The Bitcoin Group, the American Original. For over the last ten years, the Sharper Satoshi's the best bitcoins, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Dan Eave, the crypto-wrapper. Happy Friday folks. One arc from LNBIT. Good evening everyone. Good start. I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network. Moving on to issue one. Issue one. Wash out. Crypto wash out sends Bitcoin below $58,000 ahead of Fed decision. Well, Bitcoin climbs back to $59,000 after Fed signals its unlikely to raise rates. Meanwhile, people continue to predict that the price of Bitcoin can break $1 million. Dan Eave, what do you think about the price, the price, the price, and the price of Bitcoin? Well, it seems like it does seem like Bitcoin is being quite resilient after quite a coordinated attack. I think it seems a bit uncanny that, you know, Ver gets taken down the samurai of what he's ever seen, taking down pretty much in the same week. Then you've got, you know, just, I don't know, it just seems like there's a lot going on against Bitcoin right now. And I don't think the inflating is really helping. We need to get back together and be one big happy family, right? And show everyone how strong Bitcoin is. But yeah, then the price everyone's freaking out because we've done down to like 57, but we're back up to 60 now anyway. But isn't it crazy how it has this tremendous rally and yet your heart still stopping when it goes from like from 74 down to like, you know, 16, you're thinking, is it going to go further? Is it going to go further? Well, it's had draw downs before of like 30% per multiple 30% draw downs all the way up to the pretty much each previous bull run. So this isn't out of the ordinary at all. We've probably got possibly got a little bit way further to go. Hold tight because there is potential, you know, that we're going to go a bit lower, but hopefully not. But there does seem to be this post harvining blues, right? Everyone's hung over after the Bitcoin harvining parties and they expected moon immediately and it didn't happen. So a bit of fire to mix in and Bitcoin drops a bit. Happy days. But we'll see. Yes, it does seem like it's raining shit on Bitcoin. I agree with you, Dan, but as we predicted here, the halving happened and nothing happened at all. People who like Dan has said have been holding for a long time, probably sold got their profits out. People who don't believe in Bitcoin don't believe in the halving bought it for the short term said, Hey, it didn't go up after the short term. I'm out all this selling pressure plus the bad news. So and so got arrested so and so got sentenced. People are like, I don't want to be in that. They're out. They're all selling. But like we've been saying recently, you're selling into the banks now. You're literally letting the banks take your Bitcoin when you come back for it. They're going to want more. Ben Arck, what do you think about the price? And as Dan said, kind of a coordinated attack against Bitcoin there like Bitcoin cares. Yeah, I completely don't agree. It's a deliberate and coordinated attack on Bitcoin. We're speaking about getting a Bitcoin ETF for years and then the SEC blocked it for as long as possible. Because they knew that as soon as they did allow those Wall Street pricks to start buying Bitcoin, that all that traditional finance liquidity is going to pour into a little pool and then legitimize Bitcoin and they haven't really got much of a leg to stand on. So while they were blocking legacy finance being able to step into Bitcoin, they coordinated and planned an attack to tame it. They want to turn it into a Wall Street play thing. They think, okay, well, you can have your Bitcoin, but you can't have a Bitcoin. You want your Bitcoin as a medium of exchange. You can't have privacy. So yeah, it is a deliberate and a coordinated attack. And I really think that the gloves are off and this is now the time when we actually have to fight the traditional power bases which Bitcoin really attacks. They're very concerned about the impact of Bitcoin. It's no longer like this hobbyist, you know, Dorky project which we're all involved in an arse bear time. It's something which really could impact the world's economy. So particularly those power bases such as USD, Higginami and the US Petro dollar and the world reserve currency. So yeah, we should expect more attacks and we should be vigilant and we should just continue to build the tools to create this apolitical free and open source money which the world desperately needs. Well and it also simply means that the next samurai wallet or the next freedom based wallet won't be done with VC funds. It won't be done out in the open with this kind of obviousness. We've heard that the samurai wallet materials in their pitch sheet said, hey, we're going to profit from the gray market. There's going to be a little bit from the side here and they were kind of open about it. And we've also heard via Twitter that was sobby wallet is shutting down their coin joint service. So pretty much if you want privacy on Bitcoin, currently not available, you're going to have to go to some dark alley somewhere and it seems pretty obvious. The feds are going to be there recording in the dark alley. They don't want you to have privacy on Bitcoin. They want you to use the nice friendly and safe ETFs or maybe Coinbase. Do you have more on this topic? We've kind of expanded general agreement that there is certain attack on Bitcoin. I think that's right. I think they're trying to restrict the avenues aren't they? I think that finance going down was or at least CZGad now was another part of that. He's also just got his four month sentence. So with BlackRock entering the playing field, you couldn't have finance being the biggest exchange on earth and not run by someone who's under their form of control. So that's why that kind of WF guy got put in straight in CZ's place. All in a very, you know, it all slipped in in the same day, right? That it was very much pre-planned it seemed or at least they knew that what was happening up up front. So four month sentence for CZ is not bad, right? Considering he has paid it obviously a very huge file in a personal fine as well as like 50 million. Wasn't by and aunties fine like 4.5 billion and then his personal fine of 50 million or something crazy. So four months isn't too bad considering the extent of the issues that they were going after him for. So I think he got out quite lightly with that sentence. It does seem like we've entered a new epoch of Bitcoin history with the having the ETFs and now everyone getting sued and arrested. So before we go to this issue, we have to do the ball. If you