Health Ranger - Mike Adams - Decentralize TV – Ashton Addison: Bitcoin Crash, Surveillance Coin Fears & the AI-Crypto Power Shift

Feb. 19, 2026 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams

01:36:13

Decentralize TV – Ashton Addison: Bitcoin Crash, Surveillance Coin Fears & the AI-Crypto Power Shift

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Sick Of Bitcoin? 00:04:44
	So what is Bitcoin today, you think?
	You know, that it's it's not peer-to-peer digital cash any longer.
	Most people don't even have self-custody, right, Todd?
	I mean, this is what drives us all bonkers.
	It's like, who are the idiots leaving it on the exchanges, you know?
	But what is it today?
	I can answer.
	Yes.
	Can you?
	Do you see that cough drop there before you answered that?
	Digital surveillance, Michael Saylor Ponzi scheme.
	That's what I think it is.
	The Powers IV may want to try and liquidate them because it will hurt not just the microstrategy holders, but it will hurt Bitcoin if one of top holders is liquidated.
	that will change the currency for a long time.
	Welcome to today's episode of Decentralized TV here on Brighteon.com, the free speech network.
	And I'm Mike Adams, and thank you for joining me today.
	And, you know, last time I interviewed Salim Ismail, and we were missing our co-host, Todd Pittner, because he was stuck on some island somewhere with his wife.
	He was taking a vacation and got stuck on vacation, which sounds horrible, actually.
	I don't know, but he joins us today.
	The problem is he was screaming at the airline all the way back and he lost his voice.
	So welcome, Todd, but your voice is really hurting here.
	My voice is hurting.
	Sorry, everybody, but we're just going to suffer through it because, you know, Mike gave me the opt-out saying, Todd, you don't have to do this.
	And I said, I work wounded.
	You know, we're going to deliver the goods here.
	But I think I just got sick of vacation, Mike.
	And my body heard me and said, well, we'll just behave like you're sick.
	So how long were you there for, actually?
	We were there for.
	It was six nights.
	And then when we were heading to the airport on the seventh, we were informed that United shut down all flights everywhere.
	There was like something in their code in their system, and it was a two-day delay.
	Whoa.
	So we couldn't reschedule for the next day.
	And then the next day was our DTV day where we'd record.
	And so I'm like, God, I'm going to miss it because I'll be flying back because I timed the vacation based upon our DTV schedule.
	And oh, man.
	So that's the power of like cyber hacking or whatever happened.
	It screwed the whole schedule.
	Exactly.
	So, and it was just, it kind of sucked.
	And, you know, this was our 20th anniversary.
	So I dropped some good coin on where we went, right?
	Yeah.
	So to go back from the airport was very expensive because I didn't get the earlier rates.
	I had to pay the premium for the next two nights.
	And anyway, I'm literally, I was sick of vacation.
	I was just, it threw me such a curveball.
	I was so out of sorts.
	So it is nice to be back.
	I'm really looking forward to our guests today, Mike.
	And I do sincerely apologize to everybody.
	It's just, you know, about my voice.
	Well, look, you can't control it.
	And just for the record, I want the audience to know, I did not force you into this today.
	No, you didn't.
	No.
	You know, it's like Take care of yourself if that's what you want to do.
	But you're a trooper, so you're here and we're going to proceed as long as your voice holds out.
	How's that sound?
	I'll be good through the after party, Mike.
	Okay.
	And even if not, you could start, you could just use sign language.
	You could type it in.
	You could have an AI avatar speak on your behalf.
	I'm the Todd avatar.
	You should just get that ready for next time in case.
	Okay.
	Perfect.
	Like Max Headroom, but we'll call it Todd headroom.
	Yeah.
	You know, I do think I have a program on my computer to where I can modify my voice, but we're not going to figure that out today.
	No, no, no.
	That's fine.
	All right.
	So you ready, Todd, to bring in our special guest today?
Market Cap Manipulation Risks 00:14:58
	Well, you know, after the Bitcoin crash, let's talk about it, Mike.
	Okay.
	All right.
	All right.
	Let's bring him in.
	It's Ashton Addison from Crypto Coin Show.
	That's the name of his very popular channel on YouTube.
	And also he's got a substack called cryptocoinshow.substack.com.
	Welcome, Ashton.
	It's great to have you back.
	You were in studio last time.
	It's been a while.
	A lot's happened since then.
	So welcome back.
	Thank you so much.
	And yeah, a lot can happen real quick in crypto.
	And at least in the last week of January, moving into February, a lot happened in the price of Bitcoin.
	It crashed majorly from pretty much almost 100,000, you know, high 90,000s down to 60,000 at the lowest.
	So, you know, for those that hurts for people that maybe bought the all-time high or, you know, they're trying to trade the market and trade the wrong way.
	Well, what's interesting about that is that, you know, silver crashed right before that.
	Yeah.
	And silver has also recovered some since then.
	But I saw a post from one person who said, oh, you know, I lost 30% in silver.
	And so I sold all my silver and I bought Bitcoin.
	And then I lost 40% in Bitcoin.
	And so he's down to less than half of what he started with in like three days.
	It's like, that's the worst timing ever.
	But that's part of this discussion, isn't it?
	That if you think that you're going to outsmart the whales and the market, you're in for some very expensive lessons, it seems.
	What do you say to people who suffered some losses right now?
	What's the strategy?
	You always have to zoom out and look at the big picture.
	And the silver crash, minus over 30% in one day was crazy.
	But it had pretty much retraced the gains from a month before.
	It was up 10% in a day, then another 10%.
	And it was like, in the grand scheme of things, it's still up majorly, like 2.5X from the beginning of last year.
	And with Bitcoin, the market cap is still so small.
	You're so early.
	And looking at the long-term picture, the amount that dropped in silver relative to the market cap of Bitcoin would be the equivalent of Bitcoin going to zero.
	So a small drop in Bitcoin is really nothing when you compare it to the market cap of silver.
	That drop was like more than all of the cryptocurrencies combined.
	So really, when you look at apples to apples, it's not that big of a deal.
	And this has happened many times in Bitcoin before.
	It always goes up and breaks new all-time highs and continues going after they shake out the leverage traders and the retail people who always buy at the top, thinking that it's going to keep going.
	And then it crashes and then they sell exactly as you mentioned.
	They sell, their hopes are dashed.
	And that's what they want them to do.
	And that's all part of the market manipulation in crypto.
	So Todd, I'll ask you to join in here in a second.
	One of the things I want to ask you about today, Ashton, and it might be a little bit of pushback, is that what if this time really is different?
	Because people are realizing more and more that Bitcoin isn't private.
	You know, it's, it's, it's a, through the CBDCs and the way Bitcoin, you know, the blockchain, it's a, some people are calling a surveillance coin.
	And maybe people are looking for something more private and something totally different.
	Hold that thought for a second.
	Let me bring in Todd again.
	Todd, I'm going to try not to stress your voice too much today.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Ashton, just to let you know, I've been trying out for a movie gig playing Lou Rawls.
	I know I look the part, but my voice, I've been training for this.
	So anyway, welcome, Ashton.
	I remember when I bought my first Bitcoin, it was at 20 grand.
	And I remember I was on a vacation in California and when I got back, it was at $4,000.
	Oh, my.
	So yeah, that was my introduction.
	So it is true, you know, that, and I didn't sell at four grand, but I did sell later when it was north of 20 because I was just very nervous.
	So this happens in crypto.
	Welcome to crypto.
	It is the wild, wild west.
	But Mike, you touched on this earlier about, you know, Bitcoin being a surveillance coin.
	And Ashton, I'd love to ask.
	So Bitcoin was actually sold as freedom money, yet today it functions as a permanent public audit trail.
	So how did radical transparency quietly become a druid Babylonian bastard tool of control, Ashton?
	Yeah.
	You know, it's always been a double-edged sword that Bitcoin was the currency of freedom and you can control it yourself, but the addresses are transparent and maybe your name is not tied to the specific address, you know, right on like it is on your on your bank account, but it pretty much can be with the amount of chain analysis companies that are multi-billion dollar conglomerates that once you make any transaction that ties it anywhere,
	they can tie it all together and be like, okay, we know all your wallets now.
	And then creating the ETF on top of that, you know, sort of push people away from using spot Bitcoin.
	That's allowed them to manipulate the price and control it a lot easier.
	I don't think necessarily that it's going to go to zero, but they definitely can control it going up and down a lot easier than on the spot exchange because the market cap is so small, as we mentioned, relative to silver and these other companies.
	Let me interject, because I agree with what you just said.
	It's important that silver has long been manipulated through the same mechanism, which is the ETFs and the paper trades.
	We know that JP Morgan and the other Boolean banks, they can drive silver down by selling paper.
	For a long time, Bitcoin wasn't subjected to that kind of manipulation, but now it clearly is.
	So now there's so much, not just rehypothecation, but the virtualization of Bitcoin that very few people, relatively few people, are actually buying the coin itself.
