The Bitcoin Group #333 - FTX Scams - RIP Twitter -

The Bitcoin Group, the American Original. For over the last ten seconds, the sharpest Satoshi's, the best Bitcoin's, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Victoria Jones from Satoshi's page. Hi there. Ben Arck from LNBITS. When it's DS, here in sunny Al Salvador, the Don't Think Bitcoin Conference, nice to be back on the show. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network. Moving

on to issue one. Issue one, FTX used corporate funds to purchase employee homes, new filing shows. The FTX disaster continues to explode across the pages of crypto Twitter and the financial news. We've even seen an FTX Ponzi lawsuit that could set a new mark for endorser liability with Tom Brady, David Ortiz, Naomi Osaka, Shohei Otani, and Steph Curry all being named as parties in the lawsuit.

Meanwhile, Sam Bankman freed is shopping at the grocery store in the Bahamas and laughing it off like nothing happened. Fortune magazine is running profiles of Caroline, hardly even accusing her of anything and the New York Times seems to have taken the day off. Victoria, what's going on now in the FTX disaster? Well, there seems to be no end to the dysfunction going on with this company,

unfortunately. I mean, you know, buying personal properties on the company balance sheet. I mean, you are as a company. You are actually allowed to buy property for employees, but it still has to be done in a specific way. And it turns out that the auditor who's looking at the books is just a gast. The lack of accountability, the quality of the accounts. It's just the story

just gets from goes from bad to ridiculous really. It's just shocking that it was even allowed to happen. And I think that's the only way to get the money out of the company. They got so big with no one saying anything. And then of course with the celebrity endorsements, you know, someone's father class action lawsuit to go after the celebrities. Well, you know, it's probably about

time someone called some of the other players to account in this and this whole mess. And certainly, you know, if the lawsuit successful, it's certainly going to give the celebrities some pause for thought in the future. So again, very, very, very interesting to see how that all plays out. It is true when they advertised Gatorade and they said you could be like Mike. Nobody actually ended

up being like Michael Jordan. So I don't know about the celebrity lawsuit part, but the accounting going on in chat rooms, major decisions being made by emoji. Should we send them $200,000? Smiley face. Should I send them $300,000? Smiley face with stars in his eyes. What's going on at this company? We also have Carol. Helen who's now linked by her father, Ellison to Gary Gensler, the

head of the SEC, the Syracurities and Exchange Commission, the people who are supposed to be investigating this. And meanwhile, we have all these celebrities lending their names to a Bahamian exchange. Would anyone have invested their money if they said during the commercial? This exchange is in the Bahamas. You know why? Wink, wink. It's insane. It's hard to believe. And yet, he was on the cover of

every magazine and as my friend Morgan said, even in the toilets in San Francisco, the public toilets in San Francisco had San Benchmins freeds face on it. They even had them in the fortune cookies in two locations, Sacramento and Vegas fortune cookies with FTX advertisements. Ben Ark, what do you think about the FTX collapse? Many people are also noting that Bitcoin only went down 10%. Yeah,

yeah, but it's another, I mean, it's the cult of the entrepreneur. They have this so-called genius kid and maybe he's been right about something like Bitcoin. And then everyone pins that hopes on him that he's going to be a genius. Actually, he's just a kid and just makes bad decisions and hasn't lived life yet. So it spends all the money. It thinks that because he becomes

so promoted, they got some of these sick pants around them. Because he got so many people telling them that they're amazing. They think that they're going to be able to at some point return those funds either by using those funds to, you know, lobby governments, they're more friendly to Bitcoin, percent of internal benefit of their business, and they might be able to install those funds. On

the issue of the houses, they call houses. I mean, at least these are assets really liquidated. And then the debt's going to be returned to the debt. You got to remember that these people, when they scam people, like it's people's savings, it's really quite very sad. There'll be a whole load of people, hundreds of thousands of people, you've got to say, entire life savings, there'll be

something kids to college. And it's all off the back of some, you know, just ego, kid, who's run a ride and his friends, and they're making incredibly, a set of incredibly bad decisions. And there was a Twitter thread on, there was a Twitter DM thread. What's the main guy? Sam Beckman-Fried. I mean, up until two weeks ago, I had no idea what FGX was. I really

didn't. And suddenly, I have to learn all about this thing and all about this tool. And why, why the buy so far, in the Bitcoin price, I have a link. But yeah, Sam Beckman-Fried, yeah, he's just, this is the problem when you don't have accountability. Oh, yeah, I was just saying there was a DM message thread from Twitter. And it was a journalist who was a

