Bankless - ROLLUP: Standing with Ukraine & All Those Affected | Macro Analyses & More

Starting point is 00:00:00 We're really thinking about the people of Ukraine from the bankless community. Our heart goes out to everyone impacted by what's going on. Hey, bankless nation. This is the fourth week of February. It's time for the weekly roll up. David, I feel like we've got a bit of a somber episode today. Not a lot of good news right now. I'm not talking about the markets.

Starting point is 00:00:24 I'm talking about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And I think at the top of this episode, David, we should just spare a moment. and think about our Ukrainian brothers and sisters, our friends, those in the cryptospace, those outside it, because they're going through a really difficult time to say the least. And I feel heartbroken at the situation. I know you do as well. And a lot of us are looking at our screens and the images that are coming across, and we're just feeling helpless at this moment. we're going to talk about the Ukraine invasion and some of the issues around that and how it affects markets, how it's affecting crypto, how it's affecting the world.

Starting point is 00:01:09 But I want to start the episode and just set the tone. We're really thinking about the people of Ukraine from the bankless community. Our heart goes out to everyone impacted by what's going on. There's one thing that I learned during COVID is that during big times of crises, the distances and connections. between humans just collapse. And like that's kind of the cool thing of the internet these days, is that we actually get to see what's going on everywhere, but for better or for worse.

Starting point is 00:01:38 So there's a lot of shit out there. And we have this one rogue guy who's not really aligned with the rest of us taking his ego across borders, and now we are going to talk about it. It very much does feel like it's happening in our backyard because the world is so much small, and the internet has brought us together.

Starting point is 00:01:56 when I see Reddit users and Twitter, people on Twitter that I know posting things from the Ukraine, I don't see like, you know, another nationality. I see someone like in my neighborhood on my block, you know, and part of my community. And so I do think maybe that is hopefully part of the bright side of all of this is the world is a lot smaller. We have instant communication. The borders, the national borders, aren't. as strong and the world is, you know, in the best of times, one big family. So this feels like

Starting point is 00:02:31 it's happening to our friends and family members right now. We're going to talk about markets. We're going to talk about all of the regular things we do talk about. But, you know, obviously, with the undertone that even when we're talking about prices, you know, there are things people are losing lives right now. You know, like when price goes down, you're losing money, but people are actually like losing their life right now. And that is far more serious, obviously. So going to this episode with a lot of gravity on that, but we are going to talk about these things. We're also going to talk about Canada freezing bank accounts and where that leads. We started the story last week. We're going to continue that story. We also, crypto found out who the Dow hacker is.

Starting point is 00:03:17 Allegedly. That's a story that's emerging. Dow hacker all the way from 2017. Also, there's some good news, mixed in. All right? So, you know, between the heavy issues, there's some good news for crypto,

Starting point is 00:03:29 some other things that we're going to be talking about. I guess one piece of good news, a little bit of good news, is we have a new way to go bankless

Starting point is 00:03:38 with the Ledger wallet. This is an announcement from our friends at Ledger. It feels like we need bankless money systems now more than ever. They are issuing a crypto life debit card.

Starting point is 00:03:50 All right. So you can load this up directly from your ledger wallet. your bank list ledger wallet you can join the wait list i'm on the wait list i think you should be too if you don't have a ledger uh hardware wallet you probably should have one of those as we enter the 2020s uh and connect this this debit card to it and becomes much more powerful so go ahead and check that out get on the wait list uh i'm going to be on the wait list can't wait for this to come out david

Starting point is 00:04:15 let's get to the markets man markets we're going to talk about price as i said price is not the most important thing that's going on in the world today but it is something that we have to talk about because it is Market Monday and prices are down a bit. Why don't you talk about Bitcoin for us today? Yeah, Bitcoin started the week about $42,000 and it hit a low last night, Wednesday night, Thursday morning at 34,500. So really just plummeted through that $40,000 level. Since the low it hit last night as a result of the news that indeed Russia has begun the bombing

Starting point is 00:04:50 of Ukraine, we've researched from the bottom of 30,000. 34 and a half, up to 37.2. So a little bounce off the bottom there, but overall down about 15% on the week. As you would expect, and of course, all of this is driven by the Putin war on Ukraine that's going on right now. A lot of liquidations, of course, coming in too. So this is a headline Crypto Cs 242 million in liquidations within hours amid Russia-Ukraine crisis. Whenever we see a sharp price drop like this. We always see liquidations. So this is somewhat to be expected. You have any thoughts on this in particular, David? Yeah, yeah, it wasn't just generalized. I think this is talking about centralized finance liquidations, but there's also defy liquidations as well.

Starting point is 00:05:41 Broaderly, the markets are kind of in this weird spot where there's been so much selling. We've had three months of selling, not just in crypto, but also with traditional stock markets as well. So like, damn, when does the selling stop? Right. And of course, the uncertainty of what's going on right now certainly compounds to that, compounds to the market jitters and the down plunges. What are we seeing with ETHs more of the same?

Starting point is 00:06:07 Yeah, ether started the week at $3,000 hit a low last length of $2,350, which is marginally higher, a little bit higher than like the lows it printed about a month or so ago, a little bit more than a month. And then like Bitcoin, it has actually resurged. since I actually wrote my notes. I wrote the notes about an hour ago. It was at 2,450, but now we're at 2,560. So down, again, about 15% on the week.

Starting point is 00:06:32 Again, bouncing off of the liquidation lows that happened just last night. A lot of liquidations as well below 2,100. We can see this in defy markets as well. Here's a headline. ETH market faces $500 million worth of liquidations if the price drops below 2,1,000. How can we see that? Where are these numbers coming from, David? Yeah, I believe this is triggered by a very significant maker vault, which will be the impetus for, in theory, in the current state, if no positions get covered, that if we dropped below $2,100, there would be $500 million worth of ether that would go up for auction and, you know, couldn't potentially cause a cascading liquidations. And so that's bad.

Starting point is 00:07:16 the beautiful thing about defy and transparency is that we can see that. And so as we get closer and closer to that 2100 price, if we do end up going there, things will need to be covered or else we will see a significant amount of ether sold on the markets to cover the liquidations. This reminds me of chasing some of those liquidations back in March of 2020 when we first heard about sort of the pandemic news. And when the markets were grappling with all of that, something similar going on here. What about the S&P 500? We don't usually talk about the traditional finance market, but they're so correlated these days.

Starting point is 00:07:54 Bitcoin is at an all-time high correlation with the S&P 500. And of course, so is ether. So are many of the crypto-askets. They're all in the risk-on category. So what's happening with the S&P right now? Yeah, I think if you is just zoom out and go back for three months. We've had three months of down prices. At the start of the year, but right around January 1st or 2nd, was the high for the

Starting point is 00:08:15 S&P at 480 on this index. I'm not sure how standard this index is that we're looking at, but this is a tracker of the S&P. 480 was where we are. We hit a low of 410, which is, I think, down about 15%, which is a big move for the S&P. This is the aggregate stock market. Like basically all equities when we lost 15% of value inside of three months. And like if you zoom out, Ryan, go out to like the five year or something. You can see, it's actually, it's the big, the biggest down move since COVID, basically, since COVID has just been up into the right. And now we're back a little bit about almost a year in prices back to like April and May of 2021 to where we were at these prices. So yeah, this is the first first down move since the March liquidations of 2000 and what year was that in 2020.

Starting point is 00:09:08 I saw this graph too. So this is a chart of major market shock events. Many of the, These are wars or, you know, violent actions of some kind. So one is September 11th, so 9-11, 2001. The SMP drawdown in the one day was about 5% for that. And the total drawdown was about 11.6%. That took 11 days to bottom and 31 days to recover. Another example, I suppose, is Pearl Harbor attack was one day down 3.8%. a total drawdown of about 20%.

Starting point is 00:09:46 It took 143 days to bottom. Of course, that was a much more protracted war at that period of time. Yeah, that was a big war. That was a very big deal. And then it took 307 days to recover. And there are all sorts of other events. You can see how these market shocks really impact. Some of them bounce back faster than others. And it just depends, really, what happens from here on out, which we're going to try to analyze a little bit.

Starting point is 00:10:12 Here are some other wars, Dave. Why don't you talk about this one? Yeah, this is a graph of six, five different wars, Vietnam, the Gulf War, the Afghanistan, war, Iraq and Kremian War, except for the case of the Afghanistan War, but even in the Afghanistan War, basically it's lining up when the invasion actually happened and then what the markets did afterwards. And every single war, it was up afterwards. Afghanistan, it was up for a little bit, but then it was down a year or two later, or no, a

Starting point is 00:10:41 couple, yeah, a year or two later, but every single other market, it's showing that, like, well, when the invasion happens, like markets go down because they don't like uncertainty, but generally it's been up and to the right, at least, I don't know, maybe these are cherry-picked. I did not pick these. I just saw these on Twitter. But the thing is saying is like, well, the invasion itself is usually around the bottom. I think the market tends to overshoot things is obviously one of the lessons, and people are definitely panicking as they grapple and try to figure out what to do from here. Right.

Starting point is 00:11:13 So if you are panicking right now, like take into account that the market might have already made the move, or at least a healthy chunk of it already. At least the events that have played out so far. With the events that we know so far, yes. At this point, been priced in, right? So now it's a matter of forecasting what happens in the future here. And David, I know we were going to save this for news originally,

Starting point is 00:11:35 but we may as well include it before we get to the rest of the market items. Let's talk about the Russian, invading Ukraine incident because this is going to affect not only crypto for a while it's going affect the entire world and it's hard to talk about crypto without this without having some context here so I feel like today we really woke up in a different world like things have changed okay this is a it's almost a time to readjust but we also have to recalibrate and figure out what the hell is going on so as we get into this I would just say to bankless listeners neither David and or myself are geopolitical experts.

Starting point is 00:12:14 All right. We could talk about crypto politics and crypto systems all day long and are happy to do that. Now we're getting into a space where we are synthesizing things and trying to distill them, which we definitely have some strength at. So we may not get everything 100% correct and we don't view us as experts in the space. We're trying to give you enough information to be dangerous and to understand how that affects the world, your life and crypto writ large. So let's talk about this, David.

