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, Mike Jarmuz, Muzzman from ThunderFunder. What's up guys, thanks for having me, Thomas. Ben Arck from Ellen Bitts. Even all. Josh Shigala from thestandard.io. Stop gents. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network. Moving on to issue one. Issue one. Senate passes cryptocurrency and stable coin rules bill. According to the New York Times, which you can only read in reader mode. The Senate has passed the bill and now it's on its way back to the house where they hope it will pass and the president will sign it. The bill known as the Genius Act was supported by bipartisan ship as 18 Democrats or so passed over and supported the bill. The bill mainly supports stable coins and a regulatory framework for stable coins. Mike Jarmuz, what do you think about the new stable coin act, which is all that we've ever wanted and everything we've dreamed of? Yes. It's a PC Satoshi's real vision. That's what that is. We're seeing it play out live real time. It's kind of interesting when you look at who's against something because it kind of gives you a good idea about it and the fact that like Elizabeth Warren is vehemently against it makes you wonder. But it hasn't passed yet but they expected it will. What are they saying about this becoming the real way that the dollar is going to regain its status? That's pretty much what it comes down to is that this is the loophole and the way that they're going to push it in there. I don't know. I've never been really much of a stable coin person. I don't even know if I've really ever had too many stable coins if I have. It was maybe less than $1,000 for about 10 minutes. I guess it's exciting for the industry. I guess it's exciting for everything Bitcoin but it's just ironic that it's genius because the real genius act would have Bitcoin in it for sure. That's the thing I always feel about this too. I saw a tether come out. I saw these other stables come out and say, oh great, you can sell Bitcoin for your portfolio. I sold it in something that matches up to the dollar. Why would I want that? That's not what I got in this for. That's not what Satoche is about. But remember that the market has spoken and tether made like billions and billions of dollars. So it doesn't matter what I think. People clearly want stable coins. Apparently they want them regulated. There's a chance that this goes through. Of course, the house version is different than the Senate version. They are going to debate on that. I thought it was neat to see the split in the Dems. I'm with the minor group but then again, I'm so uncertain about stable coins. I don't think that was the revolution we asked for. I think like Moses saying, this is a way for the USD and the old system to hang on like being tethered to the USD is such a good thing. I think they'll look back and they'll say, what? I was holding a stable coin. Bitcoin goes up this much and you have me in stable Bitcoin. Ben Arck, what do you think about the bill passing the Senate? Perhaps a real law, a full payoff for the Bitcoiners? Or the stable coiners, whoever they are? Yeah, we've got a little bit of time to go. Because it's just they just got the bill passed the Senate and then they actually have to go to the process of trying to make into a law. And then in that process, it may change. But as I understand it, it had bipartisan approval and those some Democrats who crossed the floor to support it. So what's interesting is that I think we've transcended that period where we were worried that Bitcoin would be regulated out of existence. And the regulators would come down harshly on it. I think we're kind of beyond that. You know, as a few years ago now, when I come and put it was name was but the guy said the Bitcoin was too big to regulate. And I think it's true. And they understand that and they've got to embrace it. And it's a huge industry and look at Trump. It was the biggest donor of his whole campaign was the Bitcoin industry. But it's interesting how it transcends parties, which I think is important. Because you have a lot of people on the right and you know, you have Trump and his lot who are pushing Bitcoin and the quote and quote crypto industry in the US and then you have Farage on our side of the pond who's also pushing for a light of regulation or just clear regulation when it comes to cryptocurrencies. So it's nice to see the Democrats gain involved as well. And then what we don't want is for if it switches from Republicans, Democrat that we lose all that traction, which we had when it comes to fair regulations. And I understand that this bill is mostly regarding stable coins. But I think that banks perfect sense for the US like why you know, when there's always talk about CBDCs and building your CBDC and sort of digitally native currency, which everyone's going to use, the reality is like a large portion of the world already used Heather and find it very useful and lots of them, but unbanked folks use tether the sorts of people who traditionally the US would have wanted to get printed dollars in their hands. That they they use tether and every time we try and go into some of these unbanked regions and get them to use Bitcoin, the price and stability is too much for them to end up just using tether. So all in all, a good thing to see whether it goes through. There was part of me, the conspiratorial part of me was like the timing was interesting because obviously any fair equipped regulation for is probably a good thing for Donald Trump regarding knowledge from coin and the meme coin. And it was almost like, you know, crazy Iran, war bombs, let's get this bill through. So there was probably we start the timing was kind of interesting because you know politicians, they do do that when there's something distracting people, they're trying to push something else through. So I wonder whether that might be connected, but yeah, it's, you know, it's it's good for the industry having clear regulations and actually, you know, good for people, I work in Bitcoin payments and we need stability for unbanked folks. So we need some more R&D in that area. You know, if you look at the real losers of this thing and you can see it reflected in Visa and Mastercard stock, basically since the circle IPO, I mean, they both just cratered. Visa and Mastercard stock have just absolutely nose-dived. And you know, if you sell things online or if you accept credit cards for whatever that is, right, whether it's your, you know, your local cafe, your pub or online, you know, they're basically the mafia, you know, they're taking what three and a half percent, sometimes a little bit more, maybe a little bit less. But whatever you're using for your credit card processing, I mean, it's an ultimate scam. Using stable coins puts that at what like effectively zero, I think Stripe is maybe charging 1% right instead of the 3.5%. So the retailers who are actually going to be accepting it, whatever they're doing with it, I mean, they're kind of the winners here and the legacy sort of payments, the plastic card issuers, you know, they're kind of the real losers. So Bitcoin gets to mess with finance and take over commerce just not the way we thought it was. There was stable coins that threw other things, not Bitcoin directly. Well, there was because you have obviously have all this treasury stuff, which is happening at the moment in the Michael the strategy type companies and then like things like five fish with the, you know, loans, collateralized loans when it comes to Bitcoin. And there was part of me was just thinking that perhaps if you wanted to accept for it or take fear, sorry, but then accept Bitcoin. So then you get Bitcoin, you could have a marketplace of collateralized loans where you effectively get a micro loan, which would mean that actually instead of charging a percent, you could reward a percent for the, to the, the merchant for accepting the fear payment because you're then going to use that to fund a collateralized Bitcoin loan and do like a tiny little strategy. But yes, there are two knows in this crazy new world of Bitcoin of fear existing in the same echo chamber. And yet still for an advertisement for a pork fest, I saw they were taking yum yum coin and flue balls, some kind of random things and it still goes on. This altcoin, that coin, they corner the market, get a couple of merchants and say their number one, as Ben said, Trump is supporting this coin. He's pressing the house to pass it at the incredible crypto bill with no delays, no add-ons. As Ben said, 18 Democrats did join most Republicans to pass this bill. However, there was pushback because of Trump, because of his Trump coin and his liberty financial exchange. Democrats are likely, when they come back against it, it'll be a buzz of that corruption that they'll call out crypto. Josh Shagalla, what do you think about the Senate passing the stablecoin bill and stable coins generally? Yeah, I mean, the reason why I started the standard was basically to build better stable coins that were backed by Bitcoin and backed by these volatile assets without giving up private keys. It came because I kept on going to these conferences and people, I'm so used to being in Bitcoin and all these people were like, I'll show you that if you got tether, what the fuck, tether, what are you? So many times people that tether, this is just awful. We've gone a full 360 from, we live in fractional reserve land to yay, Satoshi invented, you know, bare-based assets that can't be printed out of thin air, well, can be, but there's a finite amount. And to, yay, let's hold these and I've trust me, I've got the money in the bank. Here's a certificate, you know, full circle. So I do think that they're super useful. On the positive side, they help people understand public private key cryptography rather than username password, which is pretty good in a way, right? The bad thing is that these regulations force AML and CTF, you know, rulings onto these companies and they have these clawbacks written to the smart contract, which makes them non-fungible basically, which is not good for a currency. And so it'll be really interesting. In a way though, I applaud the US for doing this because they have a natural head start. Above anybody else, we tried launching the standard with a euro stablecoin, totally failed. No one had any appetite for it. The US has a natural head start in the crypto industry because everybody calculates everything. If you go to any country, they've got their portfolio app on their phone set to US dollars for Bitcoin. They, everything is, Bitcoin is worth this much. Oh, what? In pesos? No, no, in US dollars. And in Australian dollars, no, in US dollars. So it doesn't matter which country it's always in US. So they've got this natural head start in that network effect, which is really, really important. We were to destroy that. It would go to something else. And so I think it's kind of clever to grab onto that as fast as possible and do something good with it. Now, some of the details in this genius, but I love the genius bill. You could tell it's done by politicians. It's like your mum saying, wow, he's really good with computers. He's a genius. He's a genius. Wow, they're really good at crypto. What do we call this genius bill? It's just so cringe. But anyway, I think it's interesting that they have, like for instance, reserve requirements on these things, which is really important because if these stable coins become so massive that there's trillions of dollars, they're centralized. They see it as circles totally centralized. They same with tether and all of