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, Josh Egallo from thestander.io. Well hello there everybody, what a week. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network, moving on to issue one, Trump, Partins, creator of Silk Road Drug Marketplace. Ross Obrek was serving a life sentence for creating a site in a shady quarter of the internet to sell heroin, cocaine and other elicit substances. He was serving a double life sentence plus 20 or 40 years. Josh Egallo, Ross Obrek is free, free Ross. Ross free. What do you think? Absolutely amazing. Many, many, many people including yourself, Thomas, including myself, including Tatiana Marose. And then there's literally countless worked very, very hard for this. But the person that worked the hardest is Lynn Obrek, Ross's mother. And she has been, you know, been, been vindicated today. I mean, not today, but, you know, a few days ago, as Ross got out and I'm just so, so, so happy for him. He, he's been through hell. He's paid the price. And I just, I just am so stoked. And many people doubted that it would ever happen. I was quite hopeful. I thought maybe usually pardons happen at the end of, end of periods of serving, but this time it happened at the start. And it's been a strange year of pardons as well, you know, with, with Biden pardoning his own family and, you know, all these sort of strange and, and, and Fauci with sort of pre, preemptive pardons and stuff like this, it's been a strange year of pardons. But nevertheless, Ross is out and I'm just, I just cannot believe it. I'm so happy for him. I'm so happy for him. Really, it's made, made my week. I, I agree, Josh, on a personal level, it's amazing that Ross is free. Uh, you and I, I think both met Ross's mother. So we have a personal aspect to this. I think we might even met his sister once at pork fest. And they seem like very nice people. Ross has always been kind of this eagle scout who wandered into this kind of libertarian drug protest website, uh, made, you know, tons of money at the time, very popular, successful protest. Didn't seem to have an end plan, uh, completely got caught in that library. And then there's the whole thing where they kind of give him, they say, oh, you have a problem. This informant needs to be killed. And we have this guy next door. Does the killing, you know, so it's very, you know, service and ready, the, the murder for higher charges. As we've talked about here, it seems a little like entrapment. Um, and it was, and it was a celebratory thing for the FBI. They'd caught him. They used this tactic. They had a woman domestic violence situation that they'd scripted out. Ross turns to the side. They grab his laptop and they get the unencrypted contents. They get the whole thing in this way. Maybe this is why so many of his keys were taken. His Bitcoin was sold. They say that Bitcoin was worth, um, maybe just, it wasn't very much of the time. Maybe 15 to 100 million. Now it's worth, um, like $18 billion. If they still had it, but remember they sold it because it's confiscated property. And when you have a case like this, the government doesn't save your boat. I've seen a lot of people today with topics we'll talk about later. And they're like, the government should just save all the Bitcoin that they confiscate because you like Bitcoin. Sure. But in that same way, the government should save Rolex watches that they confiscate because they'll be collectors items or they should save baseball cards or whatever your thing is. And then the government's got a whole vault full of things. Whereas the government really needs money to pay for services. That's why they sell things. But getting back to Ross, like we said last week on this show, Josh, you were here. David Bailey and the political bit corners, even if I disagree with them politically, are the bit corners of the year. And this really shows why they got Ross free. They paid money. They paid votes. They gave Trump speaking slots. Trump said that he'd do this. And he actually did it. A rare thing for Trump. People are pretending it's not. But it really is a surprise and a rare thing from this president that you would get a direct quid pro quo. But that kind of brings me to the other side of this, Josh, where I want to go out there. It's great that Ross is free. But this isn't the expected time where I expected Ross to be free. Not only, like Josh said, a lot of strange pardons at this beginning of this term, including 400 or so violent people who attacked the Capitol and committed violence on camera, which is really strange. And a lot of other pardons of other leaders, of groups and things that we'll just have to see how that sorts out. Historically, it's not so good there. But with the Ross pardon and with the bit corners and libertarians paying directly with votes and a Capitol and then getting a pardon. And as we'll talk about the show, other things in return. It's not a great good. It's not a great look for liberty-based democratic, small, D government. It looks a lot more like if you could pay, you could get this person free. This isn't a full-time revolution where Trump has said, I disagree with the drug war. Ross was protesting against the drug war. He was protesting for freedom of liberty to use things in your body to buy what you want. This is more like some people paid Trump so he did it. And I just think that's going to be a continued problem in addition to the people repeating the murder for a higher story, people repeating the potential drug overdoses story, people even saying in a video that I watched recently where Ross basically inspired the entire dark web. Now this is a little tough because the dark web would have existed anyway. Let's not persuade ourselves that if humanity wants a dark and depthful place where they can sell horrible things, it will exist. Maybe Ross accelerated it, maybe Ross helped inspire it or the dread pirate robberts who we still haven't seen in years and years and years and I don't know if we're going to see again. But Josh, what do you think? Is it pay for play government? It's certainly not the end of the drug war. No, it's not the end of the drug war. But I don't think your spin on it is a little bit different than my take. I see it as, especially if you read, I'm trying to find Trump's tweet on truth social that he made but I can't find it just off the cuff. But basically, he talked about how ridiculous it was because it was basically Chuck Schumer, I mean, he mentioned Chuck Schumer in that thing but it was law fair against this guy and to really make a show of him and an example of Ross rather than actually punishing the event. And we saw the largest drug dealers on the site get way less time than Ross who had built some software allegedly. And then there was still a lot of issues with the entire investigation with dodgy FBI agents stealing funds and this and that and the other thing and work globally, traveling, hiding funds like there was so much dodgy stuff going on in that whole thing. And then you have the fake murder for higher charges which I still don't believe. So I think they were put in there to basically because the massive following that the Dred pirate robots had because his writings were all about peace and not using the initiation of the use of force, very and cap based writings back then. And when these were for higher charges came, all of those people turned their back on him and that was exactly what they wanted. It was similar to how they got the laptop by having a cuffle happen, hit Ross turning and then grabbing the laptop. It was the same sort of thing. Hey, Trump up some fake murder for higher charges and everyone turns away and looks the other way and doesn't really help him. Luckily, he had still a core group of people that were willing to fight for free Ross and everything else. But yeah, I'm really just amazed and happy and I'm really happy that the January 6th has got out too because I think this is also a ridiculous fast. You call them violent insurrectionists. I call them a bunch of people that had concerns that their election was stolen. And we