The Bitcoin Group, the American Original. For over the last ten years, the sharpest citotis, the best bitcoins, the hardest crypto-currency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Josh Shagalla from thestander.io. Pradyho, neighbor. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network. Moving on to issue one. Issue one Bitcoin headed to 150,000, claims famed investor, slams bearish investors as drama queens. Meanwhile, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana to hit all time highs in 2026. Bitwise predicts. And we've also heard of a Bitcoin price prediction. Liquidity concentrates near $85,000 ahead of option expiry scheduled for December 25th, December 26th, the day after Christmas. Josh Shagalla, anything about everybody's favorite topic, the price, the price, the price, the price of Bitcoin. Well, you can either say Bitcoin will go up or the global currencies go down in value and both the sure things because one happens when the other happens. The fact is that Bitcoin was in a price discovery phase for the last ten years, it still is. And that's why we see these massive moving shots and down and up because it's like, what is this new technology? How does the market price it? But at the end of the day, it needs to settle into what its use case is. And I feel it is settling into that slowly, which is that store of value use case. And then of course, you've got all the other cryptos, which then get used as currencies like the stablecoins. But as pure money instead of a currency, Bitcoin is there. And so, yeah, I can definitely see 150K. It's not a problem. I can see a million. I can see 100 billion. You know, it depends how much money they print. And so we don't, you know, we don't have QE anymore. We have, forget what they've called it now. But anyway, it's basically the same thing. It's just doing it more seriously. So they do it in a whole lot of different ways. Little sections of the government print in different ways. So using the Fed. And so we will definitely see more money printing. I mean, there's no way like my big question is, my big question is on the market if it crashes to let people buy some of these expensive stocks a bit cheaper, especially the ones in the know. And they're in start, start the money printers up. Or if the Trump government's going to just not let it crash at all, all the way through the midterms and keep the money printers, the liquidity flowing. But either way, it's terrible long term. You know, what really needs to happen is there needs to be pain for there to be long term sustainable markets that aren't just ridiculously overpriced and massive inflation really what needs to happen is it needs to be a bit of a painful sector. But politicians don't like pain, you know, whether it's Trump, whether it's anyone, no politician likes pain. So they will always kick the can down the road. And that can is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Maybe they should call it a kick the snowball down the hill. But yeah, so my point is that Bitcoin will easily reach. I mean, this is silly thing to say. It'll reach 150k or whatever. Of course it will. But when is the question? When is the question and it's better if they say the exact day? I don't know if the QE is gone, Josh. I've heard a lot of people say that they were trying to tame the economy to do the pain like you were saying to try to do that. And then as you see the Fed went the other way now with the rate cut and we're headed down. I don't know the exact number. I think it's around two and a half, two percent. There's not that much more there before zero and before negative interest rates where we'll pay you to borrow money. We'll pay you, which you know everything is just fine. So I don't know about all that and the larger economic things, Josh, but it doesn't look good. It doesn't sound good. It does sound like the adults tried to control it and put the cap on it. But as you say, no one wants that kind of cap. They want the unlimited money printing, the safety of that. Stable coins as well have taken the lead as far as payments. We used to think that we would be the one doing tap to pay or doing click to pay. It's your Apple card. It seems like it's going to be your tether account or your stable account. No one wants to spend actual Bitcoin. Even though we're in a horrible downtrend. So it's hard to say that, but the reality is still there. No one wants to spend actual Bitcoin. Talk about a bad year, Josh. We got beat by silver. What do you think about that? Silver investors are running laps around Bitcoiners this year. Gold as well. The ETFs didn't help. The billion dollar purchases by sailor didn't help. Even the alt coins with tons of stable coins didn't help. Everything is down this year. Everyone is super depressed. People are even starting to give up on the Santa Claus rally. They like to say Santa Claus rally. I'm talking like the president now. I've contracted some more talking disease. But yes, Santa Claus rally. And I don't know if that's happening either. I love this option expiry though. A little bit about that on December 26th. I can't say it right. All of these options are going to expire. They think that that's been holding down the price of Bitcoin. And if we just get past that, everything explodes and it goes back up. It sounds like insane hope. As well as the general predictions next year where they're like, everything next year will be fine. But if you have to sell rent to pay rent today, you're F'd. Josh, what do you think about the talks of next year and what about this options expiry? Is that going to save us all? I don't think it's going to save us all. But yeah, when a lot of these options get called and people have to close positions, obviously, things happen in the market that change. So it could be part of it. Yeah. Fundamentally, it's all about people hedging inflation at this point. That's why I brought up the price discovery. I think we're beyond them. I see like 10,000 to 20,000 a day sort of rallies. I think we're now at a closer sort of slowly going up with inflation, with obvious dips around F'd and China banning Bitcoin and stuff like that that are still to come. Whatever sale are selling, everything, whatever. We'll see it dumps there. But we'll get in margin called. Yeah. Yeah, that's the term RMP. They're calling it now. Not QE. The Fed loves just to change the moment of pleasure. And then that way it confuses everybody. It's kind of like legal easy. It makes the language so complex that you have to pay very expensive people to do it for you. I know it pisses a lot of people off, but I don't think Sailor can be margin called. I think it's fun to everybody say, oh, the MNAV is here. Oh, he's under the MNAV or whatever it is. But I think that the way his company set up with the board of directors and whatever, I think they're all in his pocket. And I think that they're all basically drinking the cool aid. And they're saying to themselves, we're going to ride this thing five years. We're going to ride this thing 10 years. We're going to ride it 20 years. Who cares? That's only part of our investible money. We have other things. We have other funds. Sailors always get all in, get your house in, get all in. You know he has other houses. You know he has other funds. You know he has savings accounts. Like he's not. I'd