True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 224: Krypto Kulturkampf
Aired: 2022-04-28
Duration: 01:07:19


=== Ooh, Coindextery There (04:55) ===

[00:00:01]  Oh, God, you're like in the stance.
[00:00:04]  You literally, like, I've made this remark before, but your body contorts, whether you're like, depending on the character that you are.
[00:00:15]  Oh, my God, put the coins down.
[00:00:17]  It's just my bones movie.
[00:00:20]  just my bones that's my teeth clacking because you're making me nervous That's the sound of my bones.
[00:00:30]  Yes, Liz.
[00:00:33]  Don't you like it?
[00:00:34]  One day, one night, when you're safe, tucked in your bed with your covers drawn up to your little nose, you'll hear the clinking of coins outside your window, a little rapping on the outside.
[00:00:48]  And you'll look up, and all you'll see in the moonlight are two shiny golden orbs with B's imprinted.
[00:00:56]  And you think, oh, is it my old friend Bryce Bell to know he is dead?
[00:01:01]  It's your new friend, Coindexter.
[00:01:04]  And we're going to be married.
[00:01:30]  I was going to make a joke, but what girl, you know, doesn't like a proposal?
[00:01:35]  Honestly, yeah.
[00:01:37]  Listen, my advice for all fellas out there anywhere, get as many rings as possible.
[00:01:44]  Possibly you can waylay travelers, merchants, various kinds of NPCs.
[00:01:51]  And often if your loot table draws the ring, you can get one.
[00:01:55]  Just do like get a couple, couple hundred kills.
[00:01:58]  You can just start proposing to every fair maiden you see on your on your route.
[00:02:03]  And they'll all say yes.
[00:02:05]  Yes.
[00:02:06]  Hello.
[00:02:07]  Hello.
[00:02:07]  I'm Liz.
[00:02:08]  Hi.
[00:02:09]  My name is Bryce, and I love you.
[00:02:10]  Will you marry me?
[00:02:12]  It's the question I'm asking to young Chomsky, the producer of this podcast, which is called Truana.
[00:02:20]  Hello, everyone.
[00:02:21]  Hello.
[00:02:22]  Ooh, this is getting a little coindextery there.
[00:02:26]  Coin Dexter has a vocal fry.
[00:02:31]  We are, like some people probably guessed, with the arrival of Mr. Dexter.
[00:02:38]  We're talking coins today, but not just coins.
[00:02:40]  We're actually not talking real, we're not really talking coins, but we're talking coin culture.
[00:02:45]  Yeah, God.
[00:02:46]  Is that what they call it?
[00:02:48]  No, it's what I call it.
[00:02:49]  Okay, good.
[00:02:50]  I like that.
[00:02:51]  Coin culture.
[00:02:52]  Coin culture.
[00:02:54]  We're talking about a conference that Liz, you really wanted us to attend.
[00:02:58]  And we did try to attend.
[00:03:01]  Yeah, you also really wanted to attend, by the way.
[00:03:03]  I know, but it was your idea.
[00:03:04]  I'm trying to give you full credit for something.
[00:03:07]  And now you're just flipping it back on me like it was a bad thing.
[00:03:11]  We did try.
[00:03:12]  Well, we didn't try very hard.
[00:03:14]  We tried middlingly hard to attend.
[00:03:17]  That was not hard.
[00:03:17]  We sent an email, one email, no follow-up to do follow-up.
[00:03:21]  Oh, yeah.
[00:03:21]  I did.
[00:03:21]  No, I did forget.
[00:03:25]  I was too busy thinking positive thoughts about you.
[00:03:28]  Sorry if you want me to do that, Les.
[00:03:31]  Well, we thought about going.
[00:03:33]  We thought we tried to send an email, a form email.
[00:03:39]  Yes.
[00:03:39]  Even send it to a real person.
[00:03:42]  Well, they could go to a real person.
[00:03:45]  Look, you don't listen to Trunan because we try hard to go to conferences.
[00:03:50]  No.
[00:03:51]  No, you listen to Trunon because we're willing to find someone who did go to that conference and talk to them anyways.
[00:03:58]  Yes.
[00:03:58]  Jacob Silverman, who we didn't even actually introduce properly when we started the interview.
[00:04:05]  We did not do that at all.
[00:04:07]  No.
[00:04:07]  No, we're going to do him a solid.
[00:04:09]  And not only are we going to introduce him now, I'm also going to say we're going to link to a bunch of pieces he's written in The New Republic, the place that he writes for as a reporter for The New Republic.
[00:04:21]  They call him Knights of the Old Republic.
[00:04:28]  He's also the author of Terms of Service, Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection, and the forthcoming book with Ben McKenzie.
[00:04:41]  That's about crypto.
[00:04:43]  So he's the perfect person to talk to, and he's such a delight.
[00:04:46]  And I'd even go so far as to say I'd love to have him back.
[00:04:49]  I do appreciate him teaching me a few old ancient Sith magic tricks prior to us recording.

=== Crypto Celebrities and Market Shenanigans (15:27) ===

[00:04:56]  And I have bewitched many a maiden since then in order to give me their NFTs.
[00:05:03]  What are all these fucking famous ladies got these?
[00:05:06]  No, no, no, no.
[00:05:08]  All the female type celebrities got like these, they're like NFTs of women.
[00:05:14]  Flower girls.
[00:05:15]  Yeah, flower.
[00:05:15]  Yeah, like goop, the goop.
[00:05:17]  You know why?
[00:05:18]  Because the lady type ape, not good looking.
[00:05:21]  No, dude.
[00:05:22]  Yeah, I've looked at a lot of the like sort of fan art showing apes mating and shit.
[00:05:27]  And like, dude, I saw a video of a monkey getting his dick sucked by a frog the other day.
[00:05:33]  Why?
[00:05:34]  Yeah, I don't know.
[00:05:34]  The monkey picks up the fucking frog and just like, just starts going to town.
[00:05:40]  I mean, he, it's, it's actually like a pretty disturbing video to be totally.
[00:05:46]  Jacob didn't share this with any major financial journalists.
[00:05:49]  No, it's okay.
[00:05:50]  What do we need?
[00:05:51]  Major.
[00:05:52]  Listen, if they knew about finance, they wouldn't be journalists.
[00:05:55]  They'd be power players and titans of the world-finance Schultz stage.
[00:06:00]  Yeah, that's airtight logic.
[00:06:01]  Oh, with that, let's roll the interview.
[00:06:27]  ¿Cómo está?
[00:06:31]  Bien, Bitcoin gracias.
[00:06:35]  My name is CoinDexter, and I'd like to extend a heartfelt gracias to our host here, Satoshi, here at my 500th...
[00:06:48]  what's the Khalifa Tower replica I had built in El Salvador.
[00:06:53]  Joining me in my penthouse is, of course, a woman I met on the internet, Liz and Jacob Silverman.
[00:07:07]  Hey, Jacob, welcome to True Anon.
[00:07:09]  How you doing?
[00:07:10]  One of the better introductions I've gotten.
[00:07:12]  Thank you.
[00:07:13]  I kind of faltered towards the end there.
[00:07:14]  I was going to accuse you of being a silver bug, but I think that'll wait till a more serious part of the interview where we finally battle that out between gold and silver and the digital versions of both.
[00:07:26]  Welcome.
[00:07:27]  You look tan, refreshed, hail, and healthy, like you might have just come from Miami.
[00:07:33]  Well, there's that.
[00:07:34]  Yeah.
[00:07:34]  I've been taking a lot of walks too.
[00:07:37]  You were just down in Miami.
[00:07:40]  That's correct.
[00:07:40]  For Bitcoin 2022, the conference that Bryce and I really were trying to go to, but never got an email back from anyone who worked there.
[00:07:51]  You would have loved it, I think, actually.
[00:07:53]  How was it?
[00:07:54]  How was it?
[00:07:55]  Have you been to a lot of crypto conferences?
[00:07:58]  I went to South by Southwest this year and did like, I was the token crypto skeptic along with my co-author Ben McKenzie and our buddy Ed Angueso Jr. works for Vice, our motherboard.
[00:08:10]  And we did a panel, not very well attended, but it was fun.
[00:08:15]  And, you know, because it's tech and it is South by, it's just all the crypto stuff was very raw-raw.
[00:08:22]  But this was really the first kind of, well, this, I mean, this is going, doing the Hodge kind of like you're going.
[00:08:28]  Yeah.
[00:08:29]  The Bitcoin Miami conference is the main one these days.
[00:08:33]  And a lot of these people go to a whole, will go constantly to conferences, but this is the one.
[00:08:39]  And it's, it is very, it's just saturated with like hardcore Bitcoiners, Bitcoin maximalists, as some people call themselves.
[00:08:46]  Maxis.
[00:08:48]  It's intense.
[00:08:48]  Yeah.
[00:08:50]  Well, so I think this is usually we tell this to people before the interview starts, but there will be many listeners out there who are normal.
