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. Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network, moving on to issue one. Issue one, uptober sees Bitcoin price spike 11% as traders ponder nuclear rally. Coin traders are feeling bullish about a potential nuclear rally amid rumors of over-the-counter exchanges running out of Bitcoin. Well, if you've been watching this channel for any amount of time, you know we've been talking about the potential supply squeeze for Bitcoin ever since the havining. The havining is a event that occurs every four years where the amount of Bitcoin being produced cuts by 50% i.e. half, hence the havining. Pretty much every other havining that we've had, the price of Bitcoin has risen because as you can see there's less coins on the market. If you're used to buying 100 coins a week, you're a coin base or a big exchange or something, now you can only get 50. This is a big problem. This could drive up the price of Bitcoin and many people think this is driving up the price for Bitcoin. Let's check in with the next story. Well, we've got the check in with the magic eight ball for the exit question. This is the only source of truth and knowledge we're doing this up front so you guys know what's a bet on. Now, remember shaking the ball can cause bubbles, bubbles are bad, but let's check it out with the price of Bitcoin be higher or lower this time next week. Will it be higher this time next week? Outlook not so good. The ball's probably seen the other stories coming up, but this is just your standard price article. People talked about October all month long and then we get to the last couple days in October and it finally goes up. So not very satisfying to people looking for it to go up and only went up 11% but they think it could go up a lot more. This is where people have been talking about 100, 200,000. Remember if we talk about that, it's probably going to be more like 180 or it'll be like 80,000 or it'll be like 179, 99, 99 and obviously we don't have any guests this week. I think we messed up on the UK. They have this daylight savings time thing in America. They moved it up a week so we're a week ahead of them and their week behind so no one showed up because the time change. So we're going to work on that. But I am talking to you in the chat so it is a special week if you have something to say in the chat, give us a thumbs up. Let us know. Do you think the price is going up? Do you think it's going down? Not much to say on this. Like I said, I do think there is a potential supply squeeze where there's less Bitcoin available on the market and there's more people that want to buy it. And traditionally with any kind of asset Bitcoin or anything else, this causes the price to go up. Not financial advice. I don't have a crystal ball that can read the future. I do have a magic eight ball though. Let's see in the chat. They say surely it's supposed to be dark and scary on Halloween but they had this idea where if they moved the time change up a week or put it back a week, then the kids could stay out longer on Halloween. The candy companies could send more, sell more candy. We certainly ran out of candy here. We gave it all away. They say every country on the planet needs a naive bucali. Well, I don't see that's coming up later on the show. He says nuclear is a weird word to say that the rally would be nuclear. Maybe it'll go straight up like a mushroom cloud. I don't know. Shroudinger's destiny also says the ETFs have been buying a lot and the price is about as high as it's ever been. It almost hit the all time high and it still might. He also thinks higher next week. They say the ETFs hold one million Bitcoin now. Pretty crazy. They've only been buying for a year. They've got to keep going. We'll have to see how it goes on the price of Bitcoin. This is a big topic. Everyone talks about this every week all the time. They don't know what's going to happen. They didn't know this last bump was going to happen. That's why people say that you should stay into Bitcoin because if the price goes up, you don't know what day it's going to be where it goes up crazy. There it is. Moving on to issue two, Bitcoin price dips along with Trump's chances of winning the elections according to Newsweek, which is owned by the UK tabloid, the daily beast. They say that the Bitcoin price dropped in the last three days after nearing a record high as Donald Trump's chances of winning the election have also gone down. They say Trump has promoted policies favorable to digital assets envisioning the US as a leader in the crypto industry. I disagree with this article. I don't think that Bitcoin is directly related to the presidential election. It's nice to believe this, but it's probably much more likely that Bitcoin is just riding the ups and downs of the usual Bitcoin trends and that it went up because it wanted to go up and it went down because it wanted to go down. We always think that we are the ones controlling the things and it's because we did the thing that it happens, but it's very similar to trying to predict a sports game or control of sports game. You're like, I wore my lucky hat, but the team didn't win just in this way. It doesn't matter if the election wears its lucky hat or not. It might change in the short term of people getting shaken out of Bitcoin if there's people that have weak hands and they're like, oh, I've got to sell the election is going to destroy it or the election is going to be good for it. I have to buy these kind of people are going to get wiped out in the chop as it goes up and down and up and down against your control without your wishes. So it is very interesting. More on the political issue, I think we're talking a little bit more on this later with the polymarket issue. For now, I just think in general, yeah, we're not directly linked to the presidential election. It's a nice idea. It's similar