The Bitcoin Group, the American Original. For over the last ten years, the sharpest Satoshi's, the best Bitcoin's, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Victoria Jones from Satoshi's page. Good evening everyone. Happy to be here. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network, moving on to issue one. The price of Bitcoin, the price of Bitcoin is down to $84,511. That's $1 for $1,183 Satoshi's on the wrong side of the 1000 Satoshi barrier. The recent high for Bitcoin in the last 24 hours was $85,330 with a low of $78,617. Volume was $4,126. Issue one. Bitcoin down 25% from all time high as crypto route worsens. Bitcoin hit a high on January 20th the day of Trump's inauguration and the decline is now a part of widespread sell-off in digital assets. Victoria Jones, what do you think about the most important issue to everyone? Let me get the magic eight ball ready, the price, the price, the price, and of course the price. Yeah, it's pretty scary. Obviously, those of us who've been in Bitcoin for a while realises that this is what Bitcoin does from time to time. In many respects, it does seem to be a classic case of buy the rumor, sell the news. As in, everyone was really hyped about Donald Trump being the crypto president, but of course, the moment he's inaugurated, everyone's been waiting with baited breath for all those executive orders that he signs for, one of them to include Bitcoin. That's been dramatically absent from proceedings. Although there's a lot of stuff going on, obviously we'll come and talk about it later. There are a lot of meetings with various officials about crypto, but they're mainly focused on stablecoins, which of course is not great for Bitcoin in terms of the regulatory environment. So, yeah, very disappointing, really. I suppose those who are at the forefront of these things, especially a number of the businesses and the ETFs and the financial managers, they keep careful on these things. As time goes by and lack of evidence starts to appear of these things not taking place, people start to get spooked. Of course, obviously, all of these institutions had a big part to play in the price rising, but of course, the moment they get disillusioned, they have a big part to play in the price coming down as well. A number of months ago, I was talking about exactly this scenario. So, it doesn't surprise me. But, yeah, be interesting to see what happens. It is true they haven't gotten much for their money so far. They got an executive order announcing a working group for crypto, a working group for the crypto asset reserve, not the Bitcoin asset reserve, very quickly how those goal posts move, especially as the president made himself a meme coin just days before the inauguration, then made a similar copy for his wife, the first lady. They did get Ross Ulbrich freed, but that's a small thing to pay when these, not just the Bitcoin conditions, but the 25% tariffs have also destroyed the market. There's an expectation that the economy is going to be raised. The prices are going to be raised. Trade is going to slow down as well as international relations being hampered and so forth by the isolation as president and the things that they've chosen and announced so far. There is still a little bit of hope if you want to go there that the 25% tariffs won't happen, that they'll give him something similar that we saw with Canada and Mexico where they were able to give him something that they had already given him and get the tariffs canceled. But then again, it comes back on the thing again. And it's hilarious. I was just reading a book about practically the 1900s about Teddy Roosevelt and tariffs and what a disaster it was. Every single thing, the new group comes in and wants to lower tariffs because lowering tariffs lowers prices increases trades. You sell more widgets so people can buy more widgets so they're happier. People can sell more widgets so they're happier. People can make more widgets and be happier. Instead, we're going the other direction here constricting the economy which leads to a pullback on risk assets. Bitcoin's still seen as a risk asset. Gold somehow getting through this, I think. But in general, the stock markets down, Bitcoin's down, everything's down regardless of your libertarian philosophies and your belief that Bitcoin is radically different from these markets. For we have been linked up to these markets now for quite some time, whether we wanted or not. As it says on Coinbase, Bitcoin's sell-off could be a text book breakout and retest play says, Ohmcar Godbull. And now a great financial advisor and analyst over there at Coinbase. As he says here, you see how Bitcoin goes down suddenly. Everyone who got into the market recently, all the shorts, all the longs, all knocked out here. And then it hits a point right here. He's got the former retest at 73,757. Then it's possible that it bounces to new heights. Other people on Twitter have said it still could go to 50 in six months. There's still general macro belief. But once again, just not now. So as long as you don't have to sell now, you're fine. Let's move on towards the exit question. Because what else can we say about the price and the political situation? We'll talk more about stable coins later, like Victoria said, predicting against the Magic 8 Ball. I believe was pessimistic last week. I believe he said don't count on it. So yes, if you were selling by the 8 Ball, you should have sold everything. You could have had it, could have been there. Victoria will the price be higher or lower this time next week? Have we hit the bottom yet? I highly doubt we've hit the bottom yet. If you look back in history, often there's a few red candles when you have a dramatic one. It's going to take a while for everyone to kind of restabilize their confidence. So yeah, I'll say it's going low in next week. Well, let us know what you guys think in the chat. If you think it's going to be higher or lower, now go ahead and ask the Magic 8 Ball. Will the price of Bitcoin be higher this time next week? My reply is no. My reply is no. The ball's pessimistic. I remain optimistic. I like Bitcoin, as with many of the hotlers, these kind of things happen. All of a sudden, you're kind of knocked over by it, but your strategy is hoddle. Your strategy is long term. You're not selling now. You're selling in five years. You don't know what the price is going to be in five years. You don't know what it's going to be in six months. And we'll just have to wait and see. Of course, every once in a while you got to sell for some money as a showtaker said in the chat, damn that ball. Yes, the ball is very wise. And we could all do better listening to the Magic 8 Ball. Moving on to issue two, Musk and Fort Knox. Their trip is all about Bitcoin. More than a stunt, the Fort