	They're buying some virtual version of it now.
	But anyway, I just want to interject that.
	Go ahead.
	So I wanted to insert my second question because it's perfect for what you're talking about.
	So, Ashton, rapid fire question here.
	Okay.
	Are all Bitcoin ETFs bullshit?
	Yes or yes, and why?
	Yeah, well, definitely.
	You know, if you look, if I think maybe a lot of people that buy, they said, I own Bitcoin now because I own IBIT shares or whatever.
	You don't own Bitcoin.
	Somebody else owns it.
	And they've given you a piece of paper that says, we may or may not give it to you, probably not, if you actually ask for it.
	And yeah, it's people, you know, they always hoped that it would be for the greater good overall because it would get into the hands of old money that only has their capital in the stock market.
	And they would push Bitcoin up.
	But really, it just pushed it up to the market cap that it was just prior to the ETF listings.
	And it's sort of like what you mentioned about 20,000 and then it goes down.
	And then when it goes back up, you're like, okay, I've waited many years to finally break even.
	I'm going to get out because I don't want it to go back down again.
	And that's what we saw with the Bitcoin all-time high.
	It was pretty much like, you know, from 123 up to all the way down and then 126.
	It's like, okay, we'll pretty much gain nothing since the last cycle.
	So yeah, it's definitely a long game.
	And the part about holding on for the long term is that the big money, they can afford, they always have long-term investment horizons because they already have money.
	They don't need to get rich quick.
	They can afford to keep it down for years and years while you're struggling and hoping that Bitcoin will be your savior until you have to pull out.
	Right, right, right.
	Okay.
	And we, I'm throwing this out right up front because this is what's been in the news following the Epstein files released by the DOJ.
	Of course, Howard Lutnik is named multiple times in the files in some possibly disturbing contexts.
	And it's being widely said that he lied about his ties to Epstein.
	Of course, he's tied to Tether.
	And Tether, of course, is the USDT stablecoin that actually, I think, purchases most of the Bitcoin that's purchased now.
	Perhaps you know the numbers better than I do.
	But my question to you is: are these kinds of ties and this kind of information now, is this creating actual doubt in the minds of some people who used to never have any kind of FUD in their heads?
	You know what I mean?
	Like, is this a new level of FUD that is getting traction?
	What are you hearing?
	Yeah, the Epstein release is definitely interesting.
	And, you know, I don't think it's changed the perspective of cypherpunks and the Bitcoin Maxis.
	They still have hope that through the decentralization of it, nothing can really be changed unless you have over 95 or 99% approval.
	But on top of that, there were some emails that, you know, with Jeffrey Epstein where back in 2011 or so with Adam Back and one of the other core developers.
	And I think Jeffrey was going to put 500 million into Bitcoin when it was a dollar or less.
	That would be like Satoshi level investment.
	So he knew about it from the beginning.
	And my friend actually brought this up to me and he said, Roger Ver was never mentioned in the files.
	And that's why, in part, why he went and made Bitcoin cash because he wanted to take the control away from the rumors that the CIA had created Bitcoin or the NSA.
	And no one knows for sure who Satoshi is.
	But it was interesting to see that the emails also involved the Bitcoin Core Foundation very, very early on.
	Yeah, yeah, exactly.
	And you mentioned Roger Veer, who I've been an advocate of his, you know, his book, Hijacking Bitcoin.
	And of course, the blockchain size wars were really pivotal.
	And I, you know, because as we all know here, the original vision of Bitcoin was to be used usable as cash in everyday transactions.
	But because of the blockchain size restrictions that were decided on by the consensus, that sort of prohibited Bitcoin from becoming the cash that it was envisioned to be.
	And I think that's why we ended up seeing Bitcoin Cash launched as a totally different fork.
	But then we saw the transition that Bitcoin is digital gold.
	And then completely offset, really.
	Yeah, title of the white paper of peer-to-peer electronic cash.
	They were saying gold.
	Maybe back in the day when there wasn't any fiat, we were exchanging pieces of gold, but it really wasn't convenient.
	And that's when you explained, it seems maybe easier to explain it to people to say it's digital gold for people who don't know, but it really doesn't have the same purpose at all as peer-to-peer electronic cash.
	So what is Bitcoin today, you think?
	It's not peer-to-peer digital cash any longer.
	Most people don't even have self-custody, right, Todd?
	I mean, this is what drives us all bonkers.
	It's like, who are the idiots leaving it on the exchanges?
	But what is it today?
	I can answer.
	Yes.
	Can you?
	Do you need a cough drop there before you answer that?
	Digital surveillance, Michael Saylor Ponzi scheme.
	That's what I think it is.
	Saylor has seemed a little bit more desperate than usual.
	Yeah, he was in the negative, I think, 12 billion at some point here.
	I think his average buys are in the low 70s, around 72,000, 73,000.
	When they drop to 60, they keep finding ways to slice and dice shares to be able to raise more money and lower their average price.
	But yeah, there's a lot of people that for some reason hugely believe in his vision.
	They'd rather purchase MicroStrategy stock than Bitcoin, which is a little crazy when you can just own Bitcoin.
	Yeah, that does seem crazy because his business doesn't do anything other than buy Bitcoin.
	I mean, that's the whole business model.
	Yeah, for sure.
	So yeah, it's we'll see.
	We'll see.
	And, you know, the powers that be may want to try and liquidate them because it will hurt not just the micro strategy holders, but it will hurt Bitcoin if one of the top holders is liquidated.
	That will change the currency for a long time.
	True.
	True.
	Okay.
	Todd, are you about to jump in?
	Yeah.
	So I want to do a public service announcement here.
	And because there are people who are crypto curious that might want to be able to get in.
	And there is, you know, Mike, I talk a lot about the two percenters.
	Those are the people that watch our show.
	But of the masses, the 98 percenters that take their download from the mainstream, man, oh man, we saw a ton of Coinbase ads during the not-so-Super Bowl.
	And I understand you are not a fan of the world's largest exchange.
	And I'd like you to explain to our viewers why, Ashton.
	Yeah, the Baxter Boy sing-along to Coinbase was pretty funny.
	And maybe it'll get those 98%ers involved.
	And if that's what it takes to buy, you know, $100 and then withdraw it and realize the value of holding your own money, so be it.
	But as an exchange, I'm sure they've been in bed with the traditional system since the beginning.
Coinbase's Layer Two Stranglehold 00:15:55
	If you're going to go to any exchange to get Bitcoin, not only do they help hold the Bitcoin for the ETFs, they're tied in there.
	They're holding your Bitcoin if you buy it on there.
	And not only are the fees are some of the highest as well, if you're trying to save, if you're trying to penny pinch and buy small amounts.
	But also, they had some major issues with ransom attacks and losing people's personal information.
	So if you had an account there, I had an account.
	It actually was frozen.
	It was targeted by some Russians or something.
	It was frozen for over two years, three years.
	And I had $100, like I gave it as the example.
	I had about $100 in there and it was attacked maybe because I'm more of a face in the industry.
	It was frozen.
	And then I got it back and I withdrew actually at a loss because it was like $100 to $75 or something.
	But there was actually a public announcement that some ransom attackers had stolen the personal information and said, if you give us a million in Bitcoin, we will give the information back.
	And they said, we're not doing it.
	We don't want to give in.
	And then when all of the customers were like, yeah, we don't want to lose our personal information.
	And because they didn't pay, now people are getting emails, phone calls, and everything.
	Because all of your personal information, if you had an account, it is given away to attackers that was listed on some hacking database.
	And now, especially for the older people who fall into phishing scams easily, they created an account on Coinbase.
	Now they're getting phone calls from teams pretending to be Coinbase to hack them even further into their cold wallets and everywhere else.
	So just a disaster in PR.
	Wow.
	Wow.
	Okay.
	Let me follow up.
	Yeah, go ahead.
	Yeah, one follow-up.
	So if not Coinbase as an onboarding entry point into crypto, what are some alternatives?
	Yeah.
	There's different faucets going from other exchanges to straight peer-to-peer or Bitcoin ATM or find other ways to do non-KYC.
	If you want to go the traditional route and you're in North America and you're like, I don't care about the know your customer, like have my identity, but trust that it will be more secure.
	In terms of security, Kraken Exchange seems to be, I actually interviewed the chief security officer of Kraken, and they have a very libertarian mindset.
	If you look at their company culture, it's like they're pretty hardcore with like self-custody.
	Yeah, we like Kraken.
	That's our preferred platform.
	Yeah.
	And then you also have Gemini, which was from the Winklevoss twins.
	Everything's better than Coinbase, but you can do your own research and see which kind of exchanges that you have there.
	And then there's always Bitcoin ATMs, which everything's going to charge a little bit more.
	If you're trying to find a non-KYC way to accumulate Bitcoin, I think they might charge up to 5% or even more, depending on the ATM.
	You can check it when you go.
	You can easily buy Bitcoin for cash or cards on these ATM machines.
