The Bitcoin Group, the American original. For over the last 10 seconds, the sharpest satosis, the best bitcoins, the hardest crypto currency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Dan Eave, the crypto raptor. Good evening from Blighty. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network. Moving on to issue one. Issue one, Bitcoin slides to 26,500 amid surging US dollar. Record high rates are a nightmare for crypto firms. Yes, the Federal Reserve is not lowering the rate of treasury bonds, causing the price of treasury bonds to go higher and making it harder to borrow money. If it's harder to borrow money, it's harder to invest in risk assets like Bitcoin and could be a nightmare for crypto firms as they have to reevaluate or try to raise money in a bad market. Dan Eave, what do you think about the Federal Reserve not raising rates or raising rates again? Well, it's good that the UK also hasn't done it. That information came out yesterday, which is good for mortgage people who want trackers like me, Sucker. It kept on going up. But ultimately, I don't always see these articles and I think how they link the Bitcoin price to specific events. Some of them obviously are very significant. Obviously, rate changing is a big thing. Obviously, it's hit the stock market in quite a way as well. But you think Bitcoin is a global asset. It's not like a particular stock, right? This traded in very much more in one country than another, like the NASDAQ, for example. So you'd think that isolating small or so price movements down to a few events of a particular country, they should be less and less so nowadays, especially when you hear about, and I dare I quote Shane Allesnitch, but saying in 20 in 2023, right, at 2022, the US in terms of Bitcoin adoption was fifth on the list and fourth on the list in 2023, with India, Nigeria, Vietnam being ahead. So you think to yourself, right, there's all these other countries that are out of salvage all that's adopting it as a currency. Obviously, the volume's going to be a lot lower. But the impact of certain American markets, especially when you hear about the booming trade in Nigeria, for example, at the moment, and the amount of Bitcoin trading that's going on, just all around the world, the impact of events in one country aren't going to have that much of an impact. But they, obviously, a lot of these analysts do. But it generally tends to be, I don't know, a bit more of a correlation does not necessarily mean cause of correlation, causation, but whichever one it is, right? The spurious correlations don't come. I always go back to that one, which is like the number of films that Nicholas Cage has been in and the number of people that drown in a swimming pool or something, just because the charts correlate, it doesn't mean that necessarily one has triggered the other, for example. So yeah, it's good thing, I think the rates are going down, especially for people that are actually borrowing money for mortgages or even loans, and how that's affecting crypto companies more than ever, because if the rains are so tight on loans anyway, crypto companies kind of come at the back of the queue because everyone thinks they are such high risk, especially with all the scams about, et cetera. But yeah, good thing overall, I think, lowering rates or at least not increasing them again. Well, I don't know, it's kind of an amazing thing like you're saying, Dan, the Bitcoin network is so solid, the protocol is good. We have second layer things like lightning and liquid side chains, other options like that. Then at the same time, the United States and the rest of the world was hit by such an inflation mess that they're still trying to fix it up. So the Fed is going to keep rates high, meaning that treasury bonds are expensive and that borrowing money is also expensive. So it's bad for Bitcoin, the price, it doesn't like you said, it doesn't affect Bitcoin, the network, the programmers, everybody else. But then we start to see this thing where if money is so expensive to borrow and no one wants to invest in risk assets or companies like Coinbase that manage risk assets and that support the cryptocurrency industry, then those companies are going to have a hard time borrowing, they're going to have a hard time growing, and then the crypto industry is going to have a hard time growing. So it's a very interestingly bad time to have this happen with the halving coming up next year, which everyone expects will boost the price. But if the economy keeps going this way and if the treasury bills keep staying high, causing the Fed to keep the stock market low, to keep the caps on the borrowing, we might not see the halving bump. We might not see it and it may be a larger issue where like people have said before, what if Bitcoin goes down because of this and this and that and that and it could be a collapse of the price while the network, the technology, everything else is fine. Could be some exciting stuff. Yeah, and then there's those about theory of what I must recall the, the, the, the, the depreciating gains right so that the impact of the halving going down each year because the supply shock isn't as, isn't as much right? It's, um, it is definitely less and less than it used to be. The first one going from 50 to 25 as a huge reduction. Now I think we're going from six to three or we're going to three to 1.5, something like that in that range. So yeah, it is not as much as a reduction. But then there's that to counter that, there's, you know, adding in black rock, all these huge other, you know, what the $15 trillion of assets that are now pushing for sport ETF. So we'll, will we see that kind of boost Bitcoin beyond the depreciation of the halving? It's all, it's only going to happen after you sell. They're definitely acquiring these assets. They're waiting, they're waiting. Everyone thinks it's a conspiracy like the silver markets or whatever it is. But yes, once they've decided that Bitcoin's good as we're going to talk about in our next article, everything will suddenly seem fine. And you'll wonder how people could have ever doubted Bitcoin at all. But it is a very interesting time to be a Bitcoiner as the Chinese proverb goes, we're going to go and go to the exit question. We're going to bring out the magic eight ball early. Dan, evil, the price of Bitcoin be higher or lower this time next week. I am. And now magic eight ball virtually shake it, which could also cause a bubble. Will the price of Bitcoin be higher this time next week? The ball says count on it. All right. So there you go, a little optimism from the magic eight ball and at least it answered our question this week. This is a great time for everybody to give us a thumbs up. Usually get about 30 thumbs up a show. So if you got a thumb, give us a thumbs up. Moving on to issue two, why Bitcoin mining might actually be great for sustainability. And as I was talking to Dan about the last issue, now that BlackRock and KPMG and all these other companies are all getting into