#505 — The Bitcoin Group #505 - Strong Forecasts - Back Empire - Salvador Stable - Trump Wanes

The Bitcoin Group. The Bitcoin Group, the American Original. For over the last 10 years, the sharpest Satoshi's, The best Bitcoins, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Ben Ark from LN Bits. Hello, good evening all. Stefan Kinsella from the Property and Freedom Society. Hello. Vlad Costa from Bitcoin Takeover Magazine. Buy my cold card. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network. Moving on to issue one. Issue one, City raises Bitcoin, Ether forecasts on strong crypto activity. Citigroup has raised its 12-month forecasts for Bitcoin and Ether, citing stronger cryptoactivity, a supportive macroeconomic backdrop, and a resumption of ETF inflows.

The brokerage increased its target for Bitcoin to $113,000 a coin, up from 82, and Ether to $3,000 to $3,000. thousand and twenty eight dollars up from two thousand two hundred and forty ben ark it's always the price the price the price the price the price of bitcoin and ethereum and other things ben what do you think about the price of bitcoin everything's fine now it's a few months over it's october usually usually happens this time of year i think a lot of it is the there's a lot of people are getting a bit twitchy around the i i bubble um some of that junky capital's looking somewhere to go People have seen moves with Tether and Bitcoin and the ETF, I think it was the biggest inflows they'd had for a year.

So you've also got, you know, inflation was a little bit cooler than people expected the US inflation. You've got weaker job market as well in the US. So it all points towards the price going up. But yeah, it's not like an extreme rally. But as we all know, once you can have that feedback. back loop where it just goes up and up and up. Particularly, I think, if there's some drop in the AI markets. I'm seeing a lot more fud around AI and around the AI industry as well. And I think that inevitably the thing which people shift into, shift their capital into from AI is going to be Bitcoin. Yeah, it's going up. It's funny, Ben, it's not just the intellectual capital of people like me you and others spending all their time playing with AI.

Soon it's the actual capital as people exit their stock investments for the chance to buy Amthropic, the chance to buy Open AI. If it's open, if it opens up or not, we'll have to see how it goes. Stefan Kinsella, what do you think about the price of Bitcoin? Everyone wants to know. I am happy with it. But when it hit 100,000 seems like a long time ago, with two years ago, of us went to uh to uh the french laundry and so in uh in uh california to celebrate um so i guess i'm looking forward to the chance to do that again so we're not quite there yeah the main thing we're always looking for is like our friend crypto graffiti used to say if you can get guacamole at chipotle if it's guacamole on time or guacamole off i think we're about halfway to guacamole uh vlad costa what do you think about the price of Bitcoin this week?

You know, two years ago when the first ETF was approved, we were promised that we're going to be in the hundreds of thousands and we're going to get bankers at our doors asking or begging us and on their knees to sell our Bitcoin to them. And there's going to be this massive demand and the scarcity is going to kick in. We're going to be super rich. We're going to buy basically private jets with the dust that we had from actions 10 years ago or something. None of that happened. I'm pretty sure that there's a lot of paper Bitcoin circulating that nobody wants to talk about, and we just ignore this phenomenon. I also don't know what half the words in that article mean, and that's part of the reason why I got it into Bitcoin, so I don't have to learn banker's lingo in jargon.

So sorry for my ignorance, but I had greater expectations. Whoever is happy with what we're having is just being delusional. We should have had prices way up. We were promised by Donald Trump. I know that this is part of the topics list, but he was going to be the best crypto president. What's going on? It seems like only the meme coin creators are enjoying anything because there's no SEC investigation into anything. So that's the extent. He freed Ross, but now what? Like, we have to just watch how a bunch of guys are getting rich and we're just stuck with Biden era prices. Come on, man. I thought you were making Bitcoin great again or whatever. Just tweet something, pump our bags.

It does seem like a return to the prices and the values of old. No one really profited except maybe the insiders. But we got more on that coming up. But first, predicting against the magic apeal, the truth of all power and prediction in this or any universe. will the price of bitcoin be higher or lower this time next week um i mean i think higher this this current like epoch of price kind of reminds me of you know when we when we breached 10k and everyone was like oh it's never going to go under 10k again and then it went into 10k and then we went over 10k and then we breached 20k and it's like because i'm we're going to go under 20k again and then it goes into 20k again you can't imagine ever going back to it know what happened with 100 k you know whatever it was i don't we care um everyone says it's never going to go under 100k and then it goes under 100k and then slowly it crawls its way back up so for now we're going up higher it does seem ben like uh last time we had the big drawdown and you're looking at it and your your terrible investment and everyone thinks you're stupid and your family's against you and you're like why did i hold on to this stupid thing and then somehow it goes up and i look at it this time and i see it drop to what 65 or something awful and everyone's freaking out and your family thinks you're stupid.

And now we're holding it and it looks like it might be coming back at 80. Again, it's the craziest thing. Stefan Kinsella, higher or lower this time next week? Well, you want the good news or the bad news first? Always the good news. The good news is it's going to be higher. The bad news is I'm always wrong in the short term anyway. It's almost like Melchial had a point about. the random walk down Wall Street. Seems to be unpredictable, at least in the short term. So I feel like is going up, but I'm usually wrong. Well, now we'll have the AI to judge. You'll be included in the statistics of the AIs monitoring this program. Vlad Costa, is the price going higher or lower this time next week?

I'll be the contrarian one. I will say lower, but like 1% lower. Not much. We'll just go sideways. a while and then something's going to happen and we're going to pump and nobody will know why and we're going to try to rationalize what's going on as proud horn said in the proud horn song i'm a bull and i'm bullish so i continue to pricked upward without any evidence or information of why this should happen moving on to issue two adam not sotoshi dude you didn't shake the ball you want to go no you didn't shake the ball oh the ball yeah you're right because that's that's how we actually know whether it's going to go up or down, so. Ben's right. We have to shake the magic eight ball.

I almost forgot. It's good to keep me honest here because this is how people predict for their whole week. This is important. Okay. Will the price of Bitcoin be higher this time next week? And remember shaking the ball can cause bubbles. Will it be higher this time next week? It says yes, definitely. Yes, definitely from the magic eight ball. So there you go. I'm not surprised, but it's good to check. Moving on to issue. Adam, not Satoshi, Bax, crypto empire hit by hacks, lawsuits. Adam, back, a pioneering cryptographer and friend of the show, has businesses linked to him showing signs of strain as the crypto industry undergoes a major shakeout, a $320 million hack of the liquid network, most of it retained and returned by a white hat hacker, and Bax's role and reputation in the Bitcoin world are being tested.

which include a failed project to stockpile four billion dollars worth of bitcoin and a collapsed public market deal for a bitcoin treasury firm he promoted uh which was really too bad because i keep saying over and over on the show that adam back's treasury company probably had the best entry point uh better than knockamoto's better than micro strategy now it doesn't look like that company is going to exist at all stephen cancilla what do you think of adam back's recent troubles from the hack to the other problems. Well, I wish him well, of course. Like I mentioned to you guys pre-show, I was in Helsinki at Bitcoin, BTCHL, Bitcoin Hell last week, and I met Adam for the first time in person and seemed like a nice and up guy to me.

So, you know, I wish the guy well. There you go. You got the picture. That's the, in the middle is the, Finland's economics minister wanted to have a meeting to talk about Austrian economics and Adam Beck joined in somehow. So no offense there, but I would be much more honored for meeting Marty Malmy, aka Sirius. He's the guy. Yes. Oh, it's on the end there. Look at that little. Yeah, so, yeah, so actually the original meeting was me and then Marty. And then our handler sort of said, hey, do you want to meet this guy on the left? There's Daniel Batten. brought in Adam back too. So to meet this guy in the middle who's the economics minister there. But yeah, Marty was great.

That's very cool. You got to meet Marty Mulny. Yeah. One of the first worked with Satoshi on Bitcoin, one of the first programmers on Bitcoin. Let's go to Vlad Costa. What do you think about Adam back? His recent troubles, his company is going down, and of course the major liquid hack. Wait, so I just want to say that there is no trouble. It's all just fud that's being spread by Ethereum shitcoiners. Only in Ethereum you get hacks where people lose money, not in the pure and perfectly professional Bitcoin world, where you have world-class cryptographers that they hire and they are super competent and there's no way that this can ever happen in Bitcoin.

