The Bitcoin Group, the American original. For over the last ten years, the sharpest the Toshis, the best Bitcoin's, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Josh Shagalla from thestander.io. Well hello there everybody. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network. Moving on to issue one. This week is the Bitcoin Group 2024 and year end spectacular. We're going to be drinking flashbacks like this. That's right. How many years have we done this show? And here we are ready to do it for you one more time. Let's get to our notes ready. As you guys know at home, you can play along in the comment section. Let us know what you think the winner category should be. We'll check it out after the show. See how close you got to what we picked. 2024 has been a long and arduous year with a presidential election. Multiple presidential trials. One of them even ending just yesterday, days before the inauguration and after the certification of the votes, there was the Bitcoin price going up. All kinds of things happened in 2024. But let's start off, Josh with the one of the most important categories. What was the best Bitcoin company for 2024? All right. Well, you know, a lot of people because they're always in the news this last year of 2024 was like these micro strategies. But I kind of feel like there's coin based, my strategies and all these companies say, I don't know. I feel like Trezor. It's in Bitcoin, it's the companies that don't get talked about are the best because nothing's happened to them. That's bad. When no one talks about Trezor, it's a good thing because nothing bad's happening. They just work and they keep keys private. They keep keys for people. They keep keys off of other people's custodianship. And so I'm going to give this one to Trezor. Well done Trezor. It's a simple and a small box and much like a plumber as long as it works, no one cares if it messes up though, everyone gets shit all over themselves. So Josh, do you have the... You have the envelope, please, the envelope for best Bitcoin company. And I need you to hold it up to the audience. This envelope has been sealed on your porch for over two weeks, hermetically sealed. A Funkin' Wagon. Now I need you to send this to me through the power of the internet. Josh, send the envelope. You're there. You're there. Well, I'm pulling it down. There it is. I have the envelope now. Here it is, hermetically sealed. Carnet. Yeah. Carnet, the mountain innocent, right? Was it like those bonded couriers? That's right. It's a very difficult to get envelope. A man, a plan, a canal, Panama. Here we go. You got to blow into it or it doesn't work. And the best Bitcoin company for 2024 is BlackRock. BlackRock. Our enemies are now our friends, the bankers who made fun of us for years said Bitcoin was a terrible investment. They said it was drug money, said it would be hacked, said they'd change the number of Bitcoin. Oops, they're still saying that. But we can't deny they've brought billions and billions of dollars into Bitcoin. BlackRock is the best Bitcoin company for 2024. Joshagala, who's the worst Bitcoin company, 2024? Well, the worst company that I have is BlackRock. So there you go. Best they hit the best in the worst, almost a trifecta, a dual factor. The reason being is that, yeah, they bring money in, right? That's what they do. But B, they store all that value and all the private keys for that. We don't know how they're doing that. Well, I'll probably do it. And well, through Coinbase, we do sort of slightly know. But it's custodian. I haven't seen one cent go to the development from all of this money or developing systems for it or maybe new layer two technologies, like employing some people to figure out other things. Instead, it's just buying the thing and custodianning it for people. And that's unfortunate. Such a large amount of, it's the same, I mean, I think micro strategy is putting a little bit of money into development here and there. I'm not sure of that. That was news a few years ago. But I'm not sure if they're still doing that. But yeah, I would like to see, I don't know, it's a two-inch sword. BlackRock was doing some development. Would you trust it? I don't know if people would actually. But the sentiment would be there at least. It's not too late for a BlackRock to make their own branch of Bitcoin like Greenpeace. They could be right in there. It's funny, Josh. My worst Bitcoin company this year is for much the same reasons of yours. Bitcoin is micro strategy because exactly what you're saying, micro strategy is teaching people to hold their Bitcoin not to use it. They're teaching people it's not a currency. They're trying to track down all the units of Bitcoin, hold them in one big pile, which is not safe for them, not safe for anyone, and doesn't contribute to Bitcoin, doesn't get the currency moving, doesn't really bring in new users. Unlike BlackRock in just the comparison right now, I'd say, micro strategy in a way is even worse because they do advocacy. I find this advocacy to be hollow and empty. It doesn't have the core principles of Bitcoin yet. He often quotes the original ideas of people like Trace Mayer or Howe Finney who came before us who are the heroes of Bitcoin. Would that even be saying he's a quote? Sorry. But yeah, without even saying it's a quote. He just said that. He never goes, wow, what a genius thing to say. Oh, yeah, it's like William Shakespeare. Oh, Michael Saylor. Like, he just crossed the name right out. And you're like, I'm so clever. I thought of that too. And it just, it doesn't align to the Bitcoin core principles. I don't think Andreas would agree with him or agree with what he's doing. If it was such a great idea, Bitcoiners could have done this forever ago. They could have vandered together and tried to buy all the Bitcoin. But that doesn't really help Bitcoin. So even though they are a good company and we, you know, people support them and we understand why. For this purposes, they are the worst in 2024 for Bitcoin. They could get better. They could turn this around next year. We can, hey, a fantastic advocacy. Also, they've been advocating against holding your own coins, holding your own keys, which is again, very anti Bitcoin. The guy says he's a fan of Ethereum now. Not a, you know, not a litmus test here, but we're just saying he's kind of losing a lot in comparison. We also have the magic Bitcoin ball. You know, a lot of people need this to set their predictions, their bets for this week. Josh, you go with a bit. Bitcoin