Knox visit might be a chance for the president to change the price of gold and dump the price hike into cryptocurrency. I don't know if you guys have seen this recently, but the president has been saying almost like a kid getting ready to go on a field trip that me and my pal Elon are going to Fort Knox and we're going to see the gold. And we're going to see if it's there. There seems to be no plan to weigh the gold or test the gold or any kind of strategic analysis of the gold. But it would be an amazing thing to even have a video camera into Fort Knox. Thomas Hunt, what do you think about Trump and Elon's plan to go see the gold? Well, obviously, if there's no gold, this is good for Bitcoin. The United States default, the world collapses, everything flies apart and Trump and Elon are there like Harald O'Revira looking at Al Capone's safe, just looking around. It's empty. There's nothing they took it all. I think that's very unlikely. Even if they did take the gold and we want to go conspiracy, they owed it to China or they owed it to whoever it is, they would have left behind painted bars that look like gold. So I don't think that Trump and Elon's field trip will yield very much. It would be fascinating to audit the gold. It would be fascinating to audit the insides of the gold at a certain point at a random level, just out of pure curiosity, not having any specific conspiratorial knowledge. The only thing I know is we have an audited Fort Knox during my lifetime and it's been a really long time. There's no reason not to audit it just like the vault in the Volaggio in Ocean's 11. They have that video camera on the vault at all times. You can see the money's there. As a citizen, I should be able to see the gold's there. So we have a rare agreement. I think here between myself and Trump, I don't like to admit that. Victoria Jones, what about the planets in Indiana Jones movie? Trump and Elon go to Fort Knox? Well, I'll give Trump the fact that he really knows how to play to an audience. Clearly, he's very in tune with what the issues are on the ground and obviously, Fort Knox not having any gold there has been a subject of conversation for a long time. As you say, it's been over 50 years ever since Richard Nixon took us off the gold standard. There hasn't been a proper audit. I mean, you've had various people pop in. I think last time Nuchin went in to look at the gold. He came out saying gold is safe, supposedly implying that he'd seen that he still had a... You sure did say a dafu, gold is saffo. Say that. Obviously, implying to everyone that everything was signed. We all know how manipulated the financial markets are. Most people don't believe that what they're telling us is true. There are plenty of ways in which you could hide it. Of course, Trump may well have his own agenda, which I think the agenda in this article was a little bit far-fetched. I'm not sure that they would re-value gold in order to buy Bitcoin. I don't believe that for a second. But if they were to re-value gold, for example, that could certainly wreak some havoc. I'll be interesting to see what happens. I'm watching with Bated Breath. I just hope they do the classic mistake of filming it and doing it live. It's a long time and it's even really before my age. Everyone can look it up. There's a hilarious video. Moral to Rivera, famous, gossip-type journalist, God ahold of Al Capone's fault. He hypes it up for 20 minutes. He's like, no one's ever opened this vault. This is a vault. He owned at the height of his criminal career. There could be Vera Bond's, dollars, cigars, guns, knives, pictures of women, everything. This is Al Capone's fault. On TV live, he opens it and it's empty. There's nothing in the vault. We'd be so lucky for them to take him down there for it to be empty or to be a cardboard cut out or anything like that. But I just think it's very unlikely. It's another kind of distraction story, unfortunately, as much as it's a libertarian fantasy to audit the vault and even just to have a camera on it as a citizen to be curious, it's not going to change anything. It's not going to restart gold coinage. You're not going to be able to trade your $20 bill in for $20 worth of gold, whatever that may be. We're not going back to that. We've been through this before. Whether we like it or not, we're in this growth economy, the capitalist growth economy, and it has to grow or the businesses fail. They go out of business and we have to get new resources. We have to expand. In a way, this is led to our entrepreneurial spirit, which until recently had Elon riding government subsidies and going to Mars. It was pretty straightforward, apparently he's going to wreck earth first and as well. We'll see how that goes. What about Fort Knox exit question, Victoria Jones? Will there be gold? Yes or no? I think it will look like there's gold. Whether it's real or not, it's a whole different bulldog. There's a... And Trump knows gold, too. He's got a gold in toilet. Airplane is made of gold. He's a very gold person. Send the right person. They'd send the right person. Even Trump, you think, would want some kind of a chemical audit, some kind of a random audit, as well as taking them apart if they're in giant pyramids of gold. It could be a led structure with gold on the outside. I don't know how far they expect him to dip into this, especially given the weight of these gold bars. Maybe he and Elon can work together to lift one. One of the interesting facts that not many people know is that underneath the World Trade Center, when the towers collapsed, was a load of bank vaults. All of that gold is unaccounted for. No one knows where it went after they left. There's all sorts of movements of gold that happen underneath the radar. Obviously, it turns out that that event actually turned out to be the biggest bank heist ever due to the disappearing bullion. No one knows where it is yet. I wouldn't trust. Anything anyone says about what's in gold, but it's especially without any evidence. And to say nothing of the disappearing money at the pentagon the day before, it was a day for heists. But like Schrodinger's destiny says in the chat, maybe he's secretly planning a heist on Fort Knox. And it's all just a heist movie and Trump and Elon are the George Clooney and Brad Pitt and Ocean's 11 is our country. Maybe, just maybe. Oh, let's keep moving. Check out worldcrypto network.com. We've got 4,169 videos you could check out and more every day at worldcrypto network.com. Moving on to issue three. Buy Bit. And we're just going to kind of cover this. So the buy bit exploiter, the North Korean Lazarus group has indeed attempted to launder some of the funds through pump.fun. They sent soul to this address, launched the token and generated $26 million in trading volume. Additionally, the owner or CEO