Bankless - Bitboy | Two Different Worlds

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

Bitboy -- aka Ben Armstrong -- is the notorious crypto influencer with one of the largest audiences in the space. After some jabs back and forth on twitter, we're bringing him on Bankless to clear the air. What's up with Ryan's glasses? Is Bitboy changing his approach? ------  Earnifi | Check For Your Unclaimed Airdrops, POAPs, & NFTs https://bankless.cc/earnifi  ------  SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER:          https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/    ️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST:                 http://podcast.banklesshq.com/    ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  ️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum   ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across   BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave   NEXO | CRYPTO FINANCIAL HUB https://bankless.cc/Nexo   LEDGER | NANO HARDWARE WALLETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger  ️FUEL | THE MODULAR EXECUTION LAYER https://bankless.cc/Fuelpod  ----- Topics Covered 0:00 Intro 6:00 Bitboy's Glasses 8:00 The Rant 14:50 RSA's Perspective 19:30 Bitboy's Bill 24:20 Ethical Platforms 28:05 Beef with SBF 34:24 Changing in Crypto 41:00 Two Different Worlds 44:55 Shortcuts 50:45 Disclosures 52:20 Heavy is the Head 59:41 Man of the People 1:03:03 Best Practices 1:05:50 Closing Thoughts ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures 

Bankless Nation, we are hosting Bitboy on Bankless today. The thing they said would never happen is happening. David, you're looking snazzy, as always. I'm glad you brought your customary suit and tie to this bankless conversation. As you know, this is a podcast by the elites. Bankless Nation, we are hosting Bit Boy. And we are going to talk about, talk to someone who is a man of the people today with BitBoy. What are we going to get into?

Yeah, we just want to cross these worlds of, you know, the, the elites and the people and see what kind of intersection we can come to. And so there's a lot of things that he has to say, especially about glasses. So I really want to hear about Ben's opinions on glasses and just kind of get his perspective as to what's going on in the crypto industry. Guys, before we get in, I've got to tell you about a fantastic tool for the elites, for the bankers out there. There's a tool called Earnify, where you can connect your ETH address. and get connected to all of these fantastic air drop opportunities, David. I've made some money using this in the last year or so.

It's like over 10K in money. It alerts you to opportunities automatically. And as a banker, as an elite, of course, I like making money. I don't know about you. What else would you say about this tool? And how could folks get plugged in? It's a pretty elite tool for all the elite boys out there. Yeah.

I mean, it does all the work. I like margins. And so when I can hire a bot to go farm airdrops for me, I'm just a big fan as an elite guy myself. Yeah. Well, if you guys want to find out more about it and plug in your wallets and see what opportunities you can harvest from this thing, go to bankless.com slash earnify. That's E-A-R-N-I-F-I. And you can find out more about that.

David, maybe we should set some context before we bring BitBoy on. And some people have said that this is peak bear market content. A comment I read going into this conversation was folks who may have bottomed bankless is having BitBoy on the podcast. I guess I'm not nearly as pessimistic. I'm hopeful we can have a useful conversation. The context for why we're having this conversation is BitBoy. This is Ben Armstrong, the guest who's about to appear on the podcast, went on a rant about my glasses. I think this rant was mostly unprovoked.

you might have a different perspective. We got in some DMs, some back and forths. He doesn't know who the FI was, or maybe he does now. I guess we'll see. It took a while to schedule, Ben, on the episode. But he replied, we got something scheduled. We did a quick gut check with the bankless community and said, should we bring BitBoy on the podcast?

You know, something for entertainment purposes, for advancing the conversation forward. I was prepared to not do it if the community didn't want it to happen, but close to 60% of the bankless community said, yes, bring Ben on the podcast, bring BitBoy on the podcast, have a conversation. That's what we're about to do. What do you have to add? Oh, I don't have anything else to add, right? Well, I think we should cut to the sponsors who made this possible. Once again, these are a fantastic tool for elites like you, listening to this episode, if you want to become more banked. And then we'll be right back with

With BitBoy, before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Arbitrum 1 is pioneering the world of secure Ethereum scalability and is continuing to accelerate the Web 3 landscape. Hundreds of projects have already deployed on Arbitrum 1, producing flourishing defy and NFT ecosystems. With a recent addition of Arbitrum Nova, gaming and social daps like Reddit are also now calling Arbitrum home. Both Arbitrum 1 and Nova leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum and provide a builder experience that's intuitive, familiar, and fully EVM compatible. On Arbitrum, both builders and users will experience faster transaction speeds with significantly

lower gas fees. With Arbitrum's recent migration to Arbitram Nitro, it's also now 10 times faster than before. Visit Arbitrum.io, where you can join the community, dive into the developer docs, bridge your assets, and start building your first app. With Arbitrum, experience Web3 development the way it was meant to be. Secure, Fast, cheap, and friction-free. The Brave Wallet is your secure, multi-trial. chain on ramp into Web3, and it's built directly into the Brave privacy browser. Gone are the days

of managing multiple wallet extensions that put you at risk of fishing, spoofs, and tracking. With the Brave wallet, you can securely manage your crypto assets across more than 100 different chains, including Ethereum, Layer 2s, Solana, and more, all without downloading risky extensions. The Brave wallet is easy to set up and removes the headache of jumping between wallets and extensions. It's lightweight, but packed with great features, like built-in token swaps, buying and holding NFTs with a gallery view and support for hardware wallets. But also much more than that, because Brave is shipping new features every single month with a mission to make Web3 easier to navigate for its over 55 million users. Wall extensions are a thing in the past. So get started with Brave's Web3

Ready browser today and experience a decentralized web seamlessly without all the clutter. You can download the browser at brave.com slash bankless and click the wallet icon to get started. Nexto is your financial hub for all your crypto needs. Nexto lets you buy crypto instantly with your credit or debit card or via bank transfer. They also have an awesome advanced trading platform called NXO Pro that pays you rewards when you swap crypto assets. And NXO also lets you earn interest on your crypto in Bitcoin, ETH, or other assets. And they also give you an instant crypto line of credit with as low as 0% APR. And they also give you access to a crypto-backed MasterCard, of course earning you more crypto when you use it. So enhance your financial life with NXO,

who ensures all credit lines are over collateralized with insurance on all. all custodial assets. Nexto, the right place for your crypto. So click the link in the show notes to join over 5 million users who are getting the most out of their crypto. Bankless Nation want to introduce you to BitBoy, aka Ben Armstrong, aka BitBoy, the crypto influencer who doesn't know who the FIM. At least didn't two weeks ago. He is a ceaseless fighter for the people. BitBoy, welcome to Bankless. Yeah. Well, thank you for having me on. I'm glad we could make this happen. I think really the problem was is when I read your tweet, I didn't have my glasses on. And so I didn't exactly read what it said correctly.

Wait. So you are a glasses wear yourself and yet you're criticizing glasses. Is this, where is this criticism coming from? What do you have against glasses, Bit Boy? Well, I've been ashamed, obviously. Well, you know, this goes back to when I was in the third grade. And people are going to be shocked to hear this. But I did things for attention back then.

I purposely fail. I know, I know. Never saw it coming. YouTube. YouTuber, YouTuber was not a career choice back then. It was only circus clown that people thought I was going to be. But basically what happened is I failed my eye exam on purpose so I could get glasses and go into the third grade for shock value for my class.

And then my parents thought I actually needed the glasses for years. And in the fifth grade, I lost the glasses multiple times, which actually spurred on the fight that I believe ended with a divorce between my dad and my first stepmom. Are you serious? That's actually true story. That's actually true story. I think because I saw you post in one of our, I think it was during the SBF, Vortes. And David was like, BitBoy's posting in our chat right now.