I imagine you're just shit-coin that's being pushed by your necklace. If you believe what's going on, you must be a shit-coiner yourself because otherwise there is no rational explanation for this. ever happening in this universe or any other. Blockstream, if you want to pay me, I will put an address below, but it's not going to be liquid. And Vlad, you didn't even get to show off your necklace. Did you show your incredibly valuable Bitcoin necklace? Yeah, this is the cold card, which of course is the best hardware wallet in the world. There is no way that this can get hacked because it's air-gapped. And you only use this by connecting an external battery, and it never touches a computer or the internet.

So it must be super safe. There's no way anyone can ever hack this. If anyone says that they hacked it, they're just liars. And I choose to believe this. It's the mark free, by the way, which some people claim that got hacked. There is no way in the entire universe that this can ever happen. No AI, no alien, no whatever. I'm stacking hard on this one. Matt O'Dell said that it's the best one ever, so I believe in it. Shinobi spent like two or three months defending this and saying that, well, at least it has great features. You're right, Shinobi. You're very smart. Thank you very much for advocating for the best device on the market. There is no way that anyone can hack this.

And if you do, you're a liar and you're a shit coiner from Ethereum. That's all I have to say. You can pay me block stream. I'll send you an address. Vlad, taken down the cold card there. I was going to Ben Ark. What do you think about Adam Back's recent troubles? Yeah, and I hear with the cold card that rolling dice is an expert feature you shouldn't roll dice just uh trust the rng trust the true random number generator coded by rodolpho's mate um poor arnold adam back uh as he as you know as he said tom's friend of the show i like him he's a good dude he's been in bitcoin a long time he's been in the scene of before bitcoin pre bitcoin so anyone who's been cypherpunking pre bitcoin because i i don't know how many people would be uh cipher points like if it weren't for the monetary incentive I don't know if I would be doing stuff I don't know who knows like you just don't know like whether you'd be involved in the scene whereas anyone who's in that scene before Bitcoin I kind of instantly give kudos some respect to doesn't really matter who it is and I'd a bank's one of them for me so you know I like him when it rains it pours he's had a pretty horrible year it did coincide with him putting on a suit wearing that black suit So in that photo, I was glad to see him dressing down again.

He still needs to get a little bit more shabby, put the orange cap back on. And then we'll be back to Gandalf the Grey, Adam Back the Grey, as opposed to Adam Back the Black. But yeah, he's had a hard time of it. And with the BSTR Holdings thing, it was just the worst time to pitch it and to try and build one of those treasury companies off the back of, you know, what happened to NACW? What happened to all of them with treasured. Oh, what's it called? Micro Strategy. and also knacker although knackers back up to be fair which is pretty pretty incredible um i mean you know wall street needs some way of getting on in and out of bitcoin and these treasury companies seem to serve that use case um and it sucked what happened with liquid i like liquid i'll still use liquid once um once it's back on its feet and uh yeah it was a hard year for him but um hopefully hopefully hopefully Watch your recover, he'll recover.

And yeah, he's a good dude. I still love this liquid hack story. So we're sitting out there and we're saying, okay, they inform their developers of the bug before they fix the bug. It's such an obvious, simple, easy mistake. And we think maybe there's a chance. Maybe there's a chance. One of the developers is a white hat hacker who took the money to hold onto it for safekeeping and who would give it back. And then they give, I think it was 80. percent an incredible percentage of it something back to liquid and because it's too much money and because the lawyers made them say it and whatever they're like we're going to get you hacker we're going to get the remaining 20 percent back when really the guy has just handed them 80 percent i agree it would be very hard to spend he'd be chased to the ends of the earth and all that but it seems like they're going to chase them to the end of the earth for the uh 20 percent anyway uh they've got they got to say that man they can't they can't let it go unless unless it's a more reasonable amount for a white hat hackers though also also remember that's like white house hackers of the cold hard hack come hack come back give us a bunch of money and then we'll chase you anyway why why are people giving back the money you may as well keep 100% you've got a better chance of survival right I mean I also that's that's not harder from an insurance perspective that's not that's not 20% of all the liquidity on liquid as well which is also something we should remember I don't know I don't know what the entire liquidity is on liquid but it's um you know it's a smaller percentage of that.

So I still got trust in the network, you know, like plenty of things have been hacked for a hell of a lot more. And yeah, I still think it's not white hack. I think you can still go away with like, you know, $10 million or something. And then agree with some where you're not chased to the end of the earth and you can be a normal person and not look over your shoulder. But I think there's some kind of unfair sliding scale that you're using against hackers where you're saying, because the money kept on the computer is so which is not the hacker's fault right if you're keeping 400 million dollars on one computer in one address like that's not the hacker's fault if the deal's percentage based and the hacker gives you 5% back or keeps 5% keeps 10% right gives you the rest then percentage based is fair but what Ben's saying is if the money left on the computer by the people who got hacked was too large then we have to work out a different deal than the percentage base it's the amount I think People who do white-ha hacking think it's a bit too much.

5%, 3%, but 20%. Come on, 320 million oil is. It's bonkers. Scandalous. But now the exit question, is this the end of Adam back? He had a little Epstein involvement. Andy was out there on the island. I don't think he did anything. And we broke that story, Thomas, right here, didn't we? Ben, I broke that live, reading the documents live on the air to our horrified truth. as we found more and more about Andy and his company. And again, I think they're just raising funds. But he bounced back from that. He's still a big star of the internet. He almost got his own treasury company. He almost got this other thing. He seems to be in a little trouble for blockchain mining, according to this article.

But he's still riding high at Blockstream. Stefan Kinsella, will Adam back be back? Well, you know the good news or the bad news? Prediction is yes, but then again, I'm usually wrong about these things. But no, I think so. I think it'll be fine. Well, I hope it's yes because he's a good guy. Dan and I had dinner with him once and he talked our ears off about technology for hours and hours and just always been really kind to us here at the show. Vlad Costa, I don't think you're a fan of Adam Back. Do you think this is the event that will take him down, business failure and hacking? No, I think that's too lame. He deserves something better. he deserves to be proven wrong by the big blockers or something.

Like, that would be like poetic justice, not something as stupid as just bad business management. Like, this is a cypherpunk world. Honestly, what, I think one point where I sort of lost respect for Adam back was when, so I don't recommend people to listen to Laura Shin, I think it's a boring show, but somehow she got Adam back and David Chom in the same interview. And I'm jealous about that. And I want to publicly say that I'm jealous about that. But David Chom, who is like the grandfather of cypherpunks and one of the people who is so OG that he doesn't even call it cryptography. He says it's cryptology, because it's the science of studying cryptic stuff or whatever, called out Adam back for claiming that he's the inventor of proof of work and said, it was not you.

It was my friend Moni Naur. And there's another one. also in the white paper, and said, why do you call yourself the inventor of proof of work when it's obvious that some people did it years before you're even working on this? And Adam back, I don't know, he had kind of a weak defense, in my opinion. He said that he was not aware, and it was kind of like a Newton and Leibniz kind of thing, where they found, or they had the same idea in different parts of the world, different contexts. But David Chom is right. Like these two people, published papers and were doing the proof of work research way before Adam Back was. And Adam Back still lists inventor proof of work on his Twitter profile.

I got to check that. Maybe he removed it, but I don't know. Maybe it was applied proof of work with the re-mailers, whereas the other ones were probably a little bit more academic. Was it Y-Dye? Okay, he calls it inventor of hash-cash right now. He doesn't say... workers hash cash, which was proof of work, sorry, but that was for Remainers, who had an actual application as opposed to just, you know, an academic exercise, which he was legitimately the inventor of. And also he printed T-shirts with RSA fought the crypto awards back in the day. Oh, yeah. Is it Einstein given credit for E equals MC squared, but there was some high school teacher who kind of came up with it like 10 years before?

So it took it to the patent office, like in the family guy. There's often disagreements on who's first in crypto. I was just reading again about curio cards and crypto punks and who the first NFT is and how much controversy it is. I agree with what he's doing now. Just change it to hash cash. Just say, you made the project you made and let other people fight about if it's the first of this or the first of that. I certainly do hope Adam Back survives it. Although what Vlad was saying, I didn't want to forget. Speaking of things we're jealous of, you had the creator of PGP on your show, Zimmerman, right? Tell us a little bit about that. How'd that go while you're here?