of buy bit Ben Zau is on the war path saying that they're at war against Lazarus attempting to track down the North Korean hackers and stop them from hacking other exchanges. They want to help people if you can help them freeze the money. There's a 5% bounty. They have a team working on this and he says let the hunting season begin. Additionally, there are reports on how the hack was carried out. Buy Bit was not compromised. The compromise was safe servers. According to this, they hot swap the ganosis, safe UI with JS code that only targeted buy bits cold wallet independently confirmed by way back machine snapshots. Lazarus group is on another level. Apparently, as soon as buy bit attacked to the safe servers, the code was already there just waiting for them. There's more details here on the internet. Let's go to Thomas Hunt. What do you think about the buy bit hack and the information? Well, first of all, I think it's super excited. They took some of the funds through pump.fun. I speculated that could be a fun way for them to launder the money. I'm certainly not involved, but that's fun. I think that was a fun story. There's $26 million. All right, good job. I think it's kind of exciting and hacker movie-esque for this CEO guy to be out there saying let's hunt the Lazarus group. The rest of us clearly know that the Lazarus group seems to be a state sponsored North Korean cyber terrorist group. We know where they are. We don't need to hunt them. We found them. I don't know what they think they're going to do or what they're going to do to stop these guys. I assume North Korea is taking care of them. That's probably a direct one to go in the relationship. I bet North Korea also doesn't let them go. It can't be that great for them, but they do seem to be great hackers again, Victoria and I were talking before and we don't really understand the details of what's going on here, but it does seem like similar to some of the other hacks where an external party was signing the keys for BitFinex. An external party, the safe network was involved in bi-bit security. The external party was hacked when bi-bit connected to the external party. The code was already there waiting for them and that led to this massive 1.5 billion dollar theft of Ethereum, which could also be crashing the market right now. This general idea of the hack, the actual money itself moving through the market. Do you want to be the one that has a t-shirt I sold because the North Korean hackers were laundering their money through the market and it scared me. T-shirt could be good. Victoria, John, what do you think about the North Korean hack? And the fast-day technical details about the bi-bit hack which are available to anyone, anyone on the internet? Yeah, it's quite frightening really, especially for those of us who aren't technical, who are involved in the cryptocurrency space. I'm quite knowledgeable. I've obviously been in this space for a while. I know lots of people who are software developers and I was reading the detail of some of these articles and some of these tweets and most of it was going over my head, had no idea what they were talking about. But it does seem that there was some kind of third party wallet software that they were relying on and that was what was compromised. In fact, it was targeted very specifically for this exchange, which is quite worrying. I mean, for us mere mortals, hopefully it's more reassuring that if they're going to go to the effort of targeting anyone, they're going for the big wallets. But in many respects, it could be a trial run for, you know, if they can do this to a big exchange, could they do it to anyone? Presumably, they'd go for a big exchange because the moment they did it to an individual and the alarm was raised, someone's going to come in and find a way to mitigate whatever it was that they exploited in order to do the hack. And obviously, if that means they only get the chance to do it once and they need to make sure that their bounty is as big as possible. But this is the kind of thing that mere mortals tend to be afraid of, because cryptocurrency is new, we're relying on software technology, which is still relatively new and we're really involved in the 60s. So, 99.9% of the time, it's completely reliable. But obviously, these things happen and it's a big warning to the rest of the community to try and get on top of these problems sooner rather than later. But of course, if they do target a big exchange, they're affecting all of their customers. And of course, something like this really affects confidence in the market. And so, yeah, I agree, you know, now that trust has been inaugurated and there's been a lack of definitive action towards Bitcoin. And we've also had this hack, you know, both of those situations could be contributing to the dump in the market. It is interesting where the hack comes down to. If your account gets hacked, if your password gets leaked or maybe you go through a phishing email that takes you to a fake coinbase, that's your fault, that's your fault, you lose all your money. This hack hit the buy bit cold wallet. So, it's actually them holding the money. And I don't know how they did it, loans or some kind of business deals or perhaps insurance. They say they already have the Ethereum back. So the company has already recouped the funds by bit. The company is not in any danger from this. And actually, as the way the market rolled, they might have gotten that Ethereum at a cheaper price, not to say that they had a hand in this or they help themselves get hacked or they had reason that it was beneficial to them to get hacked for this. I don't know anything about that. But again, it is interesting, as I said in the intro, to have them face off against what we know to be a nation state group. So we have reached kind of that cipher punk era described in the book Snow Crash by Neil Steffensen, where he said corporations are the same as governments. And you could work and live at KFC or you could work and live at the United States and be a fed in the same way. These guys who work and live at Lazarus Group have gone head to head with whatever buy bit and the rest of the Bitcoin industry can get together hacker wise, money wise, bounty wise, government wise. And we'll see what happens with the rest of this. It's an incredible sum that they've taken down at 1.5 billion dollars. Of course, adjusting now with the market, probably 1.2 billion dollars, kind of shot themselves in the foot there a little bit. But still an incredibly huge hack. But maybe one of those hacks where it's just so big that it follows you around like a ball and chain, razzle-con trading the money for PlayStation 2's and boxes of tide or whatever Wal-Mart gift cards. You're never going to be able to launder a billion dollars through Wal-Mart