The Bitcoin Group, the American original, for over the last ten years. The sharpest satosies, the best Bitcoin, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists. Flag Costa from Bitcoin Takeover podcast. What's up party people? Jimmy Song, Bitcoin expert. Blessed Christmas everybody. Robert Allen, co-founder of Sat Lantis. Merry Christmas, good to be back. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network moving on to issue one. Bitcoin price prediction, record SEC filing, signal flood of Wall Street money, super cycle starting in 2026. Bitcoin SEC filings hit 8,000 in 2025, driven by ETF growth and new US crypto laws. Is it 2026 rally next? The price is hovering near 88,898, according to this article. Vlad Costa, what do you think about the price of Bitcoin? Is it going to go up like crazy in 2026? Everyone seems to say yes. This sort of reminds me of 2017, when everyone was saying that we're going to hit 50,000, 100,000 in 2018 and we had one of the ugliest bear markets. I do believe that the four-year cycle is a strong psychological element, like part of the culture of this space. And I think our bullish narrative was stronger during paper Bitcoin summer or earlier in the year when ETFs were still fresh and they had like record inflows. Now we're just coping, I think. I don't think the bullish narrative works very well. When Michael Saylor bought a bunch of Bitcoin like a month ago, the price did not react to that. It seems like the good news don't move the price up, but the bad news moves it down. So to me, that's a strong indicator that this is copium. I don't know. All the two guys are paying also. Well, today is the day of the quadruple witching, the options expirory where they all go off on one day. It doesn't happen all at once. The reaction to that, depending on if people win or lose their long and short bets and how that shakes out over the future, they say that it will release Bitcoin from this range, meaning it could go crazy up or crazy down. Jimmy Song, the question is though, 2026, many people have said 200,000 by the year end said Arthur Hayes. What do you think? I mean, I saw what Jim Kramer was saying. He's 100% bearish on Bitcoin, which means really good news. I am going to go with the contra Kramer indicator as my thing. I mean, who knows? We don't know any of this stuff. We're just hoping and this is what most price predictions are. It's people wanting to hope in something and they watch the price shows because they're more conducive to having hope in something. And honestly, it's a little sad to me that so many people are going down that road. But if you understand Bitcoin for what it is, it's a great long-term store of value. It's never lost money if you've held it for five years longer. That's what we should be focused on and not worry so much about the short-term fluctuations. That would be nice and it would be nice if people could write some articles about anything other than the price. When I do my Google searches, it's all price, price, price, variations of that. So we always try to pay attention to that here and then get moving on. Robert Allen, I want some concrete predictions. I want you to tell me about the future of Bitcoin in 2026. Well, Jimmy stole my reverse Kramer thunder. I have to say. That's a pretty good news for us. Yeah, I think it's going to go higher just based on that. Yeah, I think, you know, kind of equating Jimmy again. I mean, Bitcoin is better money than any alternative. Sometimes the market is behind in figuring that out. But given enough time and patience, Bitcoin is going to continue to outperform every other asset in history. And I don't see any fundamental reason why that dynamic or that direction or that momentum should be questioned. I think, you know, in a lot of ways, now that we're kind of, you know, peak pain and a lot of people are freaking out and worried. This is typically when, you know, it actually does boomerang and go the other way. So, but yeah, I mean, Bitcoin's always going to surprise us. And in some ways, that's good. You know, we want to shake out the loose hands and make sure we have conviction, strong conviction. So just hang in there, be patient. It's going to be all right. It will be interesting to see. And before we go to the magic, April, we do have the exit question. BlackRock shares 2026 shocking crypto outlet outlook. Big money is starting to treat crypto less like a trade and more like a system. And it's all about the rise of stable coins. Thanks to the success of recent legislation, the Genius Act passed by the Trump administration. Big finance can suddenly focus on stable coins and focus. They are the question. I want to ask the panel, Vlad Kasa, what's more important right now? Bitcoin or stable coins. Do you start to see another one of these narrative shifts similar to ICOs, blockchains, and now stable coins? Well, not with it, my bubble, but I do understand that a large part of Latin America and the Middle East and pretty much a lot of the places that actually need Bitcoin are turning to stable coins and using them for daily transactions. And they're sort of eating our lunch. And it's super ironic that Bitfinex Tether is funding a bunch of Bitcoin companies, but at the same time, they're not supporting grassroots adoption too much, except if it's for Tether. I don't know. So normally like two or three years ago, before I met my girlfriend, I would be more against stable coins, but now that I know that she's from Iran and that's the only way her parents send her money, I'm not so much against it. I understand it's a genuine market and there's the man for this. Is it censorship resistant? Like Bitcoin? No, it's not. Can it be confiscated? Yes. Is it really stable? No, we have seen lots of these algorithmic stable coins and projects that went down. Terri Luna was like three, four years ago, I lost count. I'm not saying that it's going to happen to Tether, even if everything is possible. And what else? I don't think too much about this. Like I don't care about Larry Fink, I don't care about USDT too much, I don't use it, but it seems to be a big deal nowadays. Just not the big deal that made me get into Bitcoin in the first place. I need to look at other stuff. It does seem like Tether is well backstopped, especially as we talked about a few weeks ago, their potential purchase of the Juventus football team. And we've also seen, Vlad, as you said, stable coins being used by people, things we used to describe for uses for Bitcoin, sending someone money and having been the same value and you could just cash it out into cash. We used to stay that, but now they could just hold it in a stable coin. Jimmy, what do you think? Are stable coins going to take away Bitcoin's limelight? Or it will be all Bitcoin in 2026? Well, stable coins, I've always had like a different niche than Bitcoin. And it's stuff like Vlad mentioned, transferring money across places where you have sanctions and so on. I remember visiting Georgia, the country, not the state. And there were all these places that you can send Tether back and forth to Russia and so on because obviously Russia was under sanction. That's a very common use case. For me, stable coins are kind of like Western Union 2.0, something like that. A lot of people like it for that reason. That's not to say that it's decentralized or anything. It's highly centralized. We know who the owners of Tether are. How many regulations that they're under and so on. But yeah, it's a useful thing for people in a lot of these places because people want dollars. And you have Indonesian workers that go to work in UAE and send money back home using Tether and stuff like that. I think that's a perfectly fine use case. It just sort of speaks to the lack of infrastructure with the US dollar that's available. And it happens so that because bond rates are so high, because interest rates are so high, that a company like Tether can make enormous amounts of money just holding US Treasuries, short-term US Treasury bonds that are three to six months in nature. And they make so much money off of that because they have over a hundred billion dollars in assets under management. And they get like 4% 5% on that. And that's four or five billion dollars every year. That's how you get 50 people doing that. The big story for me with regard to stable coids is this is what a free market banking solution would look like, were it not so regulated by government. And Tether has like 50 employees. They have a bigger market cap, I think, than Goldman Sachs and other banks. Like city group employs 200,000 people. And they have a much lower market cap, even though they might actually handle more money. It just tells you how much growth is in that system, how much rent seeking is in that system, how much of it is overhead and regulatory compliance and so on. It's ridiculous. But I'm glad that stable coins exist because they're actually kind of better than banks. But in regard to Bitcoin, I think Bitcoin is going to do well, as always, that's because it's a great store of value. And that's what a lot of people use it for and continue to use it for. I agree, Jenny. Tether is some kind of a business miracle, especially when they bought heavily into Bitcoin at the bottom, perhaps even using their reserves against the rules. But at the same time, originally, it seemed like they were used mainly for US people to avoid taxes. Whenever you sell out into dollars, I think you have to pay a tax. If you sell out into Tether, it's like holding another cryptocurrency. That seemed like a small use for stable coins. But as you're saying, Jimmy, it's apparently grown to this worldwide industry of people using Tether and using stables in