On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 06/20/25 (GENIUS passes, Nobitex Hack, FUD dice retrospective) (EP.636)

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode:  The GENIUS Act passes the Senate Should GENIUS be stapled to market structure? Bessent thinks stablecoins could be $3.7T by 2030 Stablecoin FUD Will stablecoins destabilize the US Treasury market JPM's stablecoin FUDs JPMD's deposit token will launch on Base The future of stablecoin yield in the US  Circle hits a $50b market cap Yellowcard partners with Visa in Africa Kraken will launch a token for their Ink L2 Are Walmart and Amazon looking at their own stablecoins?  An Iranian crypto exchange is hacked at the coins are lost We review old Bitcoin FUDs on the FUD Dice Content mention in this episode: Yesha Yadav and Brendan Malone, Stablecoins and the US Treasury Market

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 to 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 the Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. Busy week. We finally got the genius bill passed through the Senate. did and by a big margin too. What was it 68? 68 votes. 60 votes onto the house. Yeah, so what's the deal now? We're going to staple that to market structure or just pass genius? So Trump put up a truth social that said he just wants a clean bill. He wants the same bill. He thinks it's a good bill.

Wants that version of it to pass the house. But there's a lot of rumblings in the house and also within the industry that maybe they will try to staple market structure onto the bill and send it back to the Senate, which it would be great to get both of them. That just seems risky to me. Yeah, for what it's worth, I think we should just take the win. I'm sure there's some kind of aphorism about this in politics, but we're on the one-yard line. Take the win, guys.

I would think that the stable coin bill would pass no problem in the house. But if you start to make it more complicated with market structure, I think you get into it, there's just more surface area to disagree with, you know what I mean? And I think they're going to try to put in the Trump family things and the Senate's not going to want that. So I don't know if it can get through if you staple market structure. So Scott Besson had a tweet. He said recent reporting projects that stable coins to grow into a $3.7 trillion market by the end of the decade. This becomes more likely with the passage of the Genius Act.

It says it's a win-win win for everyone involved. The number has gone up. Yes. A week ago, it was $2 trillion. and now it's 3.7 trillion. Just look at the money market mutual fund complex and look how big that is. It's probably going to be bigger than what Besson's saying. I mean, where is he getting, actually, I know where he's getting the numbers.

The first number was standard chartered estimate projection. Second one was a different bank. I want to say city maybe, but I mean, I just am so astonished that this is the Treasury Secretary that's saying this stuff. It's, I mean, it's unbelievable. This bill is going to have profound implications. I mean, not just for what we do in the startup economy, but just think about the geopolitical impact of having stable coins

disseminated globally. I think you're just going to start to see regimes topple as a result of this technology. It's really bad for people that lead oppressive dictatorships. So I've been reading a lot of stablecoin five lately. And it's a lot of it is bad. It's almost universally bad and stupid. There is an interesting paper, though, that I like, which is we can call it quality. It's not even a fud.

It's just like, here are some things to ponder with the stable coin bill. It's called, have you come across this one? Stable coins in the U.S. Treasury Market by Yasha Yadav and Brennan Malone? I haven't seen that one. Okay, this is my homework assignment to you all this weekend. So they're basically saying dollar stable coins and the treasury market will become codependent. And they do introduce some worries, actually. There are some worries that they introduce in the paper.

So the first thing they say is treasuries may not always be saleable. Although if 30-day treasuries of T-bills market liquidity deteriorates, then we kind of have a ginormous problem. So I'm not too worried about that. They talk about how in the COVID crash in March 2020, T-bill trading kind of froze up and the Fed had to inject money to unfreeze the market. So that's one risk, actually. I'm not too concerned about that, to be honest. One thing that people always point to is money market funds that broke the buck. Right.

