On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 01/07/22 (Kazakhstan mining stutters, Chainalysis 2022 illicit volume report, Washington is interested in PoW) (EP.274)

Episode Date: January 7, 2022

Matt and Nic return for more news and deals of the week. In this episode:  Everything is selling off Is the US losing its status as global reserve? We announce our policy miniseries Sen. Lummis will reportedly propose a crypto bill Opensea raising $300m at a $13b valuation Illicit activity in 2021 was only 0.15% of total crypto volume The Boston Fed CBDC pilot program rumbles on Kazakhstan turns off the internet, and dims Bitcoin hashrate by 12% NY State reproposes their bill to ban mining in the state The National Credit Union Administration looks to ratify usage of crypto for its members The House Energy and Commerce committee will hold a hearing on PoW A group of environmentalist organizations sends a letter regarding PoW to congress Content mentioned:  National Credit Union Administration, Relationships with Third Parties that Provide Services Related to Digital Assets Letter to Congress from environmentalist groups regarding PoW   Sponsor notes: Corporations and institutions can allocate cash into Circle Yield to gain crypto lending exposure and earn superior returns compared to traditional markets. It's secured, overcollateralized and built on the leading dollar digital currency. Visit circle.com/yield to book a meeting

Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden, people start to worry.

So out of this worry, we have something called a Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. In this episode is brought to you by Circle. More on that company later in the episode. Well, this is an interesting week. Everyone I know is getting COVID.

My turkeys are back. It's just a lot of things are going south in a hurry. And everything is selling off. Everything's selling off. Everything's selling macro. There's no bid in this market. It's going. on? Yeah, it's a tough week for the old crypto industry. I'm seeing a lot of panic out there on the

TL out on Twitter. People are upset. Is the dream dead? It's just the dream is dead. Yeah, maybe crypto, you know, is just didn't work. And we all just have to go home, go back to our fiat jobs. It's coupled with the fact that I just finished Dahlia's new book, which is phenomenal, but maybe not the most optimistic view of what's ahead for the United States. So he thinks a big debt crisis is coming, right? Yeah, I mean, Jubilee, maybe on the horizon. I don't know. It kind of talks about the history of empires and when they start to fade.

And so we're kind of late cycle maybe as a country in terms of some of these things, both from a political divide perspective and from a balance sheet perspective. But, you know, the thing we still got going in the U.S. is the reserve asset. So, you know, you got to have an alternative to a reserve asset. And it's unclear that there is one besides a dollar. So what does he think is going to happen that we're going to default or that's just going to be rampant money printing to get us out of the debt overhang? Well, I mean, I don't think there's like a definitive, here's what's going to happen, but a soft devaluation over a long period of time would probably be the easiest, right, from a political perspective. Is he broadly bullish on sort of the American Empire or does he think we're like going to go the way of the Romans?

I think he does a pretty good job of towing the line. I think there's an optimistic view. We're not like so far gone that it can't be saved, but you really need productivity growth to really bring you out of these things, right? So we need investment in R&D and you got to have a top line growth here. Yeah, I think negative rates are not conducive to investment in productive industries. You know, I mean, they seem to be causing investment in, you know, rampantly speculative industries instead.

So your Austrian economists would say that negative rates are not conducive to productivity rates, growth. Yeah, I think that's right. Now, the interesting thing is that historically reserve currencies have shifted through wars. And, you know, there's obviously been alternative. So the Dutch had it for a while, the UK, you know, the pound before the dollar. It's not clear that China is really ready to hold that mantle from reserve currency perspective. And, you know, obviously, like, Bitcoin people will tell you that Bitcoin's up next.

But that's not clear either, right? That's a very small asset by comparison. So you got to have an alternative here, maybe a bank war. Well, we're seeing countries de-dollarizing anyway. Russia is de-dollarizing. They're divesting all their dollar assets. China doesn't buy treasuries anymore. So the signal is kind of out there.

you know, the Fed is the largest consumer of U.S. debt. So it's not, we don't gain significant benefits from issuing the reserve currency anymore. Yeah, it's interesting because the dollar, there's kind of a de-dollarization from the actual instrument from the asset, but there's also a de-dollarization from the technology that is the dollar, right? The Swift system and the Fedwire system and just wanting to get onto a neutral payments infrastructure. And you definitely see a push to get off of both, really. Yeah, it turns out people don't like it when you abuse your position as the administrator of the global financial system.

