On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 04/22/22 (Elon's Twitter purchase, the US sanctions BitRiver, Australia gets an ETF) (EP.311)

Episode Date: April 22, 2022

Matt and Nic return for another week of news and deals. In this episode:  The OTB music debate rages on Nic survives Covid Should we bring back dueling? Ancient altcoin dramas Coinbase launches NFTs Elon has financing to buy Twitter Product suggestions for Twitter The US sanctions Russian miners BitRiver Is Russia remonetizing gold? Australia gets a spot BTC ETF North Korean hackers are active in crypto Sponsor notes:  Subscribe to the Coin Metrics State of the Network newsletter

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 Concentive 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 Nate Carter. And this episode is brought to you by Coin Metrics. Let's jump into the Metrics Minute. Today's Metrics Minute is brought to you by Coin Metrics. We are almost exactly halfway through the fourth Bitcoin epic.

The halving is in two years' time, it block 840,000 on May 4th, 2024, the per block. reward will drop to 3.125 BTC. Bitcoin's hash rate on 30-day moving average is just above 200x a hash per second, which is all-time high territory. The number of daily active Bitcoin wallets has averaged about 500,000 per day, holding steady since the fall and the total number of wallets approaches 40 million. Now, in the last week, Bitcoin transfer value has averaged $22 billion, 50% higher than last week. That's the coin metrics metrics minute. Back to the show. to the coin metrics community on GM. It's very vibrant in there.

The GM community across our podcast and coin metrics is just very vibrant. I think that's where all the intelligent dialogue is happening. So we're also running an AMA on there, a written AMA. Yeah, when are we doing that? Next week. Next week, okay. Does anything you ever wanted to ask the GPs over here? I mean, not that you haven't had the opportunity,

but you're going to extra have the opportunity to next week. We will answer every question that we want to answer. Every reasonable question. A lot of people on the GM community are talking about the music and just how much they hate the new music. So that's a big, big topic of conversation for this podcast. There's actually, there's Discord on that topic. I mean, there's actually some.

some fans of the new music, so can't forget them. There's a good line that said, it doesn't matter if the music is generative, if it's bad music. Yeah, so I did try and explain that, so here's the secret with the music. We've been using generative NFTs that certain members of Castle Island own because they are unencumbered from an IP perspective. So you don't have to go around getting the rights to use. use the music in your podcast, you can just use them. If you own the NFT, you can use it. It's just

an open license with generative, the vast majority of generative NFTs. That's why we're using them. However, a lot of people don't like it. So for the roundups, that's the compromise, for the roundups for keeping the old music. Okay, so you will have just heard the old music. Is that right? Yeah. So Matt's not aware of this because he doesn't edit the podcast. I do the another fun fact but yeah so all right i'm very excited about that i've graciously reinserted the old music into this one great to great to hear it's been a busy busy week uh boston sports by the way big time back celtics up two o against the nets i haven't been following yeah it's been great so kairie irving coming back just a super villain just we're back i'm feeling another championship

I'm secretly hoping that the heat loses as fast as possible in the playoffs because I have to drive past that stadium. FTCS arena, right? Yeah, and let me tell you, it just gets impossible. Miami is a bad traffic city at the worst of times, the best of times. And then when they're playing at the FTX arena, it's the worst of times. It's an incredibly crowded place to be down there in Miami. There's so much traffic. It's all these carpet baggers coming in, acting like they own the place.

All these crypto people like you, just move in there. I hate to see it. All right. Let's hop into, well, I was going to say let's hop in some deals, but let's talk about the pod this week. So you had Josh Mandel on, Ohio Senate candidate, loves cryptocurrency, loves Bitcoin. Yeah, he's a pro-Bitcoin candidate. He had a good tweet one time. There's a tweet so notorious, many news articles are written about it, mostly pejorative.

He said, quote, Ohio must be a pro-god, pro-family, pro-Bitcoin state. Paul Krugman wrote a whole column attacking him for that and also Bitcoiners. Now, did it cross your mind to ask him the question of why he tried to fight his opponent on stage? Was that just you couldn't get to TimeCrunch? I actually wasn't even aware of that. that's the first time hearing about it oh yeah if you YouTube him he during a debate he tried to come to fist fisticuffs with his opponent I think personally I think we should restore dueling an American political life and potentially the practice of beating your opponents with canes

in Congress things like that that used to happen a lot and people don't remember yeah people all the time yeah yeah there were other options politically back in the day, namely violence. Yeah, we've come a long way. We've come a long way. I think duels, I would think duels at a minimum should be restored. Which is the option to duel. I mean, because basically you really have to like back up the things you're saying.

