The Bitcoin Group, the American original.
For over the last ten years, the sharpest satosies, the best bitcoins, the hardest cryptocurrency
talk.
We'd like to welcome our panelists, Josh Shigala from TheStandard.io.
Cheers, big ears!
Jameson Lopp from Casa Hodel.
Hi, good to be here.
Chad Costa from Bitcoin TakeOver Magazine.
Powerbonger.
And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network.
Moving on to issue one.
Bitcoin, average cycle count suggests bull run is just two months away.
Could the price of Bitcoin be ready to rock it to maybe $180,000 or as high as $250,000?
Because today it's taken off to 63 at 5% and rising.
Let's go to Josh Shigala.
What do you think about the amazing price of Bitcoin?
I mean, I never really liked these sorts of articles.
I find them sort of aggravating.
But yeah, if all my triangles and polygons line up and the stars and the moon.
But I do think that there is some historical precedent for this after
harboring and you wait a while.
And then there's a whole lot of fun and stuff to get over.
And then miners that are hodling long enough to make a profit start to sell a little bit.
And then they hold and hold and the miners that can survive.
And then you start to, these all play a dynamic, but now we've also got all these ETFs and everything else.
So yeah, it makes sense.
I think it could happen.
But you know, these sort of articles, anything to do with price gets clicks.
And that's what it comes down to is just sort of like Hopium.
I just like how fast we shift from doom and gloom to absolute euphoria.
It seemed like it was a week ago.
The Japanese yen had crashed.
The carry trade was over and they were saying global recession, global recession.
Now all of a sudden the Fed, the Fed is going to raise rates.
Stocks are going to go up.
Everything's going to be fine.
And now Bitcoin's up as well.
Jameson Lopp, what do you think about the latest Bitcoin price and the sudden rebound from the Japanese collapse?
Oh, it could go up, but it could go down.
Oh my God.
I mean, I think the interesting way to look at this, a lot of people look at the Bitcoin exchange and they're like, oh, it's volatile.
I would say the rest of the world is what's volatile.
As you just noticed, like we're whipsawing back and forth between catastrophe and euphoria.
And I think that that's just a bigger reflection on the state of the world right now.
Of course, we've also, in America, we've got the whole political thing going on for several more months that people are holding their breaths about.
Is the industry going to be under more pressure from the government or less pressure from the government for the next four years?
So, I mean, look, I don't really talk about price that much.
We did have an internal company pool at the beginning of the year.
And I kind of did the same kind of extrapolation of like, what happens if history repeats itself yet again?
Which I've always been surprised that it seems to keep repeating itself because you would think that after some period of time, kind of like with technical analysis,
like if everybody expects it to happen, then people start front running it and it kind of washes out.
But yeah, I'm going to look like a real jackass if the price doesn't at least hit some all-time highs by the end of the year.
Well, and it was looking bad there. The Japanese were selling off. There was all this recession fears.
And now just shrug your shoulders. It's over. The political scene's moving as well. It's all happening.
Vlad Costa, what do you think about the latest Bitcoin price?
I'll play the part of the bear here. I think that since the ETFs, we have seen how the price has been less wild than before.
And I'm pretty sure that these institutions can screw us and not allow us to have all-time highs for a while at least.
And then there's going to be that FOMO on the retail side and I guess that's when they will let it happen so they can dump on someone.
That's the way in which I predict that it's going to play out.
Two months, I think that's a bit exaggerated. Usually the bull market was coming in year after the halving for some reason.
Now it has been accelerated by this hype surrounding ETFs. We hit a new all-time high. I think it was in February.
And since then, we've just plateaued around $60,000. And it's not the same $60,000 it was back in 2021 because the dollar has also lost some of its purchasing power.
So I don't know what's going to happen but I'm not very comfortable with having the former enemies of Bitcoin pretending to be friends of Bitcoin.
And I think also the November elections are going to decide a lot of what's going to happen. I don't want to get political.
I know you guys have different opinions usually and you get into fights on this show because of it.
But as a non-American, for me it's concerning to see how much Donald Trump is used as a single point of failure by an entire industry.
They put so much money in his campaign and in the event that he doesn't win, I think there's going to be a backlash or a retribution against Gemini, against Coinbase, against all of these companies that put a lot of money into funding Donald Trump.
So I'm not very bullish from this point of view because, yeah, I don't want to get there but I've explained to you why I don't think it's going to happen this year.
And if we get eight years of Kamala Harris, Kamala Kamala, I don't know, I'm not American. I'm not supposed to pronounce that correctly.
But if we get eight years of that, I don't see that being great for Bitcoin.
It could be great for developing the censorship resistance of it, but not great for companies, for mining companies, for exchanges, for everyone else who's making a buck right now in an environment that's not super-regulated.
I think it's going to be much more regulated and it's going to be worse for business.
I think it's Kamala.
No, I mean, look, as an industry, a lot has been invested in this political cycle.
So if it pays off and Trump wins and the crypto industry can take credit for that, then if anything, that's a great position of strength, I think, going forward.
But it could backfire and, you know, if despite being like the industry that has spent the most on lobbying and still not getting what we want, the consequences could definitely be pretty bad for future political cycles.
Sadly, I think that's very likely. I don't think they're going to get a lot of bang for their buck, but we'll talk more about politics later.
Let's keep going on the price-to-the-exit question, predicting against the magic eight ball, the source of all truth in this and any other universe.
Josh Shagala, will the price of Bitcoin be higher or lower this time next week?
I'm going to go with higher. Let's do it.
Jameson Lopp, higher or lower?
I'm a permable, so I'm always going to answer higher to that question.
That's what I say. I don't know how anybody can sell their Bitcoin. I mean, you got to pay rent and stuff.
But other than that, Vlad Costa, higher or lower?
I'll play the heel in this situation. Lower.
Somebody's got to be bearish. Last week, the ball wouldn't answer us this week. Will the price of Bitcoin be higher next week?
You may rely on it. You may rely on it. The ball is bullish.
Moving on to issue two.
Bitfarms, acquisition of Bitcoin miner stronghold, a strategic move against rival riot.
Bitfarms appears to be making itself more challenging target for its competitor, which has been gunning for a takeover in over a year.
We're seeing a lot of attempted consolidation and even violent consolidation in the Bitcoin mining corporate market.
Jameson Lopp, what do you think about these large Bitcoin miners and is it good or bad for Bitcoin if they combine into one or two giant companies?
This is really the name of the game. Bitcoin mining is probably one of the most cutthroat competitive industries in existence.
It's pretty much guaranteed that there are going to be losers.
If you're not number one, then you're probably going to be eaten up or go out of business.
So it's not surprising. I think the thing that concerns me that I'm not really a fan of on the sort of industrial scale mining side is how much financial leverage some of them are basically putting forward in order to grow fast.
I think that's the type of thing that gets really risky and causes more bankruptcies.
But it's fine. At the end of the day, even if the largest miners go bankrupt, the Bitcoin network will adjust and keep moving forward.
I could speak about centralization of mining at length for a long time.
Right now, we are in a more centralized period, I would say.
But over the really long term, I'm still optimistic that just due to the nature of energy distribution around the world, that mining will continue to decentralize.
It does seem like a very dangerous proposition. Obviously, it's an economy of scale. If you can buy more power, you can probably get a deal.
If you buy more processors, you probably get a deal. And these companies are combining and combining and combining, perhaps into a global cartel that could control Bitcoin mining and make lots of money and have as much power as governments.
Who knows? Vlad Costa, what do you think about the Bitcoin companies publicly combining together even against their will?
I mean, this is just a sign that they're not making much money and they do need to work together for this purpose.
I think in the beginning, we had mining pools that were sharing the revenue because they were more efficient this way.
And now we have mining companies that are merging for the purpose of basically not being unprofitable and saving each other.