these. They say they have so much in reserve. And we have to trust them. And this is exactly how factual reserve banking started. So having some, and I don't know the insiders, the inside information on what does that mean, reserve requirements and proof of those reserve requirements. Because in the financial industry, you can say we have this much in the bank, but the thing is the bank can be in fractional reserve legally. So what does it mean? How do you prove what assets you have backing all of these tokens that are flying around? And then what happens if there's a massive calamity in the crypto industry, the smart contract gets hacked or something? And they just claw all that back. And if that gets scattered, because it gets scattered very quickly, what happens then? Do they just freeze them? OK, but I bought this thing, due to add, and I've now got this stable coin. Now it's been frozen. So now that becomes a bad type of money. So sorry to be rambling. There's so many ins and outs on this. So it's a very, very interesting topic for me. I find it fascinating. But yeah, if you want a true stable coin, check out the standard.io. Because they get to lock up, be quite, rap big coin anyway, because they didn't, the operatives weren't good enough on Bitcoin for me. Yeah, this is your field, isn't this? Is your topic of your, yeah, your, your private, the thing you've been working on for the past X amount of years, so your authority in the room here. It's tougher with tether. Is there anything sophisticated going on when it comes to, because obviously, you built the standard and it's a very fireable smart contract and you can, it's all open and sorted, you can see everything. And you know that, Apple, the money is there. Very sophisticated piles of money. It's like smart in the habit. But there are tether tether tether. It has, it has, Josh, it's tether like updated in the past few years to be more than just a database. So, so what tether did is, they, well, they started the whole thing really. Exchanges, exchanges back in 2013, 14, found it very, very hard to have bank accounts because the whole narrative around crypto was Silk Road and headlines, shocking headlines, right? So banks just weren't willing to deal with them. It's one of the reasons we started Valtoro back in the day. So you, you deal with Bitcoin and physical gold instead. But tether then came along and said, okay, you can't get bank accounts. Everyone's to trade against USD. How about you just use a token? And this was after Ethereum had launched, obviously, because it was a token. I'm pretty sure. Or, or were they first on counterparty? It was pre, it was pre Ethereum. I think it was on counterparty. The beginning of tether, it was on the master coin protocol. And that's why they had to move it to a different protocol. It's called Omnicoin, I think, for one. Omni, that's right. Yeah, yeah, that's right. So, and it was, it was basically to help exchanges that didn't, couldn't get banked, run their exchange. And the thing is that tether made a massive bet, which could have gone so bad. But they made a bet that made them so insanely rich and over collateralized that it's not even funny. They took everybody's USD that was backing their stable coins. And when Bitcoin was at its low, when everyone was saying sell, sell, sell, are Bitcoin's, you know, back in the day, and Bitcoin's finished, it's over down at like 10 grand or something. They went and took all the money and put it all in Bitcoin. I don't know, maybe not all, but a lot of it. And it started going up. And they also had so much sway in it that they could print money and buy Bitcoin. So, who knows if they actually kick started that bull run. But after that, they've held so much, so much Bitcoin, it's insane. So they're over collateralized at that stage. I'm not sure now anymore, but now Josh in the same way, do you think they could have ended up like Sam Bankman freed? If the bet had gone on the other direction, they would be talking about them like the way we talk about FTX, right? Absolutely. And there would be a global hunt. So, but it was, you know, they made a good bet and they managed to, whether they had a manipulative finger on the scale during at that time to drive the bull market back up is anybody's guess. But, but yeah, it was amazing that they are so over collateralized now and so wealthy. The thing with Tether is nobody really knows the structure still. Which to me is so freaking amazing, phenomenal. It's so cypher punk. Even though this is a centralized thing, no one really understands how how Tether's structured, where they sit, where they're domiciled, where they're legally structured, they have some legal breadcrumbs here and there, but it's very difficult. Circle on the other hand, it packs us. They're very well solid, regulated out of the US. So it's, but yeah, the Tether story is really fascinating. I think it's a fascinating story. It sounds like a movie to me, Josh. You have the kid comes in the room and he's like, we own this much of the market. If we put this money back in, not only will we corner the market, we'll drive the price up against the greatest ever. We could win or we could lose. Go ahead. What else do you think about Tether? You remember the controversy back in the day with that guy who was named BitFinext? You know, and he was like, anonymous and his voice was like, you know, he did the whole thing. He was BitFinext and he had this whole insight in tell about it wasn't backed or whatever. That was like a big deal in the day. You know, and then he had New York Attorney General going after Tether and I mean, the price was crazy, you know, at that point. But in a multiverse that we're living in here in this simulation, there has to be another scenario where, you know, I think Tether is the sixth or seventh largest holder of US government debt. I'm not sure what it is, but it's around there. Like it's an astronomical number. So how would this be if they weren't holding and buying in one of the largest buyers now of government debt? With this whole stable coin, Renaissance, we're going to be the leader. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who raw would that really be going on? Because there's definitely like an agenda there, you know, and honestly, like it's shocking to me that Tether can even be in the US, right? And you look at something like Speed Wallet, you know, you get Tether by default, you know, or you know, Blockstream Green and Liquid and all these other things like, you know, Samson is pro-Tether, you know, someone like Ray Yusuf, I'm not an expert, but you know, they claim that the global South needs stable coins. Stable coins are like the save and grace for all these other people that don't, you know, live and develop countries. So you know, it's interesting to see how this plays out with, you know, a foreign, I don't know if they're unaudited or not, right? Company like Tether, who's buying the debt that the US has to cozy up to or something like Circle that's on the forefront of getting, you know, I think on Circle's website, it says the most regulated or the most licensed crypto company, you know, in the world or whatever. And you know, now you have all this. You have some bondage sort of regulated, regulate me harder, daddy. You have these companies now that are floating these ideas like, oh, Amazon's going to do their own stable coin, right? Walmart's going to do their own stable coin. But like, how does that work outside of like a gift card or like a credit? Like what are you going to do with a Walmart stable coin? You know, I mean, it makes sense to have one or two large stable coins that are international you know, crossing borders. But like, when I'm going to send my Walmart stable coin, you know, if I'm doing remittance to like my family back home, like it doesn't make any sense, you know, and JP Morgan is going to shop at Walmart. It might work out. Yeah, let's see. Okay. So there's if there's a 1% that they can get on fees or grind or not using credit cards, whatever it is that they can spin up with Amazon coin. I think they could take that 1% dump it back on their customers. So suddenly if you spend an Amazon coin, they'll give you 10% back. So now suddenly people are buying that thing. They're holding it the same way you do gift cards. You have gift cards in your wallet. Remember the whole key to the gift card economy is that they never spend them. So that's true. They don't do something. You get to say you have a million dollar company. You give it to people. They never spend it. You get to keep the million dollars. It's great, right? The whole airline mile scam, the like layers on layers, they're hardly even airline companies anymore so much as they are mileage in the same way if you want to go buy a car. They don't want you to come in with your cash or your Bitcoin, your dirty bastards. They want to finance you. They want to get you strapped to the credit card machine so you can pay off your car every month in the same way. So what's one of time as well? You know, because Thomas, you were, what was your first company with the gift cards? Gift for a while and then purse is where I worked for. Yes, I mean, that was a lot. I was buying more Bitcoin for their Bitcoin treasury. I used to know those old guys. They were like the little kids down the hall. Old is huge now. So at that time, I think gift cards are a little bit different now. A bit grateful as it was. But at that time, it's kind of a shady, murky world because Amazon would pay employees with gift cards. So when they had worked under it by some Indian developer or something, they would pay them in gift cards. And then the Indian developer would be like, well, I need to buy food. So then they would sell the gift cards at a loss in order to buy food. And that's why I personally able to accumulate so many gift cards. And Richard, I was able to take that. That was one story you heard. Another story could have been a casino that paid an Amazon gift credit. Other people say that it was all theft and credit card theft. So you just have to look out the gift card world, like you say, Ben, it's very shady. You put your money into a number. You put the number out there. You don't know if you're the first one getting the number or the second one. I remember on one of those. This is perhaps this is perhaps why Amazon one 50. You have no idea. Yeah, this is perhaps why Amazon want their unstable coin because it probably just makes sense for their gift card economy. It's just another it's another gift. It's another gift on top of the gift card gift. They're already running the gift card. Gryff why not run the the stable gift as well. And before we get before we get started. Sorry, before we get buried in the chat skeptic 33 had a really interesting point. So apparently the genius bill only applies to us backed stable coins. So to your point Josh on that monopoly that the USD has unstable coins that actually the the lighter regulations what it comes stable coins only applies to us stable coins and not those European stable coins. It did seem obvious to me when you guys are saying it the tether versus circle. It's just like a finance versus coin base right that same thing where they one group gets the regulation tries to use it against all their competitors. The other competitor maybe can be a pirate sale. The seven seas get ahead that way. Go Josh. Yeah, no and and I feel it will probably be two players that build these stable coins because they're the geniuses and and the it'll be like these are mastercard ball mart and stuff with license and rebranded in their name taxor stud did this with