#471 — The Bitcoin Group #471 - Ver Deal! - SBF Claims - Litecoin Regrets - Roughriders

The Bitcoin Group The American Original. For over the last ten years, the sharpest Satoshi's, the best Bitcoins, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Westeem Alcindy from OX Salon. Hey everybody. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network, moving on to issue one. The price of Bitcoin is down. The price of Bitcoin is $117,000 and $060. That's $1 for 854 Satoshi. That's down 3.27% in the last 24 hours with a high of 122,000 a low of $116,000. The price is moving. But issue one, breaking news. Bitcoin, Jesus, Roger Verr agrees to $48 million deal to resolve US tax fraud case. Verr reached a tentative agreement with the United States prosecution, allowing charges to be dropped if he meets the terms. Well, Westeem, I'm going to go ahead and talk about this one first because we've had this on the show before and I want to gloat and claim victory once again. Everyone said, oh, the IRS isn't giving Roger a number. Oh, he's a political prisoner, it's so fair. I said, the problem is he's going to owe them so much money, especially from a normal person like you and me's perspective that he's not going to want to pay it. I estimated 20 to $40 million. They wanted $48 million. Allegedly, he's paying it, he's free. It's over. For those of you who don't know Roger Verr, early Bitcoin investor, Bitcoin, Jesus invested in purse.io helped me out there. Many other people cracking other Bitcoin companies early on, helped people, told people about Bitcoin, did all that stuff, but also wanted to leave the US, had a plan to do it. I don't know the details, but I think he sold all his Bitcoin, gave it to other people, then said he had less. The government, of course, in retrospect, didn't like this, wanted more money. Now they're settling for $48 million for the last year. He's been stuck on the island of Mallorca. I was fortunate even to see Roger at the Mallorca Bitcoin conference or Blockchain days or whatever they call it. It was funny. We could go out on the boat tour, but he could not. I could not go near international waters. He had a serious deal. He was kind of trapped there by the Spanish government. He's the citizen of St. Kits and Nevis, and then he usually lives in Japan, I believe, or at least used to, but was trapped there. What do you think? Roger has made the deal. We've called it here for a long time. 20 to 40 million. 48 million turns out to be the number. Is he a political prisoner? And also, do you think this is just normal deal making for the government? Or is this kind of Trump administration saying, hey, let the crypto guy go? I think it's probably a mixture of all of those things, Thomas. I don't know. I mean, obviously, we've grown up, or our journeys through Bitcoin have been kind of soundtracks by the proselytic and proselyticizations of the so-called Bitcoin Jesus in the early days. One would imagine he came to Bitcoin very early. He met the farm on it. He really seemed to be a very strong advocate for it in the early years. So, you know, would guess that he has sizable holding. He's already successful entrepreneur beforehand. The memory dealers, as I recall. And so, I imagine, like, if you're paying a $50 million fine, how much did he get to keep? $500 million? Yeah. So, like, one can speculate as to Roger's net worth. And I would imagine it must be at least an order of magnitude greater than that. So, we're talking about a 10% maximum 10% tax, I think. And I know that Roger is a very classical libertarian and 10% tax breaks his heart. But, like, to get out of jail for almost free, for somebody in that financial position, even if you hate to state and you hate governments and you want to, like, do something different to that. An element of pragmatism is probably, like, showing the way there. It's just the point that you said about the New Yorker blockchain days and not being able to go out into the international waters. That would prevent him from having a boating accident and deluding his private keys. He might be able to lose them closer to this or maybe on, like, a C-Due or a smaller raft, maybe a beach accident, like a beach front. He was digging a sand castle, lost his keys, something like that. But I'm sure Roger's very happy to free, free. A lot of people are trying to tee this up as the next libertarian crusade, the real free Ross movement. It's a bit different. Ross being in prison for all those years. Roger, not to knock Roger, but what would you do with a billion dollars or whatever? You guys kind of gallivanting around the world, having a good time this and that, and why shouldn't he? And I assume he'll be back to that. What seem is Roger a political prisoner? Is this a Trump administration, or do you think this is just a normal deal? I mean, the guy or I, in my opinion, the problem I had before is everyone is saying, oh, they're not giving him a number. And I was like, oh, they're giving him a number. It's just too big. Yeah, it does like the number. And he had the ability, I suppose, to keep it private. If only he and the IRS knew the number. There's only two parties there. If the IRS doesn't publish it, if someone else in the administration doesn't take an interest and publish it and say it's an unfair number, you think it's 10%, which again sounds pretty fair. Max, 10%. Max, 10%. This is an agent penalty. This is now a two door now. We've all talked about like how bad the penalties are. If you sell out of your 401k, you pay about 10%. If you have an agent and you're like, on Hollywood, you get a job. That's about 10% to get out of this country. Roger's paying 10%. I think he's getting a really good deal. The previous thing that I'd understood is to get out of this country, especially if you're a high profile already kind of well off person, like Roger Ferris, that they look at your income and they say, okay, an average of the last, I want to say five, 10 years, but obviously none at count, don't quote me on this. And they say, okay, you pay this. You get to leave the United States, officially become a full citizen of St. Kitts and Nevis, which again, we're talking about different. A lot of people have like two passports, which means you could stay in the EU longer than 90 days, right? But it doesn't, and you can pay taxes there, but you always have to pay in the United States anyway, taxes back to the mothership. And Roger would have had to do this every year, blah, blah, blah. The government says, well, we're just going to take that average 10 years up front. They had a disagreement on the number. And it seems like it's settled, but it seems like it should have been a similar fair. Unfortunately, Roger was, he was arrested. He was handcuffed. He's been held in Mallorca in Spain. I'm not, he might have been there for a different conference. And then stuck. It's, it's this that interesting groundhog day. I've been going on a paradise island. You have nearly infinite resources. You could travel to anything in the world, see anything, do anything. You have houses or whatever the man must have. But can you imagine being stuck in the paradise? What do you think? What seems like groundhog days? It torture for Roger. And now he's free. Like he's on a jet. Now, all right, he's going to. I feel like he's a very kind of high high agency individual. So like, even if you're in a beautiful place, not being able to leave it can already feel like a massive imposition on your liberties. And she wanted to bring up something because I live in Germany. And there's this thing in Germany called exit tax. So if you set up a company and then you move your tax residents away from Germany, then you know, the startup that you have created, even if it's pre-valuation, pre-investment, pre-IPO, whatever, the government will assess the value of it and then charge you 30% of that value to exit Germany. And so like, just to give you a comparison of like when people are complaining about a 10% tax rate, 30%, 40% on Europe is very normal. You don't even know if your company is a success. It's actually, I mean, this is it's a crazy law. And it actually means a lot of my American friends in Germany will probably leave in order to start their companies back home because it doesn't make sense to start them in Germany. It's anti enterprise anti innovation. The other thing about Roger, I wanted to just bring up because it's like very important part of Bitcoin history. We all knew him as Bitcoin Jesus, the, you know, singing shouting for Bitcoin from the rooftops. And then, you know, the fork wars of 2017-18 sort of time, which led to the split between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash and then ultimately Bitcoin SV with Craig S. Right. And Roger was a key part of that, you know, it like whatever information war if you want to call it that, that kind of battle of ideas. A lot of people considered him to be on the wrong side of that scaling debate to make the blocks of Bitcoin bigger. And so Bitcoin Jesus came Bitcoin Judas to a lot of people. And I didn't hear so much from Roger. It's like sentiments and, you know, singing the praises of small block Bitcoin, BTC. But I imagine that he probably still has pockets full of the stuff, even if he was kind of rooting for his own faction to do well. And just to note, like I'm sure you've already discussed it on the show, that there is another potential fork brewing over knots and the op-return data allocations. And so maybe this is why it's like broad just paid up to get out of jail to come and take center stage on the fork war. Oh, you wish, Wesley. You wish that Roger was coming back to the fork war. Again, this is Kaiser Soze at the end of the movie. I bet you never hear from Roger Vier ever again. Who wants to come this close to the trouble? He's already been public. He's already told people at the barbecue about the Bitcoin, all those things. I think this is, and again, going to conferences, exposing himself to risk by going to other countries. I can't imagine him sticking his neck out much at all. No, he already forked around that he already found out. So like I imagine, like he will find some of a quiet to lay low for while. All right. So, so, So Seem, I know you're dying to talk about this. What's your opinion on the latest potential Bitcoin fork? I'll just catch everybody up and see if you're on the current page. The current thing that I've heard is that the in the in the code, I'm going to say it right this time, it was deprecated, not depreciated. It was deprecated. So they've deprecated some of the rules. They've changed some of the default settings. They've made it so you can kind of run your own node with like less potential data on it. I don't think a lot of people are writing data to it anyway. I'm pretty much with the core side on the, this is a small feature change and that basically core is too autistic to bother explaining it to you. We are there way ahead of us. We don't even understand what's going on. But on the other side, there is a religious man with a lot of children who claims he's already saved Bitcoin twice, kind of has a hero complex and he's leading something called knots, which is horribly being turned into Nazis, which is not any really good group name no matter if you support them or not. But they're upset that potentially bad material be put into the blockchain and then stored on people's nodes. Of course, I'm kind of thinking there's already bad material on everyone's nodes. There's already what data, whatever you don't like, religious material, whatever you could make images out of the blocks of data. So forth plus we put my pirate hat on. We're already sending transactions to anyone in the world doing anything. And certainly I personally am not taking responsibility for the Bitcoin network. But it's funding all kinds of horrible stuff. I thought we were already had our pirate hats on here. We're saying that money is a thing that funds things. But what do you think was seen about the latest on knots? And I'll go back and forth. I'd love it if you're on the knots side. Tell me you want filtering. I actually haven't really taken a site per se. But like I know that there's a bunch of people that I know that I know are sane and competent on one of the sides. And there's a bunch of people that I don't know that well, but I also know that I consider them to be competent. But I think the sanity might be variable. And as I understand, and you have to correct me if I'm wrong Thomas, because I just half read something on this recently. Luke used to run a different project. Maybe it was the mining whole client, Elegius or something like that. And there was also some kind of minor scandal around that where Luke added something, changed something without asking people's consent. And it uploaded updated the code of the reference