And then I went and I looked at these. So I want to know if this is a real issue. So there was, what was the fund that had layman paper in it? Do you remember? Was it the reserve fund? Yeah, I think that was it. So that one kind of very briefly broke the buck, I guess, in 08. But that wasn't a money market fund that had, you know,

it didn't just have U.S.T. bill exposure. It had commercial paper for an investment bank, which obviously ended up going under. So I then looked at all the money market funds that have T-bells in them, and there's never been an instance where they broke the buck. Yeah. So the composition would, I'm not worried about that at all. I mean, the composition is short-term treasuries, like sub-three-month treasuries. Yeah, I mean, it's literally, without exaggeration, the most liquid market on earth, literally. So I think you have to really be imaginative to find a situation where there's such a run from stable coins that you have actual market moving cell pressure in the T-bill market.

So that one I'm not worried about. They are a little bit worried about the timing issue with bank hours versus crypto hours. Yeah. So if there's like a ton of redemption requests on a Friday night, you know, know what happens then because the markets aren't really open over the weekend, things like that. So they worry about that. The other thing that I actually thought was interesting was if we get to that $3,000, $2,3 trillion of stable coins and by law, they have to hold short-dated treasuries, which is what Genius says,

right? Then you have a weird thing that happens where the debt structure changes. Because we then have to issue the U.S. government has to issue a lot of short-dated T-bills as opposed to longer-duration ones. And longer-duration ones give you more like predictability. You know, it's like if you were forcing a household to get rid of their mortgage and just take on a ton of credit card debt. Like you lose the ability to plan for the future as well. Yeah, that's a good one.

So I actually think that's like an interesting. Yeah. Yeah. That's an interesting one. I mean, Yellen got a lot of grief for issuing on the short end of the curve as opposed to the long end of the curve. And this is just forcing you to be a buyer at the short end. So it might actually make things a little more expensive for the government on net, is what they're saying. What else do they say?

The main thing is really if stables become an inherent part, you know, one of the biggest participants in the treasury market, does the Fed eventually have to step in? create liquidity facilities, as they did do with various other money market funds in the past. I think that's a reasonable point. I just in this current format with stable coins being regulated the way they will be, I don't see that as a very meaningful consideration. Yeah, I'm not as worried about that either. Did you read the one from the guy at J.P. Morgan, Michael Sembalest on Stablecoins? Yeah.

What did you think of that one? There was some Castle Island work products cited. actually in that one. They did. They had our data. They used our data to debunk our data. Yeah, that was a weird thing. It was a weird analysis.

I mean, he said a lot of things in this paper, but I mean, he made one point that it's all like crypto speculation, and then our data was there showing that it's not. Yeah. So he was trying to say, like, hey, you've seen this chart. It's like the chart I originally came up with. which is like stable coin settlement volume versus visa and whatever. He's like,

this is wrong. Here's a better chart, which is also our chart, which is the stable coin P2P and B2B volumes that we just published. It's like, well, they're kind of both true, you know,

neither one is the whole truth. Yeah. Yeah, I thought that was, I don't know that he really gets it. Talks a lot about the yield and, I mean, the bill's pretty clear on the yield.

You're not going to be able to pass this on to consumers. Yeah. I mean, I do think that's kind of a problem and an opportunity. I think it definitely helps protect commercial banks, but it also does create this need to find a way to get yield from stablecoins. I just don't know for sure if the bill will really prohibit creative yield programs where a stablequin issuer is giving an incentive payment to an intermediary that then itself pays the end consumer. would you ever ban that? Money's fungerable, right? Like Coinbase can keep on paying people to hold USD balances and it's divorced from, although it might not actually be, right? Like if they weren't making the yield from Circle, would they be paying? Probably not. But how do you make that case? I mean, it is classified as a marketing expense. They can do whatever they want with their marketing budget. Yeah. I don't think you can effectively ban that. So I do think de facto you're going to get stable coin yield through intermediaries. Through intermediaries. It shows you the power of

distribution. The other open question is, what does Tether do here? And so if this bill goes through, this is going to say that the reserve composition is codified. It's going to be overnight repos and short-term treasuries. Tether still holds a bunch of Bitcoin in their reserve. So did they just say, hey, we're ring fence. We're not going to be a future of the U.S. market. You know, I cannot imagine they would willingly sell all their Bitcoin and gold. I don't see that as an option. So maybe they just say, hey, we're just not doing it in the U.S. Yeah, the rumor we've seen reported is that they would launch, and this has been in the press,