their one they basically launched a binary answer smug stable coins and and then there's some regulator came in and we're it's not good enough. And shut them down and then they had to claw back all these coins. But yeah, I that's how it'll probably work out. The sad thing is we're trusting again in the centralized authorities. In a way people you know like I said people get used to using public private key cryptography in a way through some sort of front end and maybe the front ends get better. But eventually people I mean Wal-Mart could just as easily have a database and maybe some sort of multi seek database so it can't be hacked as easily or something and then just keep a database of who's got what I mean this is how gift cards work. But yeah, the scams will be also massive because people can you know that's the main scam is you know staying stay on the line stay on the line while you're going by your gift cards sorry about dodgy and dnx and there but my another way to be racist but a lot of these telephone scams are from India or Pakistan. Yeah, anyway. What about the charge back protections right everyone wants to bag on it but you know it's such a nice feature right I have the Amazon credit card first off you get five percent back with no annual fee right and then anytime that there's an issue you know you go to rent a car you use a credit card there's protections in place I mean literally American Express is the worst for a merchant I mean I you can call American Express or just about anything that happens and you have your money back like the next day it's almost like no question. But I would accept it. But what are they going to do for charge back protection for stable points when does it ever be who've need to use a stable coin you know to to pay someone and to your point about you know Amazon rolls out their own card and they say you save 2% if you pay you know with our Amazon shit coin okay I can't just put that Amazon shit coin on my credit card because they're going to lose the 3% or whatever so I have to like a ch right in my money to buy the shit coin and then they're counting on me keeping it there right so they're going to collect their interest on my money I'm going to get nothing right so it isn't exactly like worked out right but I'm curious if all of a sudden they're going to just be able to just roll back any transaction for anyone you know with one of these stable coins as if it's like oh I ordered this thing from Ellen Bitts and Ben didn't send to me you know and then he has to go and find the dispute process it's just not quite clear yet. I think that the consumers just lose power most people don't know about that they don't know that you can fight in reverse charges I would say the Apple card is great for that because you can text them you can fill out a form so you don't have to talk to someone and you can complain all you want about your charges I think they'll just say whoops that went away and like you guys are saying earlier just say like they said back in the days I just have a blockchain you just say oh it's on the stable coin we don't know what's going on we made the stable coin we can't control it it's now all payments are one way but you get that 10% off at the beginning you just lose the ability to return things unless you buy of course the big Amazon and they will just cover it for you because they have an endless float whereas you the small merchant you just get you know lose the features. Yeah I mean it's interesting because there and this is where it gets full black mirror but it's not like Bitcoin they are they are freezable tether and circle have can freeze because the ledger is within the smart contract so so when you when tether let's say there's a robbery and this is the problem right this is why it's so she didn't have any sort of way of reversing things is because if you have the ability to reverse transaction you will be compelled to use it and so what will eventually what could eventually happen is they start building out a social graph of anybody and wallet addresses that have scant or been reported as like stealing or hey I paid this guy to repair my bathtub and it's not repaired and you have to do something about it circle and then that goes through a whole process and then they freeze the freeze those coins even though those kinds have moved on from me because I've you know put it somewhere else and smart people will be able to do things they'll they'll put it into like you know I don't know defy and then trade it out for something and borrow something else against it I do you know all sorts of stuff you can do and but because these things are freezeable they'll be compelled to freeze them and then eventually people just won't use it because it's it's just not good money if I'm accepting some coin I don't know if it'll be frozen or not eventually so there's a lot of stuff to be ironed out but yeah to to to Michael's point I think they will be forced to freeze them it does seem like the kind of thing where you think it's great for crime and then you're out there using it for crime and suddenly they freeze your coin in the middle of transaction you're like oh should use Bitcoin. It's full circle creeping up on everyone ironically full circle no pun intended but that is the 1984 CBDC that is that is everything that you feared like as a Bitcoiner and talked about literally they can do it you know and it's just creeping up on your funds are frozen your funds expire next week if you don't you know spend them it's kind of crazy I won't be I won't be lining up to to hold a bunch of stable coins as for sure I don't think any of this will these wallet accounts have been banned as of today but what I also think is interesting is it's a way for the United States to maintain its power it's kind of a weak soft power it's not as good as being the world's you know central power of money but they could still be like the royal family in the UK they could be like all the stable coins are based on the USD we could always print more USD and f up the stable coin market therefore there's a little back and forth and the US still has some kind of that power that they could hold on but we better keep moving we got to move on ask one question please can I ask one question is it protocol is it consistent through all the protocols for all stable coins like what you're saying with any transaction can be rolled back right if it's tether on liquid or tether on tron you know or USD see I think they just launched on ripple or whatever you know they have like is it no matter what it can always be rolled back is there any censorship resistance stable coin that exists yeah yeah so the standard we have one but it all depends on the smart contract is the smart contract does it have the ability to freeze the tokens and then there's the thing is about bridging right because there's so many L2s in a the theorem land they embraced L2s a lot so everyone launched the different L2s that anchor back to the theorem and a lot of stable coins because they're regulated there's so much there's so much regulatory overhead to jump to launch on a new chain even though they they're regulated on a theorem but they're not allowed to be on arbitrage yet until they jump through a million hoops so what people do is they just bridge their USDC over to arbitrage by having a smart contract that says okay lock your USDC in here with the freezable function an issue of a vanilla ERC 20 which doesn't have the freezable function so you get something like USDC dot E it's called on a arbitrage that that is vanilla ERC 20 that doesn't have that they they don't have any of the fee on transfer they don't have any of the the freezability functions the ground underneath is unstable right they could freeze the thing that you're trading in then you could trade all these worthless tokens they don't link to the actual asset anymore right that's that's a systemic problem though because you socialize that risk across everybody that's bridged you know over so you know depending on how big that economy is maybe that doesn't matter but for for now you know but yeah you start to get together and one to one they could reinstate the value of their their worthless currency yeah because the bridges work by locking up and issuing and then when you've send that issued back it burns it and unlocks what's locked in there so if you start destroying the thing that are locked in there or freezing them then you start to fuck with the system you know and that's a systemic problem that could really destroy it all the all the problems of the old system brought back to you and just I assume that every user reads the smart contract like they read the the the youla before they go into software they're like oh I don't like this function I'm not going to use aetherium dash C I'm going to use aetherium dash D that's the clean one yeah disaster well we'll keep watching it's going to keep developing with those fun stable coins and I loved all the anti CBDC thing that was great that worked out moving on to issue to the price the price the price of Bitcoin is down 0.62 percent in the last 24 hours with a last of 103 810 a high of 106 580 and a low of 102 490 that's $1 for 963 Satoshi's pretty significantly on the right side of the thousand Satoshi barrier keeping an eye on the price as well at coin telegraph they say the Bitcoin price has slipped under 104,000 into triple witching options expiry Bitcoin bulls attempt to reclaim the daily moving averages while volatility volatility warnings come before a unique options expiry event for trad five markets Ben Arck has taken has disappeared let's go to Josh Shagall there's a lot of buzzwords in there it sounds like some options are expiring some people made some bets and they're running out of time and of course it's always going to be bad for Bitcoin right yeah it's not just options it's like a whole triple witching they call it there's a whole bunch of things that expired yesterday so it I tweeted about it said there'll be some volatility let's see but actually what it means is that there's a whole bunch of liquidity that's freed up so it'll pull back in or about it so they say here that six point eight trillion dollars worth of options on stock indexes ETFs equity index futures and individual stocks are set to expire during today's trading session as they call it on the Kobiasi Reletter they say it's a big day it's a big day Ben Arck what do you think about all the stock nonsense it could drive down the price of Bitcoin can you switch to it at different technical hiccup for a moment then all right we're here at different microphone let's go to muh muh muh muh muh muh muh muh muh muh what do you think about the market and of course the only thing everyone cares about Bitcoin the price I actually never heard of a triple witching before I saw a few people posting about it yesterday and then it was cool to see that it was on your agenda so did a little bit of a deep dive myself. I do like options. I think it's very fun. I think it's a way to to generate income on something that you're holding that you have no plan of selling. And you know, I guess it happens maybe four times a year. So it's not like, you know, a blood moon or one of these astrological events that's once every, you know, 318 years or so. I guess it happens four times a year, but I think that this was a record in terms of the size, right? So that's not just Bitcoin. It has really nothing to Bitcoin is probably really a small part of this triple witching to my understanding. I mean, it's index futures and everything else. And I think that this used to be a bigger