The Bitcoin Group, the American original. For over the last 10 years, the sharpest citocies, the best bitcoins, the hardest crypto currency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Dan Eve, the crypto raptor. Welcome to 2024, Bitcoins. Josh Shagalla from thestandard.io. What? I haven't seen you since last year. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network. Moving on to issue one. Issue one. Gray scale. Van Eck and Ark Bitcoin ETFs register to trade on exchanges. Two more Bitcoin ETF applicants have gotten the green light to have their funds listed on exchanges. But it's still pending SEC approval. We are still not at the Bitcoin ETF. People are saying perhaps January 10th, five days from now, Wednesday. We've been talking about the Bitcoin ETF forever as I've been saying. This video is from seven years ago, streamed live on July 1, 2016. Let's take a little bit look at the Bitcoin Group number 99, starring tone veys, Theo Goodman and myself. We talked about the Dow, Dawes, fork, hash, ocean, hacked, Winklevi ETF goes bats. First a message from my old employer. Point space itself. I'm totally done with that. Get as much Bitcoin as you can. Moving on. We're tired of eating. Get fully balanced nutrition in a bottle by Soilit at purse.io and get a discount. It's the future of food. Soilit green may be made of people, but Soilit is made of goodness. And remember, you can buy anything at Amazon for a discount with Bitcoins at purse.io. Issue three. Winklevi. Dulk. Mazdaq for bats. We can't stop here. This is backcountry. The Winklevi ETF continues to creep forward pending SEC approval. The Winklevi ETF could allow investors to buy and sell shares that would represent part of the Winklevi Bitcoin Horde under the symbol coin. No date has been announced. Tone veys, your thoughts on the Winklevi. No date has been announced. And now here seven years later, we still wait for the Bitcoin ETF. Dan, what do you think about the Bitcoin ETF that we've been waiting for so long? Well, it definitely would have been good advice when you said buy Bitcoin back then as always, of course, because it was $704 on the 1st of July 2016. So it's just a little bit up from there, like what is that? ATX or something. So what are called as usual? Yeah, I mean, it seems like for ever since the ETF talk has been happening and there was the time we almost got close in 2017. And it's this going to be the same scenario, right, where the hype leads up. There was obviously that Matrix Port report that came out. The Siemens to have dumped the markets with G, you know, G.H. Wu behind Matrix Port. He claims that they are very objective in their analysis. And it's got nothing to do with his history with Bitcoin. But it did seem to be time pretty well with the markets dumping. But if it really was all just a hot air, then you'd thought the markets recovered a lot quicker than that. But there's still, there's definitely still rumors either way that it's going to be rejected. Lots of people saying, oh, it's 90% chance. And then there's a lot of people that are saying, well, actually, it's very, very likely. It's still going to be rejected on the 10th. But what we're definitely still seeing is that, you know, the track fight companies seem to be putting pressure on the SEC. They can see to go after whatever crypto companies they can. Maybe they're trying to throttle the on ramps as much as possible so that your only option to buy a Bitcoin in the US is fire their specific products. And whilst the ETF sounds good in some ways, it's not alone. It's not immune to manipulation. And themselves, you know, and so the, and also it's turning pseudonymous Bitcoin ownership into a KYC entry only via these ETFs. Which could also be fractionally reserve based as well. So it's not all good news with the ETF, but obviously the market seems to be saving it pretty well. We've pretty much recovered since last week. Since the news happened, I think we're pretty much just about above this time last week, which is going to because I think we Josh and myself also voted up for the price. So I'm happy to be finally correct once in a while. Josh, a guy who've been waiting more than seven years is our Bitcoin ETF coming next week. I wouldn't count on Gary Gensler, but I think there's a lot of pressure on the bloke now. And this is so sick, you know, really it is sick that that it's pressure on a bloke on one guy to that that will most likely bring what's going on. Coming through and this is kind of like a soft corruption in a way where because it's a big name like BlackRock pushing this through and obviously Vanack has tried over and over and over again. And we've had a great scale as well. Try try try again. I don't know if the Vingelvi will try again with coin. I remember those days finally thinking, oh, it's going to wow. This is interesting and ETF on this crazy thing we all love called Bitcoin, but yeah. I don't know. I try not to hold my breath with these things because they seem to be manipulations as well. And maybe they're just they're not manipulations from a top down. Maybe they just sort of self inflicted manipulation where everyone gets stirred up into a hype. And then the news happens and then it's down. But the thing with this time around, it's not really a cell, the news moment. If this happens because the news literally is billions of dollars coming into the market. So it would quite interesting to see what happens once the news does launch. I think we'll see a huge huge huge shift in the market. Yeah. I'll be very, very interested to understand what happens next. The other thing is how much has how much is priced in now? Because we have seen this constant this fairly consistent uprise in the Bitcoin price and and the Ethereum price. Really over the last few months, you know, yeah, it's been up and down, but generally with usually now it's been out. And and so yeah, it'll be interesting to see what happens. I predict that it'll be a massive big boom when it launches. Then a massive sell off as people going to sell them sell the news and then it'll be back to normal and now and that's when the stock market will start to pile in slowly trying to buy up some of this stuff into these massive ETFs. But yeah, the consolidation of Bitcoin into single parties is is going to be extraordinary. And I'm also a little bit worried about naked short selling and some of these other tools that only Wall Street have available to them. They're illegal in less is in Europe to make it short sell. So yeah, we'll see. We'll see what happens. Very interesting time. That's for sure. Well, I for one thought that this would be over a long time ago from a utilitarian perspective. I thought that the Bitcoin ETF just made so much sense. People don't want to learn what a QR code is. They don't want to learn what a hardware wallet is. They don't want to use coin base or whatever weird website you want to buy their Bitcoin. They want to call up their broker and say buy me 10% of that Bitcoin stock. They want to hang up the phone. They don't want to be involved just like you wouldn't want to be involved buying large amounts of gold or large amounts of silver because at a certain point you don't have good vaulting facilities in your home. Yeah, you can have a paper waiter to but you simply don't have the vaulting facilities. And if you're a family office or a crazy rich person, you have millions of dollars you want to buy Bitcoin. You don't really want it in your home. You don't really even want it in your safe deposit box. You want to call up that broker and say buy me 10% and