got the ball, let me chime in a little bit more. But don't forget the ball. I won't forget the ball there. People having us estimates to make here. They were unadvised last week. We made mistakes. Hopefully the whole thing was in more privacy on Bitcoin natively which is the thing which hopefully Bitcoin is working towards. And I know a bunch of a couple of core developers. That is why they want it to happen. They want it to be zero knowledge proofs on chain. And however we get there, we get there at some point. Because government is the easiest attack on Bitcoin is fungibility and letting people use some coins but not the coins. It's something we need to vent against us. We haven't got particularly useful money if it's not fungible. But I actually spoke to Max, Max, the brand dog good friend from the show, from World Crypto Network. Of course he contributed a lot to this show back in the day. And he was very sad to have to stop the coin-join part of the case, Snarks. But he's going to go on and spell the great things, I'm sure. And I don't think anyone begrudges the decision for them having to close their coin-join service down because ultimately it's always going to prison for us. And that's what they want to do. They want a lot of people up. No, I applaud Max for all his great work and I look forward to seeing what he does next. And yeah, good luck to him. Well on one side it's very clearly an academic project. You want to provide people with freedom and privacy, the ability to send their money around. And then on the other hand, if you look at through the government lens, it's like, oh, what are you doing over there? So I think it's a good idea for Max and the rest of the crew to shut it down for now. And I also wanted to say, if we had any worries or any fear spent that maybe the cypher punks were getting kicked out of Bitcoin and it was getting too corporate, I think we're going to have only cypher-punk development from now on. Or perhaps a different branch of pro-corporate developers coming in to really get away from privacy, really to put some hooks in there or something. If your Bitcoin wasn't traded by an ETF, it wasn't traded by Coinbase. You market dirty or something, some kind of coin selection Bitcoin. But what do you think? All cypher punks from here out? And all of the names? Yeah, the tools are there. Max did this amazing talk because one of the cheat code conference in Bedford, we had the hack space. And Max got blessed and he's such a great dude. He came along and did this amazing talk for about an hour, almost all of you in Coin Joins. And he could have a lot of other people, they sort of went off and they went to the after party. And we had quite a small group of people in the hack space. But Max came and did a talk. He's such a trooper, man. He's such a... But this is why I'm noticing more and more that like, those Bitcoiners who've been around for a while, we're all seeing off the same PIM sheet and we all want the same thing. And you know, some of them may have to go dark, but they're still going to carry on building. And they're just going to use the toolset we have to be able to provide these services in a way which government can't crack down on. So it'll be good ultimately. Now what do you think Ben? Counterfactual history here. Should we have worked on privacy first instead of scaling? And now that Bitcoin's so public, so successful... We haven't worked on scaling. We haven't even worked on scaling. No, okay. The problem is... Yeah, we've all been spoiled by like the low fee environment and Bitcoin not really being attacked apart from just shakowing us and forks and stuff. And maybe the odd government attack. But we've all been spoiled by that. Privacy hasn't been worked on nearly enough. And scaling hasn't been worked on nearly enough. But I've seen a campaign explosion of development on scaling since we had the high fee environment from the ordinals. And with so great services like bolts and, you know, trustless automatic, trustless swaps in and out of lightning to its own chain and liquid. And then also, you know, in the privacy realm as well, there's a lot of great things going on. So yeah, it's just going to encourage... It's that pardoning effect, isn't it? The more... When they attack it and when they limit Bitcoin and try and stack a Bitcoin's growth, it hardens and then, you know, it just... It just... Repels the... The... The attack. So... Yeah, we've got a lot to hope for and a lot to look for. And I think it's great that it's NFTs, A.K.A. Read pornography that's driving all the new development and the impulses. There are like too many people are using it. Commercialism has been too successful. And now we need to fix everything. So I do agree with that. I think we're going that way. But we can't leave the topic without giving people their important, you know, prediction here. I mean, we're talking about money line here. ESPN has its own betting service now. The United States is gamble crazy. And I didn't tell you guys last week what the A-ball said. So Dan, Eve, predicting against the Magikapal, the Bringer and the show of all truth and knowledge in this universe, will the price of Bitcoin be higher or lower this time next week? I think we're going to be back, back up next week. You know, oh man, we're already on 62, 7. So that's really made a nice little comeback in 24 hours. So yeah, I think higher next week. Well, everyone knows the price of Bitcoin goes up when we make our shows and historically has gone up. Ben, arc higher or lower this time next week. It is certain. It is certain. Ben's been looking into the ball here reading behind the rules. Here we go. Watching it may cause bubbles. Will the price of Bitcoin be higher this time next week? It says, as I see it, yes, as I see it, yes, the ball has spoken. Price is going back up. Moving on to issue two, sentence and arrested. Roger Vier, crypto investor dubbed Bitcoin Jesus, aka Bitcoin Judas, has cheated the United States out of $48 million in taxes, according to the headline of the New York Post. Other people said he was arrested, but they went with cheated. As well as CZ, Binance founder is given four months in prison for failing to implement anti-londering, money laundering measures. He says he's sorry. Roger says it's all a mistake and a misunderstanding. He was arrested in Spain. His tax professionals say that he should not have been arrested. Ben, Arck, what do you think about these new updates on Roger Vier and CZ? I mean, Roger Vier is one of those classic, die hard libertarian types. I think it is probably quite likely that he has a tax bill. It is interesting to think of having tax professionals. Hopefully they