And since the halving, we have seen a climate where the fees were not as high as previously.
I think in the first week, we had the crazy fees. That was also when I was on the show around the halving time. I think I was on the halving show.
No, I was also last month during the Mallorca recording. Anyway, my point here is that the fees have been low.
And the expectation was that they would at least see some price increase or find a way to collect more fees.
The ordinal industry, I know that's the next topic. I don't want to spoil it, but the ordinal industry has not been booming.
And then you have the runes and they were only popular for about a couple of weeks and then they just faded into obscurity.
I mean, of course, there is a market for these, but it's not as active as expected.
So these mining companies are not really making a lot of Bitcoin because their rewards were cut in half and then they could not collect too much in transaction fees.
So of course, they're going to try to make these moves to stay alive, to stay afloat and hopefully survive until the next cycle.
If they're going to get overtaxed or whatever, I imagine they're going to move out of the US entirely and go somewhere else.
There was a time, I think it was only a couple of weeks where everyone was saying, oh, ordinals and runes and these things, they're going to be so great that they'll pay Bitcoin miners in the future and we won't have to worry.
I think that time passed quickly.
Josh Shigala, what do you think about the Bitcoin miners joining together, perhaps becoming one large Bitcoin mining company?
It'll never happen.
The thing is what Vlad said, yeah, it's true, but also there's an aspect of mining, which is that mining is one of the most calculatable business models there is.
There are a few variables, obviously price of energy, hash rate, stuff like that, but if you can take those aspects into consideration, you can also have a look at historical data from the price.
And so a lot of it is about can this company survive the bear times?
Things in this space are very, very, you know, I mean, it's known, it's known absolutely for being very volatile.
And that also includes things like ordinals, our volatile trend thing, you know, they're not like a permanent thing that happens.
So ordinals might come back, they might not, who knows.
But I feel if I had a large scale mining operation, the deep calculations would consider all of these facts.
And so the miners that fail are the ones that didn't run their business well.
And then they get a hostile takeover or something else.
So, but mining is always going to be decentralized purely because energy is fairly decentralized around the world.
And, you know, in terms of the US, you guys have a ton of oil.
And if Trump gets in, I think you guys will be pulling some of that juice out of the ground.
Drill baby drill.
Drill baby drill. It'll be a lot cheaper.
Energy prices have a big part to play in this whole game.
But generally speaking, miners don't like subsidized energy because generally the governments then shut them down after a while because the government end up subsidizing it.
And they don't like, they like renewables because it's just never ending flow like things like waterfalls and things.
And, yeah, so we'll see.
We'll see what happens with mining.
Mining is always one of these flood points as well in Bitcoin that are fined specifically just before a harboring.
Everyone goes on about, will the miners do that?
It's always the same thing.
There wasn't too much of the sort of minor death spiral fud this time around, though.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that's true.
That's true.
There was a little bit.
There was a little bit, but it's amazing how those guys come out of the woodwork.
It's amazing to see who those people are because usually they're like really hardcore technical people, really into Bitcoin.
And then they, as we head towards the harboring, some of these people just turn into these death spiral talk people.
Well, and it is quite a major change this time to have companies traded on the stock market who are Bitcoin mining companies to have their stock going up and down with the price.
And the same fears and the worries that Bitcoiners have echoing out through these other markets.
Let's move on to the exit question.
Bitcoin mining centralization.
Is it more likely to happen because of companies such as these ones on Wall Street combining together or countries perhaps combining together into a United Nations of Bitcoin or something like that.
James and Lop, is it countries or corporations that we should worry about?
Corporations in the short term.
Flat cost of companies or corporations.
For now corporations, but as we see more nation states getting into mining and that one can also be subsidized by a money printer that can also become concerning.
Shashigala companies or corporations or those are the both countries or corporations.
Yeah, companies and people.
I think it's some very interesting future telling here that right now we're worried about companies, but in the future, we'll worry about countries.
So that's only a matter of time.
Moving on to issue three.
Ordinals flounder while runes dominate the Bitcoin network runes have accounted for more than 50% of Bitcoin transactions in only nine of the past 30 days.
Meanwhile, interest in ordinals has plummeted.
They were all the big rage on the Bitcoin network.
People were collecting special numbers under 10,000.
This certain number, that certain number, they were going to have the best ordinals around the NFTs were finally here on Bitcoin.
And now they've slowed down.
Let's go to Vlad Costa, who was talking about this last issue.
What do you think, Vlad, about the ordinals slowing down, the runes taking off?
And in general, maybe the NFT on Bitcoin wave is over for a while anyway.
Well, I do have a bunch of ordinals, ordinals below the 20k mark.
So I was there, I guess in the first week, but a bit too late to be in the first 10k.
So I do hope that they're coming back somehow.
But at the same time, I do understand that there's not much demand for them right now.
The entire NFT market is struggling.
It seems like the new wave or whatever is fashionable these days is meme coins.
And that's where the liquidity is.
I've spoken to a bunch of artists who are doing rare Pepe cards on the Bitcoin blockchain.
And they said that this is their historic low.
It has never been this bad so far.
They could always sell some of their art.
But right now, people seem to be too focused on meme coins and they don't know how to adapt in this environment.
And yeah, because with NFTs, it's all about collections.
But with meme coins, it's just about this silly idea that you put on a blockchain.
You put a name to the token and the picture and you expect people to trade it.
As if in some cases, it's almost like a prediction market.
You had Geoboden and Dolan Tramp, which were two tokens on Solana and you could watch them go up and down whenever there was a surge in popularity.
It's actually quite funny, but I would never put my money into them.
The ruins, on the other hand, they're more like tokens that you issue on top of an existing ordinal.
So I do understand why they're being used because people have already mined a lot of these ordinals.
So they want to create collections on top of the ordinals that they have.
And there are some collections, but the market is slow for now.
And I hope it's going to come back in a few years, because once again, I have some sub 20k ordinal inscriptions.
Hit me up.
You can find them on BTCheads.com if you want to buy them.
Big money, big money for Vlad there.
And it's interesting, people are so interested in collectibles, but they don't even bother learning the basic life cycle of a collectible.
The collectible comes out, is probably overpriced, goes up a little bit more, goes straight down, is completely forgotten for years.
No one wants it.
Then it comes back and it's really valuable, or it never comes back and it's completely worthless.
It's interesting to watch these cycles go on.
People always try to pick the next one.
They're always looking at the most popular when it's often these least popular things that become popular in the future.
I think it just drives everyone crazy, this collectible market, but we keep seeing it go.
And just as soon as it's gone, everyone writes all their dead collectible market things and then it comes back.
People still pay money for tulips and beanie babies, just not as much.
Josh Shigala, what do you think about the ordinals and the runes?
At one point, they were going to save Bitcoin and make the fee market irrelevant, and now it's hard times.
I think I've got a video somewhere in 2011 of me saying there's going to be a whole lot of different coins, heaps of different coins.
Everyone's going to have their own coin, but there'll always be Bitcoin and there'll be this circus of gambling.
Just randomness that you can gamble on because they'll just pop and fizzle all around the place.
And that's really what it is.
I mean, you have more certainty with a frog race because at least you can sort of see, oh, look, that frog is really strong and tends to go forward instead of sideways.
So when you are using meme coins or any of these things to make money, you can't really do it.
It's almost impossibility.
All you can do is have some fun with it for sure.
It's fun. Hey, I like this meme.
And the other thing is like cultural relevance.
Like Vlad said, it is kind of a little bit of a prediction market in a way because it sort of litmus tests memes, which are a reflection of current affairs, which are a reflection of society.
So you can sort of, you can, there's a little bit of judgment there, but there's also a massive marketing machines behind successful meme coins, which people don't see.
They think it's all organic, but it's not.
