On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 04/10/26 (New Satoshi candidates, Mythos' 0-days, CZ's memoir) (EP.713)

Episode Date: April 10, 2026

Matt and Nic are back with another week of news and deals. In this episode:  The New York Times thinks Adam Back is Satoshi The problems with the NYT's analysis The case for Len Sassaman The case for Satoshi not being alive Could Satoshi be a group? Why Satoshi might be discovered this year Morgan Stanley launches their Bitcoin ETF Scott Bessent asks for Congress to pass Clarity The White House finds that stablecoin yield would not harm the banking system Kalshi secures a key win in a NJ appeals court Anthropic's Mythos model is exposing vulnerabilities CZ is publishing a memoir Will Hormuz tolls be payable in Bitcoin?    

Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Guests and host may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated.

The federal government loans American International Group, AI, $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. And 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. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. So watching The Masters, the Masters has gotten started. I'm not a golf fan at all. I don't think it's a good TV sport. I think it's actually a really good TV sport,

especially if you have like a Sunday afternoon where you don't have that much to do. You just watch the Masters, take a little nap. I think it's a great start of spring. I find it to be very dull. I actually think it's a great TV sport because you can just see all the shots. If you're there in person,

you've got to pick someone to walk around with or you just stay at one hole. I got invited to the Masters one. pre-FTX, a crypto company invited me and I went and it was pretty awesome. What's the scene like? I picture it being kind of aristocratic and genteel. So you cannot bring a cell phone on the property. So they have these lockers outside the property where you can leave your cell phone.

And it's actually kind of relaxing. So you get in there and everyone's just actually paying attention to the golf, not distracted. You actually speak to other people. Living in the moment. Yeah. And the food there is unbelievable. So Adam Back is Satoshi, apparently. That's what I'm hearing.

Yeah. So John Kerry Rue of the New York Times, who's one of the best investigative journalists in the world, I think. He broke open the Thurno scandal. I think he got this one probably wrong, is my guess. But he did a long investigative piece, posits that Blockstream founder Adam Back is, in fact, Satushan Akamoto.

I was very unconvinced by it. I mean, I don't think really anyone who's been around Bitcoin for a long time thinks it was Adam at him at all. I mean, certainly on the short list of people that it could theoretically be, that probably had the skill set to do it. Would you say that? Well, I guess Hashcast was his invention, but proof work was not. That was Dwark and Nowor. I don't know how to pronounce that person's name. He was in the community, for sure, one of the cypherpunks.

he understood proof of work. He had talked about, you know, digital cash. And he was obviously cited in the white paper. But I find it silly that people think that people whose work was precursor to Bitcoin, they think that they're Satoshi. I mean, Satoshi did something different from Fini, from back, from Zobo, or from Wadeye. Yeah.

So Satoshi innovated on all those things. So I don't know why people think the person who did a predecessor is himself Satoshi. I think that's a natural thing to assume. Satoshi is kind of the ultimate systems integrator. He took a lot of disparate ideas and combined them. So you have, you know, Finney, Nick Zabo, you mentioned. People talk about Peter Todd. People talk about Dave Klyman.

People talk about Len Sassiman. People talk about Jack Dorsey. You know, there's a bunch of people that were probably. to the cyphor punk movement working on similar concepts way die you mentioned be money yeah i mean the just looking at the article yeah so for sure john had a good scoop with theranos back in the day but this one was i thought quite disappointing i mean uh yes you know adam in theory had the skills to do this but actually i think a lot of people would say he he probably doesn't but uh you know at least theoretically he fit the profile.