that they would launch a parallel U.S. stable coin, and, you know, keep Tether running the way it runs. I just don't know if people would go preferentially for the U.S. version of Tether, as opposed to U.S.D.C. or anything else. Well, it won't be as liquid, that's for sure. It just won't be used internationally. I guess the other question is, does this bill, provide enough protections that you can you can use you know brokerages in the u.s even if you're a

non-us issuer you're still going to have to have like canter fitzgerald on the back end to hold the treasuries yeah and my understanding it has been considerably softened in favor of tether but i think we're going to have to wait for the final final bill to to decide you know whether it lets tether or you know u.s intermediaries use tether i think it's still kind of unclear yeah and i guess there'll be some amendments and changes here potentially in the House. But if Trump gets his way, maybe not, actually. So there is more stable cone news, but we will hop into the deals very first. Let's actually talk about a deal that we had a podcast episode on. So Sean sat down with Santiago, the CEO and co-founder of XFX. I can't say that at all. Have you noticed that?

I can't say the name of this company. XFX, which is actually the first deal of the week as well. So it's a cross-border payments infrastructure company. There is 9.1 million from us, Han Ventures, and Oak HCFT. And the other Castle Island deal of the week is Project 11. That is a quantum secure Bitcoin infrastructure company. There is 6 million from variant quantination and us. So congrats to the P11 team. Busy deal week. Another Castle Island content here, Greg Geniga from KPMG joined wide on the podcast. Talk about crypto auditing. People love these crypto auditing firms coming on podcasts. A lot of audit wants. We've done a lot. A lot of audit chat. We have many more podcasts in the can. Don't worry.

So next up in deals, we have Ubix. That's a stable coin clearing and settlement layer. There is 10 million from Galaxy, Coinbase Ventures and Founders Fund. Next one up is a company called Yupp with two peas. Yup. It's a decentralized AI platform. They raised $33 million from Andreessen Horowitz and Coinbase Ventures. Then you have D-F-X, DEFX, a decentralized exchange. There is 2.5 million from Pantera, CMT, Gumi Cryptos Capital and others. Then it's eigenlayer, a restaking protocol on Ethereum. There is $70 million in a token sale to Andresen Horowitz.

Then we have Uptopia, a launchpad for on-chain games. There is 4 million from Pantera, Coin-based Ventures, and Spartan Group. Gradient Network is a decentralized AI protocol. There is 10 million from Pantera, multi-coin, and Hong Shan. Then you have BitVolt. That's an institutional defy protocol. They raise $2 million from GSR and Gemini. And the last one is Nook, which is a defy powered savings app.

They raised $2 million from Coinbase Ventures, defy.vc and UDHC. On the news front, we've talked about genius. A lot of stable coin news this week. Circle stock is on an absolute tear. That is on a heater. What's going on there? Circle is, what did they go public at $31 a share?

It's at like $211. in the aftermarket. Yeah, so that's a $50 billion market cap, by the way, which is astonishing. I don't know what's going on there. You know what's going up is Boston real estate prices. Oh, yeah. So what do you make of the JPM deposit token launch?

It's JPMD. It's not a stable coin. It's a deposit token. They're launching on the base layer two, and this is a permission token available only to institutional clients. It's a digital representation of commercial bank holdings. Does this puncture the circle public market story? I don't think so. I mean, I don't really get the appeal of deposit tokens. So why would I want a deposit token ought not be fungible. So a deposit at JP Morgan

should not in my mind trade at the same level as a deposit with Silicon Valley Bank. You know, it's there's credit risk there on the deposit side but we treat we treat commercial bank dollars as fungible we don't trade them they don't trade i mean you couldn't trade uh you know citizens bank deposit there's yeah it's a very weird thing i don't think they ever trade and i think a deposit token is strictly inferior to a stable coin which is fully backed by treasuries you're getting you know yeah loan and real estate exposure if you're in these banks like why why would you want that instead of a stable coin. We are rethinking a lot of lessons of banking.

