#443 — The Bitcoin Group #443 - Libra Rugged! - DecaBull? - Jack Satoshi - BitMemeCoin

The Bitcoin Group, the American Original, for over the last ten years, the sharpest citoties, the best Bitcoin, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Josh Shigalla from thestander.io. The early bird makes love to the worm. Ben Arck from LNBits. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network, moving on to issue one. Issue one, the price of Bitcoin is down. And maybe we know why. That's right, we've got breaking news because everything important happens on Friday. Buybit Exchange hacked over $1.4 billion in Ethereum related tokens drained. A hacker took control of an Ethereum cold wallet on the buybit exchange on February 21st, allegedly stealing over $1.4 billion in funds in the process. It's been announced on Twitter saying that if any team can help track the stolen funds, it'd be appreciated. They also say that the hacker can't sell the Ethereum for USDC or USDT because it'll get frozen by circle or tether. So this might cause $1.46 billion selling pressure from Ethereum for buybit to cover the customer Ethereum. They'd have to buy 1.46. So the price might actually go up. Josh Shigalla, what do you think about the buybit hack and the breaking news that always seems to happen on Friday? You know, I'm always worried when exchanges offer everything cheap, cheap, cheap, free this, free that $5,000 credits. If you join now, you get $3,000, $5,000, yadda, yadda, yadda, because we ran an exchange for many years and it's bloody tough. You're getting cut, you're a massive honey pot. You're always getting looked at. Now, a so-called cold wallet seems like they would know who the perpetrator is. It's the uncle. That's the thing. It's someone close to you. Because to get to the cold wallet, if it's truly cold, you need physical access, so I don't buy that they had it cold. This is always the trick of running an exchange. You don't want customers to... Yeah, fair. Why is it taking so long? Because there's this anxiety when you hit withdrawal and it takes 10 minutes. It takes an hour. It takes a day. The longer that period is directly correlated with the amount of anxiety and feedback your customer service reps will get. To lower that, you want to have cold wallets not so cold, slightly look warm. So it's easier to access large swaths when you're making moves. Generally speaking, I don't believe that this was a cold wallet. They probably got lazy and got sick of doing moving stuff off of a cold wallet into a hot wallet. I think they probably had something that was a little bit more lukewarm. There's two scenarios. Lukewarm wallet. That was then an international perpetrator who they don't know or truly cold wallet and they know who the heck it is. But one point, it's also weird that this guy is so greedy that they took everything out of the... It's so much rather than just skimming a couple of mill and just getting out of it. These hackers, if they took a couple of mill, buy a bit would probably just shut up about it and not say it because their reputation hits going to be massive. The hacker would have been pretty as sitting on two mill. Instead, he's going to be hunted until the rest of the time. We're going to follow these coins to the rest of the time. They'll be frozen. It'll be impossible to move. It causes chaos in the whole market. So, that's obvious. Yucky. This is stupid. But yeah, that's my take. I know it sounds absurd, but I'm still excited that there was $1.4 billion in a cold wallet. I know I don't understand how many millions of dollars go through an exchange like buy-bit. I don't even think I have an account there. I don't know it at all, but still $1.4 billion actively being traded on your system, the idea that you might need to withdraw that or deposit it. That's the part that I'm having trouble with. And, Ark, what do you think about the hack and the size of the hack? Like Josh noted. That's the thing which is really interesting. Is the kind of liquidity which goes through an exchange like buy-bit? Is it as high as $1.4 billion? Is the need to have that in case someone does some big facts and they can't withdraw it? It must be greater than that even if they're having that in the cold wallet. Well, I mean, if it's, if it's, I mean, it can't be a cold wallet if someone's able to steal it. So, like Josh was saying, it's probably a lukewarm wallet. I did hear that maybe there was something they did with some smart contracty things, then when it went into the cold wallet, the person actually had access to it and they're able to pull off even though it was on the cold wallet, I guess. But I didn't really understand how the Ethereum stuff works. But, yeah, to me, and it wasn't in Bitcoin land, the cold wallet, people can't access your funds unless they've got your keys or your seed. And then they take it from you and you go to your cold wallet and it's gone. You have the, you know, the cleanly you can't trust them. But to have that much money available to a hacker if they're just hacking into your system, I guess the only reason they would do that was ever been there's two reasons either they're incredibly complacent and they shouldn't be running an exchange or they've got huge amounts of liquidity going through their exchange. I think literally you need to have that accessible like Josh said for fulfilling orders, which is quite a spectacular amount of money for an exchange which I, you know, I don't really, I don't really hear about very often. So, yeah, though, it's, the amazing thing is that by bit will probably just continue to operate, despite this hack. And then the questionable thing for me looking at it from kind of to a Bitcoin lands, I suppose, is how can you stop someone from spending that money? Surely if they've got the Ethereum, they can just sell it for whatever. They don't have to go through Tether and like if they want to get the, you know, trade it on some exchange platform, but they can sell the Ethereum to somebody else and or mix it or do whatever people do. Like, is it, is it possible to censor a transaction and Ethereum transaction and not allow them to spend those coins? I don't think it is. And not especially the main thing people are mad about Ethereum is they rolled back the chain that one time. So there is a precedent if the hack is large enough, the size of the Dow hack, maybe I don't know who it is, will roll back Ethereum. But that seems really unlikely, especially as Ethereum has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. Still worth more billion dollars. They couldn't do it now. It's too big. There's too many players. But back when that happened, there wasn't, it was a tiny community that was, it's grown so massive now that it's impossible. But in probable one, let's say that. But in terms of freezing funds, because everything's smart contract based, so if you create a token on Ethereum, you're actually creating a smart contract with the rules of that token. And some tokens have free's ability built in. So Tether, not Tether, USDC does to regulate a client. It has, you know, they can freeze USDC and where you can't freeze ETH. And now is part of the problem, the size of this transaction, Josh, is that the guy, if he put a billion dollars through Tether, they'd find it, or is it just Tether and the sleuths are looking for this, even if he broke it down in hundreds, they'd still just find all hundreds. Yeah, it's just a matter of programmatically doing it. The real problem is if you, if you convert it to a different token, like let's say, I don't know, USDC, that's feasible, and then put that USDC straight into a market maker as liquidity, that then gets mixed with all the rest of the tokens in the contract. So it's hard to mix. Then you can still, they can still freeze it, but all of a sudden liquidity sort of breaks things, freezing stuff. And we've always said that about Bitcoin, like don't, don't whitelist them because it'll break things. There's, you know, you don't want sensorability. And even though it's the right thing to do in this sort of case, you need to be fungible, like above all else, for it's kind of to work, yeah, okay. Yeah, as soon as, you know, obviously the moral thing is to say, hey, these are stolen funds. We've got to stop the move. But the bad money is freezable money. Good money is totally fungible and fluid. And you've got to use law and police to police criminals rather than dealing with the money. Of course, that's not many people want to hear that, but that's just pure economics. But big, I mean, Bitcoin on that topic, I mean, Bitcoin, Ethereum and a bunch of these other coins, they're not fungible are they? Because they do have a record of ownership. In a way, which physical cash doesn't have, I mean, there's a whole bunch of like, press it in cases early on with cash, normal money, where somebody would claim that the money which someone stole from them and then went to somebody else and somebody else then belong to them and were worth less value and then like the courts in the UK, for example, truck out those cases because they understood that you couldn't have money which had different values. You only need to be fungible and you'll need to be able to exchange the money. It was something like that, something with gold or something. Yeah, it was a, it was a, a landmark case between a banker and a bank and it was some industrialist who sent bags of money in the post and marked all the bills on each one and then they all went missing and then years later they showed up at some bank and he took them to court for it and the bank then went to the, yeah, went to the bank said, no, we can't do this. And the court cited with the bank because if they'd said, no, no, you get the money, then no one would trust the pound anymore because if I get this pound from you, how do I know that three transactions ago, this wasn't part of the highest and it'll be stolen from me. And in the same way, like we at the standard, we're not putting USDC as a collateral type because imagine there's a big highest, what do they do? They take their USDC, they put it into the standard, they convert it to our stablecoin like because they borrow against that and now they've gotten off and we're stuck with the thing that's going to be frozen. So it starts to break stuff. So bad money starts to have friction within the system. Now we do use USDC but in a different way where people can swap into USDC so they can't choose which USDC they get, they swap into it off a DEX so that way that mitigates that but allowing people to directly deposit USDC isn't available and that's unfortunate because you're basically not using something that's very massive market cap. It's always been one of my, like what I thought would be that one of the best hacks against Bitcoin would be save somewhere like the US for example, we're to say, oh yeah, can you use Bitcoin but you can only use clean coins or we can verify the source, you can't just make coins and then you'll have these coins with different values and then you would create this fungibility attack and I thought that's kind of the best attack on Bitcoin and probably the reason that we do need privacy on base layer. I totally agree, totally agree, that's always been a big fear of mine. There was back in the day, there was a huge talk about that as one of the lawmakers wanted to push through the fact that there had to be white lists instead of black lists and man that was a pushback on the forum because they rejected the, I think that it was a technical soft fork to make that happen or something but maybe not, I can't remember but yeah, that was a big shit fight because of it. Well it does drastically change the way the currency works if you white list everyone or if you black list people later that are bad actors, it does change indeed. So it is just like you guys were saying, there's so many new ways to exit these days. It's not just selling the Ethereum or flipping it or as they're saying in the chat, some of the money might have been moved on to tornado cash. There could be $200 million already rolling around out there but they could also buy NFTs or already own the NFTs or nowadays they could buy these