can keep him out of jail. This prison where they're all going, it's going to have a right old time, aren't they? But no, good luck to Roger Vier who is good back in the days. Crack is now, but there's a lot of low hanging fruit for this attack, coordinated attack. They can just look all the top 50 Bitcoiners and just go out to them. There's probably some shit they can stick on them. Just again, be careful out there. Obviously, we don't have any insider information here, but I agree with Ben. When you think of Roger Vier's tax pros, you think of Ocean 11. There's a safe cracker. There's a fast-talking guy. There's a guy that's good with electronics. It's all crew. But no, we wish the best for Roger. It's CZ that I have the real problem with here. I look at it and I think, what if I was Brian Armstrong from Coinbase, done everything right, slept in the business, practically a boy scout, no life, obsessed, addicted to it. And then he finds out he could have just done four months in prison. Do you know how good it was for Binance to have no AML, no customer worldwide? Everyone to know you could just get in there with a VPN and buy any kind of crazy shitcoin you want, no matter what your government or better thoughts may have said about buying that terrible shitcoin. Binance, CZ only four months. Dan Eave, what do you think about CZ and Roger Vier, both in trouble with the law this week? So with Roger Vier, that seems like they're dragging out the past. Wasn't this from nine years ago? It was the 2013, 2014 tax season. And also he paid the severance to become not becoming a citizen anymore, renounces US citizenship. But they're saying that he undervalued the Bitcoin at the time when in his argument. Well, it is worth noting, Dan, in case people haven't heard, and this is very strange and probably should be changed. But in the United States, they basically believe that they own you as a citizen. If you move to somewhere else, you pay taxes in the new place you live and you pay taxes in the United States, which does sound like an onerous double tax bill, they don't care. If you want to leave like Roger Vier did, and we don't know any details about this, we're certainly not involved in Roger Vier's finances. But from public accounts, he went to St. Kitts and small islands somewhere. He paid them some money, and then he renounced his citizenship. But like I say, they own you. So in order to get out, you have to pay 10 years of taxes in advance, based upon I believe your average previous taxes, and he probably had some big payments. I think this case might be about his businesses that owned 131,000 Bitcoin, or more. But yes, in case you hadn't heard, the United States government owns you. And if you want to leave, it's 10 years up front. And yes, that sounds crazy. That's unfortunately true. He should have stayed in Japan, because they don't actually like people. I thought it kind of thought that's probably why he was in Japan. So the area is just going to Spain. He should have stayed in Japan. It sounds like he might have been traveling in Spain for vacation, or maybe for business. I'm not sure why he was there, but yeah, good point, Ben. Oh, Dan, what happened to your audio? He's audio is fine. He's just lost his voice. He's got one mute on, but one other mute off. Now, we lost Dan. See, it's the US government, the tax code. You just really can't mention technical details like that. We're getting your audio sent down. I mean, really, it's just a matter of like, Dan's holding it up and saying he's charging you or something. But Ben, what do you think? Well, we're trying to get Dan fixed about CZ and Roger Vier. I mean, it's the first, isn't it? The first case is against these OG Bitcoinotypes who've got skeletons in their closet. And yeah, probably is related to his, I don't know, man, Roger Vier is just like, he's that classic Libertarian type. He was just eating bun for part of the Libertarian party in the US at some point. Those guys don't pay their taxes. They make a point of saying taxes are a moral and blah, blah. Well, the previous case and the really one to look at here is the Ian Freeman case where he was an activist. He was in New Hampshire. He doesn't wear shoes, has dirty feet, and allegedly ran a Bitcoin ATM for a long time, taking money from it and so forth. He's in real trouble. A lot of the OGs are in real trouble. Charlie Schrem, remember famously, worked with the feds and the fed said, while you're working with us, we'd like to bust you for the same thing that we're investigating. Dan, are you back with us? Yeah, yeah, sorry about that. So apparently he was also getting subsidies from US companies that he should have been declaring. So that's apparently the bottom sort of reading was part of the reason why they've got him. But it's a crazy thing that they own you for so long. You've got to pay this dual tax thing, it's just insane. And even having to pay the tax on unrealized games as well, to half the assets that you've gained on the assets that you've accumulated is just insane. And what I think their argument was that the valuation was too low that he gave Roger Fair gave, but he said, well, if I had to sell all the Bitcoin in one go, that would have been half of 110 million. It's 55 million, which would have killed the market. So he wouldn't have got that valuation at the time. So that argument you can kind of see standing, but some of the other stuff, it sounds like he was a bit naughty. And it's not going to help his case that he was, because he's such a hardcore libertarian that he has posted quite a few things about being anti-tax. So if you're kind of being publicly anti-tax and then in this situation, it's not looking great for him. Well, and that's the same thing I felt about the Ian Freeman situation, where you just worry for these guys. They complain, they complain, they complain, and you say, well, if you're complaining this much about taxes, I sure hope you're paying them, right? Because the guys who are into that kind of thing are certainly going to look at your taxes and be after you and so forth. But yes, it's sad to see Roger fall into this trap. And as for CZ, I think he'll be all right. I seems to land on his feet. Exit question, who would you rather be Roger Vier or CZ? Dan Eave, go ahead. Who would I rather be right now? Well, I think I'd rather be CZ, because he's got four months that we don't know what Roger Vier is going to be slapped with. But he's also in Spain. He's going to be extradited, obviously. The last person who was the US government was after in Spain, obviously, was McAfee. So yeah, that's hopefully doesn't end as bad as that. Ben Arck, Roger Vier, or CZ? It's a really