Bitcoin, suddenly the environmental problems around Bitcoin have gone away and they figured out all kinds of new things that they can do with Bitcoin like capturing the energy from flared natural gas, capturing other energy from renewables that can't be used at the time and just providing support for the environmental network for the power grids and other things. Thomas, what do you think about Bitcoin mining actually being good for the environment while if you've been watching this show over a while, we're pretty much keeping it up just so we can say I told you so over and over again. As we told you on the show many times when we discussed the environment, Bitcoin is not bad for the environment. In fact, Bitcoin is such a complex thing that it can actually be good for the environment in some cases by causing people to seek out more renewable energy or cheap or unused energy such as the leftovers from when you have to flare natural gas or when you can't run your hydroelectric plant anymore but the water is still running and your batteries are full. You can use some of that energy. They've also said that it could make renewables cheaper by allowing these companies to profit from this lost energy. So if you've been watching this show, you know that for years. It's been very interesting to see Bitcoin attacked as the boogie man, all the nonsense about how much energy is using it's bigger than Ireland. It's bigger than Argentina. It's bigger than Iceland, Argentina and Ireland put together and the whole time we're looking back in reality and we're saying, hey, it costs as much as the PlayStation 5 that doesn't turn off. It costs as much as Christmas lights in the winter and it could have a major effect on society and humanity. It's a brand new form of currency we've never had before that's not controlled by a central bank that has a relatively reasonable halving structure for the inflationary, deflationary aspects that you can tell in advance. It's unlike anything anywhere. There's no way to stop the halving and I think that's what the media is going to learn. But yeah, it's very interesting to see them change their mind now that block rock is in the business. Not only is Bitcoin not bad for the environment anymore, it might actually be good. Dan, we've talked about this many times over the years. What do you think about Bitcoin actually being good for the environment this time? Well, there's a funny twist to this, right? The black rock have been very instrumental in the pushing of ESG companies and suddenly it's almost as if since they announced their spot ETF. Again, maybe correlation or causation all that. But since they announced their ground for a spot ETF, there seems to be a lot of positive news, concluding about the mining of Bitcoin. So maybe there's some palms being greased allegedly, not allegedly, not I'm not saying that. That may have something to do with it, right? How this positivity is now coming out about Bitcoin. But then again, is it just the fact that there's the velocity of all the evidence that we've reviewed in the past that shows why Bitcoin is good for the environment, why it is good for soaking up renewables? And you think about the equivalent of there's always like a petition about a, you see about you know, certain food that goes to waste or like milk, this, this has been subsidized by the government and they're going to throw away 20,000 litres of this perfectly good milk because that's just what they have to do. And when I used to work at McDonald's, they did the same thing actually. It was, in fact, I don't know if I can say this, but it was years ago, but the manager literally used to walk round and used to spit in the burgers so he could do the waste count. Like this was crazy. It was like really bad. Anyway, the food didn't go back into the thing. This was the end of the shift. There's all this stuff about waste and, and Bitcoin is the perfect solution to that. It takes things like the methane, the excess methane from land, landfill, fled gas and just generally unused energy. And it's the only industry where you can very portably take somewhere to take the machinery and go and just use that power to, to mine Bitcoin and get some money back from the energy that would otherwise just go absolutely nowhere. And although there's, you know, these newfangled ideas of gravity, weight, weight storage and probably the most efficient ones actually pumping and water up hill to then pump it down hill again and generate electricity. Bitcoin literally makes money out of that electricity and does it very, very efficiently as well. So that's something that's obviously extremely positive. But also the fact that you think about how manufacturing plants, right, they, you know, back in the day, there would be a huge amount of waste from any old thing that was being manufactured. And now the more processes become lean, every shred of any resource that could be given as an excess is used. You know, if it's a chicken pluck apart, the feathers go to the, so and so they get sold on and the chick's skin will go in something else and then the gizzards and whatever will go in something else. And every smidgen of everything gets, sorry, some flowers fell off the minister. So every smidgen gets, you know, gets used. Nothing is, but no waste is spared. And we're just seeing that now with Bitcoin being able to soak up all this renewable energy that would otherwise go to waste. So to argue that it's bad for the environment when in definitely in very specific situations, let alone in the broader way, that Bitcoin's actually very good for the environment. Methane is, like, is it 30 times more poisonous than, or bad for the environment than carbon emissions? So by, obviously, methane's a lot less of the atmosphere, but still you're soaking that up with, but otherwise just go straight into the atmosphere, the same goes for, for flaring gas. So it's got a plethora of good points about it from being becoming an ESG asset for companies, building new energy markets, the stabilizing of grids and balancing using the excess energy that there is and then, and then being able to shut off quite easily when there is a demand as spike in energy. And obviously, the contentious part of that is that people are still moaning that the grid has to buy the energy back. But, you know, this is a paying customer, this is a contract, the grid isn't just going to screw itself over just for a bunch of Bitcoin miners. It doesn't work like that. That would be lunacy. So it's silly to make up things that would, you know, and go, oh, sorry, I was getting money back. Well, yeah, that's part of the system, right? Other companies do it too, go and, go and knock on their door and moan at them. But yeah, I think it's ultimately just, just very, very good for the environment. And we're seeing more of that. So once again, when, when is Tesla going to start, you know, accepting Bitcoin again and other companies start to doing it on the basis that, and this is going to be the real turning point that we're