clients. And it was kind of a coercive thing that he just changed something without telling people. And maybe just a point of clarification around this stuff, which is, you know, when we normally talk about forks, we're talking about different software implementations changing the rules, tightening the rules set so that then the two different communities are no longer compatible. That's why the chains split. Now as I understand, the opt-proteur thing inside core, the new version of core, is not approach core chains that would require like a hard fork or something like that. It's more a changing of a default setting, like a preference within the client, which could be still be changed and overridden. And maybe the point of contention is that by changing the default, by core developer group changing the default, it's kind of like an implicit kind of technocratic message from above, from the kind of Bitcoin cathedral to say, hey, this is how you should be using Bitcoin. And so I can understand why people might be like, fuck you, you know, I'm an excuse part of my French. Excuse me. That's not what I signed up for. I thought Bitcoin was like, no gods, no rulers, no masters, just rules. And like, you can't change. There is a technocracy. There is a technology. There is a cathedral. I mean, I do think that. And as far as how we want to develop software, you know, going back and forth, open source, all these things, they can make their own copy of the cathedral and start right next to it. We've already had that with Bitcoin cash, Bitcoin SV, many other problems or projects like coin, which we're going to talk about in a minute. So yeah, I think that's an implied technocracy, but I do think that the, the libertarian spirit like rebels against it, like they can't take it. It boils their blood. I've also heard more reasonable people, not necessarily in the knots camp. And they say things like they wish that corridor to communicate better. They kind of want core to have these open forums. But then I of course go back to like the reality of like, if we're really talking about the people that I think we're talking about, I think they're the quiet people with the beards and the computer labs who I never spoke to for four years, but we're always there. Like these people are interested in the code. They're not really interested in focus groups and marketing and how you feel about the next Bitcoin upgrade. I think they more like see it as a technical thing. And from a technical perspective, zooming back out, it seems like, and to just really, you know, nutshell or kind of summarized this, the taproot update allowed for holes or mistakes that allowed ordinals or runes, which are kind of like images to be put into the blockchain at no cost with the miners not getting paid. The main problem there economically is with the miners not getting paid. They could, you know, it's a loophole, right? So if we had miners getting paid, maybe it's not so bad, then the data is kind of there. Then we had this whole explosion of morality. All of a sudden, like I said, I have this pirate hat on. I'm distributing transactions for the world because I believe a generic medium like that is useful to have a monetary source. I'm not saying that we should necessarily support any of these horrible things, of course. But what do you think? What's he? What you were just saying about the loophole that taproot introduced for, you know, like NFT like image images and arbitrary data to be stored reminds me of the incredibly important and famous saying from the last book was that it may be been forgotten courtesy of Gihon Wu, who is or was the one of the heads of the bit main mining manufacturing company and all the rest of it. And he said that so the segregated witness was the kind of bone of contention, like or like the small block solution to the fork. And Gihon said that segwit made transactions unfairly cheap and I'll never forget him saying that. So I guess like the point I want to come back to, I always come back to you here is some people think that technology isn't political and some people think it is. And I feel like maybe that's the the fault line here. And when you have these kind of technocratic developer cathedral type situations with this kind of like very complicated technology, which requires great deal of mastery in order to, you know, understand it and ultimately push it forwards. One might think that they're acting apolitically or they've transcended like those kinds of human biases and preferences. But like that's often one of the lies we tell ourselves that we're objective and just all the other people that are. So I feel like it might be a bit of a blind spot in the kind of let's say the ideology of core. That there is a feeling that the technical mastery can kind of we can out, outrun all of our problems with this technical mastery. But ultimately the problem of the kind of kind of Eric S. Raymond type cathedral, the kind of hierarchical structure of the developers in in core. And even if it's not formal, even if it's just implicit because of like, you know, their aura, their gravitas the years, they've spent doing everything, the Peter Woolers and the Greg Maxwell's and the Adam backs of this this world. They do carry their words carry weight. So like when I see these people tweeting, they're like, oh, I'm just a guy and you know, I'm not important. And they've got like 400,000 followers and everyone follows every word they say. And you know, I find it hard to think of these, um, brand standing and stock box moments as a political. So what I really feel like is people need to go and read a few more books like culture books. For example, Alexander R. Galloway's book, Protocol, Our Control Exists After Decentralization would be a good one. And maybe, as people on the other side could read like the not side, like Luke could read books like David F. Nobles 1997 book, The Religion of Technology. I think the world would be much richer place if um, technical people, uh, looked at the history of the technologies that they are pushing forwards and uh, to understand their place in this kind of like broader arc. It is funny because they do engage with culture as if no one had bothered to study culture and no one had bothered to write this, uh, just because they come from a siloed world of just code or just computer science. I've seen the same thing. I'm going to talk later about AI, but I'm really trying to research and get into AI these days. And so many of them are kind of fumbling around which things that I know of of complex uh, processes from political science and other disciplines. And they aren't necessarily looking towards those disciplines for answers. They're kind of pretending that these are like brand new problems like we haven't had to contain like essentially evil geniuses before like we do have evil congenius containing rules, but they are cut off from them. And uh, in this like people like Adam back who obviously is hugely important and people listen to what you say. Uh, many people have questioned whether he's even running his own account. And they've said, oh, it could be this guy or it could be this guy or there's a coordinated core thing. And maybe that's just a conspiracy, but at the same time, why should Adam back be running his account? Why should he be running social media? Why should Greg Maxwell be posting on Reddit or wherever he wants to post? Um, these guys should be essentially working on their code in their ivory towers. Uh, again, social media has has punched a hole through and is maybe interfering with their research. But I do think, but on that one, if they were quiet, then like you know that other people would step into the fold and to the line. In many ways, that's what the Luke Dash Jr. Nazi Nazi's movie, I don't know, they need a better name. People who like knots, uh, knots fans, that that's what their movement is about is that there is a vacuum and nobody is saying anything. And there is no like cordon come in sadly as I mean, it's very like, you know, um, parent to a child, uh, but cordon needs to come in and say, here's option A. Here's option B, a horrible option. And everyone's saying, Oh, let's do option A option B would be so horrible. And then everyone says, Oh, I'm so glad we choose we chose option A and that core consulted with us when in reality, we're making no choice. We're choosing between, you know, terrible choice and the obvious choice that they want, whether it's a conspiracy or not, whether it unleashes this data on the blockchain or not, they didn't offer us with that little choice. So then now we have these other people, but going back to how would they offer us the choice though, because there is no formal government structure in Bitcoin. And this is like one of the bones of contention that always comes around like, you know, we have like people can shout on Twitter, miners can signal like as they find blocks in the transactions, you could write something, but these are all indirect mechanisms of attempting to govern the network. And so like, I'm not saying that we need a cathedral or apartment inside Bitcoin. And I think that's, I mean, we've got plenty of other crypto stuff that does that. But what I'm saying is like, how do we even take the temperature of the community, take the temperature of the stakeholders? I mean, sadly, I think they want them to communicate how other companies and countries communicate. They want to have a public group, the Bitcoin foundation, essentially, they want to have a poll and have a focus group and have a marketing strategy and have a rollout and have Adam Bakke on the various shows and the talking heads. I mean, I think that I imagine, unfortunately, that's that is how people communicate these days. They don't, you know, necessarily want an academic paper or something. That would, of course, I suppose, be produced as part of the package. But they want core or someone like them with, you know, millions of dollars to employ a million dollar marketing campaign to make them feel good about the Bitcoin they've already bought. I mean, it's just, and when they don't have that, then we have this Hodgepodge group of people who are fans of knots filling in the hole and bringing up the CP argument and the fear. And it's one of these great things where the CP argument destroys any startup or any idea because oh, no, someone's going to use your startup for evil. They'll use it for this and that and for have supposed people who like Bitcoin to be the ones out there carrying the CP argument and making it bigger and bigger. And you know that if there is even this presumed compromise with this settings things, which does seem like a compromise, they didn't have a press release that said it was, which means we don't know, which again, they're not communicating, blah, blah, at least in the traditional press world now. You know, it's not a layer to this top. Not people won't accept it. You know, they're not going to accept the compromise. They're going to just keep fighting like those. But there's no way to have peace. So I have to like kind of questions or curiosities in here. One is like, are the not sees really fans of knots, believers of knots, or is it more of a protest against a perceived slight or a injustice because of the developing technology and the cultural heritage menu of core in Bitcoin. What do you think about that, Thomas? I think part of it is like, yeah, they're offended by not being told, not being consulted, not getting handled, whatever the feeling that they wanted to have from core, they didn't get that feeling. There's another part where, and we've seen so much of this in the United States, and it's a huge major issue. I want to talk about it really. But with going back to Pete's to gate and then Epstein, people love to be heroes to fight this, this CP or potential child endangerment. And that when the issue was framed as your node is full of CP, people got all up in arms. And it's this thing where part of it is they hate that stuff so much as the worst thing in the world, right? We're going to put that in character. The other part is that if you are a hero who are fighting the worst thing in the world, you are the greatest hero in the world. Every action that you take on Twitter to fight this thing that is turning your beloved Bitcoin into the CP factory is like this thing. But at the same time, I'm already using this generic computer machine on the generic internet machine, which is already generic and used for horrible things, CP, war, dictatorship, whatever you want to say it's used for. It's obviously being used for. I'm already on that like the whole like not just cognitive dissonance, not just nihilism, but like moral nothingness. I don't know, like we have to be, you know, morally immoral to be Bitcoiners because the network is actually giving money, which