had way bigger rights in the states during the George Floyd staff where people burning down whole cities, they captured a whole city and said now it's a total police free zone and made it some, you know, and there's been so many riots all over the place. Yeah, maybe you should take on the people that beat up cops or smashed windows. Okay, I can see that. But they were just old ladies and stuff that were there just in the region. In 16,000 people or whatever it was, I mean, 1600 people, whatever it was, the large amount of people, it's a protest, not an insurrection. An insurrection has guns and armies. This was just not that and I think this is where, you know, it's already been four years that these people were in prison. I think it's time enough. And yeah, but yeah, Ross, great. All right, well, even if you're not successful in murder and you attempt murder, they're still the crime of attempted murder. So even if they're not successful and organized as an insurrection or they didn't have a chance of, say, taking over 20 states or whatever your standards are for insurrection, they still interrupted an official government proceeding, the counting of the votes. They took the building physically and violently. And as when it comes to the partens of the Jan Sixers, which I want to go too much into the politics here, Josh, it's really easy for the president. To say, give me a list of the non-violent Jan Sixers and pardon them. What's unfortunate here, whether because of expediency or laziness or even scarier reasons that we don't want to go into, they pardon the non-violent ones, they pardon the violent ones, then they pardon the leader of the proud boys and the oath keepers. So it's really scary stuff happening here. If you know anything about history, when Hitler took office after his successful takeover in the right stock fire and the political things, he pardoned the 8,000 people who helped him at the Beer Hall puts, which was the previous revolution that he went to jail for. So if we're having the exact echoes of history, you can set the needle down and you can see where we're going to be. You don't want to go into Trump tweets too much. I agree does sound nice. The part about pardoning for Ross's mother. The second half, though, again, I go back to this theme that the drug war is not over. Ross was protesting against the drug war, the FBI agents who were prosecuting the drug war like them or not, or just doing their job prosecuting the drug war. I mean, we're not going to get mad at police for holding up traffic laws. If you want to change the laws, if you want to protest against the laws as Ross did, that's fine, but I don't think it's right of the president to call the FBI agent since scum and lunatics. And then as the end in many, so many of these things, I think he really, I mean, laid it back to himself again with his self centered. They are the same ones who prosecuted me. So even even it was a lot like the whole investigation, all these things, they're trying to shut down a legal drug website. Like it was never Chuck Schumer. I think he's referring to Chuck Schumer there and not the FBI agents. That's what he. So that's open for interpretation there, Josh. But I mean, if it is the FBI agents and the investigators, which again, specifically in this case, since we know so much about it and there's been a movie about it, we obviously there were mistakes made and thefts made and framings made. They were not the greatest FBI agents, but their job is to prosecute the drug war. I mean, we're not getting mad at the guards in the prison for holding up the prison. Like, but it wasn't. No, no, Chuck Schumer was that had had a had a scope, a very focused scope on getting this done politically for political gain. That's how I remember it. And if you look at what's happened, what happened to Trump with these ridiculous charges of like putting the wrong, you know, in New York, like total ridiculous. So he's seeing that as the same thing, just ridiculous charges to make a political statement. Everything as it relates back to him because he's a narcissist. You don't want to get into this issue any further. Let's hear again again. The specific one here, he's a specific kind of character. But let's get back to the topic for the very first time. We have a video of Ross Ulbrek speaking. This is from Bitcoin magazine. Congratulations to Bitcoin magazine for this incredible poll. Let's listen to Ross. Last night Donald Trump granted me a full pardon. I was doing life without parole and I was locked up for more than 11 years. But he let me out. I'm a free man now. So let it be known that Donald Trump is a man of his word. Thank you so much, President Trump. You're giving me this amazing blessing. I'm so, so grateful to have my life back, to have my future back, to have this second chance. This is such an important moment for me and for my whole family. It's an important moment for everybody who's been working for this for years. This is a victory and it's your victory too. And this is an important moment for everybody, everywhere who loves freedom and who cares about second chances. So it feels amazing to be free to say the least. It's overwhelming. And for the next however long we need, I'm going to be with my family so we can reunite, and be whole again and heal. But there's a lot to talk about and I look forward to re-engaging the free world. And so once I'm feeling up to it, we'll talk again. So there you go, Ross Ulbrich in his own words, freed by Donald Trump. It's amazing to see it. I can't believe we're seeing it. Looking at it there, just looking at him as a free man. Like I said, I did not expect this until quote, the end of the drug war, which you could push that out 10 years, 20 years, maybe even further, which we would have been looking at a much older Ross Ulbrich. But I also think a much different situation where he could be welcomed back. Josh obviously is going to be welcomed back by the bit corners. He's going to be at the Bitcoin convention. There are some documentary filmmakers who while he was still in the prison filmed 60 hours of footage with him, that's got to be the greatest ending to a documentary ever where the subject is actually freed from prison. What an amazing film that will be. And I bet we're going to hear a lot more about Ross Ulbrich. What do you think about that, Josh? Given the video that we just watched. Oh, look, when I watched that, I really tear up and watched it a few times, I think, man, what a whirlwind. I send a message to Lynn as well congratulating her. It's just one of these moments where you think, like for me being a Trump fan, I know you're not definitely. For me, it's just been the best week seeing that some of these executive orders are so fantastic. And then Ross was just a big sort of punctuation mark at the end and of this week. It's just a sensational, sensational stuff. Well, remember, he had the chance to make us all a fan if he had pardoned Ross four years ago. In many ways because of whatever you want to call it at the end of the Trump administration, when they lost the election, whatever they had to do there at the end, they couldn't manage to sign a thing for Ross. If they had signed it then four years earlier, I would have seen them as keeping their word much sooner. Now it's great they kept their word though. But we've got one more on this topic. Bitcoin donations are pouring in for Ross Ulbrich, who might already be sitting on 47 million dollars in old Bitcoin wallets. His original fortune, which the government took and auctioned off, might have been worth $18 billion by now. He may or may not have access to that 47 million. Josh, what do you think of the fundraising efforts and likely the eventual promotion of dollar Ross coin? Yeah, it's all about Ross coin. It's probably already happening unofficially. But yeah, meme coin thing, I think it'll happen. But yeah, I'm hopeful that I'm pretty sure he would have something somewhere behind some couch who knows. I mean, it's been so long, maybe it doesn't, but people are donating. And so I think he just needs some time to