Starting point is 00:12:44 What's just happened, the news? Yeah, and a significant amount of our sources with regards to this comes to Kyla Scanlon and Twitter. If you guys listened to our episode with Kyla, she did a great breakdown of so many different things. A lot of it had to do with the European energy crisis and Putin's amassing of troops at the border around Ukraine. And that was like three-ish weeks ago, Ryan,

Starting point is 00:13:09 that we released that episode. So, like, definitely if you want some recap, some, I guess, already outdated recap, still helpful, though. I would just tune into her latest things, too. She's going to put out some content around that. So we'll include some links to our blog. So last night, we got word that Russia had indeed begun bombing Ukraine and actually crossing over the border.

Starting point is 00:13:32 We wake up this morning to an advisor to Ukraine's president saying about 40 people had been killed so far in the Russian attack on the war. the country. Actually, when I woke up and saw that number, I was like, wow, that is a lot lower than I expected it to be. The other issue is, and we'll talk about this, the other issue is actually, we just don't, there's a massive fog of war going on with Ukraine. We actually just don't know what's going on inside of Ukraine, and that is strategic, that is specifically caused by Russia's disinformation and obfuscation campaign. But bombs, artillery, missiles have all been reported. Videos are being shared on Twitter about this. Airports have been bombed and now seized

Starting point is 00:14:09 by the Russian military. And really, the impetus for this, the playbook comes right out of World War II, where in Poland and Germany, Germany invaded Poland as a result of Poland allegedly attacking a German radio tower. And turns out it was completely fabricated by the Germans as an excuse to go into Poland.

Starting point is 00:14:34 This is the exact same playbook that Putin is using with Russia, where there's this Dengenb. Basque region, which is a small region in eastern Ukraine that's right next to the Russian border. And it has probably the most amount of pro-Russia support in all of Ukraine. And all of Ukraine is very much, they all wanted to be independent from Russia. So Ukraine as a country wants independence from Russia. But there's this very small region right next to Russia that has pro-Russia separatists. And Putin has been making the claim that these separatists are

Starting point is 00:15:06 being oppressed by Ukraine, that there's a hollow. There's a hollow, Holocaust going on. He talked about how the Jewish president of Ukraine is a Nazi because he's oppressing these pro-Russia separatists in Dunbass basically as an excuse to invade. The thing is, the Dunbass region is very, very small and it's just, yeah, right there, just to the right, very, very, and there's not even all of the Dunbass region is pro-Russia, just like the corners of it that are very close to Russia. And so Russia has invaded Ukraine on the, on the precipice, of, or on the presumption of freeing these people. But the thing is, like, they all of Russia, Putin has bombed all of Ukraine.

Starting point is 00:15:48 Like, they're, I think if, uh, we're straight to Kiev already, right? Yeah. We're, we're, the Russian forces that have, you can see these little red indication marks as, as where they've been reported as bombs. It's universally around all of Ukraine. So while the, the verbiage, the wordage out of Putin in Russia is that they want to free the pro, uh, Russia separate. they have actually straight abomed the entire country

Starting point is 00:16:11 and strategic points, airports, subway stations, and they are now actually surrounding the capital of Kiev. This is a picture of the capital of Kiev, which had smoke pouring out of it. There's a number of these photos all around. Did you see this one, David? I saw this from Reddit earlier this morning. This is from Kiev.

Starting point is 00:16:31 A fleet of military helicopters flying over, yeah. Looks like it's taken from someone's balcony and gives you kind of the citizen view of what's going on. Yeah. There's a thread that has all of these types of videos

Starting point is 00:16:43 that were able to actually get out into the internet sphere from Ukraine. That will put their link to that in the show notes. There's literally just too many of them

Starting point is 00:16:51 to share. But their collection of missiles, destroyed helicopters, tanks, convoys, basically everything that you would expect to see in a war.

Starting point is 00:17:02 So there's a link, yeah, lots of destruction. So that's sick. Okay, So moving into, so yeah, so the worry here is, is Russia just claiming parts of Ukraine and then eventually just kind of folding it into all of Ukraine? Or this is a text from Alexei Navalny who says, should we perhaps replace Ukraine with, in Putin's speeches, with Kazakhstan, with Belarus, with Baltic countries, with Azerbaijan, with Uzbekistan, maybe Finland, he proposes this as a thought experiment. Well, we'll get into why Putin feels like he can do this at the moment.

Starting point is 00:17:40 But basically people are worried that first Ukraine, then the rest of the fractured parts of Europe that are all small countries because no one really seems to be physically stopping Putin from doing what he wants. And so will that just continue beyond Ukraine? It seems like one of his goals, the question of why is Putin doing this? And that's complicated and probably no one really knows aside from Putin. But it looks like it's an attempt at, reunifying the USSR basically and you know maybe in his world returning it to its it's it's

Starting point is 00:18:13 former glory and that's what we're doing here and i and i do think that um this is important to emphasize that this is really the first major conventional warfare europe has seen of this type since world war two two yep and so this this is why this is um so concerning not for for the entire world obviously for the people of Ukraine who are suffering in this moment, but also for Europeans, for citizens in Asia, the entire world needs to be looking at this and trying to figure out what happens next. Let's talk a little bit about some of the disinformation campaign and the propaganda that we've seen. I think we've seen some of this on social media already, but what's happening with the disinformation campaigns? Yeah, there's been a consistent theme of,

Starting point is 00:19:06 of reporters and people that are showing the attacks from Russia into Ukraine videos and these accounts and the news reporters that are in Ukraine and others have been consistently blocked and banned from Twitter. So this is a tweet from one of these individuals that says, I am back again after having being locked out twice in the last 24 hours. First time for a post debunking the foiled, sabotaged gas attack and the second time for a post debunking the Ukrainian attack on Russia. Twitter needs to do something against these locks now.

Starting point is 00:19:40 I'm not sure what the content was that got them blocked. But my opinion, my take on this, it's obviously not Twitter blocking these people. It's bots. It's bots, blanket reporting, blanket. Like, you can ban anyone on Twitter if you get enough people to report that person fast enough. This is an aspect of social media cyber warfare.

Starting point is 00:19:58 We're seeing kind of how it plays out where all you have to do is block some of the images and videos and voices getting out for some period of time in order to kind of increase the fog of war. And you could do that very easily if you have a bot army that just reports on various tweets and says, and then the Twitter algorithms will flag it.

Starting point is 00:20:19 It's completely automated. That's what's going on right now too. Yeah, and with stuff like this, Putin and Russia's strategy has really been to distort time. So they are making recordings. We'll talk about this later. We're making recordings that they say

Starting point is 00:20:34 are at specific times, but they actually made them like hours and hours prior. There's just a great fantastic effort of sciops and internet cyber warfare going on. And it's just obfuscating our data and our information about what's actually going on inside of Ukraine. So like this report about only 40 people have been reported dead. Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? And I know the, at least the U.S. intelligence agency expects to see tens of thousands of lives lost as a result. I think I saw an estimate from the Biden administration saying 50,000.

Starting point is 00:21:07 It is interesting that West... How many? 50,000? Lives lost? Not now. Not now. Projected. Oh, God.

Starting point is 00:21:14 Projected. And I think that I, you know, one thing that's been interesting is that Western intelligence sources have been actually pretty spot on about predicting this so far, which, you know, was difficult to foresee. So maybe that's a source of signal so far. It's very difficult to tell. But I think a larger point because we've been talking about Russia and Putin and don't want people to get the sense that these two things are going hand in hand because the Russian people largely, I think, from what we can tell, what many can tell, they don't want this to happen either.

Starting point is 00:21:55 There's an element of this is Putin and Putin's government war, not necessarily a war inflicted by the Russian people. and what are we looking at here, David? Yeah, this is a protest in Moscow, which is a brave place to protest of people protesting against the war in Ukraine. It's hard to quantify the number of people in this protest, but it looks like a lot.

Starting point is 00:22:18 They're all wearing masks, maybe because of COVID, but maybe also strategically. Interesting time that we're having this simultaneously with masks being abundant. Apparently, I saw a tweet that said, anything from the Russia TV is talking about the constant assurances that Russia is only doing this to protect and that Ukraine is provoking them. Again, like, trying to fight that disinformation. Basically, what they're doing is they're trying to silence all the information coming out of

Starting point is 00:22:45 Ukraine so they can kind of fill the void with their own narratives. I mean, where everyone's calling them out for it, but like sometimes it just works anyways. There are, there's like graffiti, no war graffiti being spotted all around Moscow from Russian citizens. And, you know, keep in mind how dangerous these sorts of acts of protests actually are in Russia right now. Obviously, you know, jail sentences and far worse can happen in people who do this. Can we talk about what happens next? Because I feel like this is all emerging as we're recording this on a Thursday. The big question is, what is the world's response going to be?

Starting point is 00:23:25 I think there's some context here that we should go over is the world largely still needs things. from Russia, particularly Europe, but also America is very dependent on Russia for resources. Here's a list of resources, palladium, platinum, gold, oil, gas, nickel, wheat. Oil and gas being the big one. Yeah, and 30 to 40 percent of Europe's natural gas supply is actually coming from Russia right now. 30 to 40 percent. So sanctions against Russia hurt the rest of the world. world as well. And this is this is something to you know, ways well. I mean, we've had inflation

Starting point is 00:24:06 recently. It's been going up and oil prices and gas prices continuing to increase for average everyday citizens around the world. And now we have this sort of supply shock. If if the EU and the U.S. stops purchasing Russia, Russian supplies, what does that do to a barrel of oil or energy costs in a place like Germany? Yeah, there's the conversation. The Germany has plans to create a pipeline between them and Russia, which are now being canceled, I believe. Meanwhile, Russia or most of Europe is going through a margin, pretty, I don't know how big to call it, but an energy crisis. The winter in Europe is mild at the moment. Thank God for that,

Starting point is 00:24:48 because if it wasn't mild, we would have even more demand for Russia's oil, and they would have an even stronger stranglehold. So it's one of those things, while we're watching Russia invade Ukraine, we're also buying oil from them because Europe needs to stay warm. But also, like, Russia needs money too. So, like, it works both ways. These supply chains are codependent. So we have these very, like, important relationships for resources and while we just watch Russia invade Ukraine.

