The Bitcoin Group, the American original. For over the last 10 years, the sharpest Satoshi's, the best Bitcoin's, the hardest crypto currency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Dan Eave, the crypto raptor. Happy Friday. Victoria Jones from Satoshi's page. Hey, hey, hey doing. Josh Shagallot from the standard.io. Welcome another day, another dollar. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network. Moving on to issue one, Bitcoin ETFs are sucking up 10 times more Bitcoin than miners can produce. And there's a Bitcoin happening on the way that will cut the mining production by 50%. Now the ETFs are purchasing 12.5 times as many Bitcoin as the miners can produce. Bitcoin ETF demand is out of control. Dan Eave, what do you think about the demand for the Bitcoin ETF as well as the upcoming happening? Well, it's pretty good news, right? We've always said about the supply and demand drop in Bitcoin is going to be a really significant event and the harvining. And before we've even got that, we've got these stats of actual daily average buying that is more than the miners are actually producing. So this is like real world data. That's not even like the hype with all these nine, ten, eleven, you know, competing ETFs with their with their adverts telling everyone about the harvining too right? Because in theory, I'm looking forward to the first, the first like ETF harvining advert, you know, like how do they approach the harvining and they can do it in a really cheesy way or in a really educational sort of way, you know, that really gets people sucked in and down the rabbit hole. So yeah, I'm actually most looking forward to the price, forget about the price, I'm looking forward to the adverts. Pretty optimistic there. We didn't see any Bitcoin ads in the Super Bowl, no Bitcoin ETFs, no crypto.coms and no FTX. That was weird. They used to have lots of Super Bowl ads and now they have none. Victoria, John, what do you think about the Bitcoin ETFs buying so much Bitcoin? Well, you know me, I don't trust them as far as I could throw them. So, you know, as much as they can buy it all, they can sell it all as well. So, you know, it could go anyway. You know, the rise in the price to Bitcoin is absolutely unprecedented for this stage in Bitcoin's price cycle. You know, typically it's still kind of limping along now. Sometimes it can have a bit of a rise and then it'll have a bit of a dip before the halfening, but not really seen that at all this time. So, on the one hand, it's very exciting, but on the other hand, it does worry me because, you know, any of us who've been around for a long time have seen all this hype before and as quick as it goes up, it can go down just as fast. So, you know, these sorts of pumps can be a time where you need to be really careful. So, yeah, that'd be my advice to any newbies out there. Just watch it, you know, and especially with all the hype, you know, because people love to talk about it and it's like, how much money are you making, but it can turn on you? And it's like, especially if you're new to the space, the first time it happens, it's devastating and then you become accustomed to it and then you're like, okay, this is what happens and you learn to prepare yourself next time. So, yeah, watch out. And the other thing I'd also say is, you know, there's a lot of rumblings of trouble in the financial system, particularly commercial real estate, you know, they've got the Evergrande company that's failed. You've got a number of banks that are affected by this. The fact that interest rates have gone up are also causing concern in the general financial system. And the thing is, if you're cognizant of history, you know, typically big financial panics tend to happen when liquidity has been drawn out of the market. And that's effectively the effect that, you know, the Fed is having by raising interest rates. There'll be a lot of people who will tell you that that's not actually how the system works because they can create money whenever they need to. And yes, the financial system can do that. But the people on the ground who are also heavily invested in Bitcoin are affected by that. People who are losing their jobs, who are getting mortgages that they can't afford. You know, we've got a lot of businesses where my brother works in Seattle and ever since the pandemic, none of them gone back in the office anyone. Apparently this is a problem right throughout America. And commercial real estate used to be one of their most profitable sectors. So the fact that that's struggling, you know, we could be heading for something really catastrophic in the financial system. And if that happens, that will have an effect on Bitcoin. And it may well be that a lot of these ETFs are buying up the Bitcoin in advance because they realize that it's the only thing that's going to help them survive in that situation. But, you know, when it was a 2008 financial crisis, I think people have been buying golden anticipation of that. But in the short term, gold actually went down before it went up again. So just, just be careful, you know, things are not as they seem. You have to look at these things very carefully. There are a lot of elements that feed into this kind of thing. And yeah, just be careful. Well, I do think a commercial real estate collapse is possible. But in this case, I do want to at least log the banks for actually buying the Bitcoin. They're creating this market demand. They're buying it. They're not just re-hypothicating or saying that they have the Bitcoin. The market demand shows that somebody's clearly buying it. So at least that's positive for now. And we're seeing the proof of banks, right? We're seeing the ETFs actually coming clean and saying, here's our bank, because our Bitcoin bank. So you can see the inflows out there. That is positive, at least. Josh, you go, what do you think about the ETFs garbling up all the Bitcoin? Yeah, it's phenomenal. It's absolutely phenomenal. Like if you look at what miners produce per day, I wrote a bit of a tweet article, actually, an ex article about it. You can, miners can mine around about 900 Bitcoin a day, basically, as the entire network. So the entire network mines 900 roughly. After the harvining, 450 ETFs are gobbling up 12,000 of them per day, or you know, on average 10,000. And miners can only produce, so what happens in that case is that these ETFs are struggling to buy and look around and contact and they're reaching out to everybody, the mining groups, the consortiums, the Coinbase. Coinbase is looking because they're getting a commission if they can find volume. And the thing is, once you exhaust, there's two things I'd like to say about this. Once you exhaust the easy ways of finding this Bitcoin, you start to delve into the more sketchy ways of finding Bitcoin. Like, boss, there was a guy on Telegram that reached out and said he can sell us 10 grand worth of Bitcoin. And take it, we've got 10 clients, the stress, we've got a lot of clients, we need to fill this order. And then what will happen to the guys is, we sent in the deposit of, you know, I don't know, half a billion dollars. Great, well done, you get a rise, you get a rise. Yeah, oh, sir, sir, it's gone. What do you mean it's gone? The account, you know, they'll get scammed. They'll get fricking scam these guys because they cannot find easy to find clean Bitcoin. They'll find sketchy Bitcoin and they'll get scam. They'll bury it, they'll hide it. And they won't maybe won't do it again, but what will happen then? What will happen then is that they won't do that again. And they'll go back to the sources they do have. And what's the only way to get good, large amounts of Bitcoin after that is to offer a way higher price above market. And that