deal before they introduced weekly options. If anyone cares or, you know, that's fairly, fairly new, which options expire every week. So I don't think it's quite as much. But I did try to find some historical data on, you know, after a triple witching event, if, you know, everything's going to just NGU. And it really that couldn't find anything. So, you know, like historically, the days leading into the event, you know, indexes lose, you know, up to 1%, maybe 0.8%, or half a percent, a day or two before. There can be a little bit of volatility a couple of days after these triple witching events because traders want to reopen those positions or get back into whatever. And remember, a lot of it's hedging, you know, a lot of it is just, you know, portfolio insurance, just in case, you know, there's a nuke fired or who knows what's going to happen. So, you know, I don't know. I mean, it looks like the price is up a little bit since market closed today. But I mean, if that's volatility, I mean, we're just completely desensitized at this point. It's like, oh man, the price fell all the way down to 102.5. Holy shit. You know, I mean, that's like a joke at this point. It's funny. And it's funny. Like you say, must we have these things that are planned every year. These options must expire. But this year, we hear about it because this year, it's going to affect Bitcoin. And it reminds me, if you look at a larger scale, you're like, why is there all this traffic in the morning? Well, everyone goes to work at nine o'clock. That doesn't make any sense at all. Why is there all this traffic in the evening? Everyone gets off at five o'clock. That makes no sense. But we just keep doing it. So yeah, I guess we're going to have more triple witchings every year. But this is a very large triple witching. Ben, do you want to get in on this all this stock market talk with the triple witchings and such? I don't know too much about it to be honest, but so what is it? This triple witching thing suddenly where like subject to it because Bitcoin is big enough? No, I think the really interesting thing is, it's like, most of the saying is that the just 100 K just feels like a launch part for Bitcoin. It doesn't, it doesn't feel like a top. It doesn't feel like where, you know, when it's hit top before, you know, we, it's felt like a top whereas this, it doesn't feel like it. It just feels like where we've made a new base. And this is what we're going to work from from now on. We're going to bounce maybe like 102 K or whatever. And then we're going to jump up to whatever. I think the new cycle for Bitcoin is just the more bullish than it's ever has been and then you have like the all-time Bitcoin reserves on exchanges at an all-time low and then you have all these strategies type companies hooping up all the Bitcoin. Like it's just supply and demand, like Bitcoin is going to go nuts. And if this witching thing is going to impact that as well, I mean, maybe that'll be the catalyst for a bit of volatility which frosts the market up and then detrages Parlin, the retail investors Parlin and then that helps pump the price and then everyone jumps on for the actual boomerome which is inevitably going to happen. But yeah, I mean, Bitcoin hasn't had more bullish signals than it currently has right now. It's quite incredible. Ben, it sounds like the triple witching is just all these gamblers and all their bets expire at the same time. So if you had an options bet, a stock index bet, an ETF bet or an equity index future individual stock bet, all these things are going to expire at the same time. So like we've seen in the past when these gamblers have to cover, they have to sell something else, usually Bitcoin, driving the price Bitcoin down. Then everyone freaks out what's wrong with Bitcoin and it starts going down. But meanwhile, those triangle guys with the big triangles, they say this is just another one of those up-e-down things we have to do because it doesn't go straight up and they're talking 130 140. And of course, I mean, $1,000 like Josh said, everyone talks in dollars. So I think about that, Ben. Up and down. Up and down. It's going to go up. It's going to go down one day. We'll win. Fortunately, we've already won because we have the source of all truth and knowledge right here, ready to tell you if the price is going up or down. But first, we're going to ask the panel, Mike Jarmuz, will the price of Bitcoin be higher or lower this time next week? Higher. Josh Shagalla, higher or lower? Higher. Ben. Everyone's optimistic. You've got to break through. Is it all optimism, Ben? It's just you can't not be bullish like higher. I mean, are we are we higher than we were last week? We had some like funny news like that. Yeah, but the higher, higher. They said in the chat that we were slightly higher and that the ball is always right. I believe them about the second part. Now, will the price of Bitcoin be higher this time next week? Shaking the ball can cause bubbles. It says very hard to read. It's really full of bubbles. It's amazing so much. The market relies upon this this moment right now. So much. Come on. Come on. I think it's everyone's got to think. I don't think it's readable. I think this is the triple witching. Yeah, it's a triple quadruple. It's some solstice this weekend too. So it's a proper thing. The ball is bearish. My sources say no. My source is say no. And I think also some of the the ball has evaporated here in Vegas. I know it's getting harder to read. But you know, it is the source of all truth and knowledge. So my sources say no. The entire panel bullish. Everyone except the ball. You can check out all of the past predictions of the ball at world crypto network.com. We've got shorts shorts and more shorts at worldcryptone network.com and YouTube. Moving on to issue three issue three hackers reportedly wipe out $90 million from the largest Iranian cryptocurrency exchange. The hackers allegedly with links to Israel drained more than $90 million from no bit X Iran's largest cryptocurrency exchange stealing Bitcoin, Ethereum and even Dogecoin from the exchange Ben Arck. What do you think about hackers taking the war digital to the Iranian exchange? I mean, there's either Iran is now just it's kind of fair game. So these hackers like, well, if we're going to target someone, let's target, you know, then they can target an Iranian exchange and it's just kind of fair game. Like they probably just get away with it. Or it could be state sponsored. So, you know, some of the biggest viruses ever made like StokesNet, for example, which is one of the first major viruses which managed to cross-pollinate across all these computers was targeting the Iranian nuclear program. So cyber war, it makes sense that it would be state sponsored but then there was also a par me who was just thinking there might just be some Bitcoiners who think that Iran is a fair target and by hacking them there in some way being patriotic towards the cause of Israel or whatever else. I'm always amazed when you have these little exchanges which have so much liquidity inside of them as well, you know, like 90 million. There's a lot of money. Incredible. 90 million that could have been invested in LN bits but it's said sat in accounts doing nothing. Nothing. I agree Ben, there's kind of it's an easy thing to hack. It's probably a smaller exchange. Like we've always said Bitcoin is this valuable thing on your computer. It's more valuable than your documents or your photos because it's money. And so of course the Iranian exchange learned this the hard way. You also have to wonder if it was either like Ben saying state sponsored or if hackers just did a calculation and said well they're going to be really busy dealing with bombs and things in the next few days. Maybe they won't even notice a stealing 90 million. Mike Charmouz, what do you think about Iran taking this war digital with the Israeli hackers hacking the Iranian exchange? Isn't it kind of amazing that they even have an exchange and Iran? Isn't that even in that alone kind of just like shocking? You know, I think what you said is your picture for the little account you have to wear a hijab like the little account picture has to be in the hijabs. They didn't steal any stablecoins. Okay, so the question is is are stable coins theft resistant? Is that just like the quickest way to just end it all if you're a hacker from an exchange? You just leave the stablecoins alone. They're like a die tag in the the bank robbery. You don't have to. I'm joking but I'm serious. You know, I mean, I what do you even do with them? It is interesting and a little insulting that they won't even steal them. I mean, does coin you say it has value because they stole it. It must have value. Josh Shagalla, what do you think about this hacking and how fun that we can bring back last week's story this week with a cryptocurrency involvement? Yes. Well, never trust exchange called knobby. It's got knobby in its name. knobby text. But no Bitcoin, right? The exchange coin. No Bitcoin. Turned out to have it. No Bitcoin at the end of the day. Well, surprise. Well, it's like empty gocs. It's just empty. So yeah, man, there's so much to this. This like the fact that the news media is saying that there is really, that know that they're saying that they are apparently Israeli or something like that. Where was it? Was the exact word possible? I think possible links. The funds were sent to an account and the account has previously put negative messages about the Iranian National Guard on the blockchain. So either like Ben saying it's Robinhood, they took the money they gave it to presumably anti-Iranian forces or like Ben saying it's a state sponsor thing they took the money gave it to themselves. They stole it. Who knows what it who knows what people are. The war certainly. The thing is that that I fear is that like the the Iranian people are very different from the Iranian government and infrastructure. So yeah, I'm always like during these times when everyone's so on guard and we're really like talking about hardcore weaponry. It's important to call the rhetoric a little bit if we want peace and just figure out how to get it sorted out. But yeah, I don't know. This whole thing is straight. Actually, you know, Iran, the thing is about Bitcoin. It was always like in two weeks. That was like the thing for Bitcoin. Ah, Litecoin's going to be on Mt. Gox in two weeks. It was like, there was the meme in two weeks in two weeks TM and it's been the same for Iran with the New Yorks. It's always been it's two weeks away. So they were the original two weeks. I'm not saying that they don't. Maybe they've been enriching who knows. But I just I have so much doubt, especially around the whole WMD talks. It's just been reason after reason. You know, the whole reason we invaded Iraq was WMDs and that turned out to be nonsense. So I'm just I guess a little bit like there's there's more to play here. I'm just suspect of everything nowadays. As well, we need to stress the difference between Iraq and Iran. It's not just one letter off. Iran is a huge country. They have a massive industrial base. They're much more industrialized, much more westernized. And a lot of way I saw a video of a mall in Iran and it was incredible and it was wealthy and it was rich and it's a rich country. It's a big deal. And like Mazou saying it's a mixture though. It's where sometimes they'll be very religious and kind of backwards perhaps. And other times they'll be very forward looking and very western and futuristic and all these things. It's not good to go to war with them. It's not good for the US to get