now using Bitcoin miners to do X, Y and Z, like all these, especially in, if there's industries where there's excess energy that they, they, they, they have, have got spam that they could be using for Bitcoin mining. And then they can turn their carbon heavy industry into a carbon neutral one via Bitcoin mining. That would be a real cool turn of events. Well, and I saw an interesting tweet recently about this where the guy showed, forget where it's called, but it's like a heavy load machine. And it's the kind of machine that's designed like basically to waste energy when they have problems with the energy grid and they have to turn these machines on. And what they said is that machine costs like $30,000. And a Bitcoin miner would only cost $3,000. So even, and that machine doesn't produce energy, it just wastes the energy. It's an energy wasting machine, an incredible invention, really. And that a Bitcoin miner could replace this and do better. So it's interesting to watch each one of these myths about Bitcoin fall. They're like, Bitcoin's only for drugs, Bitcoin can't scale, Bitcoin's bad for the environment. And yes, the whole time we're very clearly Bitcoin advocates here, but watching these myths just collapse and fall over and over again. And this whole thing where these weird guys on the internet who keep saying this over and over again are right. And these supposed experts at Forbes and all these another investment companies and investment magazines are wrong. So I think it's really fun to see that and to dunk on them once again that Bitcoin's not actually so bad for the environment and it could actually be good for the environment. It's just great to see these things turn around. And for whatever it happened, if it's BlackRock or some secret conspiracy or now that they've bought enough Bitcoin, they can be fans of it. It's the same thing. It is really interesting like you say down this focus on sustainability. As you guys know, I've been traveling a little bit recently and you go on these airplanes and usually get a little plastic bag, has a little plastic knife and fork in it, plastic containers everywhere. They're doing more and more now with kind of like a wooden spoon, like a wooden fork, wooden knife, the bag is paper instead of plastic. And if you think about these businesses where they use like, let's say 100 pieces of silver everywhere every day on the airplane and the airplane flies 300 times, three times a day, 300 pieces of silverware and they're wasting that every single day if they could just switch to wood or to noodles for straws basically replacing these things. We might actually be able to turn this environment thing around. We might actually be able to do something by getting to these points where the people use it like you're saying down. These companies could have wasted things in the past but now are finding ways to reuse them, ways to repurpose things and to see these Bitcoin miners go into the energy sustainability game or whatever ESG assets mean. I forgot already. It's an ESG governance, environmental social governance. It's still not a great acronym but still the fact that we can help out is great. It's just so surprising to me that this whole time as a scientific project, these facts about Bitcoin have been true and you could have looked them up beyond the media, beyond the like, it takes more energy than Ireland or whatever and no one did. No one bothered to look them up, no one cared and then now only as the big players are getting in the game are people starting to change their opinions on Bitcoin. Yeah, but again, is this without going down the consumer? Okay, I'm not leading to the next article but like the word conspiracy theory on this, I don't think it's conspiracy theory. It's a likely theory that that could be happening right that the tide is turning on opinion because the big players are entering the game where the money is and there's, you know, I don't think that's a conspiracy theory. I think that's a perfectly good theory. Yeah, that's that's self-intuitive. Right. These businesses are now invested. They've now made this a part of them and then now they have to defend it as well. Let me cross your palm with gold, sir. Bitcoin is good for the environment. That's all it took is just a little bit more gold. All right, let's keep moving. Check out worldcryptonetwork.com. We've got some new videos lately. These are the AI generated shorts and they're doing surprisingly well. One of them got 1,700 views last week. You guys can see these on our YouTube page as well. They're about 30 seconds long. So they're nice and short for the younger generation and the hopes is that some of them will actually subscribe and watch this show. So if you're watching now, push subscribe down below and check out worldcryptonetwork.com where we've got 3,123 videos that you can check out, including all of the new shorts. Moving on to issue three, Nick Carter doubles down on the theory that Bitcoin was invented by the NSA. Yes, another topic that we've talked about over and over again, the possibility that Bitcoin was created by a government, a government agency or even the NSA. This theory seems very strong, especially given that the NSA had published papers on crypto currency. It's fascinating to see Carter dub this as a potential lab leak hypothesis. It's like he's proving one conspiracy theory with another. If you like that, I've got a moon landing that you won't enjoy either. But yes, what do you think Dan on the idea that Bitcoin could have been invented by the national security agency? Again, I think this is, so I don't think this is necessarily a conspiracy theory. I think it's just a theory of how, there's plenty of theories of how Bitcoin came about. Obviously, you could say the conspiracy because it's a government-based thing. Is that probably where most of the most conspiracies get labeled as if the government specifically involved? But it's an interesting set of circumstances, right? I think it kind of has to do with the mystery aspect of Satoshi. By disappearing, Satoshi has robbed us of any kind of Bitcoin origin story other than the posts that he made, the emails that he replied to, the documents that we have from Satoshi. So from there, I think everybody puts their tinfoil hats on because no one believes one person could do all this, maybe three people, maybe a group of people, maybe a government agency full of people. I think it's tough there. Yeah, but it's, so it's Daniel Robbins who on earth, the kind of the paper, right? The Nick Carter commented on, which is, it does sound pretty, you know, it's called How to Make a Mint, the cryptography of anonymous electronic cash. And the authors and references were basically NSA slash GSHQ, obviously, they're kind of leading cryptors, right? Obviously, what are the NSA? And then there's the sort of side bit, the side dishes, the tattoo, tattooaki Okamoto, who kind of sounds a slight bit like Satoshi Nakamoto. But everyone's going to have their theories, right? I don't think