will loosen the diamond hands a little bit. So yeah, where it's the perfect storm is brewing everybody. And yeah, so here we go. Strap yourselves in. Get ready to be shaken out of your Bitcoin, but shaken for more money than you ever thought possible. Then to see Bitcoin go up even another 10 times. And that's when you'll realize, or 100 times or more. But it's exciting. We're finally, the banks are finally buying at least the ETFs. But moving on to the prediction against the magic eight ball, the source of all truth in this universe. Will the price of Bitcoin be higher or lower this time next week? Dan Eve. It's ever optimistic and up. Victoria Jones going to break the streak here. Well, Dan was telling us before we started that the fear and greed indexes at four. So there's still room to move to five. So I'd go, it's going to go higher. All right, room for more greed. Josh, should go higher or lower? Well, I think higher, if you think higher, smash the like. If you think lower, hit down. Let's see. Oh, higher and lower. And now we'll ask the ball, will the price of Bitcoin be higher this time next week? Yes. That was pretty unequivocal. Yes. Nothing more. You can't get more. Done. Yes. So that's a good sign from the magic eight ball. Moving on to issue two. Elizabeth Warren honors Satoshi Nakamoto on Bitcoin's 15th anniversary. What a kind thing for the senator to do. Oh, wait, she didn't endorse Bitcoin. Anyone can have a flag flown over the US Capitol and get a signature from a senator after you do it. So Elizabeth Warren has not changed her mind. She doesn't really support Bitcoin. But there was a really cool signature and a flag. And it was at this new cool bar called PubKey in New York that our friend Daniel NYC works at. So shout out to PubKey. They got a big story out of this. And afterwards they had TJ Miller from the Silicon Valley TV show read the hot old message that the guy wrote on the forum all those years ago. So I haven't checked it out, but I'll bet it's pretty funny. Shout out to PubKey and to Elizabeth Warren. But Dan Eve, what do you think about the Bitcoin story? Everyone now believes Elizabeth Warren is a Bitcoin. Well, it's well played, right? I'm surprised you haven't seen more of these from from kind of like the cat. Is it what's the their thing? Cameo because you often see like, you know, people promoting things and I'm surprised you've seen more shilling of general shit coins and stuff and and via cameo and this like official route, right? Because imagine if an ICO crappy ICO did it, then they'd have this little shit army behind them saying, oh yeah, the US government behind my job and he'll go down and get the crap in public. And yeah, I'm surprised you haven't seen more of these things. I think it's a really clever way of doing it. And Elizabeth Warren is someone, well, the interesting thing about Arrows, the fact that she's starting to you turn, right? So she was very, you know, she's very hard on Bitcoin. She even did the crazy thing of saying that, you know, a non cut, sorry, a self custodial war is what? Self custodial war, it's all the devil. And like now, Matt root of saying that they should be banned, et cetera. So she's been historically very anti Bitcoin and then for her to do something obviously seemingly positive was obviously crazy. And it was crazy. But what she is doing is seemingly moving or campaigns like moving towards this whole like financial inclusion. It's because Bitcoin has used the word inclusive. And so it's been able to disseminate itself into these other sort of areas where it's going, but Bitcoin's inclusive. Now, isn't that contribute to black rocks like what's it called there? They're kind of green. IED or IED. IED. IED. IED. I don't know. Well, there might be something else. Yeah. So it could be an improvised explosive device in metaphorically, right? But that's not on ESG. ESG is ESG. ESG, that's the one. Yeah, that's fine. So yeah, so it's like that they're obviously turning black rock have turned everyone and we've said that right since the big players entered the game, it started to become a lot more Bitcoin becoming a lot more known as environmentally friendly. And so maybe they've managed to sway a little bit for him because yeah, let's face it, all these sentences, they all rub shoulders with the big, the big reach, right? So they're going to be influenced in some form of way. I'm not saying she would be. I'm saying there is potential for her to be just like there is for anyone to be swayed by anyone who will tickle your palm with some Bitcoin. If it can be done, I don't know. Maybe there's a service for that. Maybe Ben needs to invent a palm tickling thing with a lightning payment service so you can tickle someone remotely and bribe them. You could also use the lightning network to bribe politicians that's yet another use of Bitcoin monetary funds can be transferred. I do think like Dan said, there is hope for Elizabeth Warren. I don't know why she's been against Bitcoin. She was originally with Occupy Wall Street. She was running the consumer protection bureau. She came up as a senator, but it's only recently she's had this big anti Bitcoin turn like she read that one Wall Street Journal article. Now thinks it's all terrorist money because of one source. So yes, again, with one source, if the story seems too crazy, like Dan was saying, it probably is too crazy. This one was too good to be true. And hopefully, although Dan has a good idea, hopefully they're not making investment decisions from cameo. But if they crop off that part that says cameo, then how would you know you could just be like the incredible hope told me to buy Hulk coin. It's obviously him. Victoria Jones, what do you think about Elizabeth Warren flying the Bitcoin flag and then probably not? Yeah, well, it's always very gratifying when the propagandized learn how to actually use propaganda for their own for their own agenda. You know, clearly whoever, whoever planned this was quite a smart cookie. And you know, it's also testament to the fact that we're so overwhelmed with information these days that most people only read the headline. They don't read the whole article. And so, you know, just by having that story, you know, there'll be people out there who are now convinced that Elizabeth Warren is now actually for Bitcoin without realizing that there's a follow up story that, no, it wasn't her at all, you know, someone just managed to convince her to sign a certificate that gets, you know, that anyone can get for an American flag. So, so yeah, you know, I mean, the thing is she doesn't really, I don't, when she decided to take on Bitcoin, she didn't really know who she was taking on did she? You know, I mean, these people have, have passion and they will do anything to bring down their enemies and clearly Elizabeth Warren is an enemy of Bitcoin. So, yeah, she needs to watch her back. The other thing about a story like this is if you want to believe, it's easy to believe. So if you're a Bitcoin person, you're reading this headlines like someone's changed their mind. They're into Bitcoin. I remember when I did that, I changed my mind. I'm into Bitcoin now. So it doesn't seem like such a stretch, but of course, obviously a sitting senator flying a flag for Satoshi. It starts to get a little fishy, even if you didn't know about the flag flying program. Josh Chagall, what do you think about Elizabeth Warren's sudden turn and then turning back? Yeah, absolutely amazing. But she is a siop. Like that's how I believe it. She's a siop. She was injected into the occupied Wall Street to try and like, you know, appease the beast. Now look, Elizabeth Warren doing, I think there's two things that could be at play here. She could be like, I hate this. You know, all