be higher or lower this time next week. We're into a little lower strand right now. I, all my triangles and my Fibonacci's and my circles and my spirals are pointing towards up for next week from here. That's great because it feels like it's going lower to me, but I'm always bullish. So I'm going to stick with that. But here we go. What does the ball say? Will the price of Bitcoin be higher this time next week? And the ball says, you may rely on it. You may rely on it. So the ball is bullish. We're moving on. Let's see. I have one more. I have a runner up for a worse Bitcoin company. FTX. I'm still mad at FTX. I'm still mad at SPF. I think they did an incredible amount of damage to our industry. They set us back with the trust. They took a lot of people's money. And we've seen over and over this year as we continue to cover the story. Caroline's getting a smaller sentence. The other guy is getting a smaller sentence. Everybody but Sam gets a smaller sentence. And I say we still need to keep an eye on them. They're still the worst Bitcoin company down with FTX, down with them. So not a fan. Josh Chagall, our next category. Most defining moment. It was an amazing year for Bitcoin. What was the most defining moment? I'm going to have to say Trump winning on this one. It really changed the market sentiment. And the market sentiment was already the weekends that already left. Because they'd already... And the polls were so full of crap. They weren't really polling people. They were just trying to swing opinion. And as soon as that was out of the ethos. And we already saw the market. And this was really interesting. I found that very fascinating seeing the Bitcoin price move before the election results. Because the market had already told us what the results are. And that was quite obvious to me personally. I mean, for me, it was a really nice day. I was skipping with joy through the fields. I know it wasn't like that for you, Thomas. I'm sorry. Well, it was an interesting time to see how prediction markets turn out to be correct. As much as you look at them, you say, I don't want that to be correct. I don't want that to be, but it kept drifting that way. It seemed like the smart money knew it. Even I was saying, as a back-chancellor, like, well, I could get two-thirds payment if it goes the other way. It's not a bad bet because of the incredible size of the payout, the potential. But it didn't go that way. Trump allegedly, according to the polls, pulled it out. And it is going to be the next president in 10 days. It wasn't incredible. And hopefully we'll see for cryptocurrency if it's a defining moment for the positive or for the worse. But much like he was named Time Magazine's Man of the Year again, like many other infamous gentlemen. It's often for the size of the event, the size of the impact that the personal has have not necessarily, if it's good or bad, like Mao with the Sparrows. I agree. I talk more about that later. But for me, the most defining event of 2024 for Bitcoin was Bitcoin breaking 100k. It was a huge milestone. It's a major asset, completely unaffordable for normal people to own one. Clearly more of a house than a car. It was huge. And it was as predicted after the halving. Which I find to be especially frustrated the entire time from about 40,000 up to 100,000 people would say, Hey, what's going on with Bitcoin? And I say, well, I think it's going to double in six months. I don't want to be a fortune teller. I don't want to tell you how to invest your money. That two is more than one. If you could put a couple hundred bucks, put your extra money into this dang Bitcoin thing. I've been recommending for over a decade. I think it's going to double the thing freaking doubled. So one for the ages, a towering accomplishment that will never be forgotten, which we've already forgotten. And then regained again, and then it's forgotten again. And now no one knows for a very time there for a week or for a couple of days, we were 100k. And it showed us that we could be there. And who knows we could be there again. And if we do, it just might go to infinity and beyond Bitcoin to infinity. Josh, you got the way. Do you think about Bitcoin 100k? Yeah, Bitcoin 100k was one of these things that it was like written in the stars. It's one of these price points where it's a round number. Humans love round numbers. Robots don't care that much. Or maybe they do. Maybe it's written in there somehow because they know humans love round numbers. But at the end of the day, just like the stock market, the crypto market is now fully pretty much 99% bots. And the odd person in there trying to win over the bots and losing their shirt for it. But yeah, 100k. It's amazing to think, isn't it Thomas? That we've been here all along watching this thing. And it's just a sign of how much money is being printed. But it's also a sign of the security of Bitcoin that it's lasted because it's a honeypot. If you couldn't crack a wallet, there's a lot of money there. So it's crack a wallet in terms of cracking the actual protocol. And it's never been done. So congratulations Bitcoin. Nurs. Bitcoin. And so much so much fun. So many decades of fudge. So much of this isn't good work. That isn't going to work. And then if you look back, the way it looks now, it's 10 hard years of life and 10 years of things happening. It looks like a straight line. It looks like everybody looks at it and they say, well, why didn't you tell me it was going from a thousand to a hundred thousand in like 10 minutes? Like, whoop. Like right there. And I kind of did. And I tried to and I told them how excited I was. And it goes up and it goes down and everyone loses their money. And you're like, I want to recommend it still, but it's a little dangerous, you know, for normal people. And then it goes up and it goes down again. And you're like, I want to recommend it more. I'm trying to tell them that it's happened before it happened to be before. You know, I had a little bit and I lost it a little bit more and I lost it. I had a little bit more, you know, and I keep telling them this happens. And then the full time is like 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100. And you're like, it's there. It's at this big round number where in their head, they know they're like, you know, maybe at like 75, they could get one. But at 100, they're like, that's ridiculous. I'll never have 100 K. Like I never have 100 K. It's ridiculous, right? Normal people don't have that. And now it's there. And the same thing