If you slander someone sufficiently aggressively, they probably ought to have the right to respond with a duel. It's a good campaign platform. Bring back duels. Yeah, why did we even outlaw them in the first place? Yeah. I need to look into that. Look into that. Josh Mandel.

He'd probably be pro-dual, is my guess. Loves Bitcoin. Past as Ohio treasurer, he basically made it such that you could pay taxes with Bitcoin. That was later found to be not legal under Ohio state law. But there was a glorious moment when you could pay your taxes with Bitcoin. in Ohio. Yeah, good for it.

Good for Josh. So we'll have another Senate candidate on next week. It's been a busy political season for us. We're going crazy out here with the Senate candidates. I wonder if the on the brink Senate demographic will all win their races. And then we will be seen as the place to go. We will be.

We'll launch our campaign. We will launch your campaign for you. The launch path. Yeah. You also had Adam Jackson of Brain Trust on the show. This was a fun one. So Adam is kind of a student of marketplace business model. So we talked about some of the shortcomings of Web 2 marketplaces, what it takes to run a Web 3 marketplace. So I had a lot of fun with this one with Adam. So in response to criticism from us last week, our intern has given us fewer deals.

Or maybe fewer deals just happened. I actually don't know. Where there just not as many deals as we? You know, he might have just been making up deals too. We haven't, you know, we don't know. Because some of them sound pretty far-fetched. Like some of the names definitely sound made up. I think he was just like inventing protocols last week.

There's a lot of things that is just like, that's not a real thing. I mean, there's all that actually, frankly, most deals that happen in the crypto industry sound completely made up. They do. Well, we had a several in the Castle Island portfolio this week. So Flipside Crypto, which was our very first investment ever, actually. Dave Balter, Jim Myers, Eric Stone and the team, they raised a $50 million round. It was led by Republic, a ton of great co-investors.

So congratulations to the Flipside team. Love to see it. Next up, also in the Castle Island portfolio, Ellis, an immigrant-focused Neo-Bank, they raised 5.6 million from Kintraintra and Ventures, us 20 minute VC, balladjusternavasan, and others. The next one, also a CIV deal, SoundMint. This is a music-focused NFT platform. They raised 1.7 million in seed financing from Anamoka, us, and a number of other angels. Congrats to SoundMint team. Very cool announcement that they had on Twitter. Yeah. I'm going to give them props for the model, the type of announcement. They made a little video.

It was like a little music video for their announcement. I thought it was great. I thought it was awesome. And then the last C-EV-D deal, Crusoe, which is a flared gas Bitcoin platform, they raised a $350 million round led by G2 venture partners. Congrats to Chase and Cully and the Crusoe team. Yeah, excited to be on board there. Definitely the biggest operators in the flared gas space,

flare gas mining, digital flare mitigation, they call it. They're also active in mining with stranded renewables. So certainly one of the most progressive and interesting companies, I would say, in the Bitcoin mining space and beyond. Also just general computation. So let's hop into some other deals of the week. So blockchain.com, they are apparently speaking to banks. So there's a report that they're talking to a number of banks about running an IPO process that could happen as soon as this year. and that was a Bloomberg article.

So their last round of financing was at $14 billion just in March a month ago. So would be great to see some more publicly traded cryptocurrency companies. I think it would be awesome for the whole ecosystem. So I hope this report is true. I have to say, though, public crypto evaluations are the most challenged they sort of maybe have ever bit. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess disclaimer, we have interest in a number of them.

but it's, yeah, it doesn't, it seems pretty depressed on the equity public side right now. Yeah, public markets investors are giving public crypto companies no credit whatsoever right now. I mean, Coinbase is trading at their most modest public valuation ever, something like 11 times trailing 12-month earnings. Yeah, it doesn't make a ton of sense to me. The, you know, one thing that I think is worth thinking about if you're blockchain.com is just thinking about that mechanism for how you'd go public. And so this report said IPO, uh, or suggested IPO at least, I think one of the benefits of doing the traditional IPO process is that you go on the roadshow and you get to educate a ton of by side participants around how your business works. Um, if you do the direct listing, you don't get the opportunity to do that. And so my sense is that some of these companies, including Coinbase that have done the direct list.