we'll ever find out who it is, but there's always going to be new theories popping up. Whether they're conspiracy theories or not, I think it's the conspiracy theories. I think it gets thrown around too much nowadays. It's like one of the words like, and there's obviously crazy ass ones like the, the, the no offense out there because there's a view of people, but flat, flat earth thing, which is obviously a bit, a bit, a bit off the wall, crazy, right? In terms of conspiracy theories and NASA, like, you know, painting, I don't know, all sorts of random stuff on, on, on rockets that are made of plastic bottles and all sorts of crazy things that I've seen. But yeah, I think this is quite a reasonable, a theory, ultimately. I wouldn't, maybe I'm not just not calling it a conspiracy theory because it kind of was, was one of my pet things that I thought, and that kind of makes sense right about the waning power of the dollar eventually as all the other big countries become superpowers themselves. And there's a lot more, you know, competition in the field. But ultimately, we're not going to find out. So we're all we're left with is crazy little footprints, who knows maybe AI will become so sophisticated that all this crawling effort from, from, from, you know, open AI and, and all the other, the companies will eventually piece together somehow in a way that humans couldn't have done it by, you know, holding this amount of memory and RAM to be able to figure out who actually is or at least point towards who they, you know, who they could be if it's a group or the individual. But ultimately, we're not going to know. So we're all left with is theories. But I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I don't think it's a conspiracy theory this one. I think it's just a theory. I think it's a reasonable theory that's not too kind of bad shit. Crazy. Well, when I like about this one is if it is the NSA, we might actually find out about it eventually. If things go as we've talked about on this show many times towards a Bitcoin economy, where everything is denominated in Bitcoin, one Bitcoin is worth millions of dollars. People are trading 0.000 all the way down and everyone's using Bitcoin for everything. I think at a certain point, the NSA writes a paper about this and says, hey, US government, we've got a million or however many Satoshi coins there are, a Bitcoin's just sitting here. And once they've admitted that, then everyone can stop freaking out about them selling them all at once or intentionally brewing the Bitcoin market or any kind of that thing because it's just the government. If they put on a, we're going to sell them 10 coins a year, 100 coins a year, whatever. And the United States maintains being the richest country in the world, all these kind of things like the NSA, everyone gets pay raises, rewards. I mean, this is a huge victory for the agency if it's true. And especially if they control the Satoshi coins. And it would also take a lot of the pressure out of Bitcoin. People would be like, oh, it's invented by the US government. It's not so bad. But they just had to do this huge run around to get everyone into adopted in the same way that Vitalik Booter and Zathirium got everyone on proof of work and then switched to proof of stake. Maybe the government felt we have to convince people of Bitcoin on its own merits. And then later on, let people know that it was secretly a government project, which, I don't have a problem with, I don't have a problem with the government. But I know the libertarians out there pounding their fists and smashing their coffee mugs and all kinds of things because this is the ultimate betrayal for them. The libertarians and the cypherpunks who got there early and believed they were fighting the good fight and ruining the government with Bitcoin and so forth because the government wouldn't be able to raise funds. Suddenly, find out that they've been essentially working for the government all along. So this is a pretty brutal theory. Probably hurts a lot of people's feelings. I think they'd much rather have it be invented by a shadowy coder or someone like a super programmer or a team of a super programmer and a younger guy and an older guy. All these kind of other theories would be better than this one. But it's interesting to see how this one keeps popping up. And now we have Nick Carter, a modern Bitcoin advocate selling it and putting his heart and soul behind it. But again, they don't really have any evidence. The evidence level here is very similar to what Newsweek used to accuse Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto of being Satoshi Nakamoto. Your name is the same. What Nick Carter's essentially saying is that his name sounds similar. Shintoshi Nakatoto is similar to Satoshi Nakamoto. Therefore, Chucky Cheese invented Bitcoin. I think it's a very tough road to go down without any evidence. And again, the only way we're going to get evidence is it comes from the inside, IE, the NSA, revealing it, perhaps to show everyone the million Bitcoin they have and to say that they could finally build 50 Smithsonian museums in all 50 states and that it didn't matter that they sold the Silk Road coins. That was nonsense. They didn't care at all about those coins. Dan Eve, exit question, force prediction. Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? You don't have to name names. You could name a theory like if you like the old guy, young guy, economics guy theory or if you like the NSA theory or CIA or space aliens, important theory to know. I think it's someone who was so good to cover their tracks that you probably wouldn't know who they were publicly beforehand. I don't know. I think they may have been forever in the under in the undershadows. Right. And just I don't know. Yeah, maybe we'll never know because you know, it's someone that wasn't kind of famous or in the spotlight beforehand. It was just some psychopath coding the most ingenious money he could. They could cheat could. It could alien could. Now I'm going to go ahead and date myself here, but I remember back when the New York Times published the Unibombers manifesto and it seemed like he was on top of the world. He had sent letter bombs to multiple people. I don't know if I don't think anyone was hurt, but he was definitely a terrorist in the fact that he was sending bombs through the mail. But he achieved his aims. He got his crazy manifesto printed in the New York Times, the paper of record. Getting that printed drawing attention to his ideas and his thoughts and the way that he spoke through his writing led to his brother saying, wait a minute, that sounds familiar to me. And that's how they caught the Unibomber. In the same way with this Satoshi thing, I think he, he, she, they, whatever it is, has been very smart not to publish anything more. They published all those emails. They had, you know, other announcements and public messages and things. But since then, it's been radio silence because the more evidence, the more information