[00:08:58]  And those people won't know some of the terminology like Bitcoin maximalist.
[00:09:02]  Although, if you can't guess at my context clues, then I mean, you shouldn't be listening to that.
[00:09:07]  You got to work on reading a book.
[00:09:11]  But I will request for their sake and not my own at all.
[00:09:17]  If we get to any terminology here, lingo used on the on the internet or the chain of blocks for you to explain it to them and not me.
[00:09:29]  So don't look at me when you say it.
[00:09:32]  Yeah, I'm glad to explain anything or I'll try to keep the jargon down.
[00:09:37]  What did you see?
[00:09:38]  I mean, impressions, top of the line, Bitcoin conference.
[00:09:42]  Can you tell us about maybe the history of the conference?
[00:09:44]  What, you know, who puts this thing on and who's it for?
[00:09:49]  It's in some ways it's a trade show like it would be for any other sort of industry or interest group.
[00:09:56]  It's put on by Bitcoin Magazine and I believe there's a foundation behind there.
[00:10:01]  They're basically one of the largest mouthpieces of just pro Bitcoin kind of even messianic sort of content.
[00:10:09]  I mean, a lot of these people really think that, well, one thing I should say at the beginning is that in crypto and even in Bitcoin, it's not necessarily monolithic.
[00:10:18]  There are different types of people and sometimes different types of crazy, to be honest.
[00:10:22]  But, you know, there are people who have a sort of cultish or sort of religious like devotion to Bitcoin who think it's changed their lives and they think it's going to change the world.
[00:10:33]  So Bitcoin Miami is kind of the place for that.
[00:10:37]  I'm sorry, I couldn't tell you when the first one was, but I guess sometime in the last decade.
[00:10:41]  And it's in the Miami convention center there in South Beach.
[00:10:46]  I think it was a little more tamped down last year.
[00:10:48]  There are thousands of people there, though, and a lot of energy and fair amount of day drinking and people are preaching the gospel.
[00:10:57]  And then there are all these parties.
[00:10:59]  And it's kind of what you can imagine, but with some pretty bizarre and sometimes ugly politics on display.
[00:11:06]  And I mean, it's weird for me also because, you know, I'm a skeptic or I'm a critic of this stuff.
[00:11:12]  In a lot of ways, I hate it, but I'm so fascinated By these people.
[00:11:14]  So, you know, I was excited to go and see all the sort of Bitcoin influencers and celebrities that I sort of know and despise via Twitter.
[00:11:24]  And now I can finally see them in the flesh.
[00:11:27]  I think that kind of that part of the industry has always been particularly fascinating to Brace and I.
[00:11:32]  I mean, I don't want to speak for you, Brace, but I know that when we were first doing episodes on whether it was like on GameStop or on Tether or on any kind of, you know, related,
[00:11:44]  whatever we were doing on the sheer amount of content that is pushed out on like YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and whatever channels that is then used to pump coins or NFTs or whatever and the personalities that have kind of emerged in tandem with this stuff and all these kind of new financial products,
[00:12:07]  whether it's, you know, whether it's coins or NFTs or whatever these new kind of things are, it has been completely, I don't know, I can't think of any other, I'm trying to think of something to compare it to and I can't because it seems like so much, it's such an intrinsic part of this market, the kind of content end of it.
[00:12:27]  And so seeing those kind of personalities, I can imagine, would be pretty jarring.
[00:12:31]  Yeah, I actually think the content thing is really important because basically there's no inherent value here.
[00:12:36]  There's no underlying value for any of these coins or tokens.
[00:12:40]  You know, it's all just froth and hype and marketing.
[00:12:43]  And so content is a huge part of that and the influencer culture that's emerged around all this.
[00:12:50]  So there's so much out there and there's just so much effort.
[00:12:54]  You know, some are very overt, just people having their YouTube shows and hyping X token or whatever, saying it's the future when it's just like all the others.
[00:13:02]  But then there's a lot of bots and sort of information operations, you might call them, or just kind of efforts to influence public opinion because it's really just based on, you know, what can you get trending?
[00:13:14]  What kind of misinformation can you pump out there to make people think that X token is going to the moon?
[00:13:18]  Or what can you get or which influencers and celebrities can you get behind it?
[00:13:22]  Because again, it's just sort of paper thin.
[00:13:25]  There are no fundamentals below that.
[00:13:27]  That's the level that you're dealing with.
[00:13:30]  Well, yeah, I mean, we were talking about this a little bit before the show started, but something that's basically notable about every single coin or NFT or whatever that comes out is there will be like a layer of people pretending that the underlying technology is this revolutionary new technology that is not maybe going to, but definitely going to change the world and definitely for the better.
[00:13:53]  Meanwhile, some guy is like siphoning off coins every so often and then he'll sell them when it goes, you know, they have their ICO or whatever and do a rug pull, which is a little bit of jargon I learned from doing it several times.
[00:14:07]  But, You know, that's what's sort of so fascinating to me about this is like at its core, so much of this is just about like a race to basically speculate and make as much money as possible off the speculative product.
[00:14:22]  I mean, there are a lot of people who are obviously very invested in like the technology behind Bitcoin, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:14:27]  But if we're being, you know, I think real for a lot of people who are, you know, even just dipping their toe in it, I think for a lot of the major players in it, it really is just like, how do I make as much money off of this product, this sort of ephemeral product in a lot of ways as possible?
[00:14:42]  And so, I mean, you, you, I'm sure recognize probably more people at this Bitcoin conference than I'm sure you would have felt comfortable with.
[00:14:50]  What are some of the like egregious kind of personality types that you see at these kind of things?
[00:14:54]  Because I mean, I think, you know, if you're if you're a white guy in your early 20s like I am, you probably get a lot of, you know, ads for, or not ads, but like in your algorithm, there's like a coin influencers and shit on YouTube.
[00:15:09]  So, I mean, that's a huge industry, like Liz is saying.
[00:15:11]  I mean, do you, what, what kind of folks did you see at this place?
[00:15:15]  Well, let's see.
[00:15:16]  They're, you know, always a few sort of conservative or right-wing politicians.
[00:15:21]  I think Cynthia Loomis was there.
[00:15:22]  She's, she's very pro-Bitcoin in the Senate, though it's bipartisan by now.
[00:15:28]  I saw Tucker Carlson walking around.
[00:15:31]  I saw, I mean, Glenn Greenwald was on stage.
[00:15:34]  I didn't see him in person.
[00:15:37]  I saw Brock Pierce.
[00:15:41]  I saw Samuel El Salvador.
[00:15:47]  Michael Saylor was around.
[00:15:49]  I really wanted to see him so I could ask him to unblock me on Twitter.
[00:15:53]  You know, and then there are sort of all these other lesser influencers or like the Pomplianos, I think, were circulating.
[00:15:59]  I talked to a guy.
[00:16:00]  I mean, this may be jumping ahead, but one night I was at a bar with some folks at a party for a crypto company and started talking to this guy who had taken Anthony Pompliano's course online.
[00:16:12]  And it was just like, imagine for those who don't know who this guy is, just, you know, like maybe like an entourage reject or something like that, like just a very cheesy kind of influencer type who is just always rise and grind, you know, get that money.
[00:16:29]  And he has this, I don't know, pretty dumb seeming course online, but he hires instructors and stuff like that.
[00:16:35]  And it's like, how do you use Bitcoin to change your life?
[00:16:38]  And I talked to this guy in a bar who claimed that it changed his life.
[00:16:41]  He was a former landscaper and now he is, you know, he had come down to Miami to for a chance at meeting Pompeliano.
[00:16:49]  I don't think he actually got to meet him.
[00:16:51]  I mean, do you think it changed his life?
[00:16:53]  It might have.
[00:16:54]  I mean, the thing is, partly because this industry is so new and there's, it caters to certain personality types or people like risk takers or people who have a taste for fraud or people who are kind of ready, who perhaps are ready to do something a lot different.
[00:17:11]  So you meet people who were like something else totally different in a past life.
[00:17:17]  Like, for example, we went to after South by, we went to this big, one of the biggest Bitcoin mining facilities in the country, Windstone outside of Austin.
[00:17:27]  And the guy who runs that, I mean, he's a real character.
[00:17:31]  He's like a used car salesman type.
[00:17:32]  I don't think he's actually done that, but he had a landscaping business.
[00:17:35]  Speaking of landscaping, he had like sort of, he said things like, you know, I had some issues with my bank.
[00:17:42]  Like, well, what does that mean?
[00:17:44]  You know, he's just one of these sort of vague entrepreneurs who's probably been in court a few times and has gone through like several different businesses.
[00:17:52]  And now somehow he runs one of the biggest Bitcoin mines in the country, if not the world.
[00:17:58]  He should have described himself as a fiat minimalist.
[00:18:01]  Well, that's the other thing.
[00:18:03]  There's certainly that.