love to see a report. Sailor is all in. Has zero, zero, zero, zero. Like the rest of you plebes. But I don't think so. And as far as this, I think he can hold. I think everyone's got to stop getting themselves. Adam Pax has been doing the patrol going around to Twitter, count saying like this is nonsense. This is nonsense. I think he can hold. I'm not worried about that. I do think maybe the price could go down. I don't know if people want to keep attacking it. If the banks keep attacking it, this is 10 a.m. Something keeps happening 10 a.m. in the US. They like dump everything hard. I've heard that Coinbase was selling today. Other major holders are selling. And then I think they sell. They drive the price down. They buy it right back up. And then the next day they do the same thing. And they can try that for a while at a certain point. I don't know if it's going to work for them. Well, the interesting thing about Bitcoin, it's always been this way. Well, crypto in general is that it's fairly unregulated. So people can play very funny silly by the game. And sort of beyond that line that they haven't crossed because there is no real line. It's a very blurry fuzzy space. What I'm talking about is, say you might want to crash the market and everyone to think that he's going to get martian call. Because then he'll just buy more at the lower prices. Because he now can... Bitcoin has gone through many stages where China could move the price. Elon could easily move the price. If you go way back, say like McCaffey would move the price because he'd say tweet something. But eventually the market out grows. Either Bitcoin out grows it or the market gets sick of the calls and then stops reacting to it. But I don't think Sailor is yet in that space when if there is a rumor that my across strategy or strategy, whatever they call now, were to get margin called. You say it's not possible, but it is possible in terms of the function is there. So if the function was to be called, maybe he could have a controlled margin call. Imagine the headlines that would go out there strategy being margin called. How many people would jump and then Sailor and his goons could be sitting there ready to load the truck up. And so anything is possible. Anything is possible. But I'll tell you what is... It's also very, very possible. We'll see 150. So we'll see what happens. Well, I tell you what Sailor would probably love is if we could trick some kind of a billionaire or some kind of trillionaire to get out there and start betting against him. I think he would love that because they're on Twitter. They're like, oh, if it goes below 85, he's below the thing. And then the board margin calls them and then they sell it all and it's over. I don't think it's that easy. I'd love to think that somebody with a trillion dollars could be tricked into betting against them and drive the price down. I do think what Sailor said recently on Twitter is true that they bought a billion dollars in Bitcoin this week and it didn't move the market. I think we're beyond movement as Joshua is saying. China used to move it, Elon, Tweets, McAfee, all these people losing faith, large amounts selling. It doesn't seem to move anymore. But at the same time, I wonder if the micro strategy system is flawed and there's some way to take advantage of it in that it only buys Bitcoin. Because if it never sells and it only buys and you have a predictable market actor who's holding a lot of coin, who, like he said, keeps buying a billion, who knows, will go down next week, he'll buy another billion, he'll go down the other billion. There seems like there's such a predictable pattern if somebody could bet against him in the right way. Maybe they could defeat him. I don't know the right market strategy, but if you knew someone was going to do this, I guess it's mainly about the fact that you can't print more Bitcoin. I mean, I guess if you could do the paper Bitcoin, if you could do the Coinbase or allegedly that's what I think. That would help the strategy. To be fair, the idea that a billion dollar purchase doesn't move the market at all, even there's dark pools and everything else. It is bringing up some speculation that I'm seeing that the re-harpification, meaning the paper Bitcoin, the fake Bitcoin, the Coinbase maybe just says, yeah, here, we'll give it to you later. Bitcoin is happening a lot more than we think. There isn't 21 million Bitcoin anymore. There's billions of them because it's not a short on chain. On chain there's 21 million, you can't change that. On chain, you can do whatever the heck you want. Because Wall Street's involved, there's a lot of Tom Foulery and shenanigans happening that always will happen. You can't really change that once you get in bed with the institutions. I think we might see more of that if this option expiry does happen on the 26th and if they can't use their power anymore, at least until next month or whatever, the next quadruple, switching options, expiry is whatever, all those things being four times, four events happening at once. We're going to call it a quad. One more question, Josh, from the audience, they say, what about the four-year cycle? Everyone's saying that the four-year cycle in Bitcoin is broken now, which either means bad things because it doesn't react to the supply going down 50%, which I think it still will react, but maybe good things because it's going to enter a new super cycle and just be driven to the moon forever by the power of the banks and the investment firms. Yeah, I mean, just like everything else at the market reacting and now it doesn't react as much anymore to single-tweeds, the four-year cycle was always a big event, but as people get used to these events, maybe they don't become psychologically as important. The four-year cycles are important in the sense that miners have a certain amount of money that they need to spend to mine the Bitcoin. So, when it drops by half, it's quite a shock. But how I like the price, Bitcoin, really, and see if it's a fair price is what's the cost of mining a Bitcoin? You can average that out pretty well. I think there are even people that do it professionally and show charts of it, but it's basically, I think the last count that I saw was that it was around 70 grand to mine a Bitcoin. So if 70,000 of mine a Bitcoin were around 85 now, whatever it is today, then we're kind of at a fair price. Really, it's like 10 grand above the cost of mining. So, just to keep that in mind. We'll see how it goes. I was just seeing an article over there that says it may drop to 70. So who knows? But I know who knows the magic Bitcoin eight ball, the predictor of all the future. Josh, will the price be higher or lower this time next week? I'm afraid it will be lower. My triangle and Fubanachi is everything I've been pointing to sadly. But it's a good buy. Hey, why would you say, why should I say sadly? If Levi goes on sale, everyone's happy and they're storming the shops to buy their Levi's cheap, so be happy. It's a Christmas sale for Bitcoin. Although I still think it's going higher. I think 82 might have been the low who know people are gunning for 70, 65, 55. Who knows? It's all on the board. Only the ball knows. And now, right? And if Bitcoin be higher this time next week, outlook good, outlook good. The ball is positive. That's right. It is. Moving on to