come back down. I think money's the last thing he's thinking about right now. I think what he's thinking about is being free, spending time with family, breathing the air, and seeing him coming out of that rhythm with his little pot plant is just so sweet. And yeah, I think he just needs time to come back down to earth. Well, I don't have the link to it right here, but it reminds me of a video that we did here on the World Crypto Network where we interviewed someone that was supporting free Ross. And I took a video of an animation that Ross had made from inside prison. And I think it was a very similar plant featured in that video. And I was kind of a, he is a dying plant in prison metaphor. And it was amazing little film and an amazing to do animation by hand, horrible to have that much time. So yes, it's very great that Ross is free. I think the media is not going to take it as well. I think this is a surprisingly supportive show for Ross, even if I want to talk about, you know, the actual, the way it looks from above. But much of the media is pillering him. And it'll be interesting to see how that works out. Because like I said, he's going to get a documentary, probably a book. He's going to be at the Bitcoin conferences. Maybe he'll get on TV. You mentioned in the show before someone mentioned Snowden. Maybe this is a similar situation to Snowden or what's Julian Assange? Maybe? Or one of the other ones? It's interesting and amazing end to this story, how completely unlikely, like even with the Trump, like promise and the libertarian convention and all these other things. There's other things he promised, putting a libertarian in his cabinet, paying for, you know, renovations on his house, whatever it is. He doesn't pay for a lot of things. But this time he came through. And I just think it's amazing ending to the story, Josh. We have so many of these stories that we cover over and over again. I think we might have missed it in the roundup, but the guy who had the hard drive in the garbage dump, I think that one's over as well. He just lost his court case. They're not going to let him look through the garbage dump because it violates the privacy of other people if he found other hard drives. So that one's over too. But what a surprising end to the Ross Obrecht story. Freed, still a relatively young man and completely pardoned. But let's go to the exit question. We need to predict the price of Bitcoin before we move on, Josh. As everyone knows, this is how people choose their portfolios. It's how they set things. They don't have punches or they don't use charts. They just decide on what this says. So Josh, this time next week, will the price of Bitcoin be higher or lower? Ah, according to my underpants, it's going to be higher. There's always good. We're very bullish over here usually. But let's see about the ball with the price of Bitcoin be higher this time next week. The ball says, really hard to read. We're getting old. We're getting old. Ah, it says, it says concentrate and ask again. Ah, ask again. So better, better luck next week. Moving on to issue two, issue two, Trump coin. The first big Trump scam is already blowing up in everyone's faces. The president's meme coin sent shockwaves and outrage through the crypto community, especially the time that they chose to announce it, announcing it right in the middle of the cryptocurrency ball. When many of the Trump supporters had spent $250,000 ahead to hang out at the awesome party with other Trump supporters, when suddenly they learned Trump had launched a meme coin. Until this, they'd thought that Trump was a Bitcoin only supporter despite his NFTs, despite his second collection of NFTs, despite the sneakers and the Bibles and the university and the stakes and all the other things with his name on it. This time, this time, he would be pure, but he wasn't. He launched Trump coin on pump.fun on the Salona network. They controlled 80% of the coin, which they began issuing to themselves almost immediately. The Trump coin rose quickly from $22 to $22 to $50 to $70 until it suddenly collapsed 40% as according to Twitter. The insider accounts that had not purchased through the market, Trump coin suddenly started selling for millions and millions of dollars, realizing perhaps $32 to $40 million on the very first day. All in all, though, the market cap and value of Trump coin is said to be $9 to $10 billion when asked about the meme coin after being inaugurated and becoming president. President Trump said that I hadn't even heard of it. How did it go? The reporter said you made a lot of money, sir. He said, oh, really? How much? He said, yes, sir, billions of dollars. He said with his cabinet of 100 billionaires behind him, oh, to these guys, that's peanuts. Peanut's charged as the billion dollar success if you want to call it that of Trump coin. What do you think about Trump coin, the coin? I mean, firstly, I think we live in such crazy time that the incoming president releases a meme coin. For me, it's really, really good because it means that there is nothing that the SEC can really hold over the industry anymore because meme coins are like the bottom of the barrel nonsense. Infrastructure, and this is what's really frustrated me over time is that the SEC hasn't gone after scams as much as just gone after projects for being legitimate. So a legitimate project, which, okay, people are going to shit on me here. I don't like this project. I can't stand it, actually. But XRP has been around for a very long time. They are trying to make deals with banks and be the infrastructure and the banking thing. I couldn't give us rats fat of what infrastructure, software, what databases banks use in the back end. That's why I've never been interested in it. But what I don't like is that they tried to play ball with the SEC. First thing they do is go and find them. The other project is like what were they called? It was like a YouTube equivalent trying to do decentralized YouTube. Chat can help me out. I forgot the name of it. But the SEC took them as well and started to basically took down the entire project, which was terrible because YouTube needs competition. Think of these things, whatever you think of, maybe you don't like them because you're a bit quite maxi and you don't like anything else. But fundamentally, some projects are legitimately trying to change things or build infrastructure. The SEC was just going after them. Then these meme coins and just other projects that just didn't care. They didn't care about obvious rug pools and things like that. So the president releasing this really opens the door for America, which is the biggest market in the world, forward thinking technologically advanced market that is willing to innovate. And so I'm hopeful that we will see innovation now not being scared of the giant clownish hammer of Gary Gensler coming down on him and being able to actually build cool stuff. Because when I talk about cool stuff, I also mean scaling because we need to scale these things properly. We need to scale Bitcoin. We need to scale Ethereum. And I think everyone's just got this constant fear behind them of Gary Gensler's clown hammer. But now that he's gone and the president has launched his own nonsense coin, what can they possibly say? So yeah, I think it's a good thing even though it's a meme coin. It's like any meme coin, they're going to be a bunch of people in the back end that are going to sell on the crowds. Nothing, nothing non-expectant there. Well, I definitely think there's a giant clown here at Josh, but I don't think it's Gary Gensler. Just because the SEC doesn't care enough about rug pulls or doesn't price for you at them, it's not a reason to make one. It's not that it doesn't make any sense. But overall with this whole Trump coin thing, I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised at all. I've been saying it on this show. He'll make his own coin and boom, he made his own coin. This is the standard path of new Bitcoiners who aren't really Bitcoiners. They get into Bitcoin and they say, wow, Bitcoin's really cool. Then they