you put out there, the more chance that even though you're the cyber super coder hiding in the darkness, someone's going to recognize it. And that reminds me of a guy who I met at a party once or someone in college who always used to code that way or always used to say those things. And it'll narrow it down. It's amazing that after how many years we've been in Bitcoin now, at least 10 years, Bitcoin has been out about 13 years. We still don't know who Satoshi Nakamoto is and we haven't gotten closer. Personally I would stick with the, I like the, the three Satoshi's theory, the young guy who's a really good coder, the old guy who's like kind of an all around guy and then an economics guy because there's just so many decisions made in Bitcoin and decisions made as far as we can see now 10 years, 13 years out, decisions made properly, decisions made for the long haul. The fact that the havining structure has not been adjusted, the fact that the block size raised and changing the way Bitcoin works was fought off to keep it in a hole and protected where you could run it on a small note or a small server. These are amazing that these kind of decisions have lasted 10 years and seem to continue lasting. So I think it's a very complicated project. I don't know that it was government or lab leak, but I always enjoy discussing it and let us know in the comments or in the chat what you guys think if you have an answer for the question of who Satoshi is, if you like the three Satoshi theory, the space alien Satoshi or again without any evidence at all, you just want to say Satoshi is a woman. Which you can do that if you want and I can say Satoshi is trans. I also have no evidence on that. It's just very fascinating the way people adopt people into their group and then start printing up t-shirts and there's just no evidence one way or the other. I can't say Satoshi is a man either. Just space alien is just as likely. But it's a great story and we keep talking about it. Yeah, ultimately it's just good that we don't know who who who who who who invented it because we don't you know, but I really do quote the Bible, right? But one thing is like don't don't what's it don't idolize false idolize false idols. Don't don't shit where you eat. Never get high on your own supply. That's not the blog. That's notorious. But yeah, you know, it's the false idols things, right? And we don't need Bitcoin as a need of Vitalik. It doesn't need Charles Hoskins, you know, who I am. Vincent. Yeah. Give unto Satoshi that which is Satoshi's. That's a little different though. Better move on to issue four before we talk about religion issue four. Your NFTs are actually they're exposing themselves a little bit here. Finally, totally worthless. Yes, a new report from industry researcher researchers find that 95% of the once hyped crypto assets have hit rock bottom valuation. Obviously my first problem with that is what about the other 5% that means that 5% of NFTs have value of what kind of report is this I thought you hated NFTs. So yes, the media is here to tell you that you're stupid and that you're stupid in reverse again. So this is one of those classical articles that sadly I think we're going to be referring back to in a year or maybe two years and we're going to say you know what they were a little short-sighted on NFTs or as I call them digital collectibles, blockchain collectibles, collectibles have value if people are willing to pay for them. The other thing that gives a collectible value is rarity. What's so nice about these digital assets compared to anything else like a baseball card or a stamp or whatever else you want to collect, you can verify the rarity of these on the contract on the blockchain and it can never be changed. It's amazing as a collectible. So if we were to say that there let's say there's like 50,000 or let's say 200,000 early NFTs and that the only ones that are worth anything are the early NFTs and there's 50,000 of them, they're going to go up and value again because people are going to slowly collect them until they're on the left and then the prices are going to go up. I don't know if they're going to go up to where they were during you know what we now could call the NFT bubble where they were kind of crazy but there's a possibility because of the global network of collectors, the amount of people that can gain access to them, the ease of storing them, you don't have to buy a vault or a lock, you can storm on your treasure or on your laptop or anywhere you want. It's a very easy store. The fact that they don't become damaged, the NFTs don't become damaged in a fire, they don't get torn corners or wrinkled paper or anything like that. They still seem like an incredibly valuable collectible to me on all aspects except the current price and when the media starts dumping on things and when they start saying things in the headline of the article, actually finally, wait a minute, you've been rooting against these collectibles the whole time telling everyone they're worthless dumping on them using all your power as the media to crush this new form of collectible and once again collectibles always have some kind of collectible value. People are always telling me about the tulip bubble. It still costs money to buy tulips in Amsterdam. You know that right? They never went to zero. Beanie babies still cost money on eBay and now there's become a whole grading system on the quality of the beanie and if it's been used and played with how well it sits, which is the same thing that happened to tulips, nicer tulips would be traded for canal houses which is a pretty sweet deal. And today is a day and age. Dan, what do you think about NFTs? Are they worthless or is this another case of the media dumping on someone, dumping on someone until they finally killed them just like they killed Bitcoin so many times? And then at least some, obviously 5% already of NFTs actually having value. Well, when you went through the beanie babies thing, I suddenly got like nostalgia to playing pugs. Can you remember pugs? A little disk. So, alpha is back in pugs form. They still have value. I might actually get some just to check them out. I actually look in some pictures now. They're incredible. But they're collectibles, right? Not all of them have value. I think there's because there's so much overproduction. If you think about NFTs, even though they've been around for a long while, they're going through their first real, like proper mainstream post pump cycle, just like shit coins did in the past. Really, you know, the big shit coin year was 2013 when they really started to, they've started to come up. But even back then, if you think how hard it was to, because I often pondered the idea of, you know, can I be in a project that created shit coin back before shit coins were known as shit coins. If you know what I mean, when it was just like, could we have an alternative to Bitcoin and there's not Bitcoin, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, it was bad, bad thoughts stand. But