issue two, SEC charges Bitcoin miner for dooping investors out of 48.5 million dollars. A solo Bitcoin miner was charged by the SEC for misappropriating $48.5 million from investors by selling bogus mining agreements, hosting agreements that promised passive income. Allegedly defrauded, he raised $95 million from $6,400 investors over four years from 2018 to 2022. He sold hosting agreements, promising investors a share of profits from Bitcoin mining rigs operated by his company. He misrepresented how many mining rigs were actually operational, effectively selling more hosting agreements than the company could support. Josh, just like we were talking about the paper Bitcoin, the idea of getting in over your head seems like much the same story here. It's interesting though how this used to be, this would be a small disagreement amongst family members, maybe $5,000 at risk. Instead, because of what's happened at the price and everything else in Bitcoin, it's almost $50 million and it's the SEC attacking him and taking him down. It's a racketeering case. It's a massive thing. But it sounds like it was just one guy's mining operation. Josh, what do you think about this $50 missing? $50 million missing mining operation story? Nothing's new under this time. I mean, we've seen miners defraud. It's been a major part of the fraud within Bitcoin has been the mining sector and not the actual miners that actually do mining, but people promising mining, especially cloud mining and such. I mean, I've got friends who got in very, very early to Bitcoin and lost it all through butterfly labs, which were the first company to create ASICs and ship these ASIC miners, which are application-specific computational computers. Yeah, nothing's new. And cloud miners have always been like this. They take money. They say they're buying ships. They say they're buying CPUs, GPUs, sorry. They're buying ships and ASICs. And then they start to pay out old investors with new investors and turn into a Ponzi. And it's very, very tricky to try to figure out if the miner that you're investing in is legit or not. It's very, very hard without physically going. Even if you physically go there, you can be jubed. Because what are you going to count every computer on the rack and calculate if how much money they raised is how many machines are there. It's a very foggy. And have to be spinning and the air has to be a certain temperature. Yeah. Yeah. You just much better off buying Bitcoin. Unfortunately, because I do like the idea of people investing in the infrastructure of the mining, but yeah, people always think, ah, you know, a mine that will bring in passive income. Well, guess what else brings it? Sort of passive income through capital gains if you can hold it long enough is just holding the coin. It's kind of the second level of my computer will make money for me while I sleep. Now you're like, oh, rent someone else's computer and it will make money for me while I sleep. And both of them to be true because they are too good to be true. Because they always say the cloud is just someone else's computer. And in this case, there weren't as many computers as what they said. Although like he said, Josh, I think it comes back to what you said last week. What is a scam? Maybe this guy starts out with 10 miners buys 100 has a shipping problem can't get the next 200 miners takes in the contracts anyway. Maybe he's just always ordering more miners and he just can't get enough and they're shipping problems and there's delays and you know, one of them caught on fire and three of them got dusty and maybe he's trying really hard or there's an I mean, the rest of the articles a little obvious about what the probably allegedly operations are going to be in the second half. It does seem like millions of dollars were transferred to family members, including five million dollars to the ex wife, brother and sister, mother as well, leaving the US with a misappropriate funds. It was acquired by advanced mining group in 2022 and is now defunct. So the lawsuit came after Congress was forced to debate federal measures to address crypto currency scams. A bipartisan proposal would create a dedicated task force to identify and address fraud and the digital asset sector. So oh my God, I got a job cut out for the money. The problem with any of political solutions is that politicians just do something, do something about it. And this is the big problem that do something is usually just anything and then they're like, look, we did something and it never works. I mean, you scammers would just find a new way to defraud people. And I mean, if you look at the amount of scams just on text and phone with old school like, oh, this is the telecom billing. You have a major problem or whatever. Like, it's just infinite. It's infinite the amount of scams. And obviously, you know, you need to do, you need to somehow educate people. I think education is ultimately the best way to go because doing something legally and building it structures in it. People that are doing illegal stuff are going to do illegal stuff, whether there's laws in place or not. I mean, it's already illegal to defraud people. So I don't know. It seems like a losing battle to try to just do government to do something about it really, apart from education. And it does seem like they had a chance to ramp up. They had a chance to ramp up the police to teach them about cryptocurrency to prepare them for these scams to generate these special divisions before they desperately needed them to actually have experts in them who have been trained, who have gone to courses and go to conferences and learned a bunch of stuff and really understand what's going on out there. They could have had that. In the same way, Microsoft, Macintosh, others could have beefed up their computer security. They could stop it from copying keys, stop it from typing in keys, do all kinds of more security things to prepare for this future where what we've been saying for years that cryptocurrency is going to be valuable. Bitcoin is going to be valuable. You have a valuable thing on your computer. People are going to want to steal it. People are going to want to do crimes with it. This would interest the police. Maybe it would be who've them to learn about Bitcoin now, to learn about cryptocurrency now before it's a crisis, before you have to like run around and have a task force and put all the lights up. Again, it's mainly about funding, I think Josh. I think now that the new funding is crypto security, they're going to get a bunch more money in the future. The way they're going to get it is having these stories pop up, 50 million, 100 million taken gone and then use that to justify their budget. Once again, we always close the barn door after the horse is gone. Yeah, I mean, look at the bond, I'm sure. The bond is stuff that's happening. There was so many markers that all these people screaming globalized the interferer and gas the Jews and they're interested out in the streets saying this stuff. It's like, yeah, there's freedom of speech and then there's incitement to violence. There's two different things. Government didn't do anything for two years now, sort of even just keeping lists of who's saying this stuff is and maybe like keeping again. Now that this has happened, of course, now they're like, got to get tough run