the same thing. If you lose interest in it, you want to sell it's the same maneuver. You call them up sell the 10% or user webpage. It's the same kind of thing. So it's great that we're finally getting this. I think it took way too long as Josh was saying a lot of this was this protectivism on society. Whether trying to protect people and treat them like children and prevent them from losses. But like Dan said, the price when we talked about this first was $700 a coin. So the losses that they protected from where horrible wins. Fantastic wonderful victories that they could have had with their stock market money. We all could have had with our 10% or whatever we would have thrown in. So it's disappointing that it's taken so long and it's also interesting the way this takes away a lot of the negatives against Bitcoin. They're worried about people losing their coins. They're worried about people sending their coins to the wrong address or logging in with the wrong password. That doesn't really happen with e-trade. If you have Apple stock and your e-trade account, it stays there. If you have this new Bitcoin stock Bitcoin ETF, whatever it's going to be, it's going to stay there. It's not the same risk for these people. So I do think that it's really going to change things. A lot of people who have invested despite all the things we've said and the price ranges that we've seen are going to finally get in because of this ETF. I don't agree with the G-Honwoo website and so forth. I think it's happening next week, it's happening this month. They're on the finish line. They're just finishing the last bureaucracy. Yeah, I think the biggest obviously people don't want to hold private keys and all of this stuff. But security, I'll be very fascinated to see the very first ETF hack. Actually, I want to know what the objections were from the SEC. I don't think we'll ever find out because they're so intransparent on that side of things. But I would hope to imagine that the objections were based around security of people's funds. Not due to, this is an unknown asset or whatever else nonsense they have. Because the assets, we all know what Bitcoin is. Some of their early objections seem to make sense where they said they didn't like Coinbase being the determiner of price, the holder of coin, the seller of coin, so forth. It was too many eggs in one basket. That wasn't that bad. But I do agree, Joshua, would be nice to know the other reasons that they rejected it. What on the street right was, there was market, they were worried about market manipulation as well, because of the wash trading that was happening on exchanges, the nefarious kind of activities that we saw, and how easy exchanges that could go down, which would bring down the price of Bitcoin, because there was a lot more volatile right when there were very few exchanges trading Bitcoin, and that liquidity wasn't spread so much. So that's kind of, it's all rumour though, isn't it? They've kind of benefited from Binance. Binance spreads this questionable exchange around the world, and now there's a questionable exchange everywhere, and according to what we've heard, if you go country to country, people have heard of Binance, but now if they regulate them, if they put some controls on this questionable exchange, suddenly they put controls everywhere in the world. So it kind of benefits their goal of control. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It would be fascinating to see anyway, what sort of security, how they deal with security, how they deal with purchases, especially consistent large purchases. I mean, it's fun to say, oh, billions of dollars are going to be rushing into Bitcoin, but where you're going to find that much Bitcoin to buy is also a concern for me. Like I don't see how that's really, I think it's a sticking point. And so even though, yes, you have, you might have tapped into nice sort of fresh Bitcoin through miners, maybe buy them direct from the miners, or you have great OTC interfaces, but the OTC interfaces also need to get Bitcoin from somewhere. They need interfaces to holders that have access to private keys. And so there's a whole chain. And so yeah, I've got you know what they're going to do, Josh, they're going to re-hypothicate. Right? They're going to print fake Bitcoin, and we're maybe not going to know about it, unless there's a big crash, maybe we'll find out. I don't think they have any law saying they have to be transparent on their books. What do you think, Josh? Will they print this fake Bitcoin? Yeah, I think that's what it'll come to because look, we had made off basically hoodwinking the entire Wall Street for a long time. And so, you know, you don't, like, and you had FTX hoodwinking the regulators for a long time. It wasn't like FTX wasn't regulated. So if there is a billion dollar trade, and the ETF wants to buy and not miss out on that trade, they have to find that billion dollars worth. And maybe they'll just go, good done. It's a done deal. Don't worry about it. It's a done deal. And then the people behind in the back end, in the back office, are struggling to find this Bitcoin. And they say, don't worry, just buy it, buy it, buy it, buy it. And the issue there is, if it slightly moves, if the price slightly moves, they can just absolutely decimate their profit margins. And, you know, there's ways of getting around that by hedging and all the rest of it. But, but very difficult to move like in the billions very quickly. We'll see. Well, it's a lot like that famous scene from Casino, Joshua. They have the whale gambler and they don't want to let him go. There's no way that these exchanges, aka Casinos, are going to let that player go. If he has a billion dollars, he can prove it. He can put it down on the line. He wants to buy Bitcoin, long, short, whatever it is. And like you say, Josh, those waves that come up and down, they could wipe the player out, or they could wipe the casino out. And it could be much, much worse if the casino is playing with fake money, if they've been printing their own Bitcoin, which I agree. That's definitely one of the scandals that's going to happen. As for the other scandals, like Joshua's saying about the ETF hack, I want to go on the record right now and we won't have any evidence to this. It's most likely going to be an inside job. We're not going to know and I don't know the name of the computer security professional. If it's Newman from Seinfeld, or he's in Jurassic Park, what's going on? But yeah, it's going to walk out the back door and that's going to make it even harder to solve where the Bitcoin went. But in the short term, yeah, I think we'll see that price rise. Everybody be happy, sunshine, rainbows, gumdrops, lollipops, lollipops, all the things that you need. But for now, Dan Eave predicting against the source of all truth and knowledge in the universe, the Bitcoin predictor ball, will the price of Bitcoin be higher or lower next week, keeping in mind, next week, we could be meeting post Bitcoin ETF approval on the other side of the approval. I'm still thinking it's going to be a go on the ETFs and there'll be a bit of a bit of a pump after. There may be some consolidation just shortly after. As Josh said, it's not really a sell the news event because the news is the swathes of liquidity that could be now into Bitcoin. But so I think we're going to be up again next week. Great to see 50k. Josh, Shagalla will be higher or lower this time next week. Higher. Yep. And consulting the magic eight ball, the source of all truth. Will the price of Bitcoin be higher this