meme coins and already owe them and you wonder why you know, farc coin number seven is pumping and maybe these guys are using it for exit liquidity, the rest of the market comes in. Can you imagine being an investigator and now you have to investigate one of these meme coin launches and maybe it was fake, maybe the Taylor Swift fans aren't real but how do you prove they're not real? Yeah, I mean Ethereum is all account based so it's a lot harder to mix coins. You can mix them through smart contracts like that you zero knowledge proofs like tornado cash but it's still a lot harder and it's an interesting conundrum, it's an interesting conundrum. Yeah because big coins it is actually a lot easier to mix stuff. But if you buy for instance a meme coin, it's still in the same account like you buy this and you're swapping to a different one and you're just dealing with that same account you have to do something a bit more intense and this is the thing about like the vast amounts of money what they generally try to do is split them up into shit loads of accounts and then do different things with it and but because you know computers you can track everything programmatically and if the attacker fucks up one thing where they don't cover their tracks properly out of all the thousands so the more you split it up the harder it is to do but the least you split up the easier it is to track so the more you split up the easier it is to screw it up at some stage because people are watching this in perpetuity so you screw it up and then five years down the track you get lazy and you go and buy those shoes with the stolen funds and they're like aha we got him boom and they take him down so as they're saying in the chat reminding us of razzle con they could be buying stolen PlayStation 5's or Walmart gift cards but how are you going to get a billion dollars in PlayStation 5's I mean I know they're expensive but even so and there is one more option that Ben did list that could be the source or the cause of these funds obviously we have no insider information information here but allegedly there could have been an inside job there could have been too much money in this wallet by on-purpose mistake the keys could have been left out by on-purpose mistake we have no idea what's going on here maybe even the owner of the exchange wanted to make some money disappear tax-free who knows what's going on behind the electricity allegedly allegedly we have no information about this but yes it is let us know in the chat if you have any conspiracy theories or links to information about these conspiracy theories and we'll check it out but it's an exciting first issue and as they said though it is wrecking the rest of the market as well taking a look down the line Bitcoin down let's see go to the last 24 hours Bitcoin down 3.3% Ethereum down 4.3 ripple down 5.5 tether is holding Binance going down 2.2 Solana down 3.8 and USDC is holding as well so there's a lot of market action on this let's go to the exit question predicting against the predictor ball the source of all truth and knowledge in this universe given the fact that we have been hacked this morning and the market is up in a roar Josh Shagall will the price of Bitcoin be higher or lower this time next week I think we'll be higher again Ben arc higher or lower now we were higher until this hack Bitcoin was around 99,000 everyone was saying 100 100 and like nothing we dropped back to 95 which is where we are now but as of course the ball knows all if you're looking for trading advice this is it right here will the price of Bitcoin be higher or lower this time next week my sources say no the price will not be higher is say sources say no moving on to the next issue which used to be issue one but is now issue 2 crypto worth 99 million dollars why not just say 100 withdrawn from delay backed Libra token researchers say and they launched a new one of these pump fund altcoins recently it was called Libra and allegedly it was backed by the Argentinian government the famous Malay who wanted to destroy all currencies and was going to quote reform Argentina apparently supported this Libra token as he says here I didn't promote it I shared it after he shared it the price went up and when the price what goes up we all know what's happens the price fell right out after as one of the developers allegedly or someone rug pulled the coin selling more than 100 million dollars out of the Libra token Ben Ark what do you think about the latest pump and dump the Libra token this time including the Argentinian president didn't that the guy who like did the rug pull he said well I haven't rug pulled because I've still got the money I've just got I think it's 82 million I've just got 82 million dollars and there was a few like people from the community who gave a little bit of money back to but yes so I think that's why it went down to 80 million dollars so he said look I haven't haven't rug pulled you because I've got the money I've just I'm keeping it but he hasn't said what he's doing with the money it's like 26 year old goofball crypto and hopped he managed to get this melee guy to pump it I mean that's the best defense for any insider trading isn't it's just to say oh you know I was just saying it I didn't realize it had any impact on the price and cause any fluctuation or I did wonder when I first heard this story whether that Facebook coin had come back because remember there was a Facebook coin called Libra wasn't there for a while trying to work on some sort of like crypto coin Facebook were and I wondered whether the the people who did invest in this Libra thing they were associating it with that and thinking maybe it was related to some of maybe the you know Chinese grannies pumping the pump in the coin but yeah I mean we've just got a whole like swathes of people who need to learn the lesson of you know easy come easy go meme coins and shit coins a lot of them pump and they dump and people will learn that lesson we kind of thought that maybe the lessons had been learned but obviously this whole world has opened up so much more and that's why we've got presidents and world leaders pumping coins on their social networking profiles but this me like I did say that you'd learn the lesson not to to be a little bit more guarded in what he talks about on social networks which is probably wise because yeah you can pump a shit coin so don't you know what I think about it let's see what this kid does is 27 year old with the ht million it only it only took a hundred million dollars to learn his lesson it was inexpensive and it is interesting like you say Ben there is a major interview with coffeezilla where against all odds the developer of this coin joins coffee and talks about the alleged rug poll the developer says that he's okay with people sniping their own which for you if you haven't heard yet they're calling this sniping but basically you you launch the coin and you're right there to buy the coin so you buy the coin as cheap as you can get it then the coin goes up and you dump it on other people but they're saying that now people are doing this insider as insider information and maybe they're even doing this on other coins there's a lot of accusations in the meme coin market they're even saying that Dave Portnoy the famous pizza reviewer and bar stool sports guy who keeps buying and selling Bitcoin at the wrong time that he was involved he was going to get free tokens he lost lots of money but he was reimbursed and they're saying that because he's reimbursed he might be going to jail now I don't know the details again allegedly and so forth but it is a wild story Josh Schagalla what do you think about the Libra coin and the latest rug poll 100 million dollars yeah I did a whole show about it with Adam Stokes when it happened Miele did share it but when it crashed as because he pulled his tweet is one of the reasons to crash the other reason is that they that he pulled that the developers pulled 100 million dollars out of the liquidity pool so what what happens when that happens if it's going up like crazy so his excuse the developer excuses excuses we removed 100 million because if the early snipers were to sell it would have crushed the entire graph so so what they it went up but they pulled it but the problem with pulling it is there's no there's no way to stand you know he's standing there like the the road runner is sort of looking down and then you know so stupid stupid stupid but it's not just stupid I think I think there was a there was a designed thing here in terms of I think it was stupid that they they didn't know it would all collapse and fade in and then Miele would pull the tweet because he was like because you know a lot of these large players actually have social media account people that look after their account and I feel like he might have looked at it and gone what what's this some of these people you know I don't know because the strange thing is with Libra the promise was to like back Argentinian businesses almost like a VC but it's a meme coin so like how can a meme coin also have you know some sort of function I thought it's just a meme and so none of it makes sense turns out this guy also was part of other pump and dumps and and and all sorts of nefarious you know sniping which basically means you just buy it first and you know about that first all your mates do and and so yeah there's there's been a whole bunch of stuff I think I think they just got cocky with it went a bit too hard it never surprised it never stops to surprise me how greedy people are like these people have made in other tokens hundreds of millions of dollars yet they do it again and again like when there's enough guys are you you that dumb you know not only doing it once which wrecks the poor people that are taking partaking in this as well by the way there's there's a you know really people suffer but then to do it again and again because you think I got away with it like dumb at least at least the old school bank robbers would rob a bank and then like you wouldn't hear from them for a while until they run out of money and then they do it again but and get caught but these people just seem to like just do it again it just terrible terrible but very very interesting money Josh all they seem to get though is these paper hundreds of millions there's always just talking about how on paper they have the meme coin or they have the liquidity or they have the alt coin or whatever it is it's not like a old a wild west when they would rob the stage coach or the train you'd roll into town with the money in hand you'd go right to the bar right to the prostitutes the party the whole scene and everything he's got never seem to have that scene they just sit at home in the computer and I think for them they're looking at a hundred million and they're like that's nothing you know I should get one point five billion you know if I if I'd leveraged it or if I had gone long or whatever this is or if we'd hired a better influencer than Port Noir whatever it is they have some plan and I just think it's numbers on a paper I don't think it has anything to do with or you have a nice vacation or you could buy better food for your family or whatever it is it's just this mad numbers game so it's it's a pinball number like it's just you know in pinballs always ridiculously high numbers yeah yeah they're just trying to get the new high score and as they are saying in the chat I do agree from the coffee silla interview they said that this developer guy was also involved in Melania coin which was also kind of hump and dump band did you have more on this go ahead like I mean I guess the only way to for this thing to stop happening is for some people to go to jail isn't at some point for some of these 27 you know just get chucked in jail and and yeah all right may not be very libertarian of me but it's not like the piracy argument though where all you're going to do is kind of push it off store and then you're going to push it underground and these encrypted dark web meme coins and people still want to buy their Barbie coin like the demand is still there the 20 something year old cryptic bros needs to be stopped and I don't know