say, well, it's too expensive. I can't buy it. I can't catch up. I'm not the early Bitcoiner. So what am I going to do? I'm going to make my own coin. This just in Josh, the Griff continues after they dump that $30 to $40 million, they launched Melania coin. It's only a matter of time before Don Jr. coin, Ivanka coin, Eric coin, Baron coin, maybe Trump, they're saying maybe he could do one a week. You could do like big feeling coin or fight, fight, fight coin or just take the words themselves from his speeches. There's all kinds of options here of horrible things that he could do. And again, it would be a lot better if he wasn't here. It's just him and the whole market. You can just take the whole market and doing it doesn't mean you should do it. There are right and wrongs here, Josh, that the people who are going to hurt from it, they're not our audience, right? Our audience is either buying it early and dumping it or they're going to ignore it entirely. It's his audience that's going to buy it and they're going to buy it because they think that he's putting value into it and that he's blessing it. But that pre-mind, 80% pre-mind, 20% on the market means that you can just go in and take the money. You could capture the whole thing of the market whenever you feel like it. I'm not even saying it's going to be him. He's not running the thing. But whoever this computer company that's owned by his irrevocable trust that is owned by this and this and that one, when they decide they've filled the coffers enough and they pull the big switch, all of his people fall down. So it's a very negative thing he's doing to his people here, even if it takes a long time. Now there's going to be other coins and there's going to be this isn't the end. This is the beginning. But it is so much worse when you're doing it as the presidency because there's actually a reason that you would want to give him money and there are laws, not very strong ones with citizens united and etc. But there are a volume of clauses in the constitution where it says you're not supposed to have a foreign government just give you money. But with this Trump coin, similar to when he had troubles with his casino and his father went to his casino and bought a million dollars worth of chips and took them away, thus giving the casino a million dollar gift in the same way you could buy a million dollars or a billion dollars of Trump coin and then just take the coins away with no intent to sell them and you've essentially given him a billion dollars. Which as this normal private citizen, fine, great, do it. As the president of the United States, there's specific rules governing that position and it kind of violates them. Josh, similar to the Ross Oberg thing where I said it looks like they paid to get him out of prison this system with the Trump coin looks like a way for other countries or powerful governments or whoever it is to pay and then as it seems to get what they want that the slot machine is paying off. I guess not just, well think about doing it. It actually seems like the slot machine is directly paying off when you put the money in. I'm pretty sure there's less transparent ways of giving people, giving politicians money than billions of dollars. I'm not going to block this name. Billions of dollars can be laundered through this, have already been questionably laundered through this. We don't know where the money came from, which is again the power of crypto, the reason we talk about it, the reason it's so world changing. But still, if you slow down a bit, you're like not just a way to bribe someone with a hundred thousand dollars or a million dollars. This is a way to bribe someone with billions of dollars. I don't buy it, but yeah, I mean, the thing is we are living in a time now with permissionless things. I mean, it just is what it is. And the idea of tokenizing a trend is there already. And yeah, like you said, there is definitely a question whether politicians should be allowed to do this. And I'm sure if Elizabeth Warren did the same, we'd all be up in arms. So, you know, it's definitely a conversation to be had. But fundamentally, I like the idea of tokenizing, like of everything, just everything being tradable. I think it's really interesting. And the problem comes with tokenomics and people having large hordes and dumping it, Huck tour and Trump and all of these things. But I think this comes with the evolution of concepts where people, the market starts to learn, okay, well, next time, I'm not going to buy it. Like I want the only token I'm going to buy is something that has a total transparency of how many are available to someone like all the people that got burnt by Huck tour. A probably never going to buy tickets. There, I'm not sure if people are asking basic token economics questions at this point. As the next topic shows, they're seeing it as a Trump collectible. They're saying themselves as people who collect Trump collectibles. So I think it's a straight line. I also think they think that it's going to go up. I think that there's a monetary return expected, which is a bigger problem. Well, maybe there is. I mean, it could have different capital gains. I mean, say what you want about Trump. He's an absolute icon of our generation. He has been since the 80s. And so that brand and being a collectible, absolutely. If you've got the original one of the original Trumps, there could be so I don't have any. I don't buy meme coins. But that could happen. I mean, I bought one meme coin once from a friend's project. But you know, and I've got the NF some NFTs, which are practically the same thing except for non-fungible. But yeah, I mean, it's super fascinating. On a totally remove myself from the politics, it's super fascinating. And I think we live in one of the most interesting times there is. Well, I agree, Josh. It would be interesting to tokenize everything and have these trading markets and have everything going up and down. Unfortunately, there are the large outside players who could come in and make this not just a popularity contest, but either a scam or a way for them to pump it and then dump it. Or like I'm saying, a way to bribe a powerful presidential figure who seems to be hanging off on the bribes. So that the problem with a bribe is always, how do I get the powerful person to give me, you know, what they're supposed to for this bribe. But if he's actually doing that, and you can just show him a receipt, hey, here's the billion dollars that we sent to you. The interesting thing I really think too, Josh, I'd agree. Warren should do a coin, AOC, Bernie Sanders, all of these people, if they have the vision that if they had a hundred million dollars, and they could use that to do a think tank and to hire a bunch of people and to promote their causes, no matter who you are, no matter what, agency you are, red cross, pro life, anti life, whatever your agency is, pro choice, sorry, I have that up. You know, that you should be making your own coin, right? But it's interesting to see it be done by politicians first who have such stringent rules about how they actually do it. Because if this was like David Bowie, we'd be like, what's David Bowie going to do with an extra 19 billion dollars? Well, buy bigger guitars, buy bigger amplifiers, write better music, whatever. David Bowie seems to have, would have had artistic goals to have a large politician raise this kind of money. It's just very different. It's just not music. Yeah, but it's very interesting. Specifically Trump. I don't, like, it's not like he needs that money. He's so, he's so well, he's the most famous person in the world, even for any one talking point, he could command millions of dollars to talk somewhere. So 40 million dollars is, I think there's a team behind it, behind this, like a track forms, there aren't being a million dollars. The whole market thing is 10 billion. It's a market cap, but what they took out was 40 million. So 40 million. And so, you know, a market cap isn't truth. Like we've talked about before, you can make a billion tokens, sell one for one dollar. It's not