person who'd reached out to him on, I think November the 13th. And it was an interesting, we easily could find it. And it was supposed to be off the record. But the journalist just thought he showed such a little empathy and regret that he felt obliged to publish it, which I think is fair for the victims. But yeah, in it, he was in the past a

few months ago, he was saying that some regulation in the crypto industry would be good. But in reality, in this thread, he was just saying that, yes, we've screwed the regulators, we don't need to them. And actually, in this case, this is an example of where a little bit of regulation might stop something like this, where they might have their books audited, and might realize that

it's a computing that shambles. And I mean, I think as well, there's been some discourse among governments like the US, that the Bitcoin crypto industry is here to stay. So they can't just get rid of it, which means that now they will have to seriously look at regulating it efficiently and properly. So things like this, which happened, what happened again, and people want to lose their

funds. He's not living some side to the point of dream. It's just a business, a real-world business. You can still use Bitcoin in the way it's supposed to be used, but honestly, in fear. But for this sort of thing, people want to use Bitcoin and trade with it and stuff. And those trading platforms, they should be regulated by government. And people should be insulated from these

problems, chap and unregulated markets. Obviously, there was nothing in the white paper about not having a board of directors and using customer funds like your piggy bank to just pay off your girlfriend's bad investments. But that's what happened. And it happened in a crypto or Bitcoin business. So we all must pay the price. But now you must predict the future against the Bitcoin predictor ball, the

greatest predictor in all of Bitcoin history, better than all the triangles. Victoria, the price is already down 10%. Everyone knows about Sam Bankman, Fried and FTX. But there could be more contagion. Will the price be up or down next week? I think it's pretty obvious. There's going to be a lot more to unwind here. I think it'll be going down. Ben Arck, higher or lower? I

kind of feel like there might be some plateau in the rebound thing. And I would like to point out that the last time I was on the show, I said there was going to be a horrible crash and I was going to be living in streets. Because we've been parallel for so long. And they just didn't see any of the uplifting. And so I just imagined

that there would be some some blacks one sort of thing which just to have some bad news cycle, which could easily break the price down. And it did. So as miserable as I am for all the people who lost funds, I also would like to say, I told you so price went down. But yeah, I think it's going to plateau. Maybe maybe pop up a little

bit. Ben Arck says, I told you so. And now here it is, the Bitcoin predictor ball. Will the price be higher this time next week? Outlook not so good. Outlook not so good. So we're not going up anymore. The ball has spoken. Moving on to issue two. Issue two. As Twitter staff empties out users fear for the platform. According to Reuters news service yesterday, Twitter fired

the main engineers in charge of keeping the platform running. Yes, the engineers who keep the site online were let go. Then Elon Musk announced that he was locking the doors of the building and that no one could come inside. Since then, everyone's pretty much been waiting for the Twitter infrastructure to completely collapse. As it's likely to do this weekend with the start of the world cup.

Hooray for soccer, hooray for Twitter. Sad for Elon Musk losing so much money for no reason. Ben Arck says, I'm not going to be able to do this. What do you think about the Twitter disaster as it continues to spiral down? Yeah, I mean, I don't know. It's quite usual when somebody buys a business that they go in and they have like a reshuffle. Elon Musk

isn't scared of being brutal when it comes to his employees. So he's probably just getting rid of, I mean, no matter how much I dislike Elon Musk, I have to appreciate that he's good at hiring people because he's built a lot of very successful companies. Although people like, again, the country don't have to be there. If people want to give credit to Elon Musk, it's actually

amazing. And he's excited. In fact, so a good example is when Tesla started accepting Bitcoin and they were using BTC, but they think that the integration is about an afternoon. They found like a critical plug in BTC, but they put a commitment. Like, he's got some very good engineers. And I imagine he's just going to be using them and then getting rid of the old, the

old guard who may be on board with some of the changes he wants to make. And this is just a reality of the civil buying economy. I don't think it's going to cut so on itself. If anything, I actually feel like we will get that as much as I've had a lot of good. They're saying it's like a Tom Sawyer event with people on Twitter, celebrating