There are, there is a large amount of money sitting behind some of the popular ones.
So, yeah, it's, it is what it is.
It's all part of the game.
It's all part of the fun.
But I would say it depends if you're a gambler or an investor or if, or just someone sensible willing to hedge fiat risk, then, then, you know, I would stick with, with mainstream, well, blue chip, I would call them cryptos like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
And such, maybe not even Ethereum, if you want to go really hardcore stick with Bitcoin, if you're willing to do a little bit more risk than Ethereum.
And then it's all the way down from there to all sorts of other things.
And that's not to say that there's not really good projects out there.
But yeah, the meme coins, the, the, the ordinals and the ruin, all, all of this stuff.
I don't know.
You can just, yeah, bet on a frog.
It's also interesting to watch the coin supply and who owns what with these kinds of coins.
I think it was allegedly the Iggy Azalea coin mother and they said, oh, she doesn't own that much of it.
Then they found out she owns 60%.
So if she gets bored or tired of the coin, she can sell it down to nothing and she'll exit and you'll be stuck holding the coin.
And it seems a lot of these are set up that way and it just happens so fast.
One minute you're up.
The next minute, the large holder decides they're bored with it.
They sell off and you're doomed.
James, the father coin guy is in prison.
So maybe he can't sell him.
Maybe he's locked up.
That's what you really need is someone that doesn't have access to a keyboard.
That's the only way you're going to be safe.
Even then they might get it out on the phone.
James and lob, what do you think about the trouble for ordinals and runes and bitcoins on NFT on Bitcoin?
I mean, we're basically talking about various speculative games.
I think none of what happened should have been a surprise.
Ordinals, runes, BRC20, like any of these protocols or meta protocols.
As far as I'm aware, they weren't doing anything that you couldn't replicate already on other networks that had already been done.
So from the functionality perspective, I think expecting to see the same type of hype cycles occur on Bitcoin now as we've seen on Ethereum and so on and what not makes sense.
I would speculate that the decline in NFT or art type of collections is mostly died off because people just aren't feeling wealthy right now.
If there's another bull market and everybody has more money than they know what to do with, then they're going to start putting that money into really weird things.
Or, you know, luxury items like art to just show off that they can afford buying insanely expensive stuff.
It also seems to me that the rise in meme coins is at least partially a result of the regulatory environment.
We've seen a lot more crackdowns from the SEC and, you know, anytime when you have a person or a group of people that is coordinating to launch some sort of token, then it's risky to get into.
But if you're just launching something that's based off of a meme, you know, a meme is a leaderless, organic phenomenon.
Personally, I don't think that memes should be coins, but they have found an interesting niche.
And of course, most memes are fairly short in their longevity.
So it would seem to me that if you wanted to do meme coin-based stuff, then you should probably be doing it on a network like Solana or something that's just incredibly fast and cheap and doesn't necessarily care about permanence like we do in Bitcoin.
Well, especially because you could try many, many memes very cheaply and not have to pay the large fees where if you did that on Bitcoin, it could be a disaster for your wallet.
But I do definitely agree, James.
People often talk about the altcoin market and how when Bitcoin goes up, everyone will sell some of their Bitcoin, go into alts, then alts will go up.
And in the same way, I think we have another market next to us as the NFT market.
When people have too much money in Bitcoin or altcoins, they're going to sell some of it, try to speculate on this art, and again, try to make more money.
I don't know if it's ever going to be about the art, but the money is definitely there.
Vlad, do you have more on this?
Yeah, I want to add the fact that ordinary inscriptions and runes can do much more than NFTs.
And as some people are researching right now, there are a bunch of guys who want to put zero knowledge proofs on the blockchain and verify against that.
And basically use this for extra scaling tricks that they want to use.
For me, it's very interesting that they figured out that what started out as just another way to put rare puppies on the blockchain evolved into something that is much more interesting.
And I do see a lot of potential in this.
You can also play Doom in some ordinary inscription.
I'm not sure if you discovered that one.
But Bitcoin can run Doom.
And I think that's a pretty big deal.
And yeah, I think the future is going to be interesting.
There are all of these companies that right now are working on building zero knowledge rollups on Bitcoin.
And for that, they're going to use the technology behind ordinary inscriptions.
I think it's cool.
Well, at least Bitcoin can finally run Doom.
Josh, do you have more on this?
Yeah, I mean, I've always thought art is like the last place NFTs really need to.
It was weird that it came.
We'd always get these artists come to our meetups or whatever and go, what about art on the blockchain?
You're like, dude, what's with you and the art on the blockchain?
It's never going to fly.
And then all of a sudden, NFTs like, what?
I didn't see that coming.
Okay, I was wrong.
I was wrong.
But anyone that really wants to understand why modern art is so crap, like so shit.
You've got to have a look and understand how money laundering works and how the mafia deal.
Why art?
Why people like pop artists like Andy Warhol actually became famous.
A lot of that isn't organic.
It's all about, hey, I got a whole bunch of money.
I need to make it look like it's organic.
And so they'll find some like two-bit artists and then invest in a whole heap of their art,
make them big by pumping a bit of that money into marketing,
some of the legit money that they've got, pick it big and they say, hey, where'd you get the money?
I bought this guy's art when they were really small.
And this can happen at a massive scale with all of this sort of art on the blockchain stuff.
And so there's so many aspects.
People would think, oh, yeah, I'm just getting rich because I've bet on this.
But behind the scenes, there's a whole industry of certain aspects there.
And not to say that that's bad.
I'm not making some sort of judgment on that.
I'm just saying that's what it is that's out there.
And it's going to pop and fizzle at the rest of it because of aspects like the Jameson said,
when people are very uber-wealthy, they spin stuff on luxury.
And that supports all of this tomfoolery.
Well, and it is part of the historical record that Jackson Pollock was essentially sponsored by the CIA.
They wanted to create an American art form to rival the Soviets.
They didn't really have one, so they went with modern art.
Another reason for all of the modern art is, as I talked to a friend of mine in Germany,
we have too much peace.
There's so much peace around that you can make kind of ridiculous art and get away with it.
Whereas in a more serious time, you had to do paintings of rich old people and say,
oh, you know, the rich people have all the money.
We're going to do paintings of them.
Really nice paintings, making them look heroic and powerful.
We might have to go back to that.
I'm not sure.
All right, exit question.
Vlad Costa, let's say I put a gun to your head.
Are you going to make an NFT collectible or a mean coin like a currency like Vlad the coin?
Go ahead, Vlad.
50-50 shot.
Well, I made both of them on the Bitcoin blockchain.
There's a Vlad coin on counterparty and there's also a bunch of Bitcoin heads which I created.
And you too, Joshua and Thomas, you are part of it.
You can find it at btcheads.com.
You can buy a bunch of them if you want.
I don't care.
Don't make me money.
But if you put a gun to my head, I'll probably choose the art part because you never know when it comes back.
Memes are ephemeral.
For example, 10 years ago, one of the most popular memes was the good guy Greg,
the bold guy with a joint in his mouth.
And that was a very popular meme.
Nobody talks about that anymore.
But art, it can come back.
Ah, yes, the guy with the hat.
Josh, you got a 50-50 choice.
What are you going to do?
Are you going to make a meme coin or an NFT collectible?
Yeah, just on Vlad's point, I saw somewhere like jokes from the 1900s and they don't even make sense.
The cultural void between then and now is so huge that you listen to the joke and you're like,
I literally don't get it.
And people used to laugh at them and make some sort of cognitive.
Anyway, yeah, I don't know, whatever.
Actually, we make, with the standard, we use NFTs to actually write the metadata of a smart vault of a vault of someone's debt.
So we run collateralized debt positions in a smart contract.
So you can collateralize your smart contract and then take debt out against it.