You make me so happy right now. Because I put so much work into chasing him for many years, and then I finally was at the same event as him, and I hung out with him for an entire day. And he told me that he actually lived in Romania. So this was kind of a nice bridge to connect. talk about stuff. In the 90s, after he fought the privacy and cryptography, the open source cryptography worse, he sort of found refuge in Romania. And he was living in a very central place in Bucharest, which I know. It's like upstairs from a Ferrari dealership, which is very fancy. Interesting, that today is. Living there. Earlier, you guys missed it. We talked about Sammy Hagar getting to join Van Halen because Sammy and Van Halen got their Ferraris repaired at the same.

dealership and we're all saying that's the place to hang out and then now it all comes back I'm sorry I can't believe you're docks in for Zimmerman next level go on where is he Ferrari Ferrari shop impressed Ferrari dealership yeah you're right but that was in the 90s so you can go visit that place I don't think it's even an apartment anymore maybe it was used to extend the dealership or whatever but my point is that I connected with him and I got to interview him he gave me 20 minutes in the beginning and then I started setting up my stuff and I was super nervous and then he spoke for like 35 I think which I thought was very nice of him I think he believes that healthy is Satoshi because he's cryptic about it he doesn't say it directly but he does say that he knows Satoshi and the Satoshi that he knows would not like mining to have this impact on the environment that that was kind of his at the time.

He was trying to talk to people in Bitcoin and try to figure out ways to diminish the carbon footprint of Bitcoin mining. And he was thinking of ways to incentivize miners. He used renewable energy. And I did try to tell him that this is what the market does because that the difficulty ramps up. Only the most efficient miners who are using the cheapest form of electricity will be able to survive. He's not buying it. He thinks mining is very dirty. and it should not be. And that was part of the conversation. I was also surprised to see that on one hand, he's kind of living in the past because during his keynotes, he says the same stories, which is weird, like to spend so much time, so many decades, talking about the same thing.

But on the other hand, he's also trying new ideas, like he had a business with telephony and he was trying to develop encrypted communications, which is cool. So it's not like this guy is entirely living in the past. He's still like a businessman building stuff. I think you, Thomas, would have a lot in common with him because the last time I met him two years ago, I think, in Frankfurt. He was talking about the end of American democracy if Donald Trump wins. And I was like, okay, just calm down. We're in Germany. We're Europeans here. We don't really care about your American. politics but she was like no you should be concerned it's really bad I drew up no my girlfriend drew a pepe for him and he was very triggered by the existence of this creature he was like oh that's a symbol of the alt-right and I was like you know sometimes after World War II people were wearing swastikas and German uniforms especially in Britain as a way of showing triumph over evil so sometimes you need to take symbols and give them a different meaning and he did not buy that either well it's tough to rehabilitate the rare pepe i was just reading about in a book that the a i has written from my tweets and it was talking about how in a 2017 hunt noticed a major problem with rare pepe they were all based on a what had become an alt-right hate symbol and they were all palleted to green as well as being magic the gathering uh hunt thought if you could do any other kind of card it could make more money so but i do agree with them to worry about trump and things uh still awesome you got to talk to phil zimmerman the creator of pgp everyone should check out that interview on vlad's channel i remember downloading pgp back in the day from the command line uh you had to agree from the command line that you would not export it there were serious u.s military controls on the uh the email encrypted and hard drive and you know stupid little folder full of stuff that we encrypted type thing we never did anything worth encrypting but um it was fun it was fun to play with real encryption and to uh get to do it because he allowed us to and uh while you're mentioning the uh they're trying to get a clean bitcoin uh bram cohen creator of bit bit torrent did for a while run his own clean bitcoin called chia i don't know whatever happened to it uh but like you say lad that's a common it seems to be in kind of a retired or second career type technology success guys.

They look at something and maybe try to make it green. And I don't know how well that turned out for Bram. I think they made money. Look at the price. That's a good way to understand whether or not the project was successful. But it was also harmful for the environment because Chia was using plotting. That's what they called using your hard drive for mining. And I think it destroyed like a lot of hard drives and SDs and whatever, people were essentially burning them to be able to mine coins. So you can't claim with a straight face that it's environmentally friendly, especially since you had consumer electronics that were being destroyed on a weekly basis just to be able to keep up.

So I think for a while the SSDs went up, just like the RAM is going up nowadays because people were mining chia. Yeah, I feel like the whole proof of work. and it's, you know, carbon footprint has kind of fallen by the wayside now because we've got AI, like out-competing it and burning, you know, a hell of a lot more fossil fuels to power it than Bitcoin. So people no longer seem to care about Bitcoin so much. Although I was going to say that I've forgotten all the names and everything, but that upcoming Bitcoin fork, Vlad, isn't that going to double the amount of miners online? Wouldn't that increase? Yeah, Vlad. Yeah. Isn't that a bad? the environment fork?

Booble. Which one? Oh, what's his name? E-cash, baby. E-cash, that's it. I mean, it's going to cannibalize Bitcoin's mining, if anything. I'm not sure if people are going to mine this one specifically. It's still shot to 56D. So it will compete for the same hash rate, just like Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV. And I think there are a couple of others that are not so notable, but they're still doing it. It's interesting. So to, I think it's also bold because it's easy to 51% attack. And I'm not sure. Like Paul is kind of crazy. He just wants to let the market do whatever it wants with this. And he's not going to enable any protection. Are you sure behind the scenes?

Isn't it important to line up the miners and so forth? The last time we had one of these conspiracies, I hate to be the, you know, a user's manual for Bitcoin conspiracies. But the giant. Bitmain company lined up behind B-Cash. So on the opening day, I don't recall the numbers, but they had tons of hash power, right? They weren't getting hacked. He's not going to have the same thing. You got to have the backroom deals, right? No, but Bitcoin Cash also did. So when Bitcoin SV split from Bitcoin Cash, they did a weird time stamping thing so that you could not reorg a certain amount of blocks. Like, they sort of tried to make the effort futile. So this is like a sign of centralization when you're able to impose certain rules or change the rules of mining.

Paul just wants to do a one-to-one copy of Bitcoin that has the drive chains. I think he's courageous. When is, when is he cash going to, because I thought it was, I thought it already happened to me. I thought it was arranged for September or something. Yes, it was supposed to launch at Block 964,000, which was in August. But he realized that. that the software is not ready for that and he wanted to do more testing. So he created this system or there was the alpha net for a month or you could mine and you could test the software and the amount of coins that you mine, you're gonna get 1% of it on launch day for the main net. Now it's in the beta phase where they're still testing stuff and some people rage quit because they found bugs and they could not fix them on time or whatever.

I actually told them it's better to just launch with a couple of side chains that are ready, as opposed to just getting gangri because they can't have like 10 of them working at the same time. So it's better to launch with something that works and then just roll them as they become ready. I'm not sure if they listen to me. I think Paul is a very libertarian guy when it comes to this. He's like, just let the miners decide, let the market choose what they want to run. But I think from like a marketing point of view, it's kind of a bad call. But once again, nobody listens to me. So, yeah, they're going to launch on the 31st of October, which is White Paper Day.

It's going to be the 18th birthday of Bitcoin when also Paul decides to fork Bitcoin. It all grows up. You all grows up. He's a big man now, Bitcoin, 18. Well, I'm looking forward to see what happens with it. And I've always liked the idea of drive chains. I think this is a lot. or something like you he's a dick man yeah no i don't that i just i'm just i just i just for the for his project he doesn't need to be as antagonistic as he is you know it would it would be better with if he was like well you know if you still want to use lightning then this thing would actually you could have a side chain which is optimal for it um and uh sorry a drive chain which is optimal for it or whatever i mean it's just a his general approach to to comms annoy me um feels it feels too much like the church of paul which i didn't really like so i was like i'm going to skip out good luck to you i'm going to skip out i'm going to go back to adam back he was a big support of drive chains back in the day so um no adam back supports anything he's just gonna roll like the cool wave no it wasn't no it wasn't it wasn't the cool wave at the time he was you i've spoken about it shelled it very good to say you know this is an interesting idea which people should say look at.

Well, that's when they were trying to get it onto Bitcoin, not when they were making their own drive chain coin. I don't know. We'll see. I mean, it's, whatever. If it proves it's useful, then we get the 300 onto Bitcoin and not be a great day. The other thing about Paul is that he doesn't want to pay for exchange listings or whatever, which have become kind of industry standards at this point. Like, he's not willing to play that game. I kind of but I think it's also kind of terrible because it's possible that on launch day there's not going to be any major exchange supporting his coin, which means that people will claim them and then not have a place to sell them.

