The Bitcoin Group, the American original, for over the last ten years, the sharpest Satoshi's, the best Bitcoin's, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Victoria Jones from Satoshi's page. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network. Moving on to issue one, issue one, Caroline Ellison's sentence to two years for her role in FTX crypto fraud. While Sam Bankman freed was sentenced to 25 years in prison for stealing $8 billion from customers, Caroline Ellison, for cooperating with the government, has been sentenced for two to three years. In prison she also has to hand over the $11 billion to the court and more if she has any. They say she could have faced a sentence of 55 times what she was given 110 years in prison. In court Ellison apologized to the victims of the schemes, saying that on some level, my brain can't even comprehend the scale of the harm I've caused. Victoria Jones, what do you think about Caroline Ellison's incredibly light sentence and the incredible reward you get for snitching in the United States? Yeah, it really is rather incredible, isn't it? I remember saying a couple of weeks ago, I think we brought up this story and I was saying that it should be at least ten years at least for taking part of it and the role she had. But if you read the article, even the prosecutors were encouraging the judge to be lenient on her, but fortunately, the judge was quite clear that not in prison in her at all would be a huge miscarriage of justice. So it looks like it was thanks to the judge that she even got the prison sentence that she did, but you're right, it could have been 110 years, but instead they only gave her two and it does seem given the number of people who've suffered as a result of what she did. I mean, okay, she might have given the money back, but is that going to go to the people who contributed to, who lost all that money in the first place? So it might be justice in the courts, but true justice would be those people getting their money back. So I don't know. I don't have much trust in many legal systems. I think over time they're getting more and more corrupt. A lot of people, a lot of people question how justice is administered in a lot of these law courts, often just going through the process of using a law court, most of the money goes to the lawyers. So yeah, not ideal at all really. Well everyone knows that it was perfectly acceptable because she was only committing a girl crime. She was hitting from the ladies, T's. Come on, it was fine. Everything's fine. Girl power, right? No. I agree with Victoria. I think she should have been punished far more than she should. She was there. She knew what she was doing. She went to college. She was well educated. She was in the right place at the right time. And for a long time, she was similar to SPF. She was on the cover of Fortune magazine and things like this. She was giving that famous podcast where she said, we don't even cover our shorts. Do you hear me? We don't even cover our shorts. And everyone was looking at her like, you're a giant hedge fund. The whole point is that you're hedging and you're, you're okay if it goes down, you're okay if it goes up, not that you're 100% destroyed if it goes down. And there she was laughing and cackling away with her uncovered shorts. I think we've seen this before with Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes only getting about nine to 10 years, then being reduced after she had a baby, which it seemed like she did to get her sentence reduced. We've seen Sam Bankman freed with 25 years in prison, Caroline with only two to three. We'll have to see about Gary Fong, Sam's friend who went to camp with him and who also testified against him and also went rat. I do have to unfortunately stick up for the American Justice system here. It basically relies on snitches. They need two things. They need everybody to snitch and everybody to plea bargain and plead guilty. That's the way the system works. Everyone please, everyone snitches, then the system works. Because otherwise they don't know what you're doing. They wouldn't be able to prove this crime. They wouldn't be able to see the inside. They wouldn't have had the evidence to put SPF away for 25 years, which sounds like very little, especially compared to violent crime, but is actually quite a lot for someone who committed a financial crime like SPF. So as far as the $11 billion, I don't know. She has it. She ever had it. The documents and the case from the outside seem to show that she was paid far less than her male compatriots, which again seems unfair. She requested a raise at one point. I think they laughed at her, but here on the other side, she gets the last laugh because she went rat and put them in prison more. I don't know. That's not exactly a good lesson. I don't think this is a schoolbook victory for women and girls. Right young woman knows all this stuff, goes to all the right schools, joins in with some bad boys, does some bad stuff. But I think she was also culpable and also aware of what they were doing and aware of the whole time. So it's very strange. She only gets two to three years. And how much you want to bet? She writes a book. She comes out on the other side