comes true where you're like, you should still probably buy some. Like even though your 10 years late to me and you ignored me and you ignored everyone else and all the other signs and all the other stories, it's still probably the best investment of your lifetime. It's going to go to say 200 K. It's going to go to 400, 600, 800. And you're going to look back and you're like, 100 K was a good deal. And I didn't think so because it made no sense because I saw it at a thousand. Therefore I thought I'm really dumb buying it 100. But now it's at a million. And I wish I bought it 100 K. And there's no way to tell people that of how many, you know, iterations of this we've gone through. I thought 100 was a big deal because, you know, not that I could have bought it 100, but it was in my head. I knew about Bitcoin. I wasn't like right on it or anything. But I could have and a lot of people here about 100, they're like, I didn't buy it. Then it goes to a thousand. They're like, 100 is a good deal. And then 10,000. And I like that's ridiculous. And it just seems like we keep going through these cycles. And I don't know how to tell people the same thing where it's like, even this one, like did I take all of my money in the world and bet it on it? No, I'm not that risky a person. You know, I held back in case it didn't. But like clockwork six months after the halving, the damn thing doubled. You know, it went right up and it was right there for anybody to take. I'm sure a lot of people who were way more risky than me put big money in took big money out. And it's going to happen again. And even for the normal person in that one guy, he bought like $30 of Bitcoin a day for 10 years, which is still like 30K. He's put a significant investment in even though it was like people say coffee money or skipping breakfast and dinner eating at home type money. You know, that guy's the millionaire now and he posted the chart. He's like, you know, little anybody buys over a long time works. So it is just frustrating to go through that and to see that again. And I hope people buy a little bit. I hope they give it a try. Yeah. Yeah. Let's move on to the next category. Biggest surprise Thomas Hunt. What was the biggest surprise? I'm going to go with fart coin of all the mean coins. I didn't think it would be that one. It's surprising to see meme coins in general. Hock to a doge coin, Shiba in you doggy coin, doge coin, Shiba doggy coin, doge doggy, Shiba in you box coin. There are so many meme coins. And I understand some of them like Ige Azalea coin, mother or that other guy Andrew Tate had a coin father. And they were fighting with mother and I understand Floyd Mayweather like large celebrities getting coins, having following Paris Hilton, but to see these ideas and these ideas represented by completely random people. Sometimes a kid like that quant coin comes out and nowhere people decide they like the word quant. So they invest in this kid. He rug pulls them. They dump back on him and they drive it up to a million dollars and then allegedly, according to the internet, they steal his dog. I don't know, but mean coins are out of control. Anyone can make a meme coin. You can go to this pump.fund website allegedly. I don't know. And you fill out a form, push the button. You have a meme coin. You promote it to your friends. And if you're the person that thought of fart coin or invested in fart coin as a laugh, who knows? Maybe you took down thousands of percent. I'm not saying it's a great thing. But fart coin is my biggest surprise of the year. Josh Eagall, what's your biggest surprise of 2024? Well, yeah, I mean, it's kind of on the same vein. It's hard to follow fart coin. There's quite a smell, quite a stench in here. It's quite a spell of that. It's that fart gun from the minions. I, you know, the thing is I, on the same vein, Salana's rise in the meme coin thing. Why, why Salana? Like, if anyone's used this, I've only used it a few times, but every time I've used it, it's failed on me. Like the blockchain doesn't, that blockchains don't fail. True blockchains just do the thing. Sure, the transaction might sit in the mempool and then maybe there's not enough fee in it come back to you. But that's not a failure. That's just how it works because you didn't pay enough fee or whatever. But on the Salana blockchain, I've tried to buy like a shitty meme coin. I thought, oh, yeah, that's funny. And it goes failed. What, what do you mean failed? Try again failed. Try again failed. Try again. Oh, this time it worked. Nothing to, I like the, that chain is literally rubbish in terms of technology. It's just rubbish. And yet, it's the place you go and get meme coins. I don't understand why, I don't understand why anyone would build on it. You know, there's so many good scaling solutions and L2s for Ethereum that actually work. Like, we, on the standard, the IO, we use Arbitram and it's never failed for me. It works every single time. I don't know, I don't know why Salana is the big rise. So that's the surprise. It is a surprise, Josh. I've heard the same thing. Lots of people with technical problems on Salana. But you know what they say? There is no accounting for taste. So somehow it became the thing. It's hip and popular and that just snowballs and it becomes more hip and popular. We don't even understand why. Let's move on to the next category. The next category. Best new offering. Josh Shagalla, what was the best new offering of 2024? The best new offering for 2024 was, I'm going to go with the standard, the standard IO. It's, I know it's my coming. I've got to, I got to chill at one time. But I'm really proud of what we built. We've been working on this for nearly five years. And it allows you to lock up your Bitcoin in a smart contract without trusting any third party like Celsius or FTX or any of that rubbish. And borrow against it for zero percent interest, which is, you know, for me, just amazing. I love the thought of borrowing from yourself. We've been working every day on this thing and not only RAP Bitcoin, but Ethereum and a bunch of others chain link. You know, chain link invested in us through their build program, which has been awesome. They're really been very, very helpful. And yeah, so now and not only that now, we released earlier on in the year, the ability to, for that smart contract to interface with UniSwap and have your collateral actually sloshing back and forth as a market maker. And again, without trusting any third party, you sign the key to your smart contract and