I think he's talking with wallets to integrate e-cash so you can swap it. I feel like a real error in the project was taking Satoshi's coins because if there's success there, then somebody will just fork it and without taking Stoshy's coins and if you like the superior version of e-cash. I disagree. Honestly, I would take all of them and use them because now the conversation in Bitcoin is that they should be frozen after the quantum upgrade if Satoshi doesn't move them. And if you're going to launch a new project that needs money to pay for stuff, I would just go with the Ethereum way and create a foundation and just fund the things. Yeah, that becomes centralized though then.

like that. I mean, it'll just, it won't get any support. This is the thing. He's rolling out new, basically a new protocol, which doesn't have any other developers outside of his company. I mean, it's not that. It's just Bitcoin with Bit300, isn't it? Bit 301. It's not like a, it's just Bitcoin, a little bit extra icing on top. Sure, but it's like Zcash. I think Zcash without the 20% dev tax or whatever, they couldn't pull off what they did. However, that was a big thing. which was, which people would criticize Zcash for was the sole founders. Yeah, but they removed the trusted setup, which used to be the main reason why people were saying it should not be activated on Bitcoin.

They were able to make transactions much smaller. They used to not, so the cryptography was so complex that you needed a lot of computation and a lot of storage to be able to run this. They were able to crush it down to like 90% of what it was 10 years ago. You can now run that on mobile. And they're trying to make it scale better. So there's a lot of effort that they're putting into this. No, Zcash is doing some great work at the moment. You can see it reflected in the price right there. And the Zcash wallet is dope. And because they kept the founders reward, they still have all that money going out to development or community or advertising. And with the price being up, they have tons more money.

So maybe it worked out in the long run. OG cipherpunk a bit like had him back as well. He was there before Bitcoin. Zuka was thinking of ways to decentralize de-cash while he was working for David Chom in Amsterdam. And I think he's a pretty solid contender for Satoshi. The only reason why I don't think he's Satoshi is that he actually had a job at the time. He was running a company. I don't think anyone has the energy to run traffic. Wasn't he also the first person to say, he's neither one who said that, oh yeah, cool idea, but it doesn't scare, wasn't it? No, that was James A. Donald. It was the first one to reply. And Zucco basically replied to Satoshi because some people told him on the forum.

I'm sorry, I'm really derailing the conversation, but it happened in November of 2008. I know because I studied this recently. And what happened was that some people told Satoshi that he's being too libertarian in his comments and he's trying to do politics on a forum that's about cryptography, and some people have different opinions. And Zucco told them, hey, Satoshi, why don't you join our other mailing list, which is allowing politics to be discussed. So that was Zucco's first contribution. And then a few months later in January, he became the first person to write a blog post about Bitcoin. And that one was published on Bitcoin.org by Satoshi. What happened afterwards is that Zucco sent an email.

He was running a company that's called Tehoi LAFS, which is trying to create a way of file sharing which is decentralized. So basically what Satoshi said to his employees was check out Bitcoin is very cool. One of the people who checked out Bitcoin and started mining is slush, the guy who created slush pool. So the first person to invent mining pools was actually onboarded by Zucco to Bitcoin. And I think part of the reason why there's such a large movement in Czech Republic surrounding Bitcoin is the creation of slush pool and treasurer. No, slush. Sorry, did slush pool that came before Trezorzer? It did. 2010. Wow, a guy's sick, man. What a hero. He was very smart and very early.

Yep, and you can check out our interview with Slush and Stick, the founders of Treasurer. and slush pool here on the World Crypto Network. I'm jealous about that, by the way. It was an incredible time there in, I think we went to Malta. We were at Adam Backs conference. We delivered him a satellite dish, Dan and I. And then, yeah, I got the Adam Back interview, the Slush and the Stick. And it was really cool. Slush was really nervous. And we had to restart the interview, but I thought he did fine. And then Stick was like afterwards, he was like, I don't usually do interviews and I don't like them. But this one was good. So I was like, all right, you know, right.

Made him comfortable. It sticks like obviously a gazillion at a Bitcoin, you know, Star Trezor, whatever else. But then he just randomly, like, contribute another bits all the time just pops in, puts a little PR in. I'm like, doesn't need to do it. It's just, just, he just contributes to projects. So he's one of the most selfless people out there. He's the best. I'm pretty sure he could retire, but he works every day. He goes to the office. He coordinates people in the treasor office. he still works there. He still goes to the office and he has no reason for it. Like if he wanted, he could just spend the rest of his life somewhere else on an island just enjoying himself or whatever.

He chooses this life. Stefan, you met Zuko. I did. We had been sort of, you know, internet friends, but yeah, I met him there and he actually, he suggested I come to Lugano next year for the... Yeah, but this looks like the other Zucco, Giacomo Sufus. Yeah, two Zucco, different Zucco. Different one. But, no, he's cool, too. He's a knockoff, Zucco. Going back to Adam back, and this whole thing with Paul Star and the E-Cash, I do kind of worry when we have these engineering run coins or engineering run companies, if the engineers can step up and do it. Like Vlad was talking about, it remind me a little bit of Maid Safe. Everyone can go back and look. They raised a lot of money.

They never released a product. They talked about it a lot. like really good guys, really technical. A lot of people were into it. The same thing, Star Citizen, this major game that has released many versions, but never a complete one. And I just, I hope, you know, it doesn't matter what I say or what Vlad says, but you can't underestimate the importance of a good launch when it comes to one of these crazy cryptocurrencies. If they go out on the first day and there's nowhere to sell the coins or nobody's mining it or whatever, you're going to be judged by that launch. But let's see if we can keep going I'm going. Bandy have any more on Adam back before we move to the next issue?

I just like flat calling Zucco, T-Mu-Zucco. Oh, crap me up. Team is all right. Moving on, check out. If you don't like team, I can say wish.com. There you go. Reference for the olders. Check out world crypto network.com. We've got 5,091 videos. You can check them out for free at world cryptonetwork.com. to issue three el salvador shifts to stable coins as bitcoin payments wane in a move that's no surprise to anyone el salvador is changing their focus from bitcoin to stable coins they've got a new company startup called mod vion who's going to develop a quote government-backed platform called civar that will permit salvadorians to send and hold stable coins including for remittances using coin bases base network There's also been a lot of rumors lately.

It's hard to tell what's true that El Salvador continued buying Bitcoin and maybe even continued holding. Stefan Kinsella, what do you think about El Salvador changing their tune and going to stable coins instead of Bitcoin? I'm a thumbs down, but I'm not surprised. I'm never surprised by what these governments do, just like I'm not surprised about Argentina and Millet and everyone is so excited about this guy. never never trust politicians well we're all still waiting here for the moment when we find out how many bitcoin will fit in a briefcase as the bitcoin are lost or stolen or misplaced and i hope the el salvadorian people i hope it doesn't happen but glad what do you think they're changing their mind they're switching to stable coins it kind of makes sense right we've talked about you know how tight their economy is how the up and down nature of bitcoin could wreck an individual's life there.

And yet we in the tech sector are all laissez-faire saying, hey, just ride Bitcoin up and down. Sometimes it goes up. Sometimes it goes down. But if you're betting your dinner or your rent money, it's a lot more important, right, Vlad? What I want to say is that, first of all, El Salvador is a U.S. dollar country. Like, that's their main currency. The fact that they choose to use the digital. digital dollar is just an addition to the system that they already have. It's not really such a big deal. Secondly, the adoption in El Salvador was always exaggerated and overblown. I remember like four or five years ago, I was invited to go to adopting Bitcoin in El Salvador.

And I did not go because I got the COVID. But my point is that when I bought my hotel there, I wanted to pay with Bitcoin. And the legal tender law implies that they cannot deny that payment or tell you that you should be using something else. But they did. Like I've asked the hotel, is there any way I can pay with Bitcoin? And they said, well, we have an ATM down the street. You can go use that and bring us dollars. That was one of the moments when I realized that what you see on Twitter is not real life, which should be obvious in hindsight. But people were posting pictures and saying that everything is happening there and whatever. of adoption was El Zonte Beach, where people were so enthusiastically posting about their lightning transactions all the time.