[00:18:04]  I mean, and that's where the bullshit really emerges.
[00:18:07]  But you have all these people who are often very rich in fiat terms, especially, who then claim that fiat is worthless.
[00:18:13]  Like Ricardo Salinas, who's becoming a big figure in the El Salvador stuff, he's a Mexican billionaire.
[00:18:19]  He says that fiat's worthless.
[00:18:22]  At the conference, you had Peter Thiel on stage tearing up a $100 bill.
[00:18:27]  Then Max Kaiser, who's sort of this like, he lives around, he lives in El Salvador around the Bitcoin beach there.
[00:18:35]  And he used to have a show in RT.
[00:18:38]  He's a real character.
[00:18:39]  He's also blocked me on Twitter.
[00:18:41]  So please unblock me, Max.
[00:18:42]  But he was ripping up bills and for, you know, dollar bills for a camera for a thing that he posted on Twitter.
[00:18:48]  So it's sort of this cheap meme that they're doing now where actually ripping up fiat.
[00:18:53]  I mean, that's the thing about the whole industry too, right?
[00:18:55]  You mentioned that there's a lot of players in this who are like big, big time money fiat holders, we'll say.
[00:19:03]  Whales in the fiat space.
[00:19:06]  Yes, whales in the fiat space and in the crypto space, moguls even.
[00:19:12]  And that's like really the dominant players, right?
[00:19:15]  Because they're using a lot of these crypto markets and these and these new financial products or whatever to, you know, just create, I mean, I don't know else to say it, just like new Ponzi on top of Ponzi to get insane yields.
[00:19:27]  And so what is the ratio of actual like real consumer interest in it or actual retail interest?
[00:19:35]  I mean, how much of it is just all these guys hyping up shit to increase their own returns?
[00:19:41]  And how much is actually like being, I don't know, how much of the market is actually being entered by like normal people?
[00:19:47]  I think it's a good question.
[00:19:50]  So I mean, certainly the market action and prices and sort of a lot of those relevant components are dominated by the whales, the exchanges, the market makers, the high frequency trading firms, which when you really get down to it is not that many people.
[00:20:09]  If you look at some things like Google Trends, interest in Bitcoin has been down for months, maybe more relevantly, but volume on exchanges has been going down pretty much since last May when there's a big crash, May 19th.

=== Insider Trading in Crypto (13:32) ===

[00:20:24]  So a lot of the indicators say that, look, people aren't that interested.
[00:20:28]  And some people also say that that's why you had the Super Bowl ads with sort of the apotheosis of all the celebrity bullshit is because, you know, my co-author Ben actually says like that's actually a sign of we're near the end because you get to the point where it's all marketing and it's all trying to be forced through kind of the most prominent voices you can find.
[00:20:50]  So the indicators that we do have seem to say that a lot of retail interest is down.
[00:20:54]  Maybe people are wising up.
[00:20:55]  They have less spending money.
[00:20:57]  They've realized that a lot of people have lost money.
[00:21:00]  Most Bitcoin owners are underwater because most of them have bought in the last year.
[00:21:04]  So by most measures, the retail interest is lower.
[00:21:09]  The one thing I'd also say is that it's just so hard to trust numbers in general in crypto.
[00:21:14]  Like everything is a lie and everyone is lying.
[00:21:18]  So like volume especially is fake.
[00:21:21]  80% plus on almost every exchange is wash trading.
[00:21:25]  Hold on.
[00:21:26]  Yeah.
[00:21:27]  Volume?
[00:21:28]  Wait, 80%.
[00:21:30]  Could you explain that?
[00:21:31]  Because from what I understand of what you just said, 80% of trades are not like real, real Bitcoin trades.
[00:21:38]  They're wash, I assume, like money laundering.
[00:21:42]  So basically, I mean, it has some relation to money laundering, but in this context, it pretty much means trades that are either fake or between two accounts that I control.
[00:21:54]  So this is something that's done with NFTs a lot to drive up the price because you can keep selling an NFT for more and more.
[00:22:01]  And then maybe you take it down 20% once you've raised the price really high.
[00:22:06]  But on exchanges, what you have is the same kind of similar sort of thing or just a lot of trades back and forth because you need to simulate volume in order to generate price activity in order to attract people to the exchange.
[00:22:20]  So there are different ways in which it happens, but people say this stuff.
[00:22:23]  There are scholarly papers and all that.
[00:22:25]  And on some, and even on some of the NFT exchanges, it's well over 90%.
[00:22:31]  So again, a lot of this stuff is just fake.
[00:22:33]  Like it's not what we think it is.
[00:22:36]  And then the remaining stuff, you know, there's certainly a lot of criminal activity and there's a lot of high frequency trading where like Alameda, the trading division of FTX, Sandbank Benfreed, the guy you were referring to earlier, Alameda is a high frequency trading firm that supposedly is just making a killing on some of these exchanges.
[00:22:53]  So in terms of like actual sort of everyday people and retail investors doing this, making money, you're time on a really small population.
[00:23:04]  I think, you know, that's like an interesting tension that always comes up in any of these, you know, interviews with these big crypto whale guys or big mogul guys where they always say, you know, okay, the case for Bitcoin is that, you know, we've gotten so big now that institutional has to get in.
[00:23:21]  Like they're just, they just need to find new ways.
[00:23:23]  Like there, there has to be just some avenue and then, you know, institutional investment is going to come in.
[00:23:29]  And when that happens, like we'll be legitimate and no one can deny the power of Bitcoin or whatever.
[00:23:34]  And then on the, you know, in the same breath, they'll say, you know, oh, but also, you know, oh, we have all of these new products that we don't want any regulations.
[00:23:44]  We don't want any, you know, don't want anyone getting in here.
[00:23:47]  We need to keep, you know, our independence and our ability to, you know, wash trade, to create all these new Ponzi products to basically stay away, keep it completely unregulated, which is the exact opposite of what would happen if anything institutional came in whatsoever.
[00:24:04]  And so it's like they can't, you know, they, they're constantly trying to do this dance.
[00:24:08]  I mean, obviously, you know, the institutional line is what pushes their ability to be able to continue the Ponzi line.
[00:24:17]  But it's this like frustrating contradiction that I think a lot of people, especially like media members, when they're trying to cover this stuff, present company excluded, of course, have a really hard time like holding that contradiction in their head.
[00:24:32]  Right.
[00:24:33]  And in general, there's like, I think the kind of reporting and coverage of Bitcoin is like pretty disastrous, actually.
[00:24:45]  Yeah, I wouldn't disagree with you.
[00:24:47]  I mean, I think one, the coiners try to have it both ways, as you were saying, for a reason or two that I'll get into.
[00:24:53]  But also, you know, part of that narrative that they employ sometimes and also that journalists do, which is that, hey, this is all a reaction to the big banks and perhaps the 2008 and financial crisis.
[00:25:05]  And I just don't see that as very accurate.
[00:25:07]  One, I don't think it's right even to the timing of when the Bitcoin white paper was released.
[00:25:12]  I actually think early Bitcoin and crypto has a lot more in common with gambling and other ways to transmit money online.
[00:25:21]  But yeah, everyone, most things in crypto are sort of the opposite of what they say they are, especially when you hear decentralized.
[00:25:27]  And They say that they don't want any part of the mainstream financial system, but they deeply want to be legitimized and see that what they're doing is the future of finance and is legit.
[00:25:39]  At the same time, yeah, they want to exist in sort of a semi-lawless space, hopefully in an overseas jurisdiction, which is where most of these companies are based.
[00:25:48]  So, and they're willing to welcome in the mainstream Wall Street money.
[00:25:53]  I mean, there's billions of dollars coming in from venture capitalists already.
[00:25:58]  You know, where does that come from?
[00:25:59]  It comes from like sovereign wealth funds and Wall Street.
[00:26:03]  And also, like, there's been money coming in from Canadian pension funds.
[00:26:07]  So, I think that's where actually people start getting really worried is because there's a lot more entanglement, I think, that's already happening than people realize.
[00:26:15]  There's a lot of mainstream money going into crypto, even if the regulatory and legal side is sort of way behind.
[00:26:21]  How, I mean, how enmeshed do you think it is?
[00:26:24]  That's something I'm always like trying to.
[00:26:26]  Yeah, I wasn't sure.
[00:26:28]  I thought there were some things going on because you see stuff like, again, Canadian pension funds.
[00:26:33]  I've seen a couple of those, like teachers funds investing in U.S. crypto companies, which is pretty troubling.
[00:26:42]  The thing with, I think, Wall Street banks is they all sort of act like they have a few toes in the water, which is kind of true because they all, and they all have these sort of study groups or exploratory initiatives.
[00:26:56]  One thing I think that they find out is that they don't necessarily need crypto or blockchain, but they don't want to miss, they still don't want to miss out on a good opportunity.
[00:27:03]  So some of them are still investing.