gift cards. Even under the best of all scenarios, you're never going to be able to do that. So we'll continue watching the story. Moving on to issue four. It's good that we have Victoria and I here for this. I think we're going to be in great agreement here. Michael Sailor has advised the SEC saying Bitcoin is not a digital currency. In a meeting with the crypto task force, Sailor promised proposed a regulatory framework that mainly benefits Michael Sailor written by Lola, shout out to Lola at the rage, a friend of the show. As she says here, Michael Sailor Bitcoin is not digital currency. I know it's shocking to everyone watching this show who thought they had gotten involved in the cryptocurrency revolution. Thought they had a thing here that you could pay people with. You might have even been paid with it. In the past, you might have sent a donation. You might have had a donation sent to you. But you were wrong. It's not a currency. You were sent digital gold. It's just so happens that digital gold has a mechanism now where you can send it, receive it for almost no cost, especially even less cost if you use the Lightning Network. So it's very strange again. We've been talking about this for a long time. Victoria and I, Michael Sailor is not our friend. He's interested in benefiting himself. He's made this brilliant move where he's got this company corporate structure where he can borrow more money and buy more Bitcoin. If I could do it, I would do it. If you could do it, you would do it. But we're not smart like him. We don't have this corporate structure that lets us seemingly borrow endless amounts of money to buy endless amounts of Bitcoin. And then Patisana back for it like we're geniuses. And we're talking like late, late coming to Bitcoin here. Like not. And he had this corporate structure early. He could have done this in 2010 or 2011. Victoria, what do you think about Michael Sailor? Bitcoin is not digital currency. Obviously, I disagree with him. But there doesn't much matter. You're muted. Sorry, getting carried away there. Just trying to look at the article at the same time as I'm talking to you. Yeah, I mean, I thought the article had a great headline. I mean, basically, Michael Sailor proposed a regulatory framework that mainly benefits Michael Sailor. To be fair, to Michael Sailor, though, which is, you know, unexpected thing for me to say. One of the points he makes in the article, I'm just trying to find it so that I can quote it. Because I thought that this was an important point. So he said that he pointed out that Bitcoin is an asset without an issuer. Whereas other digital currencies are an asset with an issuer. And so basically, what that means is because Bitcoin is decentralized, there's no one that's actually issuing it. And the mechanism of the actual system is balanced in such a way that, you know, requires interested parties to interact with each other in order to support the network. Whereas a lot of stable coins at the moment, you know, like USDT, Tether and also USDC, they're owned by companies who are buying US bonds with any crypto that they've had in the past in order to support this digital token. And that is an important distinction. And I think, and it's important for people to bear that in mind because unfortunately, at the moment, where Bitcoin is in its development, even though it was originally designed as a form of currency, it's not quite there technically. I mean, there are a lot of people who are working on that, who want to develop it in that direction. But right now, the adoption is not big enough. Bitcoin is still in its early stages. It's not in a situation where it could take over as the world's reserve currency. And it's been designed in such a way that ultimately, that is what would happen. You know, as much as Michael sailors, negotiations with the government may well slow down the adoption of Bitcoin and the way in which it can operate in the world, he can only influence the laws of the US. And anything that they do in the US in order to slow it down can easily be counteracted by what people do around the rest of the world. Because, you know, before everyone in the US was buying Bitcoin, it was being bought in China. I mean, I remember 2019, where they had a website where you could watch the where most of the flow of Bitcoin was going. And it was all going to China before it started going to the US and the US really, really got involved. And even now, you know, the fraction of companies and banks and institutions and governments that have access to businesses, it's a tiny fraction compared to what is held by individuals around the world. So while on the face of it, what Michael sailors doing seems to be a problem for the whole of Bitcoin, you know, most people are just focused on what's happening in the US without understanding Bitcoin from a larger perspective. And I think it's important to bear that in mind, because, you know, maybe Michael sailor is having to work with the institutions because, of course, they have the power to shut him down. But of course, if he's able to get government cooperation while it's at this stage, even as a form of digital gold, you know, the nature of Bitcoin itself is that ultimately it would take over as a currency and spite of everything that Michael sailors trying to do because the only power the US has over Bitcoin is to make a law. But ultimately, because of the way in which Bitcoin is structured, that will ultimately disrupt all of that, you know, once Bitcoin disrupts governments, it's going to disrupt the way in which it makes its laws. What it's most powerfully going to disrupt is the funding it has in order to enforce those laws. So, you know, the long term picture, if you watch how it's playing out, is much more positive. But of course, people get very upset and very focused on what's happening in the moment without recognizing, you know, the limitations of the situation. And ultimately, Michael sailor was doing the best he can in this situation to get, you know, government to even hold a conversation over Bitcoin in many respect. He's being quite sneaky in that respect, if you fully understand what Bitcoin does. And it's all a case of whether or not, you know, the US federal agents are going to fall for it or not. So, I suspect not. I suspect the longer they look at it, the more they are not going to be fooled by that. But obviously, this is the drama that's playing out at the moment. So, it'll be interesting to see. So, I felt the article, while I loved the headline, I felt the article was a little bit, it was missing some details of the big picture, really. I think what what Michael sailor and even Trump is necessarily doing in the moment, even though a lot of people get excited about that, it's not necessarily a reflection of the bigger picture. It