a lot of the things that Andreas and other Bitcoiners used to describe as things that Bitcoin would do. Small payments, global payments, all of them for free. But with none of the potential pseudo anonymity or transparency or any of the things that we used to talk about. So it's interesting to see the industry kind of diverge that way. And certainly that Tether people were probably Bitcoiners in the beginning made a big Bitcoin pick on their own. And then now we see them fronting stables. Let's go to Robert Allen. What do you think about stable coins versus Bitcoin in 2026? Well, I married a Nigerian. I live in Lagos right now. And so I've been able to understand this a bit more than I did previous just because I'm around folks who use USDT quite regularly. And I've had a lot of conversations. I've just been able to see how the world operates in a country like Nigeria. And I think the average income here is something like $70 a month. And so the reality is for most people in that position, they don't have any savings. They're living hand to mouth. And so they're looking at remittances, moving money across borders. And they're going to get that money and then immediately use it generally speaking. So Bitcoin is not really scratching that itch. We're getting closer to having the infrastructure for that to make sense with Bitcoin. But then you still have the sort of just misunderstanding or lack of understanding of what Bitcoin is. And the volatility is quite scary if you've got 50 bucks and that's your entire savings. And the price of Bitcoin is fluctuating like it does. You may not want that sort of volatility in your little savings account. So to speak. So I think it makes sense. And the dollar has name recognition. It's for a lot of countries, it is the thing that they want. They're trying to get rid of Nira and hold dollars. The Nira lost, it went from about 500 to one to it's around 1500 to one today. And that happened in about three to four years, last three to four years that happened. So yeah, I think you know Bitcoiners, we are also a bit detached a lot of us in terms of wealth relatively speaking. Like we have a lot of wealth compared to most people on earth. And so maybe sometimes we're just operating from a perspective that's not the average human. And so Bitcoin doesn't quite scratch that is today. But you know, I think can we get stable coins trading on lightning and other protocols? And that's kind of been, you know, it's going to happen next year for the last five years. But I do think at some point we'll start to see momentum in that direction. And so then once you have a wallet that's Bitcoin and Tether and you know, they're kind of easier to interoperate with, then I think some folks will naturally start to look at Bitcoin and it'll be sort of the gate. You know, USDT will be the gateway drug for some people to get into Bitcoin if you will. It does seem like there's great international demand for digital dollars. It's unfortunate that profits are going to tether in other countries or other companies rather than the United States. And like you say, Robert, inflation in the United States, we just started complaining about it recently. It's nothing compared to inflation in other countries. It happens over a week and you get paid on a Friday. You have less money on a Monday. I have heard of people stalking up on, you know, whiskey or toilet paper or other things that people that don't go bad, cans of tuna or whatever, if they could get digital dollars instead, especially of their local currency, whatever it may be, it's an obvious no brainer. They would much rather have the US dollars. So it's interesting to see. We're also joined by Steven Mackey. How's it going, Mackey? What do you think about stable coins versus Bitcoin in 2026? You may have dropped. I was just going to introduce him. Oh, well, he was going to be a voice anyway because he does new videos. So he tricked me by a leaving. But oh, well, we'll move on to predictions. We have the magical Bitcoin predictor ball. We're going to predict the future. But first, Jimmy Song, do you think the price is going up or down this time next week? Oh, Kramer. Of course. Robert on up or down? Yeah, I agree. Kramer's blessed us all. Glad cost is it a sweep is everyone positive, higher or lower? I mean, there has to be a pessimist in this conversation just for the fun of the game. I wish it would go up, but let's see down just to have a different perspective. All right, and I'll stay with always bullish, although I don't know anything, the ball and those all. Will the price of Bitcoin be higher this time next week? And it is. Cannot predict now cannot predict now. If the ball is not right, sometimes it cannot predict moving on to issue two. Russia, United States, discuss Bitcoin mining at Zaporizia, nuclear power plant, sidelineing Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the United States is, quote, interested in crypto mining at the news at Zaporizia, nuclear power plant in the disputed territory of Ukraine. Jimmy Song, what do you think about the opportunity? I suppose with the United States to mine Bitcoin in Ukraine, the United States for the record has declined, uh, disavowed this story. Although we never know what's going on. There's one source for this story. It seems to be Vladimir Putin. Yeah, I mean, we have no idea what's going on in Ukraine, regardless of the press, because like, they're both sides are going to say whatever is convenient politically for themselves. So I, I mean, I don't, I don't trust any war propaganda as far as I can spit. So it's, it's just, it's, I don't count the story at all. Is, are there places that maybe you can mine probably, but I don't think given the current situation in Ukraine that anything like that is viable. And the instability that I would expect from that region for the next decade or so is not conducive to that either. So I, Bitcoin mining does have the advantage that you can sort of pull out quickly if you want to and get most of it, but the power infrastructure that you need to support mining is, is that trivial? And, you know, depending on what type of mining is being done there, you know, it can be, it can actually take quite a long time. We know, for example, that the volcano energy stuff in El Salvador, that's like a four or five year project just to get the thing going, right? And it's a, it's a long capital outlay. And that's not, that's not, I have normal for this sort of thing. So yeah, I really don't think there's anything to this story. The real mining is happening in good places and so on. It does seem like an armor almost farcical idea, similar to Verner, Herzog's film Fitz Coraldo where they take a ship and push it over a mountain to another river, which actually happened in the film, but wouldn't happen in reality to imagine Bitmain or any company shipping all of their miners into a war zone, then to mine them at a nuclear power plant that's kind of disputed territory amongst two powers. It seems incredibly risky, but also seems like a good movie. I'd watch it. Robert Allen, what do you think? Will Putin succeed? Will he mine Bitcoin in Ukraine? Yeah, I would agree with Jimmy. This seems like a crazy idea. I mean, don't they have other power plants in Russia they could use of all the places to try to build a new business and the middle of a war zone seems like a rough spot to pick. But I do think more broadly speaking, that nuclear is a great technology and I know it's expensive to get these plants going, but it's a shame that Germany shut all theirs down and now they're freezing. The United States has kind of put a hold on it, I think for at least the last maybe 10, 15 years as far as I understand. Anyway, let's mine more Bitcoin with nuclear. I think that's a win-win for everybody. Just not in a war zone. That's right. Nuclear power has been making a comeback recently, although it might need newly designed reactors that are safer. Vlad Kosta, what do you think about the plans to mine Bitcoin in the middle of a war zone? As Robert said. I mean, why not? But at the same time, if you look at the source of the article, it cites the media, commerce and news agency, but it's also based on a tweet by the key of post. So it's very unclear to me where this comes from. This whole story to me, you put it in the right context, it sounds like the art of the deal. Like Donald Trump likes playing this sort of game where he says, you know, I just negotiated a nuclear deal to mine Bitcoin in Ukraine, unoccupied land by the Russians. And then this is supposed to just push the negotiations further to make it look like the Ukrainians are being pushed out of the deal. And then they have to come back and ask for another opportunity or something or try to make concessions to make it work. It sounds like geopolitics to me. Is it such a big deal that they would be mining Bitcoin in this place? I don't think it's going to have like a significant impact on the hash rate. But it does sound like a productive way of using geek-sass electricity that's being produced. And I bet that a lot of it is being wasted. It also says that this Zappo-Rezizian nuclear power plant was captured by Russian troops in March 2022. And it's also not operational right now. So the conversation is, it says right here, it's six reactors are in safety shutdown and depends solely on emergency diesel generators for essential cooling with frequent cuts. So we're talking about something that hasn't been functional for three years, almost four, hypothetically being used to mine Bitcoin. It sounds cool in PRE, but I don't see it happening. I think it's futuristic, futuristic. But like Vlad said, very much Trump playing the art of the