The Bitcoin Group, the American original. For over the last ten years, the sharpest citoties, the best bitcoins, the hardest crypto currency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Dan Eave, the crypto raptor. Alebic Coignants. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network, moving on to issue one, issue one, Bitcoin pairs after BlackRock says ETF application under review. But that wasn't before the price of Bitcoin spike to $30,000 because of an inadvertent posting in a BlackRock database. Yes, it looked like BlackRock was getting ready to add the Bitcoin ticker symbol to their website, but only Bitcoin detectives could have figured it out. Their news drove the price up to $30,000,000,000, before rising to $35,000,000, basically based upon ETF excitement. After all, they're going to start an ETF. They've got to buy those Bitcoin somewhere. They'll buy yours or mine or that guy's. Dan Eave, what do you think about the ETF Bitcoin application and the breaking of $35,000? Well, we had that little slumber. It's still cooking around 34K right now at 33.7K. But going back to the real indicator of Bitcoin's hard corners, I think it was $60 trillion. The difficulty at the moment, $60 trillion, which is insane. It was only late 2022 when it hit $30 trillion. Now it's $60 trillion. So it's really pumping extra $430,000. As well as still floating around within about 10% of the all-time high hash rate. So whilst the price is fluctuating a bit here and there, the hash rate is still coming on strong. The difficulty is reaching all-time highs alongside it. So that just shows that the infrastructure is still growing strong. Obviously, there's everyone tussling for this Bitcoin ETF. I even saw today that there's now, I've got one of those little Amazon Alexa TV things. I really recommend it actually when I came over to the visit to Vegas. It's all gone for me and the family. So CoinDesk now has like a daily crypto roundup on the Alexa. So you can see how much things are growing in terms of getting awareness out there of Bitcoin as maybe it was just based on my buying in the past on Amazon, although they don't really sell that many Bitcoin-type things. Maybe it's the service that they've rolled out and anyone can see who may be interested. So that's quite cool. So I've seen all of these other mainstream areas that are talking a bit more positively about Bitcoin and especially after BlackRock suddenly got behind it and started shilling the helping to shield the resourcefulness and the positive environmental factors of Bitcoin and the positive effect that it's got on power supply and regenerate using all wasted electricity, flaring and all sorts. Maybe we've set it up time and time again now. We've seen that report that says that Bitcoin mining is now over 50% that Tesla will kick off the next bull run again by accepting Bitcoin because everyone seemed to like it last time when Tesla accepted Bitcoin. So it's all in all. These are just kind of, we go sideways until the next half an inch, which is now less than six months away, right? So we're starting to creep into really exciting times. Well, and that's exactly where I was going to start, Dan. If I had a crypto news service, I would talk about the happening every day until the halving. Yes, the halving is coming and the price is probably up in some way because of the halving. It's like the sun at the center of the universe. It has so much gravitational pull. Everything is being pulled towards it unless you're lucky and you orbit the sun. You'll just sit there forever. But yes, this is more of the pattern of Bitcoin where there's breaking news. The Bitcoin ETF has been approved. Then it's not approved. Then there's breaking news. BlackRock has added a ticker. Then they remove the ticker. Then the price of Bitcoin goes up anyway. Maybe it's just people finding out that there is a Bitcoin ETF potential on the horizon and they're placing their bets there. Maybe it's other people just saying, forget it. I'm all in on this Bitcoin market. Maybe it's a flee from stocks as we see that the Fed is going to keep rates where they are and that the it's going to be difficult to borrow money. So stocks are going to stay where they are or go down. All of those factors together, the price of Bitcoin is up. It's also time soon for Michael Saylor and even naive bucali to start crowing about their Bitcoin holdings. Yes, if they made it through the dark times, we're starting to get to the point where their stocks will be above what they bought them for again and they can start singing about Bitcoin and we can have a reversal of all those articles making fun of El Salvador. Now it'll all be if you had bought Bitcoin when El Salvador bought Bitcoin, this is how much money you'd have now. But now, Dan, it's time of course at the end of the first topic to predict against the Bitcoin ball, the knower of all truth in this universe and galaxy will the price of Bitcoin be higher or lower? We've had a bit of consolidation after that, after that punt to 35 K plus. So I think we're going to go higher again. I think we're just a bit of sideways action and then higher. I'll stick with that. I'm always bullish about Bitcoin to get the magnifying glass ready and the flashlight and all the other things that we need to see the future. If you don't have a flashlight or a magnifying glass, how can you see the future? Will the price of Bitcoin be higher this time next week? Cannot predict now. For the third week in a row, the magical Bitcoin predictor ball has