and starts advising people on how not to commit fraud, just like the Theranos lady is trying to do. I don't have an exit question on this, Victoria, do you have any more to add on Caroline, Ellison and the sentencing? Yeah, it is pretty shocking, really. And you're right. I don't think it does reflect well on women because women can be very smart and they can be very sneaky as well. And sometimes their sneakiness involves playing the victim. So I think it's appropriate to call that out. I'm going to demand equal rights for women here. He should have gone to jail the same amount of time as F's SBF. And then they could have worked down from there and said, okay, you cooperated a little bit, maybe half time. But we're talking about two to three years versus 25 years, a lifetime of difference, especially for SBF and his rich Stanford parents. Too bad. Moving on to issue two Bitcoin ETF demand grows among US investors. As China considers a massive $142 billion capital injection, yes, the price of Bitcoin is up again trading above $63,000 with China looking to inject one trillion yuan into its major state banks to bolster the economy. This comes after the United States or lowered interest rates 0.5% or two basis points. Ethereum traded above $20 fund $100 and something called World Coins seems like a rip off traded above 14% on open AI announcements. It sounds like everything is good for the Bitcoin markets with ETF demand leading us back. Thomas Hunt, what do you think about the Bitcoin markets? Well, it was just a few weeks ago. Everyone was despondent and selling everything and giving up hope. Now here we are on the other side. The United States has lowered interest rates rate making money more available. More people are going to build things. More people are going to borrow money. More people are going to buy so-called risk assets like Bitcoin. Now we have China doing basically the same thing to their economy, injecting one trillion yuan or $142 billion into their markets to expand them and hope that we don't go into a recession. It was not too long ago. Everyone was freaking out about recessions. They were sell, sell, sell. The market was in turmoil. Now we're right back up. The price of Bitcoin seems to be rising. Ethereum and others following. Even Solana is up. It's all good news, right, Victoria? It's all due to the ETFs who we can trust. It's not like they just did this to us and made it go down with all that bad news. Everyone made it go up with all this good news and that they didn't know both sides of that because that would be absurd. But Victoria, what do you think about the ETF demand growing and China injecting money into their economy? Yeah, it's classic Bitcoin, isn't it really? As I've said all along, I think the ETFs have definitely complicated the picture. I think one of the problems we've had is that we had a massive pump in the price of Bitcoin earlier in the year, which inflated value is much beyond where they would normally be at this point in the price cycle. Unfortunately, that overblown factor in the market tends to create the negative effect in situations of crisis. Although everyone's excited about the Federal Reserve reducing interest rates, classically that tends to, when that happens after they've been trying to raise interest rates in order to control inflation, it's normally the sign of the fact that there's a crisis on the way. And there've been a lot of problems with US banks and also Chinese banks since March last year, which has been brewing for a while. And the fact that China has to inject all of this liquidity into their banks is actually quite a worrying sign. Obviously, 2008 was shocking because they hadn't had to do that before. So in many respects, they kind of created the precedent in 2008. And so this is something that's just continuing. But everyone knows how fragile the financial system is. And the fact that they're having to do this at all really is a sign of distress in the system, which could break at any moment. And the problem is when it breaks, it could break pretty catastrophically. And what a lot of people don't realize is that our existing financial system is essentially built on a set of rules that are managed by existing governments. The difference with Bitcoin is that those rules have actually programmed into the software. And so the two systems are completely incompatible when our existing financial system breaks a lot of the ETFs which rely on the system of rules with the government. You know, for a lot of Bitcoin is held in those systems. A lot of people might have to sell that Bitcoin in order to support some of the other business interests that they're involved in. I think Bitcoin has a great long-term future, but I think the situation with the ETFs is actually potentially quite dangerous, given how fragile the existing financial system is. And I think if the financial system breaks, I think Bitcoin could be in trouble short-term. I think it would be a great long-term, but I think short-term it could be in trouble. And I think people need to be aware of that and try and prepare themselves for it. I often recommend my family and friends that they don't have all of their money in Bitcoin because of this scenario because