deal. Now there's a non-existent Bitcoin mining deal that Ukraine has to come and say, hey, wait a minute, we want our cut of that mining deal that doesn't even exist. And maybe he just wants people to talk about Bitcoin more because he's got a couple of companies like American Bitcoin and so forth that that would benefit. Who knows what kind of long game they're playing, but it is an interesting idea for countries to collaborate together on power, sharing agreements and nuclear power and maybe even using a smart contract to send the mine Bitcoin back to the countries directly. This way, even countries that didn't trust each other could mine Bitcoin together. Leading to our exit question, Jimmy Song in the future, where should Bitcoin countries mine together? Where should they mine Bitcoin as a team? I mean, it's wherever you can put thorium reactors, I think, and regulatory apparatus around nuclear power is more or less imposed by the United States due to the liberal hegemony that decided nuclear power was bad back in the 60s and 70s. So it's unfortunate, but that's a situation where whatever region can get out from under the international atomic nuclear non-proliferation bureaucracy, that's I think who will win the mining stuff because energy is obviously very critical and miners are sort of hitting a wall as far as efficiency and so on. It does seem like in the future a country like Switzerland where they have a project like CERN that works on the large Hadron Collider and they're even making a larger Hadron Collider would have to all work together and like Jimmy is saying, build these large reactors for the shared purpose of mining Bitcoin in a safe place and maybe it ends up like Wakanda in the Black Panther movie and they have all the technology because of this early investment in Bitcoin mining. Robert Allen, where in the future should companies mine Bitcoin or countries mine Bitcoin together? That's an interesting question. I mean, if you're talking about multiple countries working together, I guess they would have to be relatively small countries. So maybe we do see some of these larger nation states, you know, by-for-kate breaking to pieces. So maybe 10, 20, 30 years United States will be three or four Texas and some of the southern. I don't know. Yeah, I guess it really, yeah, it would just have to be smaller nation states working together. So I guess it depends on where you are in earth. Some places that make sense. Some places it wouldn't. The US doesn't have many, you know, neighbors who've got two currently at least, but so I don't know. Maybe Africa, I guess in that sense Africa has got quite a few countries and a lot of power needs and a lot of power problems if they could get their act together to build some nuclear here. That would be great. Although I wouldn't hold my breath right now. They've got a lot of if you're going to build for one country in Africa, why not have the three of them share it? Share the more output, share the financial risk. Jimmy, more on this. I said I'm you. Yeah, yeah, that's that's like an app. If you know the history of the region, it is, there's so many small groups that are vying for supremacy, religious conflicts, you know, now you should try to come together through the magic of smart culture. That's not how those things work, but you could trust a smart contract. No, that's that's not how that region has operated for a very, very long time. So yeah, it's that's not going to happen. It's so far out of the robber possibility. I also think Robert might have a point when he mentioned Texas and he talked about the states, maybe multiple states could work together to build a Bitcoin mind or to build one on shared territory or or some kind of geographic near waterfall, some kind of thing that would generate the power, something in the future. Vlad Costa, your last but best, where should they mind Bitcoin in the future? At home with home miners, that's my final answer. I think that's the end game. We already see how a bunch of these Bitcoin mining facilities are pivoting into AI because they make more money even though they invested in a bunch of S19 XPs or whatever the latest model is. They realize that they can make more money working with AI companies. And I see a lot of competition nowadays between AI and proof of work mining. I do believe that it's ultimately the Bitcoin holders who have the largest stake in this in securing this network and they should be the ones securing it. And I do believe that at some point we're going to run into a situation where mining is no longer profitable. So what's it going to happen? Well, you're going to have people who own Bitcoin wanting to secure Bitcoin. And I think at some point we're going to go back to home mining. And if we reach like a reasonable amount of adoption up until that point, I think the network will be fine. And also it's harder to take down the network or disrupt the hash rate and play games with the difficulty adjustment if you have a bunch of believers actually securing the network. There's an interesting narrative coming out recently. Vlad about this home miner as a lottery ticket theory that you plug in your home miner. It used to be USB miners back in the day. And now they call them bit axes. But somebody won a whole block recently. And it's united the whole idea that you could be the lottery winner. But I think they should focus more on heat. The thing about a home miner is that it always makes heat. And it also always makes noise the worst thing in the world. I don't know about home mining. I have to see how that goes. The answer is they should mine on the moon. I hope they don't take the nuclear stuff through the atmosphere. Maybe they could gather it somehow from the solar system. I don't know. But mine on the moon. And we could all do it together and we could share the profits through a great smart contract, which we could all trust whatever country we may be from. We could all share profits from the moon. Yeah, we've got to work because you have like if you travel with the speed of light with your radio signal from the moon to earth, you're still going to have significant delay that's going to make moon miners inefficient. At least they're not going to find the blocks first. And that's going to be an issue. Maybe they could mine some moon currency and they could trade it for Bitcoin. I know Peter Todd talked about interstellar mining, but he had the same kind of problem. I think he suggested a Mars coin. You could mine that. Something we could mine closer to the Sun as we start to build a Dyson sphere. We have a lot of work to do humanity. We have a lot of work. We're going to need a lot of robots. Any more on this topic? Just so you know, like the distance to the moon is actually very, very short. It's 1.28 seconds. Yeah, that does make it a little bit more, but that's not the reason why I wouldn't work at the main reason is because there's not that much power there. What are you going to get? Like Sun, if you're going to do that, you might as well just orbit the Earth. So there's what's there that's useful that you wouldn't get either on Earth or in the atmosphere around the Earth. So hey, I don't see the moon. I think you could get regulatory clarity, but not much else, not much else on the moon. I was thinking if it's too far, we could always run a cable like a space elevator. We could run a really long network cable up there and then we could network in the moon. But I think it's a good idea. I'm sure somebody's going to work on it. Maybe not us. Check out worldcryptonetwork.com. We've got 4,687 videos. You could watch them for three months, 23 days and six hours straight without any breaks. It's been 12 years and 25 days since our first video. So happy birthday worldcryptonetwork.com. Although I think we really started in February. So I'm not sure where that's counting from. Anyway, check it out at worldcryptonetwork.com. Issue 3. MoMA as crypto punks and cromi squiggles to its collection, becoming the latest major museum to acquire on chain art. NFTs are back in the news, but prices are not back. NFTs are now being collected by major art museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art. They've collected some crypto punks, some cromi squiggles, not pictured. Here's a crypto punk. Robert Allen, what do you think about NFTs and major museums, such as MoMA, signing in? It's definitely going to keep tanking from here because modern art sucks. So yeah, that's like a nail in the coffin, in my opinion. Some modern art is really hard to take. Other modern art is really good. It's hard to say, but it is very hit and miss. Maybe they hit with the punks. I don't know. I saw a crypto punk previously in the Pompadou Museum and they had a couple of other NFTs displayed. I've seen NFTs displayed at the, what's it called, the museum mocha in Amsterdam and other places, but now at MoMA here in the United States, Vlad Kosta, what do you think about NFTs in the museum? I mean, you have to look at it from the perspective of the museum. They do have to attract younger people and get kids to come to their places. Maybe it sounds outrageous, but so did a lot of the art that they displayed in the past, like a banana that they tape on the wall or whatever splash of ink that you put on an empty canvas. So it's not the worst kind of art that they can possibly have. It's definitely something that's different in the sense that basically art is collected, is created for the purpose of expressing emotion. Crypto punks, as far as I know, they were AI generated and also they were made to exist on markets since they won. So they're sort of a very commercial kind of art. They're not made to give you any sort of