against it because her buddies at the central banks are like, you got to stop this. You got to stop this. Bag it, bag it. Everything you can. And now BlackRock and 11 other ETFs are all buying up billions of dollars in bags going Warren, you shut up, you know, close that trap of yours. And she's like, oh, yeah, BlackRock now, you know, because the more she bags it, the more she's destroying hedge funds and anyone else who's long this stuff now through these ETPs or ETFs. So yeah, there's that. But yeah, I think that at the end of the day, Elizabeth Warren or not, you're taking on something even stronger than GMA, than GameStop. Like GameStop became so massive because of memes, the meme army and the retail investor. And if they think that GameStop was big, wait until you see who's behind crypto, the army, the meme production mechanism and machine behind Bitcoin and behind crypto in general. She's going to the more she bags it on air, the more that army is going to wake up and just absolutely destroy her by more and by more. And the more that they try to short it, they'll buy more and create a short squeeze. So GameStop is nothing compared to Bitcoin. Well and it is a unique situation, Joshua, like you said, where BlackRock is buying and now our Bitcoin is their Bitcoin as well. And they have to step in and defend it. And when they attack Bitcoin, they're not just attacking all these hobbyists and programmers and libertarians. They're attacking large giant banks that are holding hundreds of thousands of this Bitcoin. So once again, the ETFs are good for us. It brings us more allies and it's brought us more buying. Now imagine if this buying had happened, what, 10, 5 years ago, whenever they first had the ETFs, 8 years ago, and they could have had cheaper Bitcoin and they could have gotten so much more before the happening, before the other happening. I mean, it's just, it's crazy. They still have to see Bitcoin. It's still right now. They've got to get it. They've got to get it on this market as the first story showed before time runs out. Let's keep moving. If people in one year time, they'll go to worldcryptoneetwork.com and they'll look at this page and they'll click on this video and they'll see us talking about $50,000 Bitcoin going, my God, Josh was right. It was cheap. It's not $500,000. These ETFs, they've made up with good money. That's right. They'll see it at worldcryptoneetwork.com. Moving on to issue three, Bitcoin market caps. Cast, cast, oh, Bitcoin market cap crosses $1 trillion as buyers flood in. Victoria Jones, they often said they only care about a market if it's worth more than $1 trillion and now Bitcoin is worth it again. Yeah. It's about half of what Apple's worth at the moment. Biggest company on the planet. Obviously, we see it as a new form of money. It's just a matter of time before all of those companies are valued in Bitcoin. One global company to go, several others just need to mop up the rest of them now. We know we'll get there eventually. I think though we have to be careful about the hype because until it's actually easy to use on a daily basis and it's easy for businesses to adopt, it's going to take a while before it reaches that, it really has that kind of reach. In many respects, it's still a speculative asset. People are buying it on the basis that it has the potential for this and we will agree it can. But the reality is, if you're trying to set up a lot of these networks behind the scenes, it's still difficult to use even with the Lightning Network, the Lightning Network has its issues. That's not straightforward to use either. There's still a lot of work to be done before it's really going to take that trajectory. It's exciting and a lot of these businesses are buying into the ETF. I still think this run up is a little bit premature. They say that the first trillion dollars is the hardest after that. It's easier. Josh Shagalla, we're worth one trillion dollars again. We've validated it. It's amazing. Victoria said, the fact that Apple, actually I think Apple's worth more than that now, but when that passed one trillion, it was the first company to do so and it's quite a move. It's also a sign of inflation. It's also a sign like we're talking in the trillions. When I was in school, I was taught there's not even a trillion stars, like it's in the billions. There's probably a trillion stars. But far out, there's so much liquidity just flying around now, just floating around. The inflationary sign is there. When you start to see even Joe Biden get up on his Twitter saying, I'm so upset because the chip companies are making smaller chip bags. It's called shrink flation and how dare they in these greedy companies like, dude, these companies are basically trying to deal with the crap that you guys in government are spewing out you guys in your mates at the central banks are pumping out money. You're forcing the private sector to deal with it without pissing off their customers because they can do two things. They can lift prices or they can shrink their product to hide that fact. They're going with that option. This is typical of any government on a bipartisan issue like inflation is they basically start to blame the private sector for being greedy. Then, historically, what you get is the people getting pissed off at petrol companies and burning them and saying, greedy, greedy. I hang on, they're not greedy. Literally, your money is worthless. It's the other way around. There's your problem, not there. Well, I do think there is a problem with companies changing the size of products and deceptively doing it, adjusting the taper so it goes in, putting one of those bubbles on the bottom of the peanut butter jar, things like this where you think you're getting the same product but you're actually buying less. They should be less dishonest in that if they want to raise the prices for their products. Dan, what did you hear into? But at the end of the day, inflation is going to kick you either way whether they try to hide it or not. They shouldn't preserve the mystery. If I'm buying eight cigarettes instead of ten, I should get to the end of the cart and be like, I'm bummed out. There's less ice cream here than I thought there was. It's not a bummer. It should be a magical experience. Josh, not a surprise. All right. These are isolated products where they're not isolated but they do it but it's not that frequent. With money, devalues across the board and it's such an open thing that everyone knows about and yet it still happens. This all like rumble like in 2020. Remember in 2020, everyone was like, especially around the hardening, everyone in Bitcoin was going, you crazy guys. The currency is going to be devalued even more now, pretty all this money. And then inflation is going to go up and then out of nowhere, they're like, next year, after that, they're like, inflation came out of nowhere. Economist baffled. What? The class of the... That was pretty surprising. Somebody bit Corners focused on inflation for so long and then finally it does happen and it does affect the goal. They were very shocked. Yeah. I mean, it could have been, you know, it could have been just luck. I don't think so. But what is quite cool is when I was just searching, I was like, I think because Apple did overtake Microsoft recently and I thought I just wanted to double check because Microsoft just hit over 3 trillion, which was all just recently. But when I searched for it... Oh, we lose, Dan. Oh, that's the situation. That's right. It's like, it's like, it's by market. Obviously, the first result was company's market. Cap.com. So you have CoinMarketCap, which is the real coin about the bit. Well, we should check that out. Crypto, what did you say, CoinMarketCap, but it's for