Like this is forcing us to reckon with how banks work and what's inside of them. The issue I have with, what is it, JPMD is the reason stablecoins are good is the interoperability. Right. And this is explicitly by definition not interoperable. Yeah, I mean, good on you for doing a project in the crypto space. We'll see if it works. I have no problem with it, but I just don't think bank deposits being tokenized are anywhere near as impactful as stable coins. I just don't see them being widely proliferated.

Also in Stapicoor news this week, Yellow Card, that is the biggest African, I would say, brokerage. And one of the biggest pan-African payments companies now has announced a partnership with Visa to collaborate on cross-border stable coin payments in emerging markets. Yeah, congrats to Visa and the Yellowfinery. Yellow card team, a yellow card is just crushing it in the stable coin space right now. It's kind of fascinating to look back on that company. And it was, you know, 99% Bitcoin and Ethereum when we invested in it. And now it's, I think, 99% stablecoin volume. Yeah, and Chris has very good answers when, you know, you ask him about, well, are these

stable coins disruptive to these countries? What's the benefit? Anyway, we're actually going to interview him on Friday. So we're going to dig deeper into that partnership. All right. here's another interesting one. This kind of slipped below my radar this week, but Cracken came out and said that they're going to launch a token

for their layer two blockchain platform, which is called Inc. So I think that's really interesting. I mean, base does not have a token. It seems like Inc. is very similar to base, and Cracken is intending to go public. I wonder how this token is going to work. And this is going to mean that they're one of the only public companies with a token. attached, right?

Yeah. Are there other public companies that have a token? I'm not aware of any. Ripple has. Well, they're not public. Ambitions, they have ambitions, but they're not public. That's a great question. Are there any, actually?

Well, I mean, I guess they're the public access vehicles. Well, you know, the Bitcoin and Slana access vehicles. But I don't know if I can think of one. Conventional wisdom would tell you that it's difficult because if you're a private company and you do a token, how do you still? still have the equity value. Does it make it harder to buy the company for the company to go public? But having a well-capitalized company like Cracken figure this out first, I think would be in the best interest of a lot of startups who probably want to do similar thing.

So in a similar vein, Coinbase is looking to launch tokenized stocks on their platform. So they're asking the SEC for permission there. Isn't it fascinating to see Coinbase just barreling towards Robin Hood's business and Robin Hood just barreling towards Coinbase's business? Yeah, I mean, if I had to guess, I think the SEC will say yes. And it seems like stocks are the meta right now. Like meme coin liquidity is dead. People are crypto people are just training stocks again.

I think perpetual futures contracts 24-7 on U.S. equities is going to be one of the biggest categories in the blockchain space. Yeah, I'd be honest with you. I've been using hyperliquid. So quite a good product. and I keep wishing that you could trade stocks on hyperliquid. Yeah, I think you'll be able to soon. I mean, I think there's a lot to figure out there just on the liquidity landscape

and how the market makers engage with both sides of that market. But people want that. FTX had something like that. It was probably not backed by anything, but they had a product there. So here's something weird. The Wall Street Journal says Walmart and Amazon are looking at creating their own stable coins. we all know that that's prohibited under Genius,

so someone's wrong here. I don't know who it is. Well, I think this is just a bad article. So this came out on the same day that Genius passed the Senate, said Walmart and Amazon are exploring stable coins. It didn't even mention the fact that the bill that's about to pass the Senate prohibits this. So it explicitly says unless you're a financial services company in the U.S.,

you can't do a stable coin. So I know that Walmart owns a bank. I'm sure Amazon has all sorts of MTLs, but I don't think they can do a stable coin here. The weird thing is that many tech companies do have kind of stable coins, right? Like, they're not exactly stable coins, but, you know, PayPal balances that are not PYUSD, you're floating, you have a float, right? Right. You know, that's kind of a stable coin. You have Starbucks credit, you know.