feeling when you look at them. Their purpose is actually to get traded and to get traded according to certain traits that they have like the color of their hair, color of their eyes and whatever else they have accessories. So it's interesting. I don't see the NFT market making a comeback because of this, but it is part of culture. If you think about it four years ago, there was a South Park episode where they made fun of NFTs, like, like it or not, it's part of culture. And at one point it was very big. I think right now they could grab these crypto punks for very low prices and they can display them whatever they just need a screen ironically because I don't think they exist on actual canvas or in physical format. That's true, Vlad. I don't think they've ever been a painting or drawing. They were AI generated from a variety of features. T-shirt might be their natural home, but you are right. I do think that younger generation I can picture them taking an Instagram with their favorite crypto punk or maybe they dress up like the punk and it draws the kids into the museums. Who knows? Maybe it's worth it. For what it's worth, I think I'm not sure on this that the rights to the crypto punk are included so the museum could use it in marketing materials, make digital versions, make little videos, animations, perhaps also with the squiggles or squiggles or whatever they are. So could be good graphics for the museum books, branding. I don't know. Jimmy Song, what do you think about MoMA acquiring crypto punks and squiggles? Well modern art and museums have been a complete joke for the last 50, 60 years anyway. So this is part for the course. And you know, marriage made in heaven I think or in hell however you want to look at it. The fact of the matter is like modern art has been a money laundering tool for a lot of fiat money that has nowhere else to go. It's unfortunate but a lot of it is driven by fiat money. It's driven by fiat art collecting and museum curators and art history majors that are in rent seeking positions of bureaucracy and so on. So in a sense this makes sense because NFTs and all of that are artificial scarcity that centralize that's made for this sort of thing. And when you're like a grifter you can recognize other grifters pretty well. And I think museum curators in this case have recognized that yeah, they're doing the same hustle essentially as the museum curators have been doing for a long time. So you know as far as like getting younger people in and stuff like that it's like I mean maybe but like what I want to wait for is when that you know that punk thing NFT gets stolen by somebody and then suddenly all the rights to the museum stuff that they once had is no longer valid and then they get sued by whoever stole it I guess. I don't know. It should be hilarious when that happens because inevitably it will because you know these places don't take security all that seriously and maybe they know something about physical security but I really really doubt that they're very good at cyber security. So yeah that's what I'm looking forward to is having their NFT stolen by some hacker in North Korea and then North Korean government suing them for using marketing materials or something because they're the rifle owner as the signer of the NFT private key. I think that would definitely happen Jamin. I can see the government stealing the figure as well. Maybe they could use it in the North Korean government marketing the same way the museum was and as we all know modern art was invented by the CIA as part of the competition with the Soviets the Soviets had all this good art they wanted to say oh yeah look at this great American art and the only way they felt they could top them was by backing artists such as Jackson Pollock and organizing the first art shows many of the first large purchases of modern art were made by the CIA so maybe it's happening again moving on to the exit question NFTs in 2026 do they go up or down in the past alt coins have latched onto Bitcoin returning every cycle will the NFT market return in 2026 Robert Allen no like it happened I don't know I hope if anything makes a comeback it's gonna be rare Pepe's because those at least are funny but NFT market no not so much like it was ridiculous four years ago how basically anything they could find was supposed to have some sort of value and they would just look at silly JPEGs and I think the story behind it was more powerful which is usually the case with art especially modern art post photography so yeah I don't see it going go Jimmy song NFTs up or down in 2026 down and I would like to contend with your assertion that alt coins go up with Bitcoin actually most of them stay dead it's just like a few of the most popular ones that prop up so I maybe one collection maybe like I don't know the board ape or something like that will go up but pretty much everything else the vast majority of this infinitely reproducible centralized crap will will stay at or near zero which by the way is also true of modern art did you know that like 80% of what gets sold in at sub b's auction actually never gets sold again it's it's a risk that you're never going to actually make money on some of the supposedly best art in the world that you get at auction so that tells you again that the these people see the same grip and kind of have respect for the hustle I guess as you would by the NFT market I think you definitely right Jimmy a lot of art and especially modern art goes to zero however I do think we might be surprised and even though we don't like it a top five a top ten of NFTs might emerge and come back at least a little bit every time similar to alt coins moving on to issue four Caroline freed FTX fraudster is out in weeks according to this tweet by mario na fall saying skated and can't run stuff for 10 years Caroline Ellison the ex alameda CEO help blow up FTX is set to walk on January 21 after barely a year in custody she flipped on sbf dodged hard time moved to a halfway house and now she's getting free snitches go free whereas sbf is stuck until prison until 2044 glad costa what do you think about the possible and seemingly imminent release of Caroline Ellison I don't think about it to be honest but I'll never forget when she revealed like the floor price to tank the FTT token like she said oh we're gonna buy all of your FTT tokens below I don't know how much it was like $16 or something and that's when it all collapsed and the traders wrecked them and they were not backed by anything they had all of these positions that you could open perpetuals and whatever that unlike bitmix they had no reserves to actually pay out those were opening the trades it was just a nice story like all of FTX I would not be surprised if there's gonna be a movie about it in 20 years or something coming from Hollywood which reveals that it will it was all just this CIA operation or whatever to try to fight against Binance which turns out to be the Chinese whatever and they were trying to fight the monopoly of Binance with FTX and when you look at it FTX came out in 2018 or 2019 and they rose to prominence in like three years and at some point there were one of the most popular exchanges there were everywhere if you watched sports you would see the FTX logo on some teams shirts if you were watching concerts there was an FTX arena somewhere in the world it was hard to escape FTX they had all the celebrities like Tom Brady and bunch of others doing gads for them and then the whole scheme collapsed and it seems like Yale leads or at least the judicial system don't want them to be doing hard time except for the CEO which basically took the fall and Caroline turned on him she was also his girlfriend at one point and basically decided she's not gonna rod and jail for this guy I don't know I do believe that this lady Caroline caused a lot of people a lot of financial pain and was very dishonest in what she was promoting about FTX but maybe the fact that she gave information to the feds which once again we're never going to know until it gets declassified I guess gave her a much lighter sentence and she's gonna be able to do whatever to be free and as far as I understand she also has like a restriction from ever investing in companies related to cryptocurrency or like 20 years which is fair but her sentence was light and I do see her it would be very funny if she got like a university professor position like a guest lecturer or whatever to teach students about finance that would make the whole story go full circle because if I understand correctly her parents were also or sdf's parents were academics or whatever but either way very educated family well I like your movie idea of flat with uh finance and the CIA fighting each other with FTX my movie your movie is a thriller my movie is more of a buddy comedy I see them as a bunch of idiots FTX the guy has like a Hawaiian shirt and his hair is a big mess and they're all messing around down there and the tropics just losing people's money being complete morons and it focuses heavily on the poly cool it's kind of a porquies meets dirty money but either way I agree with you she got out of she got out jail way too fast she's definitely a rat she definitely got rewarded Jimmy Song what do you think about Caroline Ellison she's gonna go free she definitely had a hand in people losing their life savings family fortunes all kinds of things yeah I mean she's the snitch right if you snitch and witness for the government this this is the reward you get as you get less jail time it's uh it's what you would call it a prisoner's dilemma like the the quadrant where you screw the other person but you get you get the lighter sentence and that's