He was Scottish, actually, I think. So he's British, and Satoshi famously used British spellings. The timing, in theory, works out. He had the crypto knowledge, whatever. But there's nothing that uniquely actually sets him apart from anyone else that's laid out in this article. The only thing that John and the New York Times did was they looked at language in grammar patterns,

in forum posts and emails and things like. that but it's not done in a very systematic way actually doesn't seem like they used AI to do it right it was more human beings analyzing the yeah they they kind of are like okay well let's look at certain spellings and then let's look at the hundred most possible candidates and so but they sort of assumed the conclusion they kind of went from well I think this guy back I think he was actually watching the Peter Todd documentary and he through that he decided it was back And then they kind of with the conclusion already in mind, look for corroborating evidence, which you can do for any of these guys, by the way.

Yeah. I found the actual statistical analysis to be incredibly weak. Because the way you'd really do it is you'd have the corpus of all the Satoshi candidates and then all of Satoshi's work and then you would just compare it systematically. You wouldn't say, well, let's assume it's this guy and let's find this. Thanks, the match. This is just my personal bias, but I would almost start from the perspective of who is no longer alive as the most likely candidate to be Satoshi, because who could sit on 1.5 million

bitcoins and just not move them throughout all this tumult that we've had around the block size wars, now the quantum threat. I mean, to not move your Bitcoin to still be breathing and have access to the keys. So to me, it doesn't have access to the keys or is no longer with us. Yeah, I completely agree. And also, like, Adam back raised venture capital for Blockstream. Why would you do that if you had all the Bitcoin? Yeah. They're doing a dat. Why would Satoshi do a dat? It makes literally no sense. And I completely agree with you. Okay, let's say you're Satoshi, you lost your coins. You're still going to want to weigh in on Bitcoin stuff. It's your invention. You want to steward it. You have opinions on how it should develop. As this quantum thing gets closed. So are you going to want to probably, you know, do something to preserve your coins so that it'll get stolen by a quantum attacker? Yeah.

So if you are alive, you definitely have an obligation and this urgency to weigh in either recover your coins or at a very minimum just make your feelings known. You think there's just someone down at the NSA right now that's just having a good laugh about this New York Times article? It's like, hey, these journalists don't realize that it was actually a lab leak from our NSA here. Yeah, I mean, I like the lab leak theory. There is another investigation coming out soon I've been made aware of. Finding Satoshi. Is that a documentary? Is that the Coinbase one? Yeah, Coinbase is involved. I think maybe they're sponsoring it or something. So I haven't watched it. They did reach out to me and they gave me a heads up. Jameson Lopp, I think, said it was actually a reasonable attempt, which in my book, Jameson is the barometer. of whether a Satoshi discovery is legitimate or not. Yeah, he disproved the Hal Fini thesis because he did analysis.

He saw that Hal Fini was running road races during certain emails that Satoshi was sending, so it couldn't be health any. Yeah, so that's exactly right. Anyway, this comes out quite soon, so we'll let you know what it does. But one thing I didn't like about the New York Times piece was they totally discarded the Len Sassaman theory by saying, well, Satoshi said an email in 2014 after Lund was deceased. Yeah. But that was not a genuine email.

Nobody thinks it was genuine. Yeah. I think even the most charitable people would say this is maybe, there's a 40, 50% chance that this is genuine because the email address had been hacked previously. And so, you know, both of his emails were hacked. Yeah. Multiple people obviously had access to those emails after it's hacked. So it was interesting.

I mean, this was in the Johnny Beer book. block size wars about how when that email was sent during the block size wars people were think some people thought it was satoshi some were hopping on the mailing list and saying this is obviously not satoshi but they made a much bigger deal out of that email than i think anyone in the bitcoin community uh really did at the time yeah i don't think that email is proof that it wasn't and uh frankly i think it was len okay i'll say it i'm allowed to say it i think it was len It would add up. I mean, he's, he certainly had the technical ability, and he's deceased. I mean, Len was deeply in those same circles. He worked on remailers, which some people consider, you know, predecessor technology.