hard question. I think CZ, just because the short of time, Stent, but I kind of hope the Roger Vier will have a bit of a, if he just goes to prison, he'll have a bit of a very journey. And he'll have a long time to think on his own and he'll think, wait, maybe I'm wrong, maybe Bitcoin cash is stupid and I should just go back to Bitcoin and get back on side. But I want to leave prison. So yeah, so hopefully it'll be like a cathartic experience for him if he just go in the clink. I'm obviously, of course, I hope he doesn't go in the clink. Oh, to be honest, he's best bet it's probably just a run back to Japan. It is interesting all this Roger Vier talk coming around the same time that Roger has just released a book. I haven't gotten a chance to take a look at it. But I do think Ben, he continues to fight the Bitcoin cash war and say he did nothing wrong and that kind of thing in the book. So it is bad timing. I think I agree with Dan, I'd rather be CZ, although he was so close to the door. The US government ought to most let him back to Dubai or UAE or wherever he's hiding out. He could have gotten away with it all. It's not very mastermindy to end up in jail, even if it is going to be a short four months and probably a very safe and expensive country club jail for CZ. We'll see how it goes. Again, I think the real victim here, Brian Armstrong does everything right. Still doing really good with Coinbase. We'll talk about it later. But CZ, four months, I'm sure Brian is calculating how much money Coinbase could have gone if they've gone rogue and let anybody use their service all over the world with the head start that they had so on so forth. Maybe it was better to be a pirate Brian. Maybe you should have been a pirate. Moving on, FOMO at FOMO Lightning asks, which Bitcoin podcast that is still actively recording new episodes is the oldest Bitcoin podcast to your knowledge worldwide, but regional would be interesting as well. And we all know the answer to that. The World Crypto Network, and especially the Bitcoin Group, the show you're watching right now, is probably the oldest longest running continuing Bitcoin podcast. And check out worldcryptonetwork.com by DJ Booth, where we've got a Bitcoin show for every day of the year, including leap day. Moving on to issue three. Issue three, Morgan Stanley files to expand Bitcoin ETF access to 12 funds. Yes, Morgan Stanley, the American multinational investment bank has filed a submission with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission to permit the exposing, woo, a Bitcoin ETF to about a dozen of its investment funds. This way, their clients who invest in the investment funds will also get to invest in Bitcoin. Ben Arck, what do you think about Morgan Stanley, not a friend of Bitcoin, suddenly a friend of Bitcoin? It's such a weird dichotomy, which we've suddenly found ourselves in, where we've been wanting all these big ETFs to join Bitcoin and digital funds. So it's a recognized Bitcoin as an asset. And now they've come in and they're probably just going to try and control it. And there's all these coordinated attacks against privacy and Bitcoin is a medium of exchange. So it's odd because you have the foot of that, that it was Bitcoin, there's no other Bitcoin's been attacked. And then in the same regard, you've got all this money coming into Bitcoin. Well, I mean, they can't not like their customers will ask for it. And they'll have to do what their customers want. And now they can have ETFs, they're going to have ETFs. But like you say, like the, it's when they have interest in Bitcoin and they want to keep it as a controllable sort of store of value which isn't going to be blacklisted or attacked by governments because they've got ETF money in it. I think it's something none of us really predicted. We just kind of looked forward to an ETF happening quite naively thinking that people would realize all of Bitcoin's value proposals and enjoy them as much as we do as in reality there. You know, they're like Sailor type, so they just want a store of value and it's be some boring Wall Street play thing. Wish you all know, it's not destined to become, but yeah. So it's a funny one. Seeing these articles come out for these ETFs. Well, we did predict it here, Ben. And I've already predicted the Bitcoiners will turn against Bitcoin and then come back to Bitcoin again later. Just like that other famous story that's in the Bible. But it is kind of funny, Ben. It's like, thanks for all the work you did. We'll take it from here. It's that scene in the movies where the FBI comes in and they take it from the local cop. And they're like, you did a great job setting up this case. You know, all the work you did, telling everyone about the currency and everything. We've got it now. They come with like their own troop of Bitcoin. As well, there's a whole bunch of sailor fanboys in the social media who are going, you know. I'll say something like, perhaps, someone like sailor should actually contribute some of these free and open source projects which is the value of the asset which he's investing in is based upon. And I like it's the pursuit of free and open source type and the immediate of exchange, which has given Bitcoin value and made it a store of value. And then people defend him and say, don't do that. You know, he's contributing enough just by buying a pool of Bitcoin and who you'd say to bought Bitcoin is. It's just weird that there's this whole troop of new Bitcoiners. He just aren't our people, you know. It's a funny one. Wasn't there a bit of controversy as well over the funding of Cordairs recently that sailor was involved with? Do you know who about that? Oh, yeah, this is this is. I'm not sure it was legitimate, but they were worried that sailor was against the funding of Cordairs. But I think what Ben and I would probably find most interesting about that is a whole crew of people showed up and said, of course, you shouldn't fund the Cordairs. What are you some kind of socialist jerk? Like we should take everything that they've made and make more money off it because we are the capitalist and we're here for the capital. We don't get a crap about the foundations of what built this or if we need those in the future, you know, especially we do. But yeah, don't you think that's it, Ben? They just Bitcoin. Bitcoin, yeah, no, Bitcoin, this is the idea of ossification. Like they don't want Bitcoin to change. And that's the thing which sailor's been sharing. But Bitcoin has always been a work in progress. Like it's because it's the end times better than it was. And we no longer have to tell people that it's probably going to implode it on itself. Like it's pretty