that's what she got so not surprised that uh you know she she's released early that that's the deal that's that's what you sign off for when you agree to snitch for the government um yeah that's like what what's her future I have no idea I mean I I really don't think um she has sort of like the weird sort of autistic sort of magnetism of of sbf you know he's in my theory he he was imitating like from like a gerardium perspective like you know the talik buterin right like he he was trying to like sort of imitate that energy and he he was largely successful in in doing that for ftx and she was honestly kind of a part of it he he's not gonna go after like a supermodel he's he's gonna go after sort of like the nerdy girl that's got that sort of similar autistic energy so um you know she she ended up flipping so she's she's kind of home free at this point other than you know restrictions she wasn't ever going to uh you know do anything with anyway um you know who knows what what happens for the rest of her life but i suspect she'll just sort of go away with a whimper uh no no one's gonna hear from her again she's not she doesn't seem to have that sort of desire to make it big right like uh there there are people where they come out of prison you're like okay yeah they're they're gonna go try to do something else i remember uh just scaling from enron he when he came out of prison almost like a week later he he was like launching an all-coin or something and uh and that that's kind of what you expect from certain types of people that have i don't know that will to power i guess uh but she doesn't strike me as someone that does that so i think she'll go away quietly maybe get an administrative job somewhere it's hard to get a job as an ex-con obviously but sure the government has something lined up for her maybe it's even like talking to other people that have gone to prison or something i don't know some she'll she'll be doing something uh but i don't think she's going to make any impact whatsoever in this industry for the rest of her life pop quiz jibby song do you think she'll be speaking at conferences what if she gives a speech about like how not to commit financial fraud and she's like the McGruff the crime dog of the financial industry and the FBI recruits her to make speeches is it gonna be like razzle con we'll see her in the audience trying to make her own startup or something well razzle con has a lot more sort of magnetism or desire or will that then Caroline does so like i she she's actually actively looking for that and she has like a personality at least um with with Caroline like the impression i get is that she she's always been more comfortable in the background and it wasn't like she she took on sort of some of sbf's personality when they were in a relationship but like the you know once you flip once you snitch or you're not really that anymore so i i i don't think she's going to get any conference invites who would who would actually invite her right like oh actually no uh like what are you going to talk about that's interesting i guess maybe a panel on on something or other maybe but like then what what are you going to do pay her for it like that that would be like who's who's gonna go and go to a conference with her in it i i don't i don't know she's not exactly a draw um so yeah i i don't i don't really think that that would be the case i mean the the hope that she has and and this is if she were smart enough to do this is like if she stowed away some dick when somewhere and she can kind of go live off of that very quietly for the rest of her life that would be it but yeah there there are rules around this stuff you if you're on the you know if you have if you're on the parole you have to get approvals for almost any travel outside your state even going to stuff like that would be difficult to get your parole officer to agree to yeah assuming it's not in her state and so on so yeah i don't know i i just don't see her as someone that's going to be prominent i i really think she's gonna go and be sort of a quiet person for the rest of her life i think she could speak at accounting conventions and all kinds of things for the FBI be like tee he i was over my head and i lost billions of dollars don't be like me you know do the due diligence or have multiple books or whatever you're supposed to find another option for would you want to if you were her you have like thousands of people that got screwed by at ft x the money right doesn't she have to pay back some of that or i guess that's all no i know i mean i don't think so but i like the the thing is like she she's like i would i would i would think she'd fear for her safety even on that stuff there's a lot of people that got screwed and not just like normal retail investors there's there's there's just like some significant people that were involved in that whole fraudulent enterprise and yeah i i don't i i really don't think she it's in her interest to do any of that either that's what i thought in a in a lighter way maybe they could have her in a dunk tape or we could throw tomatoes at her something like that be right to me it's it's it's not safe for her uh Robert Allen they say Caroline is going free she might have taken your life savings with her why do you think about this well you got to watch out for goblins you know they have a history of uh meddling and money and she's definitely she's definitely a goblin uh she also makes me believe in phrenology you know the old the ancient practice of kind of figuring out if someone's going to be a criminal based on the shape of their head uh uh but yeah no i would just be careful you trust your money with and obviously this is why we bitcoin because it you can be your own bank and not trust goblins and crazy people so um feel sad for people that they uh you know got duped um hopefully they learned a lesson and learn how to bitcoin the right way um yeah i mean the whole thing is just uh hilarious i mean if people hadn't been you know racked from it it's it's just crazy crazy story glad uh glad that ftx has gone one less mess the only thing that i regret is that spf wasn't able to rat on himself if only he had been able to go out there and turn himself in he could have gotten the great deal that all of his friends got and gotten out of jail quickly just like Caroline just didn't work out that way moving on to the next issue we've got some bonus issues former cio of mount gocks mark carpelles reveals details of 2014 collapse and japanese detention uh people were very critical of mark carpelles in the time now with retrospect it seems like he might have been sold a broken business that may have already been missing money and operating at a negative reserve or he might have gotten hacked or accidentally hacked by people pushing the refresh button and getting multiple withdraws it seems all kinds of other problems at mark carpelles is it time to forgive mark jimmy song what do you think about the latest article and mark carpelles back in the news again yeah the article was interesting because he claimed that there were people accusing him of being dreadpire robberts uh which i did not really uh think was a thing uh that people would think him of all people uh being being as prominent as he was at the time uh but yeah i mean this a guy that that did his time and and so on i i think you know he's trying to um do better i honestly think he's kind of like a lottery winner in that sense like he he got into something that was a little bit above his station or maybe a lot above his station and he wasn't ready for it from uh financial perspective a security perspective a technical perspective um and you know that this kind of what happens when you're when you bite off more than you can chew and his kind of he kind of became that um and yeah i i do think the hack happened before and jed mccayla of ripple fame is is to blame for a lot of the pain that a lot of the uh mount gogs people went through and he sits free without having served the day in jale which i think is uh uh completely on joc see he should be like dokewan or uh you know michinsky or uh you know sbf or whatever and serve his time in prison of course a lot of all quinter should spend their time in prison given how much they've screwed over so many people all over the world some very poor people in a lot of different countries uh but yeah i i mean i i think he he kind of gets a bad rap because he he did he was kind of overwhelmed and not really ready to do the thing that um that he ended up having to do and uh you know his security sucked his uh and uh you know he just he just wasn't the right fit at the right time but he happened to be in the right place at the right time and you know a lot of people sort of like go through these weird uh regret stories right oh had i bought you know bitcoin when i first heard about it in 2011 i'd be like a billionaire right now um this i think is like a cautionary tale because a lot of people did end up like magical talks right and and mark our palace where you end up making terrible choices because you didn't have necessarily the character or skills to be able to handle them properly and you actually end up in a much worse place as a result of having been in bitcoin i mean i i'm pretty sure he would rather have not been in bitcoin and also not spend time in prison right like that that probably would have been better um so you got to be careful what you wish for and you got uh you know um and it's it's not all roses just because you got into bitcoin early i do think there was part of the old brick defense where they were trying to say that carpelles or maybe someone who worked at mount gocks was the dread pirate