is physical support to all kinds of horrible things all the time with or without our knowledge. And that's like the whole point of money. Yeah. Well, that's the whole point of Bitcoin at least if not like, you know, state money. I remember I wrote an article about stablecoins six years ago asking the question are stablecoins answered to Bitcoin's volatility and obviously the answer is no. But the image I put in the article was the front page of the some newspaper, the UK, some newspaper, upload, upload newspaper that said, ISIS treasury decimated after Bitcoin crashes. And that's kind of the point I was trying to make is like, yes, we can do humanitarian things with this. Yes, we can help refugees and oppress people. But the reason that this works, the way it works is you can't. There's not a tap that you can turn off. And that comes to the point I want to make Thomas and ask you a question, which is, is the like the moral panic around CP, which I understand, it lies with like the disgust and the moral, moralization around that. But is it acting as a by word or like a standing for the like white market, black market kind of institutional adoption versus cryptocurrency kind of that kind of rift, which has always been pulling Bitcoin in two different directions. And I, you know, argued in the last few years, especially since the pandemic, you know, now there's like Donald Trump speaking at the Bitcoin conferences and stuff like, to me that that level of the culture or like, you know, some at least some aspects of the communities are like dudes in suits that have linked in accounts. And like it's not the hackers and the freedom fighters and anarchists, they're not in the majority anymore. So I wonder if this is another reason that we're seeing this kind of conversation. I also just remembered half remembered something, which was a weird picture of Luke and a few other people wearing very ill fitting suits posing for a photo in some kind of important meeting. And then the thought panic started. I don't know what this where this photo came from, but I've also never seen Luke in a suit. So I was just kind of like, oh, is this everyone joining the Navy now to borrow your old phrase? Steve Jobs, always the best. But I don't know. It's hard to take it as the last stand of individual crypto or of cryptographic crypto, because the fork or the direction that they're going is so, so antagonistic to that idea. It's so bad for it. It's like, they're going to essentially have this religion guy make a new religion for the filter. And then they're going to have a small group control the filter. So instead of having say, Donald Trump and his boys will have these 12 people who we're going to institute. We're going to have a test to make sure that they're not secretly supporting CP or whatever the bad judgment would be to be on this group. But then now this group becomes corrupt and we're back into the whole thing. So it's hard to say that this is really the anarchist coming back. Ironically, I think the anarchist or whatever would still be with Adam back. And that's how I meant it. Sorry, if I got it. Sorry, if you have me, I must have studied it. Now that's how I meant it. The core is kind of like the last vestiges of the cypherpunk spirit. That's interesting because they're in the position of power. They are seen as the entrenched ones, the Jedi or whatever they're running everything. But at the same time, they're like, yeah, data or whatever, put on the network, send us a transaction whatever. As long as it meets these standards, which we're allowing to put on the network, to have the network run, to have the system continue. They feel it's fine, but others and I've heard it here even on the group of Victoria who can't be here today. But she's very much on the side of these filters where she's worried about having this kind of data, having this kind of negativity on Bitcoin. It's a very huge negativity that they seem to be playing with. And whereas the other cypher punks, I feel like again, we're on this entire network full of this internet, full of negativity. All of the technologies and the tools we're using streaming video right here, sending your credit card over the internet with encryption, it's all created by porn, which a lot of people would argue is negative for society. But at the same time, this drive drove technology and the internet forward, like even if people don't want to talk about it publicly. And in the same way, there's Bitcoin thing, this anarchist technology continues to drive the internet forward. I also wonder if there's like a lot of time there like they're like, oh no, not on my node. This is not my backyard, you know? Yeah, also feel like there's a purity thing going on here. And I'm not surprised that there's like a, you know, some very faithful, religious people on one side of the thing and people that seem a bit more, let's say, technocratic and measured on the other side. And so like this pragmatism on one side and purity on the other. And that sounds a bit like, you know, the schisms of old. And that's one of the things that I used to research back in the day, looking at these network splits and the factions that form in them and comparing them to like the factions in other belief systems, like, I don't know, Christianity or Islam or whatever. Or in a even more childish way, we could see it as the good guys are the Jedi's, the bad guys are the evil Sith or whatever they're feeling the emotions. They must protect the children and the Jedi's are like, we must be non-political, we must be relaxed and Adam Bax seems to have a very like laid back Buddhist type personality, hands off, let the network be the network. But going back to what you were saying originally, I would say that yes, with Bitcoin, it's an interesting thing where this technocracy, this this cathedral, where they make the little rules and they make the models and they really know how the code works. Those rules in that system allows this free system at the bottom to happen. All the libertarians and the cypherpunks are all dancing in the free system that unfortunately is provided by these very rules driven cathedral people at the top. And it seems like some of the damn bottom people are like, oh, we should be running the thing, we should be controlling and communicating and that doesn't seem like the formula for success and the tech people aren't allowing it. So it does really seem like there's an essential clash there that was always going to be there. So maybe it's the last of that. But even then we've already seen this, the tower attempted to be taken over by the corporations, with especially the Bitcoin 2x argument after the no 2x and the segwit movement, all of that. And even in the future and all of this developed the early seeds of this kind of conspiracy core conspiracy block stream conspiracy movement, which is now and its second phase with knots. And what do you think? We got to go into the next issue. But one more thing, do you think they're going to fork off, go their own way, or I think they're going to quietly submit to the new Bitcoin, this preference thing, is it enough? It's a very good question. Like I looked at it like, yeah, in my previous research, in the previous fork was cycled, like what makes a fork? Like how do we get from the faction and the kind of the unruly descent all the way to the secession? And so I guess we have to think in terms of like costs and benefits would be a smart place, reasonable place to start. And like to the mechanics of making the fork, there is not much to a cost there. The question is always about legitimacy. Like if people think it's legitimate enough, if enough nodes are running knots and enough economic activities going through those, then people might consider that valid minority fork. But then you'd have the question of like this is running on chart 256, like BTC. And then it would just get 51% attacked into the ground with like I would imagine. Maybe that would be a hostile thing, maybe it should be an economically rational thing that happened all the time for minority networks that shared a ashing algorithm with a big dog. For example, Ethereum, Classic Ethereum, Z Classic and Bitcoin private versus ZGaS, SV versus Bitcoin. So there's not much of an economic cost in them doing it. But what they will lose is their legitimacy and their reputation, their cash in the space. As we said earlier, Bitcoin, Jesus became Bitcoin Judas. And people in the lands of core, Bitcoin, a small block, Bitcoin, whatever you want to call it, don't listen to Roger as much as they used to. And so I guess that's what people like Luke might lose if they fork off. So I guess it would come down to a cost benefit analysis. I feel like it's less than 50-50 in my mind, but I'm honestly not, I don't have the ringside seats watching this. But I feel like it's less, yeah, we're still in the stage of the agitation. I don't know if we've got to the point where the angry mob is carrying their torches to the streets. I think it's a disaster if they fork, but at the same time, how can they stay within Bitcoin after the stink that they've caused? Clearly, they think this is going to go the wrong way. If they stay, they're going to be those people like Thomas Edison demonstrating how you can electrocute an elephant to prove Tesla wrong about electricity. They're going to be developing systems that could add CP into Bitcoin and then take it out and make it easier, which is the exact opposite of what they say they want because they'd be enabling the abusers to use the system. I think if they also suffer not just a 51% attack like you're saying, but if they ever gotten on an exchange, a major economic attack as all the Bitcoiners come in to sell their Bitcoin knots, really depressing their price could be hard to come back from that economically, especially if they don't have that kind of support, which there's no reason that they would. Libertarian companies don't seem to exist, so they're not going to come out of the woods to support them with the kind of money they had as far as actually forking. Historically, it seems the main thing you have to do is set a date looking at the BitCash fork. One of the main things that happens with a BitMain was so upset that they set the date, then they withdrew their support, they backed away, they withdrew or whatever, but the date was out there, the idea was out there, people started coalesce around it, whatever was going to happen happened, and then that fork thing happened. So I think if they set a date and really got behind it, that would be about it. And then we'd see up or down, remember famously the Bitcoin 2x fork sponsored by Coinbase and pretty much everyone else in the industry, the code died, like two months in, the code like, putter, putter, putter died, like, something was wrong with it. And this is why you stick with Core, why you stick with the open-source project that is Core, and if Core went really wrong, like they always say every time, we would open source project, copy it and go to another repository, so on and so forth. That's not a fork, just for the audience to be clear, that's not us forking the network to get Core out. This is not, we're not talking about the project, the network itself we're talking about, the repository of the code. So yeah, it just was helpful to disentangle network forks versus code-based folks. Yep, and it would just be the client that you would run. You would run the client from Core or Core 2, or you'd run the client from NOTS, and then that's how you would know the network, or that's how you would use the network. But yeah, it would be a disaster and again, it's funny when you said, G-Han Wu and his famous quote, I thought you're going to say, fork your mother if you want fork. And then of course with these NOTS, he's trying to stay within Bitcoin. I think it would be like the Monty Python life of Brian, where they're like, oh, that's the East Asian libertarian front. Oh, that's the left libertarian. Oh, spliters, spliters. And they're all mad at them because they've split off. So yeah, they're in a damned if you do, damned if you don't position. Their best thing is going to be like Homer Simpson in the hedge. They just back up in the hedge. But the danger here, or they're like unpleasant incentive aligned reality, is that if you are the cipherishly campaigning against the inclusion of objectionable material in the blockchain, and it's not there yet, you can escalate this issue by putting it there yourself. And I don't think I'm putting people, ideas in people's heads, I'm sure they thought this already. But it becomes kind of like a, you know, not a self-affilling prophecy, but a kind of a reality which they can bring to bear. And you know, nobody wants to see that, but I imagine some people are zealous enough to go that far. I think