does seem like a lot of technology revolutions of the past, like radio and television and even internet now, to some degree with YouTube being very much less you now and very much more tube, is that I think that they're offering you Bitcoin without all the features. And they're going to say Bitcoin is this thing you can hold on in exchange. You can make money if it goes up, you can lose money if it goes down. But taking it off the exchange, holding it your own wallet, sending it around to your friends and family, even in other countries paying people with it, that's just a little too far. That's a little too crazy. And we can't have you doing that. We can't have you setting up your own pirate radio stations and we can't have you printing your own newspapers and pamphlets. That's just that's just too much. And I think that that's what we're going to see with Bitcoin is this continued idea that they can take it inside the house. They can take the Trojan horse inside the house. They can tame it. They can make a weaker version of it that'll still be palatable. You'll still be like, well, it's pretty good. We used to just have money in a bank, but now the bank you know has to hold Bitcoin. And we don't really know how much Bitcoin they're holding or how they hold it. They don't provide reserves. There's not a lot of real change between this and the old way that the banking system used to work. But again, as we've said on this show, I think it's going to fail. I think that they're going to be unable to tame the beast. They're just going to advertise Bitcoin. They're going to tell people about its existence. And just like with these other technologies, you're going to want to go out there and get the real radio for yourself. You're going to want to have your own radio station. You want to have your own YouTube. You want to have your own blog and your own Twitter. And you don't want to have your own Bitcoin. And that's when you're going to realize whether you want to call it, whatever you want to call it, Bitcoin is a thing that you can own. You can put it in your wallet at home. You can put it on a ledger or a treasurer. You can send it to your friend. You can pay someone with it. It's an amazing technology. And it's fascinating to see as smart as this Michael sailor is supposed to be. And he's basically supposed to be our new Andreas. We take all of our old Andreas cred and we move it over to the the business man guy who's borrowing endless amounts of money. He has the small strategy that makes him just so smart. But even he, I don't think you can really see the value of this Bitcoin revolution and what having control of the money does for the world and leveling the playing field and removing parasitical interests and other people who control prices and make the thing go up and down and are entrenched in the bank, other things like this. It will all go. But it's just going to take longer and we're going to go through this fantastic period where you can go around and collect the Bitcoin t-shirts from Wall Street. And you can get the Bank of America Bitcoin, Sache bag and all these other kind of things. And that won't always be available. I believe this will be a brief period of friendship followed by a long drawn out period of unhappiness followed by again a period where the banks come back again and adopt Bitcoin. And they just have your balance. Your balance is just denominated in Bitcoin and you just send it around. A Bank of America is just another wallet compared with a LNBITs and any other wallet solution or situation. But it's going to take a while and maybe a lot of creative destruction to get to that. There's a lot of ups and downs. But it's fun right now, right? Victoria, we're friends with Wall Street. We're friends with the government. And Michael Sailor's version of Bitcoin. It's a Utopian, it's a business Utopian vision, right? It's what the business been could dream of. Well, there are certainly advantages. And I think Michael Sailor's core business is a perfect fit for Bitcoin. I think the moment he saw it, in fact, I even have a chapter in my book where I mentioned the fact that the possibility of data harvesting, even if you don't know who the individuals are, just from analysing the blockchain data, is a huge business opportunity. And of course, that's exactly what Michael Sailor's business does. So it's not just the fact that he's interested in an inflation hedge. I think he's got a very clear plan for how Bitcoin fits in with his existing business. And if I were in his position, I'd probably be doing exactly what he's doing. I mean, I don't think it's Bitcoin's ultimate destiny, but you know, I think Michael Sailor is a player in the game. And at this point in history, he has a very valuable role to play in terms of negotiating with the government because even just in the process of negotiation, even the fact that you're pushing back on a number of laws, because at the end of the article, it talks about the fact that, you know, there in spite of all the criticisms, he is pushing back against a number of laws that the US is trying to introduce that would really siphle innovation in the blockchain space in order to try and keep some of those things free of regulation. So, you know, sometimes you don't always know how these things are going to play out. You know, it's that classic story of, you know, the, I don't know if people have heard it, you know, the farmer who kind of goes, good news, bad news, who knows, because you never know, you know, how the story is really going to play out, something that looks like good news today could be bad news tomorrow, something that looks like bad news today could be good news tomorrow. Sometimes things have implications that you don't fully realize until everything's played out. But if you understand enough about how Bitcoin is designed and how it's set up and not only that, but how the world as it currently stands is designed and how it's been set up and if you understand the history, you know, ultimately you've got an irresistible force going up against an immovable object where the immovable object is slightly less immovable than the force is irresistible. And so what that means is in the fullness of time, Bitcoin is destined to win, you know, we're just commenting on the drama as it plays out and Thomas is recording it for prosperity. So it's going to be fine folks, don't worry, it's just a blip. It does almost seem like he's being set up, he's on the cover of Fortune magazine, he's the next big thing and it's almost like he's just the next big SPF. His strategy is about as pirate at 40 who ran a Ponzi scheme years ago, all by Bitcoin, all hold it for you and that's the plan, that's my strategy. So it is interesting, we'll see how it turns out if it's good or bad, but it is fascinating. It's