Starting point is 00:25:15 So kind of very delicate situation. And on the economic sanctions list, of course, you can start sanctioning various commodities and supplies coming from Russia. You can also, if you are the U.S. or some Western powers, try to lock Russia out of the existing SWIFT financial system. So you can try to freeze assets in bank accounts. You can try to cut off Russia as a whole towards SWIFT. And I think on SWIFT, which are sort of the payment and settlement rails that the world generally uses outside of crypto. And I think that the U.S. and European countries will probably explore these sorts of things. As of now, I don't really know what's happening, David, because this is all emerging. so quickly what the U.S.'s response is going to be as far as sanctions, what Europe's response is going to be as far as sanctions. And it's hard to know what exactly to do in this case. I mean, do you go extreme and sanction very hard, or do you sort of not sanction and appear weak,

Starting point is 00:26:19 that you don't care, but you're getting the resources that your citizens and your country needs from Russia. There's no clear decision in these types of situations. Right before we started recording, we were coming off the heels of Biden's first speech, and he talked about making very strong economic sanctions against Russia, the strongest economic sanctions, including swift sanctions, as an answer to like why we aren't actually, why won't we be using military force? And Biden says, well, because we're going to want to to sanction this shit out of them, basically. The thing is, And again, unreported.

Starting point is 00:26:57 I just saw a tweet about this. I'm just reporting what I see is that Swift sanctions, cutting off Russia from the Swift network, is actually not something that NATO has full alignment with. So when Biden says that we are going to sanction them via Swift, that's not something that all NATO nations are in approval of. And like, that's how, I'm pretty sure that's how energy is being bought from Russia. Right.

Starting point is 00:27:21 And so, like, there's cracks in, like, the coherence of the U.S. NATO right now. And so... And I'm sure Russia has already game theoretically, like, working this out. Yeah. Plan this out. And they're kind of calling the West Bluff. Like, now, you need our resources too much.

Starting point is 00:27:40 Or if you do sanction, then we know workarounds or route arounds. I think they're definitely, Putin is calling the West bluff on this. Russia always has a very strong ally, maybe isn't the right word, but like China will buy all of

Starting point is 00:27:55 Russia's oil off of them if they need to. So they have like a backup buyer of their resources if Russia needs that to happen. Like China's pretty damn close to Russia. Yeah, and that's a whole other thing to talk about, which maybe we will. But those are the facts as we know them

Starting point is 00:28:11 right now. That's what's going on. David, do you have any takes on this? Yeah. So my time... Armchair takes, right? Armchair takes, yeah. My interpretations are like, well, the question we want to ask is like, why is this happening right now?

Starting point is 00:28:23 because this is an unprovoked, just impromptu invasion of another sovereign nation. Like, why is this happening? And I think understanding a little bit of the context, it might be good to do as we go forth into this. Again, I think we've been saying this on bank lists since we started this. The 2020s are going to be chaotic. And they're only getting more and more chaotic. And this isn't another example of that. So why is this happening right now?

Starting point is 00:28:46 Like, well, America itself is politically divided. Like, we've just had the most contentious presidency of all time, followed up by what is another contentious presidency, more or less. And so there's a war at home. Like, we're distracted. And meanwhile, we just got embarrassed by Afghanistan. And so America's influence abroad has not shown to be either of interests by his own constituency, or are we, we're not even competent to have outside influence abroad.

Starting point is 00:29:14 So there's that. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson is in a critical position in the UK. Trudeau is dealing with crisis in Canada. Merkel, Angela Merkel out of Germany is recently gone. Macron is facing strong opposition at home. So we have all these other world leaders that are busy, that are dealing with their own messes. And also at the same time, like, Russia has a defense of,

Starting point is 00:29:36 they got nuclear bombs. It's like, while we're all dealing with our own internal crises, Russia, with their big swing and whatever, comes in, it's like, oh, we could probably take Ukraine because they're all like in their own conflicts. They don't have a spine to stand on. And so Putin's like, well, now is the opportunity. And Putin, from his perspective, if you listen to his speech,

Starting point is 00:29:58 he talks about the ethnic purity of the Ukrainian people and how they are truly a people of Russia. And this is straight up, in my opinion, Putin is like the last big imperialist that controls a country. He is an imperialist. He is a barbarian, I guess. he's somebody who wants power in a world that has moved on from that, except since he's the only one that is aggressive enough

Starting point is 00:30:26 to actually fight with weapons and violence, no one else wants to fight with weapons and violence these days. So Putin's like, well, I'll be the one that does that because no one's going to stop me. He actually truly wants the ethnic purity of Russian people to be coherent again. And so he's using military to do that. And as a society, as a global population, we've all moved on from that.

Starting point is 00:30:49 to that after end of World War II, but apparently not Putin. And so, like, no, there's no one with, like, a taste for violence these days that's willing to go up and fight him. So, so that's my, that's my take on that. Yeah, I guess my take on that is, like, yeah, I somewhat agree. I think, I think that's worth also zooming out a minute, a bit. So Naval wrote this tweet and he said, this is the end of Pax Americana, the piece of the American Empire. I'm reading a fantastic book right now called Principles for Dealing with a Changing World Order, Ray Dalio, which he basically zooms out and looks at these things in cycles. And his general, like, his overall thesis is that the U.S. as an empire from a power perspective, and you can measure that

Starting point is 00:31:40 by a number of different metrics, and he does, is on the declaration. And there are other empires, so-called, that are on the rise. And so this is other opponents, other adversaries, kind of testing U.S. power. And I guess the bear case for all of this, or the sad case, and the reason for a tumultuous, you know, 2020s is the world tends to go in these kinds of cycles, right? Yeah, you know, we go from a period of peacetime, and that traditionally happens after some major event, after a war, let's say, and a new world order is established with an undisputed winner. And we have this period of peace for a time until that power diminishes and leaves a vacuum for others to come take in. One thing that I think is important for us all to

Starting point is 00:32:31 be watching is how China reacts. China, of course, more so than Russia, is the emerging power. and just one bit of info maybe to get in, it seems like there could be some Chinese aircraft in the air defense zone over Taiwan right now. It's hard to know if that's normal or if that's new. I've also heard some reports of ships, Chinese ships crossing Taiwan borders. So the question of what does China do?

Starting point is 00:33:01 Do they try to pull a Ukraine and go the route that Putin is going and forcibly take Taiwan? is the next question. And this alliance or so-called kind of quiet alliance between Russia and China is very concerning. But they all seem like tests on the West power. Yeah, it's one of these things where like the United States,

Starting point is 00:33:24 how can we justify going and putting our resources to defend Taiwan while we didn't do that for Ukraine? Like maybe before Putin invaded Ukraine, like we, before that happened, if China had invaded Taiwan, we would have just sailed our ships right over and gotten them out of there. But now that this Ukraine mess is happening, China's like, well, like, I guess we're doing this. I guess we're taking over the local land areas that we've always wanted to. And since they're not doing anything, I guess, like, we're just in a context of sitting on our hands.

Starting point is 00:33:55 So I guess I'll just go and take Taiwan. You can see how the ball can start to roll here. Yeah, this is what this could be building up towards. It doesn't have to. And I think Redalia in his book, you know, also makes the point. that some of these transitions of power could be peaceful. They don't always have to be contentious. They don't always have to result in war. There's some reason for optimism. We have things like the internet. So we sort of see the human side of the story far quicker. We're all in communication.

Starting point is 00:34:23 You know, we have fewer borders. So there's definitely some hope here. But yeah, it's something we're all going to have to watch. And I think it's the reason why this is a pretty major event, not just for Europe but for the world. And we'll have to see what happens next. Any other thoughts on this, David? Yeah, so this is coming off of your tweet that you referenced about Naval, who said Pax, end of Pax Americana. This is that 80-year cycle in a different words where this is the, we've talked about

Starting point is 00:34:54 the fourth turning a few times on bank lists before, but apparently every 80 years, there's a grand reorganizing of how society works. And this is that theory distilled. it's too much to go into, but there's a link in the show notes where, and also a fantastic book called The Fourth Turning. And this is just on par with when we say the 20s is going to be a chaotic decade. It's because if this model of how the world works, these 80-year cycles works this way, well, we're at the end of one.

Starting point is 00:35:22 And so we are currently going through what this green photographic labels a millennial crisis. So that's us. Yeah. It feels like it's that time for humanity, you know? Time for something new. Time for something new. This is why crypto people always talk about like, yo,

Starting point is 00:35:39 get on the arc, get on crypto, because like institutions are going to break down and we need to build up new ones. And crypto is that new institution. And we talk about being your own bank and having your own private keys. We don't know what the crisis is,

Starting point is 00:35:53 but at least you have your control over your own money. Like having your own money and your own private keys gives you optionality on the future. When we do not know what the future is, having the strongest ownership over your money and assets possible allows you to weather storms. That's what going bank with means. I don't like to get dark, but even when it comes to, if you're talking like a period of time, like the 1930s or the 1940s, fleeing a country with your assets.

Starting point is 00:36:19 How do you do that? Yeah, when your assets are cash and gold, which are physical assets. You can't. Crypto provides a way to do that. Things are getting dark. We've got some other news. We have to get to talk a bit more about the markets and, of course, the releases of the week. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

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Starting point is 00:39:12 Still on the theme of markets, we took a quick detour there because we had to talk about the Russia stuff. But David, as we're recording this and while we went to break, ETH price just shot up, which is interesting. This is absolutely crazy. Just like 12 hours ago, we were at 2450 coming out through lows. And right now we're out basically at $2,700. Same with BTC is at $39,000.

Starting point is 00:39:35 So some very strong bounces back to almost before pre-invasion levels. Yeah, look at this. That's crazy. That's nuts. I haven't seen one of these bars in a very long time. That is vertical. That's vertical. I'm looking for news, but I'm not finding anything.