your smart contract interfaces with Gamma and UniSwap and starts earning your fees on your collateral. And you can still borrow against it, which is great. And then tomorrow or on Monday, we'll be launching the stable core upgrade where your smart vault, if there's a DPEG on the stable coin that you can mint yourself, the smart vault with the highest leverage will go and pay itself off by buying at a discount so they can pay their own debt at a discount. So, and that lifts the price back up and gives a discount to the highest leveraged smart vault. And that's the thing for me is just magic, a magic and a lot of people go, it's a shit coin, it's on Ethereum, yada, yada, yada. Well, it's better, you know, there's scales of centralization and I would find that I would much like I just love the thought of these smart contracts doing this stuff rather than Celsius or block fire or FTX or any of these like ultra regulated people and you're giving your private keys over to someone else, screw that. You know, everything that the CypherPunks wanted was the ability to work with cryptography and why I love decentralized finance and the whole defy thing is that it takes Bitcoin to the next level. Unfortunately, Bitcoin doesn't have the op returns that we needed to build this project on Bitcoin and I would have loved that. But anyway, it's the second best thing and I'm super proud of that. And yeah, if you want to check it out, go to the standard.io and join the community and have a chat with us and yeah, check it out. That sounds like a fantastic new offering and it's great that you got it working with Uniswap. That's a big opportunity there. There's a lot of money in Uniswap. Yeah. But, yeah, best new offering of Bitcoin 2024. They came out last year but we're really seeing their effect this year. Bitcoin ETFs, Bitcoin ETFs, Ethereum ETFs, institutional Bitcoin. Buy it on the stock market. Get it right alongside your Apple stock. You can put it in the same basket. We said it was going to be big. We talked about it forever and now it's here and it has bigger inflows than gold. It's the fastest growing ETF in history and the Ethereum ETF isn't doing so bad either, which as you know, could open the floodgates to Solano, Ripple, Litecoin, Dogecoin, even Farccoin ETFs. Who knows institutional adopters and family bankers, serious business, serious bankers are here for Bitcoin. They know everything. They know more than you, even though they're terribly late to the party. We still have to welcome them, even though they have a bad attitude. Bitcoin ETFs, best new offering 2024. It's funny, isn't it? It's like just before we move on, I find it's almost like an art movement in and of itself in absurdist sort of an absurdist art movement where bankers and everything are starting to invest in farccoin. Something out of like idiocracy or it's just this. As long as they use their jargon and language, they're like the index on farccoin, the greed and fear ratio combined with the multiplier means that you should be getting in at a good option on farccoin. And I've been running long farccoin for a long time. As long as they get to use their magic words, it works out fine. But it does show how ridiculous and empty this whole investing thing has been. I mean, people want to invest in a company that makes a good product. You think that that will lead to profits, but really look at micro strategy, they don't make anything at all. They make a good investment. Suddenly, they're the company of the year for stock market as well. So Bitcoin is in both arenas now. Wild stuff. So we've got the moving on to the next category, best technical innovation. I'll go first on this one. And we're going back to some of the old categories here, but it's still a technical innovation. Mean coins. Although on Solana, attracting major attention and money, pump and dumps, but maybe some survive. In general, a huge market of pumps and dumps not happening on Bitcoin, maybe not technical, but a societal innovation, providing people what they want, the ability to make their own coins, the opportunity to buy and sell their own farts. Hocktua. Josh Shagalla, what's the best technical innovation of 2024? Well, I had written down a couple of things here, but I wasn't quite sure. It's hard because Bitcoin is so solidified. There's not that much that goes on on Bitcoin in one way. You could say runes and ordinals, inscriptions, but it's, but I don't like them personally. Yeah, I'm going to go with Noster. It's not really Bitcoin at all, but you can send sats on Noster. So I'm going to go with Noster. It's a decentralized version of X. And, you know, as much as I personally feel that X is way better now than Twitter ever was because I don't have this constant threat of being banned for an opinion. I still feel like it's a human that's made that decision to do that. And I would much rather see algorithmically, some way of figuring out how to sense the bad stuff that is horrid, or decentralize that. And it's still, it's a massive, it's a massive technical problem to solve and a moral problem as well because you don't want no censorship at all. Like I don't want to go on a platform and see people being murdered or, you know, child abuse and stuff like that. So that needs to be not there in people's feeds or in my feed at least. And so, yeah, it's such a hard problem to solve. But I think how Noster is going about it is saying it's no-based. So if you sign up to a node and they've got a bunch of requirements and their filters publicly stated, then you know, okay, all of this stuff's getting filtered out. How that's getting filtered out, another story, and are they filtering out more than less? Who knows? But you could always skip if you believe that they're being corrupt. You can jump to another node. Interesting, interesting times. I think it's a great idea to decentralize the power structure of news feeds. Because censorship, while it's important, it's important also to have free speeches as vulgar as it can be, and as despicable as it can be, it's bad ideas need to be traded against good ideas and beat by good ideas. What's also impressive about Noster is that it's much more than Twitter. I've seen a lot of programmers going in and taking this idea of sharing notes across the relay and putting their own spin on it, putting their own idea in there. And what I also like about it is because it's an open-source project, I feel like all the programmers have an ownership of Noster. They're like, this is my version of Noster. I'm