And the NFT actually shows that and it pulls that data in a dynamic way because it's an SVG and shows it.
And hey, Presto, you can actually sell your debt and collateral in one transaction or many,
or you can send it to a different wallet if you feel that your seed phase has been compromised.
So that's how we use NFTs.
And that's what we've done.
I don't know.
It sounds like you use NFTs to make meme coins.
And Vlad made meme coins and NFTs.
I'm just surrounded by blasphemers here.
Jameson Lopp, would you make an NFT or a meme coin?
Well, like I said, I think that memes should not be coins.
I do find memetics and memetic theory to be very fascinating and quite applicable to this entire ecosystem.
It is driven by memetics in a variety of different ways.
I just don't think that memetics should necessarily be directly financialized and traded like that.
Now, you could step back a bit and say, well, isn't every crypto token somewhat driven by memetics?
And that's certainly true, but some more than others.
And I think in Bitcoin, we've built a lot of very strong narratives and memetics around Bitcoin
and why it's valuable and why people should desire it.
But those are all based upon actual attributes of the ecosystem, the network itself.
Organic, puddle, stuff like that.
It's gotten a lot sillier now.
It's just about who the mascot of your coin is, whether you like dogs or cats.
And that's how you make your investment decisions.
So, of course, I've also made NFTs and, in a way, meme coins.
The MadBitcoins21 Curio card was kind of a fundraiser for MadBitcoins.
I was kind of like a coin, but we never made MadBitcoins back in the day or WorldCryptoCoin,
although we thought about it many times.
And I guess it would have been cool.
I'm not sure.
Let's keep moving.
Check out WorldCryptoNetwork.com where we've got a lot of shorts recently.
It looks like they're from the Havening.
Remember the Havening?
Well, now we've got shorts from the Havening at WorldCryptoNetwork.com.
Moving on to issue four.
Democrats exclude Bitcoin and crypto from 2024 platform aligning with past hostility.
Although I'm not sure if removing it from the platform is the same as being openly hostile.
In the past, when people were openly hostile to Bitcoin, they called it criminal and drug money,
just like Donald Trump did back when he was president.
What do you guys think about Bitcoin and politics?
Let's see.
We can also talk about Donald Trump is launching a new crypto platform.
Sounds like Trump DeFi.
And he wants all of his followers to join Trump DeFi where there are no doubt going to have lots of other coins
in addition to Bitcoin.
So much for all of that.
What do you guys think?
They left it out of the platform.
Josh Shagala out of the platform and Trump DeFi.
What do you think about crypto and politics this week?
Look, we have enough scammers in crypto that it's good to see the politicians leave as well.
The scammers can leave.
I don't care.
Yeah, go for it.
Leave.
I just think it's sad and funny they gave Trump and so many of these people so much money.
And then they do the same thing every time.
They say, hey, Bitcoin's really cool.
And then pretty soon they're launching their own altcoin.
They're launching their own altcoin exchange.
They're writing smart contracts.
They're doing DeFi.
They never seem to just stick with Bitcoin.
Jameson Lopp, what do you think about it being left out of the platform and now the Trump DeFi platform?
I think it's pretty sad that the sort of the Democrat platform has really turned into financial authoritarianism.
20 years ago, it was the Democrats who were anti big banks and who were seemed to be the most upset around the great financial crisis.
And here we are, time has exchanged and seems to be mostly spearheaded by Senator Warren and her lackeys to push forward pro big bank agendas and basically cast dispersions upon all of us as being fringe and criminals.
We'll see how that works out.
I mean, it's kind of funny to see Trump spouting a bunch of pro Bitcoin rhetoric.
But as far as I can tell, Trump doesn't really believe in the narratives and the things that a lot of us believe that brought us to this space.
I think it's much more straightforward as to why he got interested.
He has realized that he can make a lot of money off of it.
And in a number of different ways, whether it's directly from industry players that are pandering to him and encouraging him to pander to us, or whether it's actually leveraging these networks and protocols to basically do the same shenanigans that a lot of other people have done,
but possibly at a new scale never before seen since, you know, Trump obviously has a huge audience, a huge network and network effects are one of the most important things if you're launching tokens or defy protocols or whatever.
So, you know, best of luck to him and his endeavors, but I directly warned Donald Trump Jr. when he first started, or maybe it was Eric Trump when they first started, you know, teasing this stuff a few weeks ago.
I was like, you should probably wait until you know that daddy is going to crush the SEC before you start doing all this defy stuff.
So, you know, they seem to be going, you know, headlong into it and hopefully they don't get burned by a Harris-Ginsler administration crushing them after they've done some questionable things.
And don't forget that also, like many people on this platform, Donald Trump has made his own NFTs, like Jayman said, activating his own audience to purchase them.
I doubt it was many bitcoiners or crypto people unless they were speculating, but those NFTs sold out and they sold out twice.
And the second time I think they had kind of a lottery thing you could win dinner with Trump, something like this.
And again, he sells them, he makes money, nobody knows what happens after that.
Vlad, what do you think about the Donald Trump crypto platform and the Democrats leaving it out of their platform?
Well, I'm part of the half of this cast right now that is not American, but I'm going to be indirectly affected by whatever happens.
But what I want to say is that I want to take a step back and think about the fact that 15 years ago, bitcoin was still in its infancy.
And 15 years later, we're disappointed that one major political party in the US has expressed some direct positive ideas about bitcoin.
And the other party has not, and we're disappointed that the other party is apathetic and they don't seem to care about bitcoin.
And they also have the senator who is very much against anything bitcoin or crypto or whatever.
So I think it's incredible we got to this level so fast.
I admire David Bailey for being able to pull this off because it's mostly his merit.
Without him, I don't think bitcoin would have been such a major electoral topic, but it seems like it has become.
But even if you look at the 20 point plan by the Trump wannabe administration, you're going to see that they don't mention anything about bitcoin
because they do have one specific point that says they want to maintain the dollar as the supreme unit of account and currency.
So of course, they're just bitcoiners when it comes to collecting some bitcoin which they exchange for US dollars and they finance whatever they're doing for electoral marketing.
It's not bad that we have at least one of the, no, two of the major candidates, two out of three are pro-bitcoin.
RFK is even more bullish and he had a speech in which he said he was gonna, so James, I'm happy that you're here and I get to say this,
but RFK said he was going to appoint James Lowery, not James, what's his name?
Jason.
Jason Lowery, the space boy.
He was going to get appointed to be Secretary of State? No, Secretary of something.
Or defense or cybersecurity or something, something related.
Exactly.
Well, I don't think we have to worry about that.
It's crazy we got to this point because we're entering the mainstream narrative and it also makes me wonder,
you know, every time the bitcoin bull runs have relied on some big narrative and some big players entering.
In the beginning it was the libertarians, then it was the companies behind libertarian organizations,
and then it was about corporations buying bitcoin, then you got Michael Saylor, then you got companies adding bitcoin to their balance sheet,
and now it's this political coin that basically turns people into single issue voters.
They're going to vote according to the party that gives them more guarantees that they're going to be able to self-custodate or bitcoin.
They're going to be able to run their business revolving around bitcoin.
It's insane.
So much of this is happening just 15 years after this was created.
And it makes me wonder what's next because it seems like we had Elon the previous cycle, now we have Trump.
What's next really?
How big can we get?
Yeah.
I'm pretty sure Trump's the most famous person in the world right now.
Yeah.
I don't think there's any like, so it's, I don't think there's anyone else that can go in terms of-
More heads of state, more billionaires, heads of multinational corporations when they figure out that they should probably diversify their treasuries.
But one of my many projects that I run is bitcoinpoliticians.org where I keep track of all of the members of Congress and their financial disclosures
to basically show which of these people actually own bitcoin and have skin in the game.