And one of your, one of your posts was, tragically, that you hate glasses so much because it caused your parents divorce. Yeah. Well, that's not really why I made the comment about your glasses. But yeah, that is actually a true story. That actually did happen. So maybe in my heart, I do have some, you know, natural, instinctual resentment towards glasses. It's kind of a Freudian thing then. Yeah, it must have been.

It's my fault, though. I shouldn't have failed to examine. in the first place. Well, can we talk about, so I want to start here. Actually, with the glasses, rant, by the way. Sorry, rant. I don't know if that's what you'd call it. Rant's fine. That's what they call it in the chat. It was a rant. Okay, so it was a rant. And this is what it was. I think most people listening to this probably saw this video, including me. I was really surprised to see it the next day. And then you tweeted out. It has to be said, the suits have taken over crypto. No denying that, Ben.

And I won't stand for it. F. Bankless. F. Bankless. F. Ryan S. Adams, F. the horse they rode in on. We stand for the people, not the elite, not the lawyers, not the billionaires. One thing is for sure. I definitely don't represent douches. It was really, so this rant about like bankless, about me. Was this like spur of the moment? Because it kind of looked like in this rant, you just like scrolled up on my profile. Yeah. A dude in a sports jacket with glasses on. And you were just like, yeah, F this dude in particular. Was this like, where did this come from? Was this spur of the moment? Like, why did you say this? I was left very confused about the whole encounter. Well, first and foremost, you know, people know, I get hot. You know, I get heated over stuff. I, you know, that's just how I'm built. And why is that? Because I'm super extremely passionate about things. And so what got me really riled up was, you know, when me, that's the first night, me and SBF got into a little argument over, you know, basically them trying to steal some of our political backers out from under us. And, you know, all of a sudden, you have this tweet where you say, you know, BitBoy does not represent crypto.

I'm going to show the tweet. What's that? Yeah. I'll show the tweet. This is what I said. Please, dear Lord. And any lawmakers or adult three in this tweet, just no. doesn't represent us either. Talk to Jay Chervinsky of the blockchain association, DCG ties.

Talk to Miller, CWL, don't know anything about them. Talk to CoinCenter. They're fine people. Which, you know, that's no shade at Jay Chervinsky. I don't know him personally. Blockchain Association is doing some good stuff. They're great, by the way. Jake is fantastic. I'm sure. Miller works at the D5 fund doing fantastic work in D.C. And I'm kind of surprised you actually don't know about these people. I know you're doing a lot of work on. I would call them personal heroes. Well, I know I know Jay Trevensky. I know CoinCenter. I just didn't know Miller, CWL. So you saw this tweet and then what happened? Well, I was offended.

I mean, because the fact is, I do represent crypto. I represent the average person in crypto. If you look at the statistics, I actually did a poll, which is not scientific, but I did a poll on Twitter, which you would think would skew harder to Twitter. And 70% of the people to answer that poll said the first place they went to learn about crypto was YouTube. My channel is the mainstream YouTube channel. It is the gateway through which the majority of people, at least in the last bull run, came into crypto. Now, certainly, I don't end up being everybody's cup of tea.

And some people ended up wanting to get more into trading. They want to get more into mining. They want to get more into, you know, maybe they just like someone that has a different disposition. Someone that doesn't do hour and a half live streams every day. Maybe they want their stuff more concise. Look, there's plenty of great YouTubers out there for people to watch. So, but I'm the doorway. And so many people come in and I'm great with that. If people come in through my channel, but then they end up somewhere else, The point for me is, I love the fact that I bring people into crypto. I was at a conference a couple weeks ago. And, you know, the guy who organized the guy who organized the entire conference,

Expoverse, he came up to me and said, you know, if it wasn't for you, I wouldn't even be into crypto. And now there's a giant conference going on. I met with a woman from I OG who works, you know, under Charles. Well, yeah, I guess he is the head of I OG technically. But she came up to me at Rare Bloom and said, hey, you know, like, I got into crypto through your channel and now look at this. I'm working at I OG. It's so cool. So I know that we are the doorway through a lot of people that people come into the space. And to say that I don't represent people, like, yes, I don't represent the suits.

I don't represent, you know, people that have, you know, 74 degrees, whether it's in financial management or whether it's in law or whatever it might be. But I do represent the average person. And no person on planet Earth has educated more people about crypto than I have. That's just a fact. If you look at our number of views, we dwarf everyone, at least in the United States for sure. Obviously, Coin Bureau in the UK, I think he just moved to Dubai. He does a good job.

His channel is outgrown ours. They have a different, you know, kind of a different kind of thing they do. They do longer videos, but less videos per week and things like that. But, you know, for us, we really believe that we are, you know, that's the catalyst for bringing people in and educating people. And certainly, you know, people can point back at things from years ago that weren't done perfectly, you know, some things that happen, whether it was projects we promoted that didn't do well or did well for a short period and then dropped or, God forbid, there was a couple that rug pulled, whatever. You know, people hold that against us from years and years ago.

But if you look at the maturation of my channel, if you look at where we're at today, I take that very seriously that we are the educator in crypto. I'm coming out with a book, catching up to crypto. You can find out on Amazon comes out in January. This is going to fill the gap between people that come into the space to understand the space because you've probably experienced this before when people watch your podcast, there's a gap between when people come in and what we consider to be a beginner. It would take 60 videos to make that content in the book. I'm going to try to do that job of filling the gap. So we take it very

seriously and people don't understand all the things we do behind the scenes to try to push crypto adoption and regulation and trying to make things that are very friendly for the crypto world. and we want to keep decentralization. So to say that I don't represent crypto, like, yes, it triggered me. It definitely triggered me because I see this kind of comment all the time. And it drives me insane. And then, of course, when I look at the list of people that you have there that you can talk to, like, these are your traditional kind of, you know, your traditional kind of, you know,

lawyer and Jake Trevinsky, obviously, like I said, I didn't know at Miller CWL, but Coin Center, I know what they are and I know what they represent. They're buttoned up. Like, for me, it's about representing the person. like the average person that comes into crypto with a dream to change their life. And so, yeah, it made me mad. And when I get angry, I do have a way of verbally assaulting people in a way that it's, it's both a strength and a weakness.

You know, it's one of these things where I can defend myself pretty well. And I don't take things lying down. But obviously, you know, should I have made fun of your glasses? Probably not. We do have a suit on in the picture, to be fair. By the way, there's a T-shirt under that suit. So it's just not, I mean, it's just like. to how the suits are. Not today with skinny tie. There you go. Not today. Today is my full

banker apparel. So, okay, so you're saying that, so by the way, I think we'll come back to this, but you're saying, hey, look, BitBoy is a gateway to many people into crypto. I'm, you know, helping to lead people in. And by the way, like bankless and others, you shouldn't be so dismissive of me, right? And you felt like this tweet was dismissive. Let me tell you my perspective and where I was coming from with this tweet. And I do want to come back to like with that entry to crypto and the 1.x million number of, you know, followers you have on YouTube, subscribers you have on YouTube, what a tremendous amount of responsibility. Absolutely. Rest in your hands, bit, boy.

Like, what a tremendous amount of responsibility to make sure people aren't falling for scams. Right. Are going in the direction of like the doquans and the 20% anchor yields. Like, you have a tremendous amount of responsibility. We'll get to that a little bit later in this conversation. But I guess here's where I was coming from with this tweet, right? I don't know very much about you, to be honest, Bitboy. Like, I did know who you were.