Twitter's funeral on Twitter. Are they too early? Victoria? Yeah. Well, Elon has always been a bit of an attention junkie. Hasn't he say, well, it doesn't surprise me. I mean, when I watched your life, stream yesterday, it's quite clear that he was kind of making light of the situation and posting pictures of Twitter's grave and him is grave. So, you know, as much as everyone else

was kind of been moaning. It's downfall. He was kind of milking it as well, which kind of just goes to show how resilient he is. I mean, I agree with Ben. I think he he's a smart business person. And as much as people like to throw trash at him, he does have a track record unlike our newfound friend. SPF. So, you know, I don't think disaster

is as likely. I think it's also true that, you know, he he had a clear vision for the company. He seemed to have a clear vision for the company when he took it over. And it's he also has a very different philosophy behind it. So there was always going to be blood in the streets, I think, in terms of in terms of people being unhappy and

wanting to protest. I mean, I've been in companies before myself where I've seen exactly that kind of thing play out. But I think it's not going to be a lot of things. Of course, you know, Twitter is like the local town center for the world, isn't it? So any little bit of gossip, it's easy to escalate out of proportion. And and Elon's made light of it

by joining in the fun as well. I don't think it's nearly as bad as Twitter's making out. I think it's just par for the course with these sorts of changes. Well, previously, Twitter had the kind of uptime that it was practically an internet utility. People would go to Twitter to complain about other websites being down, or they would search first, they would say, Hey, is Microsoft

down? Is Google down? I'm going to go check on Twitter. So I do think it's unfortunate for Elon to be squandering such an advantage in the consumer mind about uptime. When people look to share their important news during the Iranian Revolution during the Egypt problem, so on and so forth, they went to Twitter and Twitter was there. Certainly they had early problems with stability. They were

built in kind of a slap dash startup style. They fixed that. They reformed it. But there's still issues as many threads have discussed about what if a server has a hard drive that fills up and then that server stops replicating things like this that you don't expect to happen can happen even with good software like Twitter. So I do hope that he fixes it. I do

think he's going to lose a lot of the credibility of Twitter, which could affect the price of Twitter when he later has to sell for pennies on the dollar. Exit question, will Elon Musk fix Twitter? Yes or no, Ben Ark? I mean, to fix it would mean getting rid of Twitter, replacing some creative open source things on the basis of the side of the East and

do that. So that's how the fix is going to improve it. We use it for a bit until the free of the source wins as always does. Victoria Jones, do you agree? Will Elon struggle and not create a free and open source Twitter? Well, I think as Ben says, free and open source probably would use a different protocol. He's certainly going to change it. I don't

think it will die. It's a valuable service. People enjoy using it. I'd be very surprised if you didn't find a way to make it work. No one has ever made money running Twitter. Neither will Elon Musk. He'll sell it to Google for half or less than what he paid for. And it will be much diminished. But maybe it'll come back. Who knows? Check out worldcryptonetwork.com. We've

got 3,019 videos. You could watch them for three months, 13 days and 23 hours straight. That's a long time. Moving on to issue three. Gray scales Bitcoin trust hits record low 43% discount after the FTX crisis. Gray scales in trouble. And so is Genesis Genesis. It has paused client withdrawals for their lending arm, citing the FTX impact. They've stopped withdrawals for the Genesis earn program. And

this is led to concern about the entire digital currency group portfolio. As you can see up here, Genesis trading down here, you can see purse, some other ones. It's pretty amazing. Z cash. That didn't work out. DCG is all over Bitcoin. And now they might be in trouble from FTX contagion. Victoria, what do you think about DCG, Genesis and the grayscale discount? Well, the grayscale discount.

Basically, the market is telling us that the price is going lower. I know the way in which the, that grayscale is organized is not exactly the Bitcoin price. But it's certainly a reflection of sentiment, I think. I know they've gotten a lot of competition from other people who brought out ETFs last year. But even so, to be carrying a discount for that long, I mean, I'm

not, I'm not a fair with exactly the technical ways in which these funds work. But on the face of it, I would have thought that's not a good sign. In terms of what was the other one, Genesis, suspending club. Now that is quite worrying because they're like the biggest, are they the biggest company providing yield to the entire crypto industry. And the number of people there

can, I mean, it's almost the same chart as with different companies, the SBF has, I mean, you know, this is, this is literally like a nuclear bomb has gone off in the crypto industry. Really. And it couldn't be at a worse time because I think, you know, the Fed is clearly trying to get a handle on inflation and restore their reputation for managing money in the

markets. And, you know, there's so many issues kind of converging on each other. The Fed is going to be a little bit more serious. But it's not good for Bitcoin in the short term. We all know how good the technology is and how, how well it will work going into the future. But, you know, these are big, big issues. You know, this is Matt got, when