But I did see this guy, John Attack, who actually lives there. He moved to El Salvador to enjoy the freedom of that tropical place or something. And he did say that the adoption had gone down, and he speaks with locals who regularly say that they haven't used Bitcoin in a long time. and they prefer to receive the US dollar. And I also have a friend who runs the payments processing company, and he told me that the volumes are abysmal and have always been abysmal for El Salvador. And the ATM operators can also confirm that there is not much activity, like the expectation was much higher, and the marketing always blew this out of proportions. So I think El Salvador did a good job just attracting new capital and attracting rich foreigners to move into their country and possibly attract investors or whatever.

As a nation states, they do care about the ratings given to them by the World Bank and the IMF. So they have to play the game in order to attract other investors who might bring and build businesses in the country. I don't blame them. It's just the way of the game. But it is disappointing compared to what our expectations were but once again the price is a disappointment the development is a disappointment the adoption is a disappointment like if you actually want to go down this rabbit hole it's very depressing and it feels like we failed and in the meantime as Ben's t-shirt says fuck tether because they use the same technology except that it's not censorship resistant so it fools you into thinking that it's like Bitcoin but the price doesn't go up or down But in reality, they freeze hundreds of millions of dollars every week from transactions.

And Tether is literally printing money. They're making millions of dollars every week from their business. And it feels like... So to be honest, it is very cypherpunk because the early cypherpunks were thinking of ways to send US dollars to each other without revealing their identity. So in this way, it's kind of cool. But on the other hand, not as Bitcoin. It's not censorship resistant. It's not really decentralized. You're going to possibly have your funds seized, which I, this is why I tell people to swap their stable coins for something that cannot be confiscated as soon as they receive that payment. But I don't know. Most people don't care. I've been to lots of countries where I tried to pay in Bitcoin because it was a Bitcoin conference or whatever.

and what I got in return was, well, we don't accept that, but you can send us USDT on Tron or Ethereum or even Binance. That was a thing for a while. I don't blame people for wanting this. It's just that they should be informed. And I also want to send this message to Bitcoin designers and people complaining that the U.X sucks in Bitcoin, and that's why it doesn't get adopted. In order to use Tether, have to have the gas token. So you don't just buy the USDT token, you also have to buy the whatever token. It can be Tron, it can be Ethereum, depending on your network. The fact that you have to use a token that pays a transaction fee is actually much worse user experience and can lead to a lot of failed payments or disappointments, or you can have your transaction stock if you're not paying the right fee.

So the user experience is actually much worse than what you get in Bitcoin, except that we always find the wrong excuses for our failures. And my closing note is that Tether was built on Bitcoin on Yomni layer, and people forget that. And then other Bitcoiners complained that it was taking up like 30% of the block space, so they just said, okay, we'll just move to Ethereum. I think that's what made Ethereum more successful. So thank you for being such good maximalists. that you enabled other networks to try. Well, Vad retail adoption, I do think, is the hardest thing in Bitcoin. And I've had the same experience you've had where you go to the business and it's on the Bitcoin map and you got your coin ready to spend or whatever.

And they're like, oh, we lost the tablet or the employee who knows how to use it isn't here. And we haven't used it in six months anyway. And you can't expect them to, excuse me, to have a whole different system for something that you three times a year or whatever it's it doesn't make any sense for them to have the bitcoin retail and uh we saw it in the bitcoin bowl when bit pay tried and they went around and got all the retailers to accept it and they armed them all with tablets and then no one showed up to buy and now we've seen the same thing with el salvador on a countrywide scale for perhaps even with a little bit of force a little bit of government pressure on there and it seems like it's a huge failure as well we really need i think demand on both sides where the retailers want bitcoin and the people have it and they want to spend it and i don't know when we're going to get there it seems like a long time ben ark what do you think about el salvador changing their mind and switching to stable coins it actually goes a lot deeper um than what you're saying that flat on um you know you're looking so you need to go and look at you need to go back to the genius act so when the genius act came in tether has to prove that it's backed by assets one of them being bills treasury bills so effectively they're buying u.s debt so it's good for the u.s the more tether which rather in the world um when you've got the u.s dollar losing its place as a world reserve car world reserve currency and then you've got bricks and these other nations who are thinking about using different mediums of exchange between countries the best thing the u.s can do which is what they're doing is to encourage tether to be used more widely across the world it's the reason which here in the UK, Nigel Farage had a huge payment from one of the owners of tether.

They want more tether out there in the world, because the more tether there is in the world, the more US debt gets bought up. So far as $140 billion worth of US debt being bought up by tether, and that's only going to rise. Now, Becali is pals with Trump, and he wants to build that relationship. So I believe, hence the T-shirt, that there's actually more at the moment. So, you know, U.S. citizens are going to widely reject any notion of a CBDC, of course. But this thing which is buying up U.S. debt, which is a private company, that's okay. So, yeah, tether's a huge story. And just within the Bitcoin industry, like Tether have invested a lot of money. And they proxy it through VC funds because they can't be seen directly to be buying up the Bitcoin industry.

But they have invested through proxies, of VC companies in lots of companies within Bitcoin. And then lots of those companies then support Tether and then start building Tether support into Bitcoin. Unlike on the Lightning Network, for example. And it's something which I'm not here for. You know, I'm not here to be the test net for Tether and build their infrastructure. I'm here for Bitcoin. However, Bitcoin does have a problem and that it's not sound money. of sell money is stable stability. Bitcoin doesn't have stability. It fluctuates all over the place. So if you're now Salvadorian earning X amount of hundreds of dollars a month, then if Elon must tweet something out and it halves the price of Bitcoin, that really sucks because your children starve and you can't afford to pay your rem.

So when the El Salvador thing happened, my assumption was that using the Bitcoin stack, using the tools we have, that they would build a more decentralized, stable, of exchange on Bitcoin because that needs to exist. And there's plenty of examples of it out of there in the shit coin world. There's make it down. There's all these different examples of there of being able to create kind of stable medium of exchange by having a vault and using arbitrage or whatever to create it. And I think that's what needs to happen. But the problem is the financial incentive is so big for a company like Tether to exist where you centralize. And I agree it's completely counter to the proposition of Bitcoin, which is being able to send a transaction to somebody else with no third party sat in the middle.

And now you're having this company, which is also a terrible UX, like you said, to this Striever wallet, which they're implementing in El Salvador. I think it charges like $2 per transaction or something, which is this insane for your average El Salvadorian. So there's still room for Bitcoiners to build a more decentralized stable medium of exchange or a recipe for building decentralized stable. mediums of exchange on Bitcoin. And it is possible with the tools we have. It's just for some reason nobody does it. But then hopefully somebody will. And then on another point, like El Salvadorians, ultimately, they don't want to use the US dollar. Like there's this assumption that the world loves US dollars.

They don't. Like countries which have issues with their currency, they end up using the US dollar because it keeps its value. like Al Salvador, they hate the US. They hate, the US broke their country practically. He stored a horrible dictator, which then got rid of their democratically elected dictator, a democratically elected leader, put in a dictator. And then that's one of the things which went to destroying their country. And that's when all the things, everything went wrong, during the Red Scare period of the 1970s. So there's this deep resentment for the US. They don't want to use the US. They would much prefer to use an El Salvadorian dollar. And if somebody can build an El Salvadorian dollar built on top of Bitcoin with those rail with that, you know, like that better UX, like you saying, it keeps its stability.

It could be pegged to price of coffee, US dollar, I don't know, the Euro or whatever. It could be pegged to a bunch of things. Then I think that will go a long way and it'd be very, very popular. But this, this tether kind of co-option, yay tetherism, I call it, in Bitcoin, where everybody seems to be excited that tether are looking at Bitcoin and trying to build on Bitcoin and more people are getting access to tether. It's just an excuse to buy. up US debt and then get the US dollar, keep the US dollars position as a world reserve currency and it's not something I'm for, it's not something I'm working on. Hence the T-shirt. Wait, what I heard is a speculative attack on the dollar and you're shorting the dollar if you're using Tether.