guns. Even though the guns are already mega tough, you can barely get anything. I don't know how this guy managed, but it's always reactionary. It's always ridiculous and pathetic really when it was obvious that something was going to happen somewhere. It is a really interesting story in Australia. From afar, Australia had that one crisis, then they crack down on guns, then they had pretty much nothing except I think they had a synagogue shooting that was very bad and then now they've had this shooting. And like you say, Josh, they've continued the crack down which as much as we want to say worked pretty good still didn't get us that 100% gun-free, violence-free society that we want. I mean, bomb bombs are totally illegal, right? You can't have bombs yet. These guys had bombs in their car that they made them. It doesn't matter if you can't crack down on one, but politically, I guess you get up there and you're so we're going to crack down on it, then you get some brownie points for it, I guess, politically. Well, I mean, what's interesting, I mean, there's a major comparison, of course, the American society and the Australian society. In Australia, I don't know the exact details, but the government is structured so that if they want to get something done, they can get it done. And they've put forward additional bans on these weapons which have gone through. In America, basically, the NRA rules our society and they've decided that no matter what happens, no matter how much violence there is, we're not going to reduce our right to have hunting weapons. And if you really drill down, they're talking about society overthrow weapons. And this belief that the Constitution hasn't reset button in it and that you could just overthrow the Constitution with exceptional violence if you feel that you have agreements that hasn't been solved by the written and legal system, which is an absurd thing for the Constitution to have. It doesn't have it. Well, I mean, it's very difficult and I had to change this to a con conversation, we'll end it up soon. But to compare Australia, America is very, very difficult because Australia didn't have many guns in the first place. You know, it really didn't. And America had no one thought the gun. No one thought to arm the convicts. If only we had armed those convicts. Well, I mean, you know, Australia is very difficult. Yeah, Australia is very difficult. The thing is that we had the ability to got by guns, which is not many people had them in this net. So to collect them was quite easy. In America, you can't just ban the gun because they, they, it's just, there's so many of them, they're proliferated. If you ban them, they will just go underground and the baddies will have them only. I got to admit that that's something that is, that is a truth and that's the difference a lot. I think culturally is also what's important with violence. I mean, the fact that gun violence is so sort of, and this sort of thug life thing, especially in rap music and stuff, it's so, it's so, it's so, it's so, it's so, it's so massive over there. I think that also has a part to play culture, because a lot of part to play of the violence, because you get just as many guns in Switzerland and there's hardly any shooting as America. So, yeah, it's a straight, it's a very difficult topic and a, and a large one. But I think, I think Switzerland is a bad example because they have many guns because they're part of the military. So they're kind of trained to have them. So it's a more safe thing. I think in America access to guns is part of the problem. I'm not sure about hip hop anymore, especially with Snoop Dogg hosting the Olympics and being Martha Stewart's best friend back in the day when I was in school. It was murder was the case that they gave me and Snoop was a public enemy. And I feel now that the same way they used to talk about like radio or rock music, they're like, rock music is going to poison your kids. They're like hip hop. I think violent. And I, the same for Grand Theft Auto. I mean, I know a lot of horrible people play the violent video games and then we say, oh, mirror society, but just as much it might be an escape valve where violent people play a violent game and get the violence out of them. I don't know. I think there's a lot more study, a lot more discussion. But we're not supposed to be talking about gun violence, Josh. Let's move on to the next issue. Check out World Crypto Network. We've got 4,682 videos, including some shorts from last week, featuring Jess C. Dr. Orangepill, Jimmy Song, and more. Check it out at worldcryptonetwork.com. Moving on to issue three, Royal Farms adopts safer Bitcoin ATMs with fraud protections. Despite regulatory pressures on Bitcoin ATMs, they continue to expand into new spaces, such as some place I've never heard of called Royal Farms. Yet these retailers aren't ignoring crypto ATM scams. They are choosing operators that combat it. And as it says later in the article, this software from a company allegedly called BitStop will stop you, interestingly enough, as probably not what they thought when they're naming their company, but will stop you from depositing a lot of money. If they notice a pattern of, say, you're putting thousands and thousands of dollars in the machine and sending it off, it'll say, this is a pattern of a fraudster. One is, you know, fraudging you and the machine, allegedly, will stop taking in money that makes it money, a percentage of every dollar going into the machine, going to the operator, and will reject it and will protect you. Let's go to Thomas Hunt. What do you think about Bitcoin ATM safety mechanisms? Well, we've been talking about ATMs a lot on the show and what a threat they are and how it's going to get bigger and bigger. And the main threat is, as we're saying, is these people on the phone scamming people, especially grandma and grandpa. They keep them on the phone. They make them go down there. They say they've kidnapped their son or they have to pay the IRS. For some reason, the IRS is accepting Bitcoin now. They never question it. They keep them on the phone. There's lots of great YouTube videos where you can learn more about how these scammers work. There's people who scam the scammers trying to waste their time, which is a noble pursuit, but obviously there's way more scammers than there is scammer trickers. I think we've seen this that this was going to come, that the ATMs are going to be a problem, that it's going to be the last kind of Bitcoin on ramp. Again, it's still, it's pretty much KYC in this country. You have to do put your ID in. You have to put your address, all your information. But it is a way to buy Bitcoin in person. Maybe people make people feel more comfortable. Maybe it's better than getting it from a random person, although they close local Bitcoins too. But I do support this idea of having the machines detect fraud. I am skeptical of the companies that make money on the machines being the ones that will stop the fraud. As much as I don't think Josh is going to like it, I think we're going to see government limits put on Bitcoin ATMs to protect people from fraud. But in the same way, it will protect them from transferring their money out of the fiat system if they have a big conversion or if they think the price is going up or whatever reason they might have. Josh, when