Matt got, when Matt got us collapsed, it was one single exchange. You know, the interconnectedness amongst amongst the businesses in this industry is really, really quite scary. And I think this is definitely a watershed moment, which ultimately is healthy. But it's like sending a patient to get made just surgery. It's not just, you know, it's not just putting a plaster on the arm and telling them,

the arm's going to get better. This is like, you know, you almost have to do life support to get it back on its knees when this is over. I think it's going to be pretty, it's already pretty dreadful. But I think it's going to be a while before we see the full ramifications. It's like that old SNL episode. They're going to get out the barber, do

some bloodletting and introduce the leeches. Then, Eric, do you think there'll be a domino effect? Will the FTX collapse knock down all these other businesses? I mean, again, it's going to be heavily impacted. Biggs always absolutely rights a watershed moment. And ultimately, it needs to happen because this is clearly a point of failure. These companies, and the quality that much Bitcoin on their balance sheet. So,

yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's the problem is used to be addressed. And then, you know, let's hope there's more decentralized ways of performing some of these functions. And then also, let's hope that in traditional, long decentralized corporate structures that they are regulated. And they will have to be now, because, as I said before, it's a government to start into an hour where the Trojans behind within

the financial system. And that they're aware that this industry's not going anywhere. And if it can have such a catalyst to make the effect of traditional on-rats, such as Genesis and Grace scale, because these will be more traditional investors, then, yeah, it's, it's really going to highlight that it's really time that there's, there's more straightforward regulation and oversight. And that'll ultimately be good for the private

businesses, because private businesses will know how they can operate in those different jurisdictions. And they'll be less ambiguity. And, yeah, so ultimately good and healthy. It is an empty Cox type moment. But I would, I think there's a, I think the market is a, perhaps, I don't know, considering the amount of liquidity within Bitcoin, I think, and because how, I can think how low we are

as well. So, if this had happened in a, a ball cycle, there'll be a lot more funds on some of these sites. But it hasn't. So, hopefully that, that'll mean that, that maybe the market's the overreacted. And, and maybe, maybe it won't be as, as bad as you think it's going to be. But yeah, it's going to happen. It's going to be healthy. And it's just

to show me came up, but actually, maybe it's a good thing that it came when it did, because if it happened with the top of the ball cycle, it could be really, really quite bad. And more people would have lost their money. Exit questions. Satoshi Nakamoto, after seeing the 2018 financial crisis, invented Bitcoin, gave fire to man, said, hold your own keys, hold your own wealth.

Man, of course, made banks. Is man now rightly punished? Is this similar to religion? Does everything repeat? Are they just worshipping the golden calf? Because they couldn't wait for Noah to come down the hill with the 10 or 15 commandments? Can't we ever listen? Are we eternally doomed to have great inventions like Bitcoin, great inventions like the internet turned into centralized websites like Twitter and Facebook,

Toria? You have some great analogies, Thomas. But no, I think it's the nature of humanity really. It's about consequences. And unless people face the consequences, sometimes are they bad actions, they wouldn't learn their lesson. Some people face the consequences and still don't learn their lesson. So, yeah, I just think it's part of life's rich pattern. And it's not the first time this kind of thing has

happened and it won't be the last. It would be a Sam Bankman freed named SBF and he should be in charge of the largest exchange in the world FTX and they should advertise on the uniforms of the umpires of Major League Baseball. And he should totally collapse and nothing should happen to him. Why does this keep happening to us, Ben? Yeah, it's that's game of design

problem. We have this beautiful new tool which can prevent these things from happening. But then we have this legacy, traditional finance mindset where we build basically the same tools with this beautiful. So, yeah, ultimately, we'll fix problems, Bitcoin, we'll fix problems like this. But not as long as we just continue to build the same things, we used to build, of course, it gets going to collapse

in of themselves. I only really trust the money when it's held by a bank. And you think about that meme, I don't have it up right now where it has the guy with a little stand and it's like Bitcoin 60,000. And there's a giant line. Bitcoin, I don't know. Bitcoin, what are we at? 17,000. Nobody there at all. It just keeps happening over and over again.