refused to predict the future. It just doesn't care. Moving on to issue two. Bitcoin primed for supply shock as exchange balance drops to five year low analyst says a spot ETF approval could fundamentally alter Bitcoin supply and demand dynamics as professional investors would allocate to BTC as an uncorrelated asset for x.com's Matt Weller told Coinbase T coin desk TV and let's go to Thomas hunt for this Thomas go ahead and let's go back to the screen share. I think that this chart is one of the most important ones to look at. This is the balance of Bitcoin. Bitcoin's on exchange the orange line and the price of Bitcoin. We see that Bitcoin's on exchange peaks here starts to go down gets about there and now we have a sudden down of price on the exchange. And later we have a sudden up of the price of Bitcoin. So as less people hold their coins on exchanges, there's less supply of Bitcoin and the price goes up this fits perfectly into the basic havining theory that the havining reduces the production of Bitcoin by 50%. It's not as large a reduction as we previously had, but it's enough and it'll reduce the amount of supply on Bitcoin. If you are in exchange and you're buying like 100 Bitcoin a week, maybe you can only get 75. This is a big problem for exchanges and it's something that naturally happens that Bitcoin as it's deflationary. There's less Bitcoin to buy every year. So theoretically the price of Bitcoin should go up. Dan Eve, what do you think about the deflationary nature of Bitcoin and the economy and the media figuring out that there's going to be a supply shock? As there's more exchanges popping up, it used to be a case that there was 10, 15 exchanges back in 2012, 2013 to buy Bitcoin. Now there's hundreds and hundreds. So the amount of Bitcoin, even though the supplies gradually increased since back then, the amount of Bitcoin that's on exchanges is just spread out more thinner. And as people are learning more and more about the exchange hacks, the issues from holding your not holding your own keys, people are pit-filling their Bitcoin off exchanges and only trying to use them for the necessary part of why they're trading in or trading out as they need to, which means that there's much thinner layers on exchanges. We're seeing, we may see some more price volatility as bigger orders come in on these exchanges and they swing the price a bit more than they would otherwise do. And there's less exchanges and much thicker order books. But overall, it's a good sign. It's a good sign right that the less Bitcoin on exchanges, the better because it means that that learning process is happening. Bitcoin's doing its thing, which is being in self-custody, which is what it's meant to be for. And people are going to be benefiting from that even more when they, you know, more exchanges go down in the future. So yeah, your keys, not your coins, the classic same way. And it's time to take your keys off exchanges, especially in time for the third of January, right, which is the, I can't remember what it's called now, the trade trace may as proof of not an inappropriate proof of, so called proof of asset stay. Maybe proof of coins. So like, when everyone pulls their coins off the exchanges on the third of January, which was, you know, the anniversary of the Genesis block. And as Josh has said many times, the most punishing day for exchange employees who just want to have a couple days off at the beginning of the year. Proof of exchanges. That's the same, Jeff. Proof of exchanges. Proof of one side. Proof of keys. Proof of keys. Yes. We miss trace. He's not around anymore. I was reading over the break here, the, the Sam Bankman freed book, at least the first one, the Michael Lewis book going infinite, the roundly criticized book. And while it's great to hear about Sam and all of his fun times that he was having, getting bigger and bigger and bigger, the book reads so far just like a normal startup chronicle. There's nothing, nothing mysterious about it. It's just Sam and his friends and he's just playing video games and meetings and the author seems in love with him. But remember, Dan, like you were saying, so many people thought they were set because they had their coins in FTX and to go back, you know, previous generation, so many people thought they were set because they had their coins in Mt. Gox. Both of them had X's in the name. So it is very bad when you trust someone else with your coins when you trust a custodial wallet, even if it is someone trusted like Coinbase or even reading this book, FTX sought to be the most regulated, the most official, the most government friendly, etc. exchange. And then in the same way, according to the trials, allegedly, was dipping into customer funds from almost the very first day. The obvious thing not to do, they were doing it. They were spending the customer funds, even billions of dollars of them allegedly on Tom Brady and Shaquille O'Neill and other endorsements. So it is very interesting how it seems like you've got it and it seems like you've got the mainstream support and they're on the TV and they have the big celebrities and your coins are safe in there and you log in every day to make sure they're still there, right? But they're not really there. It's different when you hold it in a treasure or a ledger in a hardware wallet. And we're going to talk about it later, but the guy later on made at least three or four copies of his keys and still lost them all. So he do have to be very careful when you're custodialing your own keys. There's some