Starting point is 00:39:51 We'll have to see how this develops. Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's talk about some other things while we're talking about markets. This is something we haven't looked at in a while. It's worth looking at. You know, the wrapped Bitcoin supply on Ethereum is at an all-time high. 1.4% of all Bitcoin is actually in tokenized form on Ethereum in wrapped BTC. This is somewhat banked, so, you know, I don't love it because it's custodied with BitGo, I believe. But it's really interesting to see Bitcoin as a monetary unit being used on the Ethereum network. Yeah, we've always said that

Starting point is 00:40:25 Ethereum is a settlement network for all types of assets. And if people want those assets on Ethereum to be useful, then that number is going to go up. I'm expecting this number to go up further. Yeah, same here. It's also talk about a number that's gone up is the Uniswop market share. I didn't realize. Uniswap now has 80% of the decentralized exchange market share on Ethereum. And that's up 30%.

Starting point is 00:40:51 I believe 30% this year, maybe. over the last year or so. So not only are they growing, they're also eating up market share in the deck space. Any thoughts on this? No, no thoughts. Nice job, Uniswap. Yeah, UdaSwap just crushing it with their V2 release. Also, decreasing fees, which I think helps with that. Rocket Pool is crushing it as well. Now they have 1% of Ethereum validators that's been over a three-month time period when they launch. So great to see some progress on that. Rocket Pool, of course, is a much more decentralized staking as a service provider, which we always support at bankless. Any takes on this? Yeah, 1% is a fantastic number, especially for such a young protocol. And there's been some

Starting point is 00:41:39 Ethereum client diversity issues, as in too much stake is happening on the same clients, which has some negative repercussions if bad events happen. But Rocket Pool has been a force to help balance that out. And so more and more stake inside of Rocket Pool helps Ethereum, become more and more decentralized. So we like that. Yeah, doing the right thing for the network. Absolutely. Let's talk about this too. So I think everyone is looking for yields these days, David, especially in this high inflation environment. And I saw this from the Coinstack blog newsletter, which I read. If you look at yield, where can you get yield? Your bank savings account, mine pays 0.01%. At best, you might be getting half a percent. I don't know anyone who's

Starting point is 00:42:24 getting half a percent. You might be getting out. If you want to get into treasuries, they're paying out 9%. This is nominal yield. Municipal bonds, 1.6 percent. Corporate bonds, 3.3 percent. You go into something super high risk, like high yield debt, big risk of default. That pays out 5.6 percent. Okay? That's all nominal yield. That's not adjusted for inflation. Now, factor in a 7.5 percent annual inflation here. These so-called savings accounts look terrible. Bank savings account, you're making negative 7% per year. Negative 6.4% on treasuries. The safe asset doesn't look so safe. Municipal bonds, negative 5.9%, corporate bonds, negative 4.2%. Your real return on these products actually sucks.

Starting point is 00:43:11 So where do investors go to get returns? This coin stack article, he talks about defy. and I think that's actually a great place to talk about Notional, who wanted us to get this message out anyway this week. But they are offering a fixed APY interest account effectively in D-Fi. So you can do it all without a bank, and you can get 7.8% fixed APY on your USDA. I think it's upwards of 9% on die. And these aren't variable, so they don't change by the day,

Starting point is 00:43:42 but you can just lock that in. Not only Notional, there are some other fantastic DFI. products, of course, that offer these types of returns. But I think this is why people are going to come to defy. They're going to come to crypto for the returns, for things that they can't get inside of their bank account. So it's pretty cool. Of course, we'll include a link in the show notes to Notional. So you can go check that out. They also have ETH and Bitcoin. You want to stake some of your tokenized Bitcoin as well. Yeah. How ironic is it that you can actually beat inflation on dollar yields, but the only place that you can do that is in defy. That's so awesome. It's awesome and

Starting point is 00:44:23 also silly and terrible at the same time. I don't know what to say. So is this decade, Ryan. Yeah, exactly. It's exactly. Best of times, worst of times, kind of decade. I guess humanity's seen those before. Let's get to the releases of the week. All right. So this is a big one. ZK rollups on Ethereum. ZK. Sync has just released an EVM compatible ZK rollup. For people who don't understand anything, that I just said, David. What is this? And why is it significant? So, previous, people generally think that ZK EVMs will be the end state of Ethereum. Just because ZK is like a compression algorithm, roll-ups another compression algorithm. So super, super compressed data, which means super, super, super cheap and fast transactions. And out of Matter Labs, out of ZK Syn, they have made

Starting point is 00:45:12 their first ever ZKEVM public test net that's live. So we can, start to actually build out Ethereum defy apps on layer twos, but layer twos that are like another order of magnitude faster than the layer twos that we previously are used to, like the traditional optimistic roll-ups like Arbitrumber optimism. There's definitely, ZK EVMs are definitely a hard mode. Building out tooling, building out infrastructure,

Starting point is 00:45:38 building out composability is an order of magnitude more difficult. So while we're getting more an order of magnitude more speed, it's also an order of magnitude more difficult. But if there's one thing I've learned is you do not bet against the Ethereum ecosystem on innovating and being able to solve hard problems. And this is the first step, the actual building out the foundation for experimenting and iterating and improving ZK apps, ZKDFI. So really congratulations to the Matterlap team. ZK Sync 2.0 public test net is live. And so the developers of the world can go and start building out the super fast.

Starting point is 00:46:13 Okay, this, you know the meme about Vitalik saying the internet money needs to be less than five cents? This is that. This is that solution. This is what that is. That's what we're getting towards. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And we're going to have Alex from the ZK Sync, the Matterlabs team on the podcast,

Starting point is 00:46:28 hopefully next week to talk about this and what it all includes. Because I think the big story here, David, is people thought this would be years away. Now, here it is. We're in February. And we already have something on TestNet for this. So it seems to be happening quicker than we thought. We'll have to ask Alex about that when he comes on. This is pretty big too.

Starting point is 00:46:47 Opera has millions of users. So it is a popular web browser. They are integrating Layer 2, Ethereum's Layer 2 through Diversify, which is also a ZK-powered technology. This time by Starkware. But the cool thing about this is it's all behind the scenes. So where do you see it? Well, it's integrated into Opera's Android Android crypto wallet.

Starting point is 00:47:08 Behind the scenes, it's connecting to liquidity if you want to trade something from Diversify, which is a layer to technology built on Starkware, right? So users don't really, they're not going to hear about Starkware or ZK or any of this thing. They'll just click on a transaction. It'll be completely sensor resistant, trust minimized, and bankless, and they'll be able to make it happen with minimal to no gas fees. That's the future here. And that's getting integrated in the app layer by a pop, like, not a super popular browser. But a browser, nonetheless, you know, Opera has millions of users at this point in times.

Starting point is 00:47:45 It's super exciting to see. Yeah, if anyone wants the world where you click your buttons and the crypto things happen and it's cheap and free and instant and it obviously is also obfuscated away from you, that's what we're talking about. That's what Opera is doing right now. That's also the power of ZK roll-up, ZK EVMs, just like you press the button and then the thing happens and that's the only thing that you think about. This is the UI and U.X that consumers expect these days.

Starting point is 00:48:08 and so ZK stuff being built into browsers directly is like probably the holy grail of just like defy UI, UX. Absolutely. Arbitrum continuing to punch it forth. Of course, that's another roll-up solution. And Yerne has just launched on Arbitrum, which is cool to see. In fact, I think we should include a list

Starting point is 00:48:32 of all sorts of cool new apps that have been developed on Arbitrum in the show notes for you guys. We don't have time to go into it, but there's really long, somebody, who is this? Oh, this is Lido Cohen from Hop Protocol. Just put a list together of everything that you can do on Optimism, or an Arbitrum, and it's literally too long for us to read in the weekly roll-up. So go ahead and just check it out in the show notes.

Starting point is 00:48:54 So much more. Also, this is on Layer 2 as well. This is a Hop Lira integration. Talk about that. What are we looking at here, David? Yeah, so this is the first of its kind integration that I've ever seen. This is Hop Protocol, which is a bridge that allows you to move aspect. from layer one to layer two and layer two to layer two,

Starting point is 00:49:11 but also an app, Lyra, which is an options trading protocol on optimism. And so Hop is integrated directly into the Lyra app, or is it Lyra? Is it Lyra? I don't know. Lira Lyra. Lira, Lyra. And so you can go, and again, this is a conversation of UX.

Starting point is 00:49:29 How many problems can we just remove away from the user's lives? And if you don't have money on optimism, you need to get money on optimism so you can use Lyra. but also you don't care about optimism. You just want to use Lyra. And so you can use Hop to go straight into Lyra inside of the Lyra UIUX. And so inside of Lyra, you have the ability to get your money into the app that you needed to because Hop is integrated directly.

Starting point is 00:49:53 And so this is just how we start solving some of these UX issues that make people frustrated about layer twos. Yeah, another example of how seamless this is going to be, how the UX problems will be abstracted in the future. This is super cool to you. Whenever EtherScan launches something, I just love it. it because I use EtherScan on a daily basis, and they just launched this. So this is an NFT viewer on EtherScan, and I think there's a button, so you can see your NFTs, and this

Starting point is 00:50:21 commenter says it feels like the chat with owner button is going to be a popular feature. So I think a few roll-ups ago, we talked about this messenger-type app that EtherScan was building, where you could message from one Etherdress to another. It looks like they're integrating that here too. So you can actually message the owner of this particular NFT, which you're seeing on EtherScan. Block Explorers are becoming incredibly useful, incredibly neat in the future. I mean, I don't know if these are the future Googles, but they're certainly indexing the chain and doing all sorts of useful things on chain for users. And this is a really cool feature to see. I think a lot of haggling will be going down in this feature. I feel like that's what that

Starting point is 00:51:03 chat with owner basically just replace chat with owner with just haggle. And that's what what that's going to be. Hagle now. Hagel now. All right. What's this, David? So this is a chess app on Ethereum. I think we're about to see. Yeah, this is Dow versus Dow chess, which is a really interesting

Starting point is 00:51:20 concept. Chess on a blockchain, never mind. Games will never be on layer one, so don't think about that. Games will only be on layer twos. But also there's a problem with games like chess to have a smart contract competition because chess is

Starting point is 00:51:36 such like a computer-dominated world these days. You can't have humans to humans uh, playing trustlessly playing chess because one of them could just have a computer engine to the side. But this thing is completely different and solves that problem. This is Dow to Tao chess where one Dow is black and one Dow is white. And if you guys remember, Twitch plays Pokemon where there's just like, you know, 10,000 people all pressing inputs and like the collective intelligence of all of them tried to coordinate on the right move. So Dow's like, will come together and they will use snapshot voting to vote on what move to make, and then that move will be made on on chain, I think on arbitrium.