you just don't know. It could be fine, but if it blinds eyes everybody, then you need to be careful of that as well. Bitcoin is a great insurance policy, but I see a lot of people putting their life savings into Bitcoin and they're not having anything else in reserve because they think that Bitcoin is all there is. And I think eventually that will be the case, but I think you really need to be careful of relying on it completely. So yeah, that would be my word of caution in this situation. Well, we all know in the United States that the Federal Reserve was supposed to eliminate the boom and bus cycles that we were going through, massive crashes, massive explosions every 10 or 20 years. It actually seems like what it did do is make the waves smaller, which might be good, but certainly doesn't eliminate the booms and the busts. With the Bitcoin ETFs, what I think it might actually do for the Bitcoin market is make the waves bigger. So the Bitcoin price would go down further faster. The Bitcoin price would go up faster and you never know which way it's going to go, but maybe these people running the ETFs, maybe these money market type people, maybe they have some insider information now, whereas before you could say, well, Bitcoin is a relatively uncontrolled market. Nobody has the scoop. There's no inside traders or anything like that thing. Now we have such a large player in these ETFs and we just don't know how they're going to go and they could be doing things with the money on the inside that we don't know about, especially with the multiple deals. And certainly it was a rumor and I think it's unproven with Coinbase and re-hypothication, but I think it's something we need to be on the watch for and we need to thank every once in a while. Maybe they have more Bitcoin than they're saying or maybe they have less Bitcoin than they're saying because this could always be a possibility if you're not using real Bitcoin, the underlying asset. Yeah, absolutely. Let's go on to the exit question. I went all the way to the other room to get it. It's the source of all knowledge and truth in this universe, the magic Bitcoin ball. Look at those graphics, big graphics today, big budget. All right, Victoria Jones, I think last week, my mind went negative. I've heard some negative people, but the price is up. Where will it be next week? Will the price of Bitcoin be higher or lower? I think at the moment there's a lot of optimism because of the reduction in interest rates and a lot of people seeing all of this liquidity going into the market. So in spite of the dangers, I think maybe in the next week it could still be higher, but in the medium term, watch out. Maybe not for too long. I'm a bull and I'm bullish. We're going higher, especially like the report last week that BlackRock said that Bitcoin was not a risk on risk off asset. They saw it as a transformational asset. They saw it as so much more. And I was like, they're romantic about their Bitcoin. They're like me. But the ball doesn't care for your romance. The ball will smash you with its truth. Here it comes. Will the price of Bitcoin be higher this time next week? And it says, yes, definitely. Yes, definitely. The ball has spoken. Moving on to issue three. Issue three. Check out the world crypto network. We've got more than 4,000 videos. You could watch them for three months, 20 days and four hours straight with no breaks and no sleep. Issue three, Harris signal support for crypto in potential break from Biden. Vice President Kamala Harris is signaling support for the expansion of the cryptocurrency industry in the United States, attempting to rebuff claims that she would seek a crackdown on the rapidly growing but controversial sector. Harris on Sunday promised donors in New York City a safer business environment for digital assets and promise to release a policy document that would encourage innovative technologies like AI and digital assets. Victoria Jones, I know we talked about this before the show, but what do you think? I think it's a positive thing that Bitcoin could be seen, not just for right wing people, but also for left wing people. Maybe everybody could use Bitcoin and that means that all politicians can use it to get support and donations and so forth. What do you think? It doesn't surprise me because obviously she's up against Trump who's being very positive about it. I think the interesting thing to note though is she doesn't mention Bitcoin and she talks about AI and digital assets which is actually a very different thing. I think there were a lot of powerful players behind the scenes who would love to get our existing financial system onto a blockchain that they can control, one that they have the backdoor keys to. I think that would suit their narrative right down to the ground and of course the design of Bitcoin because it's decentralized is designed to root all of that. She's being very clever as politicians are about the exact wording that she's used, that she uses. I don't think AI is necessarily a great thing. It can be a great tool but it gets lots of things wrong and it relies on scraping data from human beings who are fallible from the internet in order to come up their answers. It's not always correct. You