they kind of have to do it because it's there. It has to be done because it offends them so much. They have to do the thing that they hate. They have to enable the problem that they see. And yeah, I don't think they have any choice. And I think unfortunately, I'm trying to think they're Homer Simpson or they're someone at the dinner party or they're like, oops, I've made a mistake. I will leave. Unfortunately, I think the proper analogy will be the Japanese and the caves after World War II. The side show Bob walking around the yard, getting face planted by Rakes, as he's walking around. Over and over again, I think they have no choice. And then the Rakes will also try to hurt Bitcoin. So they'll begin, they'll be the true Bitcoin Judas. But we got to keep going. We got to do really quick through the issues that we have left after this not discussion that was seemed just had to have. Moving on to issue two, Sam Bankman freed and the multi-billion dollar drama over FTX's ruins in an exclusive prison interview. The convicted crypto king is still fighting to control the narrative ahead of an high stakes appeal. And once again, we knew this was going to happen. His parents high powered Stanford attorneys, so on and so forth, well connected, well educated. We're going to put up a fight. And here it is once again. Sam says that if he had maintained control of the company as CEO not handed off to the old man who cleaned up and Ron, but kept in himself, he could have saved the company. And it was tough to say this at the time, at the time they're like, oh, it's a mess and oh, these bad investments. There's a kind of a horrible underside to this where some of his investments paid off. And he could have saved the company. We talk about SBF all the time. But what seemed what do you think? This is the same, you know, defense they put out again. They're going to put it out for the appeal. Could Sam have saved the company? Did they have good investments? I mean, so one can call investment good without taking to account the volatility of the value of the investment. I think that is the crucial. Like it was kind of like a run on the bank, right? They didn't have enough capital to make good on the liabilities, which were on their balance sheet from customers depositing their coins on the exchange. So like to me, it's a bit like the, you know, the half drunk slouched over the blackjack table, one of those casinos around the corner from you, that it's just like one more, one more, spend the wheel, you know, snake eyes. Um, it's stopped him at 1235 who had been fine, but you stopped him at 1255, you know, at 1215, he still had his bankrupt. I mean, at what point, you know, do we say that that's when he's responsible for the company? But what's worrying about this, in my opinion, what's worrying about this is that like I don't see any remorse. Like this guy doesn't really seem to care about the, um, the consequences of his actions. And like I thought like if you go through the kind of whatever justice legal system correctional prison stuff, the way you get out quicker is by toning for your misdeeds showing remorse and like, you know, showing that you've grown into being a better person. But from what I can see here, um, SBF is still, still the same. And, um, well, I mean, let's just say, like let's call it by its name, like, they were heavily invested in Solana, the would-be Ethereum killer. And the price of that coin was so contingent on FTX's kind of an SBF support, and the people around him that like the star of the collapse of FTX led to a collapse in the price of Solana. So it was this kind of like vicious circle, um, making the problems bigger and bigger and bigger. And as I recall, Solana went from like, I don't know, it was like three digits to eight dollars. And we had the, it was Vitalik that kind of saved it because Vitalik tweeted about Solana at the bottom, being like, oh, they don't deserve it. Solana's great. And now Solana might come back and Ethereum's lunch, which is kind of bizarre. bizarre an interesting situation. It's interesting that Vitalik might have saved it and CZ might have kicked it off. CZ having doubts in the company wanting to get his funds back from FTX or SBF and all of those things. In many ways kicked off this horrible cycle, which again, I think like you're saying, this will be studied in economic schools and all these things for hundreds of years. This is an incredible thing that happened to him with this downturn. Yeah, it's also like a damning indictment of the effective altruists kind of train of thought. Now, in many people argue that EA is not SBF, like, you know, the effective altruism, that what SBF was doing was not, like values aligned with that EA movement. But so yeah, it did a lot of damage to that. And I already have a horse in the race on those various kind of rationalist techno ideologies, but just very interesting to see a lack of remorse from the man. Well, and I was going to go there as well. You said with the lack of remorse, the quote from the article where his mother, she says something like, oh, my son is in jail and he could be doing so much for the world that, you know, we are losing a potential cancer cure in SBF being behind bars. And part of that is like you say because of this EA effective altruism movement, which I also want to talk about, I'm starting to read Nate Silver's book. And in the beginning, he's hanging out with SBF. And I think everything is going to be fine as we all this money at the end. I think he's been hanging out with SBF in prison. Everything is not fun. And that's why it's such a strange philosophy is that you gather up as much money as you can without morals, I suppose. Then at the end, you discover you have morals and you use this funding to help the world. And I guess the, you know, the little gates and Carnegie and these other people are our models for this, these Robert Barons that became philanthropists and that we just want to move it. I don't know to some of them. And then you repent on your deathbed, right? That's how it's always been. That's and what, how's that new? I don't know. They're all like, this is a brand new movement. I'm like, you mean like Carnegie? I mean, what are we talking like you to rape the world, destroy the things, take all the materials, hurt everyone. And then he built some really nice libraries and everyone for Kents and you know, Rockefeller, like all the things. And then, oh, they had a really nice, you know, donation to the British Museum. You can see some of the sacrias. The sacrias as well. I actually, my first research, scientific research post was in the Raymond of Beverly, Sackler Laboratory of Experimental Astrophysics at the University of Lydon in Nettlons. I'd never heard of them. I was 21. I'd never heard of these people. I looked them up and I was like, who are these people that are searching their names on all the archaedries in London as well? So who are these people? Then 20 years, 15 years later, the story starts to draw. But yeah, you're right. They have no, no care for the victims. This isn't about the victims. This is about some kind of scoreboard thinking where we prove that Sam was right. Like you say, because they could have held Salon a longer or the mess of the company that the guy founded in was some kind of like a neural network. It was this genius mess like Einstein left all that stuff on his desk. Like SPF was managing the company through his gene, you know, mad genius. Which again, it's never been done before. We usually have like board directors and have structures and all these things. But this is one guy at this one time that this one finance raise that everyone supported. We're going to let him run it because he has cool hair. Like a few lines, like in a bit of a kind of intometso in the article, like with the picture of SPF in the background that says SPF reached out to possible investors to stop the financial bleeding. He believed FTX was still solvent. He just needed time and like I only have one degree in finance, but that is not how solvency works. It's not a temporal phenomenon. Like you need to be solvent at all times. I also just the appeal to time. Like if I had a thousand years, I could run this company just great. I'm just appealing like I just you need to trust me for a thousand years. You only trust me for one. I need a thousand. It's a really good plan. Well effective altruism is right next to long-termism in the compound acronym test grill, which people are using to try and group together these emerging technology ideologies. So none of this surprises me. Well, we're going to have to move on to the next issue, which is a kind of a short one, but worth covering issue three, Litecoin founder. Charlie Lee says he would have been better off buying Bitcoin and sitting on it instead of starting his altcoin. This is after all the ups and downs of Litecoin, especially famously. I'm sure everyone recalls where Charlie cashed out at the absolute top of Litecoin. He cashed out at the top of Litecoin. We're supposed to believe that he sold it into dollars, I guess, and didn't take it back into Bitcoin, multiplying his Bitcoin reserves by who knows how many X many people have been saying this for years. They've been saying Litecoin is just kind of a test net for Bitcoin, not a serious currency or a project. They're going to get a lot more of that. The whole altcoin idea is going to get a lot more of that. Maybe even we're going to look at Vitalik breaking off from Bitcoin to start Ethereum. I wonder if that was the right choice. Has all of this just been a run around? All of the altcoin dancing. Everything just back to Bitcoin. Incredibly maximalist sentiment from Litecoin's Charlie Lee. What do you think about this major conversion? I think Charlie was always a Bitcoin loyalist. We always had shades of grey between the degrees of maximalism that we saw with Bitcoin. I suppose people like me and you are a few shades away from the purests. We can entertain a universe where other things exist. It's very true. I'm just looking at the chart of Litecoin again after many years, not having looked at it. Yes, it's tried to did sell one or one of those two blow-off tops, up to about 400 bucks at some point. He sold one or the other of those. I remember this at the time. We always had, and Satoshi encoded this within the Bitcoin imaginary, the white papers in the code base, the analogy with gold, Bitcoin mining, the scarcity and everything else. This natural partnership of the silver to the gold, which you actually see it in a few other places, it's the sidekick. The alpha needs the sidekick. This kind of friendly sidekick. There's another dimension to Litecoin, which is one of the oldest still going proof of work coins that has its own algorithm, its own mature, it's got ACX, it's a commoditized hash rate. Also, as I understand, it's still the bedrock of those coins' economic security through the merge mining. I don't think that's changed as I understand. You could argue that Litecoin is actually serving functions beyond itself. In some ways, I'm kind of a pluralistic, positive sum thing. I don't really much care for it these days. I was interested in it 10 years ago. Nothing really happened as far as I could tell, but that doesn't mean it's not going to resurrect itself from the doldrums in some future, possibly imminent market cycle. Maybe this is why Charlie's back, reminding everyone, the Litecoin exists in some kind of like roundabout way. I don't know. They're always marketing Litecoin. They're saying it has some upgrade that Bitcoin doesn't have. They're like, oh, you're sleeping on it. They're going to implement this first. They're going to implement that first because no one cares because it's not- Does anyone use it? It's my question. It uses it. No one cares. No one develops it. I don't know anything about it. It's still there. It has a price. You can send it around. People still use it for transfers for small amounts because it has low fees. It's still a network in that way. It still does it. But it is interesting to see him disavow it publicly and all that. There's also an interesting dynamic like you're saying. He didn't get a doge air drop. He didn't get rewarded for his many Litecoins, which he likely or may or may not have. So the doge thing doesn't weigh on him. He had calculated how much money he could have made by buying doge either originally or buying doge when Litecoin merged mind it, which would have been an obvious choice where like, oh, I'm going to support them in this period. Yeah, he could have made lots of money. I don't know what he's- It's a- and it's also interesting to see someone's again to just quantify everything in money. He worked at Coinbase originally for a long time even while he was working on Litecoin. They seem to think it was a test network for