	And then there's always finding somebody that lives their life in Bitcoin and they need cash and you could get it from them directly.
	And maybe you can avoid all that stuff that I spoke about if you can do that.
	So it's different ways.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	Most of them, most of them involve KYC, though, unfortunately.
	And that's true across the board for all the coins that are supported on these platforms.
	Almost everything becomes a surveillance system, which again contradicts the original vision.
	But I want to point out a use case that I think is emerging for all crypto.
	This includes private crypto as well as Bitcoin.
	And that is as an AI bot friendly payment system because AI, you know, I'm an AI developer.
	I code in AI.
	I was coding this morning and vibe coding.
	And AI loves crypto for trading.
	And there are bots.
	Did you know there's a website called like rentahuman.com where bots can rent a human if a bot wants a human to go do something because the bot needs something in the real world.
	So now humans, the new gig economy will be not just driving for Uber or delivering Uber Eats or whatever, but you can actually be rented out by an AI bot that needs you to go do stuff.
	And how will you be paid?
	Probably in crypto because that's what AI can do easily.
	And also Visa, MasterCard, the whole e-commerce system hates bots because usually they're trying to steal.
	But so Ashton, isn't the rise of AI and AI agents and AI personal assistants, isn't this actually a really strong use case for crypto?
	Definitely, definitely.
	Yeah, we're seeing that with D Pin is the industry inside of crypto that deals with decentralized physical infrastructure networks, whether it's autonomous vehicles that they need to have a wallet so that they can pay the charging system or the passenger can pay them.
	D PIN, right now it's focused on IoT devices, being able to make them more smart, integrate AI and do payments.
	And then we're also seeing a surgence of what's called X402.
	Sure, if you've guys heard of that, but it's a native protocol that was sort of built into HTTP and these internet protocols that would allow for payments, but it hasn't really been activated because they didn't really have a way to do it natively through the web.
	It always required banks or having all this onboarding stuff.
	But of course, Coinbase have taken that, a stranglehold on that and they're trying to lead that so that they control it, just like they control one of the top layer twos on Ethereum base.
	But there's definitely, I think X402 will probably be a standard internet native protocol that will be used by the smart devices.
	See, that could be huge because, see, content providers like us, this could enable micropayments for access to content or access to a PDF or a video or a research report.
	And given that a lot of people are spawning AI agents to go out and do the research for them, they could give those AI agents a budget like, hey, spend up to $10 to get this research done.
	And then the AI agent could decide what's the best source of information for the best economical efficiency and go ahead and do those transactions and bring it all back, right?
	Definitely, definitely.
	And we've been seeing that with the growth of the Claude bot, which seems to have all of this human-like power to spend money for people and make decisions for them.
	And I think they're working out the kinks still, you know, of it.
	Yeah, the malware tools kinks.
	Yeah, yeah, that too, where it goes in and deletes your entire computer, but also starts spending money on things.
	I think this, you know, it's hard to tell what's factual and what are made-up stories for humor.
	But I think this one watched an Alex Hormozi video and then paid for his subscription and had spent like a few thousand because it realized that if this guy was going to get smarter, he needed to have this multi-thousand dollar mastermind program.
	And the logic behind these AI agents is improving.
	Yeah, well, I mean, so on one hand, you don't want to give any AI agent total access, admin-level passwords, all your API keys, everything else, and your credit card.
	That's insane.
	But if you have, like, for example, Dr. Robert Malone recently put out a list of 109 glyphosate science papers.
	So I just took that list and I handed it over to Claude, Claude Code.
	And I said, you know, go out and find all these papers and bring them back and extract all the text and do these things.
	And it spawned a bunch of agents and it did that.
	It got like 54 out of 109 within 20 minutes.
	And that's the research basis for my article coming up on glyphosate.
	And that was free.
	Imagine if I could give it a budget, you know, to go through paywalls or whatever.
	But that's coming.
	And crypto is perfect for that.
	I agree.
	I agree.
	And Claude Code seems to be the top contender for the smartest individuals that are coding, at least the ones that are posting on X. Cloud Code has become the go-to.
	100%.
	No, it's a miracle worker.
	Just to interject this, because Opus 4.6 got released and I've been coding on 4.6 for a few days.
	And it's just, it's solving and finding critical bugs that the other agents couldn't find at all.
	I mean, it's solving in minutes what I couldn't get solved for weeks.
	So it's insane.
	Yeah, it really is.
	It's a game changer.
	But it doesn't have access to the, you know, like as you mentioned, gathering these reports, you know, if you ask the questions that are in those reports to ChatGPT, it's not going to go look in those reports because of who knows the censorship or it doesn't have it in there.
	And that's why I also use your AI system that uses the banned books and all of the other research.
	Yeah.
	Bright answers.
	I'm guessing you won't find that in the centralized AI database.
	Yeah, you're right.
	And brightanswers.ai is what you're referring to.
	That's our AI engine.
	It's very good.
	As you've probably noticed, it does deep research.
	And we're adding a lot more curated data to it all the time.
	I mean, hundreds of thousands of books and science papers continue to get indexed into it.
	But even then, we don't go out and search the internet, you know, because that's a whole different technology area of bots.
	But I can imagine that like there might be a day where if this X402 becomes, you know, very popular, we could say, hey, if you ask our engine for free, you're going to get this basic level answer.
	If you pay one penny via this micropayment system or whatever, a nickel, you know, and then it's going to do this other level of research and that's going to be totally worth worth it.
	And then there can be a like an API handshake with autonomous AI agents.
	So humans don't have to even be the users.
	Definitely.
	And I want to bring this back to crypto in the micropayments use case because the way that Bitcoin works right now, if you wanted to pay one cent or 10 cents to unlock a paper that pays the artist or the author, you can't really do that without paying a transaction fee of a couple dollars to the Bitcoin network.
	Just unfeasible for micropayments.
	And then if you look into stable coins, which more likely the X402 will be using stable coins or non-Bitcoin payment, it'll be Ethereum, layer two or something.
	Then, depending on the blockchain, Ethereum could be a quarter.
	It could be five cents, but it could be over a dollar.
	I think with this recent crypto crash, the price of Ethereum transactions actually went up, surprisingly.
	Maybe everyone's selling or trading.
	It was around a dollar.
	Also not feasible for micropayments.
	If you look at the layer twos like base, then you're getting into decimals of a cent, which is great.
	But now, you know, base sort of controlling your payment again.
	Right, right.
	But are there other coins or networks other than like ECR20 coins that can cost you only a fraction of a penny at this point, other than the layer two solutions you mentioned?
	For sure.
	There's stable coins and then there's non-stable.
	And in terms of stable coins, most of them are on Ethereum layer twos.
	And those layer twos have different levels of decentralization.
	Base being one of the most centralized.
	In terms of liquidity and speed and being able to move your stablecoin to that network, Arbitrum and Optimism are more decentralized and have the ability to make payments.
	And then there's always other blockchains, which you have to find your way to from Bitcoin or stable, whatever you have, swap the coin into that coin, which is on a different blockchain.
	And it's harder right now with the decentralized infrastructure to move from one chain to another.
	That's why these centralized exchanges got so popular because they're sort of handling it all in the back end.
	But it is possible.
	And then there you could use other chain.
	There's many coins you could use that have little to no transaction cost.
	And there's always privacy coins as well, which the transaction costs are all quite low.
	So, okay, one more thing.
	And then Todd, turn it back to you.
	But remember, we interviewed a guy from Dash, I think.
	And the thing about Dash is that it was really fast.
	And like Litecoin is also really fast.
	And it seems like the AI bots need something that's not just low cost, but also very fast.
	And Bitcoin is not fast.
	You're waiting for confirmations.
	And even Monero, the same problem, right?
	And also downloading Monero's initial transaction ledger is massive.
	So is Bitcoins.
	So what do you say, Ashton?
	What can be fast and cheap?
	I know.
	It's like, can we have the best of everything?
	Yeah.
	You know, it's tough.
	I think right now there's no perfect answer for what is, that's what they call the blockchain trilemma.
	And that's been the trade-off for a decade now.
	You're trading off between speed, cost, and security.
	And you can't really have all of them.
	If you have something that's super decentralized, then you're sacrificing one of the other two.
	It's sort of like there's a toggle and you put two of them and you try to click the third, one of them, one of them turns off.
	So there's no perfect cryptocurrency.
	Otherwise, it would probably be the only cryptocurrency at the moment.
	Okay.
	Fair answer.
	So Todd, if I pose the same question to you, you know a lot of different crypto projects.
	What do you think is a good answer?
	I covered Epic Cash for years and it had it up and down, but I have been covering it now for the last year and a half privately.
	And I would say that with all of the development that has been happening by magical somebodies behind the scenes, that I think 2026 is going to be a very exciting year.
	And I think Epic Cash has come as close to any coin to solving the trilemma as is out there.
	Ashton, I'm curious what you would say to that.
	Yeah.
	You know, I've had the Epic Cash team on different contributors on the CryptoCoin show over the years as well.