And even if you look at a lot of the so-called pro-bitcoin politicians who talk a good game about it, they don't actually own any.
So you really have to wonder, do they actually believe what they're saying?
But Robert F. Kennedy, he is definitely in.
He, according to him, converted a lot of his wealth into bitcoin about a year ago.
Yeah.
I think like Trump has always said, you know, the US dollar, that's what I focus on.
That's what I care about.
Bitcoin's a competitor, so I don't like it.
But I think specifically with like stablecoins defaulting to the US dollar in terms of network effect, it's a huge opportunity for the US to have to
really, really solidify that as the global dominant settlement currency, just purely because every Bitcoin that I know,
even if they live in Australia, if they live in Poland, if they live, they've got their portfolio set to US dollar because of this network effect.
And so I think it would be very, very clever for the US to really double down on that and make the US dollar denominated stablecoin market really support that.
I mean, you know, I don't really care either way, but if I was a US politician and I cared about my dominance in the world in terms of the US dollar,
that's where I would focus.
And maybe that's where Trump's going to go.
Well, remember also during Trump's speech, he said that he wanted all the Bitcoin to be mined in the US.
And I think that would wreck decentralization, would wreck the lack of Bitcoin to be uncensurable and so on, which I think a lot of Bitcoiners would be against,
you know, back in my day, having one country control everything, having maybe a president who says, I want the Bitcoin price to be this,
or I want the number of Bitcoin to be this.
And they say, can we really stop such a powerful president?
So I just think it's very strange that all the anti-government Bitcoiners are certainly pro-government.
If they think this guy who is not known for fulfilling his promises, who mentioned you in a couple of speeches, is then going to suddenly fulfill all his promises.
It would have been a lot simpler if he just pardoned Ross Olbrecht back when he was president.
Go ahead, James.
More on this.
Go ahead.
Oh, yeah.
That was something I brought up, too.
It was like it was on his desk and he decided not to do it four years ago.
Well, and that would have been currency for all of us where we'd say, okay, you know, I don't like the guy, whatever, disagree on his politics,
but he came through for Ross and we would have said, well, he took a big risk there.
He put this, you know, drug lord guy in quotes back in the market and so forth, but he didn't take that risk.
He didn't do that.
I have a lot of distrust of Trump, but go ahead, James.
You know, my take on the whole Trump thing with regard to, you know, quote unquote, anti-government Bitcoiners, I think that at a very high level,
it's more of a question of on one side, you know, you have the party that is historically openly hostile to our industry.
And then you have Trump and his administration that, yeah, he said some stupid things about not liking the industry when he was president,
but he was never really openly hostile to it from executive branch standpoint.
And he wasn't, you know, pushing the legislative branch to do things that were hostile to it.
So I think it's more of like the way that I put it is, you know, we don't want any help from the government.
We just want you to leave us alone.
And I think that people are more, I think they're more likely to believe that the Trump is more likely to just leave us alone than to actively meddle in our affairs.
And at the very least, he does seem to be more pro business and he seems to be listening to the industry leaders who are coming to him and saying, you know, just leave us alone and let us do business.
So, you know, I'm very much more in line with the leave it alone or even just let technology develop slowly so we can see again how we can benefit as a country from that technology.
But with Trump and with these other Republicans and the offers, I think what people see is they see someone that's going to put their thumb on the scale for Bitcoin,
someone that's going to equal things up, someone's going to make us the winners.
And I don't want the government to do that.
I'm not looking for a higher power to come into Bitcoin and save everything or fix anything.
And they always do.
They always come in and they say, hey, we're here.
We're new to Bitcoin.
What's going on?
And then in the next week, they're like, we can fix it.
We can expand the supply.
We can limit what addresses you can send to.
We'll have no at home custody, all these kind of things.
They're always here to Bitcoin and how to fix it.
But we're going to move on to the next issue, which is also unfortunately politics.
So we're going to stick with this discussion.
Moving on to issue five.
I promised I wouldn't talk about RFK until he withdrew from the race and Robert Kennedy Jr. has withdrawn from the presidential race.
He says now that he will support Trump, which is not a surprise for many of us who saw him as a right winger.
Many people thought he was a Democrat.
He used a 1960 JFK Democratic advertisement during the Super Bowl, perhaps to convince people he was a Democrat.
But rather than talk about the politics of this, obviously I disagree with RFK in many ways.
I'd mainly like to talk about the difference in strategy here.
David Bailey famously gave tons of money to RFK, allowed him to speak at Bitcoin conferences.
Now David Bailey, Jesse Powell and the Winklevye have publicly given tons of money to the Trump campaign and allowed him to speak at Bitcoin conferences.
I think that these efforts, while as Vlad said, they have gotten the word Bitcoin in the news several times.
I think they're going to be unsuccessful, not provide any political power for Bitcoin.
And by trying to get just one party into it, you're going to turn off a lot of people to Bitcoin.
I would prefer to see as a ground up strategy, perhaps starting with the House of Representatives, maybe five Republicans, five Democrats, supporting them at the early level, getting some wins where they could then make speeches about Bitcoin all the time in the house for the next two years.
Starting small versus starting big.
Let's go to Jameson Lopp, which would you prefer, starting big with the president or starting small with representatives?
Starting small and this goes back to my Bitcoin politicians project.
There's no reason why we shouldn't be able to orange pill both sides of the aisle.
It's actually very simple. You go to the Democrats and you say, hey, you should want to hold some Bitcoin in case those Republicans try to fuck you.
And then you go to the Republicans and you say, you should hold some Bitcoin in case those Democrats try to fuck you.
It's very easy, right? From that perspective, and they should already have the paranoia around that being de-platformed, de-banked, et cetera, et cetera.
So it's kind of ridiculous to me that it has Bitcoin has become a quote unquote like right wing issue.
I mean, I think that that's mainly just because the particular platform of the Republican Party seems to overlap a bit stronger when it comes to those types of freedoms.
But I've been watching both the Republican and the Democratic conventions recently and I've always found it interesting whenever they talk about freedom.
Because both parties talk about freedom. They just talk about different types of freedom around different types of things.
And so it's always funny to me to see them promising me freedom and it's always freedom against the other party somehow aggressing upon you.
Of course, I'm the anarchist guy. So I'm just like, oh, yeah, you're both just trying to screw me in different ways.
And I'm supposed to pick which one is going to screw me the least or in the ways that I like the most.
So I don't vote. I don't participate in that stuff. I kind of find it amusing.
I think that my time is best served working on freedom technology rather than trying to deal with volatile political environments.
Well, I definitely agree. It is unfortunate. Bitcoin's now seen as right wing.
I think we would get so much more if we used both parties, if we had them both supporting Bitcoin or at least discussing it and anything like that.
So I'm for the bottom up supply. Vlad Costa, are you for the bottom up?
Or do you think they got more bang for their buck with the presidential candidates and the major speeches?
I think this ship has sailed. It's counterfactual to say what would have been better because they spent their millions of dollars and their thousands of Bitcoin on this one guy that they hope they're going to push to presidency.
And all I want to say on the topic of RFK is that I actually saw him as a much more decent candidate, even if he has some crazy ideas.
He was talking about healing the nation, uniting the two sides.
I think he had a very good run as an independent, just pushing this idea.
And he provided much more, I guess, opposition to the two parties by having some common elements from both.
Then the Libertarian Party has done that in years.
I think he could have had a pretty good run if he only ran, but at the same time, he was not comfortable because there were a bunch of Democrats who believed he's one of them.
And there are a bunch of Republicans who believe that he's one of them, which is honestly the best position for an independent to position himself in within this framework of a two-party system.
So there is no better way to present yourself than to confuse people which side you're on and at the same time have the best of both worlds.
I kind of liked his platform overall, even if I don't entirely agree with him.