He was very secretive. Bramcom said he'd posted on the Cypherpunx mailing list with a pseudonym that nobody knew what it was. So, and then he died, you know, just a few months after. Satoshi sent his last email. Yeah. I mean, the timeline completely matches. I don't know if we'll ever know. And there's another interesting piece of evidence for Len. And like, I know a lot of people think it's sort of uncouth to speculate as to who Satoshi was. I grant that, but also how can you not? It's the biggest mystery in the world. The most compelling piece, I think, is that one of the citations in the white paper is this paper that was it was the result of a conference that was held

in Belgium or Luxembourg and the conference proceedings you know the written version was only made available in a couple universities in the region and and of course Len he studied in Belgium so it actually wasn't on the internet freely available interesting So you would have only had access to this paper which is cited. It's like the third reference in the Bitcoin White Paper if you were physically studying at one of those institutions in Belgium. Yeah, that's interesting. That's compelling evidence.

I mean, what do you make of the theory that it could be multiple people? I'm actually, I'm warming up to that because what I did this morning was I had Claude and Chat review all the evidence again. And chat actually ran for two hours. So it's really. And so I went through the evidence for the kind of, you know, 10 most commonly named candidates. It doesn't fit any of them.

And I am actually starting to believe that for that reason, that it might have been more than one person. Because if you think about it, I mean, obviously, I'm saying this from the perspective of someone who could never have built this, but you have really robust C++ programming chops. So it had to be someone that was really deep there. people are saying that Adam back doesn't fit that mold. I think very few of these guys do.

It's someone who has a system's way of thinking to combine all of these things. And then someone that actually has the ability to write the white paper, which is hard to understand if you're a novice, but it's actually very, very elegant. And so you're combining just a lot of skill sets. It's almost impossible to imagine someone be capable of doing that all themselves. But I guess, you know, stranger things have happened. Yeah, I mean, lone geniuses do exist.

But this is like an engineering project. It's not just a flash of brilliance. Yeah. It does seem kind of consistent with teamwork because it's about persuasion. It's about building the early community. It's about keeping the early network running physically. Right. It's about creating an academic work that's persuasive.

It's about the forum posts. It's about the tricky engineering decisions, the open source maintenance, And then of course, the knowledge of monetary history and so on. So it's so interdisciplinary. Like, look at Bitcoin today. There's no one person that just could sort of like run Bitcoin. Right. So, like I think it's actually an argument for someone like a Nick Zobo who has this

like broad kind of theorist approach. But I don't think he would have had the hard skills to do it. So yeah, I'm actually leaning more towards the group thing because there's just is no one person that fits the profile of this astonishing genius that was skilled in so many domains. You know, the argument against the group thing is just that it's hard to keep a secret with two people. And so it's hard to keep a secret even more so with three people. So, you know, I guess you could say maybe two or three of the people that were involved have passed. And so I'm open-minded to that.

But can you imagine coming up with the difficulty adjustment? I think that's the most elegant part of Bitcoin. You know, I think that was the leap from Hal Finney's R-Pow to Bitcoin, right? I think this is the most interesting mystery in the world. I think it's the number one. You think it's up there? You think it beats Epstein? Yeah, for sure.

And then I think it beats aliens. Oh, wow. Whether aliens exist. I mean, what are the other great mysteries that are left to ponder? There aren't many, right? So aliens, you know, why are we here is a pretty big one. that's a big one in a world that has been stripped of so much of its enchantment I think it's great that we still have some true abiding mysteries I do too I kind of wish that we weren't trying so hard as a human race to find this Satoshi character I almost think it's better to not know but I've been on record I think it's going to be the case is going to be cracked this year is my guess well just because of the AI advancements I you know yeah yeah I think I've been on record I think it's going to be the case is going to be cracked this year is my guess well just because of the AI advancements I think I think you could point an AI at the whole corpus, all the text ever written on the mailing

list, et cetera, all the academic papers and say, just find the match. Yeah. And I think it will be able to do it, especially if it's this new anthropic AI model. Yeah, we're going to talk about the mythos model. I want access to the mythos model. I promise I won't abuse it. Yeah, mythos could figure it out. All right.

