it's what is what amazes me is that the people aren't really that don't seem to be that inventive and innovative about how they're hiding their private keys, right? You know, if if that one, well, number one, if that was me, I wouldn't have it on an old computer like, you know, in a in a cake tin as Victoria said, I'd memorize the words, right? I send it to an address where I knew this the seed and I'd memorize the words. I'd you know, you'd you'd use a treasurer and a treasurer and you'd use a smear secret and you know, and you know, effectively multi-seed your seed in some way or like you do something that's a bit more inventive than putting in it in a cake tin and underneath a rug. It just seems like, I don't know, it just it just seems like there the people that that holding these vast amounts of cash that they've got in it in a listed way, they were so clever in the way that they got those funds and then just so dumb in the way they help them and that is just freaking insane. Like, yeah, I don't know, I'd like to think that like maybe in that, you know, how you watch like a like, I don't know, maybe this is a bit like, if you watch a murder thing, you're like, oh, I would have got away with that crime, you would have just needed to do this that. Yeah, there's a big, you know, surely I would have been able to hide the big coin and you know, even just taking out a little bit rather than than just, you know, pretty much living in a in a shack and hiding it there, just seems, you know, you do something about it, but it just goes to show about how much the HODL culture's caught on because like, you know, Razor had it for years, I guess, the head it for years, and just just holding it and obviously they, they cashed out with a few play stations or whatever, but they didn't really squander it crazily. And so even the hardest of criminals that steal all your Bitcoin will still hoddle it to death and not actually enjoy the stuff, which is, I don't know, I don't know about that. I like, I honestly feel like these people are just, they steal all this money and then they're scared stiff of being caught. So they don't move it and they don't have a plan for it and every plan they make, they think, oh, but they could, yeah, someone could find it there, and if they, and they just get so scared stiff that they don't do anything, they've got their day job and they hope that through time and space somehow tracking will become worse or some new technology will come along maybe that will make it easier or something, but I think that's the reason they're hodling is they're just scared to act too, but they're going to get caught. But I think so, so actually in the chat pointed out that, you know, the media about the media using it to fund and so that that three billion valuation was actually at the time when it was seized in November 2021, but the the the the DOJ is only just coming out with the news now, and maybe they've done that just as a purely, you know, for a for a a well timed, in fact, now this was November 4th actually, it says, Zong pled guilty on November 4th, so maybe it was prior to this this, this downturn, you know, you almost think maybe they're doing it to strategically, you know, worry everyone about 50,000 Bitcoin hitting the market again, and they can set up some sort of short and lines and pockets here and there, you know, time the news. But the first thing I do actually think was was James Zong that that just made me think of Zao Zao Tong, right? Like the musician, right? It maybe maybe that's the same person, we never unmasked that musician. But yeah, crazy, crazy scenario where again, someone's stolen Bitcoin from a long, long time ago and somehow Uncle Sam has has managed to un, you know, unearth the money and and let I wonder if they actually do, you know, auction it or whether they whether they they keep it from, you know, treasury or give it back to the people as Josh said, right? They've decided that it was it was taken from people fortunately. So surely the good thing to do, the only logical moral thing to do is return people their good money that they would have, you know, used, you know, they spent all that taxpayer money hunting down someone that defrauded people. So give the money back to the people that were defrauded. The taxpayer was defrauded. Yeah, they used it for illegal drugs. Not not not holding my breath for that one. And there's still a chance that they build more Smithsonian museums. But let's move on to the exit question. Everyone says that Bitcoin's so terrible it can be used to buy anything you want on the internet from drugs to assassination. But the law enforcement keeps catching them. exit question is Bitcoin actually good for law enforcement? Victoria Jones. Possibly possibly. I think it's difficult to to say completely one way or the other. I mean, I think the authorities are just kind of getting their heads around how it works in order to chase these people down. So obviously, you know, they go for the big targets first and then gradually refine their efforts and it will get easier and easier as they build