It's just that he seemed like a much more decent human being, at least when it was all about Trump and Biden.
I watched that debate live and I felt so embarrassed thinking.
You know, the future of the free world rests on the shoulders of these two people and they can't even discuss some of the topics that were proposed.
They basically avoided answering the questions and they just insulted each other.
Yeah, there should be like negative points whenever you don't directly answer the question in a debate.
I'm not a fan of the current set of debate rules and how much they let the speakers get away with.
Well, originally the American debates were controlled by the League of Women Voters, but they were nonpartisan and so we couldn't have that.
So they switched it to the Commission on Public Debates, which was half Democrat, half Republican, which meant that it was totally partisan.
And we've seen the debates get smaller and smaller, no responses, no rebuttals, a lot of pre-made speeches.
So it is unfortunate.
And I don't want to talk about too much on the debates, but I felt that yes, Biden was kind of weak and quiet in his answers.
Trump didn't answer any of the questions.
And it was really the more shocking because the CNN moderators didn't ask follow-ups or say, excuse me, sir, I asked about childcare.
You didn't mention childcare and your response, which is a standard debate thing.
I don't know how they could continue the debate when they're asking these detailed questions.
And then he's like, I want to talk about the Yankees or my golf swing or whatever it was.
But let's go to Josh Shigala.
Josh, would you rather have, let's see, would you rather have RFK and the large name recognition of major speeches about Bitcoin or start smaller with perhaps representatives or maybe even local government?
Yeah, I just want government out really of Bitcoin.
I really care if they're there or not.
Although like RFK, I did like him.
I think the only thing, you know, he had everything going against him.
He was running as an independent.
His voice is really hard to listen to.
You know, we can't just ignore that.
It's very, very difficult to listen to the guy as much as I like his stance on the medical industrial complex and all of this, you know, to try to listen to our of his talks is really difficult and jarring.
But he has a lot of stuff running against him.
And so I'm absolutely amazed that he got so far.
And then the New York took him off the ballot, even though he's domiciled there and said that he wasn't domiciled there.
So there's a lot of tomfoolery there going on, some jiggly pokery.
Again, from the, and I think honestly that the Democrat, he didn't leave the Democratic Party.
I really do feel that, you know, it could be a talking point, but I do feel the Democratic Party has left him.
Like so many Democrats that I hear from, they say Democrats have just gone Gaga.
They've just gone so far weird over here that I don't, they don't, I don't recognize them anymore.
And I've been placed either center or to the right now.
And the whole idea of left and right is so vague.
It doesn't mean anything.
It doesn't mean anything.
Now, something that does mean something is tyranny and freedom.
That's something that you can actually quantify.
But left and right, it's such a vague crap term in terms of political thought.
Even I've always thought that even as a young child, you ask mom and dad, what does that mean?
What does left and right mean?
It literally means whatever you want it to mean.
And, and so, yeah, tyranny and freedom or, you know, that's, that's basically your fascism is even more descriptive.
But, but yeah, so I think that RFK really doesn't have anywhere to go.
But towards Trump, because Trump, in my mind, would make more sense for him right now.
And I feel that the Democratic Party is just like, see you later.
I don't know who you are.
I mean, it's the same thing with Trump, right?
I mean, I could be misremembering, but what didn't Trump basically align himself as a Democrat 30 years ago?
He wasn't a traditional Republican, and I would argue he's not a traditional Republican now.
And in fact, it's more that he, you know, he looked at the two parties and he decided that the Republican Party would be easier to mold in his own image.
And he's actually like reshaped the Republican Party to be the Trump Party.
So yeah, you know, the whole left, right thing is pretty ridiculous.
I also think that kind of talking about the debates again, the debates are almost worthless.
And from me observing a number of different conversations and speeches that these politicians have had,
I've actually felt that one thing that's different that I've really liked this time around is the podcasts.
I think that the presidential candidates should go on as many of the most popular podcasts out there,
because these podcasters, and this is of course very vague and hand-wavy,
but I feel like the podcasters are going to be better journalists than these fake-ass journalists
who are just giving, feeding, pre-planned questions and responses.
The podcasters are more likely to be like real people and having real conversations.
So for example, I was blown away after having seen a bunch of Trump speeches,
which are pretty predictable in how he goes about giving them.
When I saw him on the All In podcast, where he was having just a conversation,
or when he was, it wasn't as good with Elon Musk, I think Elon Musk was being a little more softball,
but especially the All In podcast, and I think the Theo von podcast recently,
like when you just sit the guy down and you just have a conversation with him,
it's a lot easier to listen to him and to understand his thought process
than letting him ramble for several hours and you go into a lot of the mud-slinging
and talking points where he repeats himself.
That's also been a part of the genius of the Howard Stern Show.
He'll get a celebrity or someone on for a couple hours.
He won't take any commercial breaks and no one ever runs in and says,
hey, don't talk about this, don't talk about that.
The longer consecutively you can get someone out there on your podcast,
the more likely I think you're going to see the real person.
And for a while that was true on Hot Ones as well.
You'd see the real celebrity after they eat the wings and they'd be cursing
or they'd be doing something off color and you'd be like,
this has gotten to the truth of them.
They feel pain.
They're expressing truth.
And now, of course, Hot Wings has just jumped the shark horribly,
having the cartoon character Donald Duck as a guest this week.
Yes, it's true.
It's horrifyingly true.
Josh, did you have more on this?
Go ahead.
Yeah, no, I think it's a really, really great point,
Jefferson, about the podcasts and Thomas.
The beautiful thing is that if you look at the corruption in the media,
I mean, people talk about, oh, we need to get money out of politics.
You can never get money out of politics.
Sorry to say.
You cannot get money.
If you say, we're going to put a cap on how much you can donate,
well, then Rich will just send money directly to the big networks.
They'll just start advertising for themselves.
Instead of funneling the money to the politicians who then make the ad,
they just go straight to channel seven themselves or whatever channel.
So it's impossible because then it becomes a freedom of speech issue.
So if you look at the RNC, for instance, I saw some of the prices
for some of the media booths up the top.
It's like half a million dollars for one seat up there.
And so a lot of independents are just down on the floor because they're cheaper,
but like million dollar, half a million dollar, 1.5 million dollars per seat.
I mean, it's billions of dollars now.
And so these media organizations are going to want to pander to these politicians
or to these parties.
And so, yeah, it becomes all a big game.
The media is such a big part of politics that it is what it is.
So, yeah, podcasts are fantastic, although you do have the currency of clickbait
and wanting to have the politicians on your podcast again,
because it's such a high rating thing.
So you might want to sort of touch them lightly instead of poking them too hard.
But yeah, I really enjoy the long form stuff you guys are spot on.
It allows you to actually hear them talking instead of this mud slinging speech crap.
I mean, you see that the RNC is so...
Sorry, just the recent one, the Democratic Party Convention.
Man, it's just so full of vitriol and hate and just constant just...
Come on, let's talk about issues.
Can we please just talk about some issues and how are you going to deal with it?
No, it's just mud slinging. It's horrid.
Yeah, I don't know about that.
And I watched a totally different convention.
But just as you're saying, a little bit of history, of American history here.
No independent candidate for president has ever won an electoral college vote.
As you know, they all go winner-take-all to the state, so it's hard to win a state.
No one has ever won a state.
The fundraising, the way it works, is the money is given to the two parties.
When you sign up as a Democrat or a Republican with your voter registration,
money is given to the two parties.
This gives the two parties an advantage, as well as all the incumbents that they have
who have the advantage of franking.
They can send out free mail, free mailers to anyone they want,
so on and so forth, get speeches in the Congress.
And RFK came from a family of Democrats, historically.
So I think it would be very hard for them to run as an independent
or an independent leaning towards Republicans.