going my own way with it. I still use this, this, and this, and that's fine. And I think that's a fantastic thing. That's a lot of different ideas going against the wall. But one of them has to stick. They need a killer app, whether it's the Twitter clone, whether it's some other kind of thing. It needs a killer app that goes through where people don't even know they're using Noster. And that's when they'll have their big success. So hopefully they find that soon. And we see that. Let's go to the next category. Worst technical innovation. Worst technical innovation, Josh Agala, the other side of the coin. Who is the worst technical innovation for 2024? I mean, I brought up ordinals and such. And I do feel it's a bad innovation for Bitcoin. I feel like it's spam. But the whole spam conversation goes all the way back, all the way back to when Bitcoin was 30 bucks. Between 30 and 100 bucks, where people, when Eric Voorhees was still secretly building shapeshift. But before shapeshift was Satoshi Dice. And Satoshi's Dice, people were arguing about, hey, this is spam. This is spam because what it'll allow you to do was send a Bitcoin to one of four addresses that had different odds on it. And you could send it. And then if you win, it would come back double just automatically. Or whatever it was, the different odds had different paybacks. But the great innovation there was proof of randomness. And proof of fairness, I think it was called. Which used something about the block. I can't remember the ins and outs. But basically, after the fact you could go and check on chain, if it truly was random. And that was amazing back then. But people were like, this is spam. It's spamming the network. And everyone was like, is it though? They're paying for the transaction fees. Then it's not spam. So if people are paying for the transaction fees for these ordinals, you know, if they're paying 200 bucks to get something inscribed, well, they're paying for it. Is it spam? Well, I had them for best technical innovation. And it's fitting that I have them for worst technical innovation. The worst technical innovation for 2024 was meme coins. Bringing out the worst in humanity, basically degenerate gambling, where those who get in early and get out early win and the rest lose, a never ending pit of despair for all those who enter there. But maybe you'll be the one like the people behind Hawk to a coin. And you'll make lots of money dumping on everyone else. Maybe, just maybe, it will be you. My runner up for worst technical innovation is quantum computer. I love the research. I think it's impressive. But when you're 1% of a thousand percent to cracking Bitcoin, cracking all the bank algorithms, ruining privacy for everyone for about 10 minutes until we all upgrade to quantum encryption or whatever they're going to call it, the press releases on it that are absurd. It spreads it far greater than it needs to be. It's 1% or 0.001, whatever you want to call it. Incredibly far from its goal. And it'll be very exciting in the end. But right now, it's just fear porn. People love to spread it. They love to send it. They say, oh, it's going to break Bitcoin. And I say, did they mention that it breaks the banks? They're like, oh, banks. Bitcoin use the same encryption. Yeah. And all the governments and all the other secrets. And it would be like the movie speakers. It would be completely destructive. I don't see why they would release it. And especially why they would write an article about it to tell you if they had a working version of a quantum computer that was at this thousand x capacity capable of breaking all our encryption. So yes, tired of quantum computers. Josh, I'm going to add to that. I agree. Quantum computers. It's controversial here. But that's what we're all about here on the World Crypto Network. Quantum computers are a scam. I'm going to just put it out there. It's the next scam to scam VCs. There's no business model. Millions and millions and millions of dollars into R&D. It's so vague and all the stuff that they told you can simulate reality. All this stuff, I don't know. I think it's all just techno, nerd gap, babble that is actually convincing VCs. That's next best thing, but it's actually not. If you're really graphics cards, funnily enough, all of these GPUs, that's really where it's at. And inference, A6, I think that's where it's at. Quantum computers are definitely where you want to invest your money if you want to lose it all. That's not funnily, so you do what you want to do. But no, I agree with you, Josh. I think it's the next kind of thing where everybody's going to have a new guru and a new genius who's written it in a new way. And they have a secret process like Theronos that they can't tell you. And if you invest, you're going to make a billion dollars like Uber. And it's going to be that same thing, nine out of ten of them crash horribly. The last one breaks even. Stuff like that. It's going to be a very hard market. It's not at all close to having a consumer-friendly, usable breakthrough. Now, I do think AI is on its way. So I don't want to confuse those things, because AI is useful to people now. Yeah, it's very useful. And we're way more useful, whereas these quantum computers, it doesn't run doom. I'm not interested. Call me back when it's doom. All right, we're almost out of categories. Everybody give us a thumbs up down below. This is our year-end review, spectacular. It's different than all the other shows. We wish we could have more people on this week, but Josh is available. I'm available. So middle of the winter, which means it's beautiful in Australia. We're here for you guys. So here we go. One more category till Bitcoin or the year. Josh Agala, enough already. What have you had enough of in 2024? Bitcoin, bad for the environment. I just can't stand it. If I see another article about it, I did have to laugh that greenpeace in all their corrupt glory basically spent millions and millions of dollars pumping money laundering into some crappy artist. And then basically, spreading far about the environment. Not even writing some code and hoping for a fork. They just wrote articles about not that I know of. I don't see that there was even a pull request on chain. Was there a pull request from greenpeace? There was. I think they had their own gallery or binary type thing set up, but I don't think they ever committed any code to it. But they really should have once they understood how the conversation worked. That it was a conversation about code. And