company. CompanyMarketCap. Let's see. Because I do think there are a few like Microsoft Tesla that are worth more than Bitcoin, but it's interesting that Bitcoin or those companies could now be determined in terms. Sorry about that. Crazy. No, what happened there just literally disappeared. But yeah, so CoinCook companies market cap, right? So we've got crypto leading the field now. But it's still crazy. Microsoft is 3 trillion, Apple 2.8 trillion, Saudi, Aramco, 2.2 trillion. So Bitcoin is right at the moment. It's sitting around the 8 market just after Facebook. So it's got a lot going on. It's a lot of way to go. You know, triple the price that puts us on 150K if Apple had Microsoft remain stagnant. And then we've got the top spot of like everything market cap.com. It's bigger than Berkshire Hathaway. I'm glad to see that one. Yes. That is a nice pass just to be ahead of Berkshire. Yes. Yeah, there's a fast thing that these companies are now can be defined as how many bitcoins they are. Microsoft is 3 bitcoins, Apple 2.85, Saudi, Aramco, 2.06 bitcoins. And Vita, they've been way up recently 1.7 Bitcoin, again, size of the entire Bitcoin market, not one Bitcoin piece. But just want to add, gold is at 13 trillion. So gold is at 13 Bitcoin markets. That's right. So I think it's fun that we did pass the trillion dollar mark makes us on our way, right? Dan, did you have any more on Bitcoin passing $1 trillion? I know that's it. Let's see $2 trillion as the next big pit stop, right? It's always good. They'll just keep, they say the entire crypto market is $2 trillion, but Bitcoin is one. Moving on to issue 4. Crypto venture funding climbs for the first time in nearly two years after Bitcoin's stellar run. Pitchbook said in a fourth quarter update that the level in investment in crypto related companies had totaled $1.9 billion for the fourth quarter, a 2.5% increase. Josh Shagalla, what do you think they're finally giving money for crypto companies now that the price is up? Yeah, again, I've said it before and I'll say it again, VCs are dumb as fucking boxer hammers. Like, they call them the smart money. They say, all VCs, the smart money, the smartest man in the room, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What do they do? When you're a crypto company and you're struggling through the bear market and you're pitching to every single VC and they're like, yeah, yeah, no, it's dad, crypto is dad, yeah. And then as soon as the hype cycle kicks in, just like the retail investors, just like the dumb money, they start piling in. So who's leading who here? Who's leading who is at the dumb money leading? Yeah, it is. And so VCs are really, in my mind, not a very smart bunch. They should be buying, they should be smart and they should be buying at the bottom, these companies up that are bringing true value. They should see real value, not price. So price and value are a disconnect sometimes. And so during a bear market, there's an absolute signal for a disconnect. And that's when you look at who's building infrastructure in Bitcoin and in crypto in general and start snacking on those companies or start supporting those companies, those teams. And yeah, this is so typical of these idiots in the VC lab. So not only that, family offices are getting pissed off with VCs as well. For those that don't know, venture capitalists aren't rich. They basically go around to rich families and ask them to give the money into a fund who they'll then invest and they say, we'll invest in XYZ. And this is our strategy and invest in our fund. And then they get pissed off because these VC start flying one way ticket business class and first class everywhere and go, oh no, I'm going to his conference. And they'll chew through all the money. There's no fine on them or any penalty on the downside if their stock goes down, which it mostly does because it's like I said, it's dumb money. And on the way up, on the way up, they get a cut. They get a percentage of the game. So family offices just had enough of this game. So a lot of these sees are struggling now. And maybe that's why they're only jumping in when the dumb money does. So the legacy dumb money, which is now actually the smart money because it's driving. So some would say that the ETFs are the smart money. But who's smart and who's dumb anymore? I don't even know. The fact is if you own some Bitcoin, if you own what you were used to talk about, if you have one Bitcoin, that was what you should aim for. Now you should have 0.21. 0.21 Bitcoin is the aim because you'll have one billionth of the market. It definitely right, Josh. No one can waste money like a funded cryptocurrency company. I've been to many events where they had wasted money in over invested events. One time, place at rent at a hotel room for a party. And at the end, they decided to just give away the mini bar. People weren't even asking for it. They were kind of forcing people to take bottles. But there wasn't point in this where the smart money could have bought Coinbase at $35 a share. Now it's $185 a share. So just like Josh's saying, they could have had a takeover on Coinbase at $35. Berkshire could have bought them. The article also says that Swan Bitcoin, which is an exchange raised $100 million and that blockchain.com raised $165 million. So we are seeing continued investment into Bitcoin exchanges. Dan Eave, what do you think about the return of crypto venture funding? Yes, it's very good point that Josh makes is that all these startups have been struggling for the last year and a half. And they've been literally aching for this money to stay alive. We've seen some good businesses fall because of just not being able to survive the bear market. And now they come piling. You went Bitcoin's 50K. It's the classic thing of like, you know, you show Bitcoin to someone for years. And then suddenly they're not interested. But as soon as it's all time high, you get a message going, I've all time high. I'm so excited. And then you're like, oh, I got all the way down. And maybe you listened to me like two years ago. But the problem is, is that, you know, whilst VCs are VCs, they're still like only human, right? So they can get caught up in phomo just as well. And it's easy like you think that a group of people would rationalize a decision and have done a lot of DY, done your own research and a lot more of a due diligence process. But as we've seen like, was it, what, the Sequoia in Co fell with FTX and doing the due diligence on that. So we've seen even the biggest VC giants fall by not doing proper due diligence. And they're all only human. They can all get caught up in phomo. And what's that? And I don't know if it's like mass parodolia or like a, you know, like when a group of people can still like get caught up in the same kind of weird paranormal emotion of, I've usually it's a religious type thing like where like Jesus appears in the sky or something. But people, or a COVID thing. Yeah. People have been that even in a, in a workshop when someone's got carried away of some crazy ass idea and everyone's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then they phomo into this idea that's just nuts and you're like sat there. Mass likeosis. This is, yeah, this is crazy. These guys are crazy. And that happens. That happens in the VC boards as well where they go and write, should we do, we need to do it right now? Yeah. But coins, you know, they have these decision points all the way up into Bitcoin's when it's 16,000, 20,000, 25,000, 30, 40. And they're having these, and then they go right when it reaches a peak, they go, we jump in with all the, because these are just all VCs are is a collective of retail investors, but with like a formal package around it. And yeah, they do their due diligence, but they