involved directly. Certainly Israel's had a variety of small wars in it with Egypt and other countries in the region. You want it to stay small. You don't want to see it transition into this US being overtly in it. But we're right on it. We're right on the edge there. So it's interesting to see these kind of hacks and things. You have to fail miserably in the Middle East. So it's like it really isn't within their interest. I mean the US hasn't won a war since the second world war really. It's failed. It's been major conflicts. And then particularly in the Middle East and like you don't want to go to war with the Arab world, which is effectively what will happen if you start bombing the Iranians. You can go away with supporting bombing some Palestinians. But when it comes to bombing around then you're going to end up with the World War III right there. But on Israel, Iraq is unpopular. Iraq was the like you know. Yeah, the Arab world is a prior. Yeah. So after them, but to take on Iran is to direct linked to Saudi Arabia, UAE, other probably. And if you look at Israel, Israel, I mean there's a Naomi Clark, I think as I mentioned it may be on the show last week, but she had a really interesting point about she said that Israel was effectively a citadel. And it is really when you're looking on a map, it's just surrounded by the Arab world. And it's just a tiny population of at least it's guys in Israel. Who to the point on the back going back to the hacking story, Israel does have some very technically competent people. And I could imagine that the sort of nationalistic is right that someone in Israel, they would think that maybe hacking this thing was an act of patriotism in some way. And they can also make some money from it as well. So could be a win-win. But yeah, Israel has some very talented technical people. But it is, I mean it's a very technically advanced country. And it is something of a citadel because it just exists in this sea of Arab world, this little pocket. Which is why it's so important strategically, and why it has the backing, you know, the support from the US and UK and Europe as well, because they want that for hold in the Arab world. But yeah, don't bomb the Iranians please. So also clear with Iraq, it was a lot easier in the first Persian Gulf War to say they crossed the line. They went into Kuwait, they moved troops, they took over a country with this. And then in the next Persian Gulf War, they presumably had an assassination attempt on George Bush. But with this, the Iranians have moved into the Adams. They've developed too many Adams. They've broken too much of the rules. It's a lot like a thinner line to say it's time to invade. It's funny, though, because you've always got North Korea who openly say we hate America, we're going to kill all the Americans. And we have nuclear weapons. But then they just kind of left alone. It's all right, North Korea. You have no oil. That's a great theme that's going around Ben. They're like, we're attacking Iran because they can't get nukes. And they're like, what about Russia? Like you crazy? We can't attack them. They have nukes. It really changes when you're in the club. And that's also what we saw the Ukraine situation where Ukraine gave up their nukes with a security promise. And we see how that's gone. If you have nukes, it seems the ultimate security promise. Go ahead, Josh. I cut you off. No, no, it's it's I think the fear is that it's like going to war with a cult that has no fear of death and almost like wanted. And they're like, yeah, but we get, you know, 12 versions. So each, each guys, each. So it's, you know, that's the fear. But hey, Pakistan has nukes apparently. So I've never understood that either. You know, they've got nukes. Why, why isn't the world so up in arms about that? They have the same beliefs that they have 12 versions at the end. And they're pretty close with India. I think you're under under selling it quite a lot, Josh. I think they get 72 versions. Which is like, I think reliefs might be a much better deal. But it is funny. Like you say Pakistan, once they have nukes, they're in the club. We can't touch them. If they don't have them, though, there's still this back and forth and maybe a lot more destruction. As horrible as it might say, maybe every country should just get a nuke and then nobody could fight because we all have nukes. It's way better than having McDonald's, which previously they thought would lead to no fighting. But it turns out they just pull the McDonald's out and then have the fight. So it doesn't work. Look, the videos of every Friday for their Friday prayers. And I ran chanting death to America is insane. You know, I don't know how long that's been going on. I actually met somebody who grew up there. They said that every morning in school, that was like something that they said, kind of like we did this Pledge of Allegiance. So I don't know why I didn't really pay much attention to see things like that. But the videos are insane. You know, they're not chanting death to UK. You know, they're not chanting, you know, it's just it's insane. And it's it's crazy. It's crazy. It's not nice. Okay. Other countries that do that. I mean, it's certainly not the first time historically in Rome. There was one senator who really didn't like Carthage and he would end every one of his speeches with Carthagode, Dylenda, Est. Carthage must be destroyed. And it wasn't very popular at first, but eventually the movement caught on. And eventually they attacked Carthage, burned the city down, filled in the port, salted the earth, everything they could do to make Carthage not exist. So yeah, it is scary. Most people are chanting for the end of your country and so forth. And especially, you know, in you know, there's many different views on the United States, but some views are positive that it is a positive force in democratizing the world and other things. It's a complex issue. But yes, it takes it. But I agree. It's scary. It's scary. It's scary. It's it's, you know, and I think the the way you get out of this is to be a positive force. And that's and to continue because people eventually I know many, many Iranian people throughout my life. And they've they've moved away from Iran. They've and they're usually Christian Iranian. They've moved away. But but yeah, it's it's important to remember how much propaganda there is versus how much reality. Because it's very easy to think, wow, they're chanting every morning death to America. I don't know. Maybe they are. But it's, you know, it's kind of like all well 1984. We are at war with Eurasia or Southeast Asia. And then they suddenly switched to someone else. And people eventually people people sort of can see through it a little bit, I think, I think. And and if you look through the 70s and 60s and 70s Iran was a very progressive in terms of their people without hijabs and within the Arab world. And then the this the central intelligence over through the the leader there. And so there it's such a complex web of mistrust and misinformation, disinformation. And so I just don't know what to think anymore. I really don't. But I turn on the X or anywhere. And I'm being told what to think. And this is what always makes me like, yeah, it's true. And I mean, it's with every every subject really. And it's so hard to find the truth, especially now with AI generated video and stuff. You just don't know. You just don't know. So you really want to have some fun Josh and go back to the 1920s or so and read about Kermit Roosevelt, who's legitimately a relative of TR, who was over there messing with Iran. Because the CIA messed it all up before they messed it all up again. And so forth. It's been a disaster there. But it is sad. I know there was a lot of they call it what do they say waste fraud and abuse. But that's what we kind of gave up when we when we closed down us aid is this soft power where yes, the guy gets every up every morning and he does his three minutes hate. But then he goes and gets a scoop of rice from a bag that says provided by the US government. And he puts on his glasses that he got with the free glasses program that the United States provide. And people are like, why are we giving free glasses to these jihadis and giving them a bag of rice? And it's because we can convert them this way. They're going to have a full belly and glasses they can see in books and whatever. This is a soft way of warfare. It's a soft way of changing people's minds. And I think we forget how valuable that being how cheap it can be as well compared to weapons and war and destruction so far. I think you find that most of that was not happening. It was happening. In like happening. A lot of people a lot of people had that bag of rice and that bag of rice is gone. And the new bag is going to say brought to you by China. So I was coming to you. But Thomas, the part that you left out of that that's the most important thing when people say you know the government gave them their money. The government gave them our money. Okay, that's the problem. The government gave them it's our money. You know, a lot of times. Yeah, but I think we're getting a good deal. I think that like rice and glasses are cheap compared to bombers and actual death and so far the mess is up the economy all that death. I think Obama gave them a crap ton of money. I don't know what they did with it. How much the money? Palette. Ash. It's always the USD that's palatized. They never palatized Bitcoin. I can't figure it out. Sure. Oh, well, we'll have to keep talking about certainly the issue. We'll keep going and we'll check on it again next week. We hope for the best for both sides and so on and so forth. Less death. Let's move on to issue four, a real powerhouse of a country. Norway, eyes crypto mining ban amid local firms, heavy investments in Bitcoin. The Norwegian industry's surge in Bitcoin holdings sparks a contrast against the government mining crackdown. We've seen other countries adopt Bitcoin. Companies are adopting Bitcoin, but not Norway. They're stopping the mining. Ben Arck, what do you think about Norway taking a stand against this Bitcoin wave? It seems to be going on. Yeah, I mean, like when it comes to mining, Norway makes a lot of sense. You've got to keep your mind cool. Then Norway has a lot of geothermal renewable energy, which you can access. This is the worry when it comes to, it's always a double extra sword when you talk about mining, because then what becomes the incentive to run the power station? Yes, it can bring some hydroplanned back online, but will it then serve the grid and benefit the people living that country? Then consuming the cheaper form of power, which then has to be in order to have a steady base load for the grid, then they have to resort to like dirtier ways of generating power. It's interesting that Norway have taken a stand. I'm not entirely sure, I didn't actually be the article, so I'm sorry Thomas, but I'm not entirely sure why why they've taken the stand on it, but I could imagine there would be some concerns, but it's almost like the mining version of the strategy effect of having this thing exist. We have the material reality of fear currency and power stations and whatever else, and then suddenly just kind of chuck Bitcoin in the mix. It's this very valuable asset, which generally goes up and creates huge gains for the people who accumulate it. Then that has insane impact on financial markets and similarly has an insane impact on power generation, because it's like what are you going to use that power for? Are you going to like people's houses? Are you going to use it to mine Bitcoin? I