robert's there's also an idea that multiple people logged into the dpr account so the dread pirate robert's could have been many people operating under an alias uh but only ross went to jail robert alan what do you think about mark carpelles the mount gocks collapse a long time ago now people lost bit coins with an s back then uh but what do you think about the idea that we should you know give him a break and uh maybe he's not so bad yeah i i guess i tend to agree with jimmy that he's probably a guy who was in over his head um rather than being you know like setting out to rob people and doing it intentionally um i'm happy for me looks like he's much healthier he lost weight and got a tan um so at least in that sense it looks like he's winning uh yeah like wow handsome guy why don't we what happened to him that that was shortly after he was released from prison which i think was like six years ago so i don't know he still looks like that oh i see prison prison definitely made him look a lot better yeah i guess he was working out he had a lot of time to wait lift weights and you know not as much food to eat uh yeah i don't i don't know i i don't even know how many years he serves but yeah i would say you know i mean i wouldn't trust him with my bitcoin but uh yeah i mean he he probably should be given a chance to do something with his life i would imagine so on i was always rooting for this guy the guy who stood out front of mount gocks and demanded his money only to have carpellers walk by him with his cafe frappelacho or whatever it was as he busily went to work in his doom startup but now i do agree with the panel i'm starting to have some kind of uh you know misgivings maybe he wasn't such a bad villain uh as jimmy said he was over his head he bought an exchange that as far as we know was already hacked already had negative sets he probably needed that frappelacho a Vlad Costa what do you think about mark carpellers is he such a bad guy bye i think this whole conversation on the second day of christmas is very decenncien we're being visited by the ghost of christmas past and we have to reflect upon all of these people like the sbf guy from ftx and mark carpellers i think in hindsight mark carpellers was more honorable than the modern days camers he still lost a lot of people out of bitcoin to his credit i think a lot of the mount gocks people got some money back i think it was last year or something that they were able to redeem some of the bitcoin that they had but i think it was denominated in us dollars so they did not get the amount of bitcoin that they had but they they got the amount in bitcoin denominated in us dollar holdings that they had at the time so it's still something but it's not whatever you unwanted i think also that this guy is responsible for possibly the biggest and most famous bear markets in the history of bitcoins so i don't know what's interesting for me is that in this article that you linked it says that today carpellers says he owns no bitcoin personally though his business accepts it as a form of payment discussing the current state of bitcoin he critiqued centralization risks and ETFs and figures like like michael sailor saying this is an a recipe for catastrophe i like to believe in crypto and mathematics and different things but i don't believe in people it's interesting that this guy who potentially own hundreds of thousands of bitcoin at some point personally i don't mean his customers coins he sort of lost faith in the system today well he did get sent to jail and such for running an exchange probably sourd it for him also he probably lost his bitcoin in a boning accident there was probably a treasurers don't float kind of situation something went wrong but as you mentioned glad micro strategy our next bonus issue micro strategy now called strategy b increases their usd reserve to two point nine billion dollars as we've been saying many people on twitter seems to think if the price goes to a certain point suddenly micro strategy will just flip over and start selling their bitcoin that doesn't seem to be true as they're providing two point nine two point one nine billion dollars in reserve jimmy song what do you think about micro strategy a k a strategy and their new reserve offering yeah this uh this is sort of like the opposite of the inverse kramer um prediction this tells me that sailor thinks that we're going to have a bit of market because usually when he gets a loan he buys instabyes bitcoin with it but instead he is uh stocking up on cash largely because he has all these instruments where he has to pay out a large amount of dividend so 10% in stretch uh some others that have dividends that you know i think stretches what 10% dividend yield per year uh so he he wants to make sure that he can pay those out without having to sell his bitcoin or have to get emergency loans at very bad terms later on so this this tells me he's prepping right now for the bear market i don't know if if this is necessarily what he believes will happen but there's at least enough of a possibility that he feels the need to have this reserve to pay out those uh dividends and yield uh from uh uh you know this cash word that he has and uh and also like i what what we've seen with a lot of treasury companies is that the minute that they sell bitcoin is a giant downgrade on price because people start realizing okay if they're going to sell their bitcoin then this goes to you like they're they're even more sensitive uh to any price drops and they don't they don't have the upside that bitcoin allows you to have if you're if you're selling your bitcoin so um this it's an interesting signal and uh and you know we'll see what he does in the coming weeks if uh if we get like a bull run um and especially if we get a bull run in 2026 how he manages that and whether he uh sells more preferred or sells more stretch like how does he manage to acquire more bitcoin and what what mechanism that he's going to use because what we found out with convertible debt is that you get shorted to that right you're uh the trade that everyone takes is uh they long the convertible and then they short the main underlying and then they make the difference and that that made a lot you know that made a stock go down significantly and that's uh that's something that i think he's vowed not to do again and he's instead doing these preferred with you know predictable returns that's uh uh essentially using the market as uh some kind of bank to go and raise a lot of money and yeah well we'll see but it's definitely an interesting an interesting signal uh on where he thinks the market is going. Robert Allen it's an impressive signal at 2.19 billion dollars what do you think about micro strategy are they bearish on bitcoin and what about this new reserve? Well I think he has to be a little more conservative with his cash his cash position given that he has these interest bearing uh instruments so I guess I would you know I would say I don't know if it's so much that he's necessarily bearish as he's just having to uh position himself more conservatively because yeah I mean of course it would be very bad PR if you had to sell bitcoin and so I think you know he's wanting to have a cushion to make sure that he is not in that position um but yeah I mean perhaps also you know he's he's wondering hi maybe we have a little bit more uh head headwind in front of us here before the next uh run up um that could be his thinking as well. Glad Kosta what do you think sailor increases his reserve to 2 billion with a B? It does sound like he's loading up on dry powder to buy the dip at some point like maybe we are close to the ending of the bull market and he's waiting to buy the bottom which is not a bad strategy to be honest like a lot of people in bitcoin I remember a trace mayor was doing this with his mayor multiple back in the day and he was always talking about selling the top and buying the bottom maybe that sailor is finally realizing that his signals are not pumping the market anymore so why would he buy at a high price when he can just wait? Usually yeah he was always buying bitcoin directly at any price but it seems like he's being more conservative and cautious this time which is not necessarily bad it's what a lot of us do except that he does it on a much larger scale. As Vlad mentioned this next company said that they were going to be a bitcoin reserve company but they were going to sell the top and buy the bottom they were going to use an algorithm it was all going to work out great and now it doesn't seem like it's going well kindly MD faces Nasdaq D listing risk after failing to meet minimum share price levels the quote healthcare and bitcoin treasury firm has six months to lift its share price above one dollar for 10 consecutive days it sounds like bad news for the David Bailey backed Nakamoto's which took over kindly MD's stock symbol and company to become a bitcoin reserve company the company launched here in Las Vegas at the bitcoin convention launched by David Bailey who I believe owns bitcoin magazine bitcoin media let's talk bitcoin and the bitcoin conventions however it doesn't look like it's going well for his bitcoin treasury vehicle Jimmy Song what do you think of kindly MD aka Nakamoto Nakka getting potentially de listed from the stock market yeah I mean I think it's an advantage they're trading at like 30 something cents and the peak I think in July was like 20 something dollars it's it's a brutal brutal crash right it's it's it's bordering on like something absolutely nuts because you know they they they're going down faster than bitcoin because they leveraged and to they took out debt to buy bitcoin and they mostly bought