reliable now. But it's already been very hard to change. It's been very hard to change. But if it truly became ossification, whatever I say it wrong, if it became a bone, right? If it turned into bone, there's security problems alone. We can't be thinking that way. It's a classic security problem. We're like, well, I wish we could just hard-nour security problems and never change things again. We'll never have any new code in it all, right? But pretty obviously you have some kind of code you're not aware of that has a security problem or some situation you're not aware of. Like let's say the government changes the way net neutrality works and the change way the internet works. Bitcoin needs to adapt to this. If you had a completely ossified Bitcoin structure, you couldn't get any updates into fix for this kind of thing. I mean, maybe he's just not a software guy. Well, that's the sort of roger of a Craig Wright angle, isn't it? That Bitcoin is perfect. He shouldn't change. You should just get bigger blocks or and know those people that's for cough. Because that's not what we want Bitcoin to be. Bitcoin needs to change and adapt and harden. But yeah, it's kind of a typical, this is why when the billionaire comes in and then all these people latch onto them and praise them and thank them for coming in on. We've already got a question like the motors and incentives of these billionaires and also like, what they're connected with as well, like a lot of these people and I'm not going to accuse anyone of anything, but a lot of these people, they get to where they are because they're in bad with government and because they're, you know, they've been turned by agencies and etc. So I don't think we should really trust any billion. Do you come into Bitcoin or any big fund you come into Bitcoin and we certainly should have think this got Bitcoin's best interest at heart for those normal users. Well, it seems like those entanglements might have gotten Roger as well if his companies relied on government subsidies. As we've often seen Elon Musk and Tesla providing on government subsidies and ran taking welfare herself, government subsidies. Everyone likes to say in public that they're invincible and they've done it all themselves. And then they look back and they're like, I just carried it on the roads and had it on the ships that were protected by the Navy and I used the satellite network and it just seems like you used a lot of different people there together. But we were talking about Morgan Stanley. Dan, do you have more on this? Yeah, I was going to say that the picked up on an appointment from Ben, actually, the Usain about how the, we kind of, we were almost wanting this, the ETF there for the validation from all the biggest asset managers that Bitcoin is an asset to be contender with. But we didn't really think about the oversight of how they would try and manipulate and control it and how I think there's been a lot of evident actions with some positive, for example, the U-turn since BlackRock got involved about how Bitcoin is actually environmentally friendly versus being whale-boiling. So there are some benefits but yeah, it does seem like the kind of part has been put in that the order of things in my head was that we, you know, we financially liberated the world of the unbanked first and then the bankers got involved. But now the bankers are involved first and we've, you know, we've still got people who are unbanked. So that kind of solution is lagging behind at the moment. So hopefully we get some good glared-toes to help bring them on board and realize that. I definitely thought we'd have to go through this. The trough of disillusionment, the feeling of great despair. And that's why I was so glad so many people had gotten Bitcoin before that, especially like the Black Bitcoin billionaires and other groups like that were small groups of people getting their community in. But it is Dan, it's like the Wizard of Oz. Bitcoin went through all that and they said, oh, it was you all along. You had the spirit inside. You could have done anything. And then they're like, yeah, but we want the money too. So we had to do it. We had to let the banks in. We had to get the money. And it's just like everything else, Bitcoin's on the hero's journey. And this is the part where Bitcoin is taken in by the money lenders and the banks. And they're worried. They're like, what if Bitcoin has gone over to the other side? You know, he's dressing in nice suits now. He's changed. He's not like he was. And then on the other side, they're like, Bitcoin is still the same. He's the same Bitcoin we always had. But let's keep moving to issue four. Coinbase integrates Bitcoin's Lightning Network in partnership with LightSpark. We've talked about it happening, but it's finally here. Coinbase has given in SegWit2X. No more SegWit. No. No more. The war is over Coinbase integrates Lightning Network. And Coinbase poised $1.2 billion in net income in quarter one, surpassing their entire 2023 earnings. You can see the tractor right there. It's a full of money. A full full of money. Ben Arquady think about Coinbase finally adopting the Lightning Network. And now we can move on to bothering whoever's next. Yeah, I don't know. I don't really trust this like Xbox thing. I'll be honest. They got like, it's one of the XPAY palboys and it's $200 million VC investment. If you go on the website and you read between the lines, they're praising Lightning as payment rails. But Bitcoin is almost an afterthought. So I think sometimes that VC shit coins is the test net for Bitcoin functions. And I think quite often they're seeing Bitcoin as a test net for their fearship. And yeah, they've got this partnership with Coinbase. But I guess it's good that Coinbase have started to accept Lightning. But a bunch of other exchanges have already done it like cracking. And they've done it properly off their own backs. And they've got their own nodes. They're not relying on this extra pie. And I just don't trust lights. But I mean, I think the reason I don't trust them really is because they're like a dead core perversion of Ellen Bitts, which is the thing we work on. So I kind of get annoyed at the fact that they've raised $200 million. So maybe I'm just over that. Yeah, Paypal boys, your teal musk. Remember the light spot you did, Stunt Trust him. It does seem like putting it through another box where you could say, hey, we'll take 10% of this and we'll take 10% of that. And people say, why is the Lightning network so expensive on Coinbase? And it could be because they're passing it through someone else's system. And maybe they're having their own database and they can track all the