So let's talk about some Castle Island content. Sean sat down with Connor Dardy, the co-founder of Valenore Digital, to talk about the evolution of the credit markets on chain. And you published your five takeaways from Google's quantum threat paper. So we're all quantum all the time over here right now. Yeah, I would read the papers. You can read my takeaways as well, but just read the papers. You don't need to get it filtered through me.

Good papers. All right, let's hop into the deals of the week. First one up is Farros. This is a Layer 1 blockchain that raised $44 million from SNZ Holdings, Sumitoma Corporation, flow traders, and others. I-NXY Payments is a cross-border payments company. There is $7 million from Flashpoint VC and others. O.XYZ is a tokenized adult AI platform that raised $7.5 million from Maven 11, Cyberfund,

L1D, Kedenza, and others. GoSats. This is a Bitcoiner rewards platform. There is 5 million from Convoy Ventures, YC, and Tysu Ventures. Then it's Giggles, which is a Web3 social network. They raised $1.2 million from 1KX and the Virtual's protocol. Pixie Chess is a Web3 chess game. There is 5 million from Paradigm Seed Club and others.

All right. So a bunch of stuff going on this week, you know, micro strategy continues. So they purchased another $330 million in Bitcoin. primarily from that STRC preferred share class. So micro strategy continues to just outpace ETF inflows here. This is the marginal buyer here for Bitcoin. Also on the ETF front, Morgan Stanley's Bitcoin ETF, that's MSBT. They saw 30 million in net flows on its first day of trading on Wednesday.

Not eye-popping day one numbers, but I believe this is the cheapest Bitcoin ETF from an expense ratio perspective. It is. Yeah. So there's the the mini, what is it the gray scale one called? The mini contract there. The GBTC has that other product. That's at 0.15%. This Morgan Stanley one is 0.14%. And yeah, they all kind of go up from there, up to about 25 basis points. So yeah, pretty good debut. $30 million, nothing to sneeze. that in day one. I mean, outside of Bitcoin ETF land, if that was just a regular way, ETF, you'd say that's a phenomenal

first day. Yeah, and I think the thing to track here will be Morgan Stanley's ability to actually bring capital to bear because they have a big financial advisor network. Yeah, they have a huge private wealth platform. Did you see that Scott Bessent, Secretary

Treasury Bessent, wrote an op-ed in the journal today, taking aim at Congress, calling on them to pass the Clarity Act. talking about how the U.S. needs to remain the world's financial center. This is an involving technology. We need to lead. Like what I'm here and there. I agree. Let's get it done. Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Besson. Digital asset rules need clarity. That's his piece in the Wall Street Journal. I think he's right. I think if we don't get it done, it's going to be a

very long shot to see any kind of crypto legislation for the foreseeable. Yeah, you just don't know, So you have this window where you should get it done. It seems like this compromise on yield. We haven't heard much about it other than that the markup is coming. And potentially there could be a floor vote in May. So it's better not get pushed back much longer because we're running out of days here. So there was an analysis on the effects of stable coin yield not being banned on the banking system. I think it was from the White House?

From the White House is economic advisors at the White House. And basically found that there would be very little effect, actually, on the banking system. So it's not really a point in favor of the banks that are trying to block yield. No, not at all. I mean, I think the banks probably didn't like that very much, because it's just data to go against their claim that we're going to bring down the banking sector with all these deposits flowing into stable coins.