you think about Bitcoin ATMs and the idea that the companies could put software in that would say, okay, Granny, stop putting in your $10,000, don't send your life savings to this random account. Yeah. It's just, I think it's notable, but I don't think it's the right way to go. I have had, we know these people, ourselves, Thomas, who own these companies, these ATM companies. And I've heard stories of people having an ATM in their shop and seeing this old woman coming in and feeding money and then saying, don't do that, don't do that. You're being scammed and they're like, no, the IRS and they can get really scared. And they're feeding money into this machine and they've, the shop owners dived for the plug and just pulled the plug on the machine to save this woman from just destroying her savings. It's happened a long time. It's a terrible thing. But I think the real way to battle this stuff is a better way. It's not, nothing's going to be foolproof because scams will always find a way around stuff. But is to have on the big screen. Is this before we allow you to buy a Bitcoin, what is this for? And they have like multiple choice pay the IRS. You'd hate that, Josh, that's a privacy invasion. What is this for? This is by money. The bank is asking me what do you want to do with that? Oh, oh, oh, oh. Hey, yeah, I mean, you know, whatever, but that's the only, either that or massive, like government, if government want to do anything, they could have education. You know, they do it all the time with speeding. They put all these ads on TV speeding kills. Like if they want to do anything, they could do that, I guess, but fundamentally. I'm not seeing the cookie warning all over again. Now when you want to take your money out of the ATM, you got to say, you know, is there someone scamming you right now? Like, are you are you paying this money to the IRS and Bitcoin? Yes, no, you know, has your relative been kidnapped? Yes, no. And then again, there's a there's literally it's bad enough. There's a dude on the phone. He's like, grandma, don't say that. Don't answer that. Whatever you do, don't answer the question that you say being kidnapped because then all they're going to kill me. Grandma, oh, help me, you know, I mean, they're pretty good. These scammers. I mean, it's an interesting idea. But yeah, I mean, like I said, nothing's for it. But, you know, the other, the other solution is technical where you have like a holding wallet. And you buy it, it goes into a holding wallet. So it's provably there. And you get access to the keys within like, you know, two, you know, five days time or something because they can't stay on the phone for five days. So that's like scammer activity where we freak out with the ATM company. They're like, they're stealing everyone's money and waiting five days and they're going to run off if the float gets big enough. And it's so funny that and it also takes away the kind of immediacy of Bitcoin that like, I can buy it, I can move it, I can put it in my wallet, I can put it in my wallet. You're a wallet if I owe you money or whatever. Yeah. But it's an education gap. It's an education gap because it's generally speaking. I could guess that it's 90% elderly people that have no idea. And the reason why they're on the phone is, A, they don't say something stupid to the clerk and the clerk wants them to scan. But B, the scammer can walk them through every single step because they're absolutely clueless. And so by having these machines, give them a clue. I don't know. And obviously for every countermeasure, there's another measure. So if you say, okay, if the machine detects the person is over, you know, pick your age 70, 60, whatever you want to put it at, then you have to fill out like a questionnaire. Like, did you know that people call people on the phone and pretend to be IRS? Like, no, I didn't know that. Yes, I knew that. And then choose your own adventure, like keep giving them prompts about like oftentimes people have you send Bitcoin when it's not you, blah, blah, blah. But even then, I think that the scammer guy on the phone could be like, just push, push agree, granny, push agree, disagree, agree, agree, disagree. We've got to get through this. I got to get them free. We need the money now. Click, don't read the prompts. Click quickly. I mean, as horrible as it is, I don't think they're going to fight it that way. Yeah. Comment in the chat. I want to talk about as well. Starship says, we should work on the ad system, kind of where these victims come from, attack the top of the funnel, wherever they're finding these people through the Facebook groups or through wherever their information is being exposed. And we could reduce the number of victims at the top rather than trying to catch them at the bottom where they're, you know, maneuvering the victims to Bitcoin ATMs. And remember, in the past, they would, you know, put money in jars and take it to the post office and they would send the money to someone to the courier or to someone else, to someone else. I mean, it just had more steps. Bitcoin eliminated some of the steps for them. But these scams have been with us since the beginning of computers, it's the beginning of mail or postal service, wherever you want to start. Yeah. What about getting less victims? It's a very similar problem to like, to email spam is that it's very hard to figure out which emails are legit, which emails are spam. And so a caller, you know, I think LLMs have a part to play here, maybe local LLMs on a phone, very light ones that just basically look for patterns of scams while people are talking and it's local. So it's not being put to the cloud to open a eye or something. And it just says, hey, someone's saying that RS is asking for Bitcoin, Bitcoin, you know, it just hangs up or whatever, just, you know, a protection system. It's basically a spam blocker. It's all I got to do. It's so far, everything just violates all of your privacy. If you only let them listen to all of your phone calls, they could protect you. I'm saying, I'm saying it's a local LLM. I always more worried the other way, Josh, that the LLMs are going to make these scams so much better. They're, you're not going to see broken English anymore, you know, no more two spaces after a period or, you know, misspellings all that. All the better. Yeah, perfect, perfect Liam Neeson accent color pictures of him in the hospital with a broken leg like desperately needs your help. Like, come on, Granny, you've got to help Liam. Liam's in the hospital. So you're Liam Neeson accent. Awesome. Oh, man. Well, they had it on stern. There's one of the staffers on stern. His mom was like tricked and like sends hundreds of money, hundreds of dollars to Liam Neeson. And their accents worse than mine and their pictures are worse. And yet at the same time, I know that the AI is going to improve them and the AI is going to give them better pictures of better scams, better targets. So I think this fight's going to go on. But like you say, Josh, it is notable and noble that this ATM company is trying to make less money by not taking scammers money and to try to make ATMs acceptable. But it started, it started to feel like pornography. They're like, you can have a Bitcoin ATM, but it's got to be behind the counter. You got to have a camera on it. You got to have a guy watching it