users. I don't know. I don't have any evidence on this. No, it does sound bad. Like you said, Ben, it would be much better if they had it in-house like crack and did. Dan, what do you think Coinbase? They've got the earnings. They've got the Lightning network kind of. Yeah, well, you know, it seems it's good that they've got it implemented. But it does seem where they went through a third party. And there was that tweet that Brian Armstrong did a few years back or a year or so saying how the reason why they're implementing Lightning, it was they're taking so long is because it's very challenging to implement. Which we all know isn't actually that challenging for them. Because I've worked on projects that have done it within a week. So I'm not sure why they needed the third party. Especially when, as like Ben said, they picked one that's so kind of heavily over for kind of VC funding when they could have gone for something that's a bit more like routes, you know, grass routes sort of movement. And pick some of the core developers up who've been working on things like that. Rather than actually going for a kind of big VC back company. But they're doing good. With the start of the ball run, we've had the halving now. So things are starting to pick up. They're probably going to do pretty good over the next couple of years, especially as we have probably another shit coin explosion. And not just that, but they're also, they're revenue from base. They're new chain, right? That's a big revenue spinner on its own. This new coin base kind of Ethereum EVM chain. So we're probably going to see quite a lot of profit from that too. I think coin bases is definitely going to be around for a while. By the people liking it or not. They've got their fingers and a lot of pies. A lot of shit going pies. So I just I just flick through the light spark website. And it's apart from the banner at the top, what it says, it's live coin base integration with Bitcoin Lightning powered by light spark. And then if you look at their website, it's like enterprise grade, fast secure payments on lightning. Blah blah blah. Light spark enables low cost interoperable and secure transactions. Access and real-time users. Lightning network. Blah blah blah. And then it's not too small right down the bottom there. Right down about the lightning network. And then Bitcoin's mentioned once on their entire website. So yeah, don't trust them. They're using our shit. And it's not, yeah, they don't care about Bitcoin. Ben's made up his mind. But I was going to say, what else could we expect from Brian? He's a dot com startup guy. He'd use a dot com startup to get them lightning. But it would have been better to do it in house. It doesn't make sense. Probably still but hurt from the war. Moving on to issue five bonus issue. Oliver cobalanets writes on Twitter. I'm actually losing brain cells listening to Michael Saylor at this conference. Let's put everything on the blockchain. I want to put my home on the blockchain. My ID to it's the future. And they have a picture of a sailor wearing kind of a Vitalik Esk T-shirt here. And then we've got this from Fred Kruger at dot Kruger writes. Sailor MSTR using slightly modified approaches. Ordinals to store identity on Bitcoin. Makes sense. Don't hate on ordinals. Lots of applications for Bitcoin and a data layer. And I don't know if you guys have heard. I don't follow Michael Saylor that closely. But yes, the great hero has fallen to the earth. They worshipped and they worshipped and they blew the balloon up. And now the bloomers come back down. Saylor and MicroStrategy have some kind of an identity-based system for Bitcoin. They want to mark all the ordinals and mark all the Satoshi's and track your identity. And nobody seems to like it except MicroStrategy who would make lots of money. Dan Eve, what do you think about the heroes of Bitcoin? How we keep building them up and tearing them down with MicroStrategy and Michael Saylor? Just being the most recent, nobody knows anything yet about El Salvador and the big heavy briefcase. Well, that wasn't on my bingo card for 2024. MicroStrategy coming up with some kind of ordinary slash inscription product. And then going down the hole, we need to put IDs and stuff on the block. We need everything on the blockchain. It was like straight back to 2017. Y'all are like, we're going to put grapes on the blockchain. We're going to be wine on the block of chains and you can see which block, which grape the vine came from via the blockchain and all these crazy things they put in on the blockchain. So it does seem like it, but kind of seems quite reminiscent of a 2017 ICO type pitch to a certain extent. Obviously it's using Bitcoin, which is slightly different. It's got obviously got a few people's backs up. I was saying that Bitcoin is pure money because Saylor was one of the kind of Bitcoin is pure money crowd. Now he's saying that we can use it for the chain for data. So his cursed the sacred blockchain, blasphemed against the sacred, the sacred, sacred, sacred moment of whatever it is of the block of the blockchain space. So yeah, it's going to kick off another interesting discussion. Right? It's to where the Bitcoin should be just purely money or we should be using Bitcoin as the protocol is for data and other sorts of other messaging as well. So time stamping and whatever. I think the end of the day, if you're willing to free market, right? If you're willing to pay for the block space, then you're paying for the block space. So an ultimately would make the whole Bitcoin is a sort of value more of a case because there'll be more utility in the more utility there is for Bitcoin. But he's also rubbed up a lot of the Ethereum the wrong way. Hasn't he, Sailor recently? Because he said in that same presentation that he thinks Ethereum is going to be dubbed as a security and a bunch of other coins are going to fall as well. So oh, he's he's upset a lot of people this week. Old Sailor, you put these guys on these pedestals. Now bring me a little crocodile tears. It has been exciting. It's great to watch. Ben Arck, what do you think about Michael Sailor and his new project to mark all the Satoshi's? Yeah, Sailor's, I mean, Christ was a prize. And all those people, when I went to this conference, I was sailing with a rock up like Ima Deira and they were cheering. And I didn't go to his talk. This guy doesn't contribute anything to all these projects. Like I said, which the value of Bitcoin is based on, it's the talent the people working in Bitcoin, which give it value and the ethos behind Bitcoin. It's a cypherpunkment like technology. Sailor is an attack on privacy and he's an attack on the