regret not reading the article to no more about it, sorry Thomas. Well, it's the same thing as the Middle East though, Ben. They're like, we don't want to get the oil, even though we could sell the oil for a lot of money and we could use that money to buy other electricity that we could use for our people. They're not seeing it all the way through. What I really want to get out here is I want to understand their reasons for doing this, and I think it's a new form of government called ironic government, where the government is performance art. Ben was saying they have all these advantages to running servers there. You have all these companies, like MicroStrategy, all buying Bitcoin companies or countries or having reserves and so forth. This is the option for Norway to make a Norwegian Bitcoin Reserve and to power up some of these miners for the people. If they're worried about the industry eating all the profits, take it and give it to the people who use 10% for libraries. They have the best libraries in the world, but instead they're doing this performance art government where they ignore the obvious way to use their serving mines to enrich their people and they just kick the can down the road until they have to change their mind. It's just a countdown now for how they change their mind. The Norwegians were historically quite friendly because I remember covering a story once upon a time on the show on the Norwegian sovereign fund, which is one of the biggest funds in the world from their oil reserves. They had quite a large percentage of just bought Bitcoin, but they just bought Bitcoin with the proceeds. We spoke about it a while back. I'll have to look it up. Maybe they've always been pretty big. This is the government. Humor, I just saw the South Park. I think that the Norway was the troll country and they had all that going on. So it's performance art, then they have so much Bitcoin. They don't even want to mine it. They're just mocking us. They're mocking us. That's why it makes no sense because it's all it's a joke to them. Mike Jarmoose, what do you think about Norway and their brave stand against Bitcoin mining and money making in general? Well, first off, someone needs to make them watch dirty coin. Okay. I think that if they just play dirty coin for Norway, maybe they will change their mind and realize all the benefits. You remember when China banned Bitcoin mining? Maybe the first time, the second time. Maybe it's banned right now. I don't know. Many times it's always banned. It used to matter. It used to affect the price and you said, everyone was talking about 51% of tax and this, that and the other thing. And then all of a sudden it mattered less. It mattered. It's such a good movie, dirty coin. It mattered less. It mattered less. It mattered less every time that China banned mining. And this will do absolutely nothing except hurt the Norwegian people. It's so perfect for their climate. I mean, it couldn't be a more exciting thing to get into for a country. And this is Bitcoin's anti-fragile. So that's it. Bitcoin does not care about Norway. I don't care about Norway. I went there once. It was terrible. I've been all over Europe. I hope to never go back to Norway. I did not have a good time. I actually paid two dollars to use a urinal. I swiped my credit card, paid two dollars to pee in Norway. Everything was a scam. Uber ride that was three miles was 70 dollars. And a hamburger at McDonald's was 24 bucks. So I never want to go back to Norway again. And you know what? They don't deserve Bitcoin. They'll get it at the price that they deserve. But it's just really stupid. It'll go down as another government blunder. I mean, how much did Germany lose from their last big Huha cell that they've done? I mean, pretty much most every government blunders Bitcoin all the way. Except El Salvador, who's buying. And now you have some new buyers emerging. But in a few things, I think there was news that less than a $600 transaction in maybe Thailand or somewhere around there just happened this week. You know, you have a few little positive news. But when it comes to mining energy, flood, and nonsense, I mean, they pretty much always mess it up. So I think this is just another case of that. And we'll see how long it lasts. Go to the GoFundMe page to bring dirty coin to Norway to play and parliament. And we'll sponsor the popcorn. And we'll see what they say after it. I agree, Ma, as it is so obvious and so tragic, because it's not just like Germany where they had the funds and they could have held them or other countries trying to hold the funds that are seized in criminal actions, which doesn't seem right to me at all. They could actually create new coins here, or they could just tax an industry where they create new coins. They could put a bunch of rules on mining. They could have all kinds of things, you know, you have to build a park, whatever it is. They could put the rules on. They'd be in a strong position. Instead, they're giving it to their neighbors to Sweden and Finland, presumably. They could just keep people warm. How about that? You know, all the heaters in the country are blockchain Bitcoin miners tomorrow. Josh Shagalla, what do you think about Norway? I've said this quite often specifically that Bitcoin is extremely green, because it always looks for the cheap energy. The only place that's cheap energy, the only places that are cheap energy that are dirty are more socialist leaning countries, because Norway, it's majority oil, it's rich because of its oil, and the oil is primarily owned by the state. The problem with that is if you look at any way that's banned Bitcoin, it's because people go, oh, wow, oil's cheap here. We could use it for a little bit. Then the state goes, you're using all our oil and actually getting rare numbers for it. You'll see that everywhere. Where it's not socialist, they'll look for renewable versions with private sector. Yes, Norway has a lot of renewables, specifically with Hydro. My feeling on this is that they're actually sucking on the teeth of the very cheap, cheap oil that Norwegians get over there. This is why they have heated roads because they have a lot of oil. That's not even a joke. It's typical, and this is an important factor is that wherever people go, Bitcoin's so dirty. It's only dirty in the countries where they steal from everybody to subsidize an industry that they control, which is usually in more socialized countries or coming to leaning countries, they will subsidize the year. They will nationalize the energy grid and then sell it for cheap and then get pissed off when people start using that cheap energy for private gain. It does seem obvious though, Josh, if you have lots of oil to diversify, I heard the Saudis are going huge into renewables, things like this. Why miss the next market? Why stay with only one thing and going into Bitcoin as well as renewables, as well as other energy generation possibilities? It just seems obvious. It's the largest suffering fund and it's 1.7 trillion they have in their coffers. They're not short of a penny. They have poor Bitcoin, Bitcoin is on their portfolio. They're on a pound. It's $27 per Norwegian. They're worth a Bitcoin, which is held by the suffering, Norwegian suffering fund. They probably just got too much money and they can't be bothered with all the things. Yeah, well, you charge it around two bucks a piece. That's a lot of money. Add some by Bitcoin. You can almost do money. How about a drink of water? You could see Michael Saylor waiting on the outside just trying to get in, trying to get this fund to buy Bitcoin. Every single fund should be Bitcoin and I can hear him from the speech still. But it's only matter of time before we go to solar mining and Bitcoin pirates as Peter Todd predicted in one of his speeches. Look it up. Moving on, we got a couple more issues. Over at the block, a guy named James Hunt, I like the name says Bitcoin's on-chain activity is a ghost town, but whales grow more dominant beneath the surface, only large activity on Bitcoin now. Finally, Bank of America ranks Bitcoin with the printing press, steam engine, light bulb, and internet as once in a millennium technology. You can see it right here next to iPhone, social media, electric vehicles, CRISPR and AI, Bitcoin. Let's go to Moz. What do you think about Bitcoin's on-chain activity not being anything good? It's a ghost town and Bank of America celebrating the wonderful invention that is Bitcoin. Well, first off, are low fees a bad thing? That's really the question. I actually just consolidated UTXOs last night. It cost me a whopping $3 at one sap per bite. That was way overdue on that. But is this a bad thing? Does that mean that lightning's working? Does it mean that the ETFs have eaten up a lot of it? Does it mean that coin base to coin base, Robinhood to Robinhood, Cash app to Cash app, these sort of things. It's not even so I've been hitting the chain. I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing that fees are low and Bitcoin is cheap to use. I'd rather be here than the scaling wars and the spam and everything else that happened. I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing. I think that it's great that Bank of America says that, but why does Bank of America put their money where their mouth is? And actually buy some Bitcoin or allow it to be the pristine collateral that it is. Can I get a mortgage with it? We'll bank of America lend on it. Will they do anything with it? So it's a real nice feat to put it on their little chart there. But they have every bit of the US government and regulatory ability to do anything in the world more than put it on a chart and say, oh, this is cute. And then put three things after it. What was it? Electric vehicles, CRISPR and then quantum computing. So I think it's nice, but it would be real nice if they actually did something with it that was more than that. But I really don't know. I saw some of those glass node stats about the large holders that are selling. And I just, I don't think any of this is bad. If anything, I think Bitcoin is working exactly like it should. We don't have some sort of segwit 2x nonsense right now and some debate about raising the block size limit. There's too many debates right now as it is that only the smart people like Ben Art can really talk about. But I personally like one sat one sat per V byte till death. You know, and I don't know. I couldn't be happier with it. I think it shows that Bitcoin is working. It is pretty good, but like they say in the article, a lot of the activity has moved to the futures markets. So once again, Satoshi creates this beautiful thing. You can see exactly what's there, who has what Bitcoin, and everybody comes along and builds a thing on top of it says come trade in my casino on top of Bitcoin and all that. And it sounds again like Bitcoin is just the classy classic yogi bearer quote. That place is too crowded. Nobody goes there anymore. Josh Shagalla, what do you think about Bitcoin? Nobody's using it, but it's still really popular and Bank of America or at least some intern who made the PowerPoint suddenly thinks we're as good as the printing press. Well, Bitcoin for a very long time has embraced the huddle meme. And so the smart money is holding and not moving it. And I think this is part of why stablecoins are becoming more interesting for people because it's the currency side of it, whereas Bitcoin's not being used as a currency, being used as a store of value. And I worked for a long time in the gold industry. And that's what we noticed. People would buy gold and they would hold it. So it was