or just not very well understood by the street. So speaking of Coinbase, they are apparently looking to acquire BTC Turk, which I believe is the largest Turkish crypto exchange, reportedly for $3.2 billion. Turkey, of course, one of the most popular crypto markets, I mean, just globally. Obviously, there's tons of. of headlines you can find regarding crypto dollarization in Turkey, especially as the lira

has been collapsing. It's one of the most opportune markets for crypto. Coinbase has been rumored to be on the acquisition path with other companies in the past couple weeks too, Mercado Bitcoin being the other one that comes to mind. So seems like they've been busy over there on the MNA front. So why, yeah, why not? So also in acquisition news, Robin Hood has agreed to a require Zieglu, a U.S.-UK-based crypto platform for an undisclosed amount. You want to talk about companies that are getting hammered on the public markets. Robin Hood's another one in that category. It doesn't help that the founder of Robin Hood is spending his days musing about block sizes

and how doge coin could be optimized. Everyone has to go through that journey. I actually made a meme this week. I don't know if you caught it. one of my very rare Twitter appearances. But in response to his tweet, I put out a meme around the IDMAs. Everyone has to go through the phase of their crypto journey where they think the answer to everything is to just make the blocks bigger. And that's where Vlad is right now.

It seems that Elon, our dear friend Elon Musk, is stuck there, though. Some people get stuck there and they never get out. It's like some people hit the private blockchain thing and they're just like, this is for me. Yeah. I just stop there. Elon is stuck at a local maxima in terms of his thinking around block sizes. I mean, look, I was upset with him back in the day when he was trying to concern troll Bitcoin. He was accepting Bitcoin.

He's not accepting Bitcoin. I'll say this. I will forgive Elon all of his transgressions if he acquires Twitter and puts a stamp on it. All right. We're going to talk more. Twitter in the news section here. I agree. So, you know, I forget sometimes if, sometimes you have to go through that idea maze. Sometimes you get stuck. A lot of people are stuck. I was, how long were you stuck at the ripple makes sense phase of your crypto journey?

I spent a solid maybe two weeks there. Ten minutes top. This ripple thing. Oh, you were only 10 minutes. I did, I did like 14 days. I punched the clock. I got one pay period on ripple. I was like, this makes sense. Cross chain ledgers, XRP as a bridge currency, why not? So, and then I, then I woke up. Yeah, I'm trying to think what my worst crypto intellectual crime was. I mean, I was a big Minera guy for a while. You're a big blocker for a hot second, right? I definitely saw the logic there for a time. Yeah. What else was I? I was in a non-coin. A non-coin made a lot of sense to me for a little bit. I mean, maybe we're going to look back in five years' time and be like, wow, we were small blockers?

What were we thinking? I know. I know. The blockchain has to innovate at the speed of the internet. It's a, you know, I've never had flirtations with Cardana, though, so I haven't hit that. I don't know if that's coming. Like at some point, do you have to go down that path? I don't know.

I went to a Cardano meetup in 2017, in late 2017, during the peak of that cycle. And actually, so it was in Boston, Charles Hodgkinson spoke. And the people in the audience were just completely transfixed by him. And I left that meetup being like, I have to sell everything. You got to get off. This guy is not, it wasn't just Charles's, comments, it was the reaction of his acolytes, which was just overwhelming. It was like when you see, you know, like folks in North Korea, like they see Kim Jong-on and they like weep with joy.

It was like that. And I was like, oh my God. Yeah, I can't do that. I got to sell. I need to sell. Didn't you have a cup of coffee with the decred movement? Yeah, I remember thinking decred was really cool. I don't remember why exactly. It's because it was proof of steak and proof of work. Yeah, the hybrid. I know the DECRED people would always represent that as like dozens of times more secure, more efficient. Yeah, I had a flirtation there. And then I remember I was at a decred meetup.