No, you're not shorting the dollar. You're buying up US debt. That's what they want. Like it's backed by the dollar, it's the dollar. It's just the US dollar. Just being just this, as Besant said, it's the new era of dollarization, the stable coins. I think the very thing is very clever. It's genius. The genius act is legitimately genius. True to its name. Speaking of the payment systems of some of these restaurants and shops, I was in Helsinki for this Bitcoin conference last week. And the closing event was at a restaurant which had a floating sauna. And they claimed they took Bitcoin or Lightning that night. And so I paid for my meal, $20. a wallet of Satoshi, which I've never used, and I had like 50 bucks on it.

So I paid for it, and it actually worked. I was surprised. And so then I was talking to some guys, and I offered to buy them beers because I had free cash, right, that I'm never going to use. So I went to buy them beers, and they said, oh, our thing stopped working. So I had to use Fiat cash to buy it. So it worked for one transaction at least anyway. What were they, what was there, what points that were they using, wasn't that LMBITS? I don't know. They said they claimed they had their own. their own, their own a channel, but it just broke down for some reason. So I had to use Fiat. So you should use Lundits. It's usually some guy in the room. Some guy named Joey is backing the whole operation.

And he'll just take lightning for that night. And then the next night, they're like, oh, no, we don't take lightning anymore. That was for the special party. I swear. Yeah, it was connected to their little device on the counter where you pay with the credit cards, but it actually worked the first time. So I was surprised. The thing is like the stack. is amazing. Like, you can do these crazy micro-transactions, do all these payments on Lightning. And like Vlad said, like the Bitcoin payment solutions are good. They work. The problem is that people don't want them because it's not stable and because they have no association. I don't want Bitcoin. They want something which is culturally relevant to them.

So, yeah, we need to build stable coins, a recipe for stable coins built on Bitcoin. Then I can build the Welsh pound, then we can wiggle out of, you know, the pejanomy of the US, of the GDP, the Great British Pound, and the Bank of England, not the Bank of UK, the Bank of England, and we can become a sovereign nation, and Wales can be free. Well, we like to make fun of credit cards and payments, but we forget how well they work, even though it's a system from the 1950s where they used to take an imprint of the front of the card and it's just a number they write down. It does seem to work every time. And like Ben was saying, I do think if you want to, if you're a country and you have to switch to the USD, it's kind of like going to the ER.

No one wants to go there unless they're really hurt. And as for the El Salvador Tether plan, I wish they had done this. I think it's a pretty clever idea like Ben saying, having Tether being forced to buy local El Salvador bonds or securities to back up their economy, then if they can get more and more companies to invest in. No, no, no, no, Tether are buying U.S. Treasury bills. They're not buying up. So our Salvadorian is using tether. I know, but they should make their own El Salvadorian version of Tether. Ah, yeah, yeah. El Salvadorian tether that buys El Salvadorian bonds that they could support, El Saltav, whatever. And so, yeah, I think that would work.

And I think because they didn't do it, I think we have to wait now for a larger company like Germany or somebody to do it, where they create this, the copy of the United States Act. where they have this tether backing up your local economies which again remember ben when we used to be revolutionaries and we were like cryptocurrency rebels and we were going to take down the whole system now we're backing up company countries we're backing up tether and then we have the next issue so let's keep you're wearing a suit i'm always wearing a suit it's free gravitas on tv you can get them at a goodwill moving on to issue for trump loses favor with crypto fans who call him out for cashing in.

The president's 2024 campaign leaned into crypto to attract young men, a demographic that is deserting Republicans in the midterms. We've talked about this here before over and over again. If you get into bed with a con man, you get conned. They all thought they were going to be the ones. They were going to be the ones who got in bed with Donald Trump and didn't get conned. And then they weren't. All they got is Ross freed, the couple of attempts on the Clarity Act and not much more, mostly derailed by Trump's meme coin. Ben Ark, what do you think about Trump losing favor with the crypto fans who brought him in and the obvious failure of the right-wing-only strategy when around here we've been saying the whole time, you've got to go left-wing and right-wing.

You've got to get both of them on board for Bitcoin for their own reasons, and then together we advance, and that's how you get legislation done. takes longer and cost more money, it's less exciting. But they thought they had it all, Ben. They thought they were the big winners. What happened to our right-wing crypto bros? Yeah, I know you can't, you're telling me you can't trust the politician or the billionaire. Why can't trust the politician or the billionaire? And that's the first page of their book, too. That's the first page of like the libertarian handbook. Trust us. Politician, yeah. Yeah, I mean, Trump did well out of it. I remember at the Nashville conference, he was taking photos with people and they're posting them all over and you had to pay like 100 grand or something or 60 grand to have a picture with him.

No, I think it was 60 grand to have a picture with him. And then if you paid like 100 and something, you could go to his meal. And then people would post these pictures of them, of them shaking Trump's hand. And I was like, you're a twat. Everyone who had a pitch with him, I thought you're a twat. But yeah, it didn't really work out for them. Did it? What a surprise. Maybe we shouldn't put our trust in these politicians and we shouldn't put our trust in these billionaires. And we should just build this decentralized stuff where we don't need them anymore. And one silver lining to the previous story on El Salvador, which I thought was kind of interesting, actually, was the horrible app which they're building, which is basically WeChat for El Salvador, and it has their, you know, attaches their personal identity to payments and all this other stuff.

The thing which I did think was kind of cool was they'll be polling in there. So they'll be able to do like daily polling for things in El Salvador to trying to get a handle on what people which is interesting this is kind of a more of a direct form of democracy and I think that a lot of our democratic infrastructure is based on a form of democracy which is you know entirely outdated now we have the internet now we we we all have these phones in our pockets where people could vote on just day-to-day stuff so I thought that was kind of it so silver lining to the El Salvadorian dictator and the horrible we chat is actually you'll have daily polling which to me maybe looked like a way of keeping yourself as dictator and you say, well, there's still democracy because people are still, you know, they're voting on stuff daily.

It's just maybe I'm here all the time and I'm your main guy. And with Trump, yeah, he wants to be, he wants to be a dictator. He's, he's, he's jealous of the true hardman of this world, which is, you know, Putin. But yeah, like, when will bitcoins learn not to just not to trust them, the politicians and the billionaires? Well, I'm definitely a fan of liquid democracy and direct democracy, but I'm not sure they're going to get that in El Salvador. It seems to me a lot that the dictator could just push his thumb on the scale and suddenly win all the polls, Ben. So I don't know how great that one's going to be. I like it in theory, but it's the same thing like saying, I like the Chinese credit scoring app because I could get free video rentals sometimes.

It's just not a very good deal, like overall, like government control-wise. And I do recall that Trump's first speech to the Bitcoin he said the most telling thing and again i i feel i can see through the con man from the beginning and he said something along the lines of he was making fun of president biden of course and you know belittling him he said i know what to do you say the christian thing to the christian people you say the bitcoin thing to the bitcoin people you don't say the bitcoin thing to the christian people or the christian thing to the bitcoin people like he was describing the con in front of them and and i thought for sure that they would like break through and they'd be like wait a man minute, we're being conned.

But no, it took years and years and years, but I think we're finally getting there. Stefan Kinsella, what do you think about Donald Trump, his meme coin, and he didn't get a lot done for being the so-called crypto president? I mean, I've seen people argue that Jesus was an anarcho-capitalist, and I think Jesus would have been a bit coiner. But look, as bad as Trump is, first of all, I'd never mind when people get their money taken from them if they're idiots. an efficient, you know, that's evolutionary, the social Darwinism. So if you get taken in by Trump or someone like that, you know, you probably deserve to be. And as bad as Trump is and as over the map as he is, I mean, just think of the alternative.

I mean, at least he's not hostile to Bitcoin. I think the demon rats would have been. So, yeah, he's not great, but he's not as hostile as Harris would have been. nonsense. All this fanboy enthusiasm for the Clarity Act and all the other legislation. Yeah, it's nonsense. I mean, what government does is to distract you from their unwillingness to do something real and substantive, which it would be lower capital gain or get rid of capital gains tax, make Bitcoin legal tender, something real that would actually help it. They do window dressing stuff, you know, just like when they say, oh, we're going to simplify the tax code. I don't want the tax code simplify.

make it as complicated as you want as long as you lower the goddamn rates. And that's what they don't want to do. So they distract you with simplification. So the same thing with the Clarity Act and all these things. I don't care that it failed. It's all nonsense. We just need rates to be lowered and friction to be lowered. And if it won't be lowered, it'll just take longer for it to become adopted, but it will still win, I hope. I do agree. I don't think we had very much to win. what they had planned out freeing Ross, the Clarity Act, maybe the price goes up, we wouldn't be in that much of a different position if we had all that. Whereas what you're saying, if we had legal tender or if we had a more clarified tax code, something simpler, something we could understand, we would actually gain something by that and something that we could gain for a long time.