FTX. There is some light at the end of the tunnel for some people on the used FTX because there's I'm pretty sure I read about takeover bits, potential takeover bits. So FTX by the sounds of it isn't completely dead. It's kind of obviously some is out the picture. The more we're hearing the more crazy his escapades were and how it wasn't just kind of at the towards the end of things that they became chaotic because things grew too fast. I mean, right, it sounds like right from the start. He was shady as it is. So at least for people that have lost money, there is maybe some redemption coming from a buyout of sorts of FTX. Also, they did make quite a lot of random investments, right? Although they did some crazy stuff, they made some investments and some of them are meant to be paying off. Like I'm pretty sure I read that they invested in chat GPC or open an open AI or something like that. Right. Which is it's going to be paying some pretty hardcore value. So if they've made other investments back in the next bull run, they could actually benefit quite a lot from that. So all is not lost by the sounds of it. It does sound like there may be a percentage return as you're saying as these investments come back as well as some of the political donations that were given directly to the candidate. Those might be refunded while the political donations that were funneled through alternative systems are going to be harder to refund. And I'm not sure if those are going to go back to the original people. We also, we didn't really put FTX in today's show, but we did find a large article that said, it's very possible that Caroline, Mr. Fong, Mr. Nishad and the other people who were in Sam's inner circle who testified against the company may receive no jail time at all. So it's a very interesting possibility that all these people were around Sam when he was planning and running it allegedly, of course, and that all these people are now going to get away with it. Obviously, they'll have to pay back any of the money they made from FTX and perhaps even pay back large penalties monetarily and so forth. But it does sound like if you're in the gang of people that stills billions of dollars, but you're not the leader of the gang, you might be fine. I don't know. Then what do you think about that? Well, it's another scenario where, you know, obviously he did what he did was thoroughly illegal, but where their crypto kind of companies are being made an example of. And we've said this before, but the termal that came out of the 2017-18 financial crisis and I don't think anyone went down for it. Yeah, there was a lot of dodgy stuff going on. Obviously, regulation became a lot tighter. And I worked in a finance company after that on some hardcore regulation, you know, surveys actually in Kingfrey and King Tune, all sorts of all of the other ones that they brought in regulation wise, but no one kind of went down for it. Whenever something happens in crypto, there's always a lot of prosecutions going on. This is dating back to Charlie Trem that was made an example of years ago. So whilst obviously, I'm not saying they shouldn't prosecute people, but maybe there should be more prosecutions going on in the real world with the other financial companies that currently have more of a swing and had more of an impact on the world than small kind of, well, I'll say, small reasonably sized exchanges, which were nothing in terms of its size compared to the traditions that got away with murder. It's almost as if these prosecutors are following the great man of history theory. They took out Ross Olbrecht. They're going to take out SPF. They've captured the King pins, like you're saying, Charlie Shrem and etc. of these crypto enterprises, but they let all the other people slip right through. It doesn't seem sensible. It doesn't make any sense as an enforcement strategy. It's very strange to see, but in the public eye, it's very flashy and exciting. And it looks like the untouchables with Al Capone, you know, we got our man. We got him. Sam's not untouchable anymore. Well, after he testified for himself today, suddenly the estimate is doubled, right? And people are plucking out 40 years plus for the guy. Four years to life for how kind of flippin he was in his own witness statement. So it's not really looking good for him at all. And the judge warned him. Then the judge had him answer questions in a private session where he, like he said, he was flippin and petulant and rude and so forth. And then the judge, I'm not sure about it. I haven't read the new articles, but I assume he had the jury in and they had him in front of the jury. And I'm sure he was no better. It's shocking that his attorneys are letting him testify. It was always shocking when he went on his press tour and did all those shows, especially appearing with coffee zilla on a Twitter space. I know exactly how to handle that. And especially if you have a client, you just go like this, you turn it off. Oops, we had a disconnection. Sam lost his feed like coffee zillas here. I mean, come on. But no, he didn't have good attorneys then and he doesn't have good attorneys now letting him testify. It's a bad idea. Not to say that he's not going to get, he's going to get away with it, but testifying it's not going to help. Let's move on. Check out worldcryptonetwork.com where as we were speaking of artificial intelligence, created some incredible new shorts for you to watch, such as the surprising environmental impact of pooping cat NFTs NFTs surprising my environmental