Why Privacy Coins Matter 00:13:02
	And they're doing a pretty good job with maintaining the privacy and the integrity of the network.
	I did see recently they had sent me an update that it was actually the coin was listed on non-kyc.io, which the name sounds pretty promising to be able to, if you have a lot of these exchanges, you sort of have to have crypto already.
	You know, if you have fiat, that's a whole nother story of like getting in without KYC.
	But if you have other crypto, being able to swap into privacy coins is fairly easy.
	And they definitely are, it is fast and it's very cheap as well.
	It's just a matter of having getting access to the coin and then also the service provider, you know, the author of the book accepting that currency.
	Now, I have a follow-up point on all of this, which is that you see so many people are paying for AI services now: AI video generation, AI text generation, you know, everything, image generation, text-to-speech, audio generation.
	It seems to me like a lot of these APIs that exist out there for these various services, or even companies like Open Router that just route API calls to a bunch of different engines.
	It seems to me that this is just perfectly made for crypto.
	Again, but the crypto would have to be fast because I can't, you know, if I'm if I'm querying it, if I have my code that's querying through an API to do text generation, I want that text now, right?
	I don't want to add even 10 seconds wait time to that thing.
	So it seems to me that speed is going to become the bottleneck issue for the automated AI use of cryptocurrency.
	And also the providers of the compute or the images, the video, whatever, are going to have to start accepting crypto.
	Have you ever, has anybody started doing that yet, to your knowledge, Ashton?
	No, with the regulation that happened in the U.S. last year with the Genius Act, more businesses that are larger have sort of been given a green light to start using stable coins as an alternative to fiat currency.
	And, you know, I actually was on, like, there were some beauty products I was buying for my wife and they started accepting cryptocurrency.
	I was like, oh, this is, you know, in the last month or two, I was like, oh, this is impressive.
	Actually, of course, I'm going to utilize that if I can.
	So I was surprised to see that.
	I think it's happening more and more.
	And it will only get bigger as it gets more mainstream, especially with the likes of Circle and USA, Tether, USA coming in and sort of pushing that and realizing, of course, there's benefits to having stable coins over traditional payment rails because you're getting rid of the 3% surcharges.
	It's faster.
	It's instant settlement.
	So it's definitely happening.
	Well, and let me add one follow-up to that because one of the big questions that I think Todd and I have both heard from people about crypto is: why should I get into crypto if I don't know how I'm ever going to use it?
	And this kind of answers that question.
	Like, what if the future is going to involve a lot of compute?
	And even as an individual or in your job or career or as a researcher or as a content creator or a podcaster, you're going to need to access a lot of compute that, like I said earlier, is perfectly aligned with using crypto as a payment mechanism because it can be well automated.
	It's just perfect built for AI.
	So this provides that off-ramp use case.
	It's like you never have to go back in the fiat.
	You're going to burn.
	You're going to burn the crypto on the APIs to generate your videos.
	Like, there you go.
	And then, of course, the video, you know, then they have to figure out how to convert all their crypto to pay the power bill for their data.
	Until the power bill, the power company starts accepting stablecoins, then you don't have to leave the ecosystem.
	And that's been the hassle of everybody that has been involved in crypto for 10 years.
	It's like, oh, we got to find bill pay providers that will take this.
	And there's definitely companies, service companies that can do that.
	You can pay your credit card with crypto.
	It's going to cost you a percent or two.
	But there's a service company that's found out, yeah, we can do the offboarding for you.
	You pay us and we'll take a little cut.
	But eventually that will be merged into just the credit card company accepting crypto and paying all of your bills, ideally in crypto.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I wouldn't mind that at all.
	Go ahead, Todd.
	Ideally, in private crypto would be great.
	Yeah, totally.
	So a two-part question, but the first part may take you longer to answer, but I just know I have a follow-up question to it because I really want to talk about the rise of privacy coins and hammer home privacy as a survival requirement moving forward.
	So I want to talk about surveillance beyond the blockchain.
	Can you tell us and our viewers about the company Chainalysis and why many people fear this company and inform us why you argue that the real danger isn't chainalysis, but the wallet itself when reading some of your work today?
	Yeah, you know, Chainalysis, and there's another company called TRM Labs, which I actually had on the show to hear their perspective.
	And they've recently had a bunch more investment.
	You know, they're able to chain together all of your transactions in different wallets, you know, even if you're accepting.
	It's possible on Bitcoin with something called HD wallets to accept payments and the new incoming transaction goes to a separate address each time so that it's not all tied into one public bank account that everyone can see.
	But even so, just look how powerful AI is right now at finding something that took Mike, would take Mike weeks to do it in like a minute.
	Now just apply that to all of your crypto addresses and try, you know, with the power of Palantir and the government being like, find out the addresses of this, of what we need to know.
	It can very easily be done.
	And it's very hard to, you know, if you're trying to secure your, like, for example, if you're trying to secure your gold and it's buried somewhere in the lawn, it will be pretty hard for somebody to guess where that is.
	But when you have it digitally and on the blockchain and it's transparent and, you know, the blockchain is the chain of transactions from the very beginning, there's some kind of chain that leads there to the Bitcoin moving into the address that you own from somewhere else.
	It came from somewhere originally from Satoshi.
	You know, it exists somewhere.
	There is a trail.
	So with these companies, you know, it's, it's, you just, if you're trying to keep your funds safe, whether it's from them or from, you know, what they call the $5 wrench attack, which is being quite popular in Paris right now.
	I'm not sure if you guys have heard of the attacks and kidnappings that have happened.
	They actually canceled, in part, canceled some crypto conferences in Paris that were supposed to happen this month because people in Paris are getting targeted and kidnapped.
	And then what they call the $5 wrench attack, they hold a wrench to your head and say, we know you have wallets and just physically give us the addresses and the private keys, or we're going to beat you up and you'll be gone.
	So that's happened many, many times now.
	There's like a dozen incidents just in Paris.
	Never mind the whole world.
	So, you know, it's a crazy world right now.
	There's chain analysis off-chain and then there's wrench attacks on chain or off-chain.
	Sorry.
	Wrench attacks.
	Man.
	Amazing.
	Amazing.
	Whatever everybody should know, the moral of this story is the only reason why chain analysis exists is because the mother of all crypto, the father of all crypto, whatever, is Bitcoin.
	And it is a transparent blockchain, meaning it's a surveillance chain.
	So these companies exist.
	They're billion-dollar companies to be able to go just harvest data from the blockchain and they know everything about you.
	If you own Bitcoin, they likely know your address unless you have used some privacy methods to be able to wash your Bitcoin, which is possible out there, to where at least you then don't have the Bitcoin associated with you.
	But the 98%ers out there are never going to do that.
	So it is like when you walk into, when you compare the emergence of privacy coins and why they are so important, it is, I'm just going to say it, guys.
	It is you walk into O'Hare, you got to go to the bathroom, you go to the airport bathrooms, and there are the stalls.
	And you have four transparent doors and you're seeing them doing their business, but you have a couple of opaque doors that are the privacy coins where you cannot see in those.
	So does it mean that everybody behind those transparent parent doors are doing something illegal?
	No, they're just going to the bathroom.
	I mean, does it mean that the people behind the privacy coins are doing something illegal?
	No, of course not.
	But that is the narrative.
	That's the Druid Babylonian bastard narrative, which is.
	Go ahead.
	Yeah, Tom, what's incredible, you know, even if you buy something on a credit card, the whole world can't see your credit card statement.
	That's right.
	No, the government can, and then the bank can.
	And the banks do cancel some people, you know, deplatform people because they don't like their politics.
	That's been happening.
	But the whole world can't see your credit card purchases.
	With Bitcoin, they can.
	And, you know, these wrench attacks, that's really pretty disturbing.
	But that's happening in Paris.
	And I'm sure other places I've heard of that happening other places as well.
	But I was just thinking, remember the old game, Rock, Paper, Scissors?
	Sure.
	I think in Texas, we should have a game called the Wrench Glock Belgian Malinois and see how does your wrench stand up against my Glock?
	You know, because these attacks maybe aren't happening in gun-friendly zones as much.
	I don't know.
	And Ashton, you're in Texas too, so you know what I'm talking about.
	But there's a lot of areas like Austin where maybe people are not that well armed and they could get the old wrench to the head attack.
	I guess for the attacker, though, they got to be careful.
	If you bash people too much in the head with a wrench, then they can't remember their seed phrase.
	So You have to be intimidating and threatening, but not actually use the wrench.
	Definitely.
	Yeah, you got to be careful.
	And with AI nowadays, too, it's so easy to do audio impersonation, even full video, live video impersonation.
	You know, if you're somebody can impersonate you and then call your parents and be like, you know what, send me money because I'm lost.
	And, you know, I just need to, I'm stranded.
	I need to catch my flight back.
	You know, send me a few thousand.
	The AI is getting really good.
	You know, I saw some videos on X. You can instantly switch between people of every age and gender.