to when they say we're directly linked to the stock market. Same thing. Ryan and the chat would like everyone to know that he has a cute new hairdo. Very cool. Moving on to issue three, businessmen claiming to be Bitcoin creators Satoshi Nakamoto holds press conference in London. And generally, I'd say we should ignore these. I don't really care if someone claims their Satoshi Nakamoto. It's actually the worst possible thing similar to they said about the philosopher king. You want a ruler who doesn't want to be a ruler in the same way. You want a Satoshi that doesn't want to be a Satoshi. The worst kind of Satoshi we've had so far have been the self proclaimed ones. The ones who say I don't want to be Satoshi. It's not me. It was never me. I would never want that. Those seem to be the better ones. This one is British business man Stephen Mala, M-O-L-L-A-H. He claims he's the true creator of Bitcoin. I'm a bit of a character here, not to judge someone or book by its cover, but a very interesting character from the camouflage pants to the kind of grunge sweater or undercoat with an outer topcoat, long beard and a turban. So very interesting character, the alleged new Satoshi. This seems to be wearing some kind of athletic training shoes, they're bright yellow. He says he has a long backstory, has asked for the evidence. They were said that they charged about $500 an hour for the press to go to this press conference where he declared he's Satoshi. Once again, it's the same thing kind of as organized religion. God always needs to see money. He always needs money. It's really strange that the Bitcoin creator would need money and would charge money for this. So it's very strange. We're going to check in with the chat. Shoting his destiny says the real Satoshi would never admit to being Satoshi. And I agree with that. I don't think that we've seen him or her or them or it or whatever yet. And I'm in the camp, I hope we never do. I do like covering it. I do think it's an important issue. I think we should talk about it. You guys should know if this guy's out there claiming to be Satoshi, but I do think as a reasonable person, it's very unlikely that this person is Satoshi. It's very unlikely that most people are Satoshi. Ryan also said Craig Wright loves Halloween with all those pumpkin sales. There's also been some great Photoshop where they put Craig's rights face over Mr. Stephen Mollis face and had some fun with this announcement, which is something we can do on the internet, at least for now. At least for now. Moving on to issue four, a week of failing to pay with Bitcoin and El Salvador reason magazine went there recently and says the country claims to be a leader in crypto transactions, but you can't force people to take a currency they don't want. And this is one of the things we talked about this show on the show years ago when this all started Bitcoin is not a top down revolution. You can't just say to people, we're switching to Bitcoin now. You're going to use it. It's a little difficult to use. It takes people who want to be into it. And as the price goes up and down, people that are also capable and accepting to be exposed at that. If you save up your sandwich money in Bitcoin and you have five sandwiches, and at the end of the week you go to buy a sandwich and you only have one, it's a disaster for someone who only has sandwich money. There's also all the technology, the potential loss, the potential confusion. People just don't understand new technologies and a new technology like Bitcoin is not any different. Naive Bukali really tried for his people. He tried with a large investment. He tried by kind of requiring them to accept Bitcoin, having them to download the Chivo wallet, which is another bad idea because it was locally written software. It wasn't the best available software. It was the best local software available and that puts you at a disadvantage. It's not over yet as El Salvador is now up on their Bitcoin investment. So if they do need to or want to build more Bitcoin ATMs or build more point of sale systems or whatever seems to be missing or maybe give the people more money in Bitcoin, I don't know what the solution is. But I do generally agree with Reason Magazine. You can't force people to take Bitcoin. You can't force them to use it, especially when they have other alternatives. And all the alternatives are gone, as in the recent or not recent, but the episode of Mr. Robot where they had no one, nothing left. Those people were using Bitcoin right away. In the same way we've often talked on the show how in the apocalypse, what you'll want is small whiskey bottles and toilet paper rolls because you can easily trade half of the roll or trade several small bottles. Whereas if you have a large whiskey bottle or a large amount of toilet paper, it could be a disaster. So in the same way with Bitcoin, it just might not make sense until it suddenly does. There's some chat going on. Remember, it's a good time to put into your chat. There is a bit of a delay, so I will have to kind of wait for the chats. But if you do put them through, we'll try to read them and we'll try to discuss this week's episode and this week's issues with you. The reading is destined. He says, it being legal means you don't have to calculate capital gains tax every time you spend it. It can't be really used as payment while you have to do that. I would agree with that. Bitcoin doesn't need to be legal. It does generally need to fall under the rules of it commodity, something similar to gold, silver or money where you're trading it and you can trade in and out of it. And like he says, you don't have to keep a first in, first out capital gains statement every time you buy a taco. So that is a major difference. They made there that helped out at least for their tax system. Doesn't help out in your local jurisdiction. That's all up to your country. crypto