what what it will take prison you can't yeah sorry it's a beautiful time in the United States though because we've legalized crime so there's no problems anymore so these crypto bros are not going to be stopped there's not going to be regulation if anything they're going to start celebrating this and branch out the white house for like Joshua saying who who has the biggest high the biggest high the biggest this will be a country wide thing as well while my computer broke again and this is every week on this so but yeah the board or by score competition they could have your country versus my country the Russian hackers versus the American hackers fantastic competition who could see that the intercontinental hacking competition has always been there but the thing is you cannot regulate this with regulations it's funny because simple humans go oh we need regulation like this is international it's and the whole point of blockchains is it's it's there's there's no permission needed you just jump in and partake it's it's just ridiculous to say let's regulate it because you cannot as a smart contract code code something for one cut for for one little continent or one country and then something else for another country it just doesn't work people VPN around that they'll take all you can do is say you know the LBMA the gold markets in London are voluntarily regulated there is a voluntarily voluntary body called the London Bullion Market Association who give generalized rules and if you follow those rules as a business selling gold you get the stamp of approval and people go oh we can trust them because they have the official LBMA so we'll go people will learn from these big calamities people learn okay so I'd I will not buy a meme coin that launches directly onto the market because they have these snipers and I'm just you know the last one holding the bag and there's no way I can beat them because all inside are trading okay so someone's created a smart contract that vests out over time or that is something else some other mechanism that stops that so and maybe voluntary regulatory bodies pop up to say these are the best practices if you do want to go into shit coinery then you you'll follow these best practices and only by those tokens because otherwise you'll get shot on and you don't have a gradiated launch like that you need the excitement of the launch the people going all in with the money all the djens with the price and then this is this if you launch it slowly like you're saying Josh it won't have that that excitement so essentially these hackers are denying people the ability to launch their meme coins in the way they want to but those hackers are always going to be there they're going to be around the world they're going to build bots that's that that see an address pop up and the fast that they can get to it the more they can jump on it or whatever right so or it's insider you know you cannot you cannot regulate this with human rules and laws you have to regulate it with education and building systems that that the market goes I'm not using that because I know that that mechanism can be easily controlled there's the only way to do it you cannot you cannot change things sure you you could take the this guy to jail that did this after the fact that's the thing but the people participating that got rotted they're always going to get rid of because then the next one will come out of some other country that you don't have jurisdiction over so how you're going to stop that people are still going to partake you're going to take all the victims there's like a you know if we're going to put what's the face in prison for packing bit for next whatever there's like a society needs to decide whether sniping is you know in a moral like a legal or a par with insider trading thing to do and then some of the jurisdictions in which I mean these it's the this it means like a like an American guy isn't he this young guy I don't want to see anyone go to jail but like he wouldn't hurt if there's a little deterrent that that people say or maybe I won't do this thing because I might get in shape for it might get in trouble for it's not worth it so I'm with you that there's a whole bunch of more sophisticated ways to handle the problem but we do have laws with things like insider trading and some of them probably do apply to their behavior there's already regular yeah there's laws like theft is a thing right so if you the yes it's sniping this this concept of sniping is it like oh yeah yo let's find or is it something which we all decide is you know oh we're continuing down the line of the pre-mind if the pre-mind is announced is it okay for example Ethereum has a pre-mind is the pre-night if a pre-mind announced is it okay Trump coin they own 80% of the coin so if they ever decide to they could dump twice four times the amount of coin on the market onto the market crushing the market this other thing now Libra if they buy it you know a minute after or 10 a 10 seconds after they launch is that okay so it's really like where the where the money is taken and that we're going to go down the line on that going back to what Josh says I think that unfortunately I think this pump fun site is done I don't know if it's in the United States but it's going to move it better run they all better run I do think like Josh is saying this is going to be a dark web thing people investing in meme coins but that at least makes it into what it is it's a casino if you want to go to the casino you go to the CD part of town and you go gamble your money not to mock Las Vegas which is all CD then I guess but the same thing you have to separate these things and as far as if it's unbreakable yes right now it looks impossible all these people have all the money and they're hiding by I think it's the same as the code of omerta where the mob was all silent until all the mob started riding each other out and even if it takes actually you know not extra judicial but outside of the computer system actual real world investigations following these people there's so much money now being taken it seems like that that would happen these investigations will happen and as they broke the mob I think they can break these pump fun people even if they have hundreds of millions of dollars yeah yeah yeah exactly and sorry what was that been saying you probably need like radically more sophisticated police forces because they're they're not the best of this sort they've come back in this type of crime are they but there we are yeah and and like just to reiterate there there are laws like I can't go into eBay and say I'm going to sell you something but hide all these things about it because I could be taken to court about me hiding the fact that it's totally busted and it was just a figurine it wasn't the real thing it was just a figurine but the photo made it look real right there's fraud and so by the difference between a pre-mind and telling everybody hey there's this many tokens and and it's already pre-mind I don't think there's a problem with that the fundamental problem is when you defraud people by lying about something and dumping on like telling all these like insiders to trade on the first second that it goes live and then and then tweeting about it after to tell people it's live now and the candles already shot up and meanwhile all these bag these people are holding giant bags that they're ready to dump on to retail so you know that's fraud and there's or it we don't need regulations for that because it's basic fraud it's not much more to say you just take them you take the people that perpetrated to court if you can track them down you know try doing that if they're from the meat from Myanmar or something but if they're in the US which they usually are all parts of Asia I guess but yeah but then those countries deal with that I guess you get to confiscate the funds don't you so maybe there's a bit of you know carry on a stick there for law enforcement usually where this stuff is evidence of intent isn't it if like you are genuinely making some meme coin which you think is going to change the world and there's no breadcrumbs if you trying to send your mate on telegram saying yeah I'm going to dump this shit and make loads of money then you're probably all right you know it's just an accident whatever but if usually I mean there must be there will probably be evidence of intent there's some point from uh just watch the coffee zilla thing there's evidence for news yeah yeah I know he's such associate path as right the way he's just it's all about him there's nothing about the people who he stole the money from and yeah it is awful it is awful it's disgusting yeah well it's from the humanitarian to the brought you Melania coin and I'm not sure if Josh if anymore if they want to enforce the laws or just have a leaderboard for fraud or we could say okay these guys fraud at the most therefore they are the best but let's move on to the exit question going back to bitcoin in the early days we used to talk to Andreas and he talked about the idea of Joey coin and everyone on the school yard having their own coin and it all seem kind of you know but you call it kind of a Norman Rockwell painting of beautiful American landscape everyone with their own coin but we didn't see we sure thought that Joey coin was going to get popular and maybe Joey would go all school yard but we didn't see Joe going all worldwide and the amount of worldwide liquidity being pumped into Joey coin and the billions of dollars that suddenly Joey coin is managing let's ask a Joshua goler were bit coiners naive on this and also like have we unleashed something that's horribly dangerous now this idea that everyone can have their own coin whether it's about them or it's about a meme or it's about whatever they want it to be and they can pump it and they can dump it it's a Andy Warhol in the future everyone will have their own coin for 15 minutes yeah that went change for sure I mean anyone can make a coin why not it's it's just is what it is anyone can I I can make I can make some physical coins too it's just easier to make digital ones but people will just get over it they'll be over the fraud and over the things and they'll only the system will self regulate the market will self regulate after a while because they'll realize of course there's a new idiot born every day so it might take very long time and greed is a factor and and foolery is affected but but generally speaking the market especially the smart money tends to go oh okay that's how it works that there's a fraud here's a gold for instance has 3,000 years of scams they've pretty much figured out a lot of the scams so so there's there's ways of you know that they've built around and structures and and stuff but but crypto is very new still and so there's always new ways to scam people with with tricky and a furious ways that they don't see up front but yeah people will start to see them and go oh look we can see on chain that they've minted you know billions of these pre-mine and they're not saying it's a pre-mine I mean most tokens are if it's on pump.finance it's just created and sold but uh but yeah maybe that you create it then you create a smart contract that's that vests over time when you buy it so you buy it from the smart contract rather than a free mark from rather than a dex and it all vests over you know the next five years trickle slowly into people's wallets again oh I'm only buying those sort of tokens you know this is this is what's gonna happen I think that the approach to regulation was so heavy handed chasing down the industry making everyone a criminal scaring the shit out of these CEOs who are now so freaked out they've gone over right wing I think that was a mistake it led us to a point where the public's not informed the main thing the public knows about cryptocurrencies is their get rich quick schemes but they still believe they can work so they still go into this meme coin and they go into the next meme coin and they think this one's backed by the president of argentina this one's backed by the president of the united states it's gonna be a winner and I think that we're not educating people we're not