impact, the crypto raptor and Thomas hunt discuss the Bitcoin news, discover the power of Bitcoin own your future unpredictable balls mysterious exclusive stands weekly. Hello and a mass exquisite finances that stress or someone else. We've got shorts, shorts, shorts and more shorts at worldcryptonetwork.com and a lot of other videos. Moving on to issue three, Hamas just learned a brutal lesson about Bitcoin can senators learn it. Yes, Hamas was previously accepting donations with cryptocurrency, including Bitcoin, not just Monero or Z cash or other privacy coins. And both they and their donors have gotten in trouble for their Bitcoin donations. Yes, it turns out that Bitcoin transactions are saved on something called the blockchain and that they are completely transparent and anyone can follow them back to their source. Hamas, the alleged terrorist group has restops taking crypto donations in Bitcoin and has worn their donors that they may soon be in trouble for donating. Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, has produced a whole campaign where she's going to campaign against Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as dirty terrorist money. Dan Eve, it seems that the terrorists themselves are campaigning against Bitcoin as not private enough and telling people not to use it. Yes, so it wasn't this born out of, I mean obviously, Elizabeth Warren's hatred for crypto has been around for a long while. But what's really kicked the business is a Wall Street Journal article, I think that kind of came up with this plucked a bunch of figures out of Finair about how much Hamas has, Hamas has, Hamas has amassed in Bitcoin donations. That's a tongue twister. I think they is your favorite firm, their chain analysis niche. The analysis is, that's turned out later to be very, very wrong. As sadly, I fear most of the early work with chain analysis is going to be, I think that yes, you can do blockchain analysis and you can claim all these things, but it's much like IP address analysis. Like you're going to make lots of mistakes. You're going to have lots of false positives and you're going to bring a lot of guilty people to jail before they master it, before they really figure it out. Go ahead Dan. Even chain analysis niche's own data says that around only 0.25 to 0.5% of Bitcoin transactions are actually used for the various purposes. So they're misquoting the most experienced analysis niche service around Bitcoin and not only the misquoting it, but then they're just kind of putting the dots together. That aren't really there. It's almost a conspiracy theory of analysis, to be honest. And the way it was phrased. Now the Wall Street Journal kind of kicked off this, this, this kick this honey honey business. And then I think it was Cynthia Loomis, right? The Wyoming Senator. Now also wrote to, to, to, to Congress to say that bit, bit finnext and Binance need to be investigated for their role in funding, Kermas as well, even though it seems like I think some other research shows that there's less than like 400,000 that was actually sent to these, sent to, sent to Hamas. And of that 400,000 as this other articles says, they learned less than that it's, you know, the blockchain's transparent. That's the whole point of it. It's a public blockchain. So the ability to hide transactions is, is not good enough, which is why we've seen so many of these, you know, historic events in terms of hackings like the bit, bit finnext recovery, so road recovery, all of these other events have led to people being caught because the blockchain is so, so transparent and it's so hard to actually hide these transactions. And it's a bone of contention in, in the Bitcoin world, right? Is the Bitcoin isn't private enough, you know, rather than it being people saying, yes, really private. It's, it's, it's exactly how it needs to be. They're saying, no, it needs to be more private because of these exact reasons. So it seems like the, the, the Wall Street Journal kicked something off that really is not, is not legitimate and has led to a further one to crack down on Bitcoin, on cryptocurrency. I think this was, was specific exchanges and their role. But exchanges are centralized. So they, you know, they're, they're a point where, if I was to transact between you and you, I can send you cryptocurrency back and forth, nothing can stop me sending you from Bitcoin, me sending Bitcoin, you sending me to Bitcoin. But if it goes to an exchange, that is a point of a single point of failure in the transaction rooting where the exchange could stop it and hide and take someone's Bitcoin to prevent them from getting, getting, you know, using it to send outward again. So it's a shame that, that this is happening, but I saw that Nick Carter put a bounty together, I think 60 lots of $500 and it's still way overfunded to provide some more analysis on, on, you know, how much actually has gone to potentially to Hamas and to fund other terrorism, to, to, you know, to respond to the allegations of, again, Bitcoin being used for the ferries and ferries reasons. I think even the article that I saw as well had like the, the article was like a gun. It was just like a gun pointing, right? I think it was that article, you know, and this is talking about Bitcoin, it's nothing like that, you know, the, the, we, we've covered this so many times, it's, you know, there was the English report recently that said, oh, Bitcoin is just used for the ferries transactions and, and it's all, you know, provably wrong. And what's very