cleanse says naïve becale tried and succeeded. Salvadorans now have a choice besides failing currencies. And I do think if they look at it as a hedge for inflation as a way to save money. And then if they can get over all the crypto, all the technology, all the things that you have to learn or that you have to trust to know that your money is still going to be there. If you follow the steps and you put it into your code and you put your code underneath your mattress, you want your code to still have the money in it. And I think, wow, it's easy for us to say, oh, it's cryptographically proven. It's all these different layers, all these things. It's really hard to come up to a random person and say that. You could be saying anything. And in a way, I think they know that and they're never going to just trust computer people as magical salesmen. It's soft, 256 verified. You can trust it. But if somebody's looking over your shoulder when you write down your key, none of that matters. They stole your money or it's even be worse. We used to have the old paper wallets with the JavaScript generator and it would generate a random key and you use a random key to store your Bitcoin. It turned out the JavaScript generator wasn't random enough. So these people could have done all the work, used tails, Linux, put it into a secure paper wallet then by bad luck. Someone could reverse engineer the randomizer or randomize it or whatever they need to do and steal your funds. So as long as that's a possibility, as long as there's all this technology in between it, I think people are going to have a hard time using Bitcoin as currency and as money. But it is exciting when a country tries a top-down experiment like this. We might have thought it wouldn't work. Be sitting on the other side saying that it didn't work. But still, they made a ton of money. Maybe they can change things around for their country. Moving on, check out WorldCryptoNetwork at worldcryptonetwork.com. We've got more shorts and more Bitcoin group videos. We've got tags, organized by topics, by shows, by host, by guest, all at worldcryptonetwork.com. Check it out. Moving on to the next issue, how FTX's young executives shattered their parents. As their children or descendants are fraud, the parents of FTX's top leaders have described their disbelief at how the crypto exchange upended their lives. I don't want to be trivial about this. It's unfortunate that Sam and others are going to jail. But it's also unfortunate they lost $8 billion of other people's money. That's really what this comes back to is incalculable losses. They were flip and careless with their financial responsibility. They had several chances where they could have brought in professionals. They could have had their system audited. They could have fixed this. But the crime was all around them and their solution was to just keep crime. I know it's shocking for their parents to see this and to see their future gifted, smart, rich, brilliant children transformed. The loss is unparalleled. The amount of loss that normal people have in FTX doesn't matter as this letter talks about Sam's mother, how he's not like other people and you can't underestimate him through normal behavior. They got into a scam. They kept scamming. They lost everybody's money. We've got some more on this story. This is a big update this week. FTX current CEO hits hints that Nishad Singh should remain free to assist the bankruptcy court. Then the next day Nishad Singh, a top of FTX executive, is given no prison time after cooperation. It does benefit to rat in this country as unfortunate as it may be. However, you can understand from the Fed's perspective, he was probably incredibly useful at unwinding the mess that they had made over at FTX. They had a no accounting system. They were using quick books. They had no idea where their money was. At the end of the day, they had no idea how much money was on their tabs on their books. Unbelievable situation. That's probably why it justifies giving him no jail time. That's about it for the FTX update. Just wanted to cover through this again. Yes, it's shocking to these people, but so is the crime. Maybe the rich parents of these people should go meet with some of the people who lost their money. It is a little strange from our perspective. I do look. Is there anyone in the audience right now that lost money on FTX or knows someone directly that lost money on FTX if you put that into the comments or into that chat? As crypto people, you think that of course we'd be affected by this giant exchange going down. But everyone I know uses coinbase or they use Kraken or BitTrek. One of the more established Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency exchanges, no one used this FTX for us except for the Blockfolio app. Blockfolio was just better than using a calculator. Oh, what kind of Bitcoin do I have? What's the current price? All multiply it. And instead of doing that, you could use Blockfolio until Sam and one of his genius marketing people bought Blockfolio and used that as the basic kind of mailing list if you will for their app. They changed that into the FTX app and then all of us were drawn in. We didn't have to create an account, but we had the option, what a brilliant marketing move. But yeah, if you lost money in FTX, you'd probably be furious at these rich parents saying, what happened to our gifted children? What a disaster. Shoting is destiny. The chat says he told his friends not to keep money on the exchange, but they don't listen. And one of his friends lost some money in FTX. So it is a real thing as much as you might not know anybody or I don't know anybody directly. There are people affected by this. They also say Ivan on tech lost some funds in the exchange as well. Tom Brady certainly lost some funds, although I don't know personally. And crypto cleanse says you can't use. He says you