like a like a Sartorial or a you know, Sophocles based academy or socratic method, you have to present your argument. Then you get questioned and a bunch of people attack you negatively. And they attack you in many ways. And that's the Bitcoin conversation. And if they want to participate that in a greenpeace way, they want to improve the environment, produce the code. Where is this clean Bitcoin that we could run? I agree with you, Josh. They should have produced some code. Then they could have had a conversation about it. Then they could have said, we failed to convince the Bitcoin developers that RIT, I was better. Now be true. Yeah, that's right. Instead, they just pumped it into articles, into press releases, pumped, if you're donated to Bitcoin, to a greenpeace, they pumped your money into some artist's pocket, which okay, some people say, well, artists need to eat. Yeah, but that's not the point. The point was to say that Bitcoin is bad for the and the articles going on and on and on and on about Bitcoin being bad for the environment. Meanwhile, all the miners are putting so much money into actual R&D on how to get cheaper energy, which is renewable because that's the cheapest energy. There's a waterfall flowing, tap it, mine Bitcoin. There is excess energy at night because the power companies don't find it hard to wind down generation. So let's store that in Bitcoin. There's so many ways and miners are actually doing the R&D actually putting the money into that greenpeace, could have done that. Instead, they money laundered basically. I agree, enough already of greenpeace and environmental Bitcoin. For mine, enough already 2024, SBF pardon. Elon Musk claimed it was happening to create a straw man with which to attack President Biden. Ah, boring. Your game is so boring. You play chess like a school child. It was weak and pathetic, but many people enjoy Elon Musk's propaganda, so they repeated it, and they allowed the rumor to happen. We keep going through this. SBF bribed both sides, Republicans and Democrats like any good businessman, like Donald Trump himself suggested and have scribed. It's been total nonsense the whole time. Nobody's partening SBF. He was previously politically powerful. He was previously rich. He's screwed now. He's in jail. He's not getting a pardon. It's over. Now there are 10 days left in Biden's term, so I could still eat it on this, but I'm going to go down on this not happening. Fs, BF pardon. Now the real question is, will Trump pardon Ross Olbrek stay tuned to that story? We're going to keep an eye on that. Josh, it's your time. Here it is. Drum roll. I don't know if you have the right button. Let's see. We have crickets. We have trombones. We have a record scratch. And we have applause. We're going to have... Here we go, Josh. Kind of a weak applause for Bitcoiner of the year. 2024. Josh, it's all... It is. It is. I'm going to go with Donald J. Trump. I never would have thought that. Funnily enough, because he... The reason I'm saying that is because he was fervent about the greenback. Well, you know, not the original greenback, but the US dollar. Back in his first term, he was all about that. He said anything that competes with it, he's against because he's all about America first. And so... And actually, I understand that as someone that... Let's say, you know, they're running the head of the Mafia and the Mafia print the money. Why wouldn't you be for that money? So... I was surprised that he... That... At the ability of... The Bitcoin nerds. And I think it's the vague. It's Elon. It would be large players in the ETF market and BlackRock and all that would have said, Look, this is a good fallback. And we should be... I think that's where the argument went. We, as America, as America first, should be building a hub here. Because if this is the future of store of value and we let China take it all, then, hey, we've lost. So... So the Trump's turn makes sense. For me, it was a bit of a surprise to see... I don't like governments really particularly being part of the whole crypto thing. But at the end of the day, when it becomes so big, it's just what it is. It's... It's permissionless. So anyone can. And for me, that was a surprise. And for me, that's the Bitcoin of the year because he is literally the most famous guy in the world. I would say at this stage, there's no one famous. Anyone knows, everyone knows of Donald Trump. He is the most famous in the world. And he claims to like Bitcoin. He claims to purchase burgers in it at a New York bar. We will see. But the Bitcoiner of the year for 2024 is... Mad Bitcoin's... Mad Bitcoin's as usual is the Bitcoiner of the year, 2024. For keeping the Bitcoin group going, 47 episodes out of 52, that's pretty good for a show that doesn't pay anything. All the panelists volunteer. Thanks to everybody for volunteering their time, keeping the world crypto network going. His face is being sold on Kiro cards almost every day. Sometimes, for even $16,000, if they buy that expensive one, Mad Bitcoin's continues his streak of being Bitcoiner of the year. Although, as with every year, you can't just celebrate Mad Bitcoin's, even though we know he's the best. So we do have honorable mention for Bitcoiner of the year, we are going a slightly different mention, kind of the same way Josh is going, we're going with... David Bailey, Bitcoin magazine, Brian Armstrong from Coinbase, and political Bitcoiners. They are very right-wing, and I disagree with them, but they won. So they win now. And we see what they get. As it says here, they went hard right-wing. They adopted an unpopular monstrous former president. They platformed him at the Libertarian and Bitcoin conventions, let him say anything he wanted and believed everything he said. But they won. Now they are winners, inviting you to spend $2,500 to avenge their inaugural ball in Washington, D.C., so that maybe Trump will walk by for five minutes, and you can wear fancy, expensive clothes. What will they get for their field tea and their millions and millions of dollars? The jury is still out, but so far they have an SEC chair and an AI and crypto-zar. Whatever that is, we don't have zars in America, who at least on paper support Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Will the monster free Ross? Some claim it is happening on day one, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Will aligning with the government be good or bad for Bitcoin? We still don't know. But we are going to find out. Either way, Bitcoin doesn't care, but