Starting point is 00:52:14 And so we can have Dow versus Dow chess matches where it's just wisdom of the crowd versus wisdom of the crowd, which is insanely cool. But why are we doing this? It's insanely cool, but like it seems like the world's slowest game of chess every be played. I think it's, well, I don't know how, remember Tritch plays Pokemon, Ryan? That game lasted a week because of how chaotic it was. And it had tens of thousands of people tuning in to either participate or watch.

Starting point is 00:52:39 And it's not necessarily about chess, although I think this chess use case will take off because crypto people love chess for some reason. But it's more about just like Dow collective hive mind intelligences becoming insantiated into games. So like this is one part of game, one part proof of concept as to what could be. That's super cool. Yeah, I see it when you put it like that. Wait, before you go on, before you go on.

Starting point is 00:53:02 You have more of the chess. The thing about this is like since Dow's, are open in permission lists, like the game of who wins the game of chess actually can move off chain and into discords where like if you're on team white and you need and you want team the black side to make bad moves, you can go into the black side Dow and start siopcing them. It's like, well, guys, I think we should sacrifice our queen. I think that'd be a good move. And so like the internet warfare like is just, this is a friendly kind of internet warfare other than the ugly kind we saw earlier, but just like the siops of Dow versus Dowell.

Starting point is 00:53:35 I think it's going to be really fun because it's going to put the game elsewhere other than the board. I do think this is a really interesting primitive. And of course, you can only have once you have super fast transaction execution layers like ZK rollups that we were talking about earlier. Let's get to races, though. Sequoia Capital, they've been a little bit late coming, big VC firm, but late coming crypto.

Starting point is 00:53:56 Now they are launching a $500 to $600 million dollar crypto fund to invest in tokens. What a title. Yeah, 2018, no one wanted to invest in tokens. Now we got big VCs launching $100 million funds, $500 million funds to do it. And they've done some of their first. The first is a company called Maltis, which is building a crypto wallet that's based on the NOSIS Multis, completely bankless, really cool product if you haven't checked it out. Maltis's been a fan that product for a while. And Sequoia just funded them as an example. I bet more exciting things in the future, but I don't know, high level, it's great to see all of this capital flowing into crypto projects. These are very important projects for the world. If anyone from Sequoia's listening, let me know if you want some advice to buy which tokens to buy, because it's going to be mine. You can sell them your bags?

Starting point is 00:54:54 No, I'm not going to sell them my bags. I'm just going to ask them to buy my bags. Buy my bags. Buy my David's bags. We've got some good token suggestions for you. Guys, speaking of great suggestions, we have some great job suggestions for you. Of course. And our biggest suggestion every week is get a job in crypto. That's a suggestion. It's not an imperative. It's just something we strongly recommend you to do. It's a really exciting time to join the space and get hired. And there's lots of companies hiring. I'm going to read out a few of these. The first is a senior product manager. It's super rare. Senior product engineer at moment ranks. A bunch from DYDX. You got to check out. Community manager, DYDX, governance growth lead, a business operations and finance, a social. and marketing associate, all from D-YDX, an accountant at SmartDefi, a Web 3 engineer,

Starting point is 00:55:41 Saladin React, at Goldfinch, a senior go Rust engineer at Syndica, a bunch of maker roles, bunch of deep-dow rules, bunch of other things on the jobs board. You can find that out at banklist.pallet.com slash jobs. Just sign up for it.

Starting point is 00:55:54 And email will automatically remind you when new listings are listed. Get a job in crypto. What more can you say? Are you ready for this one, Ryan? What? News? Yeah, what's coming up next? Yeah, what's coming up next?

Starting point is 00:56:10 Aren't we about to find out who the Dow Hacker is? Oh, I think we are. Oh, yes. That's what's okay. Actually, I already knew this. This is not a surprise because it's in our show notes, David, but you could act surprised. Sure, I'll act surprised. Okay, so this is Laura Shin, who has, I think, started actually the first significant crypto podcast with Unchained.

Starting point is 00:56:29 And she recently, she's been writing her book, The Cryptopians, which I have right here. It's kind of a gargantuan book, actually. That looks heavy. It's thick. It's a thick boy. And she allegedly has discovered the identity of the Dow Hacker, the 2016 Dow Hacker. That is the thing that resulted in the chain split between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic and caused a bunch of drama.

Starting point is 00:56:53 And apparently we know who that person is now, according to Laura Schum. I feel like the Dow Hack is like probably the second biggest crypto hack, crypto event in the history of this industry. Maybe the first is probably Mount Gawks, just because it happened a little earlier. But this is like a massive, a massive event and somewhat of a mystery. Like everyone's always been wondering who the Dow hacker actually is. Why did they do this? What were this person's intent? So Loras figured it out for us. Lorishin says in this Forbes article, who hacked the Dow? My exclusive investigation built on the reporting for my new book, The Cryptopians, appears to point to Toby

Starting point is 00:57:30 Honishk, a 36-year-old programmer who grew up in Austria and was living in Singapore at the time of the hack. Until now, he has been best known for his role as co-founder and CEO of 10X, which raised $80 million and in 2017 ICO, which is, by the way, now valued at like $5 million. And I've heard that failed. Excuse me, now South has said $11 million. After being at a valuation of $535 million with that one, but anyways, that's beside the point. He did an ICO, as scammers and hackers might do.

Starting point is 00:58:00 And apparently through how she discovered this is way too much for this weekly roll-up. But people are generally looking at the evidence that she has put forth and kind of giving it a soft thumbs-ups. Like, okay, that looks legitimate. I think we're still going to be unpacking this thing. So far, no one has really raised a red flag saying that's not right, except for Toby himself, again, of what you would expect. But apparently we found out who the Dowhacker was this week. That's a big deal. So if it was Toby, the way it might have happened is,

Starting point is 00:58:30 is the hacker, maybe Toby allegedly used ShapeShift to convert Ethereum Classic to Bitcoin, and then used Wasabi, which is a coin-joined privacy technique on Bitcoin, a wallet specifically for this, a Bitcoin Tumblr. Kind of like tornado cash. Yeah, to mix the Bitcoin, then withdrew it to four different central exchanges, then withdrew it to another blockchain called Grin, which is a privacy-focused blockchain for added privacy. and how was this determined through chain analysis? Chain analysis, you know, the actual company were the ones who uncovered this.

Starting point is 00:59:09 And so this also brings to mind anything that was mixed through Wasabi, through coin join techniques on Bitcoin, is that all suspect? Does chain analysis have a way to crack that and determine who the identities of any individuals are, who have used this in the past? or did the hacker Toby mess this up at some point in the process and leave some clues that he shouldn't have otherwise. So it's calling that into question as well. The privacy techniques used by this particular wallet. I think the answer is all of the above. It was both a combination of filling in the Sudoku puzzles of the on-internet IP address traces that this guy left.

Starting point is 00:59:48 Apparently he had a connection that blabbed and then also Wasabi was not a perfect mixer. but this is not how he hacked the Dow, this is how he laundered the funds. But I mean, the guy managed to stay secret for a really long time. So crazy. We should say that, you know, obviously this is not certain.

Starting point is 01:00:08 I don't know. Where does this go next? Does this go to court? Do people press charges? And who presses charges? Yeah. Who's the victim here? I, you know, anyone who lost money

Starting point is 01:00:19 the Dow hack happened so long ago. But they didn't because they did the, the contention, or they did the state transition and did it. It's like, who really lost here, actually? Right. I suppose the hacker might say, you know, code is law. And if they were to defend this in court, that I was just exercising an option provided to me in the code itself. I don't know if that's a legal defense. I don't know where this goes from here, but it might be a story that resurfaces and we talk about it again. If, if indeed this moves to the next step in the process. I feel okay. I remember when this happened. some Ethereum Classic at the time. Oh, you were in the Dow? I don't know you were in the Dow.

Starting point is 01:00:57 No, I wasn't in the Dow, but I got... But you had Eith on chain. I had Eith, and so I got the Ethereum Classic fork. And I decided, what am I, what is this thing? And I was just learning at the time. It's like, what is this mysterious coin? Do I keep it? A bunch of people are saying, it's the next Ethereum. It's like, you know, the real Ethereum, the true Ethereum. I just market sold it eventually. But I... Proud of you. I didn't feel impact. or hurt by this incident other than the price of ether tanked, of course. Yeah, but it does that every now and then. It does that.

Starting point is 01:01:29 It has tended to do that. What else happened this week? Another hack or fishing scam that was pretty big deal over last weekend, I think. This was an OpenC-NFT-related issue. What happened here? Yeah, this news rocked the NFT world before people realized that it actually wasn't that big of a deal. People thought that basically somebody hacked OpenC. hacked the OpenC contract and was therefore able to access everyone's NFTs.

Starting point is 01:01:57 That was not the case, but that was people's first impressions when they were trying to figure out what the hell was going on. As it turns out, there was a very well-crafted phishing email from OpenC that got people to approve their NFTs as a request because they said, you have until 2 p.m., oh, I do remember getting this email. I remember getting this email. I was too busy to even look at it. I was like, oh, that's, that's, there's.