I know you didn't know who the FI was. But I knew who you were just like, but I hadn't subscribed. I'm not listening to the BitBoy crypto channel on the regular basis. Like, I'm not down the Bit Boy Rabahou. I just don't know very much about you. My reputation, like you're kind of a crypto influencer. sort of attention-seeking individual, and you might have reasons for that, maybe the reasons to kind of onboard. Also, you know, Zach XBT, which uncovers a lot of scams and, you know,

frauds in crypto had sort of a thread. I was familiar with that. I was familiar with your riff, you're back and forth with Kofi, Kobe, where there was like some sort of lawsuit involved. So I hadn't done a deep dive on this. And what I was saying here is if you see my tweet here, at, you know, SBF put up his, my current thoughts on crypto regulation. All right. First tweet here. This is what I said before you even replied, Sam, with respect, this absolutely sucks. You're saying defy should be OFAC. You're saying on-chain freezes should be normal. You're saying defy front-end registers a broker dealer. No, this is not reasonable. This would eliminate the U.S. from the crypto race. All right? So the things that you were saying, at least the, The points I could glean from the rant that kind of resonate with me is like, you are anti-Sam's ideas on so-called crypto regulation that would stifle Defi. Guess what? So am I. Like, so am I. And here I am in the thread saying that. And you lumped me in with the devils, SBF and which we can come back to you, which was completely factually incorrect. And honestly, BitBoy,

I think you owe me an apology for that. And I'm happy to say, I could have phrased this tweet, the other tweet that you're talking about differently. The tweet where like, what did I say here? The tweet where I said, don't listen to BitBoy. But let me give you some context for what I'm saying. I don't want lawmakers to listen to SBF, all right? And I don't want them to go to the nearest attention-seeking crypto-influencer YouTube

and get their information from that person either. I want them to get the facts from the people who are on the ground working on the DC CPA in D.C. Like Jake Trevinsky, who cares about our values, bankless values, who cares about the values you say you care about, Miller as well from D5 Fund, Coin Center. These people are the people who are standing up for our rights in D.C. and actually have the funding and have the ears of lawmakers. I want lawmakers to go to them. No disrespect. I don't want lawmakers to see that the rate you put out because they think we're crazy when we do that.

All right, it sets our cause back. I don't want them to listen to SBF, but to be honest, BitBoy, I don't want them to listen to you either. I don't even necessarily want them to listen to bankless, okay? So that's where the tweet is coming from. I'm trying to redirect. Look, your game is attention. I get it.

That's like, that's why you said, you know, back in grade school, you put on the glasses for attention. channel for attention. Okay? And you're good at it because you're good at getting attention. By the way, this rate got a lot of attention. I think like you were trending on Twitter. Like three days. My point is this is not where serious lawmakers should actually go. And you're saying in your rant that you're working behind the scenes and you've got legislation coming up. I talk to these people. They don't know anything about what you're talking about. Like, who are you working with in D.C.? Like there are some things that are factually like just not

resonating. I sent you guys an email last night and you didn't get it and it has all the information. I wanted you guys to come with that information so that you guys will see exactly what I'm doing and it's not smoke. Like it really is. We are working. We have high level politicians on both sides of the aisle. And what we're working on is a bill. And the goal for this bill is now to become an amendment onto the boot onto the Booseman bill. So because of that, like yes, if they're working on the specific language of the bill, we're not to that stage yet because this has to run through a process where it gets tweaked down to an amendment. And now, look, here's, here's, okay, number one, sure. I'm, I'm sorry that I said that. I apologize. I can certainly be a bigger man, apologize. Obviously, you know, I make fun of

Sam Bainment frets hair. I make fun of your glasses. Like, I tend to, I tend to focus on things that really don't matter, but really what that is, is that is just me trying to, to manifest the way I'm feeling about you. And that's the way that it comes off. And to me, it was a very, very elitist thing to say that I don't know what I'm talking about when, number one, you don't watch my channel and you don't haven't listen to the things that I've said. We actually already have a bill drafted in California that's, you know, sitting there in front of the assembly, which is the financial stability and the Financial Education Stability Act of 2022, SJR 16 on the California docket.

I've got Senator Mitch Hersberg, who is the head of the assembly in California. He's coming on my channel soon, met with his chief of staff, gave input on the blockchain bill in the blockchain bill that they did for vital records in California, guess what? It got approved. I'm not the reason it got approved, obviously, but we had input on that bill. We looked over it in early stages. So I think people really dismiss the level of involvement that I have in crypto. Now, here's what I want to say. I really wish, basically, I know you guys didn't intentionally not read that email. You didn't realize it was sitting there. We talked before we went on air. But that email tells you a lot of the players were working with.

It tells you exactly what we're doing. And I think when you understand what we're doing, it makes sense. Because I don't want to be in charge of crypto regulation. I don't want to try to determine what is a good transaction and what's not. What we're working on is a mechanism that a lot of people have called for for years in crypto to be able to make those decisions on crypto regulation. I would not be the person making those decisions. some of those people that you mentioned in that tweet,

they could be involved potentially in the future in making some of those decisions. And I wish it could be a little more clear about exactly what all that means, but unfortunately, until we have the funding for the bill and it's registered, then we technically can't give the details away of the specifics. But it's taking away the ability from one man

to be able to come in and influence crypto in terms of what SBF has done and it puts it in the hands where people in crypto actually have a seat at the table. And I think once you look over what we put together, I think you'll be like, oh, yeah, that makes complete sense. And I doubt that anybody in crypto, Eric Voorhees, who was on your show a couple weeks ago or, you know, last week,

I doubt any of these people will be against what we're doing. What we're doing circumvents all the language, actually, in the DCAP. Is it DCCAP or DCC. DCAP, yeah. DCAP, right? it goes around all that language. CCPA, I think, yeah. Yeah.

DPC, you know, YMCA. So the whole thing is, it's a mechanism and it's common sense. Like, we like doing things that are common sense for people. And people would say, like, why in the world, these people came to me, by the way. Why would these people come to me? Because I have the biggest voice in crypto. Like, I have the biggest platform in crypto by far. In the middle of a bear market between TikTok and YouTube and we had almost 10,000 people

watching our stream today. We have almost 10,000 people around the internet watch our streams every single day. You're Eric Voorhe's versus SBF debate, which was the most, the thing in crypto, I enjoyed watching more than I've ever watched another thing. It got like a thousand viewers. Like, I wish they've got more. It should have gotten more is what I'm saying. But the point is, I've got a big voice and we're able to circumvent marketing costs on builds because I'm able to go out and speak on behalf of crypto. So that's, that's why I got triggered. And that's what we're doing in a nutshell. You guys can read more about it later. But I don't, I don't want to make decisions. It's creating a mechanism that also, by the way, I think everybody will be on board with this,

who right now is in charge of crypto? Everybody knows. It's SEC. That changes under my amendment. So this is the thing, right? And this is the thing that we're kind of like, we have to respond to is sort of like the crypto ethos of not trust, but verify. And so I don't. I don't. know anything about the bill that you're saying there's an email waiting for me and i'm happy to like look at that and investigate right but your approach was not that your approach was not like hey here's the bit boy uh bill you know let me reveal it let me let me go over it kind of like a a rationed reasoned uh sort of reply and eric vorhe's style of reply to sbf it was just it was just like kind of this big like rant uh kind of it

I think that you'd probably say, based on this tweet anyway, BitBoy, that, like, from what you say, we're probably on the same side. Okay, so we both think that Sam's proposals sucks. And, like, you've got one approach, one way of doing things. Bankless has another. We were able to bring both Vorhees and SBF on the show to have a productive conversation. It wouldn't have worked if we started the conversation rather than rationally replying with something like this by making fun of Sam's hair.