time next week? Cannot predict now the ball is not very cooperative lately. It must be see I have some real secret insider story that it can't tell you moving on to issue two. Why Wall Street might be falling in love with Bitcoin Bitcoin ETFs cryptocurrency stocks and more Wall Street seems enamored with the fledgling cryptocurrency. Perhaps even falling in love. Is this the Trojan horse of Bitcoin sneaking inside the doors of Wall Street. They can't help but fall in love with its aspects while ignoring the whole time that they don't control its issuance or its production schedule. Josh Shagalla, what do you think about Wall Street? It's new love for Bitcoin. Well, first of all, I love the fact that that article didn't use the typical Bitcoin with the chip inside it's nice to see some actual art around around articles. At least at least it's not sourced as AI so it might be actual or yeah. That might be actual art. Yeah, I mean everything that I talked about before, we've talked about it very often these institutions Bitcoin wasn't developed to try to become institutionalized it will. But it becomes also very scary. I don't like the centralization and especially on the proof of stakes side of the coins if if if a theorem starts which it will get an ETF. Because it'll just follow Bitcoin. The proof of stake side of things could absolutely centralize the control of that infrastructure. So yeah, we'll see what happens there. So that's an interesting side of these institutions coming in. Coming as a crypto anarchist who just wants to hold their own money and basically be subversive to central banking and even retail banking. I don't really, it's not something that interests me that all that stuff but I guess it does interest other people. I think we're about to enter into Bitcoin's adolescence and it's the scariest time of Bitcoin Josh and I were talking about the Disney classic Pinocchio before the show about when he gets in with the bad crew and they're swearing and they're gambling and they're breaking windows and graffiti and all that kind of thing. Much like now Bitcoin's getting in bed with the banks and the banks are going to do what they always do. They're going to claim that they invented Bitcoin that they are the first ones to tell you about it and without them you'd never be able to use this new technology because it's purely the banks entirely a bank innovation. No one's been talking about it on the internet. None of that's happened. It's all banks. It's all banks. Well, go ahead, Jeff. The biggest concern I still get is I just don't get it. Can you explain Bitcoin? I don't understand. It's too difficult. And that's really a fault of us as a community not breaking it down. I think I don't know. I think it's a fault of Bitcoin. I think that Bitcoin is too complicated. It's a Swiss army knife of currency and privacy and no government and no third party and all these different things that appeal to different people. And you're trying to make your sales pitch. You're like, what do they like the most? They'll like that it's on the internet or they'll like that it's on their phone or what's the pitch going to be. I think it's just too complicated to explain by a green Josh. I think they'll bury it even more in jargon, even more in this level of control. And it'll drift away and people won't even think that it's possible for them to hold any Bitcoin or send it around or use it as a payment network. And this is again one of the great fears of Bitcoin is that it'll be co-opted by the banks. And this is the dark part of the story where you lose faith in the hero and you're like, maybe he's not a hero. Maybe I'm not with Bitcoin. It's become corrupted. And all the time you're like holding on. You're like the core developers. They won't change it. Bitcoin will stay the same. And I think this is one of the, you know, tough times for Bitcoin that we've projected ahead. Just like the time when the government bans Bitcoin. And it's impossible to use. We have these potential down periods. But at the same time, if Bitcoin stays to its truth to its core, if it doesn't change, it slides right through and all these other things can't affect it. Dan, what do you think about that? What do you think about that, Josh? That's sorry guys. But the people are the consumers changing, you know, like you said, initially everybody ran their own node. Everybody ran Bitcoin core or Bitcoin E whatever it was called back then. And then people went to light wallets when Electrum first released their light wallet. And now nobody runs the nodes basically that I know of anymore. I mean, obviously, I know people that do like Ben Ark and such. But generally people just have their Bitcoin on their mobile wallets. So that's the next step. And the next step, like you said, is banks. So, you know, it goes from running your own node, holding your own keys to running your sort of, you know, holding your own keys. But on your phone, which is referencing somebody else's server to then, oh, the banks just do it all for us. It still changes out the backbone though. We get a new backbone of a banking system. Maybe we don't get the whole thing. We're not touching the bearer asset, right? We're not sending around the veribonds or whatever. And maybe we were for a while there. Maybe for a while we were buying hot dogs and beers and whatever with essentially veribonds. I think Andreas would have agreed here, you're using bank money. You're doing high level transactions. You're getting this number of confirmations to get your coffee. You know, it doesn't make sense. That's why I do think we have the lightning network. And sadly, as romantic as we might become for this time where people sent actual Bitcoin around. It might be people just using lightning. And like you say, Josh, people just using the bank money. And that might provide enough change. That might be a better system where the abuses of 2008 couldn't occur. Which was the original kind of goal of Satoshi Nakamoto. If we go back to the 2008 crisis. Yeah. Let's go to Dan Eve get you in here. What do you think about the banks adopting Bitcoin? And whether or not we can still be friends with Bitcoin after it's all bank Bitcoin. So on the self custody thing. We're already seeing that attack happen. We've seen it from inside the crypto community where even CZ was was was trying to make the case for custody over. Over self custody and then from from the regulatory aspect. Well, remember CZ wanted to roll the chain back one time. Yes. CZ's got some crazy ideas everyone. Yeah, it's pretty out there considering he's meant to be like, you know, hard core in the industry. He said some pretty crazy things. But then from the political side of it, you've got Elizabeth Warren who they recently attacked the idea of self custody. And it is to say that that should be read you regulated in itself and people shouldn't actually have self custody while it's so. Whether this is some form of coordinated attack. Or you know, from from the trad five bros and sisters as it were. But with you know, there's obviously there is coin base critical of the coin base being the custodians for some of these is you know, support you to get family and. And I say this with a with a with a with a grain of salt right. They they haven't actually been hacked in a major event. So there is a reason why people are a lot more trusting towards them. I'm not saying our safe safe who. And they are completely genuine and blah blah blah. Obviously people have got some quite a lot against them because they're especially the way they're met with the Bitcoin