at levels that are higher than the current current situation they have something like 5700 bitcoin but unless they get a new cash infusion I it's it's going to be very rough I and if I'm not mistaken I don't think they filed the the paperwork that they needed to to the SEC last month and they're probably in danger of not doing it this month either as a public company you you have to have regulatory filings and so on I mean if they get the listed off the NAS Act and what the heck was all that for because that that was as far as I could see the big bet that David Bailey put in and he hired some very high powered people to his board he put a lot of money into it he he was going to have kindly and be or Nakamoto buy the bitcoin conference and everything else associated with it and you know he bought the domain Nakamoto.com from Bologi I think he actually traded it for some shares or something so like it's not it's not cheap like what what he did and it's looking worse and worse every day and like my my thesis has been with a lot of these treasury companies there's just way too many of them and a lot of them are essentially banking on the on something like what the GBTC trade was it had a premium for a while but once it crashed it had a huge deficit that essentially wiped out the entire arbitrage market and we found out later that you know all these other companies including Luna and FTX and they they all traced back to the GBTC premium and the assumption was that the premium would would stay and when it stopped and they all started losing money and they couldn't return to the investors what they promised and that that's kind of what what seems to be happening with a lot of these treasury companies where you know for a while there you could essentially buy you know two dollars worth of you can get like two dollars worth of equity for one dollar that you put in and so on so it made sense because your MNAV was high and now that it's below one it's it's it's looking pretty terrible and they're they're going to be and yeah I talked about like sailors sort of like being against convertible debt and so on that that's definitely happened to knock them out as well they they took out a lot of convertible debt for what I hear the terms of a lot of the debt that they had were terrible which is why they re-finance like three or four times and it's it's I mean if we get any sort of prolonged bear market I I think companies like this maybe sequins even ASST that's that's the one by Vivaire, Varam and Swami so a lot of these treasury companies I think go bankrupt or close to bankrupt and I don't know maybe that's a bear market sacrifice we need to kick off the bull market because they they're playing all these leverage games that you know the market has a way to clear out so that there's maximum payment involved well when the fire sale comes let me know because all by let's talk Bitcoin for a dollar but it is too bad Jimmy they had such a clever plan to get listed under this kindly MD buying a company similar to the clever plant plan launched by FTX when they purchased the block folio app buying all of their customers and client lists transforming that by update into the FTX app in the same way here they hope to transform Bitcoin magazine and the media and the conference into Nakamoto's it's also an interesting idea as you said Jimmy that they plan to sell the conference to the company I'll bet that would have been a great asset a good thing for them to hold we all saw when the money 2020 client list essentially sold for millions and millions of dollars I bet they have the same thing there with the Bitcoin conference I don't know if they're going to be able to sell it anymore but what a trap nothing could go wrong unless you make your first buy when the price is too high and it seems like they've put themselves in that position where their first buy was too high now they can't defend their position now they're in real trouble yeah the parallels here are striking because consensus was the big conference beforehand and of course Barry Silver was the GBTC guy it seems like David Billy is making the same mistake that Barry Silver made and you know Barry Silver of course like did horribly and you know and they're up you know having to sell consensus and and the conference and so on but yeah I mean this what happens when you play with leverage and so on is you get that I don't wish anything bad on David I think he's done a great job with the Trump administration and at least getting some of the de minimis you know legislation into the Hallsville Congress and you know legitimizing it at least in the eyes of the public more because of that and so on but honestly like it's crazy that this same the same mistake that Barry made is the same one that David's going to make you know it's not always the first Greek out of the horse that takes over Troy and it's also interesting how it's the opposite of tether where tether allegedly takes all of the reserves makes this big bet on Bitcoin at the bottom now is completely untouchable financially Nakamoto seemed to have taken a big bet on Bitcoin at the top or what seems like a local top and now is in serious financial trouble being traded by similar instruments that have crushed others before maybe even what was that guy that was against the short selling he went for the fight McAfee or Elon or somebody somebody was a big anti that overstock calm guy Michael he was a big anti short seller guy Robert Allen or something yeah Preston Bern that sounds right somebody like that well they'll tell me in the comments I'm sure Robert Allen what do you think of kindly MD aka Nakamoto's the Bitcoin Treasury company launched by David Bailey of Bitcoin Media potentially being D listed well you know hindsight is 2020 so I guess being gracious uh extending some grace to these guys I could see how the hype the excitement you know politicians are on board governments on board you know feeling like they had all this momentum and then seeing the success of strategy and then thinking hey you know I'm gonna I'm gonna take this playbook and run with it I could see how people could fall into that trap I do think what kept me from falling into that trap was you know having principles and not just a data principle a lot of people don't um yeah I mean when people are talking about paper Bitcoin and anytime someone's putting an adjective in front of Bitcoin or you know something on Bitcoin or you know trying to add some additional spice to the recipe we should all be a little cautious I think and so I had a bad feeling about paper a Bitcoin summer and for the reasons that Jimmy said you know you start playing with leverage and sure if the market goes the way you're hoping it does you could look like a genius but if it goes the other way which it very well might you can get wiped out um I used to play around sadly with leverage at one point until I got burned enough times to finally realize it's not a game worth playing um so you know we all learn hard lessons in life it sucks to learn a hard lesson on a national stage with a with a stock so I you know I hope it doesn't go that way for them but uh you know in the end Bitcoin is about being able to be your own bank hold your own wealth and uh transact with that and so when people are you know creating these elaborate stocks to accumulate it and so on and so forth it's really antithetical in a lot of ways to what Bitcoin is about and um so I understand why they're doing it but and the other on the other side it's you know I'm not that sad that this is happening because I had much rather individuals understand Bitcoin and use it and that's how we have the freedom that we're looking for is if enough of us are actually using Bitcoin as money if it's you know held in 20 different stocks and uh traded as a financial asset we've we've really missed the boat um and so yeah I mean maybe it's good that some of these companies get liquidated and we get back to what Bitcoin is really about and it was interesting Robert this paper Bitcoin company wasn't like Michael sailors paper Bitcoin company which is all raw raw raw Bitcoin this one actually said that they were going to quote using algorithm or what have you to sell the tops and buy the bottoms and that they were going to be more immune from these uh shifts in the market what we've seen is the exact opposite they seem to have bought the absolute top now in a huge financial trouble and uh and it's just it seemed questionable from the beginning we talked about it on this show many other people on Twitter were upset about it and it seemed bad from the start uh also I looked it up it was Elon Musk who was famously against shorts and short sellers it seems like a lifetime ago uh but I completely agree him I I'm against short selling I don't think it's good and also Vlad I wanted to mention uh according to the internet many insiders such as Adam back James and Lop and other friends of the show and Bitcoiners who all say all my money is in Bitcoin I have no more money uh we're secretly investing in this Nakamoto's there was some kind of idea they might have even gotten early cool stock prices uh which don't matter at all now uh but Vlad what do you think about kindly MD and Nakamoto's it's not looking good I've actually had David Bailey on my podcast like three weeks ago and he was very much humbled by the market and he's not a bad guy but at the same time I'm happy that I did not buy into this paper Bitcoin summer and a bunch of fellow podcasters were chilling at very heavily and saying well you should buy into these reserve no what they're called treasury companies and they're really great and they're going to be the next 10X and maybe that