clear is that the dollar, the pound, all the euro, all of these other currencies, especially in cash form are a lot like far less traceable, far less traceable and far easy to money laundering than Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency. So again, it's much to do about nothing and it just seems like another one of these, you know, sarcastable type episodes of self-parkway, someone's written something and then everyone just goes running with it until it becomes, you know, complete, you know, complete files of the system and they're going off to something that, that, you know, doesn't need to be regulated to this level because it's provably not as big an issue as they're saying. It's interesting, Dan, if we just did a simple thought experiment, if I gave you cash or a stack of cash, there's no external transaction needed, right? That doesn't need to go being or whatever, you have the cash. But if I give you Bitcoin, let's say that I give you a copy of my private key, until you've claimed it and moved it, it's not really your Bitcoin in the same way. If I have the Bitcoin and I send it to you, but I don't broadcast it or I don't actually push send, if I haven't created a transaction for it, it's not actually sent. So it's the exact opposite of cash in that. Like there has to be some kind of a physical movement, unless I guess if you were trading a casaceous coins maybe or some kind of other trusted medium, which again, it would be very difficult to verify. But yes, they have to have a transaction. They have to send the Bitcoin, they have to extract it from the private key if that's the way they're going to do it. But yes, it's very strange to see the two compared. Cynthia Loomis, formerly a friend of Bitcoin, suddenly not a friend of Bitcoin anymore. So I want everyone to keep track of that. One politician, Republican, one day our friend, the next day, not our friend. And it's very sad to see Elizabeth Warren go this way. I know you guys have known she's been anti crypto for a long time, but she's good on a lot of other issues. Maybe she's just being misled by her staff or she's out on a crusade. Sometimes a senator goes out on a crusade and it's hard to say you're wrong. It's hard to like slow the boat down and say, whoopsie, especially if you think about the war on drugs. So many people arguing from mandatory minimum. So many people arguing the gateway theory. So many arguing things that we know are no longer true. And much the same, the hill, kind of a right wing publication, takes Warren to task, saying that she might also find illuminating the high profile criminal prosecution of a Manhattan rapper and her husband. People are always so cold with this. It's always Sam's girlfriend. It's always the Manhattan rapper and her husband. It's whatever you're famous for. Who are easily caught when they tried to launder bit billions in Bitcoin stolen again, it was the transparency of the blockchain really in their own stupidity that expose them's Warren's bill, the digital asset and time money laundering act aims to solve a problem that no one has. And I always think we have to watch out for this when we have people that are out there solving problems that you don't have when there's not statistical evidence and information and things that they're fighting against. You have to say, maybe it does something else. And I'm sure it's not going to take long for our chat room and our comments to say, well, of course, they're trying to track your crypto and my crypto and, you know, Johnny spending crypto down the block and they're trying to limit the power of our Bitcoin and cryptocurrency revolution. And I'm apt to agree with you. I do think that given that there's no problem for them to solve that perhaps they have a nefarious problem or perhaps Senator Warren will look at the evidence, which now is overwhelming that her position is wrong and change her mind. We can always hope. Dan, more on that before we close out the issue. Go ahead. Well, I mean, the other thing I saw is that I'm not sure how reliably it was, because obviously these things can be tend to be quite biased, but she doesn't own any individual stocks. And recently she was actually pushing for all senators to not be able to own stocks for insider trading, but she does own funds, which have lots of banks in them. So it's in her very best interest to have cryptocurrency held to the same standard is these huge banks that have the infrastructure to be able to do so, even though they've had the more fines in history, then the huge sums of money from money laundering themselves and no one, as we said, before no one being taken to task for it and actually prosecuted. So maybe there is a bit of a selfish interest in that respect, because it's very clear that Bitcoin will be damaging to banking stocks unless they can crack down on it so much that it becomes throttled and bottlenecked, and it allows these heavy, old, ancient finance companies to slowly be able to adopt Bitcoin services so that they can make money off of it, rather than the smaller upcoming companies that she doesn't have funds of. So I think that's one thing, but fair enough, but fair play to it for actually saying that the senator shouldn't own stocks, because that's been a big thing recently, right, with, with, and I think that'd be a good point for them to adopt that old airline adage where you have to put on your own oxygen mask before you could put on other people's oxygen masks. It's very obvious to a lot of people on both sides of the aisle who