I mean, it's an educated guess. Like, nobody knows what would happen exactly. But, yeah, it's not at all helping their side. So maybe that will swing the debate. I don't know. Well, we don't know what's going to happen, but we've seen something similar in the past, and it was money market funds

and banking sector is still around. So I think it'll still be. be fine. Yeah, and I think the ultimate question is, to what extent does Congress owe the banking sector, you know, continued profitability or strong margins? Like, that's not really Congress's concern. They care about stability and banks lending and serving American businesses and households, but they shouldn't really care about how well shareholders and banks are doing. I think it also comes down to lobbying. I think the bank lobby is one of the most powerful lobbies in the entire country. And we're seeing that. I think you're right from an academic perspective. But,

you know, if you're in Congress, if you're in the Senate, I think you react to the constituencies that are putting money in your pocket. So there was a win for Calci. I know we are sometimes bearish on prediction markets in this podcast. Calci won in a New Jersey appeals court, two to one in their favor that their prediction markets are under the jurisdiction of the CFTC and should not be regulated by the states. This is the first of their state level cases to reach an appeals court. Doesn't it just feel to you that all of this is going to come to a head with the Supreme Court? And it's going to say, look, prediction markets on things outside of sports, probably there's no contest. Those clearly should be regulated by the CFTC. It's really the sports gambling aspect of this

that we're going to need someone to weigh in on. But you have a lot of capital on both sides of these arguments. You have Fanduil and Draft Kings that have kind of staked out a lane of pre-prediction markets. They're trying to decide do they pivot into prediction markets? Do they fight against the prediction market companies? You have Calci, Polymarket, and others that have raised just a ton of money here. So there's a lot of capital at stake here on both sides of the issue. Yeah, I think what compromise in the end might simply be

that they can't offer sports markets, but they can offer everything else. Well, if that's the way it goes, it's not great for Kalshi and Polly Market. I think 70% of... They've been diversifying, right? They're diversified, but I think it's something like 70%

of Kalshys' revenue is sports right now. Kalshys one of the fastest growing companies in the history of the country, right? Like, this has hopped on the scene over the past few years and just gotten to tremendous scale. The other thing, I think a lot of folks are thinking is, would it be better, to have this Supreme Court case sooner rather than later so that the next head of the CFTC

doesn't really have a chance to rewrite the rules. Yeah, I think it will go to the Supreme Court because you'll get split appeals decisions and it'll be one of the biggest SCOTUS cases of the decade. You know, I'm somewhat sympathetic to some of these states, right? Because if you're in Utah, you kind of staked out this position that we don't want sports betting here. And then the CFTC allows these prediction market companies to come in, and it looks an awful lot like sports betting. Yeah, I'm sympathetic too. So let's talk about this mythos model. So this is not directly a crypto story, but I think we're going to hear a lot about this in the industry.

So the new Anthropic model is called Mythos. They have not released it to the public yet because they say that it has the ability to inflict zero-day vulnerabilities on every operating system, basically every internet browser and they have formed what they're calling project glasswing bringing together some of the largest companies in the United States, Google, JPMorgan, Cisco, Broadcom, number of others to bring them under the tent on fixing some of these zero days before the model is released. This is scary stuff. Yeah, you know, we sometimes make fun of Dario for doing his kind of self-important, oh, we're summoning this terrifying god-like. like technology and, you know, it's going to take everyone's jobs and it might destroy the world.

And that's why we have to stay in control of it. And I think it's, you know, sometimes it's like a cynical tactic to raise money, but sometimes things like this happen, you start to believe, you know. So apparently they found zero days in every browser and every operating system. And we're already seeing hacks happen all over the place, actually, just even with the older models. So I guess the idea here is that we're buying time to try and close some of these vulnerabilities before the model gets released, right? That's exactly the idea. Notably, no cryptocurrency companies, no protocols are in Project Glasswing. Can we get a couple of the chain code lads over there as part of that? Maybe get Vitalik on this, maybe the Coinbase people.

Yeah, I mean, of the named partners in this, Google is probably the most. crypto focused of them, but they're not really. So I do worry about the fallout here. I mean, what happens when this thing comes out? Is it just every smart contract gets exploited? I mean, you'd like to think that, you know, Bitcoin has had enough eyes on it and it's basically this huge bug bounty. But even that, it's like some of the, they found bugs in the Linux kernel. I mean, this is like really low level stuff that they're finding bugs in. They're finding bugs in. They're finding bugs and things that have been out there for 30 plus years. So I think there's cause for concern in the defy ecosystem.