Starting point is 01:02:22 something, OpenC tells me I have to go do something. It looks legit. I'm going to go to my Discord and see if my friends are doing things. And I went to my Discord and my friends weren't doing things. And I was like, oh, well, I'm not doing anything either. This is how I maintain security. It's like I check out and see if my other friends are doing stuff. The email says, you have until 2 p.m. Eastern on Friday February 25th to migrate your listings. After that time, any

Starting point is 01:02:42 listings you haven't migrated will expire. All existing offers will expire at that time. So basically like a slight fear-inducing email saying, hey, you got to go and you got to migrate your listings. Hit some buttons. On your wallet. So some people did that and they went in there hit their buttons. And what they were actually doing was they were giving approval to the hacker to access their NFTs.

Starting point is 01:03:02 So this ended up 17 people ended up falling for this. And I think that's basically about it. I think $1.7 million worth of NFTs were stolen, aboard a couple of Azukis and a few others. Ultimately, ended up being just not as big as a deal as people were making it out to be when they first heard about. it. But I'm sorry, heart goes out for the 17 people that lost their NFTs. It was scary at first. It wasn't the actual open-sea contracts. It was scary at first. People thought it was like some general issue with open-see NFTs. So there was some freak out and, you know, the communities I was involved in,

Starting point is 01:03:38 which are like, you know, go check your wallet, see if any NFTs are missing. So at first, people didn't know how broadly this issue was being. There's just reported of NFT wallets being drained of their NFTs, which of course is scary. Very scary. Very scary headline. I did go to OpenC and make sure that all my NFTs were there. I was like, oh, did he get mine? I'm fine. Not my MFers. Go back to sleep. Yeah. David, let's talk. Let's continue the story from last week about Canada. So we started the story last week. You know, Canada had a trucker protest, of course, and we talked about Canada implementing an emergency provision that would allow them to freeze protesters bank accounts. Well, they did implement that. wrote an article on Friday about that called Canada Needs Crypto. And it was a really historic event. You know, first in Canadian history that this particular Emergency Act was put in place.

Starting point is 01:04:35 And the concerning thing, you know, from bankless perspectives, you know, it's not political at all. It's not like pro-trucker or anti-trucker. It's just anti-the-ability of a large government to freeze your life savings. It feels like that should not be a power. governments have over their citizens. And I think that's been a consistent message from bank list from day once. The separation of money and state is a good idea for reasons like this. So anyway, I guess moving the story forward over the weekend, Canada implemented this Emergency

Starting point is 01:05:09 Act provision, started freezing a bunch of people's bank accounts. And this stranded people's money, canceled their credit cards, stopped their mortgage application, no due process. There's no judge involved. It was just sort of, you're on a list. We think you're involved in this protest. We don't have to give you the reasons why. We're going to send a message to your bank to cancel your accounts and kick you out of the financial economic system. So that happened. And then there was some back and forth. So why don't you read this Ontario Superior Court of Justice who's asked to, ask a self-custy wallet provider to disclose user information and freeze users Bitcoin. actually wanted to freeze your crypto assets on a self-custody wallet, on a bankless wallet,

Starting point is 01:05:55 and this was the team's response. Yeah, this response is so great. Their response, this is the wallet provider, says that, Dear the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, Nunchuk, which is the company question, is a self-custodial, collaborative multi-sig, Bitcoin wallet, basically a Bitcoin wallet multi-sig. We are a software provider, not a custodial financial intermediary. Our software is free to use. It allows people to eliminate single points of failure and store Bitcoin in the safest way possible while preserving privacy. We do not collect any user identification information beyond email addresses. We also do not hold any keys. Therefore, we cannot freeze our users' assets.

Starting point is 01:06:31 We cannot prevent them from being moved. We do not have knowledge of the existence, nature, value, and location of users' assets. This is by design. Please look up how self-custody in private keys work. When the Canadian dollar becomes worthless, we will be here to serve you too, sincerely the Nunchuk team. This is an example in my mind

Starting point is 01:06:53 of crypto values becoming instantiated in the companies that serve them. There's a reason why companies did not take home addresses, names. They took the minimum viable thing, which is an email address, which is not a good proxy for identity,

Starting point is 01:07:07 and that's the only thing they took. And as a result of exhibiting the values that are in our crypto systems, they get to draft this awesome email to a top-down government who's requesting them to be ridiculous about how they manage with their clients. And they say, no, we literally cannot do that by design. And you know what enables us to do that? Crypto, Bitcoin. Bitcoin enables us to give you the middle finger. Here's an email explaining that to you. Go learn how private keys work. Because you clearly

Starting point is 01:07:35 don't, if you're even asking this question, right? So that was some of the crypto community's response. But I found this particularly unnerving. So apparently during, during the freezes and as a result of this information, the CEO of Cracken, crypto exchange, and also Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, started tweeting things like, hey, just so you know,

Starting point is 01:08:00 if the Canadian government, the regulators, ask us to freeze accounts when they're in Cracken and when they're in Coinbase, we have to do it, and we can do it. If you don't want that to happen, you should go check out a custodial wallet. Go look at those solutions. We encourage you to,

Starting point is 01:08:14 evaluate them, use them, if that's what you want to do. Well, apparently, it seems like a totally reasonable position for anyone in the crypto industry to take. Like, what's the solution to not having your accounts being frozen by a bank without your permission? You take custody of your own keys. You take ownership of them, right? Well, apparently what happened as a result of this is the Ontario Securities Commission

Starting point is 01:08:37 sent the tweets to the police. Ridiculous. Because I believe that the crypto executives were offering advice on how to not store your own private keys, but evade the sanctions on funds, according to the report. Absolutely ludicrous. They just don't get crypto. They don't understand how it works. They don't understand how it works.

Starting point is 01:09:01 And to think that they could pressure, and this is what's concerning is this is a regulator saying this to organizations, to companies that they regulate, hey, Brian Armstrong, hey, Jesse Powell, Cracken, you don't tell people about self-custodio crypto wallets. Don't tell them crypto exists. Don't tell them about this. Very concerning. And actually, it's like, for me, it was kind of off-putting because, so I tweeted this out. Brian Armstrong, Jesse Powell tweeted support of self-custodial wallets.

Starting point is 01:09:37 Ontario regulator tweets to the police for offering advice on evading sanctions. There may come a time with writing a bank. bankless article or recording a podcast becomes illegal to these people. We have to be ready for that. Half of our previous podcasts are already illegal. The whole thing. How do you go bankless? Step one. Something we would totally put into the bankless newsletter is how to get your crypto assets off of a centralized exchange and onto your ledger. We talk about that almost every other roll-up. And this is the- We encourage it. This is the conversation.

Starting point is 01:10:09 It's the entire point of the podcast and everything we do. One day, Ryan, we're going to be running an illegal podcast. I can't believe that. It's insane. It's absolutely insane. And I think we've talked about this abstractly in the past. What happens if governments really cracked down on going bankless or the ability to own your own private keys? Like, what do we do in these cases?

Starting point is 01:10:34 And it's surreal and scary to see it starting to happen maybe in the West. We're not talking about China here. Not talking about Russia. We're talking about Canada. Right. Oh, my God. I guess some other follow-ups on this. Vitalik Buterin, what did he say about this?

Starting point is 01:10:53 It's dangerous. He says on Canada blacklisting protesters cryptow wallets, I do think that having decentralized alternatives to intermediaries is a good way to limit the damage. She said this at East Denver during a coin desk interview. But also since then, Trudeau has revoked the Emergencies Act, saying existing laws are enough to deal with the protesters. So maybe this is a self-admission that they went too far,

Starting point is 01:11:18 but still, the fact that they went there at all and didn't think twice about that is insane. Yeah, so what are the learnings or takes coming out of this? Yeah, so my take, and there's a bunch of people, I put this tweet further on in the take, so we'll come across it later, but I made a take about how people that are anti-trucker convoy are on the side of anti-trucker convoy,

Starting point is 01:11:40 people. Apparently that's like actually a lot of Canada. Apparently the trucker convoy was very, very... It's a majority for sure. It's a majority of Canadians did not like the truckers and were kind of in approval of those people getting removed. And like I could totally see myself like very frustrated by, I don't know, how the truckers are messing up the supply chains and messing up the roads and like preventing me from doing anything. I could see myself getting mad at them. You are allowed, you are totally allowed to be mad at the truckers and also be very concerned that we froze their bank accounts. Those are two different opinions

Starting point is 01:12:12 that you are allowed to hold at the same time. Those are not mutually exclusive. And that is where, I don't really have an opinion on the truckers. They didn't impact my life. I'm generally pro-compliance when it comes to COVID and whatever, like other stuff. But I'm also down for freedom of expression,

Starting point is 01:12:28 and I'm also down for freedom of money from state. And again, you can separate your opinions about who these truckers are and also still think that government, should not be freezing bank accounts. Yeah, I agree with that. And I was actually disturbed by some of the people who, like some of the pushback on that, some people who don't seem to understand that you can have those opinions at the same time.

Starting point is 01:12:51 And I tweeted this out, I'm really disturbed by the amount of people justifying a Western democracy using its banking system as a weapon against the people to stifle dissent. What Canada did is not okay. Also, this is a better advertisement for crypto than a thousand Super Bowl ads. I really think that this message was heard around the world to people who otherwise wouldn't have heard it. And actually have a take about that coming up later. But it's, I mean, this is what can happen. This is what governments have the ability to do.

Starting point is 01:13:25 They can freeze the banking system, your bank account, your money at a whim. Do you really have property rights if they can take it away from you with a keystroke and a mouse click? That's the question. But this, I thought, was a tweet that just summed it up far better than I ever could have. And this is from an account on Twitter, 6529. Punk 629, he's famous. Punk 6.529. Let's get into this.

Starting point is 01:13:50 So where does he start this thread? He basically makes the claim that there are no other constitutional rights in substance without the freedom to transact. Making the claim that the freedom to transact is like the meta right. And then he makes a tweet thread about this. So skipping into number two, Pug 6-529 makes the assumption that we are in agreement that constitutional democracies are a good form of government or at least better than all the other ones that we've been had before.