say, yes, it's very, the senators and the representatives should not be trading stocks, especially when they have insider information or could have insider information on these companies, on the regulation, the laws that they're writing, and making it public is not enough, especially making it public later on. They should make it public live so that we know the day after where like, oh, Facebook went up and, for example, Nancy Pelosi bought a lot of it yesterday. Oh, it seems to happen many times as an embarrassing to her and to other senators and representatives. But let's drift back towards the topic. Dan Eve is Bitcoin, for the exit question, is Bitcoin good terrorist money? Should terrorists be using Bitcoin? Not of course, the disclaimer, we don't want to provide advice to, to terrorists or whatever, but let's say they had a choice of currencies, should they choose Bitcoin? Well, there's obviously Monero, which is more privacy features and there's other cryptocurrencies that have more privacy features. But this is a good thing, I think, at the moment for Bitcoin. And if something like, if there's letter, these letters, these pushes for these bills, the cryptocurrency and assets and money laundering act and all these, as soon as they go under scrutiny, it will be very clear that Bitcoin isn't the best currency to be using for illicit activities because it's so traceable. And that's something that there's very, very clear evidence for, because as soon as you explain how blockchain works and that you can trace these addresses, you can, you can, you can, you know, stifle a money laundering by tracing Bitcoin transactions as they go to exchanges and they go to off ramps. And even as they go to buying vouchers to pay for play stations like we saw with Razzle Khan and her meager boyfriend, however they usually described. So yeah, the evidence will show for itself just like the evidence has been shown for itself that Bitcoin is actually good in terms of spurring on renewable innovation and making the most out of wasted gas flaring in gas emissions, etc. So Bitcoin is bad for privacy and good for the environment, the opposite of everything they always said. Yes, I'm always reminded that Bitcoin is pseudonymous, which I say wrong and I'm saying wrong now, which means you could use it like a pseudonym where you could put on a mask and you could be user A and you could send coins to user B. And as long as no one knows who you are and you don't take public online credit like putting it on a YouTube video or something stupid like that, they'll never know, right? You would be pseudonymous, right? You can be quantum, but you could be Bob Alice or Bob and Alice at the same time or not Bob and not Alice at the same time. But the problem is too many of your addresses link back to your exchange. And as I said with the Hamas case, too many of their donors got in trouble with their Bitcoin exchanges or maybe even their bank accounts for buying and giving money to Hamas allegedly a terrorist organization, obviously the current news everyone knows about. So yes, it's a bad buy. They shouldn't use Bitcoin. We're going to go give that our Bitcoin group says no terrorist using Bitcoin, but much like with the case of naive bukele or even what's his other name, the big guy Peter Sellers, who's the guy that bought all the Bitcoin? Michael sailor even with Michael sailor, we don't get to choose who's in the Bitcoin. We don't say we want this billionaire, we want this country leader, this dictator, this terror crack. We don't get to choose who gets into Bitcoin. Bitcoin's for everybody. And Bitcoin also doesn't care. Bitcoin's like, oh, you're a punk rocker and you're into Bitcoin. I hate you. Oh, you're a country rocker and you're into Bitcoin. Bitcoin doesn't care. Bitcoin doesn't notice. So yes, Bitcoin officially, Bitcoin stands as that it doesn't care if Hamas is using it and it doesn't care if the US government's using it and doesn't care if I use it or you use it or that guy in that book uses it or whatever it is. Nobody cares. Bitcoin, especially the most of all. So let's remember that we don't get to choose. What is that the old joke? You can pick your friends and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friends nose. All right, let's move on to issue four. Issue four, they cracked the code to get a locked USB drive worth $235 million in Bitcoin. Then it got weird. A special laboratory formed with incredible cryptographers and hackers who then broke into the Iron Key encrypted USB drive. Remember, the Iron Key limits you to a certain number of guesses of the code and Stefan Thomas of San Francisco, who made the what is Bitcoin video back in the day. For seven thousand and two bitcoins could now access his USB drive. That is if he wants to work with this new group. Thomas says he made a handshake deal with two other cryptographic groups and that he has to work with them. The unsyphored group is now just sitting there with a solution to the Iron Key potentially worth $235 million, even a 10% take of that would be 20 million. I don't know. It would be a lot of millions and they might even get more what's going on with this hack. Well, I'll go first Thomas hunt. I think it's wrong. I think if the other hacking and cracking groups that Thomas has made a deal with haven't cracked it now as clearly the other people have, they did a demonstration for the journalist. He made a new encrypted thing, put it on the Iron Key. They got it back to them in a couple days or something like that. It was really