Those used to be a thing. And I asked a guy like, what's the core thesis here? And he's like, that is just like better than Bitcoin. It's a better digital gold. I was like, if that's what you'd have to believe, I think I'm off of this one. Yeah. Yeah.

That's the first I've thought about decred in years. Yeah, Decred had a time. It's still around. I remember thinking Steam was actually cool. Steam. Oh, man, Steam, yeah. I went to a Steam meetup, and this guy who is there wrote a post about me on Steam, or not like about me, but he wrote about the meetup, and he categorized me as a fidelity portfolio manager, which I was like I was not.

It made it sound like I was running like a public mutual fund. And he's like, this guy who's at the meetup is just all about Steam. He's like a huge fan. Needless to say, that didn't go over very well. And you know, Steam posts, I don't think they get deleted. I think they have a permanence to them. Yeah, that's the whole value prop, I think. Yeah.

I mean, Steam then had a weird thing where Justin's son took it over and used. then there was like a rebellion and then Justin Sun used people don't know this this is one of the problems of proof of stake sorry sorry proof of stake enthusiasts I'm gonna say it Justin Son used

Huobi and finance and Bitrex to like commandeer steam that's how he did it so he got enough steak and he I think it actually deleted some people's balances I mean that's incredible to me

that that was a yeah i hope he deleted that post about me might still be it might still be out there and then there was a rebellion against his coup and then the steam community moved to something called hive so there's just like insane politics nobody's aware of this stuff really who is writing the book like there there needs to be more books in this space i know crazy people that you come across Yeah, like we have books about Bitcoin and Ether, but that's basically where it ends. I just read a book called The Caesar's Palace Coup, and it's about the Apollo and TPG acquisition of Harris back in the day, which later became Caesar's. And it was a big bankruptcy. There was a bunch of fraud.

And it's a pretty good book. It pales in comparison to some of the crypto stories that are out there. I mean, my God. Speaking of Justin's son, I mean, he's now. replicating the Luna stablecoin with his own stable coin also named after celestial bodies. Yeah, he will copy you fast. Yeah, it's the copy paste approach to innovation. Yeah, I mean, there's just so many dramas, especially as you get down the list in sort of the out coin world. There's so many dramas. No one's chronicling. Where are the historians?

We need some on-chain archaeologists too. I mean, there's a, there's a calling. Yeah, we keep saying. All right, let's hop back in some deals. Coin DCX. This is an Indian crypto exchange. They raised $135 million at a $2 billion valuation from Steadview, Pantera, and others. Next up we have the sandbox, which is a blockchain-based gaming Metaverse company. They're raising $400 million at a $4 billion valuation. I'm going to admit I had not heard of them before this. Yeah, this is a Metaverse. It's big, big Metaverse company.

Next one up is KuKoin. They have launched a $100 million fund to back NFT creators. KuKoin is a big exchange. Apparently very popular in Africa, too, believe it or not. Next up, we have Block Apps, a blockchain developer for enterprises. There is $41 million from Liberty City, Consensus, Morgan Creek Digital, and others. Framework Ventures has raised a $400 million fund. They will be investing in Web3 gaming and DFI. Congrats to the Framework team. Then we got Delta 1, a Salonabase DFI

protocol. They raise $9.1 million from Alameda and others. Bit Digital, which is a Bitcoin mining firm. They have filed a prospectus with the SEC to raise $500 million. then we have Rario which is a cricket focus nfti platform and I'm assuming that's cricket the sport is that cricket the sport not the insect not the insect yeah it's cricket I mean it's the hybrid golf baseball thing we talked about a couple weeks ago yeah we cricket keeps coming up on this podcast actually do enjoy cricket it's it's painfully obvious that we're under deployed against cricket as a theme

of our fund. Zero exposure. So I would be excited if this was an NFT platform with an entomological focus as in bugs. Oh yeah, that would be better for you? I actually like the cricket. I want to play cricket.

Have you never played cricket? I've never played. I don't... Do people play it in the United States? Not like, you know, natively born Americans, but yeah, cricket. It's a fun sport.

I mean, you can play it casually. I would say it's even more amenable to being played casually than baseball is. I'd love to. I would love to play cricket. It's challenging. The bowling is challenging. That's what they call pitching bowling. It's not easy.