Let's move on to the next issue. Issue five. El Salvador plans to buy more Bitcoin every day despite losing millions already. You know, I've been critical of this guy in the past, but I'm kind of starting to like him. Boo Kali has pledged to buy one Bitcoin a day. I don't know when he's going to stop, but he says he's going to keep doing it. And

even this magazine right here, this is a, it says Microsoft, it's Gizmodo, they claim, and again, this is from the magazine. It says that it's a shockingly dumb decision based upon the massive lost. He's already taken by buying Bitcoin at an all time high, whereas I think the Bitcoin or mindset sees this more as dollar cost averaging for El Salvador. A chance to get some cheap

coins. Ben Arck, you're in El Salvador. What do you think about the decision to buy more Bitcoin? I think it's win, win. This is a thing. So if you look at the amount of money that they've lost in holding Bitcoin as a national asset, it's the GDP was up 10% last year. So from like two or three percent of the year before. So the very fact

that they embrace Bitcoin in the industry has brought a lot of industry in the world. And to a very small country, which doesn't have huge GDP, it's actually made a noticeable change in different. So when I came last year, it was different. It wasn't like it is now. It feels safer. People seem happier. There's this beautiful new airport when you fly in. The airport I came

to last time was what you expect from like a fairly small central South American country. But now they've got this wonderful new airport with this, this, this, this great roof design, which simulates the roof. But Vickali's, he's pushed two things. He's pushed the surf city and pulling in surfers and their tourism money. And then he's also pushed the Bitcoin industry and lots of businesses have set

up here. So it doesn't really matter that they make losses on their Bitcoin. Because they made such huge gains on the industrial impact, which is quite interesting. And we are probably towards the bottom of the bear market. So he could take, he could take it. He just redirect the money they've made on the, the, you know, increasing GDP, he just redirect that and so on. So

they're going to break even. But then of course, the price will eventually go up. It's always doesn't Bitcoin. And not there being a very good position indeed. I have noticed that it's somewhat the elephant in the room when it comes to payments. And this has been something which is, it's kind of, it's already been sad. Like I thought about it deeply. And I was like, well,

it's actually a good thing that when they adopted Bitcoin, since then, we've had this bear market and they they, they exist. They've had their first bear market. And also for the Bitcoin industry for using your lightning network, because we can exchange, which was useful. Then you can't have price volatility. It makes terrible money for people on subsistence wage. So there's, there's lots of people focusing on

how, how do you solve that problem? You have, you know, these rap dash sets. This is like the Bitcoin beach wallet where you can have like a dollar. You can have things priced in dollars, but it starts behind it. And then there's like stuff in the background to make sure that that's that peg stays. And I think there's going to be some really interesting work next

year when I come here, I want to see an ourselves already a dollar which is stable. And it's there's some federated thing where it's like half geographical political regions of the country and then maybe half industrial sectors. And then maybe the, maybe the ourselves dollars like peg to, you know, USD GP or your and maybe some first domestic products, such as coffee, or producers or whatever.

But yeah, it's quite an exciting place to be. Even though they've, you know, clearly lost a lot of money by having Bitcoin as an asset that GP has gone up and just tried all this, all that industry has been very, very good for the country. Notice the country. Ben, how's the attendance at the conference? And would you say it's mainly locals or mainly bit corners from

out of town? Now that's a very good point, Thomas. So last year when I came, it was just all green goes. And like I brought these electronics here. And I wanted to like make points of sale and then get them back into the local, local community. Like, I mean, the virus is, and I basically just brought all these electronics on a plane from Europe. People made

them in my workshops and they took them all back to Europe. So it was there wasn't many locals involved this year. There was, there was a fair amount of locals at lots of Latin American. Lots of Brazilians and people from Guatemala and other regions nearby Mexico. So that was really exciting that there's, there's, and I think this has been a side effect of Latin America having

a country which is embrace Bitcoin. It means that the little counts and the Bitcoiners where they want to do something with Bitcoin. It's, they've been inspired and empowered. And they've realized that they can't have effect change. So you have some two great projects in Guatemala. So some of the things that the else on take Bitcoin economies. And then also in Bitcoin Brazil, prior Bitcoin for sale,

it's absolutely beautiful what they've done that. They, they've brought in some Bitcoin donations and then they've used those donations to help the infrastructure for town. They've like built a school of computers week and you've got a, a rural neighborhood where everyone's on bank. And now they all have payment cards and they're able to make digital payments in the shops. And it's, it's really quite inspiring. I

went to an incredible talk of Bitcoin for sale. So I please do you have to go check that out. But yeah, it's inspired a lot of good work around our Salvador. Maybe not even, maybe not. I mean, that's good working in our Salvador. But there's also in the other countries of Central and South America. And there has the word definitely more attendees who, you know, we're

going to go. And what about Bitcoin beach? Are they still buying burgers with Lightning Network? I mean, the, the prices just gone down. So no one's to use money in its fact because I was speaking to a guy who went to a beautiful bar looking over the, the lobster bag yesterday. And he was just saying that he, if he has any money left over, then he,

he uses it for investment in his part. And, uh, uh, and, you know, add some extra tables, chairs, those things and then, and this is kind of the interesting thing. So that he's not using Bitcoin, but the Bitcoin law. And then also the push for CFC has attracted a lot of tourism. So he's reinvesting that money into building out his own operation. But when it comes

to actual payments with Bitcoin, it's like, it's kind of gimmicky. It's just as we have it in Europe or US, you know, like, they're accepting payments in the bar when all the Bitcoin is wherever you can imagine. They probably wouldn't afterwards. But that's some, it's it from, I was hanging out with another Bitcoin, because I didn't go there last year. He went to the, uh, Elzonte.