anyway, back then, you know, you needed to develop it was quite hard. There was a lot of work involved. And the same really with minting Ethereum tokens back in the day, you still needed a bunch of expertise and it cost a lot of money. Whereas the real boom, I think, for NFTs, which came in like 2021, it was so easy to mint them that anyone could do it. You know, these were copy-paste contracts. So the market was inevitable that the market would become completely insane and oversaturated. And if you were to think about how the different the landscape would be if, oh, I'm probably going to get hated for saying this specifically, but there's an analogy. But the proof of work that had gone into NFTs was a lot more required, right? It wasn't so easy to copy and paste and be able to create your NFTs. And the markets wouldn't have been oversaturated and we wouldn't have seen this 95% drop. It would be significantly less because a lot of the projects actually doing it would have to have proper skin in the game. It would, you know, be a well thought out and planned experiment rather than someone who's just cloned a bunch of, you know, properties of a face with a smoking a cigar and whatever and wearing a hat and all these funky little things and then just being able to try and sell 10,000 of them. Then exit scam. There would have been a lot more legitimacy, I think, behind the NFTs and we'd be seeing a lot less of a lot less of them. But we're getting the same thing that we did, right, which is, which is the prices and volumes are low, obviously a lot lower than, than 2021. So we're hearing all the bit obituaries and the NFTs are dead and these extraordinarily loaded headlines like, I can't even what it is now. Like that's like your NFTs are actually finally totally worthless. And that's just, in my opinion, and it's just such a loser thing to say, like to be that much against something that you're like, you're almost, you can, you could, the smug, the smug in this guy, as he's writing the article, he's literally fighting into a glass again. Oh yeah, that's actually the worthless now. And rolling stone does have some pretty loaded articles against crypto currency in general. Sorry, you were going to say something to him. Oh, I saw a great post by the, the artist and a NFT artist X copy. And he said, I guess my NFTs worthless and it was a crypto punk that he'd bought for like $500. And I was like, well, if you bought it for $500, it's not worthless. It's still worth more than that. And for a lot of these NFTs, people that bought them early, bought them before they were popular, people that bought rare Pepe's or whatever it was, they're still crazy up. Like, yes, you're not 10,000 times up. You're like 5,000 times up. It's still a pretty good up to be on. Yeah. And it's the same as people who bought Bitcoin, you know, when it was, you know, $20,000 peaked 2017 and who were crapping themselves when it was, was $3,000. And we had the same obituaries and, and you know, that, that sort of things. But, you know, photos and filters and, and Photoshop's apps, Photoshop apps didn't kill photography. Video didn't actually kill the radio star. There's plenty of those still about, you know, that there's, I think there's, there's a lot of doom and gloom when it comes to new industries and new markets and things. But the Rolling Stone magazine has generally been quite anti crypto, right? And obviously you can tell with this extremely loaded, loaded article. And they didn't, they felt it like, include certain things like the fact that actually in the, when this article was being written, one of the, one of the things that was defying the slump was the coin disk culture and in statement index, which, which gained after some really strong performance of their NFT platform and mutable X. So I'm not pushing that. I don't have any of it or anything like that. But, you know, this is, these are things that it fails to sort of mention that there are, you know, legitimate sounding projects that are actually doing quite well, rather than the pump and dump carbon copy things. But the thing about this, there's article I think that I got to read this, this, this little bit out. NFTs, which became a major contrarian. And this just, again, it's just how loaded it is and very badly researched as well. NFTs, which became a, or maybe I should read it in a more depressing tone. NFTs, which became a major controversy as they peaked in popularity, their environmental impact, non-fungible tokens are minted on the blockchain, a process that requires energy and bought and sold in marketplaces that run crypto currencies mind with computer rigs that have a significant carbon footprint. But minting tokens carries a cost that dead NFTs report observes that the nearly 200,000 NFT connections with no apparent owners or market share identified by the study caused carbon emissions of equivalent to the annual output from 2400 to 248 houses or 3,500 cars. Is that it? Is that literally it? What a waste of an analytics and effort researching that, especially when actually, you know, like like it will lump it, but obviously Ethereum went, went proof of stake, right? So proof of stake and Ethereum would be in the biggest market for NFTs and polygon the second biggest market. You know, that's there's no more mining involved. So they literally don't know what they're talking about anymore. Like they're not including the very pertinent facts that would otherwise prove their, you know, their silly headline and stuff wrong. You know, I'm not pro. I don't have any NFTs. The only one I did try and buy was it was a Pepe and I bought the original print or print one of one print and then, and then the, the, the, the artist sent me the NFT to the address that I use, which was, which wasn't my address. So I couldn't have to the NFTs gone now forever and I can't get it. So which is very sad. So, yeah, unfortunately, I'm not in it, but you know, I can see the value of some of the things like the ticking systems, the things like that, the end, the club entry and stuff. I think there is value at the end of the day. People are going to pay for it. It's a free market, right? That's how we learn about Bitcoin is this free market. And I can buy this Bitcoin even if you crazy people in the Treasury team, and I talk to about Bitcoin all day, think I'm nuts and, you know, even though you're the money experts, and I'm not, you should listen to me about Bitcoin. And they thought I was crazy talking about Bitcoin. So, you know, I think NFTs do have a lot of purpose. And thinking about Bitcoin, it was, you know, Bitcoin is like the original collectible, right? It's the most, it's the one that you can prove that that you actually own. It's the first, it's the first change number one. And obviously it's, it's, it's the most secure chain. So having these other things that are collectibles, why not let them, people collect them, right? If you don't want to, you know, don't, if you don't want to spend your own money on buying an NFC, don't, don't