really hard to run an exchange where you're making money from trading fees because people buy it. And then they hold it for like five years, 10 years, whatever. And so people generally they hold Bitcoin if they're smart, they'll put it away in a seed and they just won't touch it for a while. That's their kids' fund or their retirement fund. And hey, number go up technology, right? So it's working for them. And you know, why I think what we built at the standard was important was to have the ability to borrow against it without giving up your private keys by locking into smart contracts and borrowing against it. And so that's, that's a might be happening too, is that people are borrowing against the people are holding it. And yeah, I think that's my answer really is that holding it doesn't mean it's not successful because we all understand that's the value of Bitcoin is that it is obviously its program on money. It is excellent currency, but it's also very, very excellent at just being a rare number that is a collectible because it was the very first blockchain. It was the very first cryptocurrency. And so it's collectible in people's eyes. Obviously because the number keeps going up and they they hold it and it's working. Ben, are you okay with you? No one's using Bitcoin because it's just a collectible now. Yeah, it's real fun. So it's like people point to the the price of a transaction and how quiet the the main pool is and they'll just say, look, no one's using Bitcoin and it's like, no, it's just working, like most said, if you look at like 2017 when we had crazy $50 fees or whatever, like Lightning didn't exist Lightning won main live in 2018. So we didn't have Lightning, we didn't have Liquid, we had none of these things which are used quite heavily like for payments. So you had all those payments on chain. And then as well as that like often if you wanted to buy shit coins, you would have to go through Bitcoin first, you'd have to buy some Bitcoin first, then you'd have to go but get the shit coins with the Bitcoin. So there was all these reasons to use on chain Bitcoin which you no longer have, like people who are paying for stuff with Bitcoin, they're not using on chain, they're using Lightning, like it works, like the solution, we had a problem that demand was too high, the transaction throughput was too low and we needed a higher transactions per second and now we have crazy high transactions per second with Lightning, it's just the case of making it easy and easy for people to access but I mean, just if anyone who says that like people aren't using Bitcoin, just just go hang out and nostril for a bit and watch all these guys zapping each other and then just go pay for anything online, like go to a cafe and go buy a coffee or go to a bar by a beer, you're power on Lightning, go buy some server hosting, you know, on Bluena node, you're paying Lightning, like it works, the solutions which are being built works and that's why we have these lovely low on chain fees, when kind of a fun, oh no, I personally, this is a nice excuse to reduce the block size and push the fees up because I think people don't track tackle scaling until it's a real issue and on chain transactions eventually will be quite expensive so we do probably need to tackle scaling and people get lured into this false sense security, false sense of security when on chain fees are very low and I'm not sure that's entirely productive like for the sort of scaling solutions, like the last leap we had in scaling solutions, like when you know bolts and people actually finally start making use of liquid was when we had some high fees a year and a half ago, so I quite like high fees but it is a symptom of just Bitcoin working, like the technology stack working and the multi-layer protocol approach working as well, so rejoice friends, it's working. Well there's something you never thought you'd see, the fees are too damn low and like you're saying it's probably a good time for Roger Verte to go ahead and unite and merge his UXTOs, he said that was a big deal back in the day, now's a good time, but we're running out of time, let's move on to predictions or a story of the week, Michael Jarmouz, you're first with a prediction or a story of the week, go ahead. Story of the week, story of the week might get me in a little bit of trouble but so somewhere back in 2018 when I was just investing like a lunatic, I actually invested a couple of shackles into a company called Circle Internet and had not really thought too much about it and boy that's going to be good, I can't do anything with it for probably about six more months or whenever that lock up is and you know I have to unfortunately live with being a shit-cliner when that gets out there, but yeah I fell backwards into a nice payday with this circle thing, so I have to be at least bullish unstable coins until I can dump this shit-cloin and the day that I can dump it, I swear to God I'm going to be out of this thing and pay off every bit of credit card debt that I have and rejoice and put the rest of it in Bitcoin for sure, but until then I have to ra ra circle internet company and that's my story of the week is sometimes when you angel invest you can just get dumb lucky and that was a long time ago in 2018 that I did that and I would never do something like that today, but the illiquid nature of Bitcoin start of angel investing makes it, so you basically can't do anything, once you click the button and send in your money you have to live with it and thank God because if they would have said like hey you can get four times your money, I would have probably just took it and said give me out of this thing, but since I couldn't I'm sitting kind of pretty and can I show my thing now Thomas? Sure go ahead. My thing, oh yeah, okay, so ThunderFunder is a RegCF crowdfunding portal, yay, a pleb investment platform where you can invest in Bitcoin and open source companies, it is fairly new, we're just getting started, we don't accept Bitcoin yet, but we will very soon, oh there it is, look at that, we have one live deal in a company called the Orange Pill app that is open till June 30th, so for a $250 minimum you could get your feet wet angel investing in Bitcoin startups and open source companies, and look at that coming soon and has been coming soon, they were supposed to be our first deal way back in July of last year, Ellen Bitts, the beloved Ben Arck, the mad genius himself will be on ThunderFunder very soon, so this is a way that you can as an accredited or unaccredited investor, you don't have to meet any sort of requirements, you can be located anywhere not just in the US, I think you have to be 18 years of age, you can turn some of your dirty fiat into Bitcoin and open source companies, equity, so not like Geyser, you're not like donating here, but you actually are an owner and get all of the upside of that whole thing, so this was our latest thing that we just started here, I am no longer the CEO and I am working on Lightning Ventures, which is the parent company of this ThunderFunder thing, so we have a group, we are the world's largest Bitcoin focused angel investing network, wow, that's a mouthful with over 3,000 people and we invest in Bitcoin companies only, a little bit of a higher minimum and you need to be an accredited investor, or you at least need to just click the button saying that you're an accredited investor because everyone is an accredited investor, if you click the right button, that is how that works there, so that's it, LTNG.ventures, if you want to learn a little bit more about that, and that's it for me, that's what I'm working on, if you're going to be in Riga or Helsinki for BTC Hell, you should check out a Satoshi Raka Moto, which I'm putting together, Thomas stopped by our very weird Satoshi Raka Moto on Fremont Street in downtown, beautiful downtown Las Vegas for the Bitcoin conference, it was kind of a bizzaro Raka Moto, but it worked and it was great seeing him there, so if you can jam, you can get up in an instrument, play with the Satoshi Shredders, the Bitcoin All-Star Band, and have some fun with us, and that's pretty much all I have going on these days. Well, the sound's pretty cool, Muzz, and it's a great way for people to invest in Bitcoin companies, like you're saying, Angel Funding, and we say all the time that Michael Sailor should give back, and not just hold all his Bitcoin here as a chance for him to invest in some early companies, he could just come in and buy them all, just add them all to the shopping cart, piece of cake from Michael Sailor. Josh, should all of you have a prediction or a story of the week? Go ahead. Yeah, last week, a couple of weeks ago, we launched the Key.Fun. It was just a smart contract I wanted to build, which is a game, and basically it's a last man standing with three game, and it's kind of fun. So I upgraded the troll box there so people can chat and leave little emojis and things like that. The jackpot is now up to 5,909 bucks, and basically what happens is you hold the key, there's one key, and there's a jackpot, and every time someone buys the key of somebody else, the timer resets, and so now it's up to 30 hours that you have to hold the key. If you hold the key right down at the bottom, then you go into the final, and the last two key holders, basically go into a prison as dilemma where they have to decide whether to split or steal the jackpot. If both players split, then they get 50% each of the jackpot. If one player decides to split and the other decides to steal, then the thief gets 100% of the jackpot, but if greed takes over and both steal, then the jackpot automatically trickles down on everybody that ever held the key as an adrop. It's just a fun little exercise I wanted to build myself as a smart contract. People are loving it. It's going up and up. The key price keeps, it goes up 0.4% every time, every time you hold the key, you get a dividend shard, because 10% of that purchasing price goes into the dividend pool and you just keep pulling dividends as price keeps going up. It was a fun exercise in coding these smart contracts. I just enjoyed it, and it's just a bit of fun. It's nothing serious. Please don't bet the farm on it. It's just a fun little thing. By the way, we also got the contracts audited now. That was also a fun exercise getting that but yeah, check out the key.fun. It's just an arbitrum and running with our stablecoin USDS, which is backed by people locking up Bitcoin, Ethereum, and smart contracts that they control and don't. They have the private keys. That's cool. You can check it out at the key.fun. We also have Moses Company at ltng.ventures. If you want to invest and support the next generation of market-defining Bitcoin companies, let's go to Ben Arck from lnbits. Do you have a prediction or a story of the week? Go ahead, Ben. A couple of things. First, Josh, what do people do do they steal or what's the general outcome at the end of these games? Well, it hasn't reached that yet. We'll see. This is the first time it's running. One game could take months because every time someone buys the key, the clock resets, and they have to try and hold it without someone buying it for more than they bought it for. So I think what will happen is when does it trigger the end game, Josh? When does they buy back and forth? They buy back and forth? Then how does the end game stone? When the huddle time reaches zero in the smart contract. So right now it's at 23 hours. It's counting down. If it reaches zero, then the last two people holding the key go into that prison dilemma. It was really fun building that because that