Or I saw on your Twitter screen, like, Sam with like devil horns and like a goate patched. I just retweeted it, you know. Look, okay. So you're doing a different approach here. And yet, like, you're saying we're on kind of the same side from a values perspective. You have to respect the approach that bankless is taking this. It's different. And my ass to you, BitBoy, is like, I'm not just going to trust you.

Okay. So, like, one thing that we can't do in crypto is to the best of our ability, if we have any kind of platform and your platform is bigger than ours on YouTube, you know, for certain. But if we have any kind of platform, we have to help people. We have to, there are predators in this space, tons of them. And so we have to do a better job sniffing out the predators and the scammers and those that would take retail money and giving them access to get information. And if you just play these games of kind of like, you know, attention for the algorithm

and you don't open source what you're talking about, you don't. don't like come back with with reasoned arguments. It's just not going to be as effective. But like, let me let me ask you a question. So what were your thoughts on the SBF and Vorthe's conversation? So you say you watch that stream. Yeah, what did you think of it? Like who won the debate? Where were the good side? Like, where were the good points made? And overall, what were your takeaways? Well, before I get into that, I do have to because I definitely want to give my thoughts on that. I do want to just like the thing about that tweet, like the same thing you're saying to me, like you could have left out that first part about BitPoint. You could have

just said, hey, these are the people we want to have in. You didn't have to call me out specifically. I guess that's, but I'm not sure like, so I'm actually not sure you're one of the good guys. Like I don't know you. I am. Like I don't like I understand why people, but you can't just say that. You have to like, you have to, you have to show it. Right. And by you just engaging in, in the way that you've been engaging, it just doesn't show me that. It just looks like it's, uh, crypto influencer looking for more attention. That's what it looks like to me. If you had been like, here's GitHub and here's kind of an open source document of all of my propositions. Here the senators were working. If it was like that kind of reply, you would have gotten a different response to me.

My only thing was like, let's focus on the people doing the actual work. Sorry, I'm going to let you finish. It's hard in the bear market to get people to fund things. So that's really where our struggle is. When we've had several people that have committed to funding and then ghosted us, and you've got to wonder why that is. But so here's what I have to say about SBF before we get into the debate, which is you have to understand what happened. I've been whistleblowing on this federal bit license for six weeks now,

for six weeks. And the thing that triggered that entire conversation on Twitter after he posted that was I said, I just responded to him. I said, get ready, bud. And he responded back, oh, you're shilling finance or whatever. But he didn't even say finance because he was scared to actually have CZ involved. There's a deep civil war going on in Crypt,

though between CZ and SBF, people don't know. It's why him CZ had been investing in Twitter is such a big deal because SBF was told no. So, but what happened is we, I have a person who helps us raise money. He reached out to SBF and Tim Harrison from FTCS, US, and sent them our bill and our proposal and said, hey, we're looking for funding. We think this might be something you'd like to take a look at.

They said, yeah, sure. So they took, FTX took the bill. they moved it over to their policy team. Now, in the world of politics, the way a policy team works is they move very quickly. They don't work very slowly because it's always a race to try to get things out. So they sat on our bill for like three weeks without telling us if they were going to fund it or not, no input. One of our top politicians who's involved in this called the policy head at FTX US or I don't know if it's FTX or FTX US. I think US and basically called him and this is a type of person when this person calls you answer the phone.

And so this person talked to the politician and said that, okay, so here's the deal. We're actually not going to be funding this bill because we're working on our own legislation. We have Chuck Schumer behind it and we are attempting to create a federal bit license. And because of this, we've been having a problem with your side of the aisle. We would like for you to lead Bit Boys team and come over and work for us. He literally tried to steal one of our top people out from under us. Meanwhile, they sat on our bill for three weeks to sabotage us to slow us down. And so it's been very personal.

So you can go back and look, nobody else was saying this about SBF because I'm the only person who had that information. For six weeks, I've been telling you he's going to push federal bit license. About four weeks ago, I finally came out with the term federal bit license. I outed Chuck Schumer. I outed SPF. I'm outed Tim Harrison. So I explain what they're trying to do. The next day, Brett Harrison steps down from FTXUS.

who was the person that just all ended up going through. The next day, Brett Harrison follows me on Twitter. So you know they're watching. And so it's personal between me and SBF. And if you look at SBF's track record, this is what he's done consistently. Consistently, he has crushed competition in pursuit of his own endeavors trying to rule the space.

But what happened is when we came out with a video that very, very distinctly articulated what he's trying to do, what happened is he's softened the language. So if you go look at his tweet, He very specifically says in those tweets about what they're doing, which by the way, the manifesto on the website, a little bit harsher language, a little more detail. But on the tweet thread, he said,

now, just to be clear here, we're not coming after decentralization. We're not coming after defy. We're not coming after peer-to-peer transactions. Well, what are the two things that I said he was trying to destroy for four weeks before this came out, defy and peer-to-peer transactions? So he literally comes out specifically with those terms, to try to make it seem like, you know, what we're doing is favorable for these things. Like, you know, look at us. We're so great. We care about crypto.

And he doesn't at all. I know people that know him personally. He's not a crypto guy. He's a finance, bro. If you look at what Alameda research did to make all their money with the Kimchi Premium and all kinds of other stuff, they had to rebrand. And he had to leave, even though he owns 90% of the company because they have such a bad reputation. FTX is getting the same reputation. So what I thought was really interesting is they can't, he came out specifically trying

to talk about those two things because obviously if you get a license, a decentralized exchange can't get a license. Peer to peer, the Bit license put this in perspective for people. It costs an average of $100,000 to be able to get one. And in addition to that, you also have to have a certain amount of cash on hand as a broker to be able to meet their qualifications. So you're looking at almost a half a million dollar. It's not like the normal person is going to be able to go out and get one of these, especially a decentralized exchange is going to be able to. So what I thought was so interesting in the debate between, Eric and SBF on your channel

was that actually he's finally started sprinkling out the idea of licensure of licensing and if you go back and you look at actually what happened with tornado cash I think he's behind that too the arrest

of the developer I think he's behind that too that's speculation but if you look at the playbook for what got the bit license you had 2014 February Mount Gox gets hacked July 2014 the bit license gets voted in. The next year it got, it came into action, right?

So all of a sudden, a tornado cash thing happens kind of out of nowhere a few months ago. And then all of a sudden, what does SBF start doing? Sprinkling out these ideas of whitelisting and block listing. And, you know, if you, if Bob sends money to Alice and Alice's address has been blocklisted now because Bob sent money to her, his is as well. What if somebody, what if his scammer's address gets blacklisted or blocklisted? listed as the new terminology, and then someone gets scammed and sends money that person,

and now they can't reach the rest of their crypto that's left in because it's been blocklisted, you can't off ramp it. So he started throwing all these ideas out about tornado cash, it seemed very insucinct with the timeline for him pushing this federal bill license. So Eric 4, he's did a, I've never seen such a one-sided debate. I've never seen a debate that was so lopsided in anything in my entire life. All SBF did was ramble, not say anything, try to talk about people's heads, and try to rephrase what Eric said 48 times. And then Eric would come in with one or two sentences

and would totally wreck SBF. He'd have to go right back into retreat. I'm shocked. I don't know if this guy has handlers. I'm shocked they let him do this against Eric Borges. I mean, my gosh. Actually, I give him credit for doing him because he did have this conversation out in the open.