can still fall at the same hurdles, right? Not every VC is successful, just like not every investor is successful. So yeah, they're only, they're only human and they all are susceptible to phomo. So they wait until Bitcoin pumps and then they jump right in and get all worried and then yeah. But then, Dan, that's the, their entire job is to not be that. That's their entire job. But yet they don't do it. They just phomo like a bunch of fools and, and, and just want about like there's some important, you know, God's gift to startups. Yeah. It is surprising when the whole of their strategy could be summed up by saying, everyone else is doing it. Is that your whole strategy anymore? No. Victoria Jones, what do you think? The venture funding has returned to Bitcoin. Well, there are two comments I'd like to make about this subject actually. And the first one is if you actually read the article, Mr. what they're investing in is the tokenization of real world assets. And if you listen to someone like Whitney Webb, she'll tell you that, you know, that's definitely a darker gender. Basically, they're just trying to figure out, just trying to get everything as a token on the blockchain as a means of controlling the world. So the fact that that's what they're focusing their energy on is should be something to be noted. And then the other thing I'd like to pick up on is what Josh said about the fact that, you know, a lot of these companies, they don't get any punishment when these things are going down. In fact, it's set up in law that, you know, when companies go bankrupt, you know, no one takes personal responsibility for this kind of thing. And actually, it's, if you look into it, it's a real scourge in our society, you know, the most recent newsletter I wrote was Bitcoin and joint stock companies. And I looked at the history of how joint stock companies came into being. And one of things a lot of people probably don't know is that as much as we complained about the banks, the banks came into existence because companies needed a way of storing their wealth until joint stock companies were invented, they didn't need banking. And so actually, you know, if you look at, you know, where a lot of our problems are in society in terms of our money and our finances, it's often because of the way in which these companies are set up. And then through the 1800s, you know, the British introduced a series of laws that allowed for limited companies because that wasn't that wasn't the case in the beginning. But each time they had a financial crisis and they needed to find a way in which they could keep their economy going to overcome these things, they didn't introduce a new law. And actually, if you look on Wikipedia and you look at what the historians say about the industrial revolution, most of the marvel about the fact that, you know, Britain was streets ahead of Europe and how is it that they managed to do this thing? And it's also due to the way in which they set up legal precedence on how companies worked. And of course, they were then picked up by America. And this is the basis on which our society now operates. And so what this means is you've now got this huge moral hazard where if companies fail, this is where a lot of the liquidity gets sucked out of the market. And so, I mean, my dad worked for an American company that came to set up. They were like server farms in the UK around the early 2000s. And, you know, they would spend money like water completely irresponsible. And then when the company failed, it suddenly went bankrupt. Everyone lost their jobs. But the people who were implementing this, there was no way of holding them to account or anything. And you witnessed those things and it's absolutely terrible. And so, yes, the banks are a problem. But behind that, you've got a number of companies who, you know, no one's holding them accountable. There are meant to be other provisions in law to hold these people accountable. But often they're not that effective. I mean, look at how many bankers went to jail after the 2008 financial crisis. And so, you know, this is what Bitcoin is set up to fix. But again, you know, Bitcoin as the money is just one part of the problem. You know, if you just, if you just still have the legal structure for companies using that money, you're going to create the same problem all over again. So there's more that needs to be done in order to overcome this parasite on society. And it's way more complex than just money. The money is a great start. But there are so many other things that we need to address in the process. That also reminds me that SPF is expected to get a lighter than normal sentence. Because as Victoria said, we don't punish financial crimes in the same way that we do other crimes. Can I do that? Oh, just before we move on, that, you know, it's kind of a two-edged sword. If you have a massive financial collapse, and then every entrepreneur or manager has to go to prison, because there's no limited liability, then you basically suck the entrepreneurial ships out of society. And then you cannot restart. So you've got to have that fine balance. And this is why the UK did go miles ahead, because they could screw up on a level higher, like the central banking level, and not have to like jail anyone that's actually valuable in terms of risk appetite and everything else. And you get huge advantages from that, but there's a cost that comes further down the line. Yeah, yeah. Moving on to the next question. There's another problem before, sorry, Thomas. There's another problem with real world assets is that because we're at the stand where we're dealing with a lot. One of the thesis is to bring world real world assets so you can borrow against it by locking into smart contracts. But the thing is no one's built them properly. And this is why we at Valtora never tokenized our gold, even though we had millions and millions of dollars locked up in gold. We never tokenize it because you cannot, it was very, very difficult, especially in the UTXO model. It's almost impossible to remove, to pay for the demorage, to pay for the fee of the men with guns and the storage and the BDO and auditing and the insurance. All of that cost money. So real world asset have real world costs. And if you have a token, where are you getting those payments for the storage fee from most people like packs do on a burn, sorry, do on a fee on transfer. So the fee on transfers like, hmm, I'll send you that token. Now you own it out and the smart contract says, okay, you have to split off a fee when that's transferred. Well, that's great and good. But if I die and my bunch of tokenized gold is sitting there that's screwed there. No one can basically the storage company has to pay for that gold forever because the person that holds the private keys dead. We don't know where they are. And there's precedence for this. There's a whole lot of people that have took up deals in before the Second World War with Swiss voting firms where they'd say, this month free lifetime free storage if you go with us. And and then Second World War hits a lot of these customers gone, no records of them anymore. And these voting companies are still around holding that gold for these people because they might family members might turn up. Maybe they have a small clause or they didn't put that clause in there. So there's precedence for this sort of thing. But also on the last level of that, it doesn't they doesn't work on D5 fee on transfer coins don't work in UniSwap V3 pools and routing in general. And routing in general doesn't work with fee on transfer. So so that means when you go up and you met a mask and you go, I want to swap, you know, this shit coin for that tokenized real estate coin. It'll go, I can't find a route