worth 40 billion, you know, one billion dollars. Previously, we didn't have the potential of nation states investing in, say, Hock Tua coin. If a nation state wanted to say back, Trump coin and say it's never going to go half million dollars because we're putting half million dollars in or whatever, that money would stay there. If they want to continuously buy and keep a price, although it would be expensive, as we know, market making and so forth to keep a price, large nation states could play with these things now. It's a completely different, not just rich bitcoins or rich NFT guys or rich meme coin guys or whatever these fart coin fellows are. It's not just a roaring kitty, right? It's roaring kitty Saudi Arabia. It's roaring kitty North Korea, roaring kitty China. I mean, Russia, whoever wants to buy this or any other meme coin, they could buy a OC coin, whatever it is. It's not a political thing, like you said, Josh, it's a brave new exciting world. And I think we're going to talk about this more. But let us know in the comments what you think about this. Give us a thumbs up or talking about both sides of politics here. And we're letting Josh be heard. But we got to keep moving. Check out worldcryptonetwork.com where it looks like pictures of me on short videos. Yes, we've got shorts on worldcryptonetwork.com and on YouTube. So check out our shorts. It's like this show, but shorter as if your attention span couldn't handle a large show like this. Moving on to issue three SEC officially rescinds SAB121, which prevented banks from custodying Bitcoin. Once again, the enemy of our enemy is our enemy is our friend. More success for the political bit corners and David Bailey. They said this was coming. They claimed it was in the stack of executive orders along with the Ross Obrich pardon. And here it is. Banks can buy Bitcoin. Josh, this is the libertarian revolution we've always dreamed of. The banks are now free. Let freedom ring for the banks to finally do what we told everyone else to do 10 years ago. What do you think about the bank? Obviously another victory for David Bailey in the political bit corners. Josh. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what happens when a bank gets hacked because banks get hacked all the time. They get hacked all the time. It's just you don't know about it. They cover it up. Votes get broken into all the time. They don't tell you about it. Whole blocks on these. Maybe they put the IT guy in charge and he runs off with the keys or his girlfriend or somebody else had their password. I didn't have the password. Somebody had the password. Yeah, we in fact, it gets covered up so much even so when we were running Voltoro, a competitor of ours who was a vaulting facility, they got their vault got broken into. It was a full professional outfit that did it and it was all covered up to the point where the whole suburb suddenly had a power outage. The criminals did that to basically cut off any communication to the alarm system for the vaulting facility. They got into the place. They blew off the door and everyone in the suburb felt a bim. All right. They were what's that. Then the criminals got some loot that was in the vault and jumped off. The next day, some of the newspapers are a little bit suspect. They went sniffing around the vaulting facility and the vaulting facility had to sneak out this vault door under a blanket, basically huge blanket, and tried to get rid of people from seeing it. They managed to get away with covering it up that it didn't happen. I found out because I've got some inside of knowledge that it happened. But none of the newspapers managed to get hold of the fact that there was some people that were speculated in the newspaper, but they couldn't define it. So they didn't want to get sued. But yeah. So it does happen and it gets covered up. So when these banks get Bitcoin stolen, it's harder to cover up because it's all on chain. And some people will see a huge drain go happen. So I think this is really good for Coinbase, probably more because they know what they're doing with custodianning this stuff. We talked about it before. There's thousands and thousands of years of humans holding physical things. And we're very good at that. Holding digital things, not so much. We've got like 15 years of really that. And it's gotten better, but it's still very, very difficult. So banks aren't very good at that. And we'll see what happens. We'll see what happens. I'll be watching for the first big bank hack. Well, we always say that it's never too late to buy your first Bitcoin or first zero point zero zero one Bitcoin or whatever. But if you're getting in after the banks, it's pretty late. It's pretty late in the game for you to just be getting into Bitcoin now that Bitcoin, the idea is so big that banks had this rule changed or libertarians had this rule changed or Bitcoiners had this rule changed. I guess it benefits Bit Corners because if the banks buy a bunch of Bitcoin, the price will go up. So in that way, it's good for Bit Corners. As far as the banks being our newest greatest fans and friends, they don't seem that into actually using Bitcoin, sending it around. They like to hold it in big vaults and just kind of capture it, which is not really the Bitcoin spirit as we've seen with others. So, but again, it seems very much like a quid pro quo as if they paid for something and then they got something. So I'm very excited for them that they got something politics is not usually so directly transactional. So it's very strange. But with this one as opposed to the Ross one, maybe Trump really does believe in the freedom of banks and wants to open up their rights and allow them this new freedom so I could see him ideologically lining up with this. Of course, he does also owe the banks a lot of money. Let's not forget that. Josh, anything more on the SEC allowing the banks to hold Bitcoin and of course not just Bitcoin, but crypto, I'm sure. Sure, it's crypto. I'd like to shout out to the chat who bring up some good points. Banks can legally, fractionally reserve stuff. I don't know if this is, I don't know if that is just for US dollars or I don't think they can do that with custodianing. Let's say, I'm pretty sure it would be like a Bayley Bay Law contract that they would have when custodian, because these are almost like holding physical stuff. So for instance, if I deposit gold into a bank, they can't fractionally reserve that right now. They have to have my gold there. Depending on the contract type, if it's a Bayley Bay Law contract, of course, if it's a bunch of ETFs, I don't know what they do there. It's all nonsense. So that's interesting that's from the recycling guy. That's also a fair point, Josh. At this point of time, we've got to think a little bit differently. The banks could just hold the ETFs. They could call it holding Bitcoin. They don't have as much risk with the keys. It's a lot similar to a bank holding stocks, which I'm sure they must do. Don't have the details. If that new buy. Invest in Apple stock, is that a thing where the banks are just like, I feel like technology. I guess they're backing things. They're backing mutual funds. They're backing investment vehicles. I mean, I don't back the company directly if the money company needs money. I don't know. We're deep into banks at this point. Yeah, those banks. Man, who gives a shit what banks could do? Make sure you hold your own crypto, get yourself a treasurer, and stay away from those banks. Or you can use the banks just to do an in-person trade, use their camera and their security. That's a lot of work. They're safe deposit boxes to keep your special documents in. Or have a accident. There's all kinds of options out there. But let's keep Josh. We got one more issue. Issue four, White House cryptozzar, David Sachs of PayPal fame, says that NFTs and mean coins are collectibles. He said that they are collectibles on Thursday reframing them as cultural assets. Previously, people had tried to say that NFTs, which work and are clearly collectibles, were securities. And that when you made