[00:27:05]  But I don't think any of them think that I don't think Visa or MasterCard, for example, thinks that like blockchain is going to replace them in some way.
[00:27:12]  But then, you know, I talked to someone recently, Lee Reimers, he's a law professor, Duke.
[00:27:18]  He knows everything about this stuff from the regulatory and legal side.
[00:27:24]  And he's worried.
[00:27:25]  Like he thinks that there's a lot more entanglement between sort of TradFi or mainstream finances and crypto than people understand.
[00:27:34]  And that when or inevitably when crypto goes bust in some way and there's a major crash, like there could be a lot of spillover contagion or whatever you want to call it.
[00:27:43]  Yeah.
[00:27:43]  I mean, not to like spurg or whatever, but one thing I'll say is like, I think that a lot of times people fall back on the like this, especially politicians, this idea of like, oh, there's no regulations.
[00:27:56]  We need to regulate.
[00:27:57]  We need to regulate when really there's, there hasn't been any legal test cases yet on some of these things.
[00:28:02]  I mean, there's, there are like legal arguments to be made that like some of the regulation on this stuff seems very obvious that you could just go, but a lot of it hasn't even been tested.
[00:28:13]  I don't know if insider trading has even been tested, like insider trading laws have even been tested with any kind of crypto activity.
[00:28:20]  So there's a real question of like a kind of a push-pull of like who really wants to like, I don't know, it seems like everyone's sort of waiting for someone else to do it.
[00:28:28]  You know?
[00:28:29]  Yeah.
[00:28:30]  I mean, what the all the crypto companies say is like, we just want clarity.
[00:28:33]  Clarity is the word that they use all the time.
[00:28:36]  And what some people say is like, actually, you've had a fair amount of clarity.
[00:28:40]  I mean, I think it kind of cuts both ways.
[00:28:43]  Certainly, like, the SEC has a lot of power that it could exercise.
[00:28:48]  And like, it could just say like all 18,000 cryptocurrencies are securities because they basically do count as them if you, the Howey Act and the Howie test, which people who know more about the history of securities laws than me, but can define better.
[00:29:02]  But basically, by a lot of definitions, these coins should just be securities and regulated that way.
[00:29:08]  I believe Bitcoin is a commodity because of a ruling by the CFTC.
[00:29:12]  And then there's like, you know, there's an ongoing lawsuit over Ripple and its legal status.
[00:29:17]  And there's other things like, you know, there have been a few instances where like the SEC shut down an initial coin offering that Telegram did a few years ago because basically it was an illegal securities offering where they were going to raise a ton of money for an offshore company.
[00:29:32]  And it, you know, but there's why haven't they done that many times?
[00:29:38]  You know, or why has BlockFi basically the only crypto bank that's been fined and it got fined $100 million, which sounds like a lot, but really isn't a lot for something like that.
[00:29:47]  So, you know, there have been, there's been pecking here and there, but they're not.
[00:29:51]  And Gensler, sometimes, even though, you know, he's a Goldman guy, so you can't fully trust him, but he says some of the right things about crypto.
[00:29:58]  But I, you know, I hear different things from people in and out of government, but some people from government are really baffled that like, why is the DOJ not prosecuting some of these people?
[00:30:07]  Why is the SEC not finding more people?
[00:30:10]  Like, and part of it is there's just not like political will and people don't want to stick their necks out.
[00:30:14]  Well, I know.
[00:30:15]  It's funny you mentioned that, the insider trading thing, Liz, because noted disabled transgender activist and politician Madison Cawthorne today just had a little article on him and the Washington Examiner published about how he basically very clearly committed insider trading with the Let's Go Brandon coin.
[00:30:37]  No way.
[00:30:37]  It was pumping right before they announced.
[00:30:41]  I know it's incredible.
[00:30:42]  I mean, it's, it's, you know, I don't want to make fun of it too much because, you know, like a lot of people, I also, you know, I'm a pretty big holder of let's go Brandon coin.
[00:30:51]  You know, I think, I do think the underlying technology is incredible.
[00:30:58]  You know, it's mostly sort of in the flash game type stage right now, but it's definitely going to get up to like the first quake in the next couple years.
[00:31:06]  But yeah, I mean, it seems like I think the thing with a lot of the coin stuff and insider trading.
[00:31:14]  And like, I always try to think of like the stuff that's more complicated, I think.
[00:31:17]  And like, there's all this stuff going behind the scenes.
[00:31:19]  And like, so everyone's smarter than me.
[00:31:21]  And something that that one of the few things in my life that I've ever encountered that actually makes me feel like I am smarter than some people is realizing that like a lot of people are dumb and they think that because they're doing something on the internet that's so goofy that there can't be a crime that they committed.
[00:31:39]  And that does seem probably to be to be the case, for instance, with like the Let's Go Brandon coin.
[00:31:45]  And yeah, I mean, it is, it is sort of astounding, like this, this like push-pull with regulation because I mean, if you want Bitcoin to be mass adopted, there would obviously necessarily have to be Bitcoin or any kind of coins mass adopted in any kind of capacity.
[00:32:02]  There'd have to be a lot more regulation than there is right now.
[00:32:06]  But I also think that some of the people probably behind a lot of this stuff do know that.
[00:32:10]  And they are just kind of trying to just get their money while they can.
[00:32:14]  Yeah, totally.
[00:32:16]  Yeah, I think so.
[00:32:17]  I mean, like, look at this from a VC's perspective, for example.
[00:32:21]  Like, if you're in Andreessen Horowitz or Paradigm, or I mean, as you're used to.
[00:32:26]  Andreessen Horowitz, I'm spending $10 million at a MediSpa and getting as much surgery as possible.
[00:32:33]  So I don't have to look like fucking Mark Andrew.
[00:32:36]  One of the, what, what is, I mean, my God, my God, what a weird-looking guy.
[00:32:43]  It's, it's a man, a man who's you, one can only imagine what his cock looks like.
[00:32:48]  Just grotesque.
[00:32:49]  No one's imagining that.
[00:32:51]  No one's imagining.
[00:32:52]  That might be my next subject, but I'll hold off for a second.
[00:32:55]  But anyway, just, you know, the basic model is like, if you're investing in any sort of startup in the last like 20 years, you put a bunch of money in and you get some share of it.
[00:33:05]  And then hopefully there's some liquidity event where like you, you, you sell your shares or it goes public or whatever, but that won't happen for years.
[00:33:14]  And if it's even successful, now what these startups do is, or these VCs, is they invest in some of these crypto companies and sometimes they receive equity in tokens.
[00:33:26]  So, and the token then ICOs in like three or six months and they may they sell at the top and they make a boatload of money and then they move on to the next one.
[00:33:36]  And the token might then dump just like a regular pump and dump.
[00:33:39]  But, you know, they're out by then.

=== Bukele's Bitcoin Bonds (14:23) ===

[00:33:56]  I mean, it's interesting because it's I was Brace and I were talking earlier.
[00:34:00]  I was saying that so much of the way these like pump and dump schemes work mirrors the way these guys are kind of hopping from like city to city or state to state, trying to like kind of escape regulation or kind of like get in these places, get out before shit hits the fan.
[00:34:17]  I mean, we should talk about El Salvador because, you know, you were just in Miami.
[00:34:22]  I know you said that you've been doing a lot of research and talking with a lot of, you know, people in El Salvador about what's going on there.
[00:34:30]  Maybe you can like, you know, back up for our listeners a little bit and tell us kind of, you know, I mean, El Salvador is kind of the test run for a lot of what, you know, coin maxis imagine mass adoption of Bitcoin might look like.
[00:34:47]  And it's a total fucking disaster.
[00:34:49]  Right.
[00:34:50]  So, you know, this was supposed to be the great exemplar of Bitcoin in action as legal tender, as currency, as kind of like a beacon of freedom.
[00:34:59]  And it's been a disaster for a number of reasons.
[00:35:02]  So the president of El Salvador is Naib Bukele.
[00:35:04]  He's in his early 40s.
[00:35:07]  And he, in a lot of ways, what I think makes him sort of an interesting character and kind of perfect for the role he's assumed is that he's basically like a Bitcoin South Beach influencer.
[00:35:19]  Like he is like Anthony Popliano or one of these guys who's like, you know, like he, he's a marketing guy.
[00:35:25]  That's his professional background.
[00:35:27]  He came from a somewhat like a fairly wealthy, but not elite, elite family, though his father was involved with, I believe, the Communist Party as a politician.
[00:35:36]  And then he got into marketing and nightclubs.
[00:35:39]  He owned clubs, I believe, or ran some nightclubs.
[00:35:42]  You know, like you can imagine this guy doing the same kind of stuff and like and Instagramming from South Beach or whatever.
[00:35:50]  And so he basically made common cause with the Tether folks and some of the other people in that network, like Blockstream, and decide and introduced Bitcoin as legal tender.
[00:36:04]  It was, it, I believe it was September, this past September, it was introduced officially.