cash fork. But they haven't been hacked yet. So from from the industries, especially from regulatory perspective. The reason why they're they're the go to whether they're the best people for not not that not that we know anything. But there's also many Las Vegas casinos that claim not to have been hacked who've also paid hackers rancors. So we don't know anything about coin base, but they're pretty big and it's pretty complicated and all they have to do is want to make one small mistake. I don't know. I think it's much more likely they've been hacked. Just like it's like that is there extra treksual life in the in the universe. Like yeah, probably. And in the same way, I'm like, have they have they've been hacked. And probably they made a mistake here or there. Maybe it didn't make the news, but of course, no, I have no information on that. Not a new story. But good answer. It's very true. You know, definitely it definitely could have been happening. But you know, we could see the. These these yes to be available when certainly for grayscale and in Europe and other markets. So there's a reason why they were they were they were allowed early on in Europe. So it understands the reason why the USA would have it. Obviously they're they're trying the SEC is very hardcore right is very strict. The EU is is pretty strict as well, but perhaps not as heavy had it as the SEC the way they dish out fine. So that's probably one of the reasons why. Even at the UK like the. The FCA now making it a lot harder for people to just trade crypto currencies. So various exchanges coin base being one of them are sort of a tweet about earlier. But that to continue trading on on coin base, someone had to do a survey on stable coins. And and essentially only let them carry on trading, even though they had thousands and thousands of of dollars worth of coins on coin base. If they described themselves as a high net worth individual. So there's it's not just the US that they are really clamping down on on crypto trade, but it just seems really silly that we're going into this thing that. Now have like there's the rules around VCs can only be people that are high net worth individuals because apparently they're the only ones that are clever enough to be able to make a decision that's not going to. Screw themselves up even though. Anyone can go into a casino and blow their entire life savings in one go. The whole thing is just insane really is not really protecting anyone. It's more cutting off the on ramps for people that might actually just want to make a difference and buy some big Bitcoin instead of holding fear money, which is sickening. But just want to go back. I forgot the other reason why so there was there was two reasons right where the Bitcoin dump happened. One of them was this matrix poor article. And the other was of course, Crayba tweeting Bitcoin or saying on a show that Bitcoin is unstoppable. It was almost time perfectly with him saying that that Bitcoin had a little dump midweek. So could host a Kramer again for calling it completely completely. Well, say completely wrong short term short term wrong. But maybe this is maybe that's an omen for the future and the ETFs get rejected and done again and blah blah blah. I'm kind of hoping that actually Crayba is right in this instance and Bitcoin remains unstoppable. Well, it is incredibly ironic Dan that we used to have local Bitcoins where you could meet up and trade with someone person to person. Now that's been wiped out. But we're going to have stock market Bitcoins where you could buy your Bitcoin on the stock market and trade them back and forth with the stock market in a much more limited way. So it's interesting we we gain things, but we lose things as well. And also a side note on local Bitcoins and so forth. There's a really interesting break in KYC that's going around. We've all heard of the AIs and so forth. There's an AI you give it like 30 seconds of you talking and it makes a perfect video of you holding up your ID blah blah blah. I am Joseph I can he turns to the right and the left. I mean he has all the things and so yeah, it's really strange out there what's happening with the potential for AI to completely break everything that we have on KYC. And to make that whole world a nightmare once again. But let's move on to the next issue. Check out worldcryptonetwork.com. We've got 3481 videos. That's a lot. Worldcryptonetwork.com. Issue three Texas Bitcoin miners profit by using less electricity. Advocates say all Texans should get the same chance. I wish I had the life track this week. As predicted on this show, the Texans are not happy about paying the Bitcoin miners not to work. But then again, that's intrinsic in the design and poor design of their energy grid unique in the country completely cut off from the rest of the grid. So they do have to employ the miners to use a lot of energy keeping the grid going and then having the miners turn off their miners when the grid is in trouble. You can't just do that at home by running your washing machine more Josh. What do you think about this obvious and predictable predicted right here on this show situation in Texas where they're upset that they're paying the miners not to mine. Yeah, definitely, definitely interesting. Yeah, this is when the state starts to get to involve specifically. Could you imagine any any other free market mechanism where they say use less like if you if you had the free market dealing in I don't know. Giving you drinking water or whatever and they say, oh, use less you know, this is the beautiful thing. Common example on subsidies people always bring up how they pay the farmers not to farm at a certain point we do have too much of certain commodities. If they raised up more that would just drive the price down that would ruin all the other farmers so the government pays them not to farm. But yes, it's frequently discussed. Sorry to interrupt. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean, it's a I just don't like manipulations usually the the thing is that the miners should just suffer if they didn't calculate properly. But also the electricity grid, you know, it's a it's all generally pretty controlled by the state as well because it's such infrastructure. And yeah, we get it over here in Australia where. Yeah, constantly we'll get told that. Don't use any more water or don't use any like I can't imagine any other industry saying don't use less. If it was private because they would just figure out they would get more deceleration plants they would get they would just figure out how to deliver more product that the consumer wants rather than saying. We're about to run out, loot use less. Our infrastructure is so crap. We don't want to upgrade and we don't want to spend more. So yeah, interesting, interesting with the with the miners will have to keep an eye on it. And the especially interesting thing in this case, Josh is that Texas they're being rebellious and free by having their own electrical grid every other electrical grid in the 50 states connects to the other states. You had this excess power situation. You could theoretically and I don't know the details, but you could ship the power out. You could import more power when Texas has had these crisis is in the past where they couldn't restart their power. It was two cold situations like that. The rest of the United States cannot help them because we are literally cut off because their grid does not interact with the other grid. I don't know the technical details. Maybe it's very difficult. But obviously sharing the power