Whereas even if we had these things, we just have another legislation that seems to protect incumbents like Coinbase, which is not us. Coinbase. Vlad Costa, what do you think about Donald Trump? He seems to have some of his magic wearing off with his crowd. Well, first of all, I don't think about Donald Trump. But I don't know. It was always weird. The way that he treated us, once again, you mentioned how he was explaining his game, where he was just being a politician who's open about it. I think this is like the greatest virtue that Donald Trump ever gave to the world. It's that he reveals to us how the game is played and I think that's also part of the reason why his peers in politics hate him so much because he's nonchalant.

He doesn't care about maintaining any degree of modicum or whatever it is that you call it when someone is diplomatic and nice and says all the right words. He doesn't care about anything which exposes how the game works and we get to understand behind the curtains what it was probably like for many years or decades or whatever but he did say during or at the end of his speech at the bitcoin conference good luck with your bitcoin and crypto and whatever else you're playing with he did say something like this i'm paraphrasing i'm not sure if it's the exact quote but he did sort of make us sound like we're just children playing with stupid toys and he's just trying to get everyone's votes And yeah, I mean...

And that was the speech where he was demanding their money. That was the speech where he's like, crypto people, give me your money. Let me run with your money. And like you said... If you listen to the same speech once again, you're going to realize that he opened it by saying what happened in Israel. And then he spent a lot of time talking about stuff which is completely unrelated to his role at that conference. Also, if you listen to the speech by... What's his name? Kennedy, RFK, Jr. He tried to kiss our assets for like 30 minutes and he spoke like he's on a Bitcoin podcast and talked about being orange-pilled and falling down the rabbit hole and appointing James Lowry to, you don't have a ministry of defense.

I think it's a defense secretary or something. But my point is that it was too much. It was so sugar-coated or orange-coated or whatever you want to call. it. And then Trump came and he showed us that he doesn't care about any of this, but people cheered for him anyway. I think even Elon Musk fell for the illusion that he's able to buy his president. And he believed that he's going to have someone that he can manipulate and control, and then he got his ass kicked and he got kicked out from the White House. Like literally, he had a black eye when he was sort of stepping back from his Doge initiative. So if Elon Musk cannot pull this off, with all the resources and the money that he has, what makes David Bailey think that he can?

Or what's the name of the guy from Masari? I think he was the one that sort of sealed the deal for the entire industry. And the Winkelvost twins, they're also playing along with this, and it's just weird. It's a phase. I think even Mark Zuckerberg is trying to play along, and... I think his presidency will end and everything will reset to whatever it was before. I'm not even sure if it will reset to the Biden era, maybe to the Obama times or whatever, but he will be forgotten, which is possibly his biggest concern. He's doing his best. He said he's running for the legacy or whatever. He started with a promising administration where he put together like the smartest people in the conservative camp.

He slowly but surely phased them all out, like even his biggest supporters don't support him anymore. And it's just weird at this point. I think he revealed how the game works much better than other presidents before him. And I'm not going to get political here. This is about Bitcoin. I just hope it's weird, right? I'm going to a conference next week in Singapore and the headliner is Eric Trump. this guy. What did he ever do for this space? Did he ever accomplish anything? That he, like, of course, he co-founded the World Liberty Financial Ponzi. And that's sort of a milk that they're, a cow that they're milking dry. But it's weird. It's like we have to also please the Trump family to whatever.

I'm also aware of someone who was trying to get some favors from Trump, like forgiving of his... If I say it specifically, it's going to single out the individual. But what I know is that, and what I can say is that someone was told that in order to receive some legal favors, like a pardon or whatever, from Trump, he's going to have to buy some shares or tokens or whatever from World Liberty Financial. So... was the bifenex guy i'm not gonna confirm or deny what's his name thomas but i i don't think it was a bitfinex it was a drunk guy justin law bought a bunch of the coins or just there's the other guy that was the other guy that was the biffinx or binax as well bought a lot of coins got a pardon got a pardon by the also arthur hayes from bitmax backdoor car backdoor pardons but i do agree gladda if anything trump's shown us uh with his nihilism with his nothingness and his utter belief in nothing.

People are always saying, oh, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Or as they learned in Dick Tracy, the enemy of my enemy is my enemy. It doesn't mean anything if Trump's on your side or against your side. He's always on his own side. And I think people are starting to realize that and are seeing a little bit of it. And again, what can you do with a nihilist? What can you trade with them? What can you negotiate? They believe in nothing, Lubowski. But we're running out of the time. Well, he's what you call in the U.S. a lame duck. So he's not going to get reelected. His movement will probably die as soon as he leaves office. And once again, this is the thing that hurts someone like him the most because he was hoping he's going to have a huge impact and his legacy will live on.

He was hoping he was going to be the next Ronald Reagan, who sort of changed or reshaped the entire party around him. But I think the opposite is going to happen because political parties have to adapt. and I don't think his ideas or approach were successful at anything, which means the party will have to distance itself from Donald Trump. So I look forward to seeing where they're heading with this. I honestly hope that, like, this is just my rant about modern or future politics. We usually have a right-left dichotomy, which has worked, but is very 19th century rooted in the philosopher of a time that we don't live in anymore. I think the next regimes will be much more focused on data because there is so much data about our behavior and there are so many ideologies that assume that you don't know anything about individual.

So you assume like some large ideas about what you should do about people you know nothing about. But now we're going to have a world where we know a lot about what people do and you can sort of generalize using data. So I think maybe that we're going to head into that direction where we have data about people and we make politics according to that data. Well, that's an incredibly optimistic technology-driven belief there, Vlad. I hope it comes true. We have seen in the past in the United States that certainly if the Republicans take over, it swings back to the Democrats at the midterms. If the Democrats take over, it swings back to the Republicans.

seems to self-regulate so hopefully this will happen at the midterms and they will be seated in january we'll have to see what happens uh but we're running out of time uh just wanted to say briefly it's not a sponsorship they didn't give us any money but check out remove paywall dot com uh like three or four of the articles this week i could not read because they bounced up a paywall i just want to read one article i don't want to subscribe right i'm just in and out uh remove paywalls dot com has a couple of mirrors internet archive type things that will get you to read the article you want to read. So check out, remove paywall. Also, we're out of time.

So let's see. It's go to predictions or story of the week. Stefan Kinsella, are you ready with a prediction or a story week? Or just tell us what you've been up to lately, what you've got coming up. Okay. Prediction. The Austrians will continue to become more pro-Bitcoin. You know, in the beginning, the Austrian economics, I'm talking about mainly the Misesians, the Rothbardians, the Mises, the two types. Some of them were skeptical in the beginning of Bitcoin because they said it violated the regression theorem. It wasn't gold. It wasn't physical. And those seemed to have been winnowed out over time, except for my good friend Gido Holzman, who gave a speech in Turkey two weeks ago when I was there for the Property and Freedom Society Conference.

And he argued that he explained why he viewed that it's impossible for Bitcoin to ever become money. we shall see if Guido is a lone voice in the wilderness or if he turns out to be right. But I have a feeling that he's a minority voice. Well, I know we'd love to have them on board. It seems like they should have been with us for a while. And definitely check out the archives here on the World Crypto Network. Our friend Max Hillibrand went to many libertarian conventions, the Mises Convention and others, and I think spoke with them philosophically about Bitcoin. Hopefully his work helped convince them as well. Thanks, Stefan. Vlad Costa, do you have a prediction or a story of the week or what you've been up to?

Go ahead, Vlad. I don't have any specific prediction, except that we're in October, so supposedly the prices will go up and up only. We can only hope for the best. Otherwise, we're screwed once again, but we got to hope for the best. My story of the week is that I will be releasing a new magazine, which is called Bitcoin Takeover Forks with an exclamation point. And it explores every upgrade that Bitcoin has done. Every UTXO fork that Bitcoin has, actually not each one of them because there's a lot of junk there from 2017, like nobody tracks Bitcoin Diamond anymore or whatever. It was just a thing of its era. but the major ones that are still out there, like Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, the eCash that was created by the creator of Bitcoin Cash, Amari.