can't use BitTrix in the US anymore. It's not possible to do business in the USA. They had some issues there, but they are working out. Hopefully we'll give US customers more options on crypto soon. Moving on to the next issue, the worst of crypto is yet to come. No matter who wins in November, the digital asset market could be on the brink of a deregulation fueled bonanza. This was a huge article in the Atlantic. The Atlantic is a great magazine that writes really long pieces. Sometimes too long. I did read the whole of this article and I can tell you one of the best parts that will skip to here for your benefit is at the end where he says, as if to drive to home the point of Bitcoins indestructibility, 99 Bitcoins, friend of the show, obituary tracker seems to have dropped off this year. The last entry is for April. I messaged the site owner to ask if he was still updating it. He didn't respond. And throughout the article, the author goes back and forth talking about the right wing support for crypto, the left wing support for crypto, and comes to the conclusion together that they're both going to support crypto. That no matter what, you know, from his perspective, he's a negative, anti crypto person, no matter what happens, crypto is going to get stronger and better. And we all know this too because it's impossible to shut this thing down. They always talk and they talk in this article as if there's a choice, as if we could say, well, let's not do the Bitcoin experiment. Let's not do the thousands of altcoins experiment. It can't be shut down unless you shut down the entire internet. And that can't happen unless you put gates up, stopping a data from being sent through, you can't shut down Bitcoin, you can't shut down the other networks. You can make it harder for people to use it. You can make it harder for people to trade their Bitcoin for fiat for existing money. But you can't shut that down either as we've seen in the four, the black market will rise up. People will trade their crypto like they traded their blue jeans and Soviet Russia. Right. So this problem doesn't go away. So the idea that both Democrats and Republicans want to regulate it, want to bring it in house where they can at least attempt to control it makes sense. To not do that would not make sense to attempt to clamp down on it, especially when I've shown and others have shown in more complicated details, it's impossible to clamp down on. Your servers, everything just moves overseas. You knock down the overseas ones, they move that overseas. You knock that down, they start sending Bitcoin transactions around in kitty pokes of posters in JPEGs and images. It can go pretty bad, but I think that the network can continue. And I think that there are people who are interested in making the network continue. So they'd have to take out all of those people and so on and so forth. I don't think they can stop it. And that's why I think that it is a much better idea to go towards regulation, maybe not deregulation or deregulation fueled by NANSA as the author warns here, but reasonable understanding regulation as we were talking about earlier switching it so that Bitcoin would be a commodity, not a stock or a currency or another thing. They also say in Schrodinger's cat in the chat he says, if they write some actual rules I'd call that regulation rather than deregulation, it would be useful to know if it's actually legal or not. So I think that's a lot of business managers looking for some clarity on if it's legal, some clarity on how to use it. If you use it to buy something, it certainly shouldn't be taxed like a capital gains, especially considering how many things one could buy in a year. If you buy a coffee every day of the year that's 365 coffees that you have to pay capital gains tax on, that's incredibly unreasonable. I don't think that that's the goal of the law. Let's keep moving. Polymarket presidential election odds are rife with wash trading. According to the current Polymarket presidential election odds, Donald Trump is favored to win the election at 65.5%. I think it rose as high as 66% with 33% for Harris before it started rolling back. I think it's already back to around 39%. So about a 60-40 choice there. They have said already that most of the money in Polymarket is coming from four accounts from France, around $30 million from four accounts have been invested. And that's why the traditional view of prediction markets is going to fail here. Prediction market is good at predicting when people are betting with money that's important to them, money that matters, and they're making the correct choice based upon the goal of getting that money back. Once you have four accounts betting with $30 million swamping the rest of the market, it's really about the judgment of those four accounts. And if those four accounts want to say, change the Polymarket odds so that they can say, Donald Trump is winning in the betting markets. Therefore he should win the election. That's when we start to see the difference between a betting market where four accounts can control $30 million and an actual voting market where ideally each person controls one vote. It's a lot easier to sway for people, for them to be wrong, then for each person with their one vote, and traditionally in a prediction market, people betting with money that matters to them. When you start to have someone who presumably, if they're betting $30 million on Polymarket, they must have $100 million, $200 million, $300 million, who knows, they don't really care about losing that $30 million. As hard as that may be to understand or to believe, that's why this normally useful tool, I like a prediction market, I think it's interesting, has been swamped and overwhelmed by this money that's predicting in a different way. They want to be able to say, we were winning in this, therefore this, they also, just, they're buying the