[00:36:10]  It's basically been a disaster ever since.
[00:36:12]  The wallet app that is used.
[00:36:14]  Everyone's given $30 worth of Bitcoin and a wallet app, all Salvadorans.
[00:36:19]  The wallet app has had lots of technical problems.
[00:36:21]  There's been a lot of identity theft.
[00:36:23]  A lot of people just were, if they were able to, just cashed out the 30 bucks.
[00:36:27]  Others, you know, just spent it or a lot of stores don't want to take it.
[00:36:32]  So like, oh, they're all the usual technical issues.
[00:36:34]  The other supposed use case was remittances.
[00:36:38]  It's barely used for remittances in the single digits.
[00:36:42]  I think it might be under 2%.
[00:36:44]  And so it's really been not well implemented in any way.
[00:36:49]  The other thing is, like, if you just look at this whole situation from the outside, it's basically Naeb Bukele and a bunch of influencers from the U.S. and like some Venezuelan businessmen and other people and sort of political operatives.
[00:37:01]  I've heard he's had help from some people from Venezuela.
[00:37:04]  So there's not really indigenous support necessarily for this.
[00:37:09]  But one thing that you do have to note is like Bukele is somewhat popular even still.
[00:37:16]  Like he's having this whole crackdown now on the gangs, but and on dissent in general, but he still remains popular.
[00:37:23]  So people don't really like Bitcoin, but a lot of people do like him, even though he is an authoritarian who kind of jokes that he's a dictator and has suspended civil liberties for the last month and it's now been extended and he's arresting a lot of people and people.
[00:37:41]  17,000 so far.
[00:37:43]  Yeah.
[00:37:43]  And, you know, like I heard one story when I was in Miami, we hung out with a lot of Salvadorans.
[00:37:50]  We interviewed some of them and we hung out with one journalist who can't return because she's been threatened by the government.
[00:37:56]  We talked to another journalist who while we were there decided not to return to El Salvador.
[00:38:02]  And then and also a couple of days before that, her friend in El Salvador had left because he basically he was there was a news report or social media report that went out that his brother was in a gang and the dude doesn't even have a brother.
[00:38:17]  So like there are these sort of like media and social media campaigns that are going on against people trying to tag them as gang members and stuff like that.
[00:38:24]  There was a law passed that you can't publish information about the gangs, which is basically aimed at El Faro and the other opposition newspapers.
[00:38:32]  So, you know, it's getting pretty serious.
[00:38:35]  I've heard back from some people who are like, you know, you're full of it.
[00:38:38]  We love Bukele, whatever.
[00:38:40]  But, you know, there are people in real danger and I've talked to people who have been arrested.
[00:38:44]  So it's getting pretty bad.
[00:38:45]  Yeah.
[00:38:46]  And I mean, that was sort of the great irony of him actually eventually dropping out because he was supposed to speak at the Bitcoin conference, which I was really excited.
[00:38:53]  I mean, Liz and I were supposed to interview him.
[00:38:57]  In fact, we were supposed to go hang on a yacht with him for a couple of days, which he took a rain check on, which I will cash out.
[00:39:03]  But, but, you know, it's, it's Bitcoin is sort of presented as this like new frontier of freedom, right?
[00:39:10]  Like, you know, we are going to, you know, it's, it's, it's, I don't think I'm remiss in saying that, uh, you know, it's sort of this like libertarian techno dream.
[00:39:19]  Meanwhile, it's, it's one of its sort of most high profile, at least state level adopters is a guy who has suspended habeas corpus.
[00:39:28]  And like, you know, you can, you are, if you are, you know, he cut, he cut inmates' meals.
[00:39:34]  I think they're given two a day and he's starting to go down to one a day.
[00:39:38]  You know, 17,000 people arrested, but obviously not all of them are gang members.
[00:39:42]  I mean, it is, you know, I'm not discounting the fact that he is pretty popular.
[00:39:46]  Certainly don't think he's popular because of Bitcoin.
[00:39:50]  And I think it works on a couple levels because A, he is trying to attract these sort of, I mean, you mentioned Bitcoin Beach earlier, which I am, I'm banned from.
[00:39:59]  It's crazy.
[00:40:00]  If you're not a pedophile, you can't go within 350 feet of Bitcoin Beach, which is fucked up because you know me.
[00:40:06]  I'm a fucking, I'm in the reef, man.
[00:40:08]  I'm trying to swim.
[00:40:10]  But So he's sort of working on like, you know, it's, it's almost like there's this like public facing Bukele who's like the Twitter Bukele, who's like, you know, horsing around with a bunch of fucking moral laser eyes.
[00:40:26]  Exactly.
[00:40:27]  Like, oh, yeah, like Musk type, like memester type of guy.
[00:40:33]  And then, of course, there's like the domestic Bukele who's most of his problems have zero to do with Bitcoin.
[00:40:40]  And you really only hear about the Bitcoin stuff.
[00:40:42]  And it's almost like he reminds me of like, I mean, I think he calls himself the CEO of El Salvador.
[00:40:46]  And it reminds me of like this guy who's like, I mean, it's like he's trying to pump.
[00:40:51]  You know what I mean?
[00:40:52]  Like in his own way and in the company he controls, which is the country of El Salvador, he is trying to pump Bitcoin prices.
[00:41:00]  Totally.
[00:41:00]  And I mean, supposedly, he's also underwater in his Bitcoin purchases.
[00:41:05]  I mean, he jokes that he, he, I mean, I think it's for real.
[00:41:08]  He trades Bitcoin from his phone that's connected to the, like the supposedly Salvadoran treasury.
[00:41:15]  And he jokes about how he does it in the bathroom and stuff like that.
[00:41:18]  I mean, I think a couple of things there.
[00:41:19]  One, I should also mention that there are, you know, there are all these white dudes, you know, at the Miami convention who are wearing like El Salvador shirts and celebrating El Salvador.
[00:41:28]  And they've obviously never been or have no idea what's going on there.
[00:41:31]  And yet he was supposed to be the featured guest.
[00:41:33]  He bowed out just like a day before.
[00:41:35]  They built a volcano for him at the conference.
[00:41:39]  It wasn't the best volcano I've ever seen in the street.
[00:41:41]  Wait, how big?
[00:41:43]  Like, like maybe 12 feet high, like bigger, higher than a basketball hoop, like a really big science fair volcano.
[00:41:50]  But not like tabletop.
[00:41:52]  This is like, this is like.
[00:41:53]  No, this was like from ground up, like, you know, filled up part of a room.
[00:41:58]  And.
[00:41:58]  And there was El Salvador stuff everywhere.
[00:42:01]  And he had another government representative come.
[00:42:04]  You know, there's stuff about like going to move to El Salvador, buying fancy apartments there.
[00:42:09]  So yeah, they're, they're very, they're different size to him.
[00:42:12]  That's for sure.
[00:42:14]  And then there's the whole Bitcoin Beach thing, which is basically, again, a bunch of gringos who have bought up a lot of property around a popular beach area and kind of rendered as this Bitcoin thing.
[00:42:24]  The one thing I would say, though, is that while Bitcoin isn't necessarily the source of his problems, he does have a lot of financial problems and economic issues.
[00:42:31]  And like there's a loan due to the IMF in January that I think is something like 750 million.
[00:42:38]  So, and he's basically raised a middle finger to the IMF, which may not be the smartest thing.
[00:42:43]  So like there are economic issues looming and he may think that some, he can somehow spend this Bitcoin stuff to bring some money in the door, but I have no idea.
[00:42:53]  Man, 750 million, maybe Elon can just buy El Salvador.
[00:42:56]  It's not that much for some of these dudes.
[00:42:59]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:42:59]  I was going to say, all I need to cash out is like my remaining safe moon stock.
[00:43:04]  And I could probably get that.
[00:43:05]  Yeah, your Let's Go Brandon should be hitting pretty big by then.
[00:43:11]  Here's a little investor tip, which Liz told me to give, because this is like a financial fiad podcast, financial advice.
[00:43:20]  You just buy one of every new coin that you see on the internet in any capacity.
[00:43:24]  Just buy one, because one day that coin is going to be worth $1 million.
[00:43:29]  Yeah.
[00:43:29]  And that way you have equal chance at everything.
[00:43:32]  That's like how when you go and do roulette, you put one little guy of money on all the little numbers.
[00:43:40]  That way you literally can't lose.
[00:43:44]  People are so fucking ignorant.
[00:43:47]  So, I mean, yeah, that's like, I know they were doing Bitcoin bonds there for a second.
[00:43:52]  Bitcoin bond, it's the only bond that never matures.
[00:43:56]  Oh my God.
[00:43:58]  Oh my goodness.
[00:43:59]  Well, they, yeah, they claimed that the bond was going to be oversold, which of course it almost certainly wasn't.
[00:44:05]  And then they delayed it.