always have to double check the answers that it's giving you. It has its uses. No one's saying that AI should be written off altogether but it's not necessarily the panacea that a lot of these professionals are trying to make it out to be. Obviously it's new so everyone's excited about it but I think in the fullness of time as people start to experience some of the disadvantages I think a lot of the shine will come off that technology. And digital assets, we went through this in 2017 when everyone was trying to do everyone under the sun was making their own token. Bitcoin really opened the world for digital assets. People have been trying and experimenting with different types of this technology for a long time before Bitcoin came along. The magic thing about Bitcoin was they found a way to make it decentralized which means that one person can't control it. But it's still possible to have a digital asset that centralised that core company manages and so the danger is these politicians could encourage everyone to go, yeah, we see that you all like these digital assets. We've got this perfect one for you here. Trump's already trying to do it. I mean, in the recent seminar he had, it wasn't about Bitcoin, it was about the new crypto token that he was launching that Baron was supposed to be taking part in. So Bitcoin is completely incompatible with politics. It's designed to disrupt politics. The moment we've got written rules and laws that are constantly being fudged behind the scenes, designed in such a way that it works for the government, the people who run the government, not necessarily for the people, and the way in which these things are happening is quite hidden in behind the scenes. And Bitcoin by being decentralized, it was designed in such a way that other people can't manipulate it. And by doing that, it gives us a different infrastructure on which we can build society. And so by saying that she's prepared to support AI and digital assets, she's sounding like she's agreeing with it. But what you have to be careful of is that AI and digital assets can definitely play into their existing need to try and control the population. So it's very deceptive and people really need to see through that. And so yeah, that's the thing that leapt out to me when I read that article I was not impressed have to say. It's certainly hard to doubt, not to doubt Trump and his dedication to Bitcoin and crypto assets since he launched the so-called world liberty financial. He's also launched a silver coin and a $100,000 watch. So the scams just keep coming out of that department. But as for the rest, I still think we're in kind of a golden era of Bitcoin, where Bitcoin's on the stock exchange. There's ETFs, there's coin base, there's micro strategy. Everything's respected. We're above board. We're a positive joke on the late note shows. They're like, oh, yeah, it's like that internet money. Bit cool. And they do their jokes. I think again, they still think that this is like old technology. Old technology in the past always bended when you regulated it. When you regulated the TV stations, they stopped having the dirty language or the dirty programs. When you regulated the radio stations or the newspapers, you went to their offices, you shut them down. You brought in their executives. You put them on trial. You had FCC versus Howard Stern to stop him from talking about naughty stuff on the internet. Even on YouTube here, they're censoring many of the old Bitcoin group videos because they disagree with our opinions or because our opinions might have been wrong. It's okay to share an opinion. You don't need to censor the entire show, but that's what's happening. And that's what could happen when Bitcoin, when they realize that the regulations don't work. When they regulate all the Bitcoin companies and they still can't change the way that the blockchain operates. Now whatever it is, they want to block some address because it's al Qaeda. They want to make the blockchain longer or slower. Whatever they want to change on Bitcoin, they're going to find that there's not one company that controls it. There's not one person that controls it. That it's a totally new thing. And that's when this Bitcoin golden era is going to fracture. I think it's a golden era because of ignorance. They don't really know what Bitcoin is. They all think that it's one thing, that it's like a reserve asset or that it goes up in value or that it's like a stock market or something. But Bitcoin is all of these things and uncontrollable. We just had a massive block size war. If they haven't read that great book, the block size war, or they didn't live through the block size war, as I share many of you in the audience have watching podcast after podcast, taking your side, being active in the forums, wearing the UASF hat or other hats. If you disagreed, they don't understand what's going on here. This is way beyond them. And they're going to just sleep right through it until the regulations fail, until they put out their drug cartel type bill and they say, wait a minute, Bitcoin's not reacting to our drug cartel bill. And then they bust all the Bitcoin companies in their in their state, in their country, in their whatever. They chase