their skills. But I would like to say that I think part of the problem is the fact that, you know, we live in such a, we live in a society with such misaligned incentives. It's part of the reason why there's so much crime anyway. And many of the laws we live under create such misaligned incentives. And there are so many laws almost everyone's a criminal or you know, you just need to decide which law you want to apply and, you know, you could probably get any of us, you know, who's to say that, you know, they could go back in time and look at how many speeding tickets you've got. And on that basis, they need to hunt down your Bitcoin. It's all based on resources and how much resources they have in order to target you. And you know, my hope is that, you know, once we have a world based on better incentives, they'll be less crime and hopefully they'll be less need to chase people down because people won't see the need perhaps to engage in quite so much criminal activity as there is at the moment. I mean, humans will always be humans. They'll always be some crime, but hopefully it'll be a lot less and they'll be more disincentive. I mean, you could even get to a stage where, you know, if everyone understands how to analyse the blockchain, we could all become the police. And, you know, you could have a, you have a public mob chasing down the criminal. They have even less place to hide them in the moment. We rely on the government for that because we don't have access to those tools. But, you know, if Bitcoin does create enough transparency for a local community to cut, they'll be less incentive for people to commit crime. So, you know, there are many nuances to this argument, I think. I can't wait till there's a publicly available version of Chain Alice niche and we can all rat each other out. That's going to be great, right? Josh, Gala, what do you think they say? Bitcoin's untraceable internet criminal money. Yet every time we look to the blockchain, either they get the money or they blacklist it from the exchanges or, like Dan said, they trade it for some Walmart cards and buy some play stations. The criminals always get caught. Maybe Bitcoin's good for law enforcement? Yeah, I mean, it really is. But, I feel unfortunately, I think it's not private enough because people, it's actually quite scary. If you have a lot of Bitcoin and you actually use the stuff, if you go to a shopkeeper and spend your money and they've got some sort of system, it's way worse with Ethereum. If you go there and buy something with a stablecoin based on Ethereum, the shopkeeper can know what NFTs you've got, what other crypto you've got, what everything, at least with the UTXO model of Bitcoin, there's a little bit of obfuscation there. But yeah, it's, and so I do feel that it's a little bit too transparent. And even for banks and stuff, I've talked to bankers before in, well, years ago, even this was years ago and they said Bitcoin's too transparent for us. So, it's definitely very, very good for law enforcement because it's a, hey, it's a public ledger. So you can see every single trade. I mean, what, what else do you want to know? Follow the money? Yeah, there you go. It does sound like a problem that needs to be fixed. Dan Eve is Bitcoin good for law enforcement? Yeah, I think so. And the interest in CDBCs is CDBCs, we're going to be a little, the CDBCs, right? Is part of the reason because not just the control they can have over the chain, but how easy it is to track the funds. And we've seen that there's always faults that, or people were able to trace funds, even if they go through mixes, even they go through trot cross chain mixes. There's chain Alice niches, there's other services that do the same thing. And also, just building on what Victoria was saying that when a hack actually does happen, often you did the first people that come up with something officially, the internet sleuth to who trace the funds. And then slowly, you see a bit more of a picture pulling together. And sometimes it's even the community that get in touch with Binance and it's something other changes between Binance as an example to go and get the funds frozen or whatever after doing their own analysis. There's probably quicker than paying a firm to actually do it, because you've got people that have lost money who are trying to stop it and put the brakes on as soon as possible. So I think for the government, they find it actually a good thing to be able to trace that money. And I think it's quite, it's almost quite obvious because they've got how much they've managed to confiscate in the past. But I think this is where my little theory pans out that I think part of the, if there is a driver for privacy on Bitcoin, it could be via governments who know that they want to use Bitcoin, but don't want to use it in such a transparent way, because who wants to know every other country is going to want to know what your where your money is going, how much you've got and blah, blah, blah, blah. And you know, especially if it's going for, you know, into, you know, certain government areas where you