to that coin. So you need the exact pair that's sitting on UniSwap to get that. And this is just a very, very inefficient way of doing anything. So these real world asset companies all hire air. They're not doing it properly. I'm actually giving a lot of advice to companies now that are trying to tokenize and trying to get them to do it properly because I've been doing this for so long that, you know, it's this simple stuff that people don't think about. And even the technical level they don't think about it. They just think, oh, what was just credit? DLC 20 and represents this thing in the real world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Does it? Okay. Anyway, there you go. Well, like Uncle Vitalik said, if you want to be rich, make your own coin. Moving on to the exit question. If you were a VC and you were investing $100 million today, what would you buy besides Bitcoin? Of course. Dan Eve, what would you buy? 100 million today. I suppose a bit bit. Okay. Bitcoin mining. I've set aside a portion for Bitcoin developers. I'd buy Bitcoin mining infrastructure. And as in I'd like create my own mine. I'd create behind God damn water for if I had a hundred million dollars. That's for sure. See, at least there'd be a waterfall. Victoria Jones, $100 million. What would you invest in? Oh, more shoes. Lots of shoes. Josh Shagall, $100 million. Where would you invest? Well, we're about to release some epic stuff at the standard. So obviously I'd get more standard tokens. That's what I'd do. But I'd get more Bitcoin. I get more Bitcoin. I'd invest in the standard. I would also get some mining equipment. And yeah, I'd have a look at some of the other chain link build programs because chain links best vetted a lot of those guys too. So that's where I go. The answer is AI, artificial intelligence. I don't know what company to invest in. But everybody's crazy about AI. If you guys seen the video thing, you can type in stuff. And it'll make a little video now. You can't. The public can't use it yet. But the samples are out. They're incredible. Hey, Jen does it already. Video AI. But and you can do it. But the thing is that AI will just swallow itself. So you'll invest in this AI company. And some other AI company will just open source a version that does something very similar. And then it'll just be free. And you like. This is the problem I have with AI. It's like, you might get a little bit of gains in the short term, but it's very hard to pick a win on that. Well, I haven't heard people threatening AI saying that if they take away the access to Twitter or whatever, they won't be able to build the large language model. But I think once it's already built, it'll just go underground. It'll be distributed. Everyone will have their own large language model. Just want to interject here. Hey, disruptive innovation one just said he would buy a mad Bitcoin's hat. I that there you go. Now we're hitting what else would you buy? Chat, let us know. That would be fun. Maybe you could get princes guitar from that Super Bowl show. Just, you know, proper investments, right? And let's move on to the last issue. Our favorite articles are back. Here's how much money you'd have if you'd invested $1,000 in Bitcoin 10 years ago. I love this kind of article because they only happen when the price is up. And you feel bad about not investing. They never put this out when the price is down. Victoria Jones, what do you think about the return of our favorite kind of article, as well as everyone's non-coin or friends calling them up and saying, hey, do you still have any of that Bitcoin stuff? Yeah, well, you know, these articles always draw interest. And you know, you could get your calculator out and play with what ifs for ages. But, you know, the reality is that most of the people we know that's in it is that, you know, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose and you hope that over time you're generally winning. Unfortunately, with Bitcoin, you know, there's a lot of room for error because it's such a brilliant asset. As time goes by, though, you know, it might, we might need to be more careful. And I think, you know, having access to Wall Street with their enormous resources, I think we'll disrupt how things have played out a lot. So I think certainly it's going to be more challenging going forward. You know, you know, read those kind of articles and make sure that you actually bought it at the right time and if necessary, sold it at the right time, that it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. Well, and I love the simplicity of their plan. They're just assuming that you didn't see all of CNBC's other articles saying how you should sell and how terrible Bitcoin is and how you shouldn't buy and all those other things. If you existed in complete vacuum and you only saw this one article you could have invested 10 years ago, Josh Shagall, what do you think of CNBC in the return of our favorite kind of article? Yeah, it's beautiful how simplicity, simplicity is, you know, a lot of people bought, I know a lot of very early Bitcoiners like this and they're hardly rich. Like they've got enough, now they don't need to do a nine to five and some of them still do a nine to five. But they're not like multi-multimillionaires. It's the fact that along the way, you're like, oh, it's dipping sell or hey, there's a shit going over here. I'm going to buy that and make even more money or there's a, you know, or a shit. My dad just fell over and he's, you know, needs medical attention and the best surgeon, it's going to cost us a little bit extra. I've got this Bitcoin or, hey, honey, I think you, you know, we've got now 200k sitting there, you only put a grand in. Why don't we put a deposit down for that house? It's the diligent thing to do. You know, not knowing that it's going to go up to 2 mil. These things are constant. Don't forget about diversify, Josh. Everyone says diversify. Yeah, diversify diversify. He is that ID again. So yeah, it's, it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's really important to diversify. And this is exactly what happens is that a lot of people that didn't, you know, there's people like Roger Ver, that literally went and put, you know, a million dollars worth when it was like 10 bucks, right? So they, they could do all of, have all of these life problems and still be a billionaire because of it. But generally, a lot of people say, oh, you just got in, we got it early. That's easy. Man, Hoddling is one of the hardest things in the world because you're against a lot of pressure, life pressure, scams, exchanges going down and you have your crypto on there, like I did on Mt. Gox, the very first exchange. You know, like there's so many things that can go wrong on the way. And not only and wrong, just life, right? You just need to spend and the whole diversify, which is obviously a smart thing sometimes. So yeah. You do have to be also slightly autistic. Like you said, Josh, Roger Ver putting millions in early, everybody telling him no, everybody telling if it goes up, I'm sure everyone told him to sell to get his million dollars back. And the article is just the meanest premise in the world. It's this premise. If you could stop time, go back 10 years, buy something expensive, come back into time. Like Josh said, never any crises in your personal life, never any family members that need help or a reason where you'd have to sell to move or to get a better life for the kids or whatever. None of that. Just this magical time travel thinking article Dan, Eve, what do you think about the return of it's like fall? Like it's a season. Like the articles are back. If you had bought Bitcoin dot, dot, dot. Yeah, there's only like one real place that I've, or time that I've