[00:44:07]  And what happened was maybe a month ago, you had Samson Mao, who was executive at Blockstream, which was supposedly overseeing the bond.
[00:44:17]  He flew in with CZ, who's the head of Binance, who's arguably the most important person in crypto.
[00:44:25]  And then in the background was Brock Pierce, who apparently is pretty close with CZ.
[00:44:31]  Brock knows everybody in crypto and a lot of people owe him favors.
[00:44:36]  That's horrifying.
[00:44:37]  It's crazy.
[00:44:38]  Yeah, he's done all these youth programs for it.
[00:44:40]  Oh my God.
[00:44:42]  Yeah, people will have to Google that one.
[00:44:44]  But, you know, like these are three big players in crypto and they came in the day after they announced the delay of the bond.
[00:44:52]  Samson Mao has since left Blockstream, started his own company called Jan3, and he's working with Ricardo Salinas, the Mexican billionaire, to try to basically do what they call Bitcoinization anywhere they can in Latin America.
[00:45:08]  I mean, there's talk of doing it in a city in Honduras, I believe, and in some other places in Central America.
[00:45:15]  But that's kind of the goal now, I think, for some of these guys is to just even start at like the city or regional level or like some of these economic exclusion zone type places.
[00:45:24]  And then, you know, they can establish their little fiefdoms with their billionaire sponsors and go from there.
[00:45:30]  Have these guys teamed up with the charter city dudes yet?
[00:45:33]  Because yeah, I think that's what's happening with one of these.
[00:45:37]  One of the charter cities in, I think, Honduras.
[00:45:42]  What's a charter city?
[00:45:44]  They're basically libertarian invented cities, like especially economic zones, but where, you know, corporate law rules.
[00:45:51]  All right.
[00:45:51]  Yeah.
[00:45:52]  There was, I, there was a big movement towards that stuff in the 80s.
[00:45:54]  I remember a lot of people were trying to do that with islands in the Pacific.
[00:45:59]  I mean, it's, it's, it's weird to me.
[00:46:01]  It always struck me as odd that like these guys, first of all, I don't know why they want Bitcoin adopted as a currency because Bitcoin, I think, functions a lot better for their purposes as an asset.
[00:46:13]  Something that they can like just like speculate on a lot easier.
[00:46:18]  And it doesn't make, I guess, a lot of sense to me.
[00:46:20]  Like if you're looking for widespread adoption, why you would do pick like a town in Honduras as opposed to trying to get like the 7-Eleven to accept it.
[00:46:28]  But I mean, part of me thinks that, I mean, I'm not basing this off of anything except my general pop psychology knowledge of how people work.
[00:46:38]  It's like they have to kind of keep going, pursuing these sort of like useless projects or projects that maybe have a use, but not their intended, their stated one.
[00:46:48]  In order to keep the project moving, in order to keep like basically the legs running, because if they stop, then you'll look down and you'll fall like Wiley Coyote.
[00:46:58]  It's just, I mean, El Salvador in particular really seems like a case of that.
[00:47:02]  Like, I don't see, I guess I just don't see the upside of this for people who live in El Salvador.
[00:47:10]  Yeah, and that's a good point also.
[00:47:12]  Like El Salvador is something like six and a half million people.
[00:47:15]  They have a huge diaspora population, mostly in the U.S.
[00:47:17]  So there is that remittances angle, but there are established systems of remittances.
[00:47:22]  A lot of people do use Western Union or apps to send money.
[00:47:27]  So you're not necessarily going to promise people great savings or convenience by just saying use Bitcoin, especially when the wallets suck and your elderly grandmother can't walk into a store in her town and get the money you sent her.
[00:47:41]  There's just all these sorts of reasons why this stuff doesn't make sense.
[00:47:44]  Crypto is constantly and Bitcoin are constantly basically just technologies in search of a use case and you're always hearing new ones hyped, whether it's as an asset or store of value or currency.
[00:47:55]  And none of them really stand up to scrutiny or implementation.
[00:47:58]  I mean, certainly as a currency, like this stuff is so volatile.
[00:48:02]  Why would you want your coffee to cost three bucks in the morning and nine bucks in the afternoon?
[00:48:06]  That kind of thing.
[00:48:07]  And why would you do it in El Salvador, to be honest, which is a small, poor country without a lot of resources and not a very dynamic economy?
[00:48:16]  I mean, I think the main reason they did it was just because they found a willing partner in Bukele.

=== Crypto's Obsession Mystery (16:05) ===

[00:48:20]  But again, I think you're totally right.
[00:48:22]  Like, what is, I almost asked, what is the upside for some of the companies that were involved?
[00:48:26]  I do wonder why Tether got so involved.
[00:48:28]  Oh, friend of the friend of the show, Tether.
[00:48:30]  Oh, I'm obsessed.
[00:48:32]  I mean, we would, yeah, it would be, we have to talk about them before we wrap up here because what is going on with Tether?
[00:48:38]  We haven't, we haven't checked in with them in a while.
[00:48:41]  Certainly not since we did a, you know, a big episode kind of trying to explain some of that Ponzi scheme.
[00:48:48]  I'm just going to call it a Ponzi scheme.
[00:48:50]  But what is up with them?
[00:48:52]  How are how's our old friends doing?
[00:48:55]  So Tether is in a weird spot, I think.
[00:48:57]  I mean, they have, they basically have stopped printing this year.
[00:49:02]  They print or mint tethers, but they a billion dollars worth at a time or what they say is a billion.
[00:49:10]  But they always say that one of their sort of other things that they do is they say they're just to replenish some blockchain.
[00:49:15]  So they only send them to Tron, which is controlled by Justin's son.
[00:49:19]  Justin's son is a very colorful figure who recently became a Grenadin citizen and then they made him their ambassador to the WTO.
[00:49:28]  I mean, I think anyone can guess why someone would take, would become a diplomat for an island nation.
[00:49:33]  Like, look, we get it.
[00:49:35]  You're probably a criminal.
[00:49:37]  Was he, is he banned from the Seychelles?
[00:49:39]  Like, why did he?
[00:49:41]  Why there?
[00:49:42]  I don't know.
[00:49:42]  We've made it before.
[00:49:45]  But, you know.
[00:49:46]  Even Malta was like, I don't know, man.
[00:49:48]  Yeah.
[00:49:49]  It is all those places, though.
[00:49:50]  Like Malta, Seychelles, all the usual spots.
[00:49:54]  Cyprus.
[00:49:55]  And a lot of these people, you know, are trying to, not a lot, but some of these sort of big players are trying to outrun criminal or intelligence sponsors, I'd say.
[00:50:05]  It depends who you think they might be.
[00:50:07]  But so yeah, Tether is barely printed this year, except for a few billion for Tron.
[00:50:13]  Also, Justin's son said that when he became a diplomat, he was stepping down from Tron, but he hasn't, as far as I can tell.
[00:50:19]  The other thing, Tether is supposedly being investigated by the DOJ for criminal bank fraud.
[00:50:24]  For some reason, nothing's happened there.
[00:50:26]  And like the people I talk to, I haven't talked to people in the DOJ, but people in other parts of government don't really seem to understand why.
[00:50:34]  You know, it could just be one file on someone's desk.
[00:50:36]  I don't know what's happening, but there's a lot of evidence, even in the settlements that they've had with the New York AG, and then they had one with the CFTC.
[00:50:43]  I can't remember if that happened before you did your episode, but they paid something like $60 million, $50 to $60 million in fines to the U.S. government, and they've obfuscated, which is to say they lied about their bank holdings.
[00:50:57]  So there's a lot going on there.
[00:50:59]  The piece that Zeke Fox wrote in Bloomberg over the summer showed that there's a lot of sketchy banking going on.
[00:51:06]  I don't know why it hasn't been taken down in some capacity.
[00:51:10]  They're still doing stuff in Latin America.
[00:51:13]  They claim that Tether and Bitcoin will start being used in Lugano, Switzerland, which I think one of the executives lives there.
[00:51:21]  Oh, you know my ass is all in the world.
[00:51:22]  You know, Lugano.
[00:51:23]  It's still a company where the CEO hasn't really been seen in public in several years.
[00:51:28]  He's believed that.
[00:51:29]  His ass ain't real.
[00:51:30]  Yeah, he's supposed to be in Hong Kong.
[00:51:32]  I heard he's in Hong Kong.
[00:51:33]  Do you think he's, do you know people that have actually met him?
[00:51:38]  I don't know who has met him.
[00:51:39]  I've seen a photo of him that like hasn't been, I'm not sure if it's been picked up.
[00:51:43]  I'm going to show you a photo of a guy.
[00:51:45]  Yeah.
[00:51:46]  I mean, I think actually after, I think when we did the Tether episode, I think we said that we didn't, we thought he was fake.
[00:51:52]  And I think someone in the know, I have to go back in, but someone DM'd me and they said, no, he's real.
[00:51:58]  Some people think he's dead.
[00:51:59]  All right.