But yeah, you know what's interesting bit, bit, boys, like I did not expect this kind of a conversation coming into this because I was familiar with your rant and, you know, some other things. And like you are presenting some rational arguments. A lot of things that like bankless would completely agree with you on. We have always been very wary of like the greatest threat to this entire crypto movement is that the crypto bankers come in and start to make this the same system that we just left. It's like same old, you know, same old.

boss name as the old boss. Dog market 2.0. Yeah, exactly. A new set of bankers. And we've always thought that a play could be for the crypto bankers of the world to come in and like completely sterilized defy, make it a AML KYC type thing. So what you find is like if you are familiar with bankless content, you will find that like we have, it's a, there's a common allyship there around all of this.

Now, your approach is very different. Approach is insanely different. Like, insanely different. And like, but as far as kind of what you're saying, what you're articulating some of your end goals of like protecting defy and making sure that this is a sovereign financial system, that more people are able to go bankless, like, I think we're completely united in these goals, which is also why it's like, if you were for these goals, why are you attacking bankless in the bankless movement?

That was another thing that I didn't really understand. understand about this. But maybe what you're saying is it was just in response to my original tweet that kind of like, yeah, tweaked you out. They didn't do too much more due diligence on that. Yeah. I think also, you know, the thing is, like I said, it was number one, you know, BitBoy doesn't, you know, it shouldn't have the platform to be able to do this. And number two, the I don't resent, you know, represent people in crypto. And like those, if you were to ask me like what my channel is and why it's so strong and one, it's continued to maintain high numbers in terms of viewers and watch time.

It's because the average person out there relates to me. I was going paycheck to paycheck a few years ago. I bought Bitcoin in 2012. I sold it all. It took me nine years to become a millionaire in crypto. It didn't happen overnight. And so because of all those things like people really relate to me. And so when you push this idea that I don't, I shouldn't be the person to do this,

like in my opinion, it was kind of a slap in the face of my audience. And so let's like, okay. So we're past that, right? Okay. But why don't you talk like this more often? I do on my show, actually. Here's what's so funny. What's so funny is 99% of the people that attack me on social media, they've never been in my community and they don't come watch my videos. If you actually watch my videos from start to finish, yes, there might be a time or two during a show that somebody comes in the chat and says something stupid that I jump on.

But outside of that, like, it's a really rational show. It's a very mature show. I've got a lot of perspective. I've been in crypto since 2012. This is not new to me. Every major event that's happened in crypto, So I've been a part of in one form or another. I've got Mount Gock's claims that use Bit Instant. You know, like I knew about when Roger Veer was accepting Bitcoin on his, you know, a picture frame website, the first one to accept it. Like, I've been through the ringer. I've seen it all.

I wasn't always actively investing during that time. But because I was having to buy a software for my business for many years, I kept up with it a pretty good bit. There weren't the educational resources out there. But this is what we do. The majority of people on crypto Twitter, they know me from me. and they know me from a rant here or there, or they know me from that Zach XBT threat,

which I talked to Zach about that thread. I messaged him privately. We talked about it a little bit. And the thing is, is like, even he recognizes my channel is different now than it was. There was a time where I got some really good advice from a, I got some really good advice from, you know, another large YouTuber in the space.

And they said, you know what you got to do? You got to start giving your audience what they want. And I think the problem that occurred in 2021 or 2020, really. A lot of this stuff is 2020. It's not even in the last year and a half or two years. What it was is I got too dependent on giving my audience what they wanted and I stopped giving them what they needed because it was more advantageous for me to grow

to give them what they wanted. And it was such, I did this channel for two and a half years and nobody watched. So when I started doing these videos and giving them what they wanted, all of a sudden now I start growing. And so I had to go through a maturation process to get to a point to realize, that at some point, I have to turn the dial and I have to take control of the channel and give them what they need. And that's what we really want to do for the next bull run is we're not going to be doing 100x altcoin videos every day or every week. It got to the point where my

audience demanded that from me. Like every Friday, they wanted our moonshot of the, you know, pick of the week. And what happens is we get oversaturated with altcoin picks. And most of them did well in the short term. Almost all of them did terrible in the long term. We have some like SeekVR that did 7,000% increase. So certainly some that did very well. But the overall idea is that we've just had to come to a place where I'm matured as a content creator. And I'm very confident. And what I do is edutainment or educating in an entertaining fashion. And, you know, I think there's something that a lot of people, they keep going back to this thread that was a year ago most, which we've not done a speck of sponsor content since January, even in a bear market where we've needed it as a

business. And, you know, people don't give me credit for that. You know, everybody just wants to attack all the stuff. Like the NFT stuff you pull up there. Like, that was so, basically, I had a graphic designer making NFTs for me. And they just came up with that. At that time, everybody was using stuff from Google. And once people made a big deal about this, we actually, if you, if you look at the definition of fair use, a lot of what they were saying was plagiarism was fair use. We added enough to it to make it different. But see, when it comes to me for some reason, it doesn't matter. People don't care.

They only want to go to the most negative case because I represent, I think, what a lot of people in crypto don't like. There's certainly a lot of jealousy out there. I mean, that's obvious. Just when you're at the top of what you do, there are going to be people that are jealous and are haters. But I think that there's a rejection of the average person coming into crypto. There's this idea that you have to be so embedded into the tech,

or you have to be, you have to be in the space for 10 years or you're not, you know, creditable. And so for credible, excuse me. And so because of that, like, you know, people don't give me a fair shake a lot of times. There's no question in my mind. I am the most misunderstood person in crypto, barren on it. In all of my years in crypto, I've never been hacked, scammed, or lost money to a thief. And a lot of that credit goes to my ledger hardware wallet. The ledger NanoX and the Ledger NanoS Plus hardware wallets allow users like you and me to secure and manage all of our crypto assets and our NFTs. All of that. with the security of storing users' private keys offline and out of rage from hackers.

The Ledger NanoX is the perfect hardware wallet for managing your crypto and NFTs on the go because it connects to your phone with Bluetooth and has a nice big screen for easy transaction readings. Ledger has also upgraded the iconic Ledger NanoS and made the new Ledger NanoS device more Defy and NFT-friendly, making it the perfect hardware wallet for beginners. Ledger has truly maximized for both ease of use and security. So discover which Ledger device is best suited for your journey by going and visiting shop.ledger.com. If you've been listening to Bankless, you know

that we're fans of the modular blockchain thesis. The idea that blockchains will separate execution from data availability and consensus, allowing all three to become the best versions of themselves. And Fuel has built the fastest modular execution layer in the industry. By supporting parallel transaction execution,

fuel unlocks significantly faster throughput for the web free world. Fuel also goes beyond the limitations of the EVM, with its own Fuel VM, which is more efficient and optimized opening up the design space for developers. And lastly, fuel brings a powerful developer experience with its own domain-specific language, Sway,

and a supportive tool chain called Fork. With Fuel, you can have the benefits of smart contract languages like Solidity while adopting the improvements made by the Rust Tooling ecosystem, letting the fuel development environment go beyond the limitations of the EVM. If you want to learn more, there's a link in the show notes to see how you can get involved with a fuel network. The Layer 2 era is upon us.

Ethereum's Layer 2 ecosystem is growing every day, and we need Layer 2 bridges. to be fast and efficient in order to live a layer two life. A cross is the fastest, cheapest, and most secure cross-chain bridge. With a cross, you don't have to worry about high fees or long-weight times. Assets are bridged and available for use almost instantaneously. Across's bridges are powered by UMA's optimistic Oracle to securely transfer tokens between layer 2's and Ethereum.