seen, sorry, company that I've seen these articles be done on. And there's been two or three where it said like, if you'd have bought a Tesla, so I bought Tesla stock instead of a Tesla in like 2011, then you know, your Tesla will be worth. All that's amount worth 100 million. But you rarely see in other markets. It's almost like they do it in the markets where or for the companies where I don't know, there's just this, this, this, they like to pick on them, right? It's like they like to there's a very love hate relationship between Tesla and the public and like, like there is with Bitcoin, right? And so these articles come out. They come out. They must be to wind people up because they know that anyone that's been in Bitcoin for a long time, as we said, they've got these, these, these troughs and mountains and troughs, or peeps and troughs, sorry, of their life where they've had to sell at certain points. And for most people, that's, it's a kind of, it's quite an obvious pattern, right? Where everyone's happy because they're employed in crypto companies. They, they did the thing, right? They did the thing, which was quit their quit their day job and go full-time crypto, which is a job. It's just in a different industry. And then obviously the industry starts slumping and then the company has to fire them. And then, you know, whilst their luck is down, their only assets that they've saved for all this time, they have to now sell because they, they didn't become rich in between that time. And, you know, and so it's this only industry where the, the media constantly mocks you about what you could have had such a sad thing, right? And you can't go through life looking at that because that's the same with anything, especially if, you know, forgetting about Bitcoin, but the, the, the, like the general devaluing of, of currency, right? It's, it's like, you know, if it wasn't, if Bitcoin wasn't there, it'd be the same thing of, well, you know, if you'd have just invested in, in Microsoft, or if you'd invested it and so and so. But we don't see those because we're not an industry that's that's that's sorry, we're an industry that's easily mockable. But we are also an industry that's easily mockable because there are articles and sayings and things like have fun staying poor and everyone's getting rich apart from you, that famous article in like 2017 where there's like the crypto bros in those jumpers and they're like, oh, they're scoffing at everyone who's not, you know, just riding the, the 20k Bitcoin wave. So yeah, it's just, it's horrifying when you look back at it and especially, you know, for those who didn't get into Bitcoin, you know, in the really crazy early days, there's a lot of us that kind of bought some silly, silly shit coin when it was a cent and it's now a hundred dollars and done, you know, probably more than, than, you know, the Bitcoin did in the last say 10 years. Right? And those, you don't hear many of those stories right, right now, right? You know, they're even like that. If you'd have bought, you know, if you'd have bought, you know, Ethereum instead of like a bar of soap, you could have bought an entire soap factory by now. We'll probably, we'll see more of those, right? As time goes on, right? But it's we're in the industry where everyone hates you. They love you, well, they hate, they love you after they hate you because they, they love you once that you finally realize what you've been babbling on about all those times. Oh, maybe actually they were, they were right this, this time. And everyone's been in that situation where there's like, where you're, you're considered a subject matter expert at work or whatever. And then someone comes in who's paid way more than you, who's, who just repeats what you've said. But suddenly everyone goes, yeah, yeah, that's real. And not only that, like how many times did the same people writing this article write about that anyone doing Bitcoin stuff is either a terrorist or a drug dealer or a, you know, so they're sitting there 10 years ago calling you a terrorist, a drug dealer or a pito or a, you know, whatever it is because you're buying Bitcoin. When you're going, no, it's this inclusive thing. We're now we're banking the telling all these virtues and they're calling everyone names and, and these ridiculous nonsense, even those are articles from like, from companies that are doing research saying actually, those people spend it on pillowcases than, than anything else. And, and, and, and all these sort of weird data that comes out. But yeah, these same companies that are now gaslighting you with articles like this, we're telling you you were a terrorist financing, financier 10 years ago. So those guys. Yeah, that's what the silly thing is about, right? It's like, they're almost going back and going, if you'd have done the opposite of what we said, because that's what they're saying ultimately, most people that provide articles have, have literally had previous articles exactly as they're saying. Like if you're doing the opposite of what we said, so it's almost like, if by producing that article, you're showing you're an idiot. Like, here I am, I'm an idiot, waiting, my idiot flag going, and here's what you could have won, even though the whole publication was saying, stay away from Bitcoin because it's just for terrorists and peanuts. I definitely agree with Dan. It's been interesting to see all these people saying on TV, things that we and Andreas and so many other Bitcoiners said 10 years ago, but now it matters. Now they're like, oh, that's really interesting. I can't believe there's only 21 million units. That's, that's fascinating. Wow, fascinating. It was also interesting, like Dan said, that this article attacks both sides. I hadn't quite thought of it. It attacks you if you bought Bitcoin and you didn't hold and now you feel bad or you had to sell over the years. It also attacks you if you never bought Bitcoin. I mainly thought of the never buyers, but it's interesting that it could also make other people feel bad who'd sold or had to buy things. And it's interesting. These articles always attack early adopters, right, which are the most important part of our industry. Like people who are out there on the early adopters and they had the same kind of article for the iPod. If you would bought Apple stock instead of an iPod, look how happy you'd be. But they discount all the time you would have listened to music, how much fun you had. They did the same thing when the iPhone came out and you can bet they're writing articles right now about the Vision Pro. How much Apple stock you could have bought, how much whatever else you could have bought instead of being an early adopter risking it out on the edge of technology learning about new things. It's about punishing people who learn about new things. But yeah, it's a great, great kind of article in their back again. We have a bonus issue as well. I was hoping Ben would be here, but we're going to cover it anyway. According to Bugal News, the Bitcoin Bugal, Ben Ark proposes new standard for conferences, allowing audience members to shock speakers with SATs. Victoria Jones, what do you think about Ben's idea to shock speakers with SATs? As we've seen on this show, Ben's created many machines that could slap a person or spray a person with water, put little graphics on the screen. But now he's going to shock people with SATs. Go ahead, Victoria. Well, given that the next conference I'm scheduled to speak at is when I'm also speaking with Ben, it makes me wonder, you know, what he was thinking. And of course, he saw you coming. He's preparing this. Exactly. It's just like Ben, I thought you my friend. I also like that he started with speakers, not just the audience. They could