want to have privacy over funds. So yeah, I think it's, I think it's too, too useful for government at the moment. And that's why we need more privacy tools. I can only assume the government will help us build those. And I agree with Dan, it's confusing with these CBDCs. Every time I hear it, I think about CBGBs in New York City, which was a club that had the talking heads and blondie, the Ramones, new wave. And I say the same thing, we should bring back CBGBs. A few years ago, they turned it into a clothing store, high end clothing stores. Very sad. Moving on, check out worldcryptonenetwork.com. We've got 3,000 and 15 videos. You could watch them consecutively for three months, 13 days and 19 hours without having to take a break. And you can watch all these videos at worldcryptonenetwork.com. The price of Bitcoin is 16,824, according to BitcoinOl.com, built by our friend DJ Booth. Check it out. Moving on to issue three, oil giant shell makes move into Bitcoin mining industry. Here's what you need to know. Shell is going to sponsor the 2023 and 2024 Bitcoin conferences and assigned a two year partnership with Bitcoin magazine. Shell will be going into Bitcoin mining. They say entering the mining space is a big win for Bitcoin. Josh Egoll, a shell oil, one of the giant Royal Dutch shell originally, another lens Amsterdam company, one of the giant oil companies polluting the world, destroying the world with cars and gasoline is now mining Bitcoin. This is better than Christmas lights, right? Better than PlayStation. Just like we really need more environmental fun on Bitcoin, I don't know. It's going to be just a year. I don't have much to say about it. I thought it was a joke. When I first saw Bitcoin magazine tweet about it, I thought, is this a joke? And then now, no, we've got legit articles. It's real. It makes sense. At the end of the day, it's an energy company. That's what they do. They focus on energy. They got solar. They got all sorts of stuff. They bought up a hell of a lot of solar patents and basically shelved them for years and only showed them on top of all their service stations to show like, oh, look how green we are. But they, yeah, look, welcome aboard. If you want to mind, go for it. You're an energy company. If you've got excess energy, store it in Bitcoin. Nice. Can't wait to get one of those free t-shirts that says like, shell oil Bitcoin. That just sounds great. Dan, what about shell oil? Do we welcome them to Bitcoin mining? I'm worried now. I think in the words of in the words of cut, and the God damn it. Well, we're very unhappy about, you know, we're already seeing a left right and center people gluing themselves to all sorts of paintings and stuff like that to know that if they there was already environmental, Fed around Bitcoin to know that shell, you know, one of the anti-chrisis of the environment and now moving into the mining industry, then, you know, that, that, you know, big oil, big oils, the enemy now. Bitcoin is going to be the enemy as well, because, you know, they're doing something with Bitcoin. It does sound like they're not actually running mining at the moment. They're only providing a loop. Oh, yeah. They're providing a loop. And was it mining? Mining loop lubricants and cooling solutions, right? So this is like, there sounds like the cooling gel that they have in those really awesome submerged miners, like they're in water, not water, whatever it is, you know, a non-conductive loop. Is it? Oh, yeah. Bitcoin just gets dirtier by the day. But yeah, it's going to get people's knickers in a twist and boxes in a twist. You know, the fact is that Bitcoin's already hated on enough for its environmental impact. Now, you've got like one of the biggest enemies of the environmental state, you know, moving in on the actions. That's only going to be killed by association of Bitcoin. It's also going to, I don't know, it's going to, you know, be another stick for Ethereum people to be, you know, Bitcoin with, like, oh, my god, yeah. Either we're now using proof of stake and you don't want to go with Bitcoin because they're part of the shell and shell of evil people. And it made me think it's a shame that it wasn't actually BP because it would have been quite fitting with another South Park reference of Sandbank and Free apologizing all the time, like the BP oil spill where the guys like, we're sorry, we're sorry, we're sorry. So, yeah, that's sadly not not BP getting involved. But yeah, sat down, that's downside to shell. Big company usually be like, oh, a huge big company, you know, multi billion, you know, huge billion, billion dollar company getting involved in Bitcoin. But it's the wrong type of company in this, in this scenario. So yeah, that's sad. I think for for Bitcoin, it's going to be used as a stick to be it with. I still want to see the poster with Bitcoin convention. And it has the shell logo under there, maybe in the future Bank of America, United States government, central intelligence, who else, who else ridiculously is going to sponsor a Bitcoin convention of Victoria, what do you think with