And you insert political barriers into that system and, you know, into the global monetary network. Turns out people sort of resent that and try to make alternatives. It's hard to, you know, once you start exerting the politics onto the system, though, It's kind of hard to stop, right? So it's an exorbitant privilege, as they say. Yeah, it's just, it's too convenient to be able to kick people off the financial system or use that threat. So maybe we'll see something here with Russia.

I mean, maybe Russia will invade Ukraine and then maybe the U.S. trying to kick them off of Swift. That might be kind of a reckoning. I mean, if they do, it'll be interesting to see how they react. So if they, because I believe they built an alternative. And does it seem inevitable that Russia is going to invade, Ukraine here. I was listening to Hidden Forces this week, and there's a good analysis on that. It does seem rather likely. I mean, it's like in a game of risk where, you know, you put all your

forces adjacent to one country and it's like, well, you're going to invade. Well, it sure looks like you're going to. Yeah. It sure looks like Russia is going to invade. And they've leveraged. They've leverage of the Europeans with this energy crisis. Russia is basically keeping Europe from freezing right now. Well, good times. This is an, upbeat start to the podcast. I think we're off to a good start. It can only get better from here. Well, you talked about actually some of these teams

with Preston Pish on the We Study Billioners podcast this week. Yeah, and to be clear, you know, that's a misnomer. I'm unfortunately not a billionaire. So maybe that was for his many series for non-billionaires. But yeah, I thought that was a great episode. I think in the newsletter I'll just call that WSB. Because I don't want people getting the wrong impression. You're still like a ramen noodles guy.

Yeah, that's right. Very scrappy. And you also did a podcast with Ethan Vera and Guzman Pinto's. A good little mining miniseries continuation there. Yeah, this is for a never-running mining miniseries, which has many more episodes to come. But we are also going to do a policy mini-series, actually, starting next Monday. I'm really excited about that. A lot of policy issues to discuss. This is the policy pod.

Yeah, I think it might be. And so we're going to talk about some of it today. The big news that has everyone in a tizzy is this Lummis bill, which is apparently Senator Lummis is going to propose crypto bill. And nobody knows what's in the bill just yet. But everyone's very excited about it. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know why anyone would be in a tizzy about it other than just to be very excited.

I bet it's a lot of good stuff in there. So we'll try and find out. Maybe we'll see if we can bring some. Senator Lummis on herself. But next Monday, we do have a first for this show. A sitting member of Congress will be joining the show. We're going to say who it is? No.

It's not Stephen Lynch. For those of you who are wondering, it's not Stephen Lynch. He's not invited, frankly. And it's not AOC. Yeah, she's also not invited. But we went off in this episode. We went off. You did.

So it's very excited to share it with you all. and yeah that kicks off officially kicks off our policy miniseries in case you you know in case we didn't do enough policy and regulatory stuff we're kicking it off we should do a mount rush more of the policy gurus in the blockchain space jerry brito peter van balkenberg just some heavy weights well yeah i mean we could just do the whole coin setter stuff i mean just some really john becha i mean what's your what's your starting line up there It's just some incredible policy minds.

Well, Trevinsky was a great addition to the blockchain association, I must say. It was. So they got their first draft pick there and Jake is an all-star. So honestly, I'm pretty bullish on the sort of the crypto policy space. I know we took some L's last year, but it's time to reclaim things, pick up some dubs in 22. I got a good feeling about it. I think that's right. I think that's right.

All right, we're making a positive turn here. All right, let's get to some very positive news for a lot of crypto startups this week. So there's not a lot of deals announced last week, but there's a bunch this week and some big ones. So the huge one here is OpenC. So this is, of course, the NFT marketplace. There's a report that they're raising $300 million at a $13 billion valuation. They're raising it from Koto Paradigm and from Katie Hahn's new fund. So what an awesome story that company is, huh?