to make sure that it's not an old lady getting scammed. As a certain point, these businesses who have pretty good names, well, not really good names, but like 7-Eleven or whatever, they're still going to say, yeah, we don't want that dirty Bitcoin ATM in our shop. You could do it. I know the gambling places where a lot of poker machines, like slot machines in these pubs, they only allowed 200 bucks out of the ATM there at a time. And for 24 hours. So you could do like the first time your card goes in, it only allows 200 bucks. And then five days later, it allows more or something like that. But then I thought you were going to say we should be in the gambling places with the other vice, Josh. We should only be, you can get your Bitcoin and the strip clubs and the dirty bookstores and gambling places. And I'm going to go into the limiter. Limiter are a good idea, but we all know that, you know, sadly, Limits didn't say of Phillips, he wore a Hoffman. He just waited by the ATM to let him take more money till he got enough money to buy the lethal dose of heroin that he took. So we can't protect everybody. These rules are on. And even with the scammer staying on there, maybe they'll work in teams and they could keep the lady on there five days and just, you know, lady, don't hang up your phone while you sleep. We'll be right here, you know, I mean, who knows the lengths that these guys will go to. They think that the old people in these higher level countries or whatever our first world countries are the wrong word, but developed countries that they're just like fair game, that they're just, just to browse about out. They're old. Yeah. All these solutions are more free market solutions that I, that I sort of head towards. And the same arguments apply for any government solution that gets put in. So the government forces all ATMs to do XYZ. The same thing is that the, that the, the ATMs will, other scams will get around it. So there's, you know, really the search continues for resolution. And for now, I think we'll agree with Josh that more education would help. Good luck on that. Moving on to issue four, blockchains quietly prepare for quantum threat as Bitcoin debates the timeline. Altcoin blockchains are preparing for long term quantum risk while influential Bitcoin voices agree over how and when it should be addressed. Josh, a goal of what do you think about the Bitcoin's reaction to quantum, Bitcoin quantum computing as it says in the article, Ethereum and other altcoins, I think so that they can get some press and some promotion are saying, Oh, we're, we're quantum resistant or we have a quantum protocol or we have a plan that we're going to change the algorithm or whatever when the quantum thing comes down. We've talked about it before on the show. If quantum comes down, it breaks all the encryption. So it breaks your bank encryption. It breaks probably low level military encryption. It breaks a lot of systems that frankly are more important than Bitcoin that would be a bigger crisis on society. So it's fun that we're starting with Bitcoin as the first system that we want to make safe. It's like why 2k and they're like, do we want to secure the legacy banking system? No, we want to secure that little 1% of Bitcoin that can be secured still at the same time. I think the Bitcoin smart guys, they don't want this promotion that the alt guys want. They don't want the like quantum resistant Bitcoin promotion talking points tour. So they're poo pooing it and saying we should just slow down. Josh, a goal of what do you think one side is preparing the other side says there, it will never rain. Yeah, it's a tricky one. I mean, half of me say a lot of the time, you know, there's this narrative thing in Silicon Valley. So for instance, AI had the narrative of like, we're going to kill it. It's going to kill the world. It's going to destroy it. And even the AI companies were pushing that because it's a great marketing thing. Like our technology is so amazing. It could be the end of all humanity. In fact, we need a Dyson sphere. Like, you know, like it gets crazy. So then investors go, wow, this is the future. You know, even though it's totally going to destroy us all, we're going to, it's this narrative and it brings headlines. And half of me, half of me thinks that quantum computing is a scam as Silicon Valley scam that doesn't actually do what it does. And it's so weird. No one can understand it. Whereas I, yeah, it's sort of halfway between this and that and it's not a one or a zero. It's both at the same time. And that gives us billions of more. You can calculate whole universes in a second. And then there's, you know, the other people, I don't know, it's a great narrative and it creates headlines and gets investors to invest more billions into these things. And you see these pictures of these crazy machines. And then you think, is it a scam? Is it like that woman that said my blood test tests everyone's blood for everything with the intense seconds? And really it doesn't do any of that. I don't know, man. In terms of these old coins, yeah, it's, it, look, all of these coins are trying to get above the, the news cycle and, and try to get some sort of things. So if they can come out with something, put a press release out now, quantum resistance, maybe they might get a little bump in price. And, and you know, there are hashing algorithms that are apparently quantum resistant. And, and so to implement these things wouldn't be that hard if you're a small little chain. But for Bitcoin itself, it's, it's not the easiest thing to, to just swap out. Because people get kind of iffy about swapping anything out and Bitcoin. I know it's simplistic thinking, but I don't know how an algorithm, algorithm could be quantum resistant if we can't test it with a quantum computer first. I know that's just like nonsense talking, but I think again, Josh, that the problem with this is we kind of have to humor them. It's like you have to build a fire escape, even though you know scientifically, there's no possibility of fire. Like, it just can't happen. But people, we feel so much comfortable if we build them this fire escape, maybe just a spiral staircase, something on the outside of the building that they think they could go down. If Bitcoin would have a quantum protocol or a quantum, you know, a board or something, like five guys will meet and they'll say, okay, what's the quantum threat this year, like the doomsday people with the five minutes to midnight or whatever they could be like, we are 10 minutes to quantum midnight, you know, we're getting closer and then they could maybe even add them back or whatever could say, okay, if we get to five minutes to quantum midnight, then we should develop a protocol and an alternate algorithm and a whole set of things we're going to do when this problem happens. But until then I agree with you, it's so hard to get the sides guys on board because they just look at you and they're like, you know, a combustion cannot happen in this atmosphere. There is no oxygen to provide combustion. Therefore, quantum computers cannot happen. Maybe in 10 to 20 years of like really hard work, we could develop this fire that you're worried about. But at the same time, I think that the layman, knowing nothing about it, thinks maybe there's a breakthrough or a shortcut that's going