quick. They definitely have an exploit where they can presumably guess an infinite amount of times and then find the key for the Iron Key, which could crack his code. The other cryptographers should throw up their hands and say, hey, we tried. We thought we would get this bounty, but we won't. They should doff their hats to the superior organization that has beaten them and to the superior organization should go the bounty. Even Stefan Thomas, allegedly the guy who has the money should see this. He should say, hey, I get to enjoy my millions now instead of potentially later if these guys even succeed. We should all be celebrating the opening of another ancient Bitcoin vault. That is unless the money's not there. Dan Eve, what do you think about the hackers, the crackers, and the USB vault? Well, it sounds like they're their first efforts at having to peel off using acid to peel off layer by layer and scanning every single layer like micron's thick in order to reverse engineer this this iron, iron key USB drive. There sounds a pretty hard core, but very destructive, but it sounds like they've been able to actually get into the hard drive now without even being destructive. So it sounds like there's a good chance of him being able to get his cash back, but he's already got two contracts with two other companies who haven't even been able to prove that they might even be able to get into it. This is the crazy thing, but he seems pretty relaxed. It sounds like he made a lot of money on other crypto adventures and an investment. So he's pretty laid back about it. Maybe this is kind of a fallback thing for him. So if all of his other investments fail for whatever reason, and I think by his own admissions, I don't know if it's direct, but they alluded to it, but he's got so much money that he could basically can't spend it. He's done so well. So this 7,000 Bitcoin to him is just like an insurance, an insurance policy that if or thought else fails, then he can really bring out the guns. But they may even even though they could contractually bound now these other two companies, they may even subcontract this unsyphored company. But for them for unsyphored, they've done all this work. It sounds like they're pretty ninja at what they do. So there's going to be a lot of other opportunities for them to be able to try and hack into other devices where the keys have been lost. It just depends on whether people want to take the risk. Wait, if they've got to pay up front, for example, they're not even sure that the keys are definitely on there, especially if it's from something that's like 2011 a long time ago. And that's like 12, 12 years ago. It's quite a big risk for them if they have to foot the money up front. But they this unsyphored company, they can't release any of their inner workings because apparently this is quite a big, a big, what's the word loophole? It's to be able to get it not really the whole back door, back dooring or hacking, whatever you call it, to be able to get into these military grade products. So there's a lot of natural secrets that could be uncovered and put out into the open if they actually release how it's done. So they're being very, very tight lipped about it keeping their cards close to their chest. Maybe they're just using this, as this Stefan got as a test case to prove their technology, but no doubt they'll find someone else who's lost a bunch of Bitcoin stuck on a on a hard drive. Some even if the Stefan guy has more money than he thinks he could ever spend in his lifetime, he should still close this loop. He told people about the 7,000 Bitcoins locked on the USB, the internet got all excited and it's imagination. And they sent these unsyphored guys to go get it. And it sounds like they got it. So to close the loop for the rest of the internet, and even if he wanted to take those 7,000 Bitcoins and donate them to charity or donate them to the World Crypto Network, or buy 50 Smithsonian museums for all 50 states, he could easily do that instead of letting the money sit in the wallet, increasing the value of all other Bitcoins through its inactivity. I also questioned the cipher punks that are supposedly working on hacking this. No one you're beaten. These unsyphored guys seem better than you. They had better techniques and better technology. They're going to hack larger things in the future. It seems and doff your hat and get out of the way. Like maybe we can learn from unsyphored if they publish this thing. Although as Dan said, I don't think they're going to be able to publish it because apparently these little USB keys are allegedly, I don't know anything, but used by the US government and other people to secure secrets. It would be bad if you could just crack them open as apparently this team can at will. So yes, we need the story to be finished for the good of the internet. The internet that gave him the money, the internet that probably gave him all the other money if he's doing well. This is my favorite story of the week. I always love these USB key stories. This one should have a happy ending. We should be here talking about how he got his money back and he's all happy and he gave money to the crackers and they're all happy. And their next project is working on that guy with the dang dumpster. So Danny, if it's a race now, exit question who gets their money first, Bitcoin dumpster guy or 7000 Bitcoin guy who won't let the guys who have already solved his problem, solve his problem. Well, I think I think the 7000 Bitcoin guy, because the dumpster