Across's critical ecosystem infrastructure and across V2 has just launched. Their new version focuses on higher capital efficiency, layer 2 to layer 2 transfers, and a brand new chain with Polygon, all while prioritizing high-south. security and low fees. You can be a part of Across's story by joining their discord and using a cross for all of your layer two transferring needs. So go to across.tto to quickly and securely bridge your assets between Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon, Arbitrum, or Boba networks. I actually would like to lean into that a little bit. Because BitBoy, at the start of the show, you talked about how you know, BitBoy, the channel is the gateway into crypto. It's like the first

exposure that so many people have in order to understand what this crypto industry is. And YouTube is that place, right? YouTube is so critical for that. And so the, you know, the account that leans into like the YouTube algorithm and YouTube optimization, the hardest, the fastest, the quickest, is definitely going to capture that audience sooner than the accounts that don't. Now, so like you said, you've like talked to people and they say, oh yeah, I learned through crypto, through BitBoy. When I go to crypto conferences and I went through a ton of crypto conferences over the last 18 months, something like 18, 20, 15 to 20 of them, I don't hear anyone talking about how they got into crypto through BitBoy.

And like what I've what I've come to kind of realize through this conversation with you so far is that there's like two different worlds out there. Absolutely. Two different crypto worlds. And there's like the BitBoy YouTube optimized crypto world. And then there's kind of the boots on the ground. I meet these people at crypto conferences world. Maybe there's a better name for that.

But those, these two worlds like the Venn diagrams almost don't overlap at all. And there are certain properties. that I think people from from our side, the people that I'm familiar with, the people that I talk to at conferences that are, when they see your channel and say they see that side of crypto world, they just get like super triggered. And when you go to your YouTube channel, BitBoy, to me it seems obvious. Like there's a video that says XRP to $589, which is something like a quadrillion dollar market cap or something like that. Don't make the same mistake the pump made and assume that a title on a something. thumbnail is what I believe. It's the, we covered that story because a lot of people have been asking, what is this 589 in ripple? Why do people talk about this all the time? That video was me actually explained.

There was one section of that video where I explain what that number is, where it came from, how it's so asinine, it will never happen. But the thumbnail sell like that's, we're in the attention game here. Right. And obviously to do that. And of course, I had the big thing with pomp, a lot of people know about. And Pomp does the same thing, or he was when he was covering Bitcoin on his channel. And, you know, he did the same thing where he would say, Bitcoin to, I can't remember, $20 million.

Right. So do you really believe Bitcoin's going to $20 million? No. And I don't judge him for that. I think that's fine for him to do. It's an idea that's in the video that people can watch. He used this other example of a Dogecoin video where I said Dogecoin to $5. I didn't say Dogecoin to $5.

The thumbnail said it. Matt Wallace said it was going to $5. And I spent the entire video explaining why it wouldn't happen. So I think, once again, it's like the misrepresentation. and misunderstanding, but by people seeing a thumbnail. And number one, assuming that people make investment decisions off of thumbnails. And number two, judging the content before you've even seen it. I'll take that point.

However, you also in your Twitter profile have like hashtag XRP. And the reason why I really want to lean into this is that like XRP to me is the bankers coin. Right. And it's also like got this like it used to be stronger, but it's got this like super big Twitter army. And so we have to be careful about when we make content about it. like, yes, a thumbnail doesn't really represent my beliefs. It's not investment advice.

But BitBoy, you know it is for a lot of people. A lot of people are going to see that and be like, yeah, okay, I'm going to go and buy it right now while I'm watching this video because the thumbnail goes straight to the reptilian brain. And like there's also this like meme of like BitBoy is like the Alex Jones of crypto. And like if you compare your rant to like an Alex Jones rant, it's like seeing almost the same thing. And so one of the best rants I ever had for sure. I mean, that's not typical. And so like that's like, you.

Yeah, like Alex Jones has call it educated a lot of people out there about things, but I wouldn't necessarily call it education for the education that we're trying to go after. That's the thing, BitBoy's like hearing you talk, I'm like, oh, this dude's smarter than that. Like, you actually like know better. I feel what you're doing, though, is you're using these shortcuts that aren't actually good for the community. as you just mentioned that you were using these shortcuts in 2000 to grow your channel and doing all of these super shady alt coins, right? And it's like, but what I'm saying is like asking your audience what they want and then giving them what they want.

That's actually what you do. But it is. It's bad for them. If what you're giving them is not good for them, it's bad for them. There's a balance. There's a balance. There has to be a better. I know.

And I was out of balance at one time. And today we're in balance. Are we, though? Are we in balance? 100%. 100%. Like, if you go look at everything Zach attacked me for, if you go look at every thing that I've been attacked for,

it's years ago. And people can't in their brain unwrap those things and realize we're not doing the same kind of content because that responsibility you talk, I thought so big David when you talked about that responsibility. I feel the weight of that responsibility on my shoulders at all times. Not only do I have the arrows constantly in my back that come from mostly false places.

the weight of carrying around the idea that people count on me to get educated in crypto, it's very heavy. And then the weight of thinking about my audience that like, I've told them how I made money in crypto and I've talked about all the different ways that has changed my lives and that I want that for them. And I don't want them to make bad decisions whether it's, now, even when we were covering all coins that were way down on coin market cap, whether they were promoted or not, like,

we never told people to put more than 5% of your portfolio in a super speculative coin, right? We've always done portfolio videos and we've shown like you want the vast, vast, vast majority in the top 10, the top 20, the top 50, maybe a little in the top 100. Once you get outside that range, it's 5%. But people don't listen to that. People don't understand that that's the message we're giving. They just go and they pull up the thumbnail of the video and say, see, you know, and I've always from the very beginning of my channel, one thing that you know, really, really irritates me. It really chats me is that, you know, we've never done an undisclosed promotion. In the history of my channel, in the history of Twitter,

we've never done a single one. We've never done a pump it up, not a single one. And yet, people attack us for those things over and over and over and over again. So this isn't like a crypto lark type of situation. No, no, no, no, no. Well, first of all, I don't know enough about the crypto lark situation to really say exactly where that falls. I think some of it was probably misrepresented, but I think some of it was probably accurate. The truth is probably in the middle somewhere like it is on most things. But I've understood since the first day I started this channel that not disclosing promotions is a criminal. Like, that's what Ian is in trouble

for. Now, Ian, you know, rebukes a lot of that stuff and says they're making stuff up. But I knew that from very early on. That's actually why I've been so vilified is because we did disclose every single time. Where do you post disclosures, bit boy. What's that? Where do you post them? Like, where can people find disclosures? In the video, audibly. Do you think that that's something that the crypto YouTube world could get better at? It's just like standards for disclosures and like where they're posted. And like so it's not just in some show notes that no one looks at, but it's like there's a disclosures page where like you're posting all of this information.

I know that's an exercise that we've tried to get better at over time. And I think we've landed at a pretty good place. But I mean... Were some videos deleted? Because that's what the Zach XBC threat claimed. Well, first of all, the Zachxbt Threat threatened. read. I had a 160 long tweet reply to that whole thing. I finally did because I just get asked about it so much. And we wanted to put out every single thing about all of it. So people could read

it and understand we can all move on. Some of the stuff that he referenced was not even true at all. Like he referenced one project that, you know, he said rug pulled. No, they rebranded and moved to a different coin. The coin still exists. Now, it's not doing well. Nothing is. But it still exists. It's not rug pulled. So there was some of that information that was factually incorrect. Some of it was correct. The one that everybody points to is Pamp. Now, Pamp was a project I covered, and I'll come back to this token promotion business. I think it's really important to be said here in a moment. But we covered Pamp. It was an anonymous team. After that, we never took sponsors from an anonymous team again because we learned that was a red flag. We learned red flags over time. And what happened

is, is the project that we looked at in my research team vetted, it was not the same project. When I released the video, when I released the video, they change the smart contract out. Once again, showing the predatory nature of the token promotion business and the people behind it. It's a serial team of people that goes around and does a lot of this stuff. And, you know, I didn't think about that, but oh, they can change a smart contract. And so, yes, we deleted the video. And the reason we deleted the video is because, and to me, it makes total common sense. These coins are still on decentralized exchanges out there.