friends like these shell oil enters Bitcoin mining? Well, the way I read the article was that shell were getting involved in order to try and make the energy costs more or more efficient. And I've always maintained that the fact that Bitcoin uses a lot of energy will create a lot of innovation in the energy space, because that's what the free market does, you know, once you once you get to a stage where you've got a high demand for something, there's a motivation for people to make it more efficient. And of course, with a lot of companies kind of going into electric cars, you know, some of these oil companies may well be seeing losses in their revenue. So actually, it makes a lot of sense for them to try and, you know, re-root some of their industry. And the thing is everyone wants to label a lot of these companies bad, which I don't disagree with them, but often there are a lot of good people working these companies just trying to do the best they can. And so, you know, if someone's got a good idea to try and make something more efficient, maybe work with, you know, the recognize the value of Bitcoin and want to use their resources to try and find ways of making it more efficient. I mean, that can only be a good thing, really. So, you know, I see it from a different perspective. Well, the enemy of the enemy, our enemies, our friend, or the friend of our enemies, our enemy, or the enemy of our enemies, our enemy, I'm not sure. We got to figure that out. But we're running out of time. Let's see, we have this at the end. Last week, we talked about women in Bitcoin, can women save Bitcoin? Obviously, SPF, a man has ruined Bitcoin this week. But I also want to say there were women in that little board there at the top. They were living in the Bahamas. They were having relationships with each other. But Victoria, while you're here, can women save Bitcoin? What can we do to get more women into Bitcoin? We talked about it last week. There was some discussion on the board. A guy wrote in. He said he works at a casino and 50% of the customers are women. So maybe it's the geekiness that's driving away. We'd also positive that maybe women just don't like risk. They don't like investments. They don't like risk. Maybe they're out that way. Many other people say women like shopping and spending money. Perhaps they would like that aspect of Bitcoin. But now we have an actual woman. So, of course, we want you to represent all women everywhere and tell us how women can save Bitcoin. Well, I don't think women themselves are going to save Bitcoin. I think it's a collective effort. It may well be more one-sided at this point in time. But certainly, I think women often bring more balance. Their focus is often different. I think it's very male-dominated because males are traditionally the breadwinners. So, they're much more money-focused because a lot of their quality of life depends very much on the amount of money that they can earn. Often to please the women in their lives. So, the women are much more focused on often on finding a good provider. People may say that's a very traditional way of looking at it. But it's biology. Women have the children, their nurturers. They want they're much more focused on building a home. They want good providers and people who are ethical and honorable. I think the men in the space are obviously there are always going to be people who let the sidelines. But certainly, I've met some very honorable men from being in the Bitcoin community. Actually, it's given me a lot more faith in humanity to be involved around them. There are some real treasures that I've come across. I think there were also treasures, women get trashed as well. There were treasures on the female side of it. I think whatever skills we have, focus on the skills we have and just do the best we can with what we've got. Everyone has something to contribute. I don't think it's about excluding women, particularly. I think it's just the fact that women are just focused on different things. When their time is right, they will get involved naturally as it suits them. That time will come. There are plenty of women around, but they don't tend to push themselves forward as much because some of them are ambitious, but often they're focused on different things. I don't think you need women to say Bitcoin, just keep doing what you're doing. We'll come along when we're ready. Shicks dig Unix though. You know, Unix. Shicks dig Unix. Same. Yeah, they do. Well, it's nice to have. There's a lot of mental illness in the world in general, not just in the Bitcoin space. It's nice to have at least one positive story about men in Bitcoin. So many times we have the bad stories about women that go to meetups and it doesn't turn out well. And while our analytics still are still terrible here, but I did look at them and at least in the last couple of months, we are 100% male on this channel. So I don't think we could accomplish that if we tried, but that just happens to be how it turned out. People on YouTube or accounts on YouTube, perhaps are gendered incorrectly. I don't know, but women are not watching this show. We would like them to. I must be the one percent in your algorithm. 