talking about cryptocurrency and a lot of this comes from that original idea that they had with the internet and for all I know I think they had it with records and rock and roll and radio and everything is there like this new technology has arrived the first thing we should do is put it back in the box we should control it we should strap it down instead of looking at the possible trajectory of the technology seeing something where Bitcoin other coins have established themselves and now anyone can make their coin and we've gone way beyond like just alt coins like like coin or mega coin or whatever it is or cause coin or utility coin or whatever you want to say now it's just you can make a coin because you want to you can put your face on it whatever and they were actual chains so you needed some actual engineering background on pump.fun you just just pay some money and you got to think also pump.fun's made over half a billion dollars just from fees for people launching these tokens but now just quickly inspire formulas as feels like there's a strong effort to gaslight confused nover world children to tard them it's attack on on bdc yeah look I agree but at the same time there are there are projects that are really being built and I I would say there's also some blame at the SEC here who was taking legitimate projects and finding them and taking to the court and taking them down and so people builders are actually scared of building legitimate projects on these smart contracts and so what are people doing instead they're just going out look rather than working for five years really hard engineering tasks I'm just going to create a meme coin and chill it with my mates because that's way easier so there's you know it sucks that that legitimate people trying to build stuff but you can call with theory and scan whatever but that these smart contracts that they're trying to make something of and they're taking them down but yeah it could also be a big gaslight I don't know I think markets are just full of the scammers that are ready to you know pump millions into a into a chart only to pull it from people well that is one of the things I learned when I started working at Bitcoin startups is you have no idea how many scammers are out there on the internet how many people were trying to attack our website both directly with computers and you know pinging it and whatever also indirectly with social engineering making fake accounts making networks fake accounts people will do all kinds of things you don't think they'll do and a lot of it is this economic disparity where in another country you could live on a hundred dollars for a month so for them scamming ten bucks or a hundred bucks as someone's a much bigger deal than it would be around here as they're saying in the chat that children are not being taught to build their own computer and that they're being kept dumb and I do think this is one of the major problems with our society and I've talked about it before and I really need to write a book about it but basically the success of propaganda in world where one world where two leads to a situation where you need to keep the people dumb so that the new version of propaganda called advertising can work if the people are too smart they understand that advertising is all lies and that kind of breaks your whole consumerism driven society but this is put in a position now where hucksters political people religious people other people are coming in and taking advantage of these people who can't use critical thinking who are susceptible to advertising but it turns out they're susceptible to all kinds of other things just like the united kingdom wanted to build that back door into apple software you think you're building a back door for you the government to use for legitimate purposes but you're really building a back door for everyone else everyone who finds it Ben Arck what do you think about whatever the current topic is yeah we saw wave it off that haven't we um what do I think about the current topic yeah I think Josh is right people will learn um and there's just hard lessons to be learned um but then yeah yeah that I mean there will be some social cues from laws being used for to take some of these people to court um but we've seen it in the past there's been a bunch of times where I've been like man this stuff needs to be regular because everyone's getting ripped off and then it kind of stops happening like the you know the ICO start happening or the the shit coins stop happening and then there's a year or two passes and then there's a new thing so now we have this mean coin thing and it's repackaged and presented in a way where it's not causing harm so there's pump fun things like oh it's just fun you know we're going to just scrap me crazy but there are legitimately people being ripped off and you know killing themselves and doing all the things for people to do when they lose all their money um and uh I guess there's only so many times you can skin a cat and eventually no matter how people present these things then the general populace will know it's probably a scam um we know that we learn that so I'm sure the people can learn as well so yes it's a matter of time and uh these these pump fun bricks will make a fair buck while they're while people are learning terrible ways weren't you money make something built and productive yeah it does seem a lot like a startup but in reverse when you plan a startup and you say oh well we're going to make software which means we can give our software to the whole world you know the whole world is our potential install base everyone could use our software in the same way as a scammer you look at the internet and you say wow the whole world can be our scam everyone can be our our customer that we scam uh so scamming has gotten bigger uh everything's better uh how could we come to go to prison or someone like that uh you know some some so many pump or melee that's what we need it's like no one's untouchable if you pump and dump fuck you go to prison or whatever now maybe there that's even a better question exit question will Malay go to prison uh will these developers go to prison Josh should go what do you think then we'll go to bed uh i hope no i mean i think if if anything he should have a core case and see you know what happened like who how much did he know what what happened but um you know because he did tweet about it but uh i think i think the the developers and the snipers and and the people that got away with the money should go to prison uh because melee didn't make anything from this there's no money there for him in fact he just lost he's gonna make me put his hand in the fire he should get burned they made an example of Ross Oldbrick uh are we gonna say because he's a president his tweets are above the law which is a similar situation we have here in the United States Ben arc what do you think should Malay uh be set free he only tweeted about it the other people did the damage by writing the coin and dumping it and so forth i mean i guess there is big huge reputational loss uh like Josh was saying and then maybe you know um macaroon or whatever or stama stama will be thinking oh i might tweet out about um sausage roll coin but i'm not gonna do that now because i saw it happen to my mate melee so um and and that you know you got a lot of shit for it so so maybe some of these the world leaders will be a little bit more hesitant in in tweeting unless they are lining their own pockets which often happens of course i don't know um yeah i guess it's really bad when we have political leaders normalizing scummy behavior that does kind of suck because it it gives permission and says it's like this world leader my world my my prime minister or president or whatever if they could do this then why should i you know um and it normalizes that behavior so i think it's the it's gonna get a lot rougher than you know in the near future before things ease out on people learn that these are all scams especially as it's done by at the top i mean only a president of argentina we don't know the names of any senators from argentina anything like that uh but like you're saying as well Ben these state senators could do it the representatives could do it being a politician in a democratic society sometimes you're only up for two years or four years and then you're out if you make a hundred million dollars your set for life also if we wanted to for a minute believe that they believed in something uh they could use that to fund their causes they could use that to support veterans affairs or whatever it is and i've said since the beginning of the thing since we talked about trump coin which kind of breaks all the boundaries here he was uh he was going to be president he was president elect he launched the coin he was inaugurated he is president now he's tweeted about the coin since uh as president uh as president elect uh why doesn't the left take from this and at least fight fire with fire make an aoc coin give aoc a hundred million dollars to support her causes a schumer anybody else bernie sanders launched their own coins why are we allowing this to be a one sided thing and if it is a grift or it's a grift where it still seems like it's distributing money to political causes although in this case the political cause was interrupted it did get to the argentinian people uh if that even was the goal for all we know the money put into this coin was all there to pump it was never about are they argent agent people like dentist coin was never about dentists as we've seen a bunch on this show you you throw out ideas and then a year later they happen so expect like bernie bernie coin to be made shortly because it's i mean if i was one of these pumpy guys i'd make it bernie coin parko huntus coin well and not just pumpy i mean i guess oh you have to get them to tweeter to get them to support it or in a in a distasteful way you could take over their social media or bribe their social media guy or or hack it or whatever uh because apparently i don't it's hard to really judge what's real anymore but a tweet from the argentinian president caused all these people to invest i don't know or they were doing a truth maybe 10% of it was real 20% was real like how many actual people and that was another interesting thing that the argentinian president said defending himself he said and i don't know why this matters but he said it's very there are only five thousand people who are so hurt and they're probably not argentinians uh so there's this idea that you can commit fraud and crime on other people uh as a president representing a country like argentina and then it's okay that other people are keen to fraud because they're not part of your country it's really it's getting weird out there the idea of universal human rights and respecting everyone uh equally and just saying hey that's a person too i wouldn't want them to lose all their money or even having good intentions like you want to make a product uh none of these were products i don't know that there's any even even for leber coin if it was going to go to the argentinian people i don't know that we could look at a white paper and say okay 10% going to rebuilding roads 20% to this 30% to this like it's just and it whoop 100 million dollars is in that developer's wallet allegedly go i judge all right it's a yeah yeah there should be ways to the coffee had a good uh good mechanism to repay people that lost it by focusing on the smaller amounts and saying that the larger ones obviously are a bit more sophisticated um so just focus on the smaller routes and repay all of those but um but yeah it's uh it's the thing is you cannot like how why should you ban creating a token and and selling it it shouldn't be banned because it's just a token if people want to buy it they buy it um just like a collectible like an NFT like anything you know if i want to sell mugs uh what you know it's just the market will learn slowly what the hell a scam looks like how scam is structured and scammers will then adjust and have a new way of scamming and then the market will adjust to that and eventually uh you always have scams but eventually you'll have less because