That part's hard. You need someone that sort of knows what they're doing. Yeah, I just want to hit. It's a great sport. Very popular, too, you know, worldwide. Probably one of the most popular sports. I think it's one of the most, yeah, in the entire world. It's probably soccer and then cricket, right?

Yeah. So anyway, this cricket-focused NFT platform has raised $120 million from Dream Capital and others. So we'll keep an eye on that one. If you're doing a cricket startup, preferably I'd say in the United States, you know where to find us. We cover all cricket deals. Next one up is Limitless, which is a terrific movie, very underrated, but also it is a company that is focused on the Metaverse. It's a fund actually that's focused on the Metaverse. They raise $60 million and they're going to do Metaverse investments.

That's the Bradley Cooper film, right? Where he... Best plot ever. So he like discovers a drug that makes him really, really smart. Yeah. But then it also has adverse effects on his health or something. I think so. Yeah. It was it was basically like enhanced Adderall. It's not really not great for you. Like a Faustian tale.

It has a lot. I think it's one of the coolest plots. You could do an entire 10-season Netflix run on that idea. Okay. We're going to have to revisit that one. And the last one is Tower 26. They have launched a $50 million fund, also focused on Metaverse and VR gaming.

Metaverse and VR gaming, hot categories. Up there with cricket in terms of hottest categories. is that we're seeing these days. So light on the news front this week, I guess still on the cricket theme. This might be a bit of a stretch. Australia noted land in which cricket is played will become the eighth country to launch a spot Bitcoin ETF. 21 shares in ETF securities have partnered to launch spot BTC and spot ETHs with Coinbase as a custodian. Well, it is great to see all of this innovation happening outside of the United States. I don't know what else you can say on that. Yeah, we're going to be the United States is going to be the 200th nation to launch a

spot Bitcoin ETF. We got some listener inbound around Fidelity launching two thematic ETFs. They made this announcement that one will be focused on publicly trade companies in the metaverse space and one will be more of a broad crypto blockchain and digital payments oriented ETF. A couple of people said, hey, you were bashing Schwab around launching something similar. What do you think about Fidelity? And we're unbiased. I'd say that these two products actually look awesome.

Yeah. So to be clear, we like the Fidelity ones and we don't like the Schwab ones. Yes. I think that's, it's very clear that the Fidelity ones are better. That's just the rules. That's how it works on this show. We're not sorry. That's how it goes.

So congrats to the Fidelity team. those ETFs look awesome. So also in trad-fied news, FTCS rumored or suggested that they might buy Goldman Sachs, purchase Goldman Sachs, the investment bank. Don't know how plausible that is. When was that? Wasn't that like six months ago? Yeah, that might not be news. But either way, they are apparently in conversations about collaboration.

Don't know what that means. Yeah, why not? also in exchange news Binance US they have departed the blockchain association crypto lobbying group citing a difference in values, goals and standards

and they're going to form their own group it sounds like because we didn't have enough crypto lobbying groups it's hard to leave one of those groups right people just tend to kind of stay but you don't generally see a press release when someone leaves a group like that.

Just kind of like you stop paying your dues and maybe you stop showing up to the meetings. It's kind of the normal way to do it. So this one, I don't know if this is one to celebrate, but a former Ripple advisor has been nominated to serve on the Federal Reserve, serve as the vice chair of supervision at the Fed. So is there anything?

to read into that is that we're going to have like fidget spinners going around the fed now well i don't think ripple is the chief thing on michael barrow's mind i'd be surprised if it were yeah i think he's got other stuff going on um did you see the story about metamask so they warned some apple users um or all apple users uh against allowing i cloud backups to sync with metamask and apparently there was a that lost $600,000 via his iCloud account being breached. Yeah, to be clear, don't store your private keys in online cloud backups. It's just not a good idea. Don't do it.

Yeah, don't do it. Put it somewhere safe in the real world. It just takes fishers or hackers. All they have to do is successfully get you to, you know, I mean, Even if you have 2FA, they'll often do targeted fishing where they try and get you to share the 2FA via text message. I mean, there's North Korean, there's literal North Korean hackers that are targeting people that own significant amounts of crypto.