cypherpunk methodology. And that's why he's rallying for ID systems to be connected to ordnance and care about privacy. And let's go back to the old cypherpunk manifesto. Therefore, privacy then opens the side to what requires anonymous transaction systems. Like that's why we're here. Bitcoin is a cypherpunk project. Don't try and back in coercive with your shit-fucking ID grabbing corporate bollocks, Sailor. So I'm glad that the people are waking up to the fact that the guys are a knob and should be trusted. And hopefully they'll learn from that experience and won't trust the next billionaire who comes along. Again, as always, anyone who hasn't read the cypherpunk manifesto please read the cypherpunk manifesto. Google it. It's about eight paragraphs and it's still the best explainer as to why Bitcoin is needed and why we will work on Bitcoin and live Bitcoin. It was very difficult to take Ben as we watched Sailor use his connections, his power and his money to borrow more money to buy Bitcoin. To borrow more money to buy Bitcoin to borrow more money to buy Bitcoin each time celebrated and cheered on by the Bitcoiners who didn't have the connections, didn't have the money and couldn't just create a company where it was like our plan is to buy Bitcoin. I mean, I wish that had worked. We all could have done that. That was really easy, right? Everyone in the audience is kicking themselves now. We could have started that company. But we didn't have the connections. And I agree with Ben, maybe if Bitcoiners would choose a little bit better with their heroes, they wouldn't always have to tear them down. There's this idea there now. Oh, we always have to tear down our heroes. It's because we're so good at policing our community or because our heroes turn on us. Maybe it's because we're crap at picking them. Maybe we should pick better. And now speaking of heroes and our celebration of the week, shout out to DJ Booth at DJ Booth, the Tril Zero 007 on Twitter, DJ Booth is unfortunately shutting down Tallycoin app due to low usage. He'd like to say he appreciates all the support he's received specifically related to Tallycoin since 2018. Despite making it into the Bitcoin history books in 2022, it shall not go out with a bang but with a whimper. And we all remember that Tallycoin was used by the Canadian Freedom truckers after GoFundMe shut them down. They were criticized for showing the same Bitcoin address for all donations. The new Tallycoin eliminates reuse. You can see there. It's on the Tucker Carlson show. They even had a picture of Tallycoin. And again, this is a good example of where we might not agree with the truckers or certainly Tucker Carlson, but Bitcoin is for everyone. I helped with DJ Booth with the Tallycoin tool. And even if we disagree with these people, we're proud they were able to use Tallycoin to fundraise and just hope it goes well for everyone. Shout out to everyone else who worked on Tallycoin. It was a great app. Shout out to DJ Booth. You can check out his other apps BitCoinal at Bitcoinal.com or xsats at xsats.net. He's always working on something new. Anyone have anything else to say about Tallycoin? There's a cool idea you could raise Bitcoin and have a fundraiser like a counter for how much money you'd raised. Yeah, it was awesome. It was once for funding a trip to Vegas, the uncomfuscatable conference. That was really cool. It was amazing. Everyone shipped in and then we went out there and did a bunch of interviews. I hope they paid off. That was awesome. It was great to be able to get. So it's a shame that it's going. Sure. It was cool. I think we used it several times to plan trips and raise funds like Daniel was saying Ben, more on this. Yeah, DJ Booth is great, man. Tallycoin was amazing. It was offered the back of one of your shows. It was in Thomas where you said that you wanted to kickstart a type fund raising platform on Bitcoin. Tallycoin was the first and it was a great application. Now we have things like Geyser Fund and a few other ways in which people can fund raise. Like DJ Booth said, it's cool. He's in the history books as the pioneer. I certainly very much enjoyed that period where people were just building shit. We needed something we built it and then the world used it. It's always hard to have to give up on a project. But I can see why he has because it's always requires maintenance. Yeah. Good luck to DJ Booth. I'm sure who goes on to other amazing projects. Yes, we had an early version of that app. Ben was called a block razor. I think it was. My roommate was writing it and it was very cool. It was just a basic idea that you could put up a Bitcoin address and then you could monitor it and you could kind of pretend that it's a fund razor. The website wouldn't have any control over the funds. But if someone donates 10 bucks, you could update the 10 bucks. And as long as you had a goal, say $100, you could say with that 10 bucks, we're 10% closer to our goal. And these two basic things, you could help people fundraise, raise money for a guitar, raise money for a trucker protest, raise money for whatever you like. But I do think like Ben said, newer options have come along, the Lightning Network, other ways to raise funds. But I'm sure DJ Booth will be out there again with another new app soon. Jack said he loves watching the price on Bitcoin. Bitcoin, and it's true. It's the best place to ask the price. It is good. Check out Bitcoin.com. It's a great one. It's great to use on your YouTube shows. It was kind of a developed back when we were doing today in Bitcoin. Has all the useful stats at the bottom. But let's go to Dan Eve prediction or a story the week. Go ahead, Dan. Oh man. I don't know either. Yeah, no, I'll say, I think we're going to go back up to seven. I think we'll be above 70k by the next, the next show. My little mini prediction. I think it's gross. Dan Eve predicting the price is going after the eight balls, trying to take him down. Ben, arc prediction or a story the week. Go ahead. The story of the week we had our demo server in LnBits. We test stuff on it. Very sadly, we got hacked and we lost funds. That was a shame. That's why the demo server exists. The problem is too many people were using the demo server production. How much we pleaded with them not to use the demo server. It was a sad occasion. Especially because that demo server really is. We started it and created a new one. But especially with that demo server running for four years. Hopefully we'll be able to resuscitate in some form. Maybe we've been trying to work it out. We might be able to track some of the funds down. That's been the week for me. Chasing the filthy hack who stole the money. But