this resource gives you more flexibility and they have much less flexibility because of their rebellious free and independent stance in Texas. I mean, Texas just has so much energy under the ground. Are they are they strangled by regulations like environmental regulations about carbon and such. They've made some some bad decisions. They've brought in some kind of heating oil and some other systems that don't work in the cold. And that's just a bad structural decision. I think of course they have this. Texas is an incredibly large state. I saw a fantastic terrible map or amazing map recently and they overlaid Texas on Western Europe. It's basically France, Germany. It's incredibly large state compared to like you know other nation states obviously who have nation state problems. So they do have a massive grid. But yeah, it's just it's not a very efficient grid. Dan, do you have more on this? Well, they're also they're the most they have the most renewable energy for the compared to every other states and maybe they've over leveraged you know the energy production from renewables which then catches them with their pants down when they went when they went actually things like the turbines freeze or whatever it was. So it's almost you know it's it's all good trying to try to rely on renewables but you need that backup solution there and it's just saying. I think the classic computer geek thing here is RT FM you got to read the manual on those wind turbines because if they do say in the manual it freezes below a certain temperature. It's going to do that it's in the manual and I think they may have had some problems like that where they did not plan well and they knew their climate and they knew the limitations of the device but they purchased them anyway. Diesel's hot. Yeah, yeah diesel backup generators but it sounds like with all the renewables they do have they need to invest a lot more in actual energy storage so that they can they can actually store some the excess when they when they do have it from the renewable perspective. So I'm not about about about the companies having to sacrifice money but they're losing money from from their business and and as the article points out it's not just Bitcoin mining where this this selling back to the grid or selling or being paid by the grid not to consume electricity happens it's also the petrol chemical industry and ironically even though the petrol chemical industry is probably the most hated in the world. People still seem to want to jump on the Hayton Bitcoin bound wagon even more so you've got two industries there Bitcoin mining and petrol chemical both have the same set up where they can set that they can be paid for not being able to make money right because this is the point it's not just they're being they've just being paid because they're Bitcoin miners and there's some sort of backhand a thing going on. It's because these businesses need to operate and if the business can't operate because the grid can't provide them with the electricity and they need to be they need to be paid for that so. And it goes back to this whole discussion is you know whose power is more more allowable should you know should should we also be saying actually well okay cool the Bitcoin might be what won't be paid for having grid energy but you're not allowed to use your tumble dryer during these times as well because it's you know it's an excess energy that you don't need to use you should use a washing line. You know so there's also things you can pick on no one should be playing a console at this time because you know there's energy we need all the energy and that's just a covering a console is just luxury so. You know what whose power consumption is more important and why is it more important it's essentially it's not and it's a free market and that's why we have these these arrangements. It's also worth noting the miners ability to use this power and to balance out the power grid is a significant advantage to Texas when we talked about this the first time we looked it up and there's a specific kind of machine that's designed to essentially waste power or to kill electricity and that machine cost a hundred thousand dollars and that cost a lot to run and it doesn't generate any Bitcoin at all so with these miners they found a business a fascinating way to sort of. To circumvent the need for this electricity dump machine and instead to actually get a benefit out of it where they can run a business the state could do this as well it could be a state owned enterprise instead of this but that's not seems what they're calling they want to run a washing machine at home that will I don't know balance out the power grid have the same power as a black hole and not have any consequences for their home so it's a fascinating argument good back again. Good back and forth and I'm again I'm not surprised that the Texas people are upset and I'm not surprised that the miners made more from the subsidies than from the mining I think if we go back to the episode where we talked about this first I would have predicted that about let's move on to the next issue issue four and this is Forbes magazine even though we're watching it in reader view because they blocked my web browser so congratulations to the BBB for getting into Forbes again. Black Bitcoin billionaires on education as a force for change and just another great article discussing how the black Bitcoin billionaires have been spreading the word about Bitcoin through education and how they set up that Bitcoin Academy and we talked about it a few times people were critical of Jack Dorsey and Jay Z for giving people free Bitcoin if the people had held that Bitcoin now it would be worth two or three times the amount and they would have gotten the education on how to use it maybe even setting up a cold wallet and these kind of things just incredible work from the black Bitcoin billionaires and our friend Lamar Wilson friend of the show founder of the black Bitcoin billionaires Josh Shagall what do you think about the BBB and another great piece about them in Forbes. Yeah it's good to see it's good to see Lamar out there and in the mainstream media I guess but he's right like education edification as I like to call it is is the only thing that truly protects consumers now you can go on about regulations all you want you can go on about all of that but we can see with the FTX down for. And all of that regulations they don't matter to criminals criminals just don't care about them it's like murderers don't care about gun laws might might be a bit harder but they're just going to find a gun or they'll use a knife like the main thing is that education is the key to teaching people what a scam looks like. What to look out for how to buy how to use how to hold how to secure because maybe it's not a scam before for maybe you just screw up your storing of your seed all of these things and also the key fundamental value proposition of Bitcoin what is it what. Why is that interesting and and these are really important questions as well what what is fraction reserve banking all of these things take time is a learning curve and it's all something that we hear have gone through and everyone in the chat has gone through over the years and to understand and and and that's why you know the BBB does what they do and I think it's it's a really great point and one one that's really important and I think it's really important. And that's why I love the world crypto network that's why I love good good shows and programs on YouTube because they're they're the ones that