If I was a defy founder, I'd really be looking at time locks and delays in addition to just basic multi-sig hygiene. But it makes me think about things like HSMs and think about just some of the core infrastructure sitting underneath the hood in the digital asset economy. Yeah, I mean, forget about quantum breaks. There's just classical risks to deal with. Although I will say, I think smart contracts, they kind of get picked over more than traditional software, right? So they get audited and then they get probed. And sometimes they do get hacked. But I'd say your average smart contract has been more scrutinized than your typical piece of software.

I think that's right. I mean, some of the things I've been reading about this is that some of these vulnerabilities are coming into these browsers, through things like the font settings and things like that. So I just don't think there's a lot of people that are like working for the North Korea government that are probably looking at attacking an operating system via the fonts. They're probably more looking at defy protocols with a lot of assets on them. Yeah, and I think the traditional OPSEC guidance holds here, you know, like use a hardware wallet, don't sign random transactions, look at what the contents of a transaction is if you're

doing something on your browser, you know, segregate your cold in your hot wallet. So, you know, if you're still doing all those things like, yes, there are going to be, you know, new zero days and browser-based attacks. But if you're following the right practices, you're still doing a pretty good job or protecting yourself. You think we're just going to invent things like bank branches for digital assets here? I mean, this is where it makes you really just not want to have your financial institution move anything unless you're in person. telling them to. Yeah, and I wonder, will this model ever be publicly released, or is it just going to be considered too dangerous? Yeah, what really is scary is if they release something and that

there's a way to reverse engineer it or it gets hacked or something, and then you have some Chinese open source model that just takes all of the nefarious aspects of it and just lets it rip. And you have to assume that's going to happen. I mean, most of these models end up getting distilled into the open source ones. Yeah, I think it's a fair bet. I mean, not a good couple of weeks for OpenAI, huh? Management turnover, anthropic, just record ARR.

Seems to be that anthropic, at least for now, has a leader. So did you see this news item, CZ, the founder of finance, has published his memoir. I completely miss this. Yeah, he did. I think I'll probably read this.

I've been noticing he's going back and forth with Star, the founder of Oake. on Twitter. Yeah, they're fighting over whether he's divorced, which I don't fully understand. There's just a lot of back and forth. He used to work for Star. Yeah, CTO and blockchain.com, right? So CZ's memoir, it's called Freedom of Money.

It's 4757 pages documents his view of the collapse of FTX and I guess his stewardship of finance and his plea deal. So I'll definitely read this. I mean, I think CZ has one of the most interesting points of view in the whole industry. He's seen everything. I wonder whether he's going to tell the truth about how some of the dastardly things that went on over there. Went on or are going on? Probably still going on.

I mean, I'm more interested maybe in a true tell-all from someone who was like the listings manager at Binance. Oh, my gosh. Can you imagine? it's like, hey, we will take 8% of your circulating supply. Yeah. And someone, John Kerry Rue should really get on that. Yeah, I kind of, we need someone that doesn't care about massaging their reputation and is just willing to spill the beans. Yeah.

I don't know if that person exists, but I'll read this anyway. I'll read this anyway. Apparently, there's an anecdote in there that he offered Gary Gensler an advisory role. Gensler declined. Good for him. Yeah. Not surprising. I don't know. Gensler, if he was really trying to cash in, probably could have made a lot of money in this industry.

But yeah, you got to give him credit for not doing that. Elsewhere, the CME group is rolling out 24-7 crypto derivatives. Trading starting May 29th, they'll also add contracts for Suey and Avalanche. I think this will be a trend here where you have the SEC had come out a few weeks ago. And I think they'd put out 16 different cryptocurrencies that are very clearly not securities in their eyes. Sui and Avalanche were two of those. And so you'll see these futures contracts coming out, I think, in the next few months on a bunch of these. The 24-7 trading is interesting. I continue to think a stable coin pair for 24-7 trading makes a ton of sense.