Just an explosive growth there. Yeah, I mean, went from very, very, very low volume. So it was, you know, frankly, the exchange was kind of a ghost town for a number of years there. And then, of course, with the NFT summer or the NFT, you know, explosion is the premier NFT marketplace. I mean, it really is the number one. I think they have something like 80 or 90 percent market share. Huge share, huge revenue, probably huge profit margin. I'd imagine.

So not a lot of customer acquisition costs when you're running your business on Ethereum, right? Some controversy, of course, around their policy of freezing stolen NFTs, but it's kind of like a difficult situation. I don't know what you do there exactly. If you're, you know, someone reports an NFT stolen, I guess you have to freeze it. But there's a lot of people upset about that, that feel that they bought the ape or whatever. and then it was frozen.

I guess you could always trade it somewhere else, yeah. Yeah, but I don't know if you'll get the same. You certainly wouldn't get the same liquidity elsewhere, but yeah, that's kind of an interesting phenomenon that's happening more and more. For some reason, ape holders seem to be particularly exposed to key loss. I don't know why that is. Yeah, I wonder why that is.

Maybe the punk holders were a little bit more careful with the hardware wallets or something. Yeah. Speaking of hardware wallets, I'm not going to say the brand yet because I haven't tried it yet, but there's a new hardware wallet out and I've got it and I'm excited to try it. Eagerly awaiting your review. We'll talk about that in the coming episodes and thanks for sending it to me. Or we won't talk about it if I don't like it, I guess.

Yeah, that's true. We'll see. Also in OpenC News, they're reportedly in talks to acquire Darmal Labs for a crypto wallet company for 100 to 130 million in stock. next one up is Metaversal. This is an investment firm in a venture studio also focused on NFTs. They raised $50 million in Series A. It was led by Coin Fund, included participation from Dapper, Collab, Franklin Templeton, and Galaxy Vision Hill. Also in NFTs, we have CryptoSlam. They're an NFT data aggregator. They raised $9 million from Anamoko Sound Ventures and others.

This upcoming one, I always get the tough ones to pronounce. So it's Cyan Digital. It's C-I-O-N. So it's coin but misspelled. This is a crypto infrastructure company that raised $12 million in seed funding from Green Biser, 645, and others. Then we have LivePair, which is a video streaming platform partially based on Ethereum. They raised 20 million in a series B extension from Alan Howard, Tiger Global, DCG North Zone, and Warburg-Seres. Next is WonderFy.

So this is a company that actually went out and bought BitBy, the Canadian Crypto, exchange for $162 million. Canadian crypto exchanges, you know, they've had a hard run. It's been a lot of holes in the ground there, but Bipi looks like they had a great outcome there. So everyone just thinks Canadian crypto exchanges in Quadriga, you know. Right. And Coin Square infamously had some regulatory issues from what I recall.

There was another smaller one called Einstein in Canada, which also failed. So, yeah, you're right. They've had a tough run of it. Next one up, we have Cignam, which is a Swiss crypto bank. We actually had the founder of Cignam on the show a while back. They raised 90 million from Sun Hung Kai and Co, Anamoka, SBI, SBIB 10X, and others. Next one up is Alto IRA. This is a self-directed IRA platform.

They allow you to buy cryptocurrencies, which turns out is a very popular feature. They raised $40 million from advanced venture partners, a crew, foundation, Unusual in Coinbase. I mean, if you think about IRAs, think about like fidelity balances with GBT and them in rollover IRAs. It's got to be a big number, right? For sure. And there haven't been many functional crypto-enabled IRA products to date.

No, it's a complicated thing to get off the ground, but big opportunity. So lastly, we have Pocket Network, their Web3 developer platform. They raised 10 million from Republic Capital, Rock True Capital. Arrington Capital and C2 Ventures. There's actually one more. So Goldfinch, which is a D5 credit protocol, they've raised $25 million in a round that was led by Andresen included Bill Ackman and Kingsway Capital. So a more active week in the financing space.