story. They're buying the story that people could say, well, the polls are close. The early voting shows highly female, which is bad for Trump and the Republicans, but the prediction markets show that Trump wins easily. And so it's just this kind of easy talking point that you could buy for $30 million, which might seem like an incredible investment, but to some people and other governments and whatever, it's a fine investment. Got a little more from the chat here. Shrouding here is sticking with us. He says he'd like to see a prediction market that works with billions of dollar value on the line. Polymarket is way overestimating Trump. I agree with that. He says, sadly, he's not allowed to bet on it in the UK. He was trying to buy Kamala at 30% to sell at 50. Would have worked if it was legal or not legal advice, but maybe if you had a VPN, I don't know, not my position to say, but it is very interesting that, as you're saying, if you bought Kamala, the odds at 30%, now it's back at 39%. You could sell. You don't have to wait for the election to see if you get 100%. You could take that 9% or if you bought 33 and you told it to 39, 6% profit, you could take it right now. So the fluid market thing of a prediction market is very cool. The prediction market is actually those to take money from those trying to manipulate. He's right. This is a unique opportunity. If you think, as I and many others do, that Kamala Harris is going to win the presidency, you have a chance to bet on it at 30% or 40% on these prediction markets and receive a 60% return. You would receive the other side of the bet, whereas the other people that are betting on the 60% they would receive the 40% return. They receive a smaller return. It's still available, not betting or gambling advice. Do what you want to do. But it does seem like it would pay off. It seems like a legitimate election prediction poll, where if I think three of the major newspapers or news networks declare a winner, that ends the bet. And then you would be paid. So it doesn't take into account other potential shenanigans and other problems that we could have. I hope not, but I'm afraid we might in this country. And shout out to Jack. He says, thanks for doing the show. Thanks, man. And Schrodinger does have a VPN. It doesn't want to break the TNC. I also didn't want to personally bet on the election. It just seems. It's not great. It's like it's like betting on nuclear war. Like, I don't want it to happen. I don't think it's going to happen tomorrow. So I could win, right? I could win. But do I really want to be betting on that kind of a market? It just doesn't seem right. Whereas betting on sports, not that I do it, but it just seems a lot more acceptable than betting on a political election or betting on a war or betting on anything that could result in such negativity. But I think we're running out of time. Anymore from the chat, they're saying they'll be interesting to see how polymarket copes if there's a result and then a legal challenge. I don't know if there's going to be a legal challenge. I do know that there's a propaganda perspective here where you could say, Trump won the betting market, which we all know doesn't mean anything, right? betting market has zero, zero vote power, right? As much as it's a great market and all that, no votes. But they're going to use that as kind of a wedge, what they say. It's okay to overthrow the government or to have alternate electors or to be out in the street because of these betting markets. And I think that might be very embarrassing for polymarket. And they might have to look at, I don't know how you control it because part of it, you want the people to bet. If you have inside information or you have a sure thing and you go out there and you want to bet all your money on it, the market wants you to do that. But in the same way to have these four accounts controlling $30 million in the market does seem like a recipe for disaster. And I think it makes it hard for them to prove their central thesis, which is prediction markets are smart, right? Prediction markets tend towards the truth, which I'm not against. And I'm not, you know, arguing that I'm just saying in this particular case, especially any reasonable person you could see four accounts controlling $30 million. It's just going to mess up your odds, whichever way you want it to turn out. So we are. This is our last show before the election. Apologies for everyone. We couldn't get more guests. Usually the British crowd shows up, but I think they're messed up because of the time zone and they're going to come in later. I didn't want to say anything too much about the election. Obviously, I'm liberal and I'm rooting for a Kamala Harris. I think that everyone should vote if you're in the United States, if you're connected to the United States, if you're overseas or whatever. Do your best. Try to vote. Participate in the system in a nonviolent way. Let's try to choose our leaders together. I hope that it goes well. I hope that it's a peaceful transition of power and that people accept the results of the vote. And I hope this polymarket thing isn't used as a wedge, but I do predict that it will be. Shrouding is one more from the chat. Shrouding is destiny says indeed a market is supposed to set a price based upon all information. And when we ban those with insider information from participating, it does seem like the $30 million might more know more than us. They might have insider information or they might be trying to push the poll. So it's good to know that. It's good to take that into account. Thanks to everybody for watching. We've got 16 concurrent viewers and four likes. So it's not too late to push that like button below or leave us a comment. I will be back next week, hopefully with more guests and hopefully at the right time in the United Kingdom. So thanks so much for joining us. Until next time.