Starting point is 01:14:18 And he says, he's making the following assumptions that people, all listeners believe, readers, believe that people have the fundamental rights to speech, assembly, religion, and so on. People are innocent until proven guilty. The state cannot punish people without due process. And then he goes, and he says, if you disagree with those principles, we diverge there so you can stop reading. but if you do agree with those principles, he makes the claim that freedom of speech might require

Starting point is 01:14:41 such activities like a website, a pamphlet, an advertisement, paying a graphic designer, traveling to a different location, all of which cost money. Freedom of assembly might require such activities like taking a train to Washington to sea, booking a hotel room, hiring a taxi, buying a hot dog while you assemble, which costs money. Freedom of religion might require activities like renting a space or facilities, paying the salaries of religious officials, buying food and consumables, all of which which costs money. So basically, he's saying that you cannot have any of the rights that Western liberal democracies offer you if they're also freezing your bank accounts. Because if they're freezing your bank accounts, they are silencing your ability to express your values upon the world.

Starting point is 01:15:23 Money is a tool of expression of value. If I give you money for some reason, it's because I valued something that you did for me. And that is speech. I'm speaking to the world that I value this. And Punk 6529 says that if you can't transact, you don't have speech, which is a great take. That's so right. Without the freedom to transact, you have no other constitutional rights. I think he's right on about that. Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion. They all depend on that.

Starting point is 01:15:49 And some people might say, okay, well, then if that's true, why weren't these things written in the Constitution? It's because the framers of the Constitution, they didn't have the concept of custodial digital money in the way that we have it now. They had no concept of a nation-state's ability to freeze funds, all the citizens, all the populace's funds with the click of the button. So it didn't need to be protected at that time. It seems like it does now. And I think the example of Canada shows us why it needs to be protected exactly. Speaking of... Yeah, I'm going to transition.

Starting point is 01:16:23 You're ready to transition? That's it. Let's transition. Let's get out of this stuff. Let's get into NFTs. Speaking of punks, that is the only transition that we have here. there was a massive 104 cryptopunks sale going through Sutherby's, but it got rugs by the owner. So 104 cryptopunks were about to be auctioned. It became a very big deal.

Starting point is 01:16:42 A lot of people, including some of the people that I know, actually went to Sotheby's to watch this 104 cryptopunks get auctioned. And then the person selling the crypto punks, he just tweeted out, never mind, decided to hoddle. Oh, dude. Was it all a prank from the beginning? Was this all a rugpole planned rugpole? Maybe, but the punk floor right now is kind of low at like 65 eth. So maybe he's like saying, I'm going to sell it at a different time. He's got cold feet? Maybe he got cold feet.

Starting point is 01:17:09 He's like, well, this isn't worth it. It's a pretty big batch. That's a big batch of crypto punk. So like, you know, 104 times the 65 floor. There is. Never mind. A 6,700 ether. And maybe you round up a little bit higher.

Starting point is 01:17:23 Maybe it would have gone for 10,000, if you would assume some rars are in there. But yeah, the guy just goes, never mind, decided to hoddle. It just run to all of Sutherbees. Yeah, that's how things can change. Right. Let's talk about this. This is a new NFT on the scene, Invisible Friends. Yeah, Invisible Friends.

Starting point is 01:17:40 They were minting, Minting went live not too long ago or as a very recently. They have not revealed them, so people just have, like, their tokens without it being revealed. They were minted. The mint price was a quarter of an eth,

Starting point is 01:17:54 which is insanely high versus other mint prices. Typical mint prices are somewhere between, like, to 0.8-ish. This one's coming at a quarter of an eath. The floor on these things immediately rocketed to 12, which is nuts. And there was also a specific golden custom invisible friends. They're actually pretty cool as far as NFTs goes. I'm not sure if they're 12th cool. I'm pretty sure they're not cool as 12-Eath. But they're all just like characters that don't have bodies but only have clothes. Kind of interesting about the metaverse, right? Because like you can

Starting point is 01:18:24 pick your clothes, but you can't pick your body so you can put your head in there. I don't know. Anyways, if you keep on scrolling down, there's like this all. golden, invisible friend that sold for $1.3 million going to charity. 496.699 ether in good fashion. And that finished up yesterday. So that's all being donated to charity. Very big drop, very big mint drop. Invisible friends went from minting to blue chip NFT like that. We'll see. We'll see if the price, if the floor holds. Was there some controversy about this in the NFT community? I think I saw some people upset about this. Was there a lot of marketing that went into this.

Starting point is 01:19:00 Yeah, so there's, there was this grueling white list that was happening where like people were just grinding in the discord. And so apparently the meta for these NFTs to drop these days is you have to become an really like ecosystem participant in the discord. So you got to like send chats and engage with others and like level up in the discord. And it's super, and in order to get on the white list.

Starting point is 01:19:19 And so people are like spending time out of their day to just be active discord members, like getting like fake pseudo engagement in discord just so they could climb the white list. You're just trying to game the system, right? Well, yeah, but everyone's doing it, right? They're all just like, hey, man, like, I'm in the Discord too. How's your day going? Like, I'm an active community member. Like, we're all here because we're all friends.

Starting point is 01:19:39 No, thanks. Right? Like, sounds awful. All right. Well, speaking of sounds awful, what's going on in China, with respect to you, cryptocurrency crackdowns is continuing. So one of China's provinces just implemented punitive electricity prices for crypto mining. So they already made it.

Starting point is 01:19:58 illegal. There's still some crypto mining going on in some provinces in China. Now they're cracking down on it more. This also caught my attention, David. So this is in China. China is now sending people to jail, at least the threat of jail. If you raise funds using crypto. Sick. ICO. Fund raise. Issue a token, raise funds of any kind. You could go to jail, according to China's legal system. It's like small amounts here. We're not talking about raising millions of dollars, we're talking about raising over $80,000, raising over $16,000. These are a large amount of jail for selling our shirts, Ryan. You go directly to jail. Mm-hmm.

Starting point is 01:20:40 What? Sweet. Sweet. What is happening, right? At this point, I'm just used to it. Like, can I just lock me up now? Just take me away. It's coming. Look, man, this is happening so fast. Like, I, it's just a whirlwind. And of course, sometimes when it's in China, we can kind of ignore it. But then when it blends in, and we have events like Canada and then... Remember, Ryan, when I got pepper sprayed for protesting in the Black Lives Matter riots this last summer and then when I went back home and I got the pepper spray off of me,

Starting point is 01:21:10 I was like, oh, snap, I just got pepper sprayed by nation state police. I'm also a very, very pro-cryptoperson. Those are two things that are anti-Nation state. Uh-oh. Every single time, it's like, oh, that's getting a little closer to home. Yeah, 2020s are going to be interesting, guys. we will be back with the takes and of course

Starting point is 01:21:29 what we're excited about can be hard to find something to be excited about but I got something I've got something I've got something I'll do that right after we talk about the sponsors

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Starting point is 01:23:02 No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply it for a unique grant at Uniswopgrant.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. Thank you, Uniswap for sponsoring bankless. Alchemix is a defy app that offers self-repaying loans that lets you spend money and save money at the same time. Alchamix allows you to deposit the die stable coin into its faults, which earns some of the highest yields that Defyi has to offer. You can then take a loan from Alchemix of up to 50% of the deposited die, and that loan automatically pays itself back from the yield that is generated from your deposit. It's a savings account that the banks don't want you to know about. Alchamix also has ETH vaults available, so you can get a self-repaying loan that's denominated in ETH.

Starting point is 01:23:45 Coming up in Alchimix V2 is a bunch of cool new features, such as credit delegation, multi-chain expansion, and Dauphlets. revenue sharing and vote boosting. Alchemix lets you get your interest payments on your deposits paid to you up front. Check out the power of Alchemics at Alchemics.fI. And make sure to join their extremely vibrant discord if you want to participate in governance or have any questions about the project. All right, guys, we are back with the takes of the week. This first one from Vitalik. What's Vitalik saying here, David? Reminder. Ethereum's neutral, but I am not. Vitalik is a person with opinions. Ethereum responds to the world around it. These are different things. Basically, this is coming off. I'm pretty sure this is in reference to Ukraine, although it also could have been

Starting point is 01:24:23 Canada. Oh, it's definitely Ukraine. Yeah, basically saying, Vitalik has opinions about things. This is his opinion on Ukraine in Russia. You click translate, and he is very upset by Putin's decision to ban the possibility of a peaceful solution. That is his personal opinion, but of course, Ethereum is neutral to all of that. Good separation there and a good principle, I think. What's this one? This take is completely different from anything. Mark Baylon says, old world model, never mix business and friendships. New world model, make money online with your friends. I like the new world way better. It's way more fun like that. It's like that Zelda meme, like, it's dangerous to go

Starting point is 01:25:07 alone. Take this, this being a friend. I do think this is a complete contrast from the old world. That would have been good traditional advice, say, 20, 30 years from now. But you're right, it's way, it's way more fun making money with your friends. And that's exactly what crypto allows you to do. What's this next take? Okay, so is this the line goes up guy? Yeah. Okay, so this is the line goes up guy. The picture of the line goes up guy we're looking at it. So Icebergy looked at the way, line goes up for people who don't know. It's a very anti-NFT, you know, hour and 30 minutes show, basically focusing on the most pessimistic takes you can think of of NFT. Some accurate, but also very one side in that the lens was just everything bad I can think of about NFTs. Yes, right. And it got like four million

Starting point is 01:25:55 views on YouTube. And so all of the anti-NFT hater energy got directed into this video to like promote it. Like, this is why I'm mad. Okay, here's the tweet. Here's the take. The anti-NFTE YouTube guy, the line goes up guy, has Funko pops on his shelf during an interview. For those that don't know, Ryan, we might have to go find, can't just like Google Funko Pop. Yeah, so I didn't know what they were. So I pulled this up. So I had no idea what a Funko Popp is. I had no idea what a Funko Pop. is, but it looks like it's some kind of like collectible. I think I've seen these. Yeah, there's these little, like, cute little figurine collectibles for all the...