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onerous, although it's not entirely clear. They had to pay $1.4 million civil penalty and wind down the markets displayed on polymarket.com. Yeah. So there's a, you know,

you refer to them past tense. I believe they're still continuing here. So it looks like they have a perception at least that only some of these products, need to be wound down. So it's interesting. I think the one key question here is, let's say you build one of these protocols and you know, you have a front end. I can understand the CFTC seeing that as a single point failure where you'd be running a follow of commodity pool rules. I wonder what that would look like though if you had multiple front ends to these things,

including like front ends that are started by anonymous people. So it's almost surprising to me that We haven't seen like a global prediction market started by Anans at the protocol layer that just has a bunch of front end entry points. Yeah, I remember when people thought prediction markets were going to be the first application of Ethereum and that they just never became particularly important. And instead, defy was really what took off. Yeah. For a long time, augurn gnosis were sort of touted as, you know, the initial wedge applications. But neither of them really gained traction, at least not in the prediction market context. Yeah, it's kind of interesting that the intrade style prediction markets haven't really cut on in crypto.

I guess ultimately every prediction market ends up just in a death market, though, right? It's like it's kind of a morbid category. Yeah, so none of them really gained that much traction as far as I know. But yeah, it seems like Polymarket, I mean, I don't know all the details, but it seems like it was a largely favorable settlement for them. It seems like they're going to be able to continue to operate here. Yeah, it looks like it. I wonder if the same can be said.

There's another ICO one. I actually have not heard of it. So the SEC has charged an ICO issuer, a self-proclaimed man behind the machine. apparently this guy diverted ICO proceeds to a gold mining endeavor in South Africa. They can't make this up. So charges against Australian citizens, Craig Spruill, and the two companies he founded, Crowd Machine and Medavine. So it's without fail that all these ICO crackdowns are into things that I've just never heard of.

So apparently there is like $41 million for these things via ICOs. So speaking of crime, I found Chainalysis's new report. on illicit transaction activity. Very interesting. So interestingly, we're looking at an all-time high in terms of the absolute value received by illicit addresses, at least tracked by chain analysis. So they found that it was around $14 billion compared to last year is $7.5 billion. With the bulk of that consisting of scams, stolen funds, and darknet markets. So the three largest categories there. And then the interesting thing is, as a relative, on a relative basis, it only accounted for 0.15% of all cryptocurrency transaction volume dramatically down from

previous years. In 2019, it was 3%. So on an absolute basis, higher than ever, but on a relative basis relative to the crypto economy, actually vanishingly small, 15 basis points. Pretty interesting data point. I think it's so important that the like chain analysis and TRM and Elliptic these on-chain forensic firms that are being hired by people to do these investigations that they come out with reports like this because you know they really lend credibility to the fact that only the dumbest criminals are using public blockchains to scam people. You know you're fully traceable for the rest of time if you do something illegally on a blockchain. It's a lot different from cash. And so this is

a powerful narrative counterbalance to some of these politicians that are out there saying, or even the bank executive saying that crypto's primary use cases for crime, it's just not true if you look at the data. Yeah, I mean, my prediction is they'll say regardless, but, you know, when has the data ever stopped them making erroneous statements? But yeah, this is pretty telling. I mean, it's very, very clear on a relative basis, crypto is used for crime less than cash. And certainly if you look at any of those measures of, you know, the rate of money laundering in the legacy financial system, it's always in the single digits plus. So, you know, if you compare like with like crypto is better on that front. I mean, you're going to have these crazy situations like 100 years from now where people are going to be doing on chain forensics onto like Mount Gok's coins.

And you're going to have people that have those coins and got them from their grandfather or something. is going to be like, oh, actually, granddad was like an international criminal. It's just like you're going to be able to find out things about people, generations in the future. Like, oh, how did we get all of our money? Oh, we were actually behind Quadriga. Yeah, some dynastic wealth will be made from exchange acts.