people become a bit more clued in i think it's similar to playing three card monty on the street where everyone on the street is in on the game and it's a big scam and it's all clearly illegal versus playing blackjack in a casino you know the odds aren't good but at least the odds are regulated if you win you'll be paid uh not everyone in the casino is just a scam like the three card monty game and unfortunately looks like this pumped off fun allegedly and so forth and all that they seem to be creating and encouraging these scams and now previously i would say oh there's a legal system and there's justice and there's laws and all this they're going to crack down on that i no longer believe that i don't know that there's a legal system it seems to me more likely we'll go the other direction a top ten list of these scammers they'll be rogan coin aose coin Bernie coin all the coins and the wild west will just make some of them because they're selling a coin it doesn't make it instantly it makes them a scammer if they lied about the company you watch the telephone a little bit maybe we talked about how all of these coins are being snipe now so even if you are like your aose coin and you're you want to see a legal thing you can't do it. The developers just say to you we're going to do an honest thing for you aose then they snipe you 10% because they just do that to everybody and that seems where it doesn't seem like it's a meme coin industry it seems like it's a meme coin scam industry and it seems like you coming in no matter who you are rogan aose you don't we're talking about sides even millennia for example or malay if he was involved in this argentinian lebure coin you want to make an honest coin but unfortunately all the developers have decided that the standard is dishonesty the standard is no ethics and that they will snipe you and their friends will snipe you and that your launch will be dishonest. And if that's not a good meme coin there's not one where you're like oh you know jojo's department makes good meme coins don't buy them from Freddie buy them from joe it seems they're all bad and it seems I don't think it's going to be regulated I think it's going to get just get worse and worse. It can't be regulated how are you going to regulate man it this there's a down from how fun you make it really hard you push it under the dark way okay then you start to like kind of you know you know you're saying on the me coin who do you shut pump top funder I'm not saying you shouldn't like I'm not somehow standing up for some scammers here but I'm just saying you you get you get it's it's so easy to go it's the first thing that that jumps in the head regulator what okay okay let's let's walk through this how are you going to regulate it you're going to regulate it in New York only what happens if that regulation to the people that use it get put in prison or do the people that make something okay then they don't make it in New York they make it in Istanbul like it's a global thing it's permissionless the only thing that will regulate it is that people will stop buying it if they know that every time it happens every time they buy a different token they get scammed oh there's a new way of launching these where that's less likely because of XYZ because it's you know a vesting contract or something like that I don't know but that's that's the only way that's the only way it can happen you can threaten everybody on earth but without a global government you can't do that and thank god we don't have that like what are you going to put everybody that buys a shit coin well it's not about all or nothing Josh the the goal is not can we reduce it to zero it's about can we reduce what's happening and can we reduce those harms and in that way we can regulate it what will happen will be similar to the mafia when it starts out you can invest and you can gamble your money on every street in numbers and then soon the they close it down in New York they close it down in California they close it down in the United States now you can only do it in these certain unfortunate countries and then even those countries realize that their citizens are being ripped off and that this is a bad game and they keep forcing it down and now there's less of it so yes you cannot do 100 or zero but our game is 100 or zero it's about reducing harms right now it's far too easy to make these things and they all end up to be scammed so we have similar to what they say and they're like pumped up fun is building a crack house with all these certain hiding places where you can hide your money so that you can hide your drugs so that they can encourage the crack dealers and the crack atmosphere that's happening on their website they're just going to get shut down they're going to have to go to another country they're going to go to Malta they're going to have to have VPNs they're going to have to ban traffic and it's just going to get smaller and smaller if the regulation is successful if it's unsuccessful it'll get bigger but the idea is everything that drug markets gotten smaller over the years the drugs reduction of crime seeker and bigger and bigger access to drugs which is again a complex issue which again though we're talking about the same thing something that's harming society you try to reduce it the other alternative to do nothing always encourages it it always goes to do nothing i'm not saying i'm just saying don't use the violence of the state to do it to do it because that's the that's the first thought because it's the simple to the story. Yeah, Josh you're out here saying like if only we had an advertisement you'd stop doing heroin there's no magical advertisement that stops you doing heroin in the same way these people believe that they are going to get rich on these pump coins so no matter how many advertisements we say and we have the guy up there i used to be a pumper and i lost all my money and he tells an honest story and so forth it doesn't matter they still want to pump these coins what you have to do then if you can't reduce demand you have to put barriers and obstacles between them losing all of their money because that does that does that did work in the 70s or out the 80s because you had all these like people on heroin and then people looked at them and so were quite that doesn't look very good they're like a right state and then kind of like you know coming out with meme coins you then had it redressed and repackaged and then given to all these Americans as it is now what's it called what's the what's the heroin they're all they're all on in America. So there is a similarity there in that this thing which people would kind of stay away from because like they see the repercussions of it they did learn you know a bunch of people got smacked in the 80s and then they were thought yeah and then the crackdown on smack was all about injecting heroin like you say Ben when they switched it to the pill for and with the oxy cotton that's easier to get to people. Well that's the pump pump pump pump pump pump pump pump pump pump pump isn't it is is is oxy cotton is plus pump pump and then people will learn that oxy cotton is not so good we should probably stay away from that it's a constant learning process people get a wider they will learn I think a bit of both I think both right right? Oh, I have to see how it turns out and this won't be the last time that we discuss meme coins and so forth. So let's keep moving to the next issue. Check out worldcryptonenetwork.com. We've got 4,148 videos that you could watch all at the same time worldcryptonenetwork.com. Moving on to issue 4, Bitcoin reaching $100,000 is the start of a massive wave of institutional interest. It says, Samsung Mal, probably on Twitter. Then, Ark, what do you think of Samsung Mal saying that Bitcoin is now institutional interest and that will never have a bear market again? I like it and I hope he's right, but I have noticed the Samsung Mal does come out of the woodwork. When he gets a little bit twitchy about the market, he starts stepping up his pumpy game because he's got a lot invested in Bitcoin and as I think Adam Bax included in the article talking about Bitcoin's price and how we're only at the beginning of the hockey stick and adoption is coming and blah, blah, blah. I'm kind of feeling the opposite. I'm kind of feeling like we had our pumpy moment where we thought that US government was going to have Bitcoin reserve and this was going to happen and that was going to happen and then we realized maybe Trump doesn't know too much about Bitcoin and I don't know. The exuberance has gone somewhat, I feel, from the market, which is why it's struggling. I get that it's shaking people out, so it's shaking out those weak handed miners and whoever else out of the Bitcoin market. But I have noticed a pattern when Samsung Mal comes out and starts pumping Bitcoin hard, that's when you sell your Bitcoin. Then when he starts selling, I just don't worth block stream anymore, but there was a period when he started selling, shilling the block stream stickers that he could go to the shop and buy block stream stickers, that's when we were kind of at the bottom of the market because it meant that they were really poor and you could buy Bitcoin so yeah, I don't trust what Samsung Mal says about the Bitcoin price. I'm afraid. It does seem like they went to a Bitcoin or any of these Bitcoin sticking out of this pocket and he's wearing a Bitcoin hat and a Bitcoin shirt. They're like, hey, what do you think about Bitcoin? It's like, oh, I like that. What do you think about Samsung Mal saying 100K and we'll never, ever have another bear market ever? Stupid. Of course we have a bear market. People want to just think that it'll go straight up forever. They never look at any other charts that are all waving up and down, even Facebook or Google or whatever your favorite company. They all go up and down, right, Josh? A rollercoaster cannot work if it only goes up. And by the way, rollercoasters kind of boring only up. It's fun on the way down. I don't know what that analogy says anything but anyway. It's also that the value as well like the market cap of Bitcoin is so incredibly huge right now. It's value is so, I mean, we all think it's worth far more than it is. It's just a case of the world waking up to it, but I do think that maybe the world hasn't woken up to it quite yet. And there was a lot of phoema when there was a lot of good news. There's a perfect storm of good news as it happens when we get perfect songs of bad news, we get perfect songs of good news all comes at the same time. And it felt like we had that. And now we're kind of yeah in the hangover period way. Could go down, good to go down. Well, it's all these scams don't turn it help in the rugby stuff because you know, back in the day, you'd proudly say, oh, you know, Bitcoin, if you had a Bitcoin, you'd talk about it. But nowadays you say, oh, Bitcoin, look at you like, you're one of those dodgy scammers. It sucks because you know, we're trying to make a difference, trying to make government free money. But it is. I think part of the good feelings that Ben's describing as well is the big man theory of history. They were going to skip all the hard to do retail adoption, all the talking to people individually and convincing them to get into Bitcoin. And we were going to go straight to the top. And we were going to buy the big man. And the big man was going to like Bitcoin. And that was going to fix everything. And this is similar to what we keep saying about the Ross Oldbred thing. It's great. He's out of jail. But I wish it had been at the end of the drug war. And I wish that the president who freed him was out there saying Ross protested a bad system. Ross protested a system that was too harsh, that was draconian and so forth. Instead, it's like they skipped. They used a warp zone. And they got to the final boss. And we're not ready for the final boss. We don't have the billions of people behind us. We don't have true retail. And that's why when we go to these things, we need the institutions to adopt. And we need the institutions to buy and the countries and the states and the Bitcoin reserve thing. Again, it's