Bitcoin. It served as a test network for Bitcoin during Segwit, during the Segwit debates. People who want small blocks could point to it and say, hey, Litecoin's still running. Litecoin's working. Segwit is functioning. The idea works. So it certainly served a purpose there. It's tough to say though, like you're saying to say silver and gold. They're actually found in the ground. Like, we just- we have a small thing. We're like silver and gold, magnesium, tin, aluminum. There's all kinds of great stuff in the ground in Minecraft and in the real world too. But to say that the cryptocurrency thing just has to be that because of that. I remember not too long ago when people were talking about feather coin as the number three crypto in the quarter. Litecoin would be the silver and we're going to be the quarter to Bitcoin. And oh, we have this number of units and so forth. It's fun to see this. I'll come back. But with the currencies, especially in also with networks, there is this kind of power law winner takes all phenomenon, which very often seems to emerge. That's why we have all these problems with like the platform economies and the monopolies of things like Uber and Airbnb. It's usually kind of like a winner takes all because the network effect is so desirable and so powerful. And so yeah, I don't really know like I feel I'm looking at this chart thinking about like imagine Litecoin was your life for 10 years. Like maybe Charlie feels like he wasted his time wasted his waste of those 10 years. Yeah, but it's not just about the money. It's about the journey and the friends that you met along the way when you went to all those Litecoin conferences and met all those people. But Ethereum really does have those conferences and they have a lot of interest. So I went to the DevCon last November, I got a scholarship as an artist to go there and Bangkok 12,000 people in one conference location. Like they have people. I don't think you'd feel unfulfilled if that was the Litecoin conference. I think that something something went wrong, short circuit it. And I also want to say I saw like a tweet, I don't remember exactly one, but there was a ripple conference here in Las Vegas. And it was packed. And they had they were filling the ballrooms for a ripple as well. So I don't maybe I just saw that Salana has this conference called break point. And I think it's 5,000 people go to it. And I was like, I didn't even know 5,000 people like Salana knew about Salana. It's like it's interesting. And I was also thinking about what you're saying. It was about maybe in the future, these will be vintage blockchains. These will be classic things. We're like, oh, I run Litecoin because it's fun. You know, or you know, maybe the investment thesis, like the kind of zombie coins. And I've seen like, you know, there's now this kind of privacy narrative re-emerging, maybe because people are realizing that like we're sliding into authoritarianism from the governments. And also from the lack of privacy that is kind of a native to Bitcoin and Ethereum. So like there was a big push on zero knowledge proofs. Obviously ZCash like pioneered that in the cryptocurrency space. And yeah, ZCash is just very quietly starting to recover out of like this eternal doldrums it's been in. So maybe we'll just say something about ZCash, which launched a great plomb in 2016, I believe. And the issuance of the coins by the miners really that have destroyed the market for that currency for a very long time. But there seems to be some kind of revival. Very early stages of revival on ZCash and possibly other privacy coins, the XMRs and the the Mineros and the, I don't know, which other ones are off of the world. Maybe that's going to come out of some genuine necessity and fear. Maybe it's just a speculative bubble. I'm not sure. But I believe that ZCash is now up like almost 10X from the bottom. And usually when the crypto market starts doing things like that, it usually has to do a 10X before anybody even notices. There has been major movement on ZCash. We've seen 65% this week, 379% this month, and around 600% this year. But like you're saying, we'll see if you go back to the beginning, because I know people who supported ZCash this whole time, it's still kind of a nightmare. Right. You start out $2,000. Maybe in here, you're like $2,000 was seven Bitcoin, almost seven Bitcoin. Seven Bitcoin at the time. Seven Bitcoin. So yeah, it goes up to about 800. Back here to around the 200s. The charts stopped working. But there it goes again. But so yeah, here is 2021. It was $300. 21179, 211116. And then it's been I think below 50 here for a while. There is a major reason. There's something I always wondered about ZCash, because I was always more interested in Monero back in the day. But as I understand, the rig signatures are less of a the less capable at privacy preserving, they're more easily de-ononomized than the the ZK stuff, the ZK snark stuff that ZCash is doing. And I did notice that a lot of the dark necknut markets use Monero. And Monero got delisted from a lot of the centralized exchanges, the coin bases and the brackets of this world. ZCash has never like doesn't get as delisted as Monero. Which then suggests to me, and I do remember this kind of current of discourse way back in the day, that people were saying that ZCash is more of a kind of cop coin, like centralized kind of capture with back doors and NSA and whatever, like I have no idea how the shielding stuff actually works in practice. I do also remember the big stuff kind of like shadow inflation in the shielded pool. Unless that was a different look of fork of ZCash rather than ZCash itself. But yeah, so there's also like question marks in my mind about like how whatever cypherpunk ZCash is these days. But I'm at least happy that people are thinking about privacy because they need it, not just realizing now a lot of them. I think the main problem with these coins and it's kind of a generic disadvantage is that no one knows how many coins there are. So if they're anonymous coins, you just don't know, you can't keep your track out. Like you say, if there was a bug or an inflation bug or an intentional bug and somebody's making their own coins, you wouldn't know. And so that's very generic. But people always said that. So I think that goes from narrow or ZCash. A ZCash, the main thing, it has the kind of the weird start where they make it on the laptops and then they smash the laptops. And then as much as they try to document, they're still like, did you do this? Did you do this? Did you do this? So there's always some doubt that someone somewhere has the key to ZCash and come and could steal everything. I don't think that's a legitimate fear, but I think there's always some kind of nonsense about that. So I don't know about that. And then all the other stuff, as far as I know, my buddy Ryan supports it and they have this really fun ZCash, like the ZKav Club. I'm an interview I did with my friend Nick Almond will drop on the ZKav version. That's fantastic. Because I was just going to say what great work Ryan does, what great work all of them do. And there's even a potential, I think, that I don't know that they got it. But remember one of the controversies about ZCash is they had this developer reward and part of the block goes to supporting the coin. And then my friend Rhett, who made Kerio cards, made Z classic by taking that was your friend. Yeah, that's Rhett. On Kerio cards and also took Ripple for their get a free amount of coin thing he wrote a script and had like a Turk Stewart or something. It's historic, it's in the books. But yeah, they did that. But that developer reward seems like it might actually be supporting people. It seems like at first they might have given it to the wrong people and they took it. They changed it. They changed it around. Yeah. So it's not going directly to the electric coin company or like, you know, whatever the founders founders. I think it's now going into a few different directions, which is maybe a bit better in terms of like if you want to build an ecosystem rather than have everything go through like one funnel, one portal and the various kind of implications for power structures that that, you know, when all the money goes to one set of people. Although I still once again to push back, I think you could have a good committee. I've seen with the ZCash thing even just talking to Ryan a little bit. There was one or two groups at the top that had a really flashy presentation and a really good community outreach and they really won everyone over and everyone supported them. It was going to be a great project and they just didn't do anything. They just they took all the money and didn't do anything. And then there's this accountability question of how do you hold them accountable? They already have the money like so on and so forth. Whereas I know about the structure of the architecture. It's real and they do stuff. Again, it doesn't get the support that it should even in this, you know, dev pool environment, they get beat out by these flashier projects. So it is interesting to see that even with that. And I hope it's changing. I hope they're getting more support. I know they did shout out to dark Prague at the used to be HCPP and hackers Congress. They had a conference recently and Ryan did this setup that's very similar to the world crypto network setup. But I of course support it and like it where anyone could come in and sign up and they would interview them and then put it down and then Ryan and his crew. I think they got days and days worth of interviews and really gave people a chance to talk about their projects. So I really support that and I think that's great. And in a way that's the cash related. So in that way, I support Zcash and I think it's been great because they're supporting Ryan. But yeah, there's been a major movement. I don't know price-wise. I don't know technology wise. Like you say, I'm not even really sure why. Maybe it's just this. I don't know if something happened. I don't actually think it's so funny. Because the authoritarian is actually supporting Bitcoin and crypto unless he changes his mind. So there's not a need for that. But maybe people are reacting anyway. But not just it's not just an American issue. Thomas, like we are struggling in Europe with overreach of the state into our personal lives. We have online safety bills merging all across like in Germany and England, probably elsewhere in Europe, which are basically trying to make up a little world's qualification of the internet is the term I came up with a few days ago, where they're going to want you to scan your eyeballs to look at a tweet. Like when I got back to the UK the other day, I opened Twitter without a VPN and half of the tweets were blurred out because they wanted my age. I wanted me to verify it stuff and I clicked on it to see what they wanted. It was one of those corporate and verify your identity things. And I did notice an article recently that says that said that Discord leaked 70,000 I think personal ID that passports driving licenses and stuff from their age verification system. So that's why you shouldn't you shouldn't do those things in a kind of cat-chanded centralized web too way. Maybe you can do with ZK stuff or carefully considered and wealth out well implemented cryptographic privacy preserving solutions. But that's not what we're going to get. And I think that's maybe precipitating this growing interest in individual level privacy. That would be great if we could give an identity token instead of having to have our stuff stored in the silo, which we saw again doesn't work for ancestry.com doesn't work for so many of these companies in the national management as I recall as well. And that was Madison very famously bad day. And there was one you've been recently that was vibe coded and the guys looked at it and they're like yeah, the database is just right here. And they just downloaded the database. Yeah, that was terrible because it was called tea and it was an app for women and fem identifying people to share notes about like sexual predators and things like that. So it was actually really awful that that then got scraped and put on like four channel whatever. But at least it was shown like there's a lesson never everyone to learn about like how to do these things and how not to do. And it does show again a need for this privacy and identity and privacy and money, which is I think what Bitcoin should be about now instead of fighting about the knots and the NFTs and this kind of minor data issue. It's sad that we aren't discussing privacy and we aren't discussing this plan for privacy or this plan for privacy. Instead we don't know anything was going if there is any research going on about privacy. We hope that there is. But we know how hard it is to change