Yeah, it's just like, it's a, you know, it's like if your grandfather was Jesse James or something, you know, you only know that by, uh, word of mouth oral tradition. Now there are blockchains to capture that crime. So here's, this is interesting. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is hiring a new director for its CBDC pilot program, which has been going for a long time now, actually. And I thought we were meant to see code this summer, but that did not occur. So we are still sort of waiting to see what they've come up with over there.

So here's my suggestion on that. Just start it in like the institutional market, start it in the overnight repo market and just use the CBDC to prove that you can move the US dollar leg of a tri-party repo transaction or something like that. But don't, I don't want one in the retail wallet. So here's an interesting little Easter egg.

They are calling the pilot CBDC program Project Hamilton. which is, of course, a reference to Alexander Hamilton, who tried to create a national bank way back in 1790. Ultimately unsuccessful. Yeah, he actually did create an entity called the Bank of the United States. This bank that he created actually did last for 20 years, at which point in 1811, the charter expired. Hamilton at that point could not stick up for the bank.

because he'd been killed. I think it was Jackson killed it, right? So that was kind of the very first, I guess central bank-ish type entity. It wasn't a lender of last resort, but it did, you know, kind of perform a lot of the services that the modern Fed does.

And so kind of clever little Easter egg right there. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. did you see this Kazakhstan news? Let's talk about that a little bit. So the country of Kazakhstan, there have been a lot of protests there, some violent protests. It's about the soaring cost of fuel, some autocratic rule things going on over there as well. So the president, who his name is Qasim, Jomart, Tukayev, he declared a state of emergency this week, and apparently he ordered the largest telco provider in the country to turn off the internet,

which is never a good thing. And I guess the only reason this is relevant to the crypto industry is that shortly after the internet went down in Kazakhstan, there was a 12% drop in the Bitcoin hash rate. So confirms that Kazakhstan is a pretty popular place to put those Bitcoin miners, and the cost of energy is pretty low in that country. Yeah, I mean, we knew that. To be clear, the Cambridge data had Kazakhstan at 18%. So we knew that.

And also, you know, there's just well-established information on the company. he's active in mining in Kazakhstan. So this was not really revealing a lot of new information. But yeah, I think, you know, a couple things. So first of all, I won't say a coup, but deposing the ruling party in Kazakhstan happened partly as a rebellion against inflation, in particular in energy prices. So any time a politician in the West says, inflation is good for the working class.

I just invite them to look at the example at Kazakhstan where those government buildings are on fire right now. Yeah, it's not good. It doesn't seem great. Doesn't seem like people like it. You maybe try and convince them that it's good for them, but it seems like they sort of viscerally don't like it.

But yeah, I found it's interesting that it's sort of enough to take down a whole regime is effectively inflation. there's probably other factors such as the fact that the country is very politically unfree. That could also be part of it. This also just drives home this decentralized internet architecture is a pretty important thing here. When the president of a country can shut down the entire internet, that's not great. This actually happens pretty frequently when there's political sort of instructions in the third world.

They'll turn off the internet so people can't organize, basically. You know, because people organize on WhatsApp and things like that. So, yeah, Bitcoin hash rate did apparently drop. That's based on looking at pool data, by the way. A lot of people are going to say, oh, the hash rate variance is too high. How do you get enough data from just looking at hash rate over a 12-hour period or whatever? This analysis, I think it was Larry Surmak of the block was the first post. It's based on looking at mining pools, and they collect much more granular data than you get from looking at the pure hash rate.

So certainly there was a drop. Now, the interesting thing is we knew that Kazakhstan was de-emphasizing mining anyway. So we know that mining projects have been leaving Kazakhstan, by the way, because they're sort of redrawing the, at least this was the case prior to the collapse of the administration. They were redrawing the rules around, you know, what miners could do in terms of buying energy. And they were making it much more draconian. So miners were leaving Kazakhstan. this might accelerate it.

Yeah, I wonder if we're going to have another China-style situation here where mass migration of hardware into other jurisdictions. Certainly won't affect Bitcoin. It will benefit Western Bitcoin miners who astutely realize that political risk is a thing. But from a climate perspective, it would also be a net good for the Bitcoin network because Kazakhstan relies on a lot of coal.