State level attackers. State level. That's the highest level there is. Well, so, yeah, it looks like the Axi Infinity hack was a North Korea state level attack. $600 million. I mean, it's kind of. have been known that North Korea has a unit that specifically goes after crypto exchanges and now defy. That is the most advanced threat there is. I mean, yeah, that's, that's not good. You can't take

OPSEC too seriously here, guys. It's interesting that that's North Korea strategy for getting hard assets. It is interesting. I mean, you know, being active on the mining space, also, you know, a lot of rumors there. So maybe, but it's probably more efficient for them to hack exchanges as a way to accumulate assets than mining. Yeah, I would think so because they would have to procure ASICs, right? Yeah. And actually there's a little piece of news about that today. The U.S. Treasury has unveiled sanctions against Russian miners. And Russian Bitcoin mining is not a small industry. This is the third biggest jurisdiction.

for Bitcoin mining as of August 2021. Oh yeah. I mean, we knew people, United States people that were running mining operations in Siberia, as recently as a couple of years ago. Yeah. Bit River is the main Russian miner that has been targeted. Compass mining actually had machines in Russia, which they are not going to be able to continue using. They have said that they will attempt to sell the machines. So it's interesting because about maybe two weeks ago, I tweeted Bitcoin mining makes sense,

you know, for Russia to have sort of a cottage industry, maybe it was longer than two weeks ago. It's when it in pre-war. It makes sense for Russia, a de-dollarizing nation that is loading up on hard assets and has lots of cheap energy to get into Bitcoin mining. And then the IMF mentioned that in their financial stability report. I don't know if they read my tweet or they just came up with that independently. It seems like seems a little far-fetched. They would just come up with that on their own. And now the U.S. government has now sanctioned Bitcoin miners in Russia. So even though the numbers are actually pretty small, you know, like the Bitcoin mining industry right now is $15 billion of revenue possibility globally per year, it's actually kind of small in the

grand scheme. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm sure there'll be more of this. I mean, basically anything that touches financial rails in Russia right now is being sanctioned. We'll see if the U.S. is able to crack down on Russia's gold ownership and keep those away from markets. Russia apparently has a standing order to buy gold 5,000 rubles an ounce right now. There might be a gram. Anyway, they're sort of partially re-monetizing gold. See if that works. Do you see that Coinbase released the beta version of their NFT marketplace to select users? I didn't get it. I didn't get on there.

Do you? I actually do not have a Coinbase account old. Okay. Well, I was not part of the Wave 1. So I can't tell you how it looks, but sounds interesting. Sounds pretty cool. I don't know what assets they have on there. My tungsten cubes are just depreciating.

That's the one metal that's not going up. So there's a common section, well, it probably won't be for much longer. There is currently a common section on the Coinbase NFTs, and it's predictably not going well. So I say people aren't the most polite when it comes to other people's NFTs. So what's the latest on the Twitter bid here? All right. So Elon Musk has claimed that he actually has sufficient financing. to successfully buy Twitter.

So he's lined up 46.5 billion in debt and equity. He has personally committed $33.5 billion, $21 billion of equity, and $12 billion of loans against his Tesla stock. And apparently there's a consortium of banks that's also chipping in the rest, including Morgan Stanley. They've agreed to provide $13 billion in debt secured against Twitter itself. So it's kind of like the classic leverage buyout.

So yeah, this, you know, apparently financing secured on the deal. Well, good for Elon. I don't know. Is this financing actually secured or is this one of these like Michael Milken highly confident letters? I would have to think that if these banks

were willing to put their name on it, then Twitter's board is going to have to take this quite seriously. Yeah, I mean, the funny thing is that Matt Levine had just the most hysterical take on this, which is normally when someone claims to have funding secured, you know, you're sort of inclined to believe them. But Elon Musk is literally the one person with a track record of saying that and it not being true. Yeah, yeah. The one person. He has his track record in terms of having funding security is questionable.

It's interesting that all of these private equity firms were sort of in the news over the past week. It just seems like a terrible buyout opportunity for these guys. I mean, the cash flows are not going to sustain the debt load there unless something dramatic happens. Well, maybe they can charge us 30 cents a tweet. Yeah, I mean, there would have to be some radical change to the business model. I think what they should do is actually introduce a retroactiveirdrop for all Twitter users. Can measure it with your usage.