to get us quantum computing in two years instead of 10 years in five years instead of 20. And I think that the media and especially the headline writers love to encourage this. Every new article is quantum computers not so far off quantum computers not and strangely, what is this magnet to Bitcoin Josh? Can you explain to me why they don't talk about how it breaks bank encryption? It breaks MP3 it breaks, you know, buying stuff it breaks videos it breaks the military, low level stuff. Like it's a much bigger problem than just Bitcoin, but they only want to pick on us with this quantum thing. It's so true. It's so true. But yeah, I mean, concern is also there. Like if it is not a scam, this is the thing about technology. Like everyone was talking about AI for years, ever since the 70s. And then all of a sudden we had a GPT 3 come out. GPT 2, 3 and then 3.5, 4. And it was like a massive hit in the face. It escalated everything so quickly and suddenly we had how. So it can happen. And I have seen it if it's not a scam. Where I think it was Google or was it Microsoft? One of them came out with a silicon wafer that instead of these crazy big things that can work at room temperatures that apparently does quantum and then the quantum have way more qubits and this and that and the other stuff. But yeah, I don't know. It can happen. So if it's not a scam, you can definitely have shortcuts that happen. Yeah. We do have an update from the chat shout out to Pacman 777 for sending us $10. He or she says they have made advances in the hardware. But it seems like creating the software for quantum computers is more of a problem. So we'll keep it all out. There's also chat. They're saying, let's see, BTC moon guy says, I agree total fud and a scam. This will not be an issue in our lifetime. Other people they say chat GPT says not anytime soon. Credible estimates 10 to 20 years away. And I agree with that and I agree with that from a scientific perspective. But then I look at these altcoins who are clearly going to get some press out of this. And I think that if Bitcoiners could just humor them as if it were Y2K and we all shook our heads and say, oh, the clock isn't that bad. Most programs are written better than that. Blah blah blah. You will probably be fine. We kind of need to have a quantum division and a quantum board. And because then at least we could say Bitcoin has a plan to be quantum resistant and maybe MIT could do this or some school, somebody that's bored at their class could do this. It doesn't have to be professional. Remember the Bitcoin foundation was just created out of nothing. And then they started taking in tons of Bitcoin and then Brock Pierce somehow became president for life. I'm not sure when that happened. Then it was there. It's going to be no more election. I remember there was an election and everyone was like, oh, who's going to win? We were trying to get Chris Ellis to run and make it more of a ground up community organization. But it became more of a thing for Brock's resume. But don't you think we need even if it's just window addressing Josh, like the Bitcoin quantum committee, don't we need something like that just to shut these articles up? You too can become a Bitcoin core developer by simply putting a push request, a pull request. Yeah, no, just jump on GitHub. If you're one of these boffins at MIT, put a quantum resistant proposal through. Well, that's all we really need to do, Josh, is put that pull request in there and just put that section and just have it be like Bitcoin quantum resistance section. And don't put anything, you just get it added. And once it's added, oh, Bitcoin has a plan. We have a quantum section. We have guys that are working on it. And then just have them fight it out on GitHub. And then at least that would be something we could point to. And we could say, oh, the programmers are working on it. Maybe not our best men, but like many, many happy, fine men are trying to, and women, and et cetera, are trying to contribute to Bitcoin. But as it is now, I think the altcoins just, they take it from us because they have a better story. I call that the global walling scam approach where everyone just goes along with it. Oh, yeah, we've got a plan. Every government just goes, I'm saving the world. Our plan is net zero. Well, it wouldn't be so bad if we had electric cars and windmails and things like that, better energy. But we must move on to issue five bonus issue. Are you ready for this, Josh? Just added to the show, FTX insider Carolyn Ellison has been quietly moved out of prison. And what great art, what a fantastic photo by business insider. How unfortunate for Carolyn, her face opened her mouth, a gasp. And it says that she's been moved from federal prison to community confinement, either in a home confinement or a halfway house. She served 11 months of her two year prison sentence after wiping out families, wiping out retirements, wiping out investment funds, just crippling financially. Thousands, maybe tens and hundreds of thousands of people laughing about it, joking, having polycules, having food delivered, all the good times in whatever that country was they were in living where everything was fine. Josh, what do you think Caroline Ellison, 11 months of a two year sentence? That's almost a year. That's almost. Yeah. I don't really have much to add. I don't know. It's, it's, yeah. I don't know. It seems to me like Sam Bankham and Fraud really got pushed under the bus. So every, every, all the blame just worked for him, which obviously you should get a lot of blame because he was the CEO. But, you know, obviously it's a corporation of people. And yeah, it's, yeah, I don't know. The courts and governments work in strange mysterious ways that I don't get. Well, remember she did famously turn rat on Sam Bankham and Fraud, ratting out her former boyfriend, as well as Sam Bankham and Fraud's best friend from summer camp, who had known him all his life also went rat on him. As you say, Josh, it seems like the entire company was one run by one person. Seems like this one person is responsible. It's very raps it up. It's all tight and a nice little bow there. Sam Bankham and Fraud was the only criminal there. Caroline, apparently not a criminal. The other guy, I forget his name, not a criminal as well. And you know, is this, is this the face that launched a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of Ilium? Maybe it was Sam. Maybe it was Sam. It was just one man. But remember, it's, it's a lot harder to say that she had nothing to do with it when she went on that podcast. And they were questioning her, they're like, don't you have a backup plan? Don't you have limit orders or stop limits or any kind of these protections on your massive, massive, massive trades, not like little joke trades that you would, I make like, you know, millions and millions of dollars on trades. And she's just like, no, we have no limits, no protections, no stop orders. We just, we want ride this wild thing and just how you had there were. Like if someone gives you a job, like just for the future, for anyone listening to the sound of my voice, if someone gives you a job that's over your head, maybe you shouldn't take it. Maybe it's not like maybe, you know, she wasn't the run to run this big finance thing. Maybe they would have been safer with someone