Starting point is 01:26:25 Physical collectibles. Physical collectibles. They're basically, they're basically, they're basically, they have no verifiable of scarcity. They just, like, they're making for Star Wars. Here's one for Squid Games. Are they expensive like that to you? I think so.

Starting point is 01:26:39 I don't know how much, I think maybe the rare ones go for hundreds of dollars. They're literally just non, not digital NFTs. And the guy that's had the. $4 million video about how NFTs are bad has Funko pops. No utility. Like, are they, do they have? Are they really all that cute? He's got one on his shelf during an interview. It's like the irony is just off the charts.

Starting point is 01:27:00 I love it. My collectible's good. Your collectibles bad. Yeah. It's basically when it comes to that too. It's the same thing. I bet he doesn't even, he can't even audit the supply of how many of those of his collectibles exist. Yeah. We can. We just, you know, right click me and go figure it out on an ether scan. But this this take is related. This is your take.

Starting point is 01:27:18 I'll read it out and then you explain it. Crypto haters only see where the puck currently is. You go on to see to say, NFT haters don't see the culture. It's going to create. Crypto gaming haters don't see how real it's going to make our games. Canadian convoy haters don't see how it's going to be them next. If there's one thing we know, it's that experimentation iteration is extremely rapid in this industry.

Starting point is 01:27:43 The puck is moving so fast and the entire crypto industry face palms when we have to to engage with people that don't see it. The people in the crypto industry all have an imagination for what the future could be. We are not in crypto for what it is right now. We are in crypto because we think it can be better and we all want to be stewards of that future. And so when people come and say, look, crypto, it's just a bunch of pump and dumping and dump and scams. And we're like, yeah, but like it's not what the kernel of it is.

Starting point is 01:28:13 It's not what the core of it is. It's just what the manifestation of it is at this current point. people in crypto have imaginations. People that hate on crypto can't figure out how to imagine what it could be or a future better world. So that's a dividing line that I've noticed. I totally agree. It's all about vision and a lot of the arguments are arguments of timeline. It's like I'll be the first to admit. Crypto kind of sucks now. Oh yeah. In lots of ways. It sucks. Crypto sucks now. But it sucked worse last year. And two years ago, it was even worse. Way harder. And like it's just getting better and better is the point. go extrapolate that 10 years and look at the values embodied in the system. Look at the end state, what it's going to deliver. And that's where you start to see the potential. But I think people

Starting point is 01:28:56 who don't look at it closely just get stuck in the here and now. It's like this NFTs are all scams. We're back in 2017. All ICOs, all tokens are scams. Remember? Now we got Sequoia pouring $500, 600 million in a token fund. This last one. This is from an article you wrote, crypto is here to set us free. Why is it here to set us free, David? Okay, so this is taking the longest time horizon possible about crypto and trying to instill the vision of what these whole Web3 things are. So, yeah, this is a great graphic to start,

Starting point is 01:29:26 where I make the claim that Web 2 and TradFi suck value inwards towards the center, where Web 3 and DFI push value out towards the periphery, towards the margins. The reason why they have the ability to do that in the first place is because we have private keys, as in we actually have a location and address, to actually send money to. And when our protocols, like Twitter, Facebook, they can't send us money because they don't, they're not crypto protocols.

Starting point is 01:29:50 They're just normal protocols. They're platforms. But crypto protocols have the ability to granularly issue money and assets to the individual users. And that makes, that's the new vector that our Web 3, DFI protocols have to compete on. Like this is, this is the new threshold.

Starting point is 01:30:04 This is the new. It's like how many people get your air drop. That's a competitive advantage. How many people love your protocol and how do you buy, and how best and most, sustainably, can we buy people's love? And so I make the claim that, like, you know, once upon a time, we domesticated plants and we went from the era of accidentally picking a poisonous mushroom to the agricultural revolution, where the population exploded. Also, like, I make the line,

Starting point is 01:30:28 I say the line, like, we once domesticated wolves to become dogs, and so too will we domesticate our protocols to treat us with love and infection. And so this is the take here. It's a longer article. I've read it's on the bankless newsletter. It's also available on the YouTube. And if you want, if you, somebody that has imagination and want to see what my imagination looks like when crypto comes to its endgame, it's, it's that crypto's not here to make you rich. It's not here to support pump and dumps and scams. It's here to set you free. That's a, that's a great line. And you also talk about how crypto is a multi-stage rocket. We're still in phase one, which is it's all about financial incentives. And that's the negative

Starting point is 01:31:08 that people see. It's like, it's all kind of scams and pump and dumps and it's just people talking about number go up. But phase two is more sovereignty, more freedom. And that's what you mean, I think. That's really cool. All right, David, can you find something this week to be excited about? I know it's a little more challenging than usual, but what are you excited about this week? Tomorrow, or actually, it might be today, actually. It might be tomorrow. Eldon Ring comes out, Ryan, which is part of the Dark Souls video game series. And if there's one video game that I really, really like. It's the Dark Soul series. So Eldon Ring comes out tomorrow and it's going to be like, it's a perfect timing. I need some escapism. And there ain't no crypto in it. So I get to ignore that too.

Starting point is 01:31:49 No NFTs haven't made it. That's exactly right. Ain't no NFTs yet in Eldon Ring. And so I'm going to be playing an Eldon Ring a lot this coming weekend for sure. That's awesome. Yeah. You got to get your mind off things sometimes. Got to have some relaxation for sure. What are you excited about, Ryan? I'm really excited about a post I saw written by a guy that I've been following for a while. David Hennemeyer Hansen, if you're in the developer space, you might know him as the creator of Ruby on Rails. Anyway, he wrote this post. He's been very vocally skeptical about crypto. I might say a crypto critic or crypto hater.

Starting point is 01:32:25 You wrote this post earlier this week called, I was wrong. We need crypto. Okay? And the reason he was skeptical about crypto, and he changed his mind. on that. But the reason he was skeptical, I think a lot of people can relate to outside of crypto. He didn't vibe with the culture, you know, the whole laserized thing. That wasn't his vibe. The energy consumption around Bitcoin, right? Again, didn't feel sustainable, not his vibe. Transaction fees, the pump and dumps, the obvious frauds, some of the fake decentralization,

Starting point is 01:32:55 right? There's a whole list of things you could be mad about in the crypto. And that's why he stayed away from it. He didn't find out it was worth exploring. But he changed his mind. And the reason he changed his mind was the Canadian actions of the Canadian government to freeze bank accounts of protesters. Now, he said this, beyond all these very real problems and challenges, my bigger beef was actually fueled by a lack of imagination. He didn't think that in the Western world, anyway, where we weren't under authoritarian regimes, that we would actually need a free monetary system. Kind of like the banking system works good enough. Where's the 5x improvement? Where's the 10x improvement? But the protests in Canada and the bank freezing completely changed his mind,

Starting point is 01:33:46 which is, I don't want to say that's cool to see because it's unfortunate that this is what it takes to change people's minds. But I do think back to that statement that this is like a thousand Super Bowl ads. When you actually see, when funds are actually taken away from you in your country. I mean, the people of Argentina, for instance, they don't have to be convinced about crypto or defy. Like, they've lived through eras of banks confiscating their funds. Now we're starting to see this in Western countries, and people are getting it that way. Anyway, exciting for me to kind of read this post and to see someone who is initially resistant to start to understand why we've been talking about the things we've been talking to. And also

Starting point is 01:34:23 exciting, because I just shot him an email a couple days ago and I was like, hey, hey, DHH, want to come on bankless and talk about this. And again, he's someone who's writing, I follow for a while. He's written some books that I've read as well. And he's like, yeah, sure, let's talk about it. So he's coming on the podcast next week. So I'm excited about that. I'm exciting about hearing the story of a crypto critic, change his mind and what went into the thought process there. We start off that podcast with I Told You So, right? No. I want him to tell himself so, which is what he did in this post. This is, okay, this is the same exact thing that we were talking about with, like, people who have imaginations get it.

Starting point is 01:35:01 Like, it's easy for them to imagine, oh, maybe the United States might turn authoritarian one day. Like that might be a possibility. This is the exact same energy. Yeah, exactly. I totally agree. All right, David, let's close this out. Meme the week.

Starting point is 01:35:15 What are we looking at? This is not a funny one, but it is a little bit funny. Okay, so this is the unofficial ETH Denver Po app, which is a positive COVID test? Oh, God. Is that what happened in Eith, Denver? A lot of people got COVID. So Arjun Buktani of Connect, he made a poll, said, Did you get COVID at East Denver?

Starting point is 01:35:35 13% said yes. 20% said no. The rest were a result. So I don't know, what's that ratio? 13 to 20 is like, you know, very roughly almost half. Like less than half, but almost half of people got COVID at Heath Denver. Like I've taken two COVID tests now and both came back negative, but I have COVID symptoms. At this point, it's just a fucking common cold.

Starting point is 01:35:56 Excuse me like much. But also at the same time, like, Like, everyone kind of new. Especially because you've been, like, vaccinated multiple times and you've already had it. Twice, yeah. Uh-huh. And, but also at the same time, we recently had a Super Bowl that had like 100,000 people in the stadium without masks. Then we had eat Denver with 15,000 people who all know COVID exists.

Starting point is 01:36:14 And so, like, I'm kind of in the pro camp of just like, is this over yet or what? Because, like, if you look at the behaviors of people, they are going to eat Denver kind of knowing that they're going to get COVID. And then they're coming out with it. Like, no, no, there's no new story. about this. Remember in Bitcoin Miami, 2021, there was like a massive news cycle story about like how it's a super spreader event. Different time, yeah. Well, this had way more people getting COVID, but no one cares about it anymore. And so like, can we call this thing, like, can we wrap this thing up, in my opinion? I do think things are changing. Hey, meme of the weeks are supposed to be

Starting point is 01:36:46 funny, though, not all serious, David. It's pretty funny. Sorry. Anyway, guys, thanks for hanging with us. Of course, none of this has been financial advice. Bitcoin is risky. Or geopolitical. It's definitely not geopolitics advice. All of these things are risky. You could lose what you put in. But 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.

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