There's also Bitcoin Gold, which tried to do mining without A6. I mean, there are some lessons to be learned from these. And also the code-based forks, because we have light coin, we have Dogecoin, we have name coin, we have what else, Zcash, dash, D-Cred, they're still around, they're still being developed to some degree. And they are all forks of the code that Satoshi gave us. Namecoin was actually sort of supported from afar by Satoshi. He was encouraging people to merge mine it. So it's interesting, and I'm going to have all of them in one magazine, which I think is going to have 120 plus pages. And I hope people will like it. I will make it free for people to read.

but if you want like a hard copy, I'm going to bring them, I think, to Amsterdam next month in November. And also BitFest, which is Nandy's event. If you guys are going to be there, I'll print some magazine copies for that and bring it to you guys. That's very cool. It sounds like a great magazine and a great history of Bitcoin Forks. Looking forward to it. Ben Arc, do you have a prediction or a story of the week or what you're up to? Go ahead, Ben. yeah bitfest looking forward oh can you enable sharing i want to get bitfest up there this will be a great conference so um if you enabled it yeah cool yeah so we have bitfest um which is a conference in manchester which is going to be our new capital in the UK with Andy Burnham.

But they did an absolutely phenomenal conference last year. Everyone who came away from the conference, they said it felt like a proper Bitcoin conference with Bitcoiners. There's my ATM. There's the Fossa. Nice. Thomas, there you were. There was me. There was you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That it's a proper Bitcoin conference and it's not a corporate conference. And yeah, it's just made by great Bitcoiners, and that's in Manchester in the UK, and that's on the 19th, 22nd November. Vlad's going to be coming, which is great news. And there is also a Noster day at Bitfest, which I'm really looking forward to. There's a Noster hackathon, which we're going to be involved in with L&Bits.

I'm really looking forward to. It's one of the only conferences I'm going to this year, because it's great. And then a couple of things I've been working on between now and the last time. I was on the show. did finally after trying for many years um i managed to get bitcoin payments into quake js which is pretty sick so you can play quake i have no idea how to um yeah i need to make a better looking URL but you can you can create a quake game a quake js game you can pick a map um and then you can charge uh so you get five sat five lives for a hundred sets And then you can actually put in a creator fee as well, so you could charge 5% and then have that go to your lightning address.

So you can put my lightning address here. And oh, was it this one here? And then if you click on it, it'll load up the assets for the arena. Seems to be loading pretty quick. So I might actually demo this in a second if it loads, whether or not it kills my internet. Oh, I think it killed my internet. Can you still hear me? We can still hear you, Ben. but he might not be able to hear us double go ahead ben anymore looks like ben uh flew too close to the sun there i'm not sure if we can get his share off the screen uh or not all right so thanks so much ben hopefully we'll be back uh we do have a sad uh remembrance today although i am many months late on this.

I'm about five months late. I acknowledge my lateness. But I just heard over the weekend that the ugly old goat, Conrad, Jules Braun, had passed away. He was a great man. He talked about Bitcoin. He promoted it at his own conferences. He spent his own money to allow people to speak about Bitcoin. Then he did a great job recording it and put it on the internet. It's really sad. He was a big fan of Mad Bitcoin. He really liked what I did with the show, and he hosted me on the Bitcoin cruise. I got to go down to Ensenada and go to his house and meet his wife and his family. And Ugly Old Goat was just a great guy, a big fan of Bitcoin, a big fan of economy and silver coins and gold coins.

And we have just a really brief remembrance of Ugly Old Goat that the computer put together. Here's just a three-minute video remembering our friend, ugly old goat. I'm going to be. Guys, it's not about me. It's not about the ugly old goat. It's really about you. I define where we are right now. The next big move. Builder, Builder, Builder, buildy, sound money, sound money, Hodle, Hoddle, Hoddle, Dave, save, Dave, build a, builder, build a, sound money. Well, I thought that was really nice and nice remembrance of our friend, ugly old goat, big supporter of Bitcoin. Big supporter of Mad Bitcoins in this show. Vlad, did you have any interactions with Goat or any remembrances of him?

Maybe online or... Sort of put me on the spot here. I had to look it up. We were following each other on Twitter. I did exchange, according to Grok, a bunch of tweets with him about arbitrary data. Sort of sucks that he didn't live to see what happened to... the knots fork bip on 10 yeah there's a lot more in this biography i don't feel i have time to read i'd like to do a separate show about ugly old goat i've talked to wang galt online we're hoping to get it together and just to have some more remembrances of him and like vlad said part of his the end of his life was spent in that um i think very unrewarding knots versus spam debate um that whole thing uh it didn't seem like it went well for him.

One of his last tweets was, I am blocked by both sides. So I think it was kind of a sad ending to a person who really, I think, built a lot of Bitcoin community. He hosted a lot of people who might not have gotten a chance to speak. And then he recorded them and put them online forever. If you like or don't like their speeches, it's still, it's amazing an accomplishment. Are you going to put together a biography for him, aren't you? That'd be a great biography. He was a great dude. And he was, like, heavily involved in Bitcoin and kind of into the when bitcoin was was weird and and yeah he's a he's a good dude i mean i tried to him a few times on the show and uh he was just all out just a nice fella and he supported a lot of bitcoins and he was also just sort of very wise as well um when it came to to bitcoin but yeah he was a good dude his sad to him go and it's quite sudden as well yeah i think well he was it was about 76 so it's always hard when you're in the 70s.

We do have a little bit more biography available right here at, there's a long address, but it talks about how he was on my show there doing the first computer interview. His first computer, he said, was an electric typewriter, the IBM with the multi-ball, and there's a little bit, we'll lose our copyright unless I can mute. They took away the ability to mute YouTube videos, but we did a great on-a-boat parody video here you can see where is ugly didn't he used to organize he used to organize the he used to organize the cruise didn't he yeah he did the uh the bitcoin cruise yeah for we got to go once uh to mexico here we go we've got it without the sound so we can not get flagged um but yeah i had a really fun time goofing around on a boat uh thanks to ugly uh never been on a cruise ship before so didn't know what to do figure you have to shoot this on a boat video uh there's ugly right there but then it cut away trying to get him on the thing but uh there we are goofing around they were the good old they were the good old days having a good time weird bitcoin's an ugly old goat so yeah oh god bless him and he had a we interviewed him on our poolside interviews in las vegas from tones conference uh dan was there we talked to him about a yacht chain and our fire offering where we're going to light all the yachts on fire um and like ben said he launched the working man bitcoin cruise i had another conference later in insinada he paid for these conferences all himself i don't think he made any money there's me at the conference and uh it was really fun to go and uh i wish i could have gone to more of them it was kind of tough it was during the covid times uh he was also he was also legit like low key an amazing trader too like he was able to work up a pretty big stack from yeah He was, yeah, I remember, yeah.

Yeah. By the way, Thomas, notice not to get political again, but twice in this episode, we've talked about copyright, something related to that, your paywall thing, and also your concern that your video you want to play would be violate YouTube's policies and all of that's, of course, because of and driven by copyright. So we live in a world permeated with intellectual property, and we're just so used to it, It's everywhere. It's like the sixth sense. I see IP everywhere. It is sad to see how quickly YouTube was so free in the beginning. It was just people talking to each other and things like that. But now when I watch the serious YouTubers, I don't care that much about my ads.

I don't even think they're turned on. But the serious ones, they won't say the words. And I'm going to get as flagged if I say the words. But they won't say like sex or suicide or like a lot of other very common English words. or something like un-lifing. Yeah, they'll bleep it. They'll bleep it and they'll blur it on the screen even. They're afraid. And we're adults here. This is an adult show. They wanted to say DRUGS. I mean, it's crazy the things you can't say no. And it's the strangest thing because we've seen it as a medium. I mean, I was here when this was the free place. This was the not the TV and you go on TV. They can't say curse words. They can't talk about hot topics, whatever.

People on YouTube could. And then now all the professional people really hiding from this they won't say the word it's almost it's almost it's almost it's almost it's almost it's almost like we we as the users need to take the internet back with all these cryptographic tools and protocols which we've been building and yeah we will i think we do and i think that's a good note to end on one we can all agree and certainly uh you know shout out to ugly old goat uh it was great to have them on the show is a great guy and uh thanks to vlad and stephen and ben for joining us today but oh we're out of time until next time bye bye bye bye bye bye