If someone were to somehow stumble across this video and think that it's new and see the video, they could very well go to unit swap and try to buy this coin. Be like, oh my God, look how cheap it is. Why would you want to keep up something that was a scam? And so, you know, there was another project that we covered Dis DeSex. We paid our community back the entire amount we got paid for that promotion. We put together an Excel spreadsheet of the Eath holders. And out of my own money that I took in from that and more, we paid them back.

And nobody wants to talk about that. They only want to make me a villain. And they only want to pound me for, you know, like I said, should I have known that they could have changed out the smart contract? I'm not a tech guy. But we learned it going forward. And every time we made a mistake, we learned a lesson and we move forward. And I think here's, I really like that you brought up the idea of disclosures.

Because, you know, there was an article going on today behind the European Union. They're about to make, you know, regulation where you have to disclose, which good. I've cheered for that. I love that. I want that. We're putting out a video this Saturday where I'm going to be talking about the token promotion business. And I'm going to be calling on all influencers across crypto. No more token promotion, period. No more private sale deals where you get an investment round in lieu of a promise for you to promote that project, right? This has to stop. If we're going to mature the space. And this is not something where I look back and I say, what I did was legal or illegal. Obviously,

there's no regulation in place. We try to do the best that we could. We implemented the same kind of rules that they used on the stock market. Like, we wouldn't touch our, you know, we did a video on something. We wouldn't touch it for at least 72 hours. Usually we never touched it. Because that's kind of what's in the stock world. But the token promotion business is totally broken. If you look back at every single project that we ever did as a promotion, very few of them are still viable. Bit Boy, why is, I'm glad you're saying this. But why does this even need to be, like, obviously, I mean, there were tons of creators. Like, bankless has never, would never include in its business model whatsoever a token promotion.

Like the daily way, Anthony Sassano, smaller channel, but like would never do that. Like, this is just common sense. He'd throw himself on a sword first. Like, why, I'm glad that you're saying it and like, you're saying mistakes were made. But like, well, this was obvious two years ago, too. The thing I really want to emphasize here is that like, Bit Boy, you're talking about, oh, yeah, we learn these. lessons, like the Zach XPT thread misrepresented me. I'm the most misrepresented person in crypto. Like, people don't talk about, like, with how we gave the money back. People don't talk

about that we did this. Like, I don't hear anyone else in the crypto industry who's like a media person content producer having to make these like defensive statements. And so like there's that, there's that dot. There's the exact exact exact exact exact exact exact exact exact exact. It's that like when I go into in real life events, like no one really seems to to listen to you. And so it's like all of these different dots that are out there. Sometimes for four hours at conferences. So sometimes when I go to conferences, like last year I was at DeCentralCon, I literally didn't move for four hours and took pictures of people.

So the people you're talking to are not that they're at the crypto conference, the people that watch me. It may not come up in conversation, but it's, it's hard for me to walk around. If I go to a to a demo hall where they've got, you know, booths and stuff, I can't make it five feet without every single person grabbing me. And I understand what you're saying like a long time. ago somebody told me something, another large YouTuber when I was growing very quickly, they said, look, you are going to want to slow down. You do not want to be the top dog in the

space. If you are, this industry is not kind to the person at the top and you're going to be assassinated time after time after time. And I said, that's fine. I'm built for it. I can handle it. And so, yes, I get more of this than anybody else. But look at all the people, Zach Exbtia has done stuff. It's not just me. And you also have to consider the fact that when I came into YouTube, You don't want to be in the same list of people that Zach XPTC has gone after. Well, I'm the one that has the most famous thread. So, you know, yeah, of course not. Of course, I wouldn't want, you know, even Zach would admit like things have changed on my channel.

I know he would. But the fact is, is that when I came into YouTube, the model for making money on YouTube in crypto was to do, number one, in 2017, it was tons of undisclosed promotions. And so when I came in the space, I said, okay, Well, the token promotion is, that's the model. Like, that's fine as long as you're disclosing. And so I really committed to disclose. And, you know, is it, we don't know what the legality is, if it's not a security. If it's not a security, then we don't know what the legality of it does.

Of course, we don't know anything that is a security or is not a security. But what I'm trying to say is, I just regret it because I don't like the fact that I did it. Because I understand now that it's a flawed mechanism. And yes, there's not a model for going to 10,000 to a million. And if you look at most of these videos, they were when I was in the 20 to 30,000 subscriber range. They were not when I had a million. They were not when I had 1.5 million almost.

And so we did, you know, learn that on, you know, learn that earlier on. We thought what we could do is we would learn from the mistakes and we would try to hone it into something that was advantageous for our audience at all times. And, you know, unfortunately, I just see now that it's. not a profit, it's not a model that works for the audience. And to be honest with you, it's not a model that works for the influencer either. And I think this is the big thing that people have to understand. The model only works for the people that are behind the token. Yeah. They're the ones. And why, look, I know almost every major YouTuber personally, okay? There may be one or two

that I would consider it to be pumping dumpers. Okay, one or two. That's it. The rest of these guys know what's on the line. What happens is, is you go pull a chart and you look at a video and you say, see, right when he did this video, look at the dump. It's the team. It's the people behind it. They're the ones that knew when the video is out. They're the ones that, you know, help, you know, tell you what should or should not be in the video. We actually would take no advice on what should or should not be on the video. We would do it totally unbiased. There was money involved, but we would never let them look at the video before we published it and things like that. But the whole thing is the teams are the ones that

are wanting the shortcut. And then what they do is it makes it look like it's the face. I'm the face. The team, nobody knows who they are. And so they get off Scott-free. They get to dump the token and now they're in Founders Dilemma where they made all of this money off a token off of something that's not built yet. What's the point to build it now? Let's just take the money and run. And that's what you see happen over and over and over again. And I think really exposing the way that this business works. And then once again, when the next hype cycle comes in, these business, look, I had somebody tried to pay me a million dollars to do a video. I said, no way. And it turned into a big, big, ordeal, we had said we would do a video and then we said we weren't going to do it. And they

try to give us a million dollars. This is how desperate these people are and these founders are to be able to push these tokens out there on unsuspecting people. And so, you know, I think personally, you know, going forward, obviously, we haven't done one since January, but I do think like you guys do sponsors. Like, there is things you can do in crypto that I think are appropriate for sponsorships. This is what one thing we're going to be talking about this weekend. and there's other things that shouldn't be. When the hype cycle comes in, the audience is looking for a shortcut. So when you do a video that's a very low-cap coin,

they're looking at that and they're like, oh my gosh, like this is the way for me to shortcut and get rich. And so they lose and then you lose credibility and the founders make off with all the money. That's why I'm like really going forward. I've talked to one of the top promotion companies in crypto as well. And they've told me that if I come out with this video, calling on all my friends,

to stop doing token promotion, that they is a promotion business will also stop doing promotion business. And they will focus on what needs to be focused. Look, wallet's fine. Exchanges, fine. Affiliates for exchanges, fine. Tokens. Now, look, here's a little dicey water. An NFT, well, NFTs are a whole other thing, but an NFT or a game that has a token, I think it's okay to do promotion for that as long as you don't mention the token at all. They have to understand. We're not even saying you have a token.

We will talk about the merits of your game, and that's it. I think that can be appropriate. But the idea of talking about a speculative asset that could go up or could go down, you know, based upon awareness, which obviously eyeballs bring awareness, I think it's just got to stop it. It's bad for the space. And people will pull up my media sheet and they'll say, oh, you know, you had $30,000 from video. First of all, that's not outlandish in crypto. Okay. Second of all, what people have to understand about that is it wasn't leaked. We just gave it out to anybody because we didn't think it was a big deal. We thought people understood.