an idea that we can go and end run around the people and that we can accelerate adoption faster by having these states pump our bags instead of doing the hard work of convincing individuals that Bitcoin is interesting. With the assumption that they're not looking after their own interests, such as USD, for example, and USD dominance over the world. I don't know why we're assuming that all these big players, the microscilers and whoever else have our best interests at heart. We don't assume that, of course, but a lot of people within the Bitcoin community do assume that. And it's like, well, maybe you shouldn't be so quick to trust that Kisely and that guy who's probably a spook, not so allegedly. It's just running out of interest. And original libertarian and archaicapolis understand at a base level that humans run on self-interest mainly. It's horrible to think everyone runs on it. But they do. And there's obviously there's a section of humanity of each person that doesn't let you do things out of charity or philanthropy, but generally speaking, any rational actor will do stuff to better their situation. So if you go into the world thinking that and understanding that, then you're less likely to be scanned because you don't just trust everybody. You just realize, okay, let's look at this with a bit more of a magnifying glass. Well, it's so fulfilling process of prophecy because they want you to, for us, you know, there's an interest in for the neoliberals that we don't all trust each other. So we all buy more shit and we're more productive consumers. So there's humans entirely do, you know, this is why when you look at like, you know, and you play those game theory models to markets and where everyone's a rational participant that they they're quite often break quite quickly because humans do irrational things such as trusting each other and not just thinking about themselves. But yeah, it's a very interesting topic, but I've got a lot of things. Taking taking investment advice from a girl that tells you to a hot tour on that thing. Yeah, yeah, you should trust that. Okay, I'll buy that. Yeah, don't trust that one. Yeah, I suppose that's the other problem is it's like that the things for all we know that could have been insiders, rugged insiders, and they all thought they were going to be insiders. But like humans were used to, because like this is me, Le, isn't it? It's like you've got your dumb arm, but you've got your people who are around you, your family, your friends, the people in your village, and you're not going to screw them over because if you do, you're going to get bad reputation, your life's not going to be so good. But you know, if they're not an Argentina, it's okay. I'm going to carry on everything's going to carry on. It's all going to be okay as long as it's not affecting my immediate dumb arm. But I guess that's what the internet gives you, I don't see which I don't know. Maybe it's not a good thing. Well, it's like PT Barnum said there's a sucker born every minute, but you have to think of that internet-wise. Think about a giant machine like Escher, or I forget the other artist, a similar artist who had these giant machines. Think about millions and millions and millions of suckers, and that these scammers are going to all of them. And I'm reminded of a great story from the Simpsons when they were about to sell Lisa's elephant, Stamper, to an ivory trader. And Lisa, of course, eyed the man suspiciously. He had ivory cufflinks and ivory hat and all this stuff. And Homer wanted to calm her. He said, Lisa, it's much safer to sell Stamper to a man whose ivory's reserves are full, rather than a man whose ivory reserves are lacking. But let's keep moving. We've got more stories. Issue five, there's a hot new theory about Bitcoin creators Satoshi Nakamoto's true identity. And I think you're going to love it. New speculation centers on Twitter co-founder, Dac Dorsey, as the inventor of the world's most valuable cryptocurrency. Let's go to Ben Arck first. You might have even met Dac Dorsey. Is Dac Dorsey Satoshi Nakamoto? And let us know in the chat what you think. I met him a couple of times. He's a nice guy. He's actually very bright as well. An incredibly good developer. I was talking to Roblo about this. He was saying that he's probably one of the bad developers he's ever worked with, all the best developers ever worked with. So he's very bright. He's a very good developer. But no, he didn't. He's got like, he's a nice guy like him. But his ego's quite big. And I'm not sure he could remain an ominous had he made Bitcoin. And then as well as that, Twitter, he's there obsessed with Ruby back in the day. So Bitcoin would have been written in Ruby on Ruby on Rails, which would have sucked. Well, maybe it wouldn't, I don't know. So yeah, no, he's not Satoshi. I don't know. Where did this new story come from? Is this just people looking in from the outside and going, oh, Dac Dorsey's like, is it? Where's the shirt that says Satoshi? Oh, right. Oh, okay. So he's actually learning. And then he says, he's a nice fellow. He's a nice fellow. But he didn't, he didn't make it. He's too busy with Twitter. Can't we go make him Bitcoin? Not just Twitter, also Square. They had article after article back in the day about how Dac Dorsey was the CEO of two companies and how could he handle it and his schedule and how serious he is about his schedule and waking up at this time and going to bed and wearing sandals and whatever it is. No, I don't think he's Satoshi. I think this is another nonsense story. And they're also underestimating what it takes to be Satoshi. It's great. Like Ben says, he might be a great developer. But this was a complex project that someone created and it's unlikely that it's someone that's busy being the CEO of two large publicly traded companies. Seems unlikely. Bad. Josh Chicago, what do you think, Dac Dorsey as Satoshi? But the good thing is Trump made it legal for me to say this with an executive order. That's the most retarded thing I've ever heard. It's just dumb. Why is it always like some famous person, too? It can't just be like some underground smart person that has to be someone that's in the public eye that's totally known and everyone understands. No, Dac Dorsey is a sensor. He was obsessed with censoring when he owned Twitter. He loved it. He loved it being a government shielded to basically take down anything that wasn't going in the right narrative to protect his business interests. Not fuck that guy. He's definitely not Satoshi. It does seem again an extension of this big man, great man theory of history. Only a great man that the media covers all the time like Dac Dorsey could have invented Bitcoin. It couldn't be an unknown person that the median covers. Exactly. Let's see. I think we got some more stories here. Let's keep them coming. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong labels Bitcoin as somewhat of a meme coin. His utility saying that Bitcoin wasn't solely built on technology or utility. It's also driven by a powerful community narrative much like meme coins. Josh Shigalla, what do you think about the CEO of Coinbase labeling Bitcoin as somewhat of a meme coin? I mean, yeah, you could say that. I mean, why not? It's a picture. It could be also an NFT in a way on the sat level kind of is. It's a picture of an orange B. It was definitely powered by memes for a long time. This is the meme economy. But it's different. It's different in the fact that the motivation to build it was to separate money and state the, you know, it's truly decentralized on a scale. Obviously, it's a scale. But it's very different than some of this ridiculous nonsense where it's a token built on a blockchain that can be shut down by anyone. I don't even know how Salana works because I've tried Salana once and it's ridiculous. It didn't work. Sorry, your transaction didn't work. What? It's totally different in that way. But it is in a way also a meme. You know, it's an idea. It's an idea that is a coin. Well, I agree with you, Josh, but the internet doesn't. The internet is very mad at Brian Armstrong. I think he's being kind of philosophical here. I think he's looking back at what we did as a group, him building coinbase, other people with bit pay, other people programming, other people tweeting about it, making YouTube videos, whatever it is, all of us together going to conferences, printing out flyers, whatever people did, that was the Bitcoin meme. We were the bit coiners who brought the value to the thing that, you know, only it worked theoretically, but it didn't have value until the bit coiners came there and so forth. But I think people really mad at him on the internet because of what we talked about earlier in the show. We said basically that these meme coins and pumped out fun allegedly is so toxic that we must against our libertarian goodwill and good ideas. We must suggest regulation. And I think that they're kind of having a problem squaring that circle of bringing the two together where Bitcoin is a meme coin, but it's not a worthless scammy meme coin. And there's a lot of fine detail there that I don't think Brian breaks down when he says that it's a somewhat of a meme coin. Ben Arqu, what do you think somewhat of a meme coin? Yeah, I mean, I think he's working to try and legitimize meme coins by saying it, I think it's not it's not just like enough of the cuff philosophical statement. I think he's like justifying American scammer. Now you know, because that says that's his racket, isn't he selling selling he's selling all sorts on fucking what is it coin base. I saw him once in in Robert Tan in this in the sea right now I'm strong as boldly had. Bobby about popping about in the sea with an entourage. No, that's his gate. That's what he does. He sells all these fucking check coins. So if he brings Bitcoin down to that level, he's like, well, he's the same sort of the same shirt just by it. So I mean, I think it's a bit more calculated than I'm just saying something philosophically like, oh, you know, there's there's memes involved in Bitcoin. Of course, there's memes involved in Bitcoin. There's a community. There's a culture involved in Bitcoin. It's and it that came about as I suppose that the big differentiator is that meme coins are built with this manufactured culture, which the creators make or they piggyback off some other culture and it comes with all that stuff. Whereas, I was supposed to say that you did have the cipher punk culture, which was attached to Bitcoin when it first started, but a lot of the things for your sociators me, you used to with Bitcoin, the laser eyes and whatever else. They're all things which naturally evolved afterwards. I love it. I don't like and it annoys me. But yeah, they they're they're they're it was like, you know, like the the calling yeah, just the sotoshi's, for example, like naming these the the the way in which we named the units of Bitcoin. It was like a a natural growth thing. It could have been bits. It could have been this. Those arguments on either side of what we're going to call the smaller pieces of Bitcoin, which we use. And then it can there's a natural evolution, which happened. And then we have all these cultural ideologies and all these cultural assets attached to Bitcoin, whereas with the meme coins, they're trying to manufacture that. So they're trying to they're trying to this is synthetic or the piggybacking of some other meme. So I think it is different. I think he's a bit more calculating than we've given him credit for. I also think like a lot of that stuff happened after Bitcoin already had value. It wasn't so much the memes they gave it value. I mean, obviously I looked in on it in 2010 and I started doing videos in 2013. And it seemed like in 2013, it was plenty valuable. It worked. You could send it around. There were wallets. It made sense. Bit pay. You could make a business coin base. You could cash out or cash in. It was all there. You didn't need a honey badger or laser eyes to tell you that. Maybe other people did. But I thought it was there. Josh, you go, what do you think? Was it the memes that made Bitcoin or was it this the core of being able to send money around