section of it there, they have to basically get a salt and hash their choice, which is split or steal with a random number. They send the hash up to the smart contract into the blockchain. When both players commit their choice, then they go into a reveal where they send the salt up to the smart contract. The smart contract now hashes it. If those hashes match, then the smart contract decides what to do with those funds, which is those choices that I made. Yeah, but yeah, you basically want to you hold the key and it reaches zero. The thinking was like, but why would people want to hold the key early on when you know it's a cost of dollar? I'll just buy it off you and then it now costs a dollar and four cents. And they keep trading it because every time you get a type of key receipt, which is a share of the dividend pool. And so every time someone buys the key, most of that price of that key goes into the jackpot, so the jackpot gets higher, but 10% goes into the dividend pool. So people are buying the key early and stacking those shards because eventually, hey, the key could reach, I don't know, 510,000. Could reach a million bucks. I don't know. Let's see where it goes. And it's always 10%. Every time the key moves 10% goes into dividend pool. So it's interesting. It'd be interesting just interesting how people react to the prisoner dilemma because that was always years ago, that was one of the bug bears of John Nash's game theory was that the rational actors in the game would tend to trust each other and tend to trust the other person's not going to screw, which was like completely irrational. So they weren't rational players. And it was very frustrating for him. And then later on, he hated the whole present dilemma game theory because the way it was applied to markets and whatever else in later life, because humans tend to trust each other. So interesting data just on what the player is actually end up doing. Absolutely. But Josh is saying a lot of people are buying assuming that there'll be a steel steel and then the key would trickle back down. Everyone would get a share of the money. So having the shares would work if it's a share share or a split steel and share then the crowd gets nothing, right Josh? That's right. Yeah. Exactly. But the crowd gets stuff all the way up to because of that dividend every time the key gets bought 10% of that price gets dumped into the dividend pool. But then yeah, at the prisoner dilemma stage, there's also that chance of having that steel steel. That's the first thing. But is what they will do when they're in that room together with the keys? I know. I know. I really, I'm looking forward to that too. There was one of these things when I was thinking up this game, I was like, there's prisoners to lemons. I've always loved it. That's why I want to see that steel steel where it trickles back down and the two winners get nothing. And they just took greedy and they they doom themselves to that. So it's fascinating to see what we're thinking. Just thinking about the prison dilemma was why originally came up with the diagonal stuff was because the idea of just having someone buying something from somebody else and then removing the trust of not stealing because obviously in the prison dilemma, often you're putting the diamond somewhere and then you have to trust that they put the diamond somewhere and you're exchanging the cash. So to try and remove the trust from a peer-to-peer transaction, you know, like for an item. It's such an important. It's really important. Yeah. And it's just good to have in your brain, like, gnawing away at your brain. The whole prison of the dilemma just as I don't know. So, the story of the week for me is, so we have the Boltz funding source, which is really cool, but people don't know how cool it is because it means you can fund your Alambits instance with a liquid wallet essentially and have subatomic swaps, which happen when you do a transaction in and out of liquid. So you're accepting lightning and then you're paying out too lightning, but the actual balance which you hold is on liquid, which is very useful for some people who don't want to run a node. And I think it will be the go-to on our software as a service. So we can go to Alambits.com and spin up Alambits. And the new system now we have, it's not implemented yet, but when you do that, you'll just automatically get this liquid wallet. And then you can, you have a QR code, you scan it with green wallet and then you just the money coming in and out of your Alambits will be coming in and out of your liquid wallet. And then if you want to, you can then add a lightning node as opposed to having it on liquid because there is like a small fee attached to it, but it's really interesting. So I was working on that. And then, of course, ThunderFunders is very, very important actually as a project because obviously where Alambits is going to be on ThunderFunders soon, which I'm really looking forward to. But like I spent a lot of my time over the past, you know, year convincing VCs, trying to convince VCs that Alambits is a great project and has in so many users that the products we've built, like if you have a company in Bitcoin, then this thing has real potential. But that's the right, so I'm trying to convince VCs of this and some of them have never heard of Alambits before and I'm presenting it as a project. And then in the meantime, I've got thousands of Alambits users who are like, we will happily invest in this project and in this company because we know how, because they know it, because they run the software, they use the software and they know the potential of, and just how useful this thing is and many of the projects we should build on top of Bitcoin and then when people accept payments, they don't on top of Alambits, it's like a go-to now, which is great. So ThunderFunders really like one of the only mechanisms that your community of users actually have to just do a traditional investment in the company which is developing the software, building the products, then help development and then the feedback. Develop a time into the project. So having ThunderFunders is very important and it's not an easy thing to set up as well. So the amount of time and effort which has gone into building ThunderFunders, I know from chatting to Merce, they've done a lot of work to get it to this point where normal folks just who are involved in a community and a project they love can actually invest in the company which is working on that project. So it's a great platform and I'm really looking forward to Alambits going live on it in the next month or so. I am too, Ben, when are you going to send me the last document that we need? We jerked you around for a year, 11 months now, okay, we need one more document now. I've got on it, Merce, I've got on it. Merce, is a special purpose vehicle that then invest as a one single investor or is it thousands of people on your cap table? No, we couldn't do that to somebody and put a thousand things up at the table, that'd be terrible. It works similar to an SPV, it's a crowd safe is what it's called but there's a nominee structure. It's fairly novel from 2012 when they came up with it. So it acts the same, it's one line item on the cap table but you just bundle up all those investors in there but it's not exactly, it's not an entity in the way that you create an SPV. This is all boring stuff but yeah, I'm excited to play this key game. I don't know what Arbitum is, I'll have to Google it but It's a layer two of a theorem. I'm excited to play the key game because it sounds like a lot of fun. I'm excited to get my dog outside. Thank you, thanks about it. Yeah, it was fun to build, you know, and we're just fun to watch. Yeah. And finally, my story of the week, I'm not ready with the story of the week, I want everyone to check out the meorka blockchain days convention even though it says blockchain, it's very much a Bitcoin conference. Of course, any conference is what you bring to it. If you're into your coin, you're going to be a permanent ad for your coin wherever you go. No one can stop you. But check out meorka blockchain days at meorkablockchaindays.com. It's a really small convention. It's just us and a couple of other people hanging out by the pool, looking at the water, talking about Bitcoin, getting massages, eating sandwiches, that's it. Meorka blockchain days. That's coming up soon, isn't it? Look at that. Very soon, July 10th to 13th. So it's kind of your last chance. I'm going to probably be hopefully buying my flight ticket soon and getting my Airbnb sorted out and all that, hoping for another Europe trip and hoping to go buy meorka. That was the last time, that was the last time me and Josh were in meets space together. Wasn't it? It was, I think, probably a meorka blockchain days. That was it. And at the World Crypto Network, we have been doing too many videos lately so I can see there's a Ben Victoria and Vlad were on last year's live Bitcoin group. And the year before, it was Dan, Josh and Ben, the full original lineup here on the Bitcoin Group live. So I hope to do another live show and see him there. I was talking to Vlad on the Twitter's today. Vlad's got a great new book out at a book Bitcoin the first year. It looked like a graphic novel. He drawn a graphic novel. So I really look forward to that. I hope I can get a copy and also wanted to say, I don't know, I watched the Phoenician scheme this week. I went to a theater and everything. It was kind of a mess. I don't know what you guys think. I'm a huge West Anderson fan. I went in not even knowing what the film was about and then being kind of disappointed didn't really come out well on the end. Maybe it's your favorite though. I like Moonrise Kingdom. But check it out. There's your movie reviews for the week Phoenician. You knew by Sanderson movie? It is a brand new West Anderson movie with words that excite me usually beyond no end. But I kind of rank it at the bottom really below bottle rocket and Darjeeling. I like to Astrid City too. Like I was Russian. Russian was my favorite. I love commercial. Everybody, what's your favorite West Anderson? Go ahead. Great. How can you put that at the bottom? Even bottle rocket was great. There was one that he drove. It was terrible. It was one of the more recent ones like a year, like two years ago maybe. Astrid City was, I liked it. It's a big play inside a play. It has a lot of narrative. The Isle of Dogs is kind of unpopular I think because it's a stop motion animation. It's kind of less well known as opposed to like Royal Ten and Bombs. Rushmore Life Aquatic. The real core. Josh, I got all that West Anderson. I'm watching that tonight and I'll let you know. Let me know. Josh, what's your thing? Yeah, I like Life Aquatic and the hotel one. Best hotel. Grand Budapest hotel. Grand Budapest, yeah. I like that one too but it's just so sad at the end. I want to watch it again but my mind would just tell me how sad it is. Folks in the chat are thanking you for joining as Michael and they said you've been a very good guest. So thank you very much for joining us. Yeah. Yeah. You're hoping great. That means a lot. Very nice and check out what Mike's working on there with the El Lightning Ventures. It's a LNTG.ventures. Check it out. And ThunderFund. Really the one you want to have a look. Yeah. ThunderFund. Yeah. ThunderFund. It's definitely going to check that out. Yeah. Lot of work. Lots of that, that boy. And thanks again to everybody for joining us. Give us a comment down below. Say hello in the chat. And until next time. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.