them, you had to follow the rules as if you'd made an Apple stock, for example. Now it is different. But as it says there, Josh, it's also different with mean coins. I'll take this one first, I guess. Thomas Hunt, what do you think? Obviously, I'm excited that NFTs are collectibles when we made our own blockchain collectibles. We called them collectibles and put it in the name because we didn't want to make securities have never wanted to make a security always made collectibles. If they go up in value, I don't know if they go down in value. I don't know. It's a collectible. It's worth what someone will pay you for it. So with the NFT side of that, I've always seen them as baseball cards. You know, same thing is with baseball cards or fine art or whatever. People might put money through them. They might inflate the value. They might corrupt the market. There's all kinds of things that I as a producer would not know about, but it's great to see the people who made NFTs just made collectibles. The other half of that, I'm not so sure about with the mean coin things. To me, it does make a big difference. You put a piece of art on it. You put a limited number on it. Maybe not even a limited number. Maybe you could grow them more in the future, whatever, but still having that art ties it to that piece makes it kind of an ownership proposition there. Josh, what do you think about this idea that mean coins, too, could be collectibles? Yeah, I mean, they are. Then obviously not money. They're not any of that. And they're a bet. They're basically a bet on a trend, a meme, an idea. They're definitely not a security. Fundamentally, I think, security's laws need to be totally destroyed and rethought of if that. Because these are ideas that started in 1929, 1930, 33, 34. It's really like fitting a square into a circle. They'll build for a different time. We have this new stuff. And it's all, think of it what you will. If they're shit coins, if they're just don't buy them. But the fact is that these ideas are available. And to throw everything through this security's acts is just a terrible idea. And so I think collectibles is the right. I don't know. I didn't know that that was a legal term collectible, but I guess it is. But I think it's a good step in the right direction. Fundamentally, people need to be educated. I think that's how you stop people from losing vast amounts of money is education. It's the only way because, man, I mean, this is why I don't buy meme coins. I'll stand up for them. But because I just think it's a free market, free market should, you know, trade things. But I just don't like the idea of buying them myself personally. And I think most people should come to the same conclusion. It is. My dog, by the way, I just wanted to say that said let your dog in. And if I let him in, he'll just want to go out back outside. You figured out, but it's interesting the way this turned out, Josh, we've been talking about it so long now. When we originally talked about an andreous had the ideas and he said things like, it'll be Joey Cohen and they'll be Freddie Cohen and Tommy Cohen and they'll all be on the playground and every kid will have their own coin. We thought of it more as a bottom up, democratizing kind of like everyone can have their coin. Maybe somebody needs to go to college they could mint some coins. Somebody has hard times, they could mint some more coins. These kind of options, more of a permanent human individual coin, which might still happen and is still an interesting idea. But what we've seen instead is a top down coin. We've seen the Iggy Ezelia mother coin, the Andrew Tate father coin, the Trump coin, the Melania coin. Obviously, I think we're going to see more of those more of Mariah Carey coin, David Bowie coin, whatever it is, fart coin. So it's interesting that it came from the top, not the bottom, right Josh? No, I don't know. I don't buy that. I think you've you've specifically chosen the big names, but I think the idea of meme coins came from tiny, the doge from and then from their like little tiny ideas and memes and pictures and fun things, which were just ideas. Oh, look, you know, Star Wars kid released a new video, there's a new Star Wars kid coin. And instead of us just sharing memes, we're sharing in the profit of how memeable this thing is. Like, is this going to explode as an idea? I think the concept of investing in your own token, I'm sorry, releasing your own personal token is going to be huge because, you know, they won't have massive market caps, but I think this is this is a really big thing that will happen. Like you said, you don't know if it'll happen, but I top down, I don't think it was top down. I think it was bottom up and just the top of gotten wind of it now. As same with the VCs with the ICOs, right? The ICOs were, oh, now we don't need VCs. Fantastic. What happened? Well, the VCs stepped in, bought up all the tokens first and then dumped it on retail. So it still happened. It's still the ICOs was still bottom bottom up to start with. It is interesting, Josh. I think we could go back to like the creation of companies and things where you have like people rallying around Steve and Waz in the garage and giving them money. That was one way of doing it. Then like you say, doing the startups, doing the ICOs, another way of doing it. Then people gathering around ideas like Doge and saying that Doge has value and that that's their meme. That's their idea, which is so interesting because the idea itself was undervalued by its creators. The creators of Doge had no idea that it would become what it became today, which through some luck and some Elon Musk. It's just a classic internet meme. I don't know what else, but it's such a success now. I don't know that they would have seen that. But yeah, if we link all of those together and then go up to Trump coin, then I think you're right. It has come and GME as well. The game stop rallying around, game stop bringing up its value and this individual human personal finance, roaring up over this idea of just a company's valued because of its price to index ratio or they sold a thousand widgets last year or whatever it is, but to actually say we like game stop, we value it in the same way. If enough people like Trump coin, which is really hard to do against an 80% pre-mind, maybe it becomes a thing. Maybe it's like Doge and in 20 years, people are still trading Trump coin, although I think it'll still be pennies. But by the way, how can it be a pre-mind? Isn't it just a thing created on pump.fun on Solana? So it's just it's a 100% pre-mind and then they sell it into the markets, isn't it? I suppose it's just that they're generating market now with 20% and that they're holding 80% back. So if you go into the market and you assume that what you're buying now is a full share, you're actually buying a 20% share and there's always a possibility of the entire market being flooded by an entire new 20% which would double the market, then another 20% and another 20% it's an incredible and to call it a pre-mind, yeah, it's not a technical thing but if it's not binding or in the in the idea. Yeah. By the way, shout out to Glenn T, who said, Fartcoin definitely came from the bottom up, I think. Yeah. So, jokes. We've got one more issue today, issue five and this one's a little reaction towards one of the crypto executive orders because there has been a third major crypto executive order, freeing Ross Ulbrich, allowing the banks to buy Bitcoin and crypto of course, unfortunately, whatever and a third executive order that has a lot of different issues in it and again, remember executive orders are not the standard way in which the United States government does business. It used to be that a bill becomes a law by being introduced in the house, passing the house, being debated and introduced a similar version in the Senate coming together in a conference agreement, then having the president sign the bill and the bill becoming a law. This executive orders, which has been used to start every major war in the past 50 to 100 years, is now being used as many feared