	And it's so lifelike, you wouldn't be able to tell that it was AI.
	Disturbing.
	Yeah, so true.
	Okay.
	So go ahead, John.
	Yeah.
	So just back to the rise of privacy coins.
	I really want to hammer this home because privacy has really shifted in my mind from a nice to have feature to an existential requirement for personal sovereignty.
	Am I wrong?
	You know, there's been a rise, even in Ethereum, you know, part of Vitalik Buterin's latest talks throughout the second half of 2025 have been around privacy and finding other ways to integrate privacy.
Mimblewimble: The Future of Privacy 00:15:40
	Although I'm sure that would be in optional add-ons, not a privacy first, maybe in the way that these privacy coin creators would hope.
	But there is a twinkle there of, hey, let's add privacy into not Bitcoin would be hard to change, but Ethereum is a little bit more centralized and it's possible to change.
	Well, but also, of course, the governments of the world will never allow crypto that is private crypto to be mainstreamed like the way they advocate for Bitcoin.
	They want KYC tracking of people.
	See, I even think Bitcoin was the stepping stone to what will become the government, you know, the CBDC, which is really just Tether.
	I mean, it's a proxy CBDC for the government.
	And I find it interesting.
	In fact, I wanted to ask you about, you know, Tether gold.
	So you've got these stable coins now.
	You know, Tether's been buying up tens of tons of physical gold.
	They say no one ever audits Tether.
	This is like, trust me, bro.
	But they have a gold stable coin.
	So if you want to hold stable coins priced in gold instead of dollars, to me, that actually makes more sense because the dollar is not stable.
	The dollar is collapsing.
	Gold is more stable than the dollar.
	But there's also like Paxos gold, which I think actually has much more rigorous auditing compared to Tether.
	But what's your take on gold and silver-backed stable coins?
	Yeah, it's funny.
	There's been many, many attempts to create a stable coin or even just a cryptocurrency that's sort of tied to gold.
	And somehow it just hasn't been done successfully that there's one solution, like, okay, this is the great gold-backed stablecoin or gold tied to the price of a coin.
	Tether, they've been around since I remember when Bitcoin was under $1,000 and you were able to use Tether was, it was before USDC and Circle.
	There was pretty much just Tether.
	They've been around.
	And that allowed them to accumulate a lot of Bitcoin and other assets.
	They could essentially print Tether out of thin air and buy Bitcoin with it or buy gold with it.
	So like the Federal Reserve of crypto.
	It's like the creature from Jeffo Island digitized.
	And yet, yet they're still going and they haven't had any issues.
	Do they own Bitfinex?
	I believe they did, and it was tied to it.
	But now that the regulation has come in, they've developed USA Tether, which Bo Hines, who was sort of Trump's crypto guy, was appointed the CEO of USA Tether.
	He left the White House.
	Maybe he knew what was coming and he went all in as the CEO of USA Tether.
	So that's very interesting.
	But in terms of gold, you would probably know best that the leaflets that you have or just holding gold, it's probably safer and more private than trying to mix in privacy coin with gold and stable and stable.
	There's no perfect solution for that yet.
	It hasn't had enough priority building.
	It also, if you think about it, trying to physically audit stored gold and silver necessarily creates centralization and a trust factor, which is the antithesis of the original decentralized vision of self-custody.
	So, you know, digitized gold tied to physical gold somewhere means you have to trust whoever's telling you they have the gold.
	And honestly, I don't trust any of them at this point.
	Yeah, who knows?
	And, you know, with what they say is in the gold vaults, no one really knows the true numbers.
	But we can see the true numbers, at least, of the strategic Bitcoin reserve that the US government has declared as a part of their reserve, which is interesting to see.
	And the plan to maybe reprice the USA's gold, which I believe is still priced at under $100 an ounce from 50, 70 years ago.
	Yeah, I think it's $40 or something.
	Yeah, like, you know, it's like 5,000 now.
	Reprice that to be able to accumulate more Bitcoin.
	You know, they they've done, they, they say a lot that they want to be the crypto capital of the world.
	They've yet to even buy Bitcoin or any other crypto.
	But accumulating Bitcoin doesn't make it more useful.
	So just a government sitting on Bitcoin doesn't do anything for me.
	You know, I mean, it's just another black hole for taxpayer dollars, as far as I can tell, right?
	And what we need is we need these real use cases.
	Like we've been talking about the AI, the AI bots cases, or the APIs for AI inference.
	Those are some really strong use cases for crypto.
	And given that so much of the economy is digitized now, it's in the digital realm.
	Those are some strong use cases.
	So what's it going to take, Ashton, in your view, for this to mature to the point where we really have a functioning, even if it's just a stable coin, heck, even if it's Tether stablecoin, at least we only have to use it for a few seconds.
	You buy it, you burn it, and it's gone.
	You don't have to sit on it.
	So you only have to trust it for 10 seconds.
	I think AI is just leading the way with all of this and AI development.
	And as AI develops and it becomes more developed on the physical AI side, well, what we're going to see with autonomous vehicles, they're already live in Austin, but they don't have wallets.
	They don't have payments.
	You're still using the traditional.
	Combine that with the regulation that happened with stablecoins and then wait a few years.
	Everything's coming quick, probably faster than we think.
	Before 2030, we'll probably be paying cars with crypto that are driving themselves, which is right around the corner.
	But just the combination of the regulation, AI, getting deeper into more physical things that we interact with and that we pay.
	And of course, the AI agents themselves that we're just dealing with, the large language models online, being able to pay in crypto that doesn't require physical devices.
	It's going to come quick.
	We're already seeing as we develop things, I don't know if it'll be microtransaction ready, but at least you can pay with crypto.
	It's becoming more widely adopted because of the regulation, whether that's good or bad.
	Whether it's like whether accumulating Bitcoin from the government, whether it's good or bad, it's going to bring more adoption so that if people want to use those same payment methods, it'll be accepted more widely.
	Okay, I hope you're right.
	Yeah, go ahead.
	I just want to pay in gold backs, man.
	I know.
	I know.
	I just, I want to be able to sell content and services for micropayments.
	That's what I want to do.
	And it's been ridiculously difficult to put that in place.
	It still is so far.
	But go ahead, Todd.
	Yeah, I want to touch upon what you said earlier about some coins that are going to have some, you know, perhaps some opt-in privacy.
	And I just want to call BS on that.
	I don't think that you can do that.
	I don't think privacy as an opt-in, I just believe that's not privacy because that becomes encryption.
	And to me, privacy is by non-existence, which leads us to MimboWimble.
	Can you share with our viewers what is MimboWimble and why is this technology so important to the rise of privacy coins in crypto?
	Yeah, MimboWimble is very interesting.
	And I want to touch on that optional privacy as well.
	But essentially with the MimboWimble technology on some of these privacy coins, the ones that are only private, you know, you can't be not private with the coin.
	It gets more technical because explaining Bitcoin to a non-techie is one thing.
	And then explaining it with the privacy technology, it's like there's no public ledger.
	There's no addresses and there's no amounts that can be seen.
	So it's like, you know, if you already were struggling to understand Bitcoin because you can't physically hold it in your hand, now imagine not being able to see the ledger or wallet addresses or amounts.
	And it gets very opaque, which, you know, if it's good.
	Yeah, exactly.
	But I think, let me, let me just jump in because I think what Todd is looking for, the simplified answer here is that in the Mimblewimble blockchain, the amounts and the from and the to and everything are simply not there.
	They're not encoded as part of the blockchain.
	Whereas what I think, Todd, what you're saying is in other optional, where it's optional to be private or not, the information is there.
	It's just encrypted, which means someday it could be discoverable, right?
	That's right.
	It could be discovered or discovered.
	Like we love Lonero, but that's just obfuscated, right?
	The transaction.
	It's like ring transactions, ring addresses, whatever.
	16 cups and balls.
	And the idea was to get your red ball from me to you, Mike.
	I mix them up and I send them over.
	And if somebody's trying to surveil that, good luck, right?
	Because only you're going to know which ball which cup to look at.
	So Mimbo Wimble, I believe, is the key to private crypto.
	And, you know, it helps us stay digitally off grid.
	It's the invisibility cloak.
	There are no addresses, no amounts, no transaction history.
	It's the digital equivalent, I believe, of burying gold.
	Only you know it exists.
	Yeah.
	No, it is.
	It is.
	And, you know, Grin, which was one of the original privacy coins that uses Mimblewimble and then Epic Cash, as you're well aware, Todd, it was based off of that same technology.
	And it does use the Mimblewimble to be fully private, only private.
	There's no option like there are with Zcash and Monero, which saw huge run-ups in 2025.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And Monero, actually, just in the second week of January, it was $800 and now it's 50%, more than 50% lower than it was not even a month ago.
	So, but yeah, there is, you know, some companies are already accepting it.
	For example, Mulvad VPN, if you've ever seen that, you know, you can pay with Monero.
	I believe Proton Mail.