if the government becomes enamored with crypto, they just might have to make their own. And then it would be a competition with Bitcoin, and you know how the government hates competition. Josh Shagalla, what do you think about David Bailey and right wing political Bitcoiners being declared Bitcoiners of the year? I like it. I like it. I don't know if they let him say anything he wants. He just says anything he wants. He's the guy. You can't get the most famous guy. I know. I was a little bit told. I'm going to find that he would cross that they wouldn't back him. He even said at the speech very publicly and very plainly, I know how to talk to people. I say the Christian thing to the Christian thing. I say the Bitcoin thing to the Bitcoin people. I don't say the Christian thing to the Bitcoin people or the Bitcoin thing to the Christian people. Almost as if he was telegraphing how he sells different brands of bullshit, depending on what audience you see. I hate it. Well, you think there's any other politician that doesn't do that? That's what politicians do. They're not going to go to Christians and say, Buddhism is best, like out of whatever they believe. You know, someone that says they set like, I'm for, you know, lower taxes and they go to every meeting and they say, down for lower taxes, you don't want a guy that he goes to the lower tax meeting. He says that he goes to the higher tax meeting. He says that says to the medium tax meeting says that you want a person that has values that's going around selling their values. That's the thing. What he's been very clear about is that he says what people want to hear. And at the Bitcoin point, Paulo was all about banning guns except when he was running. When he was there, he was like very pandery. He was like, he's like, they like this guy free Ross. So he's like, I think we should free Ross. And we'll see if it happens. It's amazing. And they're big winners. If he only pays them lip service. If he makes his own crypto and competes with them as he's done already with world liberty financial, it could turn out differently. I mean, obviously they're big winners right now. We have to see if he delivers on his promises. Previous record of him delivering on his promises is not great. Nothing for or against just saying you look at the promises. We got tax cuts last time, not much else. So we'll see if we get all this regulatory clarity and things that they believe that they've already gotten. It's very interesting to see these kind of new vote-reached guys become new vote political. And to me, it feels like they've already counted all their chickens. They're like, we've already got this. We've already got free Ross. We've already got good regulations. I'm not so sure. I think we're still walking on ice. I think we've got to be careful. See what happens. I hope for the best. I hope they free Ross. I hope they give regulatory clarity. There could be some disappointment for the Brian Armstrong and the Daily Bailey people. But we'll have to see how it goes. Josh, are you ready with honorable mention? Honorable mention for Bitcoin or the year? Honorable mention would have to be... You know, I mean, as much as they suck at the same time, I think crack and big and coinbase and some of these large exchanges that have not seen a hack. They've kept a good running business. It does what it does. Everyone knows it's centralized. So, you know, I can't say, oh, it's centralized. They've built this big thing. They're custodianing all of these Bitcoin for these large firms. They're doing what companies do by using regulatory capture, which is bad. But at the same time, they haven't been hacked. So, and that's... It's not easy. It's not easy. There's many, many very, very talented attackers out there that are constantly at your door chiseling away. And they haven't broken into coinbase or crack and so well done. It would be nice if coinbase didn't see any service in interruptions or any problems during the bull run. One of these times, that would be nice. There is a flip side to that, though. If I was an engineer there, I could see just turning it off because of the volatility. Because the market's so crazy, maybe we say it's an error 404, but really it's a... Let's take a break and let our servers catch up. Let's not make a huge mistake that would cause problems later. I don't know that there's that much buying in these crazy times where people are trying to get into their accounts. I think there's just a lot of chitters. And maybe it's good for them to just ride the chitters out with an error and look bad. But then again, if you look at the professional e-trade or whatever, they don't seem to go down when Apple stocks rising or anything like that. So... Well, it's better than the other company that... Who are they, though, the guys that... My dog's yawning here. But the other company... What was the one during the Stonk thing who turned off the buy-bron... I brought him... Robin, who turned up buying for a game stock. A stock... Yeah, turned off buying, but kept selling on. I mean, that... If that's not the ultimate manipulation of a situation, I don't know what he says. That's just terrible, terrible. And still, well, well documented in the fun to watch movie dumb money. You haven't checked out dumb money. And it's a... And maybe not historically perfect or anything, but it's a fun movie to watch. For honorable mention, for 2024, Bitcoin over the year, I'm going a little more cryptocurrency over the year. I'm going with... OpenC... OpenC defended NFTs as collectibles, not securities, stepping in to defend the industry as Coinbase did, using their great wealth and resources for good, not simply running off with the money or disappearing, not a Bitcoin company, but a good example for all OpenC for defending NFTs, honorable mention. And here we go, Josh. Our last category of the day, last category of the year. Here it is. Story of the year, 2024. Go ahead, Josh. I mean, Story of the year is obviously Trump winning. It was a big story. It caused the price to skyrocket. We also have ETFs. You know, they were always in the news constantly, along with the price. As much as I am not a big fan of Bitcoin ETFs, they are the story of this year. We talked about them pretty much on every second episode here of the Bitcoin Group on a weekly. So, yeah. And while they might not be purely 2024, they did start in like November 2023 or something like that. Bitcoin ETFs, yeah. It was just constantly there. I don't know, Josh. Can you see this card