forming the imperial presidency where the president like a king on the first day signed a lot of things. So, some of them are laws, some of them are proclamations, some of them have been challenged in the courts and seem to be unconstitutional, which will be unsuccessful, but apparently you can do anything with executive orders and the latest executive order claims to ban CBDCs, protect self-custody and mining, provide regulatory clarity and provide for a world or a US crypto reserve, again not a Bitcoin reserve, the Maximists crying thousands of tears. As it says here, the executive order forms a working group to study these things, but does not impose legally binding rules. It only instructs federal agencies if any are still open to review and recommend actions. So, progress certainly forward moving, but not a cure all-end really shouldn't be. We shouldn't have giant laws like a Bitcoin reserve passed by one person or one branch of government. The system is a shared branch system, but that's not to say that they couldn't just pass that they were Republicans control the House and the Senate. Josh, what do you think about this working group to study these things, but again, complete payoff for the promises they got what they paid for pretty much. Yeah, executive orders are an efficient way of doing things, but there's no checks and balances. It is what it is, the thing is with executive orders. You mentioned it there, they're not law. Like you said before, Josh, before the show, any executive order put down by this president could theoretically be overturned by a future president and several of the things that he did write down overturned other executive orders. Some even going back to 1968 and Lyndon Baines Johnson. Go ahead, Josh. Yeah, exactly. So, right now, I think there are steps to move some of the major ones into law. So that there is that it can't just be easily removed by the next president, but that's also possible. Yeah, you're right. You want in a democracy, you do want people on both sides duking it out and discussing things for a while. This president got a strong mandate by the the amount of votes. But in one way, I really like the fact that things are just getting done, boom, boom, boom, because things just move way too slowly in governments in general. Globally, this isn't just an American thing. It's way worse actually in the EU. European is shockingly slow. So, yeah, but I don't want to bore Sano Gen with more political talk. Well, it is designed to be a deliberative process where both sides put their input in and they form a compromise on bills. As I said, even just the House and the Senate working together can have different values. If you come from a large area like a senator, if you come from a small area like a House member, but to have one person and one branch deciding unilaterally with a pen is a different form of government than we used to have, but it seems to be what we have now. So we will keep a track of these things. We'll see how it goes. But like we've said here, incredible success for the political bit-coiners, bit-coiners of the year. So without doubt, whether I agree or not. We're running out of time, Josh Tagalog. Do you have a prediction or a story of the week, anything else that we didn't mention? Go ahead. We have International DeFi Day 2025 coming up. We have some really great speakers. It's a non-profit community-driven event. If you go to defideday.org, you can register there. I've been acclimatizing to the time because I'm hosting that. It starts at 4 o'clock in the morning, my time. I've been slowly every day getting up 10 minutes earlier. Now I'm up to 5am. My goal is to get to 3am. I've got to shift it by half an hour tomorrow. I'm going to get half an hour earlier every night from here on in just to acclimatize myself. My brain just isn't mush on the day. But it is happening on the 30th of this month. I'm really excited. We've got some of the biggest names in decentralized finance. Obviously, Bitcoin doesn't have anybody that can be on the show. But it's more on the Ethereum side. We have Chainlink and a lot of the big people building actual value on these things. Yeah, come along. Check it out. See what's up for this year. That sounds like a great program, Josh. Make sure to tweet it out. I'll be sure to retweet that. Sounds like great stuff from International DeFi Day. Really cool. Not enough much to say this week. Obviously, it's been an incredible week for Bitcoin and an incredible week for politics. Many, many more executive orders than the ones we talked about here were signed. Incredibly different. Like Josh said, our government usually moves very slowly this week. For what it is, it moved very quickly. I don't know which one of these things are legal or not legal. I assume obviously the Ross one is a pardon. It's set. It's done. So congratulations to Ross and his family for that. Congratulations to David Bailey, the political Bitcoiners. Also, that just the free Ross movement in general, it was an impossible task. There was no reason to believe that it would happen in our lifetimes. Like I said, personally, I thought when the drug war ends, which I still hope and think that will happen, that he would be freed and that he would be celebrated. It's a civil disobedient similar to Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King. But in the time period, they were hated. In the time period now, Ross is hated and not to say that it's the same or equal or whatever, they obviously different situations. But in the same way, it's an act of political disobedience. And that's what I think we've seen freed today. And that's what I hope he talks about in the future. Why he did it and what he believes and what he believes about marketplaces. And that hopefully that will be his direction. I don't know. I think we've seen so many Bitcoiners kind of become heroes and then not become heroes. So I don't know if we're going to get that from Ross or what direction he's going to be led in or that kind of thing. So it's a very interesting, continuing story with what he does next, what he speaks next, what projects he joins. If he does do it and all colliding it far away from it all. To be honest, like that, that's pretty intense what he's gone through. And the people that I know that have been to prison because of crypto through like, you know, people of people, they just stay away from it all afterwards. They just very damaged from it all. So they just I hope so. But our previous example here is kind of Charlie Shrem, who was put in prison for crypto was there many years didn't receive a pardon, but came out and rejoined the industry in a variety of ways. Some successful, some not successful, some people like some people don't like. And I think unfortunately, given the way that he got out, I think he owes many favors. And I think that he's kind of compelled at least at the next, whatever big Bitcoin conference it is. I think it might be the one here in Vegas even. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that he speaks. And I don't know what he's going to say. I agree, he's been very traumatized. It's an amazing thing. Horrible thing he's gone through. But and he also did a lot of really risky things. He really pushed the omplope in applying his political beliefs to his software. And that affects society in a large way. A lot more than it would if he wrote a book or was a local person or whatever. Because of software, because of technology, because of internet, he had an incredibly large impact for what he believed. Yeah. And it's gone on like for anyone who thinks, he should be in prison for life. What you think it stopped anything? You think that stopped anything? There are way worse and bigger sites now and far more of them than there was when he. And I've seen people try to say that he inspired the whole dark web. And I'm sure he turned a lot of people on. But the idea was always there in general economically, as we've talked about these things, may I if there is demand for a thing there will be supply to say this is to not favor the thing, but to just acknowledge markets exist, market pressure. And if he hadn't built this website, somebody else would have built this website and it would have been worse. And then like Josh said, there are worse ones now. But I think we're going to be talking about a lot more. It's an interesting thing might be time to go back, revisit some of those world crypto network interviews we did with the free Ross people. Go check out that movie Silk Road. It's a little dramatized and over the top and a lot of ways focuses on the FBI agents far too much, especially given that now we know they were stealing from Ross, which I think is covering the film. But I don't think that they're really pillory. They're not really taken down. They're kind of still who's the hero? This guy nobody's the hero. Everybody's not a hero kind of thing. But still it's out there and yeah, what Josh? Trump's the hero for releasing him. Well, I don't I think Trump is the hero is another thing. I do think we're in kind of a Rick and Morty virtual reality situation where Trump is the one wearing the goggles and the rest of us are NPCs in his game. But in that same vein of worlds within worlds and worlds underneath worlds, I just want to say a fond farewell to David Lynch. He was a great filmmaker. He'd be challenging films. He made difficult films. They're hard to watch. They're scary. It might even be called Lynchy and horror. But whenever you rented a Lynch film from the video store, you always got an incredible ride, thoughtful experience, such a great artist as well, sharing how he did it, sharing how he meditated, sharing in his book about what he did to be creative. I watched a three hour master class with him recently on YouTube and just seeming breakdown how to be a filmmaker trying to share his knowledge with future generations. And if you haven't checked out his films or Twin Peaks or Twin Peaks season three, which was actually really cool on showtime and kind of caps the whole thing off and gives it some kind of a sensible narrative if you could call it that. But yeah, just a great, great filmmaker, interesting guy. Josh, anything you want to say about David Lynch? I know you're into films and filmmaking. Yeah, I definitely loved Twin Peaks. That was one of one I've seen at multiple times on big packets of VHS cassettes. Because it's the whole season. Great stuff. It's funny because watching it now, the theme song just gets a little bit on your nerves, whereas it never used to back in the day, but I think our minds are so used to change and having different stuff now, having the same theme song going for on every scene. And also said that Twin Peaks is a revolutionary not just in being surreal or challenging or interesting television, artistic television, but it had this idea too of telling one big story connected by episodes rather than having like a sitcom where everything resets back to the beginning and nothing ever goes forward. This kind of, you know, lynchy and idea of this long forum television, which obviously is a risk, right? Because the audience can't get into Twin Peaks in episode seven. They have to go back at the time. They didn't have Tivo. They didn't have DVR or streaming or all these things. They couldn't go back. So from a network perspective, if you didn't capture the whole audience, you're running this thing that no one's going to want to watch. It's practically a soap opera in prime time. But now that's every single TV show, every single Netflix show, every single thing you'd never would think about starting on episode seven. But what a big change in media that we've had as well going from television to streaming and so forth. Yeah. There's some films I just couldn't stand. I just left Mahol and Drive. I was just like, why did I even watch that? It just made zero sense to me. I didn't want to get all artsy farting. Oh, but this represents the Arkham Bebodied. I wanted a little bit more coherency in that story. So, but yeah, definitely an interesting case, Josh, where it was supposed to be an ABC television show and that each one of those kind of little stories about the girl. It's been a long time since I watched it. But it's kind of like a girl comes to Hollywood. And like in one version, she becomes a star in one version. She's a lesbian lover in another version. She gets killed by a bus. You know, I mean, it's just all these different stories. I think that it was supposed to be a TV show. And then they f-ed him over a little. They didn't put it out. And he kind of recapped it as a movie. So, I agree with what you're saying, but there's a little background there. Go ahead. Obviously. Interesting. Yeah. Good. Good stuff. I didn't know he died. So, yeah. Rest in peace. It's been a little as sad as it's been. It's been a kind of a renaissance on Twitter, where people used to go to Twitter and talk about kind of artistic things and things we all agree with, like David Bowie or whatever it is. And for whatever reason, every kind of person at least that I'm connected to on Twitter was like, yeah, those David Lynch films were crazy. I like that guy. That was he took us some crazy places. And another thing I saw recently is thinking about he was talking about the dissolves in Blue Velvet and all those other dissolves. It's so easy now to slap a clip and another clip into Final Cut Pro and put a dissolve in there and to slide and to time it. They did all that with film projectors. And he said an obstacle printer. And they showed a picture of it and it looked like a camera projecting onto another camera with another thing. And he said he had to time it out precisely. Everything had to be like one, two, three dissolve, one, two, three dissolve. Yeah. You know, amazing transition in filmmaking technology and just technology in general that we've lived through going from the analog era of film to the digital era of easy to make film. Well, yeah. And I mean, I remember maybe date me a little bit apart from my grey beard is that that back in the day, the amounts of cuts were a lot less. So you didn't have this sort of ADD effect on children. Whereas I couldn't watch like manga, for instance, they had a lot faster cuts. And I couldn't watch it because I couldn't keep up. My brain wasn't used to this many and but now I am because I've become used to it. And now I can easily keep up with that. But I remember firstly, and I see definitely with my my young daughter, her mood change when she watches modern cartoons that have a lot of cuts. And because of the technology, they had to cut film by hand. And if she watches something from and that's why we like to show her more older stuff because the cuts are slower and she doesn't finish watching it and have like, you know, it doesn't turn into a monster after watching it. So this is an interesting side effect, I think of technology is that the fast pace blah, blah, blah, blah, cuts more than, you know, a cut every second and stuff like that has on the brain. And of course, Lynch famously protested against people watching movies on iPhones. He said that the screens were too small and he was defending the cinematic experience and it was great during the master class. I don't want to mock him or date him or anything here, but he said, if you want to be a filmmaker, he's like, the first thing you got to do is get a camera. And in my mind, I was like, what my iPhone is the best camera I have. And it pretty much is for most other people. But what a treasure, what a great man, what amazing films. I didn't know him or anything, but what an artist, David Lynch at 79. So thanks to everybody for joining us. Thanks for giving us a thumbs up and join us in the chat and sticking through our film discussion at the end of our political discussion that's supposed to be a Bitcoin discussion. Hopefully we'll be back on Bitcoin next week. But who knows like it said in the chat, Bitcoin and politics are hopelessly intertwined now. We can never separate the two, especially if they keep passing executive orders about crypto and Bitcoin. We're going to have to keep talking about them. So thanks so much for joining us. Until next time, bye.