	They even give you discounts, 10% off if you're paying with crypto.
	You could pay with Monero or you could pay with Bitcoin.
	They do accept it.
	These privacy forward softwares are accepting privacy coins.
	We should call them and tell them they need to be accepting Mimblewimble and Epic Cash.
	That would be high on the list if you want to be privacy first.
	Maybe they don't fully understand the option of privacy.
	But there is a downfall to Mimblewimble, and it is this ping-pong-ping transaction.
	And that's where you have to have both the sender and the receiver have to be in on the exchange.
	So it's like, if I want to send Mike five bucks in cash, I'm going to have to physically give him the cash, and he's going to have to acknowledge it and take it.
	And that transaction is complete.
	With Epic Cash, and believe me, I covered it for three and a half years, the Achilles heel, which is being worked on, but it is that we both have to have our wallets open.
	So Mike, in your example of having bots go out and collect and pay, let's say they paid in Epic Cash.
	They would have to make sure that the recipient had that wallet open to be able to transact.
	Now, because Epic Cash has no data on the blockchain, it is fast, like lightning fast, if both wallets are open.
	So that is the most difficult puzzle to solve, but I know that it is in the process of being solved.
	And when it is, I think, Mike, what you are looking for is going to be possible.
	Absolutely.
	Well, I mean, that's really interesting.
	And what I want to add to this as we're coming up on time for this is I think there's going to be an interesting intersection of AI coding agents and blockchain code creation.
	So, you know, the AI is becoming so capable now that I think as of last Friday, I can now confidently say that Claude Opus 4.6 is better than any human programmer that has ever lived, period.
	There's no question about it.
	And even before that, the Opus 4.5 was better than all programmers except maybe about 200 on the planet, right?
	Now it's better than all of them, period.
	So now the task is not going to be, hey, how do I write this code to solve this problem, Todd, like the Mimblewimble wallet thing?
	The real question is going to be how do I prompt this AI system to work on that problem and burn enough tokens to solve it and write the code, even if I don't totally understand it yet.
	We can use AI for auditing.
	We can use it proof of concept.
	Do you know that they use Claude 4.6 to build an entire C compiler from scratch and they compiled correctly the entire Linux kernel from scratch for less than like $20,000?
	I mean, that is something that probably would require about 100 human years to do.
	And they did it in a few days or something.
	So imagine what that's going to do to crypto.
	Ashton, I'll leave it to you for final comments.
	What do you think about this intersection of AI coding and crypto technology?
	Yeah, it's exciting.
	And decentralized AI has become one of the leading use cases in blockchain because we know AI is not going away like NFTs and these other ones that really haven't caught on.
	Besides tokenization of the financial market, stable coins, real world assets, which require more regulation, AI sort of just go, go, go.
Decentralized AI Revolution 00:14:59
	And creating decentralized AI and AI agents as AI gets better, so will AI agents.
	And then so will that translate to decentralized AI platforms that aren't just as we see with Bitcoin being fully transparent.
	I'm sure whatever you type into OpenAI, you know, many, many people can see and see your code.
	And maybe they're in another country, maybe they steal the code and build the business that you had coded up.
	Or maybe it's the government.
	But let me add this, Ashton.
	So yeah, right now through Claude, like Opus 4.6 that I mentioned, that is cloud-based, right?
	You don't run that locally.
	But what's about to come out is the new DeepSeek from China.
	And that's an open source model with open weights as well.
	So the new DeepSeek model, though, you'll be able to download it and run it locally to where it's just local inference, right?
	And so there's nothing going to China.
	There's nothing going anywhere.
	You don't even need an internet.
	So you can actually write code locally at a clawed code level, most likely is what it looks like.
	That's decentralization right there.
	And U.S. companies are not doing that anymore.
	They're not releasing open source models anymore.
	They haven't for about a year.
	China's doing it.
	China's actually creating decentralization in terms of code production.
	In fact, Quen has a Quen coder model, Quen3 Coder Next, I think is what it's called, that's quite capable.
	But DeepSeek is probably going to be even more capable.
	So, you know, times are changing rapidly.
	Wow.
	Yeah, it's going so fast that, you know, as you said, Opus 4.6 is already better than the best developers in the world.
	But there's no slowing down.
	This is like exponentially better.
	So I can imagine in a year from now, how it's already better than everybody in the world, but then it'll be like 100 times better and then 1,000 times better.
	And things that would have taken centuries will just take like minutes.
	It's going to be insane.
	Yeah.
	And then humans die because they need the energy.
	Mike, I listened to your podcast.
	Not all of them.
	Remember, I also, I always say, not everybody dies, but just the people that don't know what's coming and have no preparation for it.
	I'm an optimist.
	It's like how to survive Skynet.
	And one of the answers is learn how to control AI, by the way.
	That's actually a critical part of it.
	If you don't know how to reason with AI, then what are you going to do when the Terminator robot is in your doorway?
	You need to know how to deal with the machines.
	All right.
	So, Ashton, tell people how they can follow your show and your sub stack.
	Go ahead.
	I'll bring up the screens for you.
	Yeah.
	Thank you.
	Appreciate you guys having me on.
	And, you know, I often do interviews with all different types of Web3 companies from decentralized AI.
	I actually had Dr. Ben Gowertzel on recently, who was the guy who created Sophia Robot, you know, back over 10 years ago, one of the first humanoid AI robots to investors that are major Bitcoin investors.
	Just had Michael Turpin on, who actually called 60K Bottom about two months ago, and he was right on the money.
	We'll see how the rest plays out.
	But every different type of industry and also early stage crypto and Web3 and AI companies that you could potentially invest into at the seed stage.
	And that's always a fun, speculative option that is on there.
	So on crypto, youtube.com/slash crypto coin show.
	Then I also do a more high-level newsletter on cryptocoin show.substack.com that has the highlights of the videos, plus a bit of market analysis high-level on Bitcoin and Ethereum, and also tidbits of what happened in crypto this week.
	They're just bullet points because there's so much stuff.
	It's hard to keep up.
	I try to give bite size for everybody to follow along.
	Okay, last question.
	When are you going to roll out your own AI avatar?
	And when can we interview your avatar?
	That is probably going to happen within the next year.
	I don't want it to, I enjoy doing it myself.
	I don't want it to replace me.
	But I have actually somebody's AI avatar, somebody was pitching me over email.
	They wanted their avatar to come on my show.
	So it exists.
	I don't know how, you know, in the video and audio format, how good it is right now.
	But definitely if you go on, we have a Telegram group.
	If you look deep enough, it's CryptoCoin Chat.
	I do have an AI replica in there.
	You can ask it anything and it knows me.
	So I'm at the text level, but video level, I'm holding off for now.
	Well, Ashton, you know, there is the Asian guy and we're just holding out for the Ashton guy.
	That's all.
	Oh, I've launched a new guy.
	Let me bring up.
	I lost a new guy.
	I got to show you this guy.
	This isn't official yet, but we're launching.
	I loved your description when you were talking about trying to find the voices for your guys.
	They're all gay.
	Yeah, this is our non-gay conspiracy reporter right here.
	His name is Jack Harlow.
	And the voice is great.
	The voice is really great.
	Folks, you can go to brightvideos.com.
	I've rolled out like six or seven avatars to report on different things.
	And I'm keeping it entirely fictional, obviously, not based on real people.
	And by the way, I've decided, Ashton, I'm not going to do an avatar of me.
	I don't want my audience to ever be confused of what they're seeing.
	That's smart.
	Well, it's very confusing right now.
	Often the parents' generation, they're sending us so many videos and YouTube has the worst disclaimer.
	It's so hidden.
	You couldn't even tell that it's AI.
	And every day I got a new video and I'm like, that's not real.
	They think it's real, but the disclaimers are not there.
	People just don't know.
	Almost every video is becoming AI.
	Full YouTube channels that I watch talking about AI, but the guy is AI, but it looks real.
	You can't even tell.
	No, YouTube is about 80% AI now.
	Yeah.
	Well, the internet is going to be 80, 90% AI, and the rest of the internet will die off just like it has since we used to have forums and newgrounds and all of this stuff that no longer exists.
	Now we're stuck on five websites and soon we'll be stuck under one centralized LLM that you ask stuff and it tells you.
	Guys, I wonder if this is going to drive us, and I'm dead serious here, to just check it out at places like YouTube and stuff just because you're like, geez, everything is AI.
	I don't know what to believe.
	So screw it.
	I'm going to go plant another tree.
	Well, that's why in every one of my podcasts, I always try to do something that's clearly fully human because it's so outlandish.
	Right.
	It's like some weird, horrible joke or outburst that's completely inappropriate.
	I'm like, that's my proof of human right there.
	Yeah, we call that the after party, Mike.
	Yeah, but you know how like Bitcoin has proof of work?
	We have to have proof of human.
	Right.
	And that's going to be actually a very important thing moving forward here.
	When people watch our videos, they want to know, are you human?
	Like, like prove it.
	Say something an AI would never say, you know, right.