truly build change and and secure people. Well it's an interesting Josh if you over educate your people they see through the propaganda and it wrecks your society so you have to watch the line on that education thing too much goes too far. But no I love Lamar and I love the work that the BBB does whenever somebody comes out of there and comes into the chat room here or on Twitter or whatever they have the greatest attitude they understand the basics of Bitcoin their goal is to hoddle and to get more they're not discouraged by the price they know about cold wallets they know about using the lightning network and it's just exciting to have kind of a back to basics group that's teaching people and I always kind of talked about how you know I can talk to my group and it's mainly nerds and start check people and how we kind of need other representatives of other groups to talk to their group. So I'm really excited to see the BBB in the way that it does matter who you are but you know they're educating their own group and I'd love to see you know a Mexican billionaire's group and a Filipino and a Portuguese and Italian and I don't know whatever it is I just like the idea of it people talking to their communities about Bitcoin especially when the core of the education. So true and so valuable and just done in a nice way with honesty and kindness it's just a great group of Dan Eave we think about Forbes featuring the BBB again it's very nice yeah I think it's really cause it's just not the way they refer to how it was kicked off in 2022 they say Jack Dorsey and JZ sparked some controversy in 2022 after establishing the Bitcoin economy which focuses on empowerment through financial education. What what's controversial about that it's just that's just insane maybe the SEC's like we're annoyed because then people won't be scammed and if they're not scammed the SEC won't be able to then find companies and keep the money find money for themselves instead of then using it to actually educate people into not being scammed so maybe we're in this crazy recursive cycle of just finding people rather than doing something useful like educating as Josh is pointing out before but definitely kudos to the mom BBB for continuing on the path of education. Right this what we do here is we learn and we try and educate at the same time and help people not make the same mistakes that we do educate people on scams how to spot scams and yeah I think it's I think it's great to to be doing that and to as you said breaking it down into different communities and being able to just do something that's useful and informative rather than just do you know do a money making how to do trading scheme. This is how to trade money and use this triangle here and use this triangle here and you make lots of money in love of us so yeah it's all about education is key. I think the problem with what Jack Dorsey and Jay Z did is they tried to give people Bitcoin while the price was down and when the price is down Bitcoin is a scam and it's going to zero but as we saw just yesterday with the ETF news and everything when the price is up Bitcoin is the greatest thing in the world going to a million dollars. So I think they couldn't quite understand that they were giving those people a chance an opportunity to hodl and to see if it goes up or it goes down and this money they didn't have you know it's nothing lost so I think it was a great program and it's nice to see it turn out well similar to the naive bucali and micro strategy where yeah if you just keep betting on Bitcoin long enough you seem to come out of winner it's pretty interesting that way. Yeah I wonder what I'd like to see some statistics on bucali's whole the country's holdings you know we keep going on about this and that and that they're down or up but I'd like to see exactly how much they're up. I think recently they did break through to the break even point but we still don't know how many suitcases they could fit in I think the answer is one maybe a small suitcase maybe a back pocket could fit in a cigarette lighter I don't know this could be very small these bitcoins. I'd like to ask the chat as well do you think that we need the SEC do you think they're useful. Well I think that I think that you're going to want them after our next story the last story today issue five bit conned is a cryptocurrency cautionary tale the new documentary is a debatuous exploration of one of the first fraud cases of the crypto era and I did watch this last night on Netflix so I'm ready to go to talk about it but if you guys haven't seen it I'll give you a little bit of behind the scenes. scenes. It's about allegedly a scam, of course. It's called centratech. I never even really heard of this. But okay, spoilers alert. If you guys are going to watch the documentary, I'm going to give it spoilers here, because I kind of have to explain how the scam works. So allegedly, basically, they're going to do one of those crypto, crypto visa cards. And they had a website. And they were free previously, they rented exotic cars in Miami. But and this is where it gets really good. And I especially want people to pay attention here. Cliff high, the famous Bitcoin predictor guy who has the web bots that search the web that are kind of like AI, well, they misidentified centratech as centra bank. And they wrote an incredible AI based article that high claims that he never read or wrote himself that was published on cliff high's website that said, centra is the new thing you need to invest in. And everyone went out and bought this thing. And they raised like $50 million. There's another scene where they sell the company to Korea for $25 million again. But it really comes down to this mistake by the cliff high web bot, which eventually he does realize and does attempt to fix. But along the way, we meet some of the most horrible characters I've ever seen a person seemingly with no emotions and no humanity who just robs people blind. There's a point where someone's trying to get help on tech support. And he makes mistakes and gives this guy the password. And this guy's like, I went ahead and cleaned out his account. You know, he didn't deserve to have those things. And he buys all these fancy suits and all these fancy Ferraris. Then he rats at his friends and gets away with it. It's a dark, dark story. And I think he still has the money. So I don't want to speak bad of him. I think he's a great guy. But everyone's to check out this amazing, incredible movie, Bitcoin on Netflix. Dan Eve had you ever heard of Centra? What do you think about another great classic in the Bitcoin scam or movie genre? Well, I saw I did say it yesterday. And I was in the middle of another one. So I couldn't, couldn't, couldn't watch it. But it's it's so it's an actual, because I've never heard a centra, is it an actual genuine like, it's a genuine documentary, right? It's not a mockumentary or something like that. I wish it was fake. Yeah, I wish it would fake, because especially of how kind of cold they are about it, how they're putting on their fancy suits and they clearly made $30 million or $50 million, they allegedly could have hidden more money. It's another thing where you know, when you're at running a crypto money company, crypto just disappears all over the place. Nobody knows where it ends up. It had the victims from the story and so forth. Yeah, I think it's a legit documentary. Because I mean, even the way they're describing in this article, it's why the Netflix sort of summary that it sounds like a mockumentary says, who's Ray Tripani? A self-described scammer. Tripani says in Bitcoin that he's always been drawn to a legal activity. Ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to be a criminal. He says the doc you're intrigued. I was never like, I'm going to be a doctor or I'm going to be a scientist. If I could put if only I could put in my ear book, I would have put I want to be a criminal. So obviously, he's there's a lot of intent behind it. I mean, I'd be interested to see I'm watched it, but does he got a jail at the end of it? Because if he's kind of no, he's also a scammer and he's scammer. And again, it's just like that. He wants to be a criminal. From a youth, he wants to make money. He doesn't care how he makes the money, which is an important distinction now with these millennials. They don't care how they make the money and they don't care what the money is for. They want to make the money and get the fame. It reads like good fellas. The guy's like, ever since I was really young, I always wanted to be a gangster. It's just it's just like that. And again, I don't it's too interpretive for Bitcoiners. Probably not good for us. It's yet another gigantic con. And as a Nathaniel Popper, the New York Times columnist who's interviewed in the movie and wrote major pieces about this breaking it open, he just can't believe it. At level after level, these guys are essentially renting exotic cars. They're renting Farahries in Miami. And then they make a website. And essentially, you know, you got to draw the mistake where it's made this cliff high web bot misidentifies the company writes an article that gives them the big push. And once they have the big push, the money's rolling in. At one point, Josh, they had raised $50 million. Now you've been out there in the real VC world. And this is from the ICOs. They said one of the statistics was they figured out after the fact, of course, 79% of the ICOs were completely fraudulent. And for the record, these guys do seem to try to like want to set up a company and want to try to do the thing that they promised. But originally, it was just straight up a scam. And the money just rolls into their bank account. Josh, I know you try to set up legit businesses. I have myself as well, never got five, 10, 25, 50 million dollars just rolling in. What do you think about the movie, Josh? Got it on mute. It just sucks. Like, because we don't, we, I've always make sure I don't say anything about like profits or you get this much return or, you know, I'm always be up front with people is or risky stuff. And, you know, it got to test people, make sure that they have the money that they say they have in terms of being capable of, you know, being an incredible investor and all this sort of thing. And, yeah, these scammers, they just don't care. They just go, yeah, 50% return day over day, compounded, whatever, they just say what they need to. And, and then on top of that, you get really great projects. Like, there was a project that took on YouTube, they tried to be like a decentralized YouTube. And they got pulled up in front of the SEC and, uh, and I- Libreums, that library credits? Yeah, library. Yeah. You know, really, the, projects get get pulled up, yet these scammers can go through, have nothing, say they have stuff and go around flaunting their ill gotten gains by, by wearing all the baubles and all the crap that these people care about. Um, they are, I mean, it's unfortunate that people, it's, it's sort of assigned to me as well as that the people that fall for this stuff. Uh, again, it comes back to education. If it's too good to be true, then it probably is. But also the, the fact that you've got to understand if they do put, there is X return on this, then it's got to be a scam because you're not allowed to say that. Um, and I guess the, the, the interesting two, Josh, about the race for information, because when you're, when you're first into it, you're like, okay, I need to be ahead of everyone else. So you're reading everything, but you're also reading it fast and you're probably reading it with an intention where you're like, I want this to be legitimate. I want this to be my million dollar ride. This is my winner. And so you read, read, read, and your skim, skim, skim, skim. And the thing about this is that everything about it was a lie. Like the CEO wasn't real. They put visa on all of the cards. They had no deal with visa. They'd not applied at all. Like every single, they, they, uh, oh, it's so great early on. They're like, we decided to go to Harvard and they go to LinkedIn and each one of the guys suddenly went to Harvard Business School because you just put it on the website. It doesn't matter. Like there's no accountability. And then to get to the end and then the guy, you know, gets away with it. Pretty much gets away with it allegedly and so forth. But yeah, and he's out doing another, uh, loan type company that doesn't sound good. But again, everyone has their, their thing. But, um, yeah, they can get away with it. Whereas all these hard working people with real projects, uh, get shut down. Don't get any funding. Can't get any attention. It is, uh, it's a real tragedy of our industry that this happens and keeps happening. Well, definitely. It's almost like the, the ones that are the most obvious scams seem to be able to get away with it. And then companies that do try hard, other ones as just so they'll be season good, great example. They really tried to be down the line. They weren't, you know, they didn't use the, all the classic terms of like returns and ICO and things like that. But they still got stuff by the SEC and I'm not sure if they've completely shut down, but they've definitely been massively impeded. And then there's, you got these other crazy companies that just did absolutely ludicrous things, complete scams were never chased whatsoever. Very clearly had no intent to actually deliver something. Um, so it, it doesn't really, with, it doesn't really send a good message, right? It's like, why play ball when you're going to get hammered anyway? And you might as well just do what the hell you like and just, you know, you might get away with it. That's just a really sad message to be showing. Regulators, that should be the last thing that, that regulators should allow to be, you know, a message that comes across. People should, you know, if they want, if they want trust in themselves as regulators, they need to have the message that if you comply, you know, you're more likely to be treated fairly, rather than just, you know, if you can be a complete scammer, you're likely to get away with it. But maybe it's because they're lucky it's more of a flash in the pan, right? If the scam went on longer, then they would have been caught, like, big connect and one coin because it went on so long, they eventually got caught up. If, if they did their, their scam, and they did it, you know, as quickly as possible, and that was it in, in an out scam, they might have got away with it. And, um, but because they dragged it out, the, the, the, the, the long arm of the law finally got to them. Well, what's interesting about this guy and CZ is that at the end of the day, they are clearly caught. They are punished by the jury and justice system. But the punishment is far too weak and they kind of get to walk away with tens of millions of dollars. This guy for, for the record, he did turn rat. He did rat out his friends and was a evidence to the state. So he did get a reduced sentence. He got time served, which is very low. We've seen in the FTX scandal, perhaps the same things going to happen with the, SBF