hard to think of any scenario where a businessman goes on TV and says, I've discovered an infinite money glitch where everything turns out fine in the end of the story. I don't know exactly what the lightning bolt is if it's someone from the inside stealing the money or not actually buying the money or the price just goes down so much they kick him out as border directors or some kind of thing, but it just doesn't seem bad, it doesn't seem good, who knows, you can't be on top forever. We've got more stories in Bitcoin grab bag, we've got more stories such as very quickly to fight scams, Senate bill with limit transactions at crypto ATMs, the legislation proposed by Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois's Senator comes as law enforcement agencies report more crypto scams targeting older adults. Well, I think about this one, obviously there are a lot of crypto scams and it is very bad when people just put all of their money over and over into the machine. I just worry about the limits and limiting people's access to crypto as a market. If you're brand new to crypto and you're only way to get access to it is take your money to some machine and put it in the machine and they limit your access and you want it to buy on Thursday and the price goes up on Monday and you can't buy till Thursday. It just doesn't seem fair to me. So some kind of reasonable cap I think would be as good. It's interesting as well to think about for these operators, if these convenience stores who sometimes I do they think they get a percentage of these ATM sales so they do want you to put money in at the same time. I know a friend who operated a convenience store like this and he said he would stop people if he thought they're being scammed if they were blind endlessly putting money in. So it's hard to find a line in between here. Obviously the government is trying to protect people. We want less people, especially old age people to be scammed by these crypto scams. Victoria Jones, what do you think about limits on crypto ATMs? In the United Kingdom they just throw them all out. No crypto ATMs. So maybe limits are better than none at all. Well that would be a compromise but the overriding thing that I observe just from reading this or that occurs to me as I read this article is that we've all been so molly coddled by the government. In the old days before government got so big, people would learn from these stories and word would get around and it would be like don't do that because you'll lose all your money but it's like in these days we can't rely on the fact that new spreads and you learn not to do something because apparently the government needs to protect us. And what's even more ironic is that people are mainly being scammed by being told that they've been given a fine for not turning off a jury service or they've got unpaid taxes both of which are government agencies. So if the government didn't exist there wouldn't be the potential to scan them in the first place. No doubt the scammers would find another way of doing it but I don't know. I just think it's another case of government overreach and you're right you know responsible people. I mean I know the friend that you're talking about and I've heard those stories too you know he'd watch people who'd come in and and be filling the crypto ATM in a panic and often that would be a prompt from to go over and have a conversation and you know obviously if the rest of the world were as considerate hopefully we wouldn't get to this situation but of course you know they're people who are motivated for the wrong reasons by greed or whatever who aren't interested in helping or protecting people you know that kind of protection should be something that happens on the ground really. So I don't know I think it's I think it's another opportunity for government to get involved where really they shouldn't be involved it's involved at all but of course it's a nature of the world that we live in right now that that is what is caring. It is fascinating as our friend told us sometimes he would tell them about the scam and they wouldn't believe him you'd have to unplug the ATM that people were so dedicated to paying the scammers. So yeah something has to be done I don't know what it's going to be. As I said he's a Democrat which unfortunately in today's day and age means your bill will not be passed so it's fun talking about it. Let's keep moving. As Steven Steve Patterson says the biggest banks in the world are very happy with Bitcoin as a store of value and not a medium of exchange. The hijacking of Bitcoin has given them enough time to launch their own stablecoins to compete in the digital cash market. Not only did Bitcoin not kill the banks it could he says will give them the biggest banks the opportunity to become their own money printers brilliant and as we said before stablecoins not Bitcoin were in focus at the first US digital assets subcommittee hearing senators and key figures all things stablecoins at the first hearing Bitcoin lightly mentioned if at all. So yes I do agree with the author I think that the stable coins are a way for the banks to get a back door into Bitcoin and to prevent present a competing project product and to say hey it's the same thing it's the same as Bitcoin it's just Bank of America Bitcoin and yeah it doesn't go up and down anymore but don't focus so much on the ups focus on the down it's not going to go down you're not going to lose all your money and you can still send it around and pretend it's a digital currency and send it to your people and your friends but it's totally traceable it's totally reversible it can't be used to support rebel movements or whatever you want to send it to you don't get a choice on what you're spending it on and as far as them taking over the committee hearing I'm not surprised at all this whole time with the Bitcoiners heading for the top of the ticket and aiming to bribe Trump and get all of these spoils I have said that the opposite would have been a better plan starting from the bottom getting a few representatives who actually believed in Bitcoin who could get some bills forward get some writers that's in the old system where you just have bills and things anyway who knows how things work now but Victoria what do you think did they get a good deal all the Bitcoiners who donated to Trump they had them at their convention they had them at the libertarian convention and now stable coins at the hearing yeah um I can't say I'm terribly surprised um obviously it was in Trump's interest to flatter the Bitcoiners because he knows that they have a lot of money but it's not in the interests of any country to adopt Bitcoiners' currency you know the only reason why I'll salvage all is doing is because they're so far at the bottom of the pile that you