So kind of a black eye for Bitcoin's, you know, ecological impact. Well, definitely highlights a lot of things, I guess, what's going on in Kazakhstan. So not what you're looking for, but highlights the need for decentralized internet services. Highlights the need for better money systems. So all and all, kind of a sad story if you're a citizen of Kazakhstan. Let's transition into kind of like a wonkier thing. So the National Credit Union Administration, came out with guidance.

This kind of slipped by my radar, but someone pointed it out to me this afternoon. So they came out with guidance to all federally insured credit unions around digital assets and cryptocurrency. Maybe we can put the statement in the show notes. But to summarize it, it's basically that if you're a credit union, a federally insured credit union, you can do business with digital assets. So it's explicitly saying that this is something that you can do under these charters. And my take on this was that it was, you know, if you just hear that, it's like, okay, but it's actually pretty consequential because this is what a lot of credit unions were waiting for before they turned on some of these programs that they work with.

So you could look at some of these big crypto infrastructure companies that have been going out and getting these connectivity points into these credit unions as being probably one of the big recipients of some of this, you know, trading volume now that these things can be turned on. So now I guess the question is, how fast can you get into production if you're a federally insured credit union? This is basically a license to have a buy button for crypto assets on your platform. I'll venture that this is the only crypto podcast where you're going to hear tidbits like this. Yeah. I mean, where else are you going to hear about the National Credit Union Administration? We're just surfacing these deep cuts that are actually oddly relevant to crypto. I mean, this seems important, actually.

relatively important. So, you know, Hanskin Federal Credit Union, like turn on the buy BTC by ETH button. You probably heard it here first. I mean, you may have heard it somewhere else first, but I'm guessing you heard it here first. So good job finding that bad. I don't know how the heck you find these things. Yeah, I mean, I got a little tip on that one, but, you know, some people in the audience are pretty wonky.

They're probably subscribing to the press releases from the NCUA. Shout up, Brink Nation, the number one best. podcast nation out there. I have two pieces of sort of regulatory news which are less good. In fact, you could even call them downright bad. So New York is doing what we sort of thought they would do, state of New York. And they've re-proposed or, I don't know, redeployed this bill, which would establish a moratorium on proofwork-based mining. the state of New York. Very stupid. Very stupid. I mean, I don't understand this. Who's in favor of this? The sponsor is Kevin Parker. Not to be confused with the lead singer for Tim Impala. And yeah,

it's a bunch of other, bunch of other, you know, New York state legislators clearly have nothing better to do. As I explained, this will likely raise the carbon intensity of the Bitcoin network because the miners in New York are using a lot of hydro power. And so this ban would be a subsidy to miners in places like Kazakhstan or Iran that are using less clean energy. So classic, you know, total opposite of what you wanted consequence. But, you know, as we know, politicians, they think on the first order, not the second order. And that's what's happening here. So we'll see.

My guess is actually this probably does go through because. You know, I sort of, I think they've been trying for a while now, and I think it's very possible New York actually does ban crypto mining. Man, New York is just one of those places. So pound for pound, some of the best crypto talent in the world lives in New York City, Brooklyn, some of the outskirts. And just talk about flubbing it, just the policy apparatus around the bit license and some of these bills that are being proposed. It's talk about blowing the lead. Yeah. It's to Florida's gain and Texas and Wyoming.

In Singapore and all these other places, yeah. So the other thing that many of you will be aware of now is the House Energy and Commerce Committee is going to be most likely holding a hearing on Bitcoin mining and possibly Ethereum mining, basically proof of work, to learn about it. And so this will be the first House hearing dedicated to this topic. That'll be later this month. And how does that work? So who comes up with the idea that it's important to learn about these things? I think representatives read an article in the New York Times and become concerned. But it's also my understanding that this is part of the Biden administration's energy agenda.