And he said that there was a huge change. There'd been a huge change. I love this lovely cafe. He's restaurants, hotels, bars. He was a nice place to go and the surf was great. And that was a pretty good vibe. Um, so long way to continue. And then I hope I said to the guy in the, you might be running this, um, bar, hotel thing. I

said, um, I told him about the idea of the Al Salvador Dali and said, yeah, if that existed, then of course, I don't want to use the USD. Um, but I said, well, let's hope. Let's see. When I come back here, I can pay with a stable meeting, exchanging your wallet. You know, if you want, you can swap to the, you know, the investment asset that

this, um, store value Bitcoin over time. Or if you want, you can accept the stable coin and it somehow has some local connection. Uh, he was like, yeah, cool. Like bring it on. That's what we want. So we have to listen to the people who were actually trying to build these tools for. So hopefully that'll happen next year. And Victoria, what do you think about the

Al Salvador decision to double down and buy more Bitcoin? Yeah. Well, I think it's really interesting hearing Ben's story from on the ground, because of course, that's the one aspect that was not mentioned in that article at all. I mean, the mainstream media clearly, clearly, uh, want to create an impression that, um, you know, this guy is just a lunatic because the thing is, you know,

if you just, if you read, if you read the article as it's written, the fact that he's already lost millions of dollars on this investment and, uh, is, is going to buy more of it. I mean, those on the face of it who don't understand how Bitcoin works and how the price cycles work. I mean, it's just like, it makes him look like a lunatic at

the very least reckless. Um, so, but of course, you know, there's more to the story than that. It's not just about the fact that it's, you know, the price is what it is. It's about the fact that, you know, this is a technology that has captured the imagination of, thousands of people and it's brought investment to a country that was really struggling up until this initiative.

Um, in terms of him buying now, I mean, I'm not sure that was such a good idea. I mean, I have seen some videos where people were maintaining the bottom was in before we have this crash in the price. I think all things considered we could see a low that's completely anticipated because of all the macro economic factors going on. Um, so, from that perspective, I

don't think it's a very good strategy, but, you know, as Ben has pointed out, there's way more to this particular story than that. That we're then allegedly linked to $3.6 billion in Bitcoin, a court filing made by US prosecutors on Wednesday in the case and his eccentric rapper wife says that the investigation now involves classified national security information and documents. They did hold obviously not done

by the rapper and the Walmart gift card seeking PlayStation fan five PlayStation five fans who are arrested for it. Let's go to Josh Gollows with us now. Josh, what do you think about the bit for next hack and suddenly it involves national security. Yeah, it's, it's wild that it's actually, you know, this is one of the things if there's a hack, it doesn't matter how long

you wait. It's on the chain. It's going to get tracked and traced. So that's, that's a problem for for these hackers, you know, which is, it's great to see actual criminals being taken down instead of just this stuff. But again, I'm not a big fan of following the money. I think money should be private. I think I'm a big fan of following actual criminal activity and

trying to bust people other ways. But, um, but yeah, I mean, you know, let's see if any of the what, what I think we said last week. If any of that money. Ends up in the hands of people that actually lost their money. It'll be great. But I get a feeling it won't. And if it doesn't, then it should be put into like education. Into what

scams and hacks look like or what to look out for. Probably won't happen either. And if that's not the case Smithsonian museums probably won't even happen. It is nice in this case. You can tell the criminals from the people on the front of Fortune magazine. And you can also say to yourself, these people don't seem like the real hackers. So there's definitely more to this story.