them all away. And then they say, wait, our citizens are still using Bitcoin. I mean, this is the Grinch who stole Christmas here. He can't knock out Christmas enough. There's always Christmas spirit. There's always Bitcoin spirit. And that's when things get really bad for them. Another good thing to check out is Joe Darowski's Dune. It's about 10 years old. He wanted to make Dune in the 70s. And at the end of Dune, he wanted it to be kind of like Spartacus, where like Spartacus is killed, but the spirit of Spartacus mows on. Everyone's like, I am Paula Trades. In the same way, they cannot kill Bitcoin. Their regulations aren't going to work. It's have no effect. And then they're going to try to kill it like they always do. And they're going to fail at killing it. And that's really going to piss them off. So we have a lot of time left. And I think it's going to be fun. But yes, it still doesn't matter what the politicians think of Bitcoin. Even if you gave them millions of dollars to support it and you had some really nice hamburgers in a cool bar, it still doesn't matter. But let's keep moving to the last issue. And the best issue, the best issue of the day, I should have gone first with this maybe. Issue four, Swan Bitcoin sues X staff over rain and hellfire plan to steal mining bizz. According to this article from CoinTelegraph, Swan Bitcoin has accused several former employees of stealing the crown jewels from its Bitcoin mining business in order to create a quote counterfeit competitor. According to the articles, the employees stole the code created their own company called Proton Management, then stole Swan's largest customer tether, then all resigned in mass at almost the same time on the same day. And in the same plan and insane company and just an insane story altogether, Victoria Jones, what do you think about Swan Bitcoin? And their plan, which according to documents, was called rain and hellfire. I mean, it's just unbelievable, really. I mean, the goal of some people. I mean, if I was running a company and someone did that to me, I mean, it's just scandalous. It's scandalous. I mean, you know, it absolutely should go through the court that should not be allowed to happen. I mean, if you read the article, it says that it was a branch of their business that they were thinking of retiring anyway. But do the decent thing, you know, buy it off them, you know, you don't have to do it underhanded like that. So I don't know. They've, I think the only hellfire that's now raining down on them is the legal suit. I mean, it's not good to be tied up. And I mean, that's going to require so much energy and resources just to sort that out. I mean, what an awful situation. I don't envy them. I have to say, well, I don't know anybody at Swan Bitcoin, never know anybody that worked there. But I've seen them in a few conferences and they always seem really nice. I saw one conference where they did what I thought was really clever. They didn't rent a booth, a booth, but they all wore flight suits. So you could tell right away where the Swan people are and they'd come talk to you and you could go find one. I thought that was really, really smart. This just seems mean like they're stealing from Swan. They're stealing their customer. They're stealing their code. They're stealing their idea. There's very little that they're not stealing here. One must assume maybe the Swan guys were mean to them. Maybe they screwed them over or underpaid them or made them work really hard. I don't know what they could have done to their employees to have their employees do this to them and also just. So be quite just evil. It could be they saw an opportunity. The code was there on the server. They could have just taken it. And I also think, yeah, it's really hard to say that you're on the right side and that you're doing a good thing when your plan is called rain and hellfire. It's like, what are you? We're involved in the gum drop takeover plan or the candy bear show. We're in the rain and hellfire group. And again, you some one thing maybe when you're writing your next angry email or your next business takeover think to yourself, how is this going to look when we have to read this out loud in court when my lawyer when my opposing attorney says, and what was the plan called, sir? And you say, Oh, it was called screw over Swan Bitcoin plan and burned down their house and piss on it. That's a horrible plan. Like the rain and hellfire plan is just a terrible name. So yeah, I just don't understand it. It's a crazy article. I hope everyone checks it out. I have no idea how this is going to turn out all up to the legal system and so forth. I don't have any inside information. But best of luck to Swan Bitcoin seemed like a nice service. I don't know why this happened to you. It's incredibly unfortunate. Maybe do better job vetting employees next time. Not sure what to say. Otherwise, this is a really bad ad for zipper cruder. We trusted zipper cruder. We call all employees on there and they ran a massive conspiracy against us. Whoever did your hiring, it's a disaster for your HR man or a lady. I don't know them, but complete disaster. Oh, well, let's move on to the end of the show. Victoria, do you have a prediction