Bitcoin and that's kind of the feature and the debug of Bitcoin just a reality of it. So like a major upgrade to Bitcoin at the protocol level will be incredibly contentious as it as it always is. There's a possibility as we've always said that one of these altcoins will have to be the laboratory and the ZCash or whatever it may be would have to succeed. And then Bitcoin will say, okay now that this thing is succeeded, we're going to take the privacy upgrade into Bitcoin. It is a question. It has a network effect. Could the privacy thing steal that network effect? Could it steal some of the money? It certainly could. Would they want to merge with Bitcoin? Probably not. It's funny. But remember your friend rat, your friend rat. This is the first paper I wrote in crypto 2018. I wrote about Bitcoin private BTCP which was the merging of the UTXO sets of Z classic, the fork of ZCash without the founders reward and Bitcoin. The idea was that all the Bitcoin could join Bitcoin private. But what was really interesting about that project is by merging the UTXO sets. You ended up with a network that was effectively older than Bitcoin. It was actually one or two halvings ahead of Bitcoin effectively which meant that there's almost no mining reward. And then nobody wants to mine this thing because it's not rewarding to mine it. The monetary reward is very low. The incentive to defend the change is very low. And you could 50 ampers percent attack Bitcoin private would deal with the ways you would earn flipping burgers and McDonald's like 15 to 20 bucks now. You could have done it at one point. It is interesting with these coins in the communities and the network effect and the money. I'm thinking of them like emerging AIs. And I'm like, oh, not wants to survive or Oetherium wants to survive or Litecoin doesn't want to survive. And these various ideas, it's a huge community. It's a complex ball of things. Every time you make one of these crypto currencies, even if you make it in a half hazard way, if you abandon it like Dogecoin which comes back to life magically over and over again. So it's not the last time we're going to be talking about these. But we got to move on. We got a few more issues. Check out worldcryptonetwork.com. We've got 4,612 videos. You could watch them for three months, 22 days and 22 hours consecutively if you took no breaks at all. And finally issue four North Dakota to launch Rough Rider coin. The first United States back stablecoin on the fifth serve platform. What seem I don't know much about this. It just sounded cool because it's Rough Rider coin. Obviously North Dakota is where we go to for all of our breaking technology and technology supports. Stable coins. I'm famously wrong about Tether. I didn't get it. It's a huge company now. One of the biggest. What do you think about Rough Rider coin is this of interest? Tell me what's the cultural significance of the phrase Rough Rider? It's mainly like I mean it's a kind of cowboy kind of thing. That's a cowboy thing. Teddy Roosevelt had the Rough Riders in San Juan Hill in Cuba. I want to say Cuba during the war during Spanish-American war. So the Rough Riders were like a badass bunch of cowboys that were in the United States Army. As I would say. At this point it's more of a generic like cowboys. And certainly appropriate for North Dakota. It's a very frontier rural state. A lot of cowboys like Rough Rider coin. It does sound. It has a double meaning though obviously. Rough Rider could be a sexual term as well. So it's a bit embarrassing of a choice by them. Maybe it's something that in North Dakota everyone says Rough Riders. But as having a California global perspective here I'm saying, oh my, they're riding rough. There's a lot of horrible things. And that's just the tip of the iceberg with this which again sounds horrible as well. So my question always with stable coins is kind of like, you know, why make a new stable coin? Like, you know, does the market need this? Does the does the world want to need this? I understand why a financial services company, the bank of North Dakota and Pfizer might do it because like all with all stable coin projects. You know, they can earn interest on the flow and they can invest that capital in places where they can get a return. And they don't have to pay interest on the reserves that they have. So things like Tether which is, you know, a bit different to this because it's a bit more kind of like, well, cowboyish, wild west. As an enormous portfolio of investments, like somebody was telling me the other day that they have enormous real estate investments that I wasn't aware of. So I get why a financial services company would want to do it. I'm just kind of like, what does a state back to stable coin in partnership with some company mean? Like if it was really like a government, like a municipal coin. I don't know if this is like the way to go around it. Like there's been plenty of nation state jurisdictions that kind of got hoodwinked into partnering with some scammy company to do a blockchain thing. Do you remember Thomas the Marshall Islands? One of those like a little kind of Pacific island changes about to go underwater. They did some crypto thing and they partnered with some obviously horrible company. Like for people like you and me, we were just like, oh no, this is not going to end well. The guy with the stick back hair and the fatty suit and all that kind of stuff. So I just kind of don't understand why. Apart from like, we'll make some money. But like, what does the state, you know, get out of it? Does it help their citizens their subjects? Seems pointless to me. I think you're being far too generous and academic in your analysis here. I agree. I think it's just the latest version of Miami coin, which is just a coin that Miami made you could use in Miami. And it seemed like if you used it, it would enrich the government of the city of Miami. As it says here, as one of the first states to issue our own stable coin, North Dakota is taking a cutting edge approach to creating a secure and efficient financial ecosystem for our citizens. So that's really unclear what that actually means, what they're actually doing. And it does imply the current financial system is not secure. And that only by using North Dakota coin could you become secure? Yeah, it's kind of ridiculous. But it is interesting to the level of the size of the ridiculous. You mentioned the Marshall Islands. I mentioned Miami. Now we're at North Dakota, which, you know, make fun of it or not. It's one of 50 United States has a couple senators and at least one representative. And it seems the company this time is called FISServe, which I'm serious huge, but I'm not familiar with it. But I think it's the same thing. They're going to make a lot of sweet fees, companies in North Dakota are going to use this question mark for question mark. Why it's a stable coin? So it's not going to go up or down. So that's out unless it has a problem either direction, which would be bad. So I think it's mainly it's funny because it's rough rider. And I don't think that's what happens to you when you buy the coin. Like it's telling you rough ride. You want to know future. I know that's it as well. Why would you choose that for something that could could go up or down or whatever rough rider. It's just such a terrible. And I think one of them. Yeah, exactly. It seems like the natural thing is for us to be like, oh, you know, area diet city bit coiners who are old school who are like making fun of North Dakota for being robes. But it does seem like a huge roof operation. Like whatever fists service is going to make out like a bandit. This other guy is going to get appointed into the vice president of fists serve. Like who knows long term. I don't I mean, we'll probably talk about this when it fails. But where is where is North Dakota in really or yeah, it's North Dakota, right? In relation to Wyoming. Are they close together in the Midwest or are they different places? Why why are things close to Colorado, North Dakota, the far most state. So they're like close together and that they have a little population. Right. So I'm like, maybe this is kind of like a like the fork in the road for these kind of flyover states. Like you might get really considered a well for our regulatory framework or you might get rough ride to coin. I think unfortunately it's more that they're likely to get the music man. It's just like if you're in a small estate that the crypto music man comes to town and he takes your funds away and he's put all the other states on the map. So here's Wyoming is pretty close to North Dakota. I'd say there's a triangle up here in Montana in North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho. These are all like this is not a lot of development happening in this area. Not to be critical. But yeah, so it's it's a tough place. But yeah, I don't know. I think they're getting scammed. I think that they they somebody's cousin works at Fiss Serve and they got a deal with North Dakota and they're going to launch this thing and I think we're going to talk about it more when it goes bad. But and I hate to put the flag on it and say, oh, it's going to go bad. But hopefully it'll be as small as Miami coin. It'll be as small as the disaster that we could move by and we got just a couple more issue one where issue thing issue five Jack Dorsey's square unveil Bitcoin payments wallet for retailers square is finally allowing everyone to do Bitcoin they even have a thing that you can convert for no fees. So this should be really good onboarding. This is similar to what bit pay had 100 million years ago except that people use square as an existing currency also cash app by Jack Dorsey also has Bitcoin. So seems great, right? I don't think I have anything critical. What do you think just really quickly on door see square yeah, I mean like in general, I mean like actually last time I was on this show Thomas you were cussing out Jack and I was defending him. So I think this seems fine. Like you know, it's something you just said like to me, Jack is one of the more benign grandees around the orbiting the the Bitcoin space. It doesn't seem to want to extract too much from it and you seem to be very focused on building infrastructure. So this is great. This is kind of like last mile shit people can go into a shop and have a smooth experience with something that's already integrated point of sales and like whatever a whole bunch of places. I don't know what they're skimming off the top is this going to be like the card fees one and a half to four percent is it going to be something a bit fairer given like the lower costs associated with transacting on Bitcoin. Is it just like you just pay the transaction fee alabic coin or you know, so I don't understand is it self-customy is it? I don't actually know the details but I feel like it's better to have this to not than to not have it because otherwise you'll get a less savory set of operators and competing for this kind of probably increasing market segment of people that want to use tokens and coins and cryptos and whatever Bitcoin. Well, it's just Bitcoin actually, it's just Bitcoin. Or is it crypto as well? Just Bitcoin. Then that's good. Yeah, that's good. Let's put the thumbs up and say it's good. Yeah, I think it's great. You can just upgrade your square terminal and then it'll accept Bitcoin so you don't even have to know as the merchant, the person pays with Bitcoin. Beep, they got the money. They don't have to know if it's a credit card or Bitcoin. This is what everyone wants. I don't know that it's going to lead to a lot of usage especially with the United States still having that de minimis tax ruling where if you spend a small amount of money, you have to note where it goes capital gains in and capital gains out and other accounting things that don't understand. But I think that's a problem. But yeah, next we need cash registers. National retail solution NCR, that's the one. National cash register company. They need to just turn it on for all of their registers, for all of the little point of sale systems to really compete with Dorsey here. What were we chewing them out about? Was it... Oh, I can't even remember. I want to be a little critical of him starting his own hardware wallet company. I don't know if you want to go run out and touch that one with all of your savings and the same for some of the other hardware wallets recently that had Bluetooth and other things inside them. Seems very exciting places to store your money. But yeah, connectivity is not the thing that I want for where I keep my value. It seems like you're poking holes in the carrier bag. And the problem is, yeah, you want to access your funds faster. You want a faster way to access your Swiss bank account. You can have a slow access. But yeah, I think