the internet, even like I was talking yesterday, the fun of sending some money and then your computer beeps. It goes beep. The money is there. You have money. Yeah, memes were a definite part of the messaging. It was the fun side because the philosophical side is very intense and very serious and banks are fraud and people are starving. We've got a stop. Fraction reserve banking. Now we have this ability to have full reserve, custodial money and cryptography and how does the math work and what happens when the block reward halves. It's very serious. How do you lighten that up with messaging? We were built on the back of memes. Bitcoin grew up with meme culture. meme culture is also fairly new. The last 15, 20 years, it's growing a lot. It's changed a lot. But online meme culture anyhow. I think it has. To Ben's point, just quickly, I wanted to say when he said Brian Armstrong has been sells all these shit coins. I would also blame the SEC for that. The SEC went after serious projects, after serious things, taking them all down. Yet a lot of meme coin is saying, I'm only meme because that's the only legal thing I can do now is have a worthless coin that is named because if I make a utility token that actually tries to do things in an ecosystem of some software that I'm writing on smart contracts, then the SEC is going to take me because does it have a utility or is it a security? Is it near and near? Whereas a meme coin, it's not a security. It's just a thing. It's just a collectible. This is how bad regulation screws things up and creates more scabs. Then what does Coinbase do? To make sure Coinbase is safe, we'll only sell the crap that has no real value because it's not anything that can be placed into a bucket of the SEC's strange 1950s definition of a security. It is funny, Josh. I do think they are almost forced to do that, creating a real coin or having a real foundation or a real project that no longer necessary. Also, like you say, it exposes you to legal consequences. These guys putting up Libra coin, whatever that means, that doesn't mean anything. Melania doesn't mean anything. None of these things mean anything. It's a very post-modern place that we found ourselves. Let's keep going. We've got a couple more issues. It's a big show. We've got Michael Saylor Grabbag. Saylor's strategy to raise another $2 billion for Bitcoin looks like it's going well with lots of private industry and BlackRock and others said to be investing. Also, Saylor says that the United States should aim to hold 20% of Bitcoin, which would boost his company's strategy. The real promise is if you own 4 to 6 million Bitcoin, you could pay off the national debt. Where's my laugh button? I don't know where it is, but I have a laugh button somewhere and that is funny. I'm going to find it, but that is hilarious. Pay off the national debt. We'll go over that more. Also, MicroStrategy has cut its workforce 20% as Bitcoin buying accelerates. They need less people. Let's go to Ben Arck. What do you think about MicroStrategy raising money, paying off the national debt and cutting 20% of the people because you don't need to think that much to buy Bitcoin? You're not shocked how many people they employ because it's like 20%. There are only a couple of hundred people because they got one of the offices. It's like 1,600 people or something. Is that right for 20%? I don't know. But I think they've got 1,300-1,400 people working there, which is a crazy amount of people working company with the name like MicroStrategy, which has this MicroStrategy of just buying some Bitcoin. There we go. Look at that. Why they got so many employees? I don't know if I'm sorry for them. It's not like the proletariat factory is being shut down and all these poor MicroStrategy guys are going to be on the streets. These are hedge fund guys. They'll be all right, I think. I mean, it's probably a good idea. I don't know why he's got a company that big. Crazy. Josh, Shagala, Michael, Sailor, GrabBag. Would you like to talk about $2 billion investing or that the United States should hold 20% of all Bitcoin? I think it's, again, I'm going to say retarded because the governments just shouldn't just don't do it. I mean, do it because it'll make all of us richer, but don't do it because it's dumb for, let the private citizens buy it. Make it easier for that by having proper structures in your area, so private citizens. Let MicroStrategy grow by $2 billion. That's allowing America because generally it's Americans that are buying MicroStrategy shares. That's how you do it by the government holding it. I'm not a fan of government holding stuff. I think Josh, this story offends me on multiple levels. Bitcoin was not made to be just held by governments. The point of Satoshi's work wasn't just, we'll make a new asset that governments can hold in their accounts and never send around. Why do you make all this trouble, all the mining, all the sending the money around, all of that, if it was just going to be this controlled asset, right? Well, that's Roger Verz's point as well, that it's not just a story of value. It's a medium of exchange. Maybe we were better off when Roger Verz are here, instead of this MicroStrategy guy who seems to say that he just wants the government to buy it all. He would be happy here now. Like you're saying, Josh, there's part of this is self-interest. Of course, he'd be happy if the government bought 20% of Bitcoin because his bags would pump to the moon. His stock would go up. Everything would be fantastic. But would the rest of us be so happy if all the Bitcoin were out of circulation? Is that the goal of this project? Yeah, apparently to Michael. Now, the thing is, it will never be. That's a thing. The world could run on one stoshie because we'll just create more decimal points. I also have a problem with the kind of market stupidity that's going on here, where we think that four to six million Bitcoin could be bought without pumping the market. And that not every time the government bought a million dollars of Bitcoin, they would get less and less Bitcoin every time. Not to mention, as we've talked about before, and I refuse to talk about the ridiculous idea of the Bitcoin reserve until it's here, it starts a cascading domino effect with every other country and every other company, where they're now going to be saying, well, America has 100 Bitcoin, therefore Saudi Arabia should have 150. And then Germany says, well, they've got that. We should have 200. And the same thing, IBM, Microsoft, whoever you want to say, or we could do it state-by-state, Missouri, California, Florida, who has the most Bitcoins in their reserve? And at a certain point, what are we doing? These states, these businesses, these companies, they're supposed to do other things. They've become better than having debt. Goose that raised the golden egg, they're not going to do their normal chores, their normal jobs. Why even bother? Well, you know, the opposite side of that is that at least they're holding actual assets rather than debt because right now all they're doing is creating debt, selling government bonds and holding debt. They were buying Apple stock, it would still be ridiculous, right? It would be like your job as a government, be a government. Why are you now choosing what a good investment is? Even if we, we're Bitcoiners, we like the investment, Sailor owns a bunch, he obviously wants the thing to go up to pump his bags. But if we were anybody else, and they were like, well, we're going to put all the government money into pork futures. And you're like, I don't necessarily like pork. I'm not sure about that investment. Should the government really be making our portfolio, especially now, we're seeing this on a state level. And I see it celebrated by Bitcoin magazine. Oh, Oklahoma is buying Bitcoin. I'm like, shouldn't they be doing funds for their services for their people? Like the people gave you the money. Now you spend the money, you try to improve things. Not the people give you the money so that you the government then can hold money and invest it and try to make more money. That doesn't seem like the job of the government. Yeah, well, the, the, the people don't even give it. The, the government prints it out of nowhere and puts the, puts the people into debt so they can buy Bitcoin. I mean, maybe that's a good strategy. Maybe that made sense when they were, you know, to buy a road or to improve the society so that we can make more commerce or something like that. How would buying Bitcoin, other than we think it's a great investment, sailor thinks it's a great investment. It's not, it's just kind of upside down what the difference between the government and a corporation is. A corporation is out there just to make great investments, which is why I've said that there's no reason to have any other corporations until they fix this with laws, which doesn't seem like it's going to happen anytime soon. Where if you're a corporation that's making widgets that's employing people, you're wasting your time and your money. The clear answer here is that Michael, sailor, and, and like John Benos, who are all these people working for microstrategy when the only strategy is buy Bitcoin. So they watched Bitcoin episode from 20, 10 years ago and they're like, well, let's just do that. And if fire everyone else, like how many people does it take to run microstrategy? Well, one, right? It takes the captain. It's just one captain, like, and the whole thing for all this Apple Tesla, whoever you are, why are you bothering wasting your time making widgets, which you make a 10% or 5% they don't make big money when they could make 200 or 500% on their Bitcoin, like the whole point of doing anything. And again, we're talking about catnet here. We're talking about infinite just talking about all these things like why bother doing anything? Yeah. And it's troding it, troding us, I mean, Starship, who said it here? Yeah, yeah, formula, formulas said, I hope governments make it illegal because Black market BTC will be so much more valuable. I do eventually think we'll go there that we will go to a legal Bitcoin and we're going to roll back all of this. Again, then, I don't think this is this is the death row, why they try and control Bitcoin because they can't, they realize it's too big to shut down. So now they're just going to try and control it. So what's the best way to control it? We buy loads of it. And then you get 20% of it. I'm not pointing fingers at say, Lerm, microstrategy, or whatever. But again, to this guy who's relatively new, I'm not sure we should take him at face value as to what you're saying and what his intentions are. And there's all sorts of interests now involved in Bitcoin, which weren't there before. And there's all sorts of actors which were that weren't there before. And all of them, which would be suspicious off, especially if they're, if they're saying that the US should be buying up 20% of the world's Bitcoin. It's a terrible idea. That shouldn't happen. But it's that it's the death row when of them realizing that this thing's out the back. They can't take it down. They were too late to try and they probably could have really screwed up earlier on. But they were too late and it's too big to control now. So now they're just trying to control it. Not too big to get rid of now. So now they're going to try and control it. An interest, any of them. Slip resources. Well, I have to see how it goes. We'll continue covering the story in the future. Just a few more stories and we're head to the end of the show. Just want to give it shout out to fold. According to Bitcoin magazine, fold has become the first Bitcoin only financial service company to go public on the NASDAQ and that they already have a thousand Bitcoin on their balance sheet. Fold has been a classic Bitcoin company since I was at purse. They were out of the Draper University startup factory over there. I got to meet some of those guys sometimes and give you a discount on your Bitcoin purchases at fold. Now I think they have a credit card that you can use and you can get some of your money back in a Bitcoin through fold. This is obviously a major accomplishment for them to go on to the