from there? Are you cheating here? Story of the year, 2024. Trump wins. It's horrible for the world, horrible for America, but wonderful for Bitcoin allegedly. We'll see how that turns out. A lot of people are very bullish on this. Like we've been saying, they think they're going to get regulatory clarity. They think they're going to get friends in the IRS. They think they're going to get the largest drug dealer in the world, Roth's Obrecht. They think they're going to get them free. So, we're still on one side of that. We can't determine what it will be. You can place your bets either way, I guess, on polymarket, not financial advice, do what you want. But yes, much like Time Magazine, you cannot argue with this. The story of the year is Trump winning the presidency for a second time. Checking in with the chat, they say, does tone get an award for fasting for five days? That sounds like a lot of fasting. I award tone for that. I hope you eat some food and drink some water. Not sure what he's up to. But a lot of people fast to try to get rid of the toxins or whatever they have stuff they do. Transform says, is Gary Gensler still in the SEC? He has resigned. They are going to appoint a allegedly crypto-friendly person to the SEC and to the new. They've appointed David Sachs from the PayPal company, the PayPal Mafia, to a new position called AI and crypto-ZAR. I don't know what that does. ZARs are a Russian leadership title. This is America, or at least it used to be. Oh, we'll see how that goes. They're also saying the government doesn't allow them to invest in ETFs at some places, so they can buy micro-strategy. So that is an alternative. I just hope that both of them hold their keys very tightly and do a good job. I don't know what's going to happen there and no insider information. But that's just an incredible amount of Bitcoin, an incredible amount of funds are being held by those companies. I hope they have good tech people and locks and all those kind of things. Josh, anything else you want to say about this year? I'd say, enclosing myself didn't get out too much this year. We got to the Mallorca conference. Unfortunately, Josh couldn't make it this year, but you made it previously years. We had some great times there with our friends. It was great to see everybody. I hope everyone goes to meet-ups and conferences and hangs out with their local crew of people. Even if you're a small-time Bitcoiner like me and you don't have that much, you can always afford a pizza and a soda with your friends, get a nice meal with people, and talk about the good times, talk about the Bitcoin, and where you think it's going in the future. The guy in the chat says he bought a micro-strategy. There's no way to get into Bitcoin from the UK. So that's a good one. Really? For people who don't know how to get into Bitcoin? Well, they've shut down the Bitcoin ATM. So over there, I do know that. I don't know about other ways, not being there myself. But yeah, apparently it's not. Oh, look. And you can also be exposure with your retirement account with a stock or a thing like micro-strategy. Yeah. What do you have for 2024, a year-and-review looking back? What do you think? Well, yeah, I think it's on the opposite side. I'm just super stoked that we have some sanity in the world. I know you see it's total out there. That's the amazing thing about this show. We have conflicting views, and we can still stay friends. And that's what's important through all this. Don't be divided apart. Don't let politics divide you. That's how they get you. The people is divided in conquer. The important thing is stay united. And I don't know what to say. Basically, the story of the year is, let's see what happens. I agree with you, though. We don't know yet. What will happen? I hope that Ross will get pardoned. He did. He was very, according to Lynn, who I know personally, we had on good faith that he was about to pardon Ross, and then the whole election thing happened, where it was unknown what the hell happened. That was four years ago. Four years ago, yeah. That was four years ago. Yeah. So it's definitely not going to happen in day one, because there's a lot of stuff happening on day one. But I think Ross will be thrown in there in between all the January 6s. And so the news won't know where to focus, probably. Well, that'll be impressive. If they do it, they pull it off. They have been very vocal about pardoning the January 6 people. It would be like you said, I think it would be a good time to put Ross at the end of that list, because it would give him cover. Like I interpreted earlier, a lot of people could cover this, negatively saying a drug dealer at Kingpin, who murdered people, even if you didn't murder people, you know how the news is, they say these things. And especially when they're trying to paint someone that they don't like. And you know that a lot of people are very critical of Trump, of course. But we'll see how it goes with the Ross Oldbred thing. And as far as this year, though, I just want to thank again, all the panelists who volunteered their time and showed up on the show. I want to thank Marwee for helping schedule all the panelists. I think everybody in the audience for joining us. This isn't a big show. I don't think YouTube recommends it very well. I know Twitter has held us back this year. They don't let us broadcast for free there anymore. A lot of stuff like that. So you guys do a lot of work to find the show. You have to kind of set your watches and come back or just check on it. So I thank you guys for sticking with us, even though we're a small audience. We're still a relatively large audience for just normal people talking about Bitcoin, something that we enjoy. And there's really something to having these weekly shows discussing it every week and saying, what did we think? What did we think? Did we think 100,000 was a lot? Did we think it was a little? Were we right? Were we wrong? We put it out there as well. They stay in the chat. They should pardon Snowden too. Did he get in? And got a pardon. He went home. So that worked out. Oh, really? I know. Snowden, I wanted to do a song. A song was pardoned. My God. I mixed the two up. But yeah, a song was let free. Snowden is still in Russia. My mistake. But yeah, we'll see how it goes. So stick with the show. Keep chatting in the comments. Leave us a comment afterwards. I always check it out. Give us a thumbs up. Thanks to everybody. I'm saying positive things now. Thanks for hanging with us. And until next week.