Bitcoin will not 10X from here very soon but these companies are solid and you should invest in them and buy stocks and whatever I'm very happy that I stayed away because first of all that's not why I got into Bitcoin uh if I want a shit coin I'll just shit coin okay if I want to buy into something that maybe sounds interesting and one day will come to Bitcoin I'm just gonna buy that as opposed to just company stocks and at least I can buy it with more privacy and with a degree of censorship persistence for a lot of these guys it seemed like a free pass to shit coin after a long time of being held back by the culture finally they had this safe investment which they could use to signal first of all that Bitcoin is a financial asset which is acknowledged by the big players on Wall Street and secondly that they they could actually get rich off of it make more Bitcoin it did not turn out to be as far as I know none of these companies are actually doing pretty good I know that David Bailey also tried to copy the micro strategy playbook with what was it called like a Japanese company that was doing exactly the same a hotel company meta planet meta planet yeah that's how it's gonna say yeah that's the one none of this succeeded I think we we should go back to the drawing board read the message in the Genesis block chancellor on the brink of second bailout for banks like what are we even doing anymore we're in bed with bankers and we're supposed to think that they're our friends and they're gonna make us rich with the technology that was invented to replace them I don't know sort of defeats the purpose and I heard the same thing about micro strategy stock flat they said all these people who are in the Bitcoin and they always tell you all their monies in Bitcoin they have nothing left somehow they're all buying micro strategy stock and made tons and tons of money but I don't know how it turned out if they went down with the ship if they went all the way up and all the way down but we're running out of times we're gonna move on to prediction or story of the week Jimmy Song a prediction or story of the week go ahead the prediction or story of the week for me is the article that's been making the rounds the lost generation by Jacob Savage and if you haven't read it it is quite the read and it's it's sort of blown the roof off of a lot of a lot of millennial white men so as the only non white male on this panel I will highlight this particular article because it goes into how basically young white men have been shut out of a lot of fields and this includes academia, Hollywood, media and he has the receipts to prove it and you can you can see it in the you know tenure track based hiring in academia the writers rooms and Hollywood media and so on and you and honestly I think it's it's been happening in in corporate America as well and one of one of the throwaway lines in there was this is why so many young millennial white men have gotten into quote unquote crypto which is kind of a really sad sad thing to kind of hear because in a sense a lot of people a lot of young white men have ended up in crypto because there weren't opportunities elsewhere and this was the one place where they can sort of go into a meritocracy. Unfortunately they they went into a lot of scams and rent seeking and stupidity that is in a lot of those other industries and didn't get into something that was productive and entrepreneurial so little you know I thought it was a really good distillation of what's been happening there's been a lot of other articles talking about bad article and how you know white men basically have been suffering from that for the lower and middle classes for 50 years and not just like the last 10 like Jacob Savage is talking about with with his quote unquote lost generation and I I think I think there's a strong point to be made there that it's it's not you know the West isn't America's anymore you have you have too much fiat money too many people that are intent on you know addressing sort of weird grievances that I don't think are legitimate and so on so uh that that was for me something that I uh thought was a good thing to be in the conversation right I think uh vice president JD Vance actually retweeted that particular article among other other other things and it's it's it's been a it's been an interesting thing to be observing how people have their reacting well it sounds interesting Jimmy it's in compact magazine at compact mag dot com Robert Allen do you have a prediction or a story of the week go ahead um I guess maybe just piggybacking off of what what Jimmy has shared there I yeah I think you know that that story resonates with with my life uh definitely was a high achiever high school but didn't have the opportunities that probably would have been there if it weren't for just you know the things that they talk about in that article um that ultimately led me to look for you know career opportunities that were meritocratic so I got into finance which at that time was at least uh this would have been like you know 2010-ish um at least on the level of hey you you you know you're dialing for dollars you're just putting in the hours and if you are good at communicating with people and remembering you know the laws and so on and so forth and understanding how to operate in that world you can do pretty well for yourself I got pretty disillusioned by figuring out that the whole thing was a big scam perpetrated on you know central banking and then thankfully I found Bitcoin um it is sad that a lot of I think smart people in many respects have been sort of you know sideline by broader crypto um because there have been a lot of scams and a lot of time has been wasted but I don't know if there's really anyway around that um you know it when you have uh I don't know I guess just a society that um that is so built on people scamming like it's it's it's become so ingrained in how so many people operate um they don't understand the idea of like providing real value it's just about hey how do I how do I quickly make a buck whether or not I hurt someone in the process doesn't really matter I just want to get ahead right and so it's basically this sort of amoral attitude that that I think drives a lot of people and so they are happy to go into something that is um that is not going to end well as long as they think it will end well for them um you know Bitcoin is different um but on the surface it can look similar enough that they can just look at and and say oh well I missed that boat so I'm going to jump on this other one um but you know it's interesting because my time in Africa has also made me realize though that there are opportunities um for you know I guess you could say highly educated um white men it just might mean that they need to go to other countries where they're actually valued you know it's interesting but in Nigeria I am very well treated I'm very well respected um and I can hire people for not a lot of money relative to the value that I can get um for the work that they can provide for my company so um so I think in some ways we just have to you know I guess I'm talking to the Americans in particular perhaps because that's where I'm from but we just need to start thinking more creatively about where are the opportunities and it may not be in the United States for some of us especially if you're younger and you can travel and you can get out um go make a life for yourself and look there are opportunities and uh and there are people who need what's in your head you know if you can bring the ideas and the leadership um you you can find people that will rally behind you so um yeah I think there's opportunity but it's it's a shame because there's a lot of a lot of waste in the United States now in terms of potential that's just been wasted sounds interesting again it's at a compact magazine I'll have to check it out of lad cost of prediction or a story of the week I think this week I broke the record for the longest podcast interview with a single guest in bitcoin we went on for 10 hours and it's this guy his name is Moon settler and he has been working on something that's called Ellen Hans it's a covenant proposal and we went over all of these moments in the recent history of bitcoin when it seemed like we're gonna have some upgrade and we all reach consensus on something and then suddenly we run into another issue that distracts us and I don't know it's really crazy I'm not sure if we're captured or we're gonna ossify from this point on but there there was so much hope a various points that we're gonna have a lot of use cases and new users using bitcoin without custodians and in the way that it was meant to be used I don't know what's gonna happen in the future but it's definitely interesting to reflect upon the moments when we almost had these ctv Ellen Hans subcat or whatever to allow more builders to come to bitcoin but we did not and the question is why and where do we go from here? Where do we go from here? A good question to almost end the year on I want to thank everybody for being here be sure to give us a thumbs up down below thanks to Jimmy Robert and Vlad for joining us on this the day after Christmas we're gonna try to do a show again next week we'll try to do our year a show next week or maybe the week after if we can't get people together it is like the day after new years next week but thanks to everybody for joining us all year here at the bitcoin group so Merry Christmas happy Hanukkah crazy quanza happy holidays I hope everyone has a nice winter break however you celebrate and enjoy it with family and friends and food and whatever you like so thanks so much for joining us until next time bye bye