[00:52:00]  So I want to be, I want to be clear.
[00:52:01]  Here's the evidence you two are working on.
[00:52:03]  Jacob saw a photo of a guy and someone DM Liz and said, no, he's real.
[00:52:09]  Why not this?
[00:52:10]  Check this out.
[00:52:11]  God, if he's real, tell me.
[00:52:17]  He's fake.
[00:52:18]  Algorithm.
[00:52:21]  It's the most inexplicable company.
[00:52:23]  I mean, on LinkedIn says 12 people work for Tether.
[00:52:26]  And like, you know, 12 people cannot work for a company that manages supposedly $80 billion.
[00:52:32]  I mean, that's how they're all getting very, very rich.
[00:52:34]  Maybe not 12 people you know.
[00:52:36]  I mean, I think they can do it.
[00:52:38]  I just like, I mean, I do not think, I think you are right.
[00:52:43]  I don't think 12 people work for them.
[00:52:44]  But, but it seems like they just are, it's kind of like just like a big criminal operation.
[00:52:49]  Yeah.
[00:52:50]  It's very possible.
[00:52:51]  I mean, look at it this way.
[00:52:52]  Like, you know, one thing I say to people, like, yeah, there's speculation and sort of legitimate trading with crypto and stuff.
[00:53:00]  But imagine if you worked for one of these companies or were in one of these positions and you had a money-making machine.
[00:53:06]  Like Tether is basically a counterfeit dollar.
[00:53:09]  If you could, I mean, there's a quote from Brock Pierce from years ago where he says, this might be slightly different, but basically verbatim, he says, whenever I need money, I make a token.
[00:53:20]  I mean, think about that.
[00:53:21]  And he founded Tether.
[00:53:23]  So think about that.
[00:53:24]  If you work, like who that might attract, what kind of behaviors that incentivizes.
[00:53:29]  If you can just create a token or create some protocol that helps people trade fake money on your, on your system, like that's a money-making machine.
[00:53:37]  And that's really hard to resist.
[00:53:39]  So I think that's why like you have to acknowledge sort of a base level of basically criminality and fraud within crypto because it's built on these false premises.
[00:53:47]  I mean, that's literally what Bankman Fried says to fucking Bloomberg.
[00:53:51]  Like, you know, it's right there.
[00:53:53]  And he said, he just describes, he says, like, we just make tokens, we issue them, we get these crazy yields.
[00:53:59]  That's what yield farming is.
[00:54:01]  It's, we give it a valuation of 20 million.
[00:54:03]  And, you know, even though it's not worth anything, just, but people say it is, so then it's fine.
[00:54:07]  And we just basically are printing insane, insane returns over and over and over again.
[00:54:13]  That's what you hear throughout DeFi.
[00:54:15]  And like, there have been other versions of that from like CZ has said like one of his pieces of advice, he's somewhat frank at times for a guy who's engaging when he's engaging, but he said like every exchange should have its own token.
[00:54:25]  So there's a Binance coin.
[00:54:27]  And because one, it's just like, it's, it's your own branded token, but it keeps people bound to the platform.
[00:54:33]  Right.
[00:54:33]  Because suddenly there's this branded token that is worth, I forget how much Binance Coin is worth right now.
[00:54:38]  So, you know, there are these ways in which the user almost becomes complicit or they, you know, they can't escape the Ponzi once that, once they're in it.
[00:54:46]  Well, that's what makes a good Ponzi, I guess.
[00:54:48]  I mean, and this is, you know, with the case of FTX and Bankman Fried, I mean, this is a guy, they just fucking bought the Miami Arena.
[00:54:55]  It's now the FTX Arena.
[00:54:57]  Now, when I watch the playoffs, I have to hear that every single time.
[00:54:59]  It drives me crazy.
[00:55:00]  Yeah, they're very smart in a way.
[00:55:02]  I mean, Sam Bankman Fried's meeting with politicians all the time.
[00:55:05]  He's, I think, the second or maybe now the first biggest donor to the Democratic Party.
[00:55:10]  He's putting money everywhere.
[00:55:12]  And then some of his executives are donating a lot to Republicans.
[00:55:15]  So they have all their angles covered.
[00:55:17]  They're based in the Bahamas, but they're doing ads and branding all over the U.S.
[00:55:21]  So like, you know, you talk to people on Capitol Hill and they're like, we're being besieged by crypto lobbyists and there's very little opposition.
[00:55:28]  It's just crazy right now.
[00:55:29]  I got to say, when I was listening to that, little tip to Bankman Fried, not a voice for radio.
[00:55:36]  Not the most charismatic voice, I'm just going to say.
[00:55:52]  One last thing I want to say before we wrap up is Randy Zuckerberg.
[00:56:00]  Brace spent an inordinate amount of time.
[00:56:05]  I don't know how many videos you watch of this.
[00:56:08]  I mean, it's just the one video.
[00:56:10]  I just watched it a lot.
[00:56:11]  Like, yeah, okay, cool, cool.
[00:56:13]  Let's put me out here in the open.
[00:56:14]  I guess it's just like the blockchain where everyone can see everything.
[00:56:17]  I jacked off to the Randy Zuckerberg fucking coin video.
[00:56:20]  But if it ever came out in the news that I just jacked off ever, like if that was ever in the news, I would immediately kill myself.
[00:56:28]  Yes, Liz.
[00:56:29]  I fucking did it.
[00:56:30]  And I did it for like a long time.
[00:56:31]  I know girls do it differently.
[00:56:33]  So let me explain to you.
[00:56:34]  I spent a long time doing it.
[00:56:35]  I lit a candle.
[00:56:38]  Okay.
[00:56:39]  Yeah, I fucking got one of those things that can play a video in the shower because I don't have a bath.
[00:56:44]  And I fucking, yeah, I jacked off in the shower with a candle lit to the Randy Zuckerberg Bitcoin video.
[00:56:50]  What's your question?
[00:56:51]  What's your question?
[00:56:51]  If guys do normal stuff, then the answer is yes.
[00:56:55]  Well, actually, what I was going to say was that in that video, she kind of echoes the refrain, we're all going to make it.
[00:57:02]  Yeah, we're all going to make it.
[00:57:05]  Which seems to be really the important takeaway here that they all just kind of seem, you know, all the crypto people continued repeating, we're all going to make it.
[00:57:15]  We're all going to make it.
[00:57:15]  We're all going to make it.
[00:57:17]  Even though all signs point to not everyone is going to make it.
[00:57:21]  And actually, only a very, very small percentage of already very, very wealthy people are going to make it.
[00:57:28]  Absolutely.
[00:57:28]  I mean, in crypto, there's no incentive to ask questions.
[00:57:31]  So like if you start saying that some people are going to fail or saying some projects, which are basically the same as your project, have some problem, you know, you're going to puncture the bubble for everyone, broadly speaking, you know?
[00:57:43]  So if it's all built on froth and hype, like why ruin the party?
[00:57:48]  Yeah, I mean, that's what I think my most hated coin phrase is hodel.
[00:57:55]  Yeah.
[00:57:55]  It's awful.
[00:57:56]  I mean, I think there's probably a post hoc definition, which I looked up on Urban Day.
[00:58:00]  Actually, it's on Investopedia, which is hold on for dear life, but it definitely is just like some internet fucking corny shit.
[00:58:07]  Like I can has cheeseburger, but for fucking Bitcoin.
[00:58:10]  And it's like, that reminds me so much of WAGMI.
[00:58:14]  We're all going to make it because it's all these people being like, no, hold, hodle, hodle, hodle.
[00:58:20]  Like hold on to your Bitcoin.
[00:58:21]  Like we're all going to make it, blah, blah.
[00:58:22]  When in reality, it's like, well, no, what you want to do is you want to cash out at the, at the moment that's the most financially fucking advantageous for you.
[00:58:31]  And so you actually want everybody else to hold it.
[00:58:34]  And so it's like you're kind of locked in this like this like game of bullshit with everybody where you're trying to get everybody else to stay in longer than you are and to have them holding the bag or Googling the bag.
[00:58:46]  And that's, that's what I think drives me so crazy about this is there's this sort of veneer of positivity with all the coin stuff.
[00:58:52]  But really all it is, is like, if you're serious about this, what you want to do is fuck over everybody else and get yours at the exact opportune time.
[00:59:01]  And an opportune time in the coin space means a time right before everybody else loses all of their fucking money.
[00:59:08]  Yeah, this is why this is like a zero sum game or even a negative sum game when you add in like the social costs and the environmental costs.
[00:59:14]  Like nothing of value is being created here.
[00:59:16]  And exactly right.
[00:59:17]  It's about screwing over the person next to you.
[00:59:18]  I mean, people talk about greater fool theory.
[00:59:20]  You just need to sell it to someone who thinks it's worth more than you.
[00:59:24]  So, and the other thing is like everyone in crypto, no matter what they say, is trying to get back to fiat because fiat is what we spend money in and like that's more stable wealth.