shock each other. They could put seats in the audience, but instead they put speakers would be the ones who could be shocked. Josh, a gole, what do you think? Do you look forward to getting shocked soon? Well, I've said it before and I'll say it again, the killer app for Bitcoin is conferences. And Ben's just highlighted that fact. Yeah, I think it's great. Ben is always innovating. We saw it here on this show almost two and a half, three, probably three years ago. You can check that out at theworldcrypto-network.com. How far along ago it was. But yeah, we had Ben had built face slappers. You could send some sat-shut, sat-sim while you're trolling us in the trollbox, you can send some slaps at Benark or some smoke. As you blow smoke up his ass, there's all sorts of kinky stuff you can do with satoshis. It does sound like trouble. There might be some kind of competition as to who becomes the first all-speaker-shock conference. Maybe it will be meyorka. Dan, Eve, what do you think about Ben's plans to shock the speakers with satoshis? It's amazing. I love the interaction. That was such a fun period where we would just sit there and Ben would have a QR code. He'd be slapped. There would be smoke blown in his face. There's such a cool thing. I'm surprised we haven't seen it on more podcasts. I think I think from memory, the inspiration from that was maybe more the only fans market about things that you could control. Maybe that is blowing up. I've done my research there. But yeah, I think it's just a really cool idea that you can send a micro-payment and just interact to people whether they're the other side of the world, whatever they're doing. Obviously, in a conference, it's slightly more distracting, right? Because in the middle of a very heated discussion, but I'd still like to see someone slapped in the face with a big old foam hand and then smoke blown in someone else's face. Goodness. Brilliant. Satoshi Power Dildo does sound like a completely different kind of conference, Dan though. I would say, I'm sure they're working on it, but we're running out of time. Let's move on to predictions or story of the week. Victoria Jones, are you ready with a prediction or a story of the week? Yes. Well, the latest news letter on my website is now up, as I mentioned earlier, Bitcoin and Joint.com companies. So yeah, I was found out quite interesting researching all of that, uncovering some of my assumptions. When you think you know all you do a bit of research, and you discover another nugget, I find that quite interesting. And I enjoy sharing it with you guys. So if you're interested in that, go and have a look. And yeah, that's my news this week. Josh Agala, prediction or a story of the week, go ahead. Yeah. We've been working really hard to release something absolutely epic for the standard. You'll be able to send RAP to Bitcoin and borrow against it and then trade against that while it's... And you can borrow for zero percent interest without trust, without giving away your private keys, just FYI. So no more FTX, no more blockfire, no more sales here, no more crap like that. It is to do this on the Arbitram network. So it is not on Bitcoin sadly, but that's because, we couldn't build what we wanted to on Bitcoin network. So it is on Arbitram, which is a layer two of Ethereum. But yeah, what we've built, these liquidation pools, or these we're going to probably call them yield fields, it's wild because we're getting real yield from people trading. You know, if you don't know where the yield's coming from, then you're the yield. So yeah, with with with us, you know where the yield's coming from. It's coming from traders trading and you're taking a fee for that, being dropped onto TST and UOS stickers in this pool. It's going to be, it's going... It's absolutely amazing what we've built. So come and check it out. It's not financial advice at all. Please don't take it at that. It's just a fun, crazy project. But I think this is probably... You know, I'm really aiming high with this. I want to take over from USTC and all these nonsense centralized stablecoins, where we want to be the biggest stablecoin that's truly decentralized with thousands and thousands of people locking up assets into smart contracts that they still control the private keys to and backing the value of the the stablecoins that are there with 0% interest loans. So, you know, it's it's going to be it's going to be epic. I'm excited. Next week, it's all been audited by 250 attackers that were attacking us over Christmas, Whitehats trying to look for bounties. And so finally, that's done. We fixed anything that they found, which they didn't find much. And so yeah, it's fun. And buy Bitcoin as well. If you're if you're new to this buy Bitcoin, we're going we're going up. Either actually... No, no, no, scrap that. Work for Bitcoin. Invoice in it. You know, start earning Bitcoin. That's the future. And maybe get zapped with your lightning network to earn it. I don't know. Whatever you're into. Sounds great, Josh. Exciting stuff at the standard.io. Dan, leave a prediction or a story of the week. I'm going for something that's simple yet very obviously going to happen, which is a prediction that Elizabeth Warren is going to start on only fans that's only payable in Bitcoin. She's you turned that much. Hello, area Stan. And there's other other only fans this news this week. There's this fascinating story about a woman who pretended to be black and used to run the NAACP. Oh, Rachel Dolezal. She's now a teacher and has changed her name. I forget what her new name is. But she's been dismissed as a teacher because she had an only fans account. So that that woman's story just keeps getting crazy and crazy. But it reminds me of some of the headlines of some of those videos. Very strange. Yeah. I mean, there she does some crazy stuff. I just saw the I hadn't seen that for no, I just heard this story about her being a teacher. But I just saw like the, you know, the screenshot of the title. And you're like, oh my god, my grand would be very, very upset. She saw anything like this. Amazing story. But yes, I wish we could talk about a lighter story this week. I of course open with the commissioner of Major League Baseball saying, if you don't, if you want, you know, as a baseball fan, if the A's are leaving town, you can just go ahead and root for the giants, which is, which is great. Everyone who's ever followed a sports team just knows, you know, Yankees and Mets are interchangeable. Cubs and white talks are interchangeable. Like Manchester United and Southampton are interchangeable. Like, you don't have any kind of loyalty or anything. She just, you know, root for them. So that was, that was a good story. But sadly, we have to talk about Alexei Navalny has passed away in prison and Vladimir Putin's prison in Russia. There's been lots of other coverage about this. There's kind of a protest going on in Budapest today. In Georgia and their laying roses at one of the memorials to the people who died in the Gulags in Russia. But this is about 40 seconds of Navalny's message to us. If he was to pass away, let me make sure I do the share right this time, where it'll play the video clip. But here's a little bit of Alexei Navalny who passed away. Here's a little bit of Alexei Navalny who passed away. I think it's a bit of a strong moment to decide whether to kill me or not. But you need to use this strength. Don't give up. Remember that we are a huge force, which is under the fire, these guys are bad guys. Because we can't really know how strong we are. All that we need to do for the sake of the evil is to be good people. So the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. Alexei Navalny. Thanks to everybody for joining us. Until next time, bye bye!