If I was a retail brokerage, I'd be thinking that way. Yeah, I totally agree. The FDIC has rolled out their proposed set of implementation rules for Genius. Those are closely aligned with the OCC's rule. And Securitize, tokenized securities platform, they have hired Brett Redfern. He's a former JPM exec. He was also at the SEC. He is the company's new president.

So congrats to securitize and Brett Redfern. And I thought this was an interesting announcement. Treasury's Department of Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure, they announced a program allowing digital asset companies to receive the same actionable cybersecurity information the Treasury regularly shares with traditional financials. institutions. That's a good thing. I mean, it is in the U.S. government's interest to help cryptocurrency companies protect assets here because North Korea is just running up a balance here of cryptocurrencies, and we know that that funding is going to no good over there. And it's just

such an asymmetric thing because, you know, if it was kind of just a hacking group in the United States, for instance, there'd be a way to find them, take them down. Here, as we know who's doing it, but there's just no mechanism outside of invading the country, I suppose, to make them stop. And you're not going to invade the country because they have nuclear weapons. So it's just a, it's open season here for the Lazarus group. So speaking of geopolitical considerations, there are a lot of rumors that Iran is going to accept tolls from Strait of Hermuz passage in Bitcoin. I've seen actually rumors that they would be accepting these payments in USD1,

which I think is completely made up, but that's being rumored. And people are kind of celebrating this, which I find really bizarre, frankly. I would be very surprised, very surprised, if anything like this ever comes to fruition. Yeah, I hope it doesn't. I just don't think it's a great thing for our industry

to have that be a prominent PR story. I just wonder how they would also off-ramp that. I mean, who are you finding to be the OTC desk on the back end there that's actually going to give you hard assets for your Bitcoin? You're talking about probably some Russian exchange or something, I would imagine. Yeah, I mean, there's always a weird tension. It's like, yeah, well, like, okay, certain nation states, pariah countries do use digital assets. Like, North Korea, they have Bitcoin. But why celebrate that?

Yeah. It doesn't seem right. I mean, if these payments happen, that's not good for the global economy. No. You know, that's basically a form of international piracy. So just because Bitcoin is the medium, does it really legitimate Bitcoin? I mean, we kind of already knew that pariah states were using Bitcoin. That sound you're hearing right now is actually Elizabeth Warren staffers,

just furiously typing away on their endropic model, just trying to get me a letter. I need to send out another letter. Yeah, a letter for. from the Ayatala. Yeah. She sent a letter this week about some conference that Trump is supposedly attending at Marilago about the meme coin. Oh, yeah, there is a meme coin conference.

Yeah. So, you know, letter writing season is happening right now still. All right. So I think that is it for the week. Not a crazy news week, but cybersecurity just continues to be a big theme here. Stay safe out there. Yeah, and we'll keep monitoring the Satoshi revelations. It seems like a new candidate might appear here in the next couple weeks.

You think brand new? Is that your money? As someone that we haven't mentioned today? Having not watched this documentary, I think they'll do something like a little canned, like we're all Satoshi. Ah. Or like, it's best that we don't look into it. I'd be happy with that type thing.

Is there anyone that you would just be really upset if it were them? No, I mean, even if Satoshi is like, turns out to be some kind of criminal or something, I still want to know who it is. If it was Craig Wright all along. That would, yeah, then I would actually be upset, yeah. Still don't really understand. I guess it's hard to explain the rantings of a madman, but what was Craig Wright thinking? I mean, I just think if you persuade people that you have a hoard of $120 billion,

you can turn that into real money. Yeah, they'll treat you different. And I would also encourage people. to take that same skeptical attitude and apply it to anybody else that is implying their Satoshi. So it's a broader set of people than does Craig Wright. Yeah. All right. That's a good place to leave it.

Everybody have a safe and healthy weekend and we will see you on Monday.