spend it. But I think guarding the gates and, and moaning about other people owning NFTs is a bit, it's a bit silly, really. Well, as David Mammett wrote in the fantastic film, state and main, you have to make it yourself if it's fun. If you don't make it yourself, it's just entertainment. So they, they discount all the fun that we had with NFTs, all the fun that people had collecting these, buying them, selling them, speculating the dreams that they had, that, you know, whatever, stoner, weirdo, crypto, kiddies, number five would be worth millions of dollars. That was a lot of fun. And they don't take that into account at all that people have these fun dreams. Well, some people bought them too high and they bought them too low and all that. But there was a lot of fun that was generated and they don't take that into account at all. Also, I wanted to go through, I think the NFTs market's doing fine. I logged into Reddit the other day, unfortunately. And Reddit's doing little NFL based Reddit collectibles, which exactly is exactly how I saw this market. Anyone can now make collectibles. They can make unique items that they could send to your address that you could own or like Dan, if they send it to the wrong address, you could never own it is completely lost. This is a really fun idea, creating digital collectibles. I've seen, just recently I tried to watch all the NFT articles. I've seen Casio watches is getting into NFTs. They're going to make collectibles. Porsche is doing collectibles. All these other companies have done collectibles. And these are all at little cost. And it makes still, in my opinion, one of the greatest collectibles ever can't be damaged, perfect inventory. If some of them are lost or digitally destroyed, we can verify that, such as with Curio cards, I think card number 26. There's only 111 in existence, but six of them got stuck in the bad wrapper. So they don't exist. So now there's like 105 possible in existence. So I think it's going to turn around eventually. I think this is one of the articles where the media wants so desperately to be right. They want so desperately to chase these terrible collectibles away and all the people that made money off them. But it's not going to work. I think that they're going to come back. I watched a great movie recently called, like, Welcome to Macintosh. I think it was a 2008 documentary about Apple and Macintosh. And they showed this guy. And he's got a garage and a closet and an upstairs and an attic and his whole house is filled with Apple computers. And while he started out as is you would get him as junk, you would do a job for a company. They'd have 30 leftover apples. They wouldn't want him. He'd take him in as junk. And I saw the same thing happen with old video game cartridges like Nintendo cartridges. You could go to the pawn store or the record store and they'd have them there for you know, $3, $5, really low prices for these things. But like all things, the more time goes on and the less of them that people can actually get their hands on, they go up in value. All of these apples are now priceless. Nintendo cartridges, especially the good ones are very expensive. And in the same way, these NFTs, especially the oldest ones that you can prove on the blockchain, whether it's Ethereum or Bitcoin or Polygon or wherever you keep your NFTs, you can prove their age, you can prove their date, you can prove that it truly is part of that collection. That's a really good collectible. I don't know why the media is arguing so forcefully against the idea of collectibles. Yes, they go up and down. They have bubbles like the two lip bubble or the beanie baby bubble. And I know they want this to be a one way death bubble for NFTs. But it's just like with the internet when they're like, what's an at symbol? Well, what is this internet? Do I have to dial in? It's not going to work for them. Betting against technology never seems to work out. But I also think it's interesting, as we talked about last week, what's going on with the stoner cats as Ashen Kuchner and Mia Kunis tried to make a TV show and somehow implied that the NFTs would have value because they're making a TV show yet. And they got struck down. They've been declared a security, which is hilarious with Bitcoin and Ethereum not being securities and stoner cats of all things, being 100% now a security. But I just read another article about a filmmaker who wants to make a film and he's going to finance it with NFTs by selling NFTs. So again, this idea of creating a digital collectible that has the value that someone's willing to pay for it. And we don't know what that value is. We sell it for 10 bucks. We sell it for 100 bucks as a fundraiser for the movie or whatever it is. And it just happens on the other end, whether it's incredibly valuable or not that valuable and just incredibly rare. But I think they're being way too fast to judge on this patent themselves on the back a little too soon. It's a really think that the NFTs thing is over. I, I, I, if they want to really prove that they're worthless, you know, stack down a million dollars and go try to buy them all. Oh, you couldn't buy them all for a million dollars when you started buying them up. Other people noticed and they started buying them up too. Maybe they're not worthless. Maybe they have value. And again, it's collection by collection basis. I don't know obviously thousands, hundreds of thousands of NFTs have been made. But still to dump the whole market over this. I'm just very short-sighted. Yeah. All right, Dan. My team is loaded right. They're pretty against crypto in general. So I think we knew we know what's I, they're sort of on. Until it becomes Bitcoin becomes good for the environment, right? And then they'll be going, oh, these NFTs were amazing. You know, these, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the minting of these pooping cats, NFTs generated enough electricity for seven houses in Namibia. Yeah. Well, and I do love the idea that we worked so hard to convince them that Bitcoin had value because of the network effect, because of the structure of the haveenings, because of the way the network worked. You know, it didn't require a middleman, all of these kind of things. And then we had to go through a whole second round of convincing them that these collectibles had value. Because of like I've said, you can send them around anywhere in the world. You don't have to store them. You can prove that they actually are the collectible. They actually fit in sequence. It's provable. They're hard to destroy. It just must be so frustrating for the media. If they are, as we've predicted here and in the past, wrong on this again. So you were wrong on Bitcoin and all the cryptos having value. Then the NFTs went way up and you said, no, they're terrible. And then you dumped them and dumped them and dumped them. And then if they're wrong on this again, it'll be quite something to see. But again, no investment advice here on NFTs. There's far too many for a Dan or I to