So as we're now done dancing on RFK Jr.'s grave, as I predicted I would and I did,
we're now here to dance on Twitter's grave because we found out the people who lost millions of dollars
backing Elon Musk's Twitter takeover, an unsealed court document
and confirms that Sean P. Diddy Combs, Jack Dorsey from Twitter,
and a handful of Silicon Valley elites helped fund the $44 billion takeover of Twitter.
This has made no sense the whole time, as Elon Musk famously said,
as the advertisers were quote-unquote boycotting or holding him ransom.
He said those companies could go f themselves.
Then he repeated it a second time, saying that the companies and advertisers
who support his platform could go f themselves.
Now he's suing the industry group because advertisers are going and f-ing themselves
rather than advertising on his advertising platform.
It's been pretty much a disaster in terms of allowing more hate speech,
having the advertisers leave, so on and so forth.
Josh Shigala, what do you think about the disastrous takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk
and the sad Silicon Valley types, including Jack Dorsey,
who will never see their $44 billion ever again?
So hang on, Jack Dorsey paid to have a hostile takeover of his own company?
I don't get it.
You are correct, sir.
And he also paid to develop an open source alternative, Blue Sky, which went nowhere.
He finally gave money to Noster, but it took quite a while after I tweeted him.
And of course, we had help files here on the World Crypto Network.
But yes, it is a surprise to everyone.
Yes, Jack Dorsey is one of the major investors in Elon Musk's Twitter.
Well, I gotta say, I use a different ex than you,
because I absolutely love the new ex way more than it was in the past.
The past was so awful.
I always felt like I was walking on eggshells with with my opinion.
Now I can have an opinion.
People can talk about it.
You have the community notes, which is fantastic.
I just think it's a much nicer place.
I think it's the only place left pretty much mainstream social media wise,
where you can actually have some wacky opinions and not matter.
You can't even find wacky opinions on Google anymore,
because they just censor everything just awfully.
I have to use like Yandex or something crazy.
So it's such a way better place to be in terms of
if you want to find alternative viewpoints to things.
Otherwise, you're just getting the same old censored nonsense crap
that you do in all of the other media.
If you don't like it, don't use it.
That's what it comes down to.
If you don't like ex, then don't use it.
I don't really understand the hate for wanting to have an open platform
where people can have diverse opinions and conversations.
I think it has succeeded.
It's not succeeding.
It has no advertisers and it's an advertising supported platform.
I don't know if you see the quality of the ads you're getting,
but they're going down and down.
They're getting worse all the time.
But I agree with Josh.
I don't think the public square should be owned by either side.
I think that the internet should have been designed better than this,
and originally it was.
Then we got the idea in the 90s and so forth
to let the advertising back companies such as Facebook and Twitter
design the internet for us.
They got rid of all the open protocols where everyone could contribute
and they continued to make their walled gardens.
Twitter famously starting out with an open API,
and then pulling that back and crushing all of the third party Twitter apps.
And I'd watch out there, Josh,
because sometimes those wacky opinions that you so much enjoy
turn out to be Russian propaganda,
like the recent story about the boxer, which is allegedly a male.
I don't care. I'd rather have that.
I'd rather have that than US propaganda.
I'd rather have that than Mark Zuckerberg propaganda.
I'd rather have every propaganda thrown out.
You think it's just a little trend and you're like,
oh, it's just a trend. People are calling the boxer a man.
And then they trace it back to its source
and it's organized government propaganda.
So I would just watch out for a platform that endorses and allows that
because it's different than just a meme or a Haktua girl.
It's more organized. It's different.
But let's go to Jameson Lopp.
What do you think about Twitter being taken over
and Jack Dorsey being among the ones who lost money on this disaster?
I was annoyed at all of their API changes
that broke some of my own Twitter apps
and even a tool that I used to archive my tweets.
So not a fan of some of those decisions
and also just making the platform less open.
With the investment itself,
I'm not sure that Jack put much money into it
as opposed to like converted his equity over.
I was surprised when that happened that if I recall correctly,
that was his opportunity to cash out and he didn't.
And I think that was probably a mistake,
at least not to cash out something,
but I don't know what the rest of his finances look like.
I guess he just didn't care.
I quit every social network other than Twitter back in 2018
so I don't have a great frame of reference
on what the other platforms are like.
From my perspective,
I think I currently have around like 450,000 followers
and I do track a lot of my metrics.
In general, my metrics have just gone down.
My engagement has gone down ever since the takeover
and we'll see whether it turns around.
You could argue that maybe a lot of those metrics were fake
and they were bots and so on and so forth,
but it also just feels quieter,
but that could of course all change if we have another bull market.
One thing that I definitely noticed over the years
is that my rate of adding new followers
was pretty much flat all of the time except for one or two months
during the crazy bull market.
That's when all of my new followers would come in.
When it comes to growing your following on that platform,
it just really seems to be more about being consistent
and just letting the volatility arrive that way whenever it comes
because you don't know when it's going to happen.
I'm also on Noster though, big fan of Noster.
It's nice that Jack seems to have abandoned Blue Sky for Noster
and is funding stuff there.
Of course, it's very early, a lot of things that need to be built,
but there's actually a conference going on this week in Riga
for Noster developers.
This could be a decade long, if not longer project
to see basically what Jack had wanted Twitter to be like
from the beginning.
I get even less engagement on Noster.
I'll just be shouting at the wall.
It depends on how you look at it.
There's only maybe 20,000 to 50,000 weekly
or monthly active Noster users.
The absolute numbers are always going to be lower,
but what I've found is that my rate of engagement is much higher.
If I have only a few thousand followers on Noster,
relatively I will have more engagement with my notes on Noster
than I do with my posts on X.
One of the many problems is, for example, discoverability.
How do you find people on Noster?
How do you get people to find you?
I think it's really about how much work you put into it.
You need to go out there and start engaging in conversations
so that people even see you in the first place,
because most of the Noster clients out there
don't have an algorithm that runs to tell people
about just other activity that's happening
if they're not explicitly following it.
They really do need an algorithm.
I've seen a lot of them have kind of a fire hose,
and you can see everything that's happening on the platform,
but that's even worse on Noster than on Twitter.
You have so much more spam, so much more random stuff,
because on Twitter you could always go to that home
or go to the suggested things
and maybe find somebody new on Noster.
I'm not sure how you do that.
You're probably right, James.
Jack probably just rolled his equity over and said,
oh, I don't care. I have enough houses.
I have enough Birkenstocks.
What more do I need in this world?
That's where I worry about the Bitcoin rich as well.
There are other people out there.
You're all set, certainly, but we could use other programmers.
We could use people to write this discoverability for Noster.
We could send out all kinds of other projects
and programmers and people.
I just think that's where Jack's money could have gone
instead of investing in Elon's weird tech company.
Maybe a bunch of open-source grants to individual programmers
would have been better.
That actually reminds me, though,
there is a Bitcoiner on that list other than Jack.
I don't know if you saw it.
Do you know Olivier Janssen's?
I don't think so. He's on the list.
Okay. Yeah, so unless it's a different Olivier,
which I doubt,
Olivier Janssen's is actually a really OG Bitcoiner
and I think he was also in the Ethereum initial sale.
A lot of people don't know who he is
and he mostly rose to prominence during the Scaling Wars
because he was very closely aligned with Roger Ver in Bitcoin Cash.
He's kind of faded out of public eye a bit since then.
Doesn't seem to be too active on social media,
but I did find that to be an interesting name
that came up on that investor list.
I can't blame him too much. I used to like Twitter a lot.
I used to say they should have a subscription service for Twitter
where it has no ads. Of course I would subscribe,
but now they've changed it to where you don't get anyone commenting
on your tweets if you don't pay them money.
And I don't like that. I can't get behind that.
Whereas before, I would do it just because I like the platform
and I was enjoying it. They cut off basically all my conversations.