NASDAQs just to shout out to fold and I hope they're doing well. It sounds like an incredible accomplishment for their company. And a sad commentary on purse. But oh well, we had what we had. We also have Ben Arck here and we wanted to say congratulations to Ben Arck. Five years and 8.5 thousand commits later. They are launching Ellen bits out of beta and releasing version 1.0 in just a few weeks. They've got a visualization here of the contributors. Many free and open source developers contributed to Ellen bits and now has an exchange rate tracker that aggregates data from multiple sources for Fiat pricing. Ben Arck, while you're here, shout out to Ellen bits. Congratulations on version 1.0. What can you tell the people more about the release and what's going on at Ellen bits? Yeah, thanks Thomas. I mean, it kind of came out of this show, didn't it? It came out of the World Crypto Network Ellen bits as a project. We wouldn't have gotten any wife wasn't for the World Crypto Network. And yeah, we've had, we've been very lucky to have lots of great developers come on board onto the project and then since our server door started accepting Bitcoin, we realized and Ibex were using Ellen bits in the offer products, but it was like proper beta software and buggy. And we realized we needed to kind of get it to version 1. And it took us a few years, but we're finally here and we did want to, I think a lot of projects is tempting to come out of version 1 because it signals to everybody, okay, you can use this thing, it's safe, but we didn't want to do that until we actually felt confident that it was, you know. So a lot of work has gone on. It's been a huge refactor by DNI, Gladstan, Tile, Stick, and then all the contributors in our telegram groups and then all the other contributors contributed to the little bit of code here. And all these little things you're seeing moving around on the screen, there are people contributing to different files and folders and whatever else in Ellen bits. When you saw the thing kind of pop out, then that's when we pulled out all the extensions, they all became their own. If you scroll back, that's when all the extensions were packaged in with Ellen bits and they go pop and they all become their own little projects with people contributing to them. So I made this like little visualization last week and it was very satisfying to do. It's great now, so it's a much smoother UI, much smoother UX experience. We have a bunch of admin tools such as the Exchange Tracker. We also have an amazing user area so you can manage, if you're running Ellen bits for the people, you can manage your users. We have a bunch of charts and statistics and you can check out like, you know, what type of requests are happening on your server. And then we have a bunch of new extensions, fun extensions for people to play around with. And with this version one, we're also going to be releasing a bunch of paid extensions, which is really exciting because it's a way, because we've, because of the huge refactor, it's now much easier to make an extension so I could make an extension in a day. And then I could put it up on the marketplace and then people could pay to install that extension. So me as a developer, I could get little dribbles of stats coming in from installing my extension. So it's a huge incentive. We've got some more at the moment working on a extension, like a Nosterchair extension, so you can talk within your Ellen bits installed to each other to the different users and the admin. And traditionally, maybe we would have offered them a bounty, but this guy, he's just going to sell the extension for like a thousand sets or whatever, 500 sets. And then enough people will install it that he's an incentivized, just gives it's a little sweetener that to get people building extensions and he just builds up the functionality of Ellen bits. And yeah, it's great. It's been a lot of fun. It's very grueling and tiring. It's a lot of emotion in the past couple of months. They don't have much of a Christmas, but it's worth it to get the project to version one so people can actually use it in production, we're confident for them to use it in production. So yeah, probably a couple of weeks until we get there. Oh, I'm pretty fantastic. And where can people check out Ellen bits? If you if you're interested in learning about it, the Ellen bits YouTube, I'll be throwing up a whole bunch of videos on how to install it because we've made the install process a lot easier now as well. You can go to talentbits.com. If you, there's a Ellen bits telegram group, which is pretty good, or it's very good, in fact. But yeah, if you just want to learn about it, like the Ellen bits YouTube, just like search for Ellen bits on YouTube, then there's a bunch of resources in there showing different extensions of what they do. But it's it's yeah, it's it's it's the nice when you see projects and and they survive because quite often in Bitcoin, I think we we have a tendency to like hop onto the next kind of protocol. And we've always just kind of stuck with lightning. This is how we're going to do payments. It works. It's fast. We're going to make lightning easier to use. Oh, so there's some great stuff. So like at the moment, I'm running my own version of version one of my own Ellen bits version one. I'm running up my own server and I'm using Phoenix D. For people who don't know what Phoenix D is, it's a managed lightning node, but it's self-custodial. So you you have the keys yourself. They can't steal your funds, but they manage the channel balancing and liquidity, which means you don't have to fathom with channels. So that's a really nice solution for if you're you know, onboarding someone and you want them to you don't want to be a custodian, they're funds. You want to give them an un-custodial experience, but you don't want them to have to learn all about how to run a lightning node and sell channels and stuff. So there's the screen like we should do that. There's Phoenix D, which does that. And we've added those funding sources to all the Ellen bits funding sources. So it makes it just makes the software a million times easier to run. You know, it's like if you want to install it on your own VPS, it's like five lines of code or something. And then we'll update our like software as a service. So it'll have that packaged in with it as soon pre-butch as soon as we've got version one out. So a lot to look forward to, but yeah, check in on the project over the next couple of weeks and check on the YouTube, so I'm going to be checking out a whole bunch of videos on there. And yeah, thanks Thomas. Thanks for the platform, this platform. I mean, this is it's you know, you make something and it's cool but getting other people to engage with it and start contributing to it. There's only one thing you can do that is by reaching out to the wider Bitcoin community. And I was lucky enough at the time that I just started doing some stuff with you. And I was able to you know post things on on on WCN and then people saw it and that was a big driver to forget those first contributors into the project. So no, it's it's yeah, it's why this platform so important. Well, it is amazing, Ben, seeing all the different contributors in that graph all coming in and out and seeing the code develop. It's really cool to see it. And again, it's why it's why you want to do things on the internet. It's why you want to do software. You want those many hands to come in and those heroes that you don't know to contribute. And it's also a great thing to think someone can come in, fix a couple things, move on to another project, go back to their normal work, just how many hands do make light work, especially when you see it in that graph. Yeah, totally. There was so many reached out and they were like they they'd managed to they don't need to put in one commit but they managed to find a little guy who was like from a year ago, they put in a commit one commit. And it was like, I think it was their first commit they'd ever done to a project or something. They managed to find he managed to find himself in the video. It was like, there's me. It was like nice. Well done. But yeah, we got the we got the literature contributors. I'm like Gavin Andreessen in Alan Betts. I'm like the the dumbest one in the room, which is a very nice feeling because it means it's all grown up. And I love the idea that you could just put out the initial software and it's not that good, but it's a roadmap of where to go and all these better programmers could then come in and fix this and fix that. It's really cool. I got they did. All right, let's go to Josh Tagalog for a prediction or story of the week. Go ahead, Josh. Just want to say congratulations to Ben. Like it's really one of the hardest things inspiring other people to come along and work with you on on something so cool. So big, big ups and it's hard to stick to something for so long. I've done the same with two projects with Voltoro and then we ended up in a selling mat and now I've been working on the standard for the last four and a half years and four years or whatever it's been. And yeah, it's tricky. There's so many ups and downs and you're giving your own money away to try and work this thing out and you're trying to raise money and it's hard. It's hard. So it's the hardest thing in the world to build to build a startup. Yeah, so we've been working really hard. We've come and check us out where totally non-castodial you sign every message with Metamask. It is an on Bitcoin. It is on an EVM but it's all non-castodial. So we wanted to take away lending and borrowing away from centralized authorities like Celsius and all that crap and block fire and FTX and all these nonsense and make everything on chain and that's what we've done. So every aspect you can earn a yield on your crypto, on your tokens, on your EVM, link and app and wrapped Bitcoin. We even have Pax Gold in there and you can put them into automated market making strategies that use Uniswap to earn a yield and then you can still borrow against that value. So while it's earning a yield, it'll earn, you can go and borrow for zero percent interest. We're thinking of maybe modifying the zero-point interest thing because what's happening is that everyone's like, oh, free money and they just keep borrowing and dumping, borrowing and dumping. So we're thinking of having like a three months zero percent and then after that there is an interest to get people to pay back their debt as well to themselves because right now there's hardly anyone ever paying back their debt. They just borrow and then because within the standard they can still trade, if you've got Rapp Bitcoin and you want some ETH, you've got some ETH and you want some Rapp Bitcoin, you can still do that even though you've borrowed against it within the protocol. So there's no real need to ever pay back your debt and so we need people to bring liquidity back in. So we are thinking about that. If you are interested or you have a point of view and you love economic theory and love tinkering, come and join us on our discord and chat. It's a great community and it's fun and yeah, it's definitely very passionate people there, building stuff that is really cool. Very cool Josh and you can check it out at thestandard.io. I'm just saying sorry, it's four years, that's amazing. We could have been just shit coining all that time Josh, we'd be... Could have just launched 15 million meme coins. We could have just collect bought Bitcoin with other people's money like Michael Sayler. Just ride off the back of all our blood sweat and tears. Yeah, all other people's blood sweat and tears. There we are. We picked the wrong path, but there we are. We're getting it done. Easier. I just want to thank everybody for joining us and giving us a thumbs up down below. I don't have that much more to say today. I got a new chair. I built it myself. That's about it. So when it wasn't that much, I put it together myself. So I use tools, you know, advanced technology. But that's about it for this week. Thanks to everybody for joining us. Push subscribe down below and I need to do it slower this time so it catches it. So until next time, bye bye.