	And we do that all day long.
	We give very strong pacifics, Mike.
	Pacifics.
	People don't know.
	You're actually quoting a congresswoman from Texas, I think.
	Yes.
	That's who that was.
	That's funny.
	All right, Ashton.
	We're already blending into the after party, as you can tell.
	So we're going to have to wrap up our segment with you.
	Thank you for your time today.
	Thank you for all your research and your information.
	We appreciate you.
	Let me just plug one more time here.
	It is the Crypto Coin Show on YouTube.
	And still fully.
	John McCaffey.
	John McCaffey right on the top there.
	Rest in peace.
	Yeah.
	That was a fun one.
	Wow.
	We had him on the show.
	What was that?
	Six years ago.
	Yeah, we've been going for almost over 10 years.
	So I was before he died when there was no, I'm sure there'll be an AI version of him in the future.
	I'll be able to interview John McCaffey pretty soon.
	Yeah.
	We're going to have him on the show, Todd.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	No, great, great point.
	But thank you, Ashton.
	Have a great rest of your day.
	We appreciate you joining us.
	Thank you.
	Thank you so much, guys.
	Appreciate it.
	Thank you.
	And we'll be back after this break for the after party.
	We got to let Todd rest his voice for a minute.
	A little bit of recovery there.
	So stick with us, folks.
	We'll be right back after this break.
	Perfect.
	Join the official discussion channel for this show on Telegram at t.me/slash decentralized TV, where you can ask questions or offer suggestions of who we should interview next.
	Also, be sure to subscribe to the email newsletter on decentralized.tv, where you'll be alerted about one day in advance of each new upcoming episode before it gets published.
	On decentralized.tv, you'll also find links to our video channels and social media channels across all platforms, including Brighteon, Rumble, BitChute, Twitter, Truth Social, and more.
	Check it all out at decentralized.tv.
	All right.
	Welcome back, everybody, to the after party, the fun part.
	Well, actually, the whole show has been fun.
	We got to cover a lot of ground with Ashton there.
	Yeah, we really did.
	I love him as a guest.
	He's great.
	Yeah, he's great.
	But we got a little strongly technical there at the end.
	Not necessarily.
	Yeah, I don't think so.
	I mean, I'm serious.
	This is, Mike, you are such a visionary.
	And I could see your wheels turning.
	I mean, literally in my mind, I'm like, oh, there Mike goes.
	And I'm like, when you were starting to talk about the intersection of AI and cryptocurrency, my head started to explode.
	I thought by Monday morning, Mike will have vibe coded for 84 hours and have all of this solved.
	You know, cryptocurrency will be Mike's bitch.
	No, what's funny is on Super Bowl Sunday, someone I know called me and asked, so which team are you rooting for?
	I'm like, what teams?
	I'm vibe coding, man.
	I'm getting stuff done here.
	I don't even know who played.
	I don't care.
	It's not on my radar, but I'm constantly vibe coding.
	And with that, I also want to say that I've actually delayed my interview schedule.
	I mean, I've really shut it down for the next probably at least six weeks, which means we're going to have fewer shows of DTV for that period of time also.
	And that's simply because I'm vibe coding.
	And what I'm building, you know, I already showed brightvideos.com.
	That's going to be one of the sites we're launching, but there's some other major improvements and major new things.
	And then also when DeepSeek launches, like I have to clear my schedule for a few days, I got to go deep dive, deep seek, you know?
	Right.
	It's like it's a game changer for human civilization, I think, to have intelligence available, open source, decentralized, like at that level.
	This is perfect for our show, Todd.
	This is what we've been waiting for, moments like this.
	It's just amazing.
	And I think there's one person on this planet that will be figuring it out like you're going to be figuring it out.
	And that happens to be you.
	Well, I would say me and a bunch of people are going to are going to cancel all our schedules and just dive into this engine and start testing it.
	Well, every once in a while, I'm going to signal you and say, Mike, remember us out here.
	We said, let's still do a show.
	Yeah.
	Oh, here's something else that just happened.
	And not a lot of people are aware of this.
	So this is really timely.
	But did you know that the release of Opus 4.6 has actually caused major losses in the Indian IT sector?
	And it's crashing all the SAAS companies or software as a service companies.
	They're cratering because everybody in the corporate world is figuring out that you don't need to pay a per seat monthly fee for software as a service, you know, like Salesforce or, you know, a CRM software or legal software.
	All you need to do is install Claude Code and start running Opus 4.6.
	You can build your own software locally at a fraction of the cost and then own it forever.
	So we're starting to see a real cratering of the old model of how software was delivered on like a subscription basis.
	Yeah.
	Does that mean there's going to be less Indian restaurants in my neighborhood?
	Maybe more because they're going to be quitting the IT sector and opening more restaurants.
	Right.
	People still have to eat, you know?
	No, I, you know, it's interesting you say that because I've been in this house for 11 years and it's a gated community.
	And when I came in, it was, and I'm not going racist here.
	I just want to share with you my observation, which is there was probably about 75%, you know, Caucasian, but every home that has gone up for sale has been acquired by an Indian family.
	And I've gotten to know many of them.
	And they are wonderful neighbors, but they are all programmers.
	So it's like they're all at home programming.
Buying Up GPUs 00:05:04
	And so it's interesting that you raise that, that, wow, that's going to impact my neighbors maybe.
	I mean, because the days of human coding are fast coming to an end, actually.
	Wow.
	Yeah.
	It's big changes are afoot.
	And, you know, speaking about our show, my understanding is that the DeepSeek company is going to put out a model called DeepSeek Light, which will be able to run on consumer-grade hardware.
	So you'll be able to run on your desktop, a light version.
	It'll be blazing fast and very good.
	But I wasn't even finished with my story because what's happened is that since Opus was released and then with Quen3 Coder and DeepSeek coming,
	more and more corporations across America are realizing that they need to hurry up and buy compute hardware as quickly as possible because the real bottleneck on this is going to be having the compute hardware since the open source models will be free.
	But if you don't have the GPUs, you know, you're screwed, right?
	So what's happened is now there's a sudden rush to buy every GPU that exists in inventory.
	Yes.
	And what happened is then NVIDIA raised the price of its 5090 cards from $2,400 to $5,000.
	Same card, double the price in just the last month.
	Wow.
	Right.
	Smart move.
	Yeah.
	So there's this massive shortage of compute, which is also tied to what's called high bandwidth memory shortage, like DDR7 memory.
	There's only a couple of companies that make it and they can't keep up.
	So we're actually going to be running into in our world a compute hardware panic, like scarcity panic.
	Whereas the like the software will be readily available, the open source software, but to run it on hardware is going to be the hard part.
	Interesting.
	So I just bought up some a bunch of graphics cards that have like 96 gigs of onboard RAM and I'm setting up new workstations because I figure I'm going to have to I'm going to have to like power all of my platforms through the next three years until the shortage ends.
	So yeah, I've been other people buying up Bitcoin and some people buying gold and I'm buying GPUs.
	Only Mike Adams.
	I'm getting ready for the great GPU drought of 2026.
	The GPUs require silver, Mike?
	Well, to some extent, not a lot per GPU.
	I mean, you know, a few milligrams or something.
	But they do require cash.
	They require a lot of cash.
	Right.
	Right.
	So that's, that's the issue.
	That's amazing.
	And what boggles my mind is you understand all of this.
	Well, we're we're, I mean, I don't know.
	I'm an explorer like you.
	I'm just figuring it out along the way, but I do know, like, I do see trends before most people see them.
	Yeah.
	And that's given me a lot of key advantages like this one to know to buy up all the GPUs I can find.
	Right.
	Right.
	While they exist.
	Yeah, for all the robots you're going to buy too.
	So, well, and the other thing is going to happen.
	Well, yeah, eventually.
	No one's willing to sell them to us.
	We should have a whole talk about that, but we'll come back to that.
	But the cost of API inference for cloud-based AI cognition could actually start to go up because of compute scarcity, even though it's been trending down strongly for years.
	It could start to go up.
	So cloud compute could get more expensive, whereas local compute could be very inexpensive if you have the hardware.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	Wow.
	So that's where this is going.
	But about robots, I am, you know, pardon my language, but I'm calling bullshit on most of the robotics industry in terms of autonomous functions.
	So what we see so far in all these promotional videos and these viral videos is, you know, pre-programmed movements in controlled environments.
	And that might, the video that we see might be, you know, one success out of 100 failures.
	And they just kept rolling until they got one that worked.
	But having a robot like walk around your house and do your dishes, oh, that's a whole different ballgame.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And I'm not sure we're going to have any robots this year for testing.
	Okay.
	I don't know.
	Cheers.
	Cheers for 2027.
	My voice is gone.
	Your voice is really going bad.
	I'm sorry.
	That's okay.
Back-to-Back Consultations 00:04:03
	You're hanging in.
	I'm hanging in.
	Actually, my voice really started to go down when I got back.