co conspirators who were completely part of everything. But then at the end, ratted a Sam out before he could rat them out or whatever. It's a, it's an unfortunate message where the real lesson is, be the first one to rat out your friends. And you can do almost anything. And I enjoyed this documentary, check it out on Netflix. It's called Bitcoin. The other one I'd really like to see. And again, I haven't seen it. Didn't make it. Don't know anything about it. I would like to see that Richard Hart documentary, the one about Hex. And I remember seeing the trailer and it was like, oh, it could be the greatest investment in the lifetime. Or it could be completely fake. And Richard just such a wordsmith, the things he says. And then of course, the sad story about someone who's life savings in. And he has to tell his wife, he's like, oh, yeah, I put more in last night. And even today, I saw a message where Richard was still out there defending Hex and saying that it had a chance or something or there's some kind of way that the people were going to make all their money back. I don't, I don't know, even though I'm not involved. But again, I want to see that documentary too. It was a limited release at the time. I'd love to see if it's out more. And this one is just on Netflix. If you want to watch it, Bitcoin, let us know what you think in the comments. But we're running out of time. So we're going to go to the end of the show. Dan, Eve, are you ready with a prediction or a story of the week? Go ahead. No, no, the only thing is that on a personal thing, I just got finally finished having COVID, which was the second time I've had it. And by me, it did not be for six this time. So I'm just really happy that that's over. And maybe it will make my brain less fuzzy. So that next week, I'll have something as a story of the week. Who knows? Maybe I'll adopt a new epigen. I don't know. It's 2024. I'm getting withdraw symptoms already. No pigeon is crossed my path yet. But hopefully I will save one in the new year. As terrible as it is to be sick, it's great to get better. Dan, definitely feel that way. Go ahead, Josh. Let's try it. I tried. You tried. That's very hard. It's in the right place. Farts in the right place. Well, basically we had an electrical storm or a lightning storm and it knocked out our bore pump. Boar for those that don't know is a type of well, where the pump sits in the water table, which is 100 meters underground where I am. And now we don't have any water into the house. And so I've been going through my rainwater tanks, pumping the rainwater tanks into the header tank, which is where the bore usually pumps into. But we're slowly running out of rainwater. So that's my story of the week. Luckily, this isn't smell of vision because our showers are sparse. But yeah, the koala, the koala is good. Actually, no, the koala, I haven't heard the koala for a while. So, probably goal keeps asking about the koala. Yeah, I haven't heard him for a while. So either he's found a mate and moved a few blocks up or down. But we'll see. I'll keep an update on that. But yeah, hopefully the bore pump can be fixed. And let's see if the insurance won't scam me out of actually paying for it. It's always tricky. You read this insurance. People work and it's like, if it was an electrical storm, it's covered. But it's only motors that are covered. Is a pump a motor? Yeah, I would say it is. But maybe they have a different definition. You never know. So it's going to be fun trying to traverse that. Let's see. That's my story of the week. And also, yeah, another story on the standard IO. We've been over the last couple of weeks been going through a massive audit with over 200 hackers trying to break into all the different contracts and trying to basically, you know, clone it on testnet. That's been amazing to watch. And there'll be bounties being sent out for anything that's found. And it's all independently bountied. So it's an independent group giving the bounties out. So that we can't say no, well, that's no good or whatever like that. By the way, if you guys are auditing your code out there, it's really good to choose a group that does not partake within the competition and only judges it. Because there are some companies I've heard of that basically, they have insiders in their own circle partaking. And then they'll judge that the bug that they found is really high level and give themselves the high rewards and stuff like that. So scams within scams within scams, the thing is to basically choose. Well, we choose code hawks. They're very good. Let's see. Yeah, so I'm looking forward to the end of that. And then we'll be repagging the EUROS. I've just been waiting because we don't want to do anything until it's fully audited. And then because it's still MVP release. So we'll see how it goes. The new year is really exciting. I've just had enough of a break to sort of recharge the batteries and get back onto the onto the ball. So it's it's exciting. Let's see. Well, I think I've got nothing this week, but recommendations. Like I said, I watched the movie BitCon. That was pretty good. I've been watching the classic movie The Terminator. Just released on Apple movies. They've been releasing all the James Cameron films. Let's see. I've been reading a book called How the South Won the Civil War. It's a history book. I definitely recommend that. Very thoughtful about the founding of America and how there are two different ideas that founded America. The author calls it the American paradox. How there were these guys who own slaves saying that everyone was equal. And at the same time, there's this idea that liberty above all must be protected. And you can do anything you want to protect your personal liberty. And these two ideas don't fit together. And the book talks about how in the South, they tried to clip off the equality for all, saying that this individual liberty essentially rose to the ability where you could own other human beings, which is obviously very unacceptable morally. But this other idea that the union was about was this idea that all men are created equal. A very interesting, fascinating book, A Laird History. If you've ever read about the Civil War or Reconstruction, it's definitely an interesting topic that obviously is coming up today. As the book speculates, the West became the New South. The Cowboy became the New Plantation owner. And this individual liberty gives you the ability to own other human beings, which is morally unacceptable. So it's a fascinating thing. And it's happening in our society today. So it might be worth checking it out. Of course, you got to remember it's a history book. You have to look at it thoughtfully. And finally, I recommend the audiobook for the love of Europe by Rick Steves. He's been telling me about his travels and every single thing. And it sounds like under the Tuscan sun. He's like, I walked upon the beautiful courtyard, enjoying my coffee as the church bells rang. But it's talking about real places. So it'd be kind of fun to go there. So Rick Steves is pretty great with his European descriptions. But thanks to everybody for joining us, giving us a thumbs up down below, chatting in the chat and saying hello in the comments. Thanks for if you want to check out last week, we did a really great year-in review. It's kind of a long episode. Maybe you want to watch it in parts. But we talked about all of the stories from last year. And really give you some context. Get you ready for another year in Bitcoin. So thanks so much for joining us. Until next time. Bye bye. Bye. Bitcoin!