That's kind of how prices weren't crypto. But we stopped doing promotions in January. and that's hurt us this year. You know, like financially, that's like we've lost out, you know, two million dollars or whatever it is by completely stopping all, we stopped all sponsorships. And I think that, you know,

it's something that now after being this far away from it in January, looking back, I can say, you know what? I regret doing the token promotion. Yes, I made some money doing the token promotion for sure. But look, when is my penance up?

Like, when is it ever end? Is it ever end? or in 2029 when I'm running for vice president and I'm pro crypto, like, are we still bringing up videos for 2020 and not recognize the growth process and the maturation that we've been through? Like, I hope that's not the case. But I look back on that time and, you know, I do regret it. But I also see that, you know, you didn't have to cut it off completely.

Now I'm starting to understand like what could be appropriate. What isn't appropriate? Yeah. And trying to do, you know, what's what's best for the space overall. Yeah. And Ben, here's what I think is. happening here. Like you're leaning into the whole YouTuber thing, you're the man of the people, right? I am the man of the people. There's like a bunch of funny, like, chat comments I'm reading

right now. Backless needs to watch a show about BitBoy, guys, bits knowledge, is bankless working with regulators? And so like, you created this meme that you are the man of the people, right? And that is why people watch your show, like you're fighting for them. And that for some reason has worked. It just, the populist tactics. Like, we, Doquan did it. Like, like, uh, Danny Sesta. Alex Jones did it. It's very intoxicating for a lot of people out there. And so they get along for the ride.

And so I think your show started off as did the leaning into the token promotion business, perhaps maliciously. As you grew, you realize that you actually can't optimize for wealth while also leaning into the malicious token promotion business. So you started to pair back. And you've probably been pairing back your malicious token reporting, token promotion business as you've gotten bigger

because you're doing this optimization function where you're trying to promote the best of your ability while growing your channel the most while also still maintaining this brand of IM for the people. But what I'm seeing here, what I think here today is you are brand managing and PR managing as you've gotten bigger and bigger and bigger so that you can keep on being the man of the people and leveraging your audience for monetary gain. And whatever meta is now in 2022, late stage bear market, that's what I see going on here. Yeah, I think anybody that meets me and person will tell you that's not true. I have 50 employees here.

They'll tell you that that's not true. What you actually are looking at is you're looking at a pruning away of things as I've grown and gone through this maturation process of things that were not good, the things I wanted to change. Every channel goes through maturation in some form or fashion. And so what happened is, look, it's certainly,

like, how dumb would I be to promote a scam? Like, how stupid would that be if I were to, oh yeah you know this one definitely is gonna rug pull let me go ahead and promote this in a malicious type way no what it started out in the beginning is is hey like this is a project i like it it seems like it's got a lot of things i like and that's one of these predatory things that these places do is they learn what the YouTuber likes and so then they're you know like if you're a defy guy they're like check out this defy project boy but but but here's the thing i hear what you're saying but i still feel like you're playing the victim card here because like i mean we were bankless was around

back in, you know, 2019, 2020. And it was self-evident to us that, number one, you can't do sponsored content. Never do sponsored content for fiat, for tokens, for anything. Number two, never take like tokens in compensation and pump the price of those tokens. Of course. Well, we didn't do that. But like, okay, but like you, but you're just saying like there are some things that you're saying now you regret in, you know, 2020 you did and you've reformed your business practices.

Like, what I'm seeing is like there's some unethical things. that you did that were self-evident and obvious back in 2020 that you're now kind of regretting. Well, what is what is the unethical thing specifically? Don't take, don't take tokens for compensation to create a pump video about the token. Okay, well, I didn't do that. To protect from that, we receive Bitcoin and Ethereum or UST. So, so, so don't take cut cut the token compensation. Don't get paid for content. Don't be paid for content.

Sponsors, right? Sponsors. Disclosures. We make content and add sponsors. We don't do sponsored content. What I'm asking, what I'm asking, Bit Boys, because like, I think that, I think that, first of all, this is a much more, like, this is a different conversation that I thought we were going to have. I thought it would be, like, not intelligent. I thought it would be some back and forth.

Actually, it's the meme culture. There's a lot of benefit from this because I got, like, I think David and I got to appear inside of like a very experienced crypto influencer who's kind of matured his business and as at the top of their game. And like now you're looking at your business, you're like, how can I reform it? What I would say is like just, you know, it sounds like you're going in this direction, but disclosures, very important. We show you the bankless disclosures page right here. We show everything that we have, okay, the entire team, like what we have tokens in across NFTs, public NFT wallets, stuff like that. Okay, so you could do that. Number two,

don't get compensated for content. Don't do the pay per content play. Do sponsors, do some sort of subscription model, disclose all of these things to the public. Number three, I don't think, I think you're better than playing kind of the attention game all the time, right? It's just like, these are all of the reasons, by the way, not to get back to that tweet, BitBoy, but like all of the reasons, I want people to talk to Jake Trevinsky if they're talking about regulation and not going down the BitBoy, you know, a train of like looking at

some of the shady pass that you have. Anyway, all of these things, I feel like you are reforming. I feel like you can play a role in making the whole crypto YouTube influencer space better. It is interesting to me that this world out there exists. And I totally acknowledge this, that bankless isn't tuned into, which is like this Venn diagram of people who aren't like deep, deep into crypto with the builders at the conferences and are here for kind of like the wealth and life-changing money. But I feel like you have such a tremendous responsibility and that you're in a position to kind of do better in the years of come in introducing the crypto, like veering them away from scams, reforming your business model.

I'm very hopeful you could do that. And I'm also happy that actually we had this conversation. I feel like I understand you a lot more. And I do think that there's some common ground with respect to you making sure that we get D5 regulation right in the U.S. And, you know, I'm happy to look at all of your initiatives. and evaluate those and hopefully there's something good there. So I appreciate you coming on. David, is there anything else we need to conclude with?

I think this YouTube chat is one of the most interestingly clash of communities I've ever seen. That'll be the thing I sign off with for sure. All right, Bit Boy, what do you have to say? Closing thoughts from you. Yeah, thanks for having me on. I think it's been a productive talk. I think that most people, you know, they understand why the average person relates to me. And I think that, you know, going forward, that bond's only going to be stronger.

And, you know, we're going to try to do whatever we can that's best for our audience at all times. And, you know, for everybody out there that hates me that hasn't watched a minute of my content, like, you know, I really urge you guys to get off of Twitter threads and come over to YouTube and see what we actually do. You know, we have the most informative news show in an hour and 15 minutes, live stream every morning. We also have, you know, around the blockchain in the evening, which is perspectives of other YouTubers, a way for us to help grow the space, bringing on YouTubers and giving them a shot. And, you know, I think bankers, like I said, I've seen you guys on TikTok and I've seen some content there that I like. And I think our ideals are very aligned. And over time, you know, if people give me a chance, I think what they'll find is that we really are pushing the space forward. And we are, you know, trying to do what's best overall. So, you know, thank you for having me on. And, you know, if people want some crypto education, you know, you check out my book, catching up crypto on Amazon coming out January 17th. There we go. This has been less of an elite podcast than I thought, David. Good discussion with the Bit Boy today. I got to. end with this. Risk and disclaimers. As always, bankless nation, crypto is risky, ETH is risky.

So is YouTube and the influencers on YouTube. You could definitely lose what you put in. Trust. No one. Verify everything. We are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.