Victoria, what do you think about the BitFinex hackers? As Josh said, we hope people get money back. Remember BitFinex did that clever accounting thing with the coins as well. So it might just go back to BitFinex. Yeah, that's a good point. Actually, I haven't thought of that. The fact that BitFinex, BitFinex managed to keep itself going as a as a going concern. So presumably if they

did get the funds back, that would be even better news for the people who got their token. Simon Dixon can take even more credit for having organised that. So yeah, but yeah, I've never seen such a dodgy couple in my life. It's hard to believe that they would be the smart ones to hack into. But who knows? People, appearances can be deceptive. But yeah, when I

was looking through the article, and I was looking at how the government had captured some of the money, but they still have a lot of money. They had a lot of money and other accounts that the government hadn't accessed. And the note I made was no money, no problems. It's just like, the more money you have, the more problems it can actually give you in certain

circumstances. Keeping track of all of that and hiding it and the convoluted paths they've got to go through. I mean, good grief. Give me a peaceful life. Enough to live on. I don't need billions. Figuring out ways to hide it. They've certainly taken on the challenge. Be interesting to see how it ends up. And all these people wanted where some PlayStation 5s from Walmart. I'm perfectly

satisfied with the PlayStation 4. It seems good. Ben Arck, what do you think about the alleged FedEx hackers suddenly now a national security concern? They were trying to run some sort of unapponancy scam. You can find it. I mean, perhaps there are two videos on that now. But I'm sure that they're findable if you search for it. But they were trying to make a quick fuck.

They script Kiddies. They're not using computer. You could download software, which does a whole bunch of very complex hacking things. And they found the vulnerability that opens towards moisture, I think, quite often. You would overestimate the technical competence of somebody who can pull off a big hack. Sometimes it's just look at the jaw. As long as people are trying to find the vulnerability, they would want

to do it. They're creepy and weird. But they're in love. And I don't know. They can't help feeling that kind of endearing in a way. But it sucks for everybody. But I don't think there's a great conspiracy. It's fairly unusual for people to help. It's not unusual for people to have fuel citizenship. And it's not causation. It's not possible. But they get. So I don't think

there's a big conspiracy. I think it's just a couple, really couple in love, who try to hack things. And eventually they won. And they got a big score. And then they made some very stupid decisions in consecutive runs. Correlation does not equal causation. And I think this was also the case where they were. By Bitcoin and every withdrawal would be checked by the Bitcoin multiple. What's

it called? The multiple signature situation. They had multi-sig technology. You were very safe. But then it turned out that it was too difficult to check every signature. So they'd said it to kind of auto check. So you could just withdraw whatever you want. And they figured this out. And I think it was Peter Todd at the time who said the famous quote. Bit go fuck yourself.

Yes, bit go. So we'll see how it goes. I don't know about the national security thing. I still don't know if they're the real hackers and the national security thing for me leads right into that because obviously the real hackers might be foreign agents. But we're running out of time. Josh, a goal. I just showed up. Josh, what do you think about week two at FTX?

We found out that they're making accounting decisions by chat rooms that were regularly erased. They're investing hundreds of thousand dollars by emoji. So smiley face equals yes. Fountain face equals no money for you. And the guys just shopping at supermarkets and the Bahamas and the newspapers are profiling him like you did nothing wrong. What do you think about FTX week two? Yeah, it's there's so much

laundry coming out now and so many so many strange articles. You know, people are going into their sex lives and that they're all poly and all this stuff. But really, all of that doesn't matter. All of that doesn't matter. What matters is that these were criminals and actually, one thing I do want to say is that Sequoia is largely at fault here. I'm going to just

call them out on this. Sequoia have a massive, massive role to play when they invest. They know that people don't do due diligence once they invest. When they invest, people assume that they're not going to be able to do it. They assume that Sequoia has put a hell of a lot of due diligence in. And then instead, then they get the next person just invests in

the next and the next and then fortune magazine goes, oh, look, all these people invest plus Sequoia. I'm going to put this face on the magazine. And then, oh, look, it's face on the magazine. I'm going to, it's this snowball that happens. And it happened from the root, which was Sequoia, not doing their proper job in the industry. And really, I mean, they have good enough

accounts to go in there, look through the data room and truly understand what's going on there and ask the right questions. When someone says they're worth 22 billion, and you go, well, where does that come from? And they say, oh, well, I've got this FTT token. You say, okay, well, it's not very liquid. So actually, you're not worth that. Are you, bud? It doesn't take too

many brain cells to rub together to actually ask these tough, tough questions. Instead, I'm going to ask you, what's the next person that's going to do that? You have Sequoia, which is a very, very reputable investment firm. Basically, dog the entire industry. And now, go, oh, we need more regulation. Like what he did wasn't illegal enough. What are they going to make it more illegal? Well,

he did. No, it was already illegal. What he did, just piling or regulation for regulation, sake, makes no real difference here. And this is the stuff that started to come out. I don't care about his sex life. I care about the fact that so many people lost their money. I know people personally that have now bankrupt because of this. You know, and so it's, it's, it's

a real shame. It needs to, it needs to change. We need to head more towards decentralization. We need to stop trusting these custodial systems. This is the whole point we got into Bitcoin. We, to get away from rehab. I forgot. We've got to get away from getting money out of thin air. And we've just found ourselves back at their under the allure of a quick buck.