guy, I don't think he's going to be able to swing the government because it involves him being able to sift through all of this rubbish and waste, which is actually the personal waste of a lot of other people. He'd be given the authority to rifle through people's private belongings. I don't know his their waste, but it's there, you know, there's a lot of private information that they'll find in there. So I think that that's that's a more of a long shot than the guy who's already got a couple of contracts with some companies that haven't quite proven whether they can even do it or not, because at least he's made the first step towards that. And we don't know what the contract is, right? He might be being a bit shady about it because he's actually tied down and he's perhaps a bit embarrassed that he locks himself into these two companies that who didn't actually have the ability to prove how or if they can do it. So yeah, I do think his yeah, but if you showed up on their door and you said, okay, I'm going to give you 24 hours to crack this thing or I'm going with another country company, they'd have to deal with it. They'd have to deal with them getting new things. That's where they are. That doesn't matter. If they want to be a company that cracks things and they can't crack a thing and now they're holding on us customer hostage for not cracking a thing, it would destroy their reputation to be the one if we could say, oh, it's it's electric data. They won't let the guy out of the contract, even though he has $2.34 million, waiting for him. And yeah, they want to cut over it. They want to percent. It depends how the contract's written. But there's no way the contract is a suicide pact where it's like you can never get your money now, even if they develop quantum computers, which they're obviously going to develop. As for the dump truck guy and the garbage guy, I agree with you, Dan. I think he should have gone with a sneakier way. I think he should have run for local council. And I think he should have used some of his fundraising monies that he probably could have gotten from somebody who would say, okay, I'm going to bet in the futures of what if this guy gets his hard drive back? And you can bet four or against the futures. And there's some gamblers out there. They would bet four. He'd be able to generate some funds, maybe run a couple of people for council and then start sifting all the the wreckage for hard drives. Just basically hard drives only. Let's find all the hard drives. And then as you said, Dan, the privacy issue rears its ugly head again. Because even if I ignore all the dirty laundry and all the horrible things that everyone's put into the trash next to the valuable hard drives, if I acquire even a second hard drive and for the good of things, the guy doesn't remember the hard drive number or the name or whatever, maybe we need to look at all the hard drives. Now we're looking at other people's hard drives. So we're in a whole mess there. Maybe the garbage system should have a little gate that checks for hard drives in the waste and just set them aside for this if it happens again. But yeah, I agree with you, Dan. I think that as much as he doesn't seem to want the money, which is very odd, the 7,000 Bitcoin guy has a much better chance of getting it back. I remember when we originally talked about this, everyone said the same thing. They said, attack the USB key. It's only the problem with this USB key, letting you guess 10 times. As soon as you can separate the database from the USB key, you can guess, you know, a zillion times. You can really brute force the thing and obviously with something like this, it's worth hiring big computers and having them brute force it for weeks and weeks and weeks, no matter what it takes to get that password. But we're running out of times. We're going to go to predictions or story of the week. Dan, do you have a prediction or a story of the week? Go ahead. My story is the shame Josh isn't here because my story of the week was that I gave the standard.io a little test out and it was really useful. So I had a crappy old bag of something from 2017 and I was able to actually borrow some money against it. And then I don't need to select just in case it eventually does good and it's worth anything. So I think that's quite useful. It also means that by using your own asset to borrow money against you are not making a trading, you know, not selling something that would make you have to pay capital gains in some way. So I think that's a very cool little system to be able to use. So yeah, kudos to the standard.io for creating such a cool little a little service where you can keep your own, you can keep your cryptocurrency and not have to get rid of it in order to be able to unlock some of the value. I realize I don't have a story of the week. So I'm just going to recommend this film that I saw yesterday in a totally empty movie theater. So I know no one has seen it or is going to see it, but it's called she came to me. And it's a nice film about some real characters bouncing into each other. It's got Peter Dinklage. He's a classical composer, Marissa Tomey, as a tugboat driver and and halfway as an uptight psychologist. So it's just interesting little film you might enjoy. It's probably on video or whatever they say now she came to me. So thanks again to everybody for joining us. Be sure to give us a thumbs up down below. Hello to everyone in the chat. And thanks for leaving us a comment later. We always check for those. But until next time.