know they can't it can't really hurt them any any further you know not following through they have so little advantage by operating a fiat currency it was an opportunity for them but you know when you when you take that position and compare it with the United States it's incomparable you know the moment the United States runs the world reserve currency why would they do anything to undermine that position um you know I think Thomas you've commented on a a few shows before that it's absolute madness for the US to have a strategic Bitcoin reserve so you know if you understand Bitcoin again you understand history you understand the background they're not going to they're not going to adopt Bitcoin as the as the currency not voluntarily I think it will probably end up becoming that but it's going to be a long journey um and it'll be filled with drama um along the way but yeah you know the US government there's no way they're going to adopt Bitcoin as a currency if you can forget that and even the Bitcoin strategic reserve I think is a bit of a stretch so but we'll see what happens I think when they write about this later they'll kind of joke about it and they'll say well the Bitcoin business leaders and the other well off they thought they could go in the front door and they thought they could bribe the politicians just like any other project and say hey consider us we're just like the startups we're like Facebook we're just another tech company here to you know take your money and give you a service uh but the reality is that this service is forever seditious it undermines your currency and whatever sailor wants to say in all this it is a competitor with the dollar and that's why I think what we're supposed to have our Bitcoin committee hearing we have a stablecoin committee hearing uh it's going to be scarier for people if they have a CDBC or a CBDC uh committee hearing and they start talking about the central bank digital currencies or the US government gets back to involved with that because we've all seen before uh despite the the amnesia of these Bitcoin Trump's promises aren't worth anything so if he says no CBDCs for life and you've got it on a piece of paper and you got it signed at the Bitcoin convention uh you may as well frame it it has as much value as that you can sell it on eBay you don't know what's going to happen with these people in the future and it's not over yet but I do think they'll say yeah that the naive Bitcoiners walked in the front door expecting everyone to negotiate with them with their really weird product with all of it's really weird you know old deep connections and the way it's mined and all these kind of things like everyone will just think it's fine they'd much prefer a stablecoin prevent presented by Bank of America uh to your big we've got breaking news the SEC has just halted its fraud prosecution of Justin Sun a Chinese national who has put more than 50 million dollars into Trump's pocket since November through his purchase of crypto tokens from a Trump back company world liberty financial Justin Sun creator of Tron or something to do with Tron and some other exchange a big crypto player has been freed he's free uh Victoria what do you think we talked about this before with the Ross Ulbrich it does seem like pay to play uh that you can pay a politician get your guy out of jail previously it was our guy Ross now it's somebody else's guy Justin uh the buyer of the banana the famous guy from Tron what do you think more pay to play action here um yeah I mean if you read the actual tweet and the and the little bit of the document that you can see I mean basically basically um they've agreed to suspend the prosecution in lieu of another negotiation so basically you know whatever friendship he's made has bored him some time in a different way to negotiate what's going on rather than going through the courts and actually this isn't an unusual thing you know often with financial crimes if there's no other crimes involved this is often how they get settled so it's not that surprising um at at the end of the day I mean most most of the way America works politically is to do with who can give you the biggest donation because you know the denators the donations are what gets the president in office in the first place and I think Trump's just a very savvy politician understanding how that's worked you know it's a very much a case of you scratch my back I'll scratch yours and it's unfortunate that that's the way in which the system works I don't think it's fair I don't think it's honorable it's one of the reasons why I support Bitcoin because I think it's an opportunity to disrupt all of that um you know and 50 million sounds like a lot but I mean I did a I did a search just before we came on the show just to kind of get an idea of how much Justin's son is supposed to be worth and apparently his net worth is estimated to be around five billion and on that basis giving Trump something like 75 million is equivalent to having a thousand quid and giving him 15 quid so you know in in terms of um Justin's net worth you know the donations to Trump are miniscule really and this is the advantage of being a billionaire you know you can afford you can afford to influence those decisions unlike the rest of us mere mortals who believe that our votes are worth something but this is what we're up against it reminds me a lot of the uh CZ Binance situation where everyone thought he was going to get lots of trouble and his company had gone all over the place even fleeing countries after the country said they were going to change the tax regulations almost as if they were more of a band of pirates than a company but I don't think anything ever happened to him I'm pretty sure they let CZ go with some light minor punishment like you say massive fines to us mere mortals nothing to them and I think we've seen again it's it's just very strange sometimes when you build a business you can wreck and plunder and do whatever you want but when you or I do it or someone else does it they get caught and they get wrecked uh but then there's sometimes these magical businesses just skate under the radar and get away with everything and I think that's another one here uh with Justin Sun just breaking the right laws breaking the right things in the right way and it turns out fine for you we've got one more short story as I said with the possibility of a retreat and a bounce here uh Andrew at AP underscore abyskess rights he says re iterating bitcoin 250,000 by quarter four twenty twenty five book market and he says bitcoin's push to eighty four thousand is directly related to the black rock black rock ibit being added to its model portfolios Larry think's hands are stronger than crypto twitter don't fade the think and victoria what do you think of the chance