else. Like it's just all these kind of kids running ahead, managing millions and millions and millions of dollars of other people's money and doing whatever they want with it. And I think we're going to see more of this in the future, not less. And I don't think that this, keeping these people in jail doing whatever is going to stop it. I don't think it's going to put any limits on it, especially given the millions and millions of dollars that they were able to pull down with these alleged scams. Yeah, but I mean, you know, one thing that I've brought up multiple times in this show, but it's the fact that Sequoia, you know, that they got no punishment for this because Sequoia, these large massive, you know, it's arguably the biggest VC in the world invested in them. Obviously, no one else then does due diligence because they think, oh, Sequoia invested and they literally sucked in like a black hole into Sam's playground and all the rest of them. The fact that Sequoia can just walk away, a soft bank, paradise, all of these, these that invested in FTX, that they can walk away with nothing, no problems at all. When they were the ones that really brought in the money, if it was just Sam and that girl there straight out of college, building exchange and VC came along and did actual due diligence and went, these guys are what, what do you go, you know, you bring someone in to look through the books, to look through the paper, to look through the code, look through the structure and go, all right, yeah, we'll give the go ahead. But they did none of that. They just watched him play a video game while he pitched and thought that was so impressive that they invested. I mean, maybe the inside of friendships and stuff, but fundamentally they need to get some time. Something needs to happen. There's some fines or something, but nothing, nothing, everything went to Sam Bankman Freed. He got the, you know, and I'm not saying he shouldn't because he was obviously a massive part, a majority part of the fraud, but the fact that Sam gets everything wraps it up, like you said, into a nice little bow and boom, out you go, there we go. All right, on with the next thing. Oh, wait, no, there was only one shooter. It doesn't matter what the audio tape says. Everyone knows there was one shooter. It was Sam Bankman Freed. And I do agree, Josh, it's a lot of these VC guys are to blame, but it was like a perfect storm for them. He went to MIT. His parents were Stanford professors. This is the resume that they're looking for. This is where the magical breakthrough comes from. And I love the idea of Schrodinger's cat here. They can't look inside the box. If they look inside the box at their investment, they'll find out, like we say, this random lady is running everything. They're ordering food, having a polycule. They seem to be on all these mind-enhancing type versions of Adderall, all kinds of other fun things that we find out only after the fact. We can't find this out when people are investing tons of money. We're on the cover on Fortune Magazine and they're renaming arenas. It's only after the fact that they look inside the box and that is their job, Josh, to do that due diligence to their investments. They can do Wild Wild West. And sometimes it works out, you know, the Facebook guy, whatever it is. Maybe he doesn't look so good at the beginning, but at the same time, do we have to Wild Wild West? It's so bad. And to not even look, you can't there be stages of like, oh, they have 10 million, we should look in the box. They have 20 million, we should look in the box. They have 100 million. Should we look in the box? And then that an Aaron guy gets down there and he's like, they're using QuickBooks. At what stage did somebody say, how's your accounting department? Do you have like professional accounting guy? Are you just kind of winging it using QuickBooks? And I know startups are really hard in the beginning. A lot of people have to do a lot of things that we might not approve of. At what point of this SBF thing, are they going to be like, hey, FTX, we just want to check, make sure you guys aren't using QuickBooks, right? We just want to make sure you don't have Excel spreadsheets you're running this company out of like, I don't even know what the proper software. I'm sure that Salesforce, some kind of giant company has a really good accounting software that they could use to track this money. But obviously they didn't do that at any stage because allegedly what we've heard from the inside is that they're using the money for the Tom Brady advertisement for the other advertisement to buy the next thing and kind of operating similar to a Ponzi scheme where the new money keeps the thing going. And we have to keep spending the old money to keep the new money coming in. And at a certain point we're going to hit a wall. But until then it's free lunch and polycules. So yeah, and just so that people that don't understand how VDC's work, generally you have a lead VCE and then they will do their due diligence. But Sequoia is such a big name. If they invest, people don't do any due diligence. Nothing, they just come in because Sequoia invested so they know what they're doing. And that's why I'm just so pissed at these VC capitalists because they're the ones that lost the billions of people for all the retail investors. They're the ones that gave the green light to these clowns. Anyway. But they just sit there at their window like South Park and you give them your money and they say, and it's gone. It's gone. And it's gone. And we're running out of time for the show. Josh, do you have a prediction or a story of the week? Go ahead. No, I don't have, well, yeah, I've got to, no. It's too personal. I don't want to share. I know. Just Merry Christmas. I think we're heading towards the end of the year here. So it's harder and harder as you guys know to do these shows, to get guests. So thanks so much for Josh for joining us. Thanks to Jimmy and Jess and Robert from coming last week in Josh as well. It's good to keep it going. We'll try to do one next week. I think it's the day after Christmas. I might be available. We'll see if other people are available. We'll do at least a news update so we can follow up on this options expiry. Very exciting thing happening on the 26. After that, we're coming back on the 2nd of January, which might be okay. The party is the 31st. So people should be better by then. So hopefully we'll pull off a show then. After that, we hope to get back to a more normal schedule and trying to get guests and all that again. So thanks for sticking with us. Thank you for giving us a thumbs up below. Merry Christmas to Jack, BTC Moon Guy, Mori, Dusty, Starship. Everybody in the chat. Thanks to Roy for sending us comments and Bill and one man army for checking us out today in the chat. Thanks to everybody who comments and says hello. And I love your questions. Everyone thinks it's going to be good. Starship says have a lovely maybe there'll be a boxing day show. The day after Christmas. I like that you say Merry Christmas. Thomas, you didn't go full retard and just say happy holidays. That's great. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Everyone have a good one. We'll be back the day after Christmas. So keep your eye on that options expiry to see how it goes. But until next time. Bye. Bye. Bye.