100% you've been backed out by averages. Oh, it's you. 100% plus Victoria. But we're running out of time. Dan, Eve, are you ready with a prediction or a story of the week? Go ahead. Yeah, I'm going to go, I'm going to go prediction. And I think that I sadly think another giant's going to fall that we haven't spotted so far. There's going to be someone over leverage with FTX. And they're just going to become a victim of the domino effect, the cascade of one exchange going down. What wants someone realizes that they or a company realizes they've been over leveraged in a company that's using FTX. There's also going going sour. We're going to have another bank run situation. And yeah, I think unfortunately, we're not over the hurdle yet. Because realistically, all of this scenario with FTX and Alamedo is just another knock on it. It's literally just a knock on effect at the three-hour capital, Fiasco and if you've voyager and Celsius and all that. So, yeah, I think this definitely isn't the end of the road. And get your coins off exchanges. Dan, Eve with the fatalistic pessimism. In fact, it says right here in our private chat that Dan is looking forward to having a Zoom call with Mr. Wonderful, Giselle Bunchan and Tom Brady, where they can all cry about how much money they've lost in FTX and he hopes that he can taste the salt of their tears. Victoria, do you have a prediction or a story of the week? Maybe something more positive than Dan's horrible dislike of Tom Brady. So, do you mean a favorite story from the week just gone? Sure, or anything that you have going on, maybe something at Satoshi's page or something about you being good to? Well, my favorite story of the week, I'm sure most of you caught this was when Mike Cernovich accused Al Salvador of keeping all the Bitcoin on the FTX exchange. And then under protest, you know, he had to roll back, he had to roll back that admission, I thought, yes. So that's quite funny. It's always good when powerful people are caught out. I was wondering what that, because he didn't say what he'd accused them of and I couldn't find it. So that was it, was it? Yeah, you basically told everyone that, you know, it was a problem for Al Salvador, because they kept all their Bitcoin on the FTX exchange and it said, everyone's going, no. And then of course, you know, you know, I think CZ had actually spoken to the president of Al Salvador and said, that's not true at all. So I thought that was quite amusing. But yeah, then I'm working on the next newsletter from my website. So that will come out soon. I don't write that often, but, you know, whatever I think to keep up and it'll probably be about, you know, being wary of their Bitcoin price. So no, everyone's worried about that. And where can people sign up for that newsletter? Satoshi's page.com. So I mean, if you go to my Twitter handle, there's a link to my website on there. So thank you. Very cool. And we all know that Al Salvador keeps all their money in Binance, not FTX Binance, or perhaps under Mark Carpellis cat. There's a lot of money under that cat. Josh Egala, a prediction or a story of the week. Go ahead. Yeah. Look, we're getting very, very excited to launch the first S euros. So it's going to happen on the 28th. Sign up to the waiting list at the standard.io. And yeah, how we're doing it is the very first people that come into the pool, how we're building the stability pool is we're selling the first stable coins, the first S euros, before they become a stable coin under a euro. So at 80 cents and the more liquidity comes in, the less that discount will become until it reaches one. And then you obviously won't be able to sell that S euros until it becomes a one to one peg. So it will be on secondary markets at 80 cents as well, most likely. But on the standard, we do have a bonding option so you can bond into a liquidity pool with the S euros right away and cash in those returns, depending on how long you bond it for, you have a return. So there's lots of interesting stuff coming along. It basically helps the protocol build its build its protocol control value. And it helps you by yield farming. Obviously not investment advice to your own research. And it's just an interesting experiment in the space. And yeah, look forward to seeing people there. Very cool. And they can check it out at the standard.io. Very good. And for whatever reason, I have William Sutton's bio here. So I'm just going to read you a little bit of it. It says William Francis Sutton Jr. was an American bank robber. During his 40 year robbery career, he stole an estimated two million dollars. And he eventually spent more than half of his adult life in prison and escaped three times. So there's always hope for you, Sam Bankman freed. He only stole two million dollars. He escaped three times. And we always remember him with his great quote, why do you rob banks? That's where the money is. Thanks everyone for watching. Be sure to give us a thumbs up down below and subscribe. Until next time.