So even though I have a fair amount of Twitter followers,
no one says anything to me. No one retweets my posts about this show
and so forth unless I pay.
And of course I have a hard time paying with Elon and charge and so forth.
Go ahead, Josh.
The biggest shame really going back to the openness of the internet
and the architecture of the internet is that Google actively destroyed RSS
and in terms of popularity, you can always make a comeback.
But that really put a massive dent and centralized
all of these social media outlets into this hub and spoke model
rather than having a true decentralized network of blogs.
And I think it was because Blogger, I can't quite remember,
but I remember Google had an RSS reader which was really strong
and had a lot of users.
And then all of a sudden they just started getting rid of RSS all over the place
and you couldn't really follow blogs anymore.
So then people would post on Facebook or post directly on these different real estates.
So yeah, I would love to see a comeback of RSS to have true decentralization of...
Yeah, Twitter was supposed to be the place where you would go to post the link to your blog post
and then one of the many changes they made that I hated was they really penalize you
for linking to anything off of the platform now.
They added blogging features as we've seen with Snapchat.
The first Snapchat was the short messages now.
Facebook has that, Insta has that, Twitter has that, all the platforms have that.
But Josh, I definitely agree one of the other major things that happened was Facebook bought Instagram.
Here was Instagram, this up and coming photo sharing network that perhaps could have taken us back
to what we wanted from Facebook originally, which was ways to share posts and things with our family
and our friends rather than this political machine that makes people angry.
And the political machine bought Instagram.
So we don't know what would have happened with Instagram, perhaps challenging Facebook.
And we've seen it now where Telegram is starting to add in these same social network features that you see on Facebook.
It keeps asking me what my birthday is.
But I saw a fantastic speech recently by Corey Doctro at Def Con.
I'm not sure if it's public yet.
It was streamed, but they're going to post them later on their YouTube.
Everyone should check it out.
Corey was totally fired up and he talked about the different ways in which the internet has gone,
how the companies trap us into their program, then they trap the businesses into their program,
then they change their program removing features that we liked and we can't leave
because we're stuck because of the network effect.
The businesses can't leave.
They're stuck because of the network effect.
And what Corey basically says is we have to take our technological tools and take all of our things,
basically unionize the tech workers so the tech workers have more power,
then use this tech worker union to rewrite and change the internet,
not to allow the bosses basically in a Dilbert parlance to take it over.
And he said a lot of other great things.
I'm summarizing it here.
But check out Corey Doctorow's great speech from DEF CON
and his general idea that we need to build a new internet.
And one of the things he was inspired and I don't know how it's going to turn out by
was the recent decision that Google is indeed and obviously a monopoly that's been acting monopolistic.
I don't know if they're going to break it up.
We had a previous decision where Microsoft was declared a monopoly.
They never broke it up.
They never split off office.
That never happened.
Could be a totally different world.
Josh, if you have more on this issue, otherwise, I think we're going to head towards the end here.
Yeah, I mean, I don't like, I don't see Google as a monopoly.
They just have really good services that people use.
And as they become worse and worse, you use other things like I use different search engine now.
I'm using a different browser now.
I think the specific claim is that Google used its number one position and a lot of money to purchase the number one search slot in Mozilla,
the number one search slot in Safari, the number one search slot in Chrome, of course,
and any other web browser so that if you attempted to search, you would usually get Google.
But I'm sure there's more to it than that in the court documents.
Well, yeah, the default.
But it's fairly easy to remove the default.
Yes, but no one knows how normal people, normal people defaults are sticky.
Yeah, it's a big deal.
But I'm sure we'll cover it more here on the show and we'll talk about it when we have more information from the articles and such.
But let's head to the end of the show predictions or story of the week.
Josh Shagaller, you ready with a prediction or story of the week?
Go ahead.
Yeah, so we've been right busy writing V for smart contracts, which enable the contracts to basically place your collateral into Dex's.
So that's that's really interesting because now you can trustlessly or trust minimise Lee, you know, borrow against your crypto without,
you know, giving it over to something like Celsius or whatever.
But you can also now the collateral can earn a yield, which we're, you know, really excited about.
It's all very intense.
There's a lot of stuff going on.
And as these contracts get more and more complex, it's it's harder and harder.
But we're going into audit this week with Cypher and so that's exciting.
So yeah, that's what we're doing.
Very cool.
And everyone can check that out at the standard.io.
James and Lop, do you have a prediction or a story of the week?
Go ahead.
A story of the week that I'll be publishing something about soon is we actually had major progress in Bitcoin Core with the assume UTXO fast sync functionality.
Basically, what this means is that with the next release of Bitcoin Core in a few months, it will be possible to vastly speed up your initial sync time by loading a snapshot of the UTXO set.
In particular, I think that they've they've added a hash for the UTXO set snapshot at the having height of 840,000.
And so I'm going to be doing some testing and like writing up some explanations of how, why you would want to do this.
But in general, you know, it's a good thing for node runners to be able to get you up and rolling even faster.
That sounds great.
Like a great way to get more nodes, make it easier to run nodes.
Vlad Costa prediction or story of the week.
Go ahead.
I think I have both.
My prediction is that Monero will outperform Bitcoin in the short term for the simple reason that it's not added on all these exchanges and price suppression is much more difficult.
You don't have institutions trading against it or trying to stop it from going up.
And I do see a resurgence in privacy.
I think the big narrative of the upcoming bull market is going to be privacy and there's going to be more demand for it.
And I'm already hedging against my BTC position with some Monero.
So maybe I'm biased because of my thesis.
But at the same time I do see privacy becoming a much bigger deal, especially since we're more entwined with the political system.
And the week is that I interviewed a guy whose name is Carson, Mike Carson.
He's like Mike Carson was the piano player David Bowie.
He played that solo on Aladdin saying anyway, I'm a nerd.
Anyway, that guy's the CEO of Friendster.
That's the funny fact about him and Friendster came before Facebook and was a pretty fun social network.
But he's also into domains and he's building the spaces protocol on Bitcoin right now.
And it's going to be used for registering domains.
So that's alpha for you right now.
I interviewed the guy on the Bitcoin Takeover podcast.
You can go check that out and listen to it.
Whenever that comes out in a month or two, it might be a good idea to get the domains that you want.
Because squatters are going to be coming around trying to sell it to you later.
And I think that's something that's built on Bitcoin with zero knowledge proofs for efficiency to minimize the amount of bloats that's going to be added to the chain might have some value.
And the fact that he's also the CEO of Friendster can add some non-Bitcoiners to this equation of people trying to register domains.
Is there going to be a browser integration or something that allows you to actually use that domain as opposed to just squatting on it?
I don't know.
But if you're into domains and if you've been on the Internet long enough to remember when domains were the actual Bitcoin of the Internet,
people were buying them for no reason just because they wanted to own names, then you might be interested in that.
I remember people in the computer labs all lined up behind their computers buying this domain name, buying that domain name.
Oh, they were going to squat their way to money for sure.
It didn't look good.
It's dot com.
Well, yeah, I don't know, Vlad.
Usually being on less exchanges is not a good thing.
Usually it's a bad thing, but we'll have to see what happens from an arrow.
If there is a run for privacy and privacy coins, I'd like to say what we always say, maybe they'll add that privacy to Bitcoin.
Any feature that's popular outside of Bitcoin like NFTs or ordinals or any of these things always seems to come back to Bitcoin in the end.
So I hope we'll do that with privacy.
As we've said before, many decided that we would go with scaling first, privacy later.
You can debate at home whether you think that was a good choice or not.
But we're running out of time, so thanks to everybody for giving us a thumbs up.
If you made it to the end of the show, give us a wave in the chat or in the comments down below.
We'll be back again next week.
So until next time.
Bye.