now we made a little bit more explicit that it is a demo server and told people not to leave money on there. The great thing about LnBits is of course you can use the extensions like bolts to swap out to on chain to limit the risk you have and using anyone's LnBits server. You can also use a script to push payments to an Ln address. If you do have a user, please use the script extension or the bolts extension. Apart from that, I'm getting very excited about BTC Prague. I think it's going to be the best, the greatest conference of the year. There's a great dev hack day which has been organised by a lot of the Polar's Prague lot. Stick and some of the Tashu, Satoshi Labs. That would be great. If you can get to BTC Prague, it's June 13th. I think then please do come along. We'll have a great time and we'll build some stuff and hack some stuff. That is a true cipher punk conference. Please pop along if you can. Very cool band sounds like a great time. With one more thing, they made a really cool video about Curio cards. If you guys don't want to watch, I understand. But here's a really cool video about a project that I did back in 2017 called Curio cards. Let's check it out. History's greatest tales have unexpected trials. History's greatest tales have unexpected triumphs. Historic NFT collection on sale at Christie's today, a set of Curio cards, digital collectivables, a falter, then fade away into oblivion. Forgotten, like ancient art made by some nameless soul. And then we found again resurrected and hailed on the art world's ultimate stage. That's the greatest form of combat. That's the greatest history. That's the Curio cards tale. It was written on the blockchain, May 9th 2017, Travis Erich, Thomas Hunt, and Red Cratern, the community, the marketing, the development came together in San Francisco and made the first art show on Ethereum. 30 cards by seven artists, none of whom knew each other. Each with a different style, phonep, cryptography, cryptopop, robeck world, Daniel Friedman, Marisol Vengas, and Thoris of Mia. The show launched one month before Cryptopucks, before NFTs had a name. Thousands upon thousands of cards released in smart contract vending machines. But because they were new technology, nobody saw the bigger picture. Nobody bought Curio cards. Nobody valued the art. Only four years later did people realise Curio cards were the most prized assets on Ethereum. Because of their unique art history, only after this rediscovery, Decurio cards were come the top selling art collection on OpenC. Collect Curio cards and unravel its layers, the sets, the stories, the community. Preserved for a thousand years in the Arctic World Archive, auctioned at Christie's and Sotheby's within the same month. Treasureed by over 5,000 collectors, including Darryl Mori and Gary V. Only 111 full sets will ever exist. 320 Ethereum sold with you, 3338. Thank you very much. Which history will you own? Go to Curio.Cards to begin. Man, this is sick. That was amazing. When you have your picture of you being sold, it's Sotheby's and Christie's. You know you made it. I remember seeing the Curio cards shows on World Crypto Network and just like skipping over them. Well, that's what we had a chat one time and Jesse from Kraken was in the chat. They were like, did you know about Thomas's project? I heard about Thomas's startup, but I didn't think it would be worth a billion dollars. I was like, yeah, I agree, man. No one thought that. So, it's really cool to have that video and it explains it so succinctly and so many crazy things happened to the project like it being left there for four years with no interest at all and then the sudden takeoff of interest. So it's been really cool. It's really rewarding. It's great that they made that video that was by the Curio Dow, so kind of a Curio card supporter group. And I think they did a really good job. Got a lot of good stuff in there and I'm glad they had everyone's names as well. But we've talked to go ahead. I know that's really cool. It's amazing to see that collection. You know, you're actually pictured in that collection as well. It's just really weird to see it. It's cool. It is strange. I got a couple of NFT history type books, kind of art history books they've made and the Tashin one on NFTs. Unfortunately, it doesn't mention myself Travis and Rhett, but like you say, it does have my picture. And thanks to kind of our foresight, Travis and Rhett's picture as well because we're all drawn as the cartoon characters. So that turned out really well for us. They can't exclude us wherever we're. So, but yeah, it's really cool. It's great to be included. And also, we're including the NFT yearbook. So, check it out. The really is why this show is the best, isn't it? Because we just throughout the whole of Bitcoin's history is just, let's just be such an innovation show them unlike like the the Tali coin thing and like a Curio cards and all of that kind of thing. Well, and pro tip as well. We had Chris Ellis joined us for the happening show at the very end. If you guys go to the end, you can see Chris. And we worked on a project. This was on the original Bitcoin layer, but it was an automatic tipping tool where every website you go to had a Bitcoin address embedded in the header or the footer. It would time how long you went there and then based on an allowance, it would tip you like 10 bucks a week and it would cut up a dollar to that person to dollar to that person. And it was a really cool idea and I think it was way ahead of its time, but also finance and developed here on the world crypto network. Well, that's isn't that brave, right? And this essentially brave so you can make the attention. Yeah, we were out before brave. So a lot of a lot of things we look at that and we wonder did brave look at our interface and have some good ideas back and forth. But yeah, you can guys can check out pro tip. It's still out there in the the codes there even on GitHub. You can make your own version with the lightning network. But we're running out of time here. So thanks everybody for joining us. Be sure to give us a thumbs up down below. We want to try a new thing at the end of the show here. If you made it this far, put a surfer emoji into the chat down below or into the comments. And in general, in the comments, just mention a bunch of surfer things in case the YouTube algorithm won't let you through with just an emoji. But yeah, say like surfs up, dude. I saw this on this other guys video for people that make it to the end. And I thought it was kind of fun. You won't get anything. It's not a giveaway or anything. But the show we fun. So surfs up. Thanks so much for joining us. Until next time. Bye.