[00:59:34]  So like fiat maxi is coming up on top again.
[00:59:37]  Right, right.
[00:59:38]  See the central bank checks came through, I can tell.
[00:59:41]  But like, you know, that's how you live life in this world for better or worse.
[00:59:46]  So like, of course, you want to get back to fiat in some way.
[00:59:49]  You know, there are people who are swimming in a lot of crypto wealth, but, you know, fiat is what they need in the end.
[00:59:55]  Exactly.
[00:59:55]  They all come crawling back to the almighty dollar.
[00:59:58]  And here's the thing.
[01:00:00]  100 years ago, you know how much a quarter was worth?
[01:00:02]  25 cents.
[01:00:04]  2022, same fucking thing.
[01:00:05]  Penny always worth one cent.
[01:00:07]  It's always worth a dollar is always worth a dollar.
[01:00:10]  That's what people don't understand.
[01:00:13]  I mean, the real takeaway that all these guys need to, you know, remember, this is financial advice, actually, I will say that, is that nothing is a gain until it's realized.
[01:00:22]  So, you know, get the fuck out if you can.
[01:00:24]  Exactly.
[01:00:26]  Well, Jacob, you have a book coming out about all this stuff soon, right?
[01:00:30]  Do you want to, is there anything else you want to plug before we sign off?
[01:00:33]  Yeah, I've been writing with the actor Ben McKenzie about crypto.
[01:00:36]  Which, by the way, can I just say this is the dude from the OC, right?
[01:00:40]  It is.
[01:00:40]  It is.
[01:00:41]  And other shows.
[01:00:42]  No, no, California.
[01:00:48]  Oh, is he a crypto?
[01:00:50]  How did that happen?
[01:00:52]  He, like, you know, during the, during quarantine, he, Hollywood basically shut down and he didn't have a lot to do.
[01:00:58]  And he, he had some buddies who wanted him to, sort of average Joe investors who wanted him to, you know, buy a little crypto, just check it out.
[01:01:06]  And he started checking it out.
[01:01:07]  He has an economics degree and he's just like, this seems like bullshit.
[01:01:11]  And then he sort of became obsessed from the angle that now I'm obsessed, which is that like, this is fraud.
[01:01:17]  We need, I want to figure out what's going on here, you know, who the villains are.
[01:01:21]  Where's the money coming from?
[01:01:22]  Where's it going?
[01:01:24]  And so he read something of mine on the New Republic and reached out to me.
[01:01:29]  And we kind of had this like whirlwind intellectual bromance over the last like seven months because we just are working together constantly.
[01:01:37]  So yeah, we have a book called Easy Money that's supposed to be out probably a year from now around then.
[01:01:43]  And hopefully some other projects, you know, go multi-platform and all that.
[01:01:48]  But like we are both just, I don't know, we become buddies and collaborators and we're just sort of obsessed with the fraud and crime angle and the absurdity because it's just so, it's often so stupid and it's all happening out in the open.
[01:02:03]  Like one of the richest guys in crypto is talking about Ponzi schemes on Bloomberg because he just doesn't care.
[01:02:10]  Like, so that's what's also sort of stunning about it and makes for a good character.
[01:02:14]  So we're seeing where it leads.
[01:02:16]  Would you say that like, would you say that Bitcoin has bought you a friend?
[01:02:24]  Well, the funny thing is like, yeah, well, yes.
[01:02:27]  And the funny thing also is people in crypto talk about community all the time, especially like NFTs and Web3 and all this bullshit.
[01:02:34]  And like, it's so fake and just used as a marketing term.
[01:02:36]  But like, I got to admit, I do feel like a little, there is a sort of a community of crypto skeptics or critics like that Ben and I are now kind of part of because like there's not a lot of like, yeah, we're writing a book, but there's not a lot of money in it for the people who call bullshit on this stuff.
[01:02:49]  There's a lot of money in it if you want to sell your soul or to one of these companies or whatever.
[01:02:54]  So like it's, that's, I think, been kind of fun is like meeting these other weirdos online who just, you know, really know their shit and have been screaming their heads off for years that there's a real problem here.
[01:03:06]  That's how I felt with the Tesla Q community too.
[01:03:08]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:03:09]  And there's some overlap there too.
[01:03:10]  Sure.
[01:03:11]  That's how I felt just with the general Q community, but people finally see it for what it is.
[01:03:16]  Yeah.
[01:03:17]  Final question.
[01:03:19]  Who is Satoshi?
[01:03:21]  You want to know my actual guess?
[01:03:23]  Yeah, actual guess, yeah.
[01:03:24]  So like I've heard like some individuals propose, I kind of think it was a group of two to three people.
[01:03:31]  Lots of people think this.
[01:03:33]  My guess is some of the obvious cans who are Hal Finney and Dave Kleiman, who are both dead.
[01:03:40]  Natural causes, I believe.
[01:03:42]  Flyman, oh, um, and there may have been one or two other people involved who are perhaps still around, but you know, went underground for one reason or another.
[01:03:49]  But people, based people who like know who have read the code and sort of know about the backgrounds of some of these people and who Satoshi was interacting with early, like that seems to sort of be the consensus.
[01:03:59]  You know, there's some wild cards out there.
[01:04:01]  Um, there's this guy, Craig Wright, who has tried to in court prove he's Satoshi, but a lot of people don't think so.
[01:04:07]  Respect, yeah, yeah, he's actually pretty fascinating.
[01:04:10]  Like, he's a kind of a wild man, but he's pretty fascinating.
[01:04:13]  Um, so yeah, I think it was probably a group of people who are a couple of them probably dead now.
[01:04:19]  I am Satoshi now.
[01:04:22]  Thank you so much, Jacob Silverman.

=== Wild Cards in Crypto (02:53) ===

[01:04:26]  Unfortunately, due to your last name, I won't be seeing you in the Protestant church I attend, but I will have my revenge, and my snakes will emerge from every pipe in your house and suck you dry of every drop of all liquid in your body.
[01:04:46]  If you write another article about what made me the man I am today, yes.
[01:05:13]  Oh, stop.
[01:05:14]  What are you doing?
[01:05:15]  I don't know, it's making my throat hurt too.
[01:05:16]  Coindexter's retired for the day.
[01:05:18]  Oh my god, just kidding.
[01:05:22]  No, I'm just kidding again.
[01:05:23]  That was a great interview.
[01:05:25]  Yeah, that was great.
[01:05:26]  I love talking about the crypto space.
[01:05:29]  It was really hard for me to not throw in a kind of like where you know art and technology and culture meet intersection of all those.
[01:05:38]  Have you been to Miami, Brace?
[01:05:40]  I forgot.
[01:05:41]  No, I got chased out of Orlando at gunpoint.
[01:05:45]  Um, but that's just a different place.
[01:05:48]  Yeah, well, it's in Florida.
[01:05:50]  I don't know.
[01:05:51]  I mean, that's I'm sorry.
[01:05:52]  It's if you're like, have you been to Bakersfield?
[01:05:54]  I'm like, no, but I've been to Fresno, you'd be like, oh, fair enough.
[01:05:57]  That is so different.
[01:05:58]  You cannot compare Bakersfield and Fresno to Orlando and Miami.
[01:06:02]  That's a category.
[01:06:04]  Listener, Paul, can you compare Orlando to Miami in the same way that you compare Fresno to Bakersfield?
[01:06:11]  No.
[01:06:12]  No, you can't.
[01:06:13]  Okay, they're both.
[01:06:14]  It's like, hey, have you been to New York?
[01:06:16]  No, but I've been to Buffalo.
[01:06:18]  Same thing.
[01:06:19]  No.
[01:06:20]  It's a New York City.
[01:06:22]  Oh, my God.
[01:06:24]  That was a delight having him on.
[01:06:26]  It was, it was.
[01:06:27]  It was a delight.
[01:06:30]  A Finjo.
[01:06:31]  Oh, no.
[01:06:33]  You like that?
[01:06:34]  Finjo.
[01:06:34]  Finjo.
[01:06:36]  Wow.
[01:06:36]  Doesn't sound right.
[01:06:37]  Sounds inappropriate.
[01:06:40]  With that, I'm Liz.
[01:06:42]  My name is, well, it doesn't matter what my name is, it matters what value I'm bringing to you to the table.
[01:06:48]  And what I'm bringing to you is a coin called Safe Moon.
[01:06:50]  Now, there's two things you can trust in the coin space: the word safe and the word moon.
[01:06:54]  Moon means good and money, safe means you'll never lose any.
[01:06:57]  And I want you right now to take out your little MedaMask wallet and put every single fiat dollar you have in SafeMoon right now because I lost a lot of money last week and I would like to recoup a fraction of the expenses.
[01:07:11]  Brace Belden.
[01:07:12]  And of course, we're joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[01:07:16]  And this has been Truanon.
[01:07:18]  We'll see you next time.