Or under the allure of safety. And, you know, we, we learned this in our docs. We did. But we've had so many new people coming into the industry that they need to touch that that painful flame as well. And now they've touched it. I'm really hoping that. We have the decentralized world of defy like it really is a powerful, powerful thing. It's not a panacea. There

will be smart contracts that have back doors. There will be smart contracts that have upgrade ability functions, which can also be exploited. And but this is where smart contract auditors will come in and warn people of that, and people need to know. Ah, that's what that means. So so there's, there's a whole lot of stuff that needs to happen. There's a whole lot of industry that

needs to be looking at itself, all of us need to be. You know, working hard to educate new people into why custodianship is important for yourself, so self-custodity, custody and holding your private keys is super important. It's like, they're just like, well, this will, this will be, this will be really wild compared to the way we normally do it. We'll just risk everyone's money like this.

It's crazy. Ben, Arck, do you have a prediction or a story of the week? I think you're running out of time here and thanks so much to joining us from a El Salvador all the way down there. Yeah. I'm on my phone, but it's got some cool guest notes on there. We've made some guest notes specifically for it. So we have like a block, a block

type thing, which checks the Bitcoin price, the mental, and then you can also link it up so it like actually gives you the value of some benefits. While it could be kind of useful for someone if they want to keep an hour of wallet on their desk. And we also have like an arcade machine thing we built, which is super cool. I don't know if you

could share the screen there, Thomas, but I don't know our time. So it's okay. But if everyone just if you want to check out shop, that's not a big stop. And yes, the conference was right. They did a great job. I want to enjoy it. And it was it was the last year. And I'm sure next year again. Awesome. Very good. Thanks so much, Ben, for

joining us all the way from El Salvador. Josh, we also talked about the Twitter troubles. According to Reuters, Elon has fired the engineers responsible for keeping running the platform. He's locked the doors to the building and many engineers type people fear that the platform itself could splinter and collapse over the weekend, especially under the load of the World Cup event, which is starting. Josh, what do

you think about Twitter and what Elon's been up to? Many people on this panel think he might pull it through. It does look dire right now. I think you'll do it. It'll be right. She'll be right. Maybe we'll get actual conversations happening again. Maybe people will go, wow, there's a real world. Very nice. So far, most of the conversations are just envisioning Twitter's funeral while we're

still on Twitter. So it's been a bit of a creative writing exercise, I think. And Victoria, do you have a prediction or a story of the week? Go ahead. Well, I mentioned the latest newsletters I was producing on my web page last week. That's now out. Basically, I'm commenting on what I think of the macroeconomic environment and how I think that the Bitcoin bear market still

has further to go. Not great news, but I think it's better to be. Four warned is four armed. So anyone's interested in that. They can check that out on stoshiespays.com. Oh, I'll be checking that out for sure. Very good. And Josh, you got a prediction or a story of the week. No, I mean, just, well, we're heading in with 10 days away from launching finally the

S Euro, which is really exciting. And if you're into yield farming, go check it out because it's a really great way. The original, the first S Euro will be sold under a Euro at 80 cents. And then as more and more volume fills up that stability pool, that will, that discount will become less and less until it reaches a one to one. And at that point,

it'll become a stable coin. And while you're waiting, you can actually put that into liquidity pool and sell us that liquidity for a bond. And, and depending on how long that bonding maturity day is, the more yielded. So good old fun yield farming at its best. Not financial advice. Do your own thing. Totally, you know, check it out. Do your own due diligence. Check out the

standard.io. And everyone be sure to check out World Crypto Network this week. We did a couple of live Twitter spaces. If you'd like to join the space, just keep a watch of at Mad Bitt coins on Twitter. We also have recorded versions of the spaces here on the World Crypto Network and coming out on the podcast. So, you know, you can see the link on the

screen. So, we'll see you soon over the weekend. So mainly we talked about FTX, some of the ethical dilemmas that SBF has faced. And just a general shock of everyone to see the entire industry suddenly inflame. But we're running out of time. Thanks to the people in the chat for keeping us honest on the time. Proper Gal and others who are here early counting it down.

And until next time. Bye. Bye.