But, and here's the best part, you specifically don't give it to blue check marks. Oh, so you just want that basically so that you can have the most tokens on the platform. Is that what it is? No, no, no. You exclude blue check marks. Oh, are you a blue check mark? I am, so this is me being very self-sacrificial and generous,

but I think it's for the greater good. So you have a revolution of the people, and you restore the power to the plebs, basically, who don't have blue checks. And it would just cause chaos. I mean, all the credentialed beltway elites would get nothing, and the regular folks would get everything. There's an idea.

I'd be more of a fan just from a self-serving perspective, not to have it be a usage-basedirdrop. I think just if you've if you've ever tweeted, you get the Twitter coin. Yeah, because you're averaging one tweet a month here. Yeah, but they're good. When they come out, they're good. You've had some hits lately. Yeah, my usage rate is pretty good.

So, I mean, it might be the case that Elon is, you know, sincere here. And Twitter will be liberated from the sensors and we'll be able to, tweet to our heart's content. We'll see. I don't know. I'm surprised that we don't have more news on this. I guess the board is going to take them a week or two to actually sift through the proposal, get an opinion from their bankers and lawyers. First bid is usually not the final bid, though.

I mean, you know, I kind of wonder, let's say Elon actually does gain control over Twitter. So he fires the board. We know that's definitely... I mean, that board is... a joke. The board's not going to make it. Do you think he just imposes a rampant amnesty for all, for everyone banned from Twitter? Like, uh, kind of like, you know, I don't know, like when, when Joker, like, captures Gotham and just lets everyone out of the lunatic asylum. You know, is that kind of the vibe? Is it just going to be chaos on there? Yeah, it might be.

I don't know if that would be the best thing for the platform. though. I would think that one of the first things he would do is just trim the fat at Twitter. It just seems like there's way too many people there. I mean, I don't know if it really needs any staff at all. It really, you know, it's like DevOps. Just make sure it doesn't go down like it always used to. Yeah. Keep the servers on. Get rid of the trust and safety team. You know, just a proposal. Integrate payments. Yeah. There's some stuff to do for sure on the process. side. I mean, it's the amount of value that they could be capturing versus what they actually

capture is completely out of whack. But I think that's noble, right? The fact that they are unsuccessful at extracting value, they're creating abundant amounts of value, clearly. Everybody loves Twitter. Everyone spends all day on Twitter. But Twitter itself captures none of that value. That's actually really noble in a way, right? Maybe we're thinking about this all wrong. It shouldn't be about extracting all the value you create, just creating good value for the world and then harvesting a tiny minuscule portion of it. What's that saying that like if you got 10 people, 10 smart people in a room, they could just fix social security?

Like, how is that not been applied to Twitter? There's been a lot of smart people on the Twitter orbit over the years. So my other best idea about Twitter to finance it is, you know, the bad beat jackpot in a casino? when you're playing poker. So basically, if you have a sufficiently good hand and you lose the hand, let's say you have four of a kind

and you lose to a straight flush. In some casinos, you're eligible for a bad beat jackpot. So even though you lost the hand, you still get paid out like a huge sum, right? So it's like a reward for losing when you have a great hand. I think there should be the inverse version of that for Twitter. So if you have the worst take of the day, you have to pay everyone else that's a user

of the platform like $100 million. So if you get the most ratioed on Twitter in a given day, you're the loser for that day, and you have to pay everyone else one cent. It's not a bad idea. I say what do you think the chances of Elon going for that? I think that would be great because, you know, we have to do more to punish bad takes on the platform. It's a lot of bad takes on the platform, that's for sure. So I think that's it for the week.

You're fully recovered. It's good that you're back healthy. No long COVID for you. Yeah, fingers crossed. Short COVID only. Despite you making me do the podcast last week, I felt like. little hard dumb. Well, we got to keep those numbers up.

Yeah, they were flagging. We did have her week off. Yeah. It really shows in the data. It does. The people on GM, GM. It's like a big done.

The GM. XYZ community is asking where the, where the pods were. We don't, to our credit, we only miss one week of pods a year. We do. Yeah.

It's a tradition. We'll have two, I think two interview pods next week plus the rundown. So three more pods coming your way next week. And I recorded a new episode in the mining miniseries, another publicly traded miner. We're not running out.

We're not. Very excited to share that one. Got some great content coming. So hope everyone has a great weekend and we will see you on Monday.