that this could be a retreat and bounce situation we still have the supply shock of the havinning uh people are still out there looking for it uh what do you think quarter four is this all erased everything's fine no i don't think so at all i don't i think by uh quarter four twenty twenty five um bitcoin is going to be dipping again because that's often the way in which the cycle plays out based on the way in which um the software works obviously i think that's tampered with now because of the uh ETFs but either way i think by the end of twenty twenty five i i don't believe um i think bitcoin's going to be on a on a downward trajectory um and also like i said earlier you know the amount of even though these big institutions are buying bitcoin hand over fist you know the proportion of bitcoin they've got access to is just tiny um so the the idea that they're about to take over the world or take over bitcoin is frankly ridiculous um i think they they're taking part in the game but at this stage it's going to be because they're trading it like everyone else does i mean that's how they manage the world's finances through trading so um yeah um i yeah i don't i don't hold out much hope with that argument i'm afraid well there's still a posthi possibility based upon the supply and based on things that have come before though people have missed the top before other people said that there'd be a second top and there never was and people have missed the bottom before saying it would go far lower than they thought it would in general no one's that that's ever held bitcoin for more than five years has lost money so you can just hold on and see how it goes uh of course got to pay to pay your bills and stuff to get a sell sometimes uh Victoria Jones do you have a prediction or a story of the week we're running out of time uh well my story of the week you know in tune with some of the topics that we've been discussing today uh is my next newsletter is due out on sunday um the current the last one i had up was called bitcoin as a currency um and uh so you probably got about just over 24 hours to catch that and have a look at it for it goes behind paywall as the next newsletters release this sunday and the next newsletters going to be bitcoin in the welfare state where i analyze you know how the new labor chancellor is managing the country's finances and i outline how it's a high risk gamble uh that's likely to be tricky and how bitcoin could help solve those problems so if you're interested in that check out my website satosheespage.com very cool everyone should check that out satosheespage.com and on my story of the week uh i was looking at some old tweets or old images and i found this 10 years ago in february of 25 2015 i got my first bitcoin job as it says here on coin desk bitcoins startup btc jam taps bitcoin blogger mad bitcoins as community manager uh so it's very cool to think back 10 years ago i got to try out startups in san francisco and sleep on the couch at work and work all the time and order lunches all the fun things you get to do at a startup unfortunately we didn't get very far at btc jam so we didn't get very many t-shirts or other fun things that we would have liked to do for marketing and other stuff like that but it was exciting to be in san francisco and it's hard to believe that it's been 10 years already since i was at btc jam uh working on the bitcoins loans uh there was a backed company i think ten million dollars or something it was a big company now ten million dollars is is nothing it's an altcoin or a fart coin or something like that so shout out to btc jam and any of the people that used to be there with me it's a long time ago and uh we also want to say as many have said uh fawn farewell to jean hackman a jean hackman famous actor passed away over the weekend uh he as it says here is the star of every scene he was in and you don't think about it that much but the more you go back and think about good movies you've seen jean hackman's in a lot of those movies he's supporting the movie he's the star of the movie he's always there something like royal tenon bombs or the french connection or the kiss or so many more the conversation was so good and uh we might lose our ad revenue but hopefully we can do this for uh illustrative purposes this is the scene from heist that i quote all the time where jean hackman says that he's smart here he goes mr french you fixed it i had to make you do it oh you're pretty smart fella uh not that smart not that smart how'd you figure it out oh i tried to imagine a fellow smarter than myself and then i tried to think what would he do yeah i mean yes i i'm very familiar with watching films and very recognizable face so yeah very sad news it's always sad um you know when um these famous names pass away it makes us uh reminds us all of our own mortality and of course the more people we remember um who look young passing away just reminds us that we're getting ever closer to that day for ourselves happy days so joyful thought to end on well it's a strange thing i thought about this a lot when you're growing up you you get into all these movies and all these shows and and musicians and whatever you're into but you don't quite realize that you're also growing old with them and that just as like the baseball players are only baseball players for a little bit of time the rock stars have their period they're all going to move on and they're all going to end up at this sirenite live 50th anniversary in the audience and if you guys watch that on any of the ones where you can see the crowd there and you pause it it's everybody we've watched for the last 50 years and they've all got great hair and they're all melting and there's nothing that can stop it and it's there for all of us uh whether you're an old guy like Jean Hackman or David Lynch or a young woman like Michelle Trachtenberg from Buffy the vampire slayer and i liked her in the movie Euro Trip but she just passed away at 39 so it's very strange and there's also kind of a magic to this film technology that we forget about all the time especially now that we have iPhones and instant cameras and things that the person stays young forever on film the performance is all there it's always there forever I'll always watch Jean Hackman always exactly the same in all these scenes but in reality just like the portrait of Dorian Gray or anything else the person does age time does go on for the actors the directors the writers everybody on both sides of the camera so it is interesting and it is an unavoidable part of life so to Jean Hackman dedicated and to the horrible crash of the Bitcoin and crypto markets we dedicate this show so thanks so much to Victoria for joining us everybody give us a thumbs up down below please subscribe if you haven't and until next time