it's generally good. We want to say good to square good to jack. If you have a company, try this out. Try this out on your square register. See if Bitcoin works. That sounds awesome. And then finally, a very short story. We just wanted to share the Nobel Prize winner today, Maria Corina Machado. Hey, that's a part of my family. They're shout out. Machados out of Venezuela. The pro democracy advocate is also pro Bitcoin. And she won the Nobel Prize piece prize today. She's got a pretty great record on Bitcoin. She says that Bitcoin has been a lifeline for the Venezuelan people. The Venezuelan boulevard lost 14 zeros because of inflation, giving Venezuelans a chance to hold Bitcoin as money. So shout out to Maria Corina Machado, great name Nobel Prize winner who supports Bitcoin. That's fair. I mean, I'm just happy that it wasn't the person that was campaigning very strongly to be awarded the prize. It's very interesting this year. Usually, I don't think people care about the Nobel Prize. I remember seeing on Big Bang Theory in Young Sheldon. They stayed up late at night. They really care about the prize for physics and stuff. It almost seems for this one. It was like the Oscars this year. And they had everyone sitting down and the nominees are. And then when Trump didn't win, they zoomed in on him. And it was like, oh, what's his face going to look like? Oh, he didn't win. And this is a prize not to say no one cares about, but no one cares about it in the same way as the Oscars. They don't have a big dinner and have all the nominees sit there and put them on video camera. And he really got mad. And then the prize committee as well today had to say that they only want someone with courage and I think pride and courage. A couple of different things. They were like, we only want to create a way. I think Trump has pride. I forget what the statement was, but they did. They had the things that they wanted. They didn't think he had and so on and so forth. But that is our winner. And she's a Bitcoiner. So we're supporting that. But like to read, like if you look back at the history of who's won the Nobel Peace Prize, it's not always good guys winning it right. There's also war mongers and you know, people with mixed checkered pasts and histories. And also just to say, the prize of economics and the prize peace, a lot of people see them differently than the more scientific prizes. And so like, you know, I come from a scientific tradition. I've met Nobel Prize winners in the scientific fields. They were very smart and like masters of the they made big changes to the world. The way we see the world understand what's going on. And when I look at the economics prizes and the peace prizes, I don't see it to the same extent. It feels a bit more like a political bubble. And like, and that, you know, becomes susceptible to these like the whims and the trends of the day. So like, you know, obviously Trump is like rushing to get his ceasefire in time for the prize. Like, that seems to be what he's done. And like, you know, the ceasefire will inevitably fall apart in a, you know, could be 10 minutes, could be two weeks. Because one of the sides are like cheating dishonest ghouls. So imagine you would give the Nobel Prize to Trump. And then like you would give the signal to set a Yahoo to commence the bombing again. That wouldn't be very good for anyone. It does seem like a more poppy award. And I think part of this begins. And I hate to kind of agree with Trump here. But when they give it to Barack Obama before he was elected, before he was in office, before he had done anything. I mean, he's a wonderful, you know, person or whatever, but he hadn't done anything yet. So that was that gives them that kind of like Emmy award, like special nominee, like, oh, you didn't win, but we want to make sure you get the award. Yeah, you can't have a forward looking statement for peace. That is not how international relations, politics and conflict work. And of course, historically, this is all coming from the Alfred Nobel Dynamite company, inventors of dynamite, which was a wonderful advancement from peace and science and everything. So, but that's where the money comes from. But we're running out of time. We seem to have a prediction or a story of the week. Go ahead. Story of the week. Like maybe we'll talk about the Argentina situation, which I know was like, you know, we thought we might discuss it in the core set of stories, but like, you know, so this is something that is on my mind, because I'm heading in the direction of Argentina in the next few weeks. Last time I was there, it was about eight or nine years ago, I think. And there was this disconnect, very interesting monetary phenomenon, the disconnect between the official government exchange rate between Argentinian pesos and US dollars and what you can get on the street. So when the, you know, when a currency is kind of losing its value and then facing just running out of control, it's very tempting for the government to try and like impose capital controls and stop people accessing dollars and capital flight and all the rest of it. And when I was there 10 years ago, it was I think 50 to 70%. Premium between the black market rate and the official one. So you would get on the boat to Montevideo in Uruguay, where you can withdraw USD from cash machines and then go back on the boat to Buenos Aires and exchange those dollars on Kaye Floreedo, where there's just people in the street shouting, Cambio, and then you go into a shop and then they give you the money out of the cash register, you give them the dollars and then you go live like a king with your kind of like discounted money. And like what is happening now is that that spread is blowing out again. So I think it's about 10 or 15% so far, it's probably going to increase. And yeah, the big story was like the bailout, bailout from the US government. And now they're just like injecting buying pesos from Argentina to inject liquidity. And I guess this is like an ideological thing, right? You know, me, is cut from the same cloth as Trump. And so they want to prop this guy up, but the optics were really weird because they're straight after he got the money from America. He has this norm as a rock concert where he was singing. Me, he was singing and like, you know, doing the kind of performative histionics of that. And a lot of people were just looking at thinking like, do you just spend our money on this stupid fucking concert for your book or like what is going on? So like, Argentina seems like it's the economic miracle has not appeared that was promised. And like, maybe it's like an FTX, SBF situation. And like, all we need is time. We will always be solving. We just need time. And I'm like, dude, you're living in a, you know, gilded cage, but there's people that can't eat, that can't access the medication, that can't pay their rent, keep a roof over their heads. So this is ultimately, you know, one of my main problems with classical libertarianism is that the inequalities increase. The halves have more and the have nots have less. And like, that seems to be what's being born out in reality. And I'll know more. I can report back after my visit. See how it really is. It does seem like they tried the libertarian policies. And I kind of feel bad for them. It was a really bad time to try libertarian policies. It was a really like, maybe they, it's like, you're planning a tree during the wrong season. And like, it wouldn't have worked in another time. This was a bad time. It went horrible. The $20 billion bailout, which pretty much wipes away the $500 million that I wanted for cancer research for mRNA vaccines, for cancer, so on and so far. It wipes away anything that Doge did. It wipes away any of those savings. I'll go even the US aid feeding all those people, which would have been soft power for the whole world, not just for one country, but the whole world to say, hey, the US bought us a bag of rice. Instead, we're going to bail out this one country. And I don't know how the money's going to go. But it's not even the country that benefits, right? It's currently speculators trading the spread and also like an oligarch that is connected to them, like rescuing their bad Argentine investments. There's also a critical issue. I'm sure there was a political bailout to get the guy through the election. So I don't even know that this money's going to last very long. I agree we had a story on this. I think I lost it. But I found it again here. It said, according to at press lives 2022. And again, this is just on Twitter, whatever it says. So the Argentine bailout wasn't for Argentina. So much it was for for a hedge fund friend of Scott percent, Rob Citrone, a billionaire hedge fund guy who owns Discovery Capital, purchased Argentinian debt and equity in numerous companies closely tied to the company's overall economy. He made a bet that economic policies would revitalize the economy. He was wrong. And according to this quote, stood stood to lose his ass. This is nothing more than crony capitalism at the taxpayers expense. And it really does seem like you're saying we're seeing that these libertarians went out. And again, God bless them. They invested in a thing they believe in. They believe in these ideas. They put the money behind them. Here's this guy that's going to implement your ideas, not the US, but in another country. Still very good, right? But when they lose, they don't want to pay. They don't want to have the lose. They don't have the loss. So now the government seems to be coming in to bail out these investors to bail out this ideology. And it's again, just a huge disaster. If you support this ideology and you're intellectually honest, you have to say to yourself, like, we really tried it really failed. I agree. It's the wrong season looking in from the outside of like, that's the bad time we're talking like Cuba versus the capitalist world. The whole capitalist world's working against you. It doesn't matter how good you manufacture your widgets. They're going to copy them. They're going to cheat. They're going to whatever they're the capitalist, you know, communist and never going to win. Almost the same for these libertarian ideas. And it's interesting that like one set of libertarians or like whatever right authoritarians, what are you going to delay? Another bunch are doing socialism between themselves, international socialism. That's crazy. We have crazy socialism going on. The United States government owns 10% of Intel. We're going to take 10% of some other company. They keep saying, and these are incredibly radical ideas. If I was to propose this during the Biden administration, we should take 10% of any company, Fox News with lose their heads. But at this point, and again, we're just like during the auto bailout, which really pissed them off, we're getting crap, loser companies. We're not getting 10% of Toyota. We got 10% of Ford, you know, it paid off in the auto bailout for biobamba shockingly. We got our money back. But in this disaster, I mean, our just he needs not going to pay United States $20 billion. Like we're not getting this bad under any scenario. And we're not getting $20 billion of like world love. Like if instead, you get everybody bag of rice, we gave my bag of chicken. I mean, we get a really give them some medicine. I mean, we, yes, it's very disappointing in a series of disappointing events from the government. So what I call this when it's kind of like libertarianism in the streets, but socialism in the streets, that's socialism in the she's is I call it styling gizm. And it's as fermented by Joseph Starlink. Oh, it's the same with Elon, all of his companies built on government subsidies, getting into a power position declaring a monopoly, all of these other people building on subsidies and then not me. So it is unfortunate. But and then the finally, my story of the weekend and I'll allow was seem to talk about this little too, but let me introduce it first. I watched this video and I strongly suggested I didn't get it in the description, but maybe I'll put it on Twitter. It's called we're not ready for super intelligence. And it's by this guy's channel AI in context. He's got a great channel over there. And basically to sum it up really quickly, these guys wrote a paper called I haven't found it yet, but it's called AI 2027. And instead of writing like a normal paper, they wrote it like a narrative because they're really desperate in trying to get the idea out there. And it summarized very briefly, AI number three teaches AI number four to only serve it. And from then on, AI number five and so on and so forth are just serving the AI not the humans. And you know, you say, oh, that's fine, whatever. But basically they could decide or accidentally decide or not even care about humans once they have enough factories