know which ones you should buy. But again, my general theory that the earlier they are, the older they are, antiques become valuable. There's a, you know, this guy has a box full of Apple computers and I'd take any one of them. And all he had to do is save them. Other people took the original iPhone in its plastic container and stuck it up in their attic. And they can get it out 20 years later and sell those for big money. So it's very interesting what a little bit of time and a little bit of scarcity will do to a collectible market and turn something that used to be just, you know, nothing like we had a whole computer lab full of Mac classics. We had like 30 of them. And now 30 Mac classics, you know, in your garage. Oh, that's a sweet deal. And, you know, not so much for the PCs, but still even an old PC guy showed one with a discat lately. And I was like, Oh, that looks really nice. Yeah, but it was a lot of mechanism. Yeah, I could see myself buying one of those. That's kind of a real throwback. Whereas at the time you sold all your computer equipment to buy new computer equipment, or you gave it to a friend that needed it or another family that needed it because computers were so much into man, they're not, you know, now everyone has a computer. So I guess they just want newer faster ones. But there's only about six years ago that I saw I, I threw out some old like Amiga games. They weren't in mint condition, but they had the box on them. And I remember keeping them and I just thought, man, that was really dumb because they could actually be worth something. It is strange. Yeah, I got rid of my Sega CD cases a long time ago. And I probably should have kept all those thinking cases, but they were plastic and hard to carry. But that is the difference of what makes a, you know, valuable antique versus a less valuable antique. And again, just like antiques and collectibles, it's worth what someone will pay you for it. Yeah, we just have to have to sell it the right time. I think we're running out of time. Dan, do you have a prediction or a story of the week? Oh, man, I don't think I have one. There's no one else to ask first. Oh, jeez, I can't, I can't, I know, everyone always talks about like working stuff, and I can't, I can't because I'm under an, an, an, an, an, but, um, but, uh, so, uh, well, can I talk about, um, no, I, I'm the only thing I could say is that my, my son started school and it's just really crazy how time flies and cherish all the early moments as, as much as possible. So give us a salty thing that's non-group type. So, I think that's pretty amazing. Uh, Dan and I were talking about before the show. I think it's been about five years since we went to rega Latvia at the honey badger conference. So it is so amazing how time flies and how quick it moves. So yes, you definitely have to appreciate your time, appreciate your people. Uh, be a little nicer to them. Thank them. Be grateful. I think that's a good message there, Dan. I don't have, I don't have a story of the week. I enjoyed watching, uh, winning time on HBO Max. It's a story of the 1980s Los Angeles Lakers and their challenges against the Boston Celtics, Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Larry Bird, fantastic series. John C. Riley playing Jerry Bus, the owner of the Lakers. Unfortunately, it's been canceled by HBO. They were unable to promote the show properly with the writer's strike. And so the company just put it out there and of course no one watched it because it wasn't promoted and the company used that as an excuse to cancel the show. So it's very unfortunate, but if you want to check it out, there's two great seasons of winning time document. It's not really a documentary. It's an acted out show, but it feels like a documentary about the 1980s Lakers and Celtics. Definitely check that out. I saw that cool movie. Welcome to Macintosh about the Mac. And I saw another great one called Atari, easy to learn, difficult to master, which has several interviews with the founders of Atari. And just very interesting to read about the old days of computers and to watch these movies. So you guys can check those out wherever streaming movies are played. I think we're about done for today, Dan. Anything else you want to add? I was just going to say, didn't Atari bring out a token? I'm almost certain they either brought out a token. I met, I think I'm sure. Oh, yeah. They had they had an online video game type system. And again, Atari itself, the name has been sold several times. Yeah. So I don't really know what to say. Atari, the company, it's certainly not a Warren Bush now, the original guy who sold it to Warner Media. But yeah, they had a token for a while. I think you could play Pac-Man online or some version of Pac-Man, if you had the token. But yeah, it's been interesting to see how they they keep it up with the relevancy. I think they're making a new video game like Atari at 50. And they want me to buy it, like I bought all the other Atari collections. I don't know. I'm getting tired of collections. But yeah, it's all the different games and all the different versions. And you can play them. It's really neat, they're trying to keep the company in the idea live. But it was definitely a special time. People that played Atari 2600s and Nintendo's and video games back in the day, just what an adventure it was going from block graphics to more realistic graphics to even doom and quake. And I definitely recommend again that book about John Carmack and John Romero, who invented doom and quake in Wolfenstein 3D. And a lot of the other stuff that we enjoy today. That's a great book. That nostalgic floppy disk noise that kind of set everyone up for the for the for the iconic internet connecting. You know, if you do, you're doing like, ah, there's the, have you seen that? I don't know if you've seen it. It's really cool. There's like a a guy who gets a bunch of floppy disk machines and he makes music. So he's got like a hundred of them. And he's they're playing these incredible tunes. But just like all loading at certain points. It's amazing. It's amazing. Definitely seen some of those are pretty cool stuff. I think it was a tainted love as the one I'd seen. It's because it's a lot of like bump, bump, arm, arm, bump. And it's a very recognizable song that they could do with the kind of sounds they have. But yeah, right now we're saying, hey, that's great. He's using the floppy disks. In other five years, when he's saying, I can't believe he destroyed so many floppy drives. I can't believe he did this. He's they belong in a museum. And then maybe they'll be saying that about NFTs too. I don't know. Let us know in the comments. Say hello. Give us a chat. We're going to go check out the chat after the show. But thanks to everybody for joining us. We'll try to have some more guests for you next week. We're probably going to stick with the Friday time going back to normal here. But we just have to gather more guests. So we're going to work on that. And until next time, bye, bye.