And so I wouldn't be surprised if there was some coordination there. But, yeah, it seems like, you know, the impact of proof work on the U.S. electrical grid and climate objectives is now sufficiently salient in Washington that we're having our first hearing on the matter. And when is this? We believe it'll be in late January, although it could be pushback. So stay tuned for that. That'll be streamed. So it'll be one of those sort of crypto-twitter days where everybody watches C-SPAN. just hopefully people tie their shoes on the panel so there is already some sort of misinformation

coming out basically there was a letter to congress from a whole bunch of climate organizations i guess i mean all kinds of organizations open markets institute was involved very insidious aka the closed markets institute. This letter has all of the classic, basically false or debunked talking points on Bitcoin's energy consumption. I actually did a thread on Twitter where I debunked nine separate talking points

in this letter, but they start right off the bat with the Mora et al study, which is a very bad start. I mean, it's a complete... It's a completely... If you're a long-time listener of this podcast, you know to stay away from that study.

Yeah, Mora at Al, 2018, University of Hawaii. that's just going to be a no-go for me. So I mean, like, if that's the first sentence in the body of this paper, I mean, it's just not, it's clearly not a good sign because that study is effectively fraudulent, in my opinion. I mean, it's just false. It posits that Bitcoin's going to cause zero its temperature to rise two degrees, but their model of how Bitcoin works is completely erroneous. It just, then there's a number of academic rebuttals to that paper, which debunk it, basically. I mean, and it gets worse from there.

So already it looks like there's kind of like a war, you know, emerging on this. And it's actually reaching the highest levels in Washington now. Wow. Well, it's been an interesting one to keep an eye on. Late breaking news here. So we talked about OpenC, $13 billion valuation. We got a hot stock here. So after hours trading in GameStop is up right now 31%.

as we record this because they came out and they announced minutes ago that they're launching a division for NFT trading. So they're launching a marketplace for non-fungibles and they're going to establish some crypto partnerships. Stock is up 31% as we speak, GameStop. Is the idea that they would try to acquire OpenC? Well, it seems like they're just riding that positive momentum on the NFT announcement and building a competitor maybe.

Wow. I mean, maybe they're going to be able to parlay all the excitement around the stock into actual real business opportunities. It looks like prices of loopering, the native token, which is a layer two on Ethereum, they're also up 15%, because there's some talk that it's built on loop ring. Wow. Okay. So the thing is, it's breaking news now, but we're not going to release this for another 12 hours. So this could be over by the time you can. hear this.

Yeah. All the way back down. Maybe AMC will also put out a press release too. I wouldn't, yeah, I wouldn't doubt it's streaming video. Rivian could do all of the hot meme stocks. Rivian, so is there a Rivian truck? Yeah, they're the ones that have never made a dollar of revenue and yet they're multi-billion dollar public company.

The truck looks kind of interesting. I mean, that may be the case, but. I'm a ram truck guy, though. Yeah, that's right. You know, I'm a big internal combustion engine guy. I don't know. I love the environment, but I do have a V8 truck. Well, the thing is that you just, you got to be able to go off grid,

especially with a pickup truck. So having a, you know, electrical Ford F-150 or whatever doesn't make that much sense to me. No, you got to go up hills and stuff. Well, and yeah, I mean, what if you're going to? if you just want to go out to the wilderness, you're going to find a supercharger station out in the middle of nowhere? I don't think so. I don't think so.

You got to have gas in that thing. Yeah. Yeah, I'm a big combustion engine guy. I think they're pretty great. I don't know if this is like the best dovetail from the Bitcoin mining thing. To be clear, we like the environment. It's just... Environment is great.

Light trucks, too. How can you not? So there'll be more to come on this hearing. I don't know who's going to be speaking on it yet, but there'll be fireworks. Who's going to be the anti-cryptop person? That's who I want to know. Yeah, I mean, I think generally the members of the house will most likely be anti-crypto. So I think, you know, I don't know who the speakers are, but it's going to be a bit of a tough sort of three or four hours for sure. So I think that wraps it for this week. As we said, we have a very,

very exciting guest on Monday. Set your alarms for 6 a.m. Eastern sitting member of Congress, hopefully first of many. That will be a first in Brink history, sitting member of Congress on the show. It only took us 275 episodes. Can't wait to hear from Rashida to Lab on the Stable Act. So that's it. Have a good weekend. Everyone talk to your Monday.