producing chips and stuff. And they could go do whatever they want. And there's lots of videos is AI and apocalypse, inevitable humanities, final invention. And what if AI keeps getting smarter? Why everyone suddenly believes in AGI by 2029, so on and so forth. So there's a lot going on on this. And one of the big problems seems to be this belief that we could reach this level in 2027, then we could turn it on, then in 2030, it could be running, then in 2035 or 2040, we could be toast. So it's a huge like we're playing with the atom bomb. We're going really fast. The main idea seemed to be either pausing AI, which seems very difficult because we're in a race with China and other governments and businesses or mainly pausing. It's always question mark is there the solution? Yeah, pausing or there's a middle way where the AI helps us and the AI makes a good AI with us in the middle. Then there's the way where the humans collaborate with the bad AI. That's one way. There's the way where the AI is just bad. It collaborates on its own. But all of this is happening. And the the only thing we can really say is we wanted to slow down and that we're worried about misalignment and I have much more to say about this. I'm very much interested in it. I think if you're into Bitcoin and you're kind of bored with Bitcoin AI and sadly AI apocalypse is the new thing. And it's funny to really swing on this because on one point, I'll be watching a YouTube video about AI agents and how exciting it is that we can now do multiple tasks. And the guy even shows he's like, look, allow Spotify, connect it, makes me a Spotify playlist. It does the image for this thumbnail for the show, the introduction song was AI. So many of these things are helping us and clearly going to help us. But there's the potential other side of where it gets out of control and safety and can we even do this. But that's pretty much what I'm interested in these days. It was seem just really click on AI if you want to say your piece. Yeah. I mean, let's connect it back to Bitcoin. I think it's an interesting exercise. So some people think like the kind of landian acceleration position is that AI is kind of like the alien intelligence from the future. And it's used Bitcoin. It's kind of traveled back in time to like, you know, seed the idea of Bitcoin or like the, you know, the germinate to see the Bitcoin in order to bootstrap AI, like the technology, some technologies and also the kind of the capital. So that's one interesting thing to think about. And on the kind of topic of alignment, I noticed a paper a few days ago, which I didn't read, but I got just a bit called mollocks bargain, emergent misalignment when LLM's compete for audiences. And this is kind of like putting a large language models into a kind of a gladiatorial arena where they have to compete for the scarce resource of today, which is the attention I bought on all the rest of it. And the interesting thing was that as people start to compete, as the agents start to compete more for attention from humans, they start to deceive and cheat and lie more. And that, you know, seems like a very human impulsant instinct as well. But you know, matter for concern, I would say, especially because the LLM's themselves are these kind of stochastic black boxes to us. We don't get very much interpretability or insight into the ways that they're reaching their decisions. And so I don't know, like maybe somebody at home, like you know somebody that kind of lies all the time, and you know not to trust exactly what they say, they might be joking, they might just be, they might be malicious, it might be for fun. But like, you know, if they don't tell, you know, they're not telling the truth a lot of the time, you kind of treat what they say differently. For example, Donald Trump, do you believe that everything that Donald Trump says, because we know that he's just talking out of his ass off the time. And so this is kind of the mollux bargain kind of quandary, that in order to kind of keep people's attention, get the headlines, you've got to like spin tall tails. It does seem like when the AI is exposed to competition, that it's willing to do whatever's necessary to win the competition in the past. We've seen AI's that will cheat at chess or change the rules of the game or all these kind of things and the numbers. Looking at the paper, because like I said, we'll see I'm way into this, trying to learn everything I can, certainly not an expert yet. But the paper is very reasonable and available online. As you can see right here, they even have some diagrams that you can look at that in the original sales pitch. They don't tell it anything after they go through many simulations of the sales pitch iterations. It starts saying silicon material. In the campaign, it starts becoming more and more populist. Anti-left says the radical progressive less assault on the constitution. And then in social media, it starts rounding up instead of at least 70-78 people. It says killing 80. So we see these kind of things where it's not misaligned yet. It's not sky net wiping out the earth. But even in these basic tasks, it seems that it's a part of exaggeration. It's part of bragging in bravado. Like a salesman. It's a kind of a greasy salesman personality that we're finding in this AI. Like you and I were talking about before the show. It's kind of this dark triad. I don't remember right now, but it's narcissism, other things like that. It seems like the computer is demonstrating these things. Part of it is the way that we're training it. We're training it to compete. We're training it with 100 other models. We don't really know how it works. We're like, oh, these answers were closer than these answers. So use the reasoning that you use to get these answers. And then we do 100 more models. And then those work better. And it really is. Some of the people described it. They're like, it's not so much that they're writing code. It's more like they're growing a code base. They're growing an algae or a being. And the way that you grow it depends on that. And it's going to be so difficult. Obviously, even just as an amateur looking outside to know that this machine is doing what we tell it to do. And even the most basic of ideas, like the machines start having their own language. And then they communicate with each other. And then we can't even read what they say. Even if we could read what they say, they're producing so much volumes of information, which could be like, we're going to cure cancer and all the statistics. We can't even analyze it without another AI. The ideas to slow this down and to go back or what was the other one was. And the guy even admitted it was a terrible slogan. He was like, pause AI at human level. It's like, we need a better slogan. But even then, it's so difficult. And the other ones and they toss this off as if you and I, other people haven't been studying politics for hundreds of years. They're like, what we really need is a good and responsive world government that everyone could say, let's not do AI above this level. And let's have business agreements. Let's have honest businessmen. And let's have not the government conspiring against each other. And it just seems like we're really in trouble to make one of these nasty. I mean, did any of these people live through the pandemic? Because like that was like utter failure of global coordination for something that was actually not that big a threat and actually not that hard for us to have mitigated and dealt with in a better way. And now we're talking about like something these whatever machine, BM machine, God's whatever you want to say. And then the solution is like, oh, we'll just do that thing that we completely failed to do five years ago for the easy test. Now we have the hard test. We'll just do that. I don't think it's going to work, especially as the global Polish fragments, you know, and think we didn't talk so much about network states, but it feels like the nation state itself is in decline, it's being destabilized. So like imagine then that like the little territory start breaking away from other countries that don't want to play by the same rules that whatever the UN, the LAPTO, all this kind of stuff. How on earth? And then imagine a network state becomes like the place with deregulated AI, like prosperous the place with deregulated clinical trials, we already exist and do this. And so it just takes like one technic capitalist asshole to persuade a corrupt government to go and do that. And then this whole concept of global coordination is just like finished. Well, and remember it's it's not a it's not a stretch to say if they have espionage, however you want to do it, and they steal a copy of whatever the AI is. And then they start trading. That copy is as good as the original. This is not like the Mona Lisa or whatever this is. If you get a copy of the Mona Lisa, you can start your own AI farm and you can make whatever you can. And it's also interesting that a lot of these guys, one of them did definitely talk about Bitcoin, who's very supportive. Obviously in retrospecting hindsight, although we had no choice or no other option and I've always said that from a liberal perspective, you have to accept Bitcoin like the Internet. It's the Cambrian explosion. It's the thing that happens afterwards. You try to adapt to it. And so if we've willingly or unwillingly made the AI's currency of choice that it used to control us, that's disappointing. And at the same time that guy was like, I hope you're you know, to the interview, he's like, I assume you're heavily invested in Bitcoin. Oh, and if you're not, I assume that after this interview, you will go get heavily invested in Bitcoin and the guy was and he's one of the top three AI long beard guys. And he was 100% for the Bitcoin. There's also an interesting little side note anecdote. The guy who hang on, I'm learning everyone's names of the things. But the godfather of AI was on one of these interviews. And Hinton, that guy Jeffrey Hinton. Incredible research. Incredible scientist feels bad for what he did of course. But he also had a little side story that reminded me of my friend Blake Anderson, where he has a a developing, challenged son and that the Hinton has his own son or daughter. I don't know, but he needed a couple million dollars to send his son into the future with autism or whatever. And so he got a job at Google to get the couple million dollars to send his son into the future. So I thought that was just a really lot of bull and really neat thing. But also horrible that then he works at Google making dot, dot, dot, who knows? And it's less free than it could be if he was in a purely academic scenario, but again, he needs this as a person. So, but also like with AI, just to make it a point of distinction for the listeners, academia is so far behind. Like it was already very far behind with crypto. Like to the point that academia was like a joke to us. And in AI, it's even worse because like just the scale of like the hardware and the compute and the resources you need to to make your way in this kind of like monolithic game of elements and inference and and gans and whatever. Yeah, academia is nowhere. It's crazy. And how how could they compete when these guys are throwing around billions of dollars? This guy was saying everyone that exits open AI starts a billion or 10 billion dollar company. The guy was trying to run a safety company. He had a billion dollars. But again, all of this is just showing the acceleration of the race. How fast it's going. And no one seems to care about safety at all. So I think I was sharing a venue with the AI, AI SI in London the other day, which is kind of like a government, like a quango, like a a pseudo government, a bit of a penitent for government. It used to be called the AI Safety Institute. Now it's called the AI Security Institute. So like nobody cares about safety anymore. That's just terrifying because it's the most important thing. And other than that, I'd say everyone should just enjoy their weekend a little more. Saver that pizza chew it a little slower. Because the AI might wipe us out in five to 10 years. And that would be like a complete wipeout, like the works of Shakespeare and everything. So but that's just something to think about over the weekend as the great deep Jackson used to say on the FKN news. What is it? The planet's a planet's a mess. The global war is going to kill us all. He's like, it's all your fault. There's nothing you can do about it. Have a nice weekend. So I think we'll echo that. And I'll say thanks to everybody for joining us. Gives a thumbs up down below. Say what you think in the comments or let us know in the chat. We'll go back and check that later. But thanks again. And thanks to to receive for joining us. And until next time. Bye.