	And because I had the two additional days, I had back-to-back-to-back-to-back consultations for the unincorporated nonprofit associations.
	Right, right.
	And literally, that's when my voice started to go.
	And the reason why there were so many back-to-back-to-back consultations is because people are starting to get it that are in precious metals.
	That if you are in precious metals, there is a real strategic way for you to be able to not get hosed long term.
	I'll leave it at that.
	Yeah.
	Well, yeah, exactly.
	If you, because of the rise in the value of metals, if you're offloading any of those metals, you know, you need to have that in a nonprofit organization.
	That's right.
	Otherwise, you're going to pay huge gains on it.
	Let me bring up your website actually while you're talking about it.
	It's my575E.com.
	And what version of explaining this can your voice support at this moment?
	Like, how much do you want to say?
	What I can say is that since we've been talking about it, Mike, you know, not even three years, I've helped over 500 people acquire these.
	And we have a private Telegram group of well over 450 now.
	And they are all people that have come through the show.
	So if you're watching Mike Adams, you're not a dumb person.
	You're one of the two presenters.
	And I witness this every single day because I talk to you.
	What I suggest is people simply do your own simple due diligence to go to my website, enter in your name, email, and then you'll get to a 90-minute video of me interviewing the expert Dennis Gray.
	It's a 90-minute video, very informative.
	And it is an interview where we cover the downloadable PDF.
	So by that point in time, you're going to have a really good idea of what is possible with this entity.
	And then lots of people still have questions.
	Just simply hit the easy button, book an interview with me.
	It's right there under the video, a consultation with me.
	And then there is a fee for it.
	It's $150.
	But if you move forward with the UNA, and frankly, most people who are at that point to where they book an interview, I mean, a consultation, they move forward with it.
	And you just take the $150 off of the investment of the UNA.
	So I give it back.
	As I've shared with you, Mike, when I didn't charge any kind of a fee, people didn't show up.
	But I just really, really want people to know that this exists.
	As you know, Mike, this has always been my form of activism to be able to help people keep more of what they earn, protect what they have, and decrease their personal liability.
	And, you know, the jury is in, Mike, over 450 people who when you're in there, you just see how many people are really, really happy they learned that this entity existed and they acted on it.
	So I just want to mention, too, that this is codified under California law.
	Yep.
	So this isn't something that you and Dennis just made up.
	It's under law.
	And that it's also something where you get a tax-exempt ID number from the IRS that you can use to open bank accounts.
	Yeah.
	And that number is recognized as a tax-exempt number.
	Well, it's exempt from filing.
	And that's a key point.
	Like if you have your property donated to your UNA, you're still going to pay property taxes.
	So, but that's the key point.
Perfect Husband Remedies 00:02:54
	Right, right.
	Thanks for the clarification.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	But are you going to be able to handle conversations, consultations?
	I mean, you need some recovery time right now.
	I do need some recovery time and I'm going to schedule that in over the weekend.
	Oh, okay.
	And that's when your wife is going to say, you're such a good listener, Todd, because you're unable to speak.
	You've become the perfect husband.
	The perfect husband.
	Look, I got her a puppy for our 20th anniversary.
	I took her, you know, on vacation for a 20th anniversary.
	I'm already the perfect husband.
	You are.
	You got her a puppy.
	My God.
	You took her on a vacation to some remote island somewhere.
	Yeah.
	And then when you came home, you stopped talking.
	Like that's the perfect husband.
	That's the trifecta right there of perfect husbands.
	But I still cooked.
	I cooked.
	Even more perfect.
	I didn't know you could make it more perfect.
	So to all the husbands out there watching, if you can keep up with Todd, you're doing great.
	That's right.
	Well, Mike, thank you for the show.
	I, again, apologize.
	I'm not done.
	I was going to keep you another half an hour.
	I'm just getting started.
	Great.
	Cheers.
	I'm going to stay until your voice is gone, man.
	You're going to earn this episode.
	No.
	You're just going to vibe code my voice.
	I'm going to vibe on your voice.
	Not done yet, Todd.
	Let's talk about this.
	We still have stuff to talk about.
	No, that's fine.
	I recognize your need to rest.
	And I know you're doing all the natural health things that are necessary.
	You've got all the good remedies and this and that.
	What is that?
	This is Manuka, honey.
	Oh.
	With a lemon squeezed in there and hot water and electrolytes, salt.
	Oh, okay.
	Well, I'll let you in on a little secret formula that we use around my house.
	Add a little bit of cayenne pepper to the manuka honey.
	Yeah, we call that bazooka honey.
	For a sore throat yeah, and for, just like anything, waking up your entire cardiovascular system.
	Okay, bazooka honey, I love it.
	Just, you know, the cayenne does the trick.
	That's going to be my dinner.
	Adjust to your level of, you know, heat tolerance there.
	Oh, I love cayenne.
	You can't give me enough colour good okay well, you'll love that, and also I, I do.
	Should we offer prayers for your food, for us, or is it going to recover?
Transcription Magic 00:04:04
	Oh my god, it is so bad, is?
	I mean, the freeze got it right?
	Yeah, we literally were at 25 degrees for like five nights in a row.
	I mean, oh my god lord it's, it's just toast.
	I mean, we will see.
	I'm going to go take a video of it, probably this weekend, where it'll be at its worst.
	Oh, and then i'm going to document the resilience of of uh, permaculture food for us and we'll see in the spring if, if you know, on the third day, those banana trees rose again.
	Well, the good, the good news is uh, during the freeze, you can pick banana splits right off the tree, so you get instant.
	If there were only racks Mike.
	All right, it is, it is really it's is.
	It's in worse shape than my voice.
	Oh well, that's, that's saying something.
	Okay, I feel I feel bad for keeping you, so i'll wrap this up and I know your food for us will recover.
	Uh, let me just remind people of a couple of things.
	Yes, so I did mention Bright Videos.com, and this is our new video website.
	That is not officially launched yet, so it could be a little bit buggy from time to time but uh, there's a really cool thing about this, which is that the, the transcription, is automatically handled.
	Like well, this is just part of it actually, but we do automatic transcription using AI, and soon i'll add a feature here where you'll be able to ask a question about the video using our AI engine.
	So todd, the reason that matters for all of us here is because this episode will be posted on Bright Videos wow, and then people will be able to ask the engine about this episode.
	No kidding yeah yeah, and i'll probably have that done over the weekend.
	So that's, you know, that's coming up real soon, wow.
	So yeah and, and I and I understand you know we have Brighttown.com, which is our main video site but, but this video site Brightvideos.com is is all AI driven.
	You know, I coded it with AI and it's going to have a lot of extra features that are AI centric, like being able to ask about the video and the instant transcription, and also it does instant thumbnails too.
	It it, it pulls together its own different thumbnails, which are sometimes hilarious, I bet.
	Yeah, you can only imagine.
	I can only imagine what it will be for this show today.
	Yeah, I think it's gonna have trouble with your voice today.
	It's probably.
	Yeah, like the transcription engine is gonna fail a lot, you don't?
	You don't want to use this episode to clone my voice for an AI, uh avatar.
	Oh yeah yeah, let's send your voice to 11 LABS.
	See what it comes back with.
	Yeah oh, we call it like, uh, MR Strained, MR Strained, MR Strained, SAM Strained Not really a superhero per se, but it's like Peter Parker, you know, and then Sam Strand over here, who's who's just talked too much.
	Like your superpower is talking, but you use your superpower to the point where you got to recharge your superpower.
	I do.
	I do.
	Yeah.
	I will.
	I wish I could use micro payments to recharge.
	You'll be fine, but you know, by the time we have the next episode, you'll be fine in a couple of days.
	You'll recover.
	I'll be fine by the weekend, I'm pretty sure.
	Yeah.
	All right, Todd.
	Well, thank you for all your time and effort.
	Again, sorry about the voice issue you're struggling with.
	I know you'll heal quickly, but we still had a great show and you powered through it.
	So thank you.
	Awesome.
	Thank you, Mike.
	All right.
	Cheers, everyone.
	All right.
	Take care, everybody.
Recharging Superpowers 00:00:44
	This has been another episode of Decentralized TV.
	You can watch all the previous episodes at that website, decentralized.tv.
	So thanks for watching today.
	Mike Adams and Todd Pittner.
	We'll see you next time.
	Take care.
	Stock up on the long-term storable Ranger bucket set.
	536 servings of clean organic superfoods for your survival pantry.
	Certified organic and lab tested for purity.

Chapters

00:00:01 Sick Of Bitcoin?
00:04:45 Market Cap Manipulation Risks
00:19:44 Coinbase's Layer Two Stranglehold
00:35:40 Why Privacy Coins Matter
00:48:42 Mimblewimble: The Future of Privacy
01:04:23 Decentralized AI Revolution
01:19:22 Buying Up GPUs
01:24:27 Back-to-Back Consultations
01:28:30 Perfect Husband Remedies
01:31:24 Transcription Magic
01:35:29 Recharging Superpowers