or a story of the week? Go ahead. Ah, prediction. I don't actually normally I do. I'm having a bit of a hiatus from my website. I've still got my article Bitcoin and the Tulip bubble because it was a big deal. It was a pretty good one and I had some issues with my website over the summer, which meant that it was inaccessible. So I've decided to put a pause on writing a new one for the time being, which gives me some space to do some other things. But it's still available to see and then some of my older newsletters are available for a little bit of Bitcoin just to show people how the paywalls work on my website. So go and check that out if you're interested. But yeah, that's the main thing. I am also working on a video with a local software developer on how to put together a Bitcoin node and people have done that before. But we're actually going to talk about how to download all the software and demonstrate. It won't be the most exciting video, but I think it's really good to have an archive of people doing that because it's not something that's intuitive. It's not something that a lot of people talk about and fundamentally are keeping people understanding how the back end works. I think is really important for Bitcoin sovereignty going forward. So that's what I'm working on at the moment. And when that's available, that probably be the next thing that I publish. That sounds great. I know a lot of people have done the node video, but it changes every time. I did one used to use Tor and Tails Linux. You'd reboot into a special version of Linux and download all this stuff and you could make a secure and visible node. And now none of that works. None of that software works. Now those things work. Nothing works together. For a while, we were doing umbraille nodes. There's also the one Raspberry Blitz that roots all works on. So it's really nice. There's different packages. Now it's a lot easier to install things for nodes and you might even not have to use that much command line. So it's pretty good. I know everyone's afraid of the command line for no reason except maybe you weren't born there. So yeah, story of the week. Probably just complain as per usual about the Oakland days, the billionaire that owns the baseball team bought it for like 800 mil. If he moves it to Las Vegas, he could sell it for 1.2 mil or at 1.2 bill. So that's an extra 400 million dollars that he can make. So that's worth it. That's cool. That's worth moving it out of Oakland burning all those people. The stadium's not ready in Vegas. They're going to temporarily move to Sacramento for three or four years play in a minor league ballpark that only holds about 10 to 15,000 people instead of a major league ballpark that holds 50,000 people. That makes sense. And then they're going to go to Las Vegas and have a smaller ballpark that holds about 30,000 people. So the last place that you could buy cheap baseball tickets is gone. But let's move on. I've talked about it enough on Twitter and many other places. It's an awful story. The other thing I wanted to talk about is the Bitcoin golden age that I'm talking about. And I wanted to make sure no one's freaking out. They're like, Tom said the Bitcoin golden age is ending. I'm selling all my coin. There are a lot of fun things that you can still do with Bitcoin even after Coinbase and MicroStrategy and all of these companies go away. You can still send your Bitcoin around. You can still have a treasure wallet. You can buy more treasure wallets, send them to different wallets, send them to your friends wallets. You could put it on crypto steel. You could pay someone over the internet. You just have to use actual Bitcoin. You have to use actual lightning network. You can't just buy on Coinbase and leave it in Coinbase forever. If you do that, theoretically, eventually you'll get a letter that'll say, Bitcoin has been made illegal. Coinbase has seized your Bitcoin. You can no longer send them around. And those Bitcoin's, yes, the ones in Coinbase will be frozen. But if you take this time now to learn about Bitcoin, learn about the lightning network, send around $5, get a bunch of wallets, get a bunch of money stuck in this wallet, stuck in that wallet, send it to that wallet, then you'll be ready. Then you'll know how to move it around and how to use actual Bitcoin. And there's still hope for you. You're an amateur Bitcoin, you're a padawan, you're a learner. But you can learn now or you can wait until the government outlaws and all that stuff. And then you have to learn really quickly in a really stressful environment. And that's when you start sending around lots of money and lots of money gets stuck here and lots of money gets stuck here. And you're not all prepared and ready for it. So much better to learn how to use it now when there's no stress. And then have the stress later and be like, oh, I already moved my money out of Coinbase. I figured they wouldn't keep it. I would keep it. So there's still hope for you yet, Bitcoiner. But we're running out of time. So if you've made it this far, give us a thumbs up, comment below with a wave or a surfer guy. Leave us a comment or let us know in the chat. Hello to the chat and to everyone else. Until next time. Bye. Bye.