I guess the difference is that it's closed loop. So you can only use it within the ecosystem. Yeah. And obviously they don't, the liabilities don't circulate on a blockchain. I guess it comes down to what is the actual definition of a financial services company. Uber has, has payments on their platform. I'm sure they have MTFs. X has MTFs

Walmart has a bank Amazon must have FDLs Airlines make more money from credit cards half the time than from the planes

Yeah you know car dealerships are really in the business is selling you credit products like it's a blurry line and I don't know

if we need Congress to be saying it's we shouldn't let tech platforms as you stable coins it's like why What's the risk there? I mean, I guess the other question is, do you get value out of doing your own stable coin?

Or can you be more profitable if you just get the distribution and you have circle, tether, whoever else comes into this market, putting their stable coin on your platform and you're just making incremental float off of it? I mean, maybe, you know, they'll be able to strike a deal with a circle to get a share of the interest. I'm sure that's on the table, right? So elsewhere in the Bitcoin Access Vehicle World Strategy and Metaplanet are added again. Strategy bought 10,100 BDC MetaPlanet, bought 1112 Bitcoin, so just over 1,000. And now there are hyperliquid treasury strategies that have been announced. I think we need to redo the FUDDIS.

We need to put MSTR on the FUDDIS. So there's a company called I Novia. which is a pioneering digital ophthalmic technology company. And now they're also a hyperliquid company. What do they do? So they sell a product called the optajet, which carries prescription medications for ophthalmic therapies. And they're just going in on the Bitcoin trade?

And now they do hyperliquid. Oh, hyperliquid, okay. Yeah, I have liquid. Okay, here was a kind of a funny story. I mean, funny. I don't know. It's a story. So a hacker group exploited Iran's top crypto exchange called Nopetex,

Nobatex, for $100 million. And they didn't steal the coins, as far as I can tell. They burnt the coins. Yes. They sent them, they burned them. They sent them to a dead wallet address, a vanity address. Do you want to read the name of the vanity address? Well, you know, one interesting thing about this podcast, Matt, is that it's a family-friendly podcast.

So, and actually people will oftentimes send me DMs about it and say, thank you for never swearing. Yeah. Which is like, we don't really swear anyway. No. So why would we on the podcast? So this address is such as the one. Then it's the F word. And then it's IRGC terrorists.

No Bitt. and then some filler characters. So in case you don't know how this works, like there is such thing as a vanity address where you can generate millions or billions of addresses and then hope that you get a certain string in the address, right? But you can't really do more than like seven or eight characters. For obvious reasons, like if you could,

then you could just brute force a private key to a corresponding public key and then you could just steal all the bitcoins, right? Right. So it gets exponentially harder. So I would say this is not a vanity address and I made this mistake as well. It's just a burn address

because this specific address complies with the structure of what the Bitcoin protocol expects to see from addressed but you don't have the corresponding private key. So no one can spend it. Unbelievable. So, you know, they could have just confiscated the funds. they decided to just burn them so no one can have them.

I've never seen anything like this. Yeah, I think this is literally first. And so this is, I had never heard of this exchange, but apparently this exchange has been at the center of a lot of Iranian money laundering. Yeah, so I mean, lest you feel bad for the clients of no bit techs. Chain Alice reported they've been linked

to a range of illicit actors, including IRGC-affiliated ransomware, and that's your Iranian Revolutionary Guard, by the way. Affiliated ransomware, entities tied to Houthi and Hamas-affiliated networks, you know, the platform facilitated transactions associated with the pro-Hamas media outlet, Gaza Now, a pro-alkite, a propaganda channel, sanctioned Russian Crypt Exchange, many other illicit operators. So I don't know if anyone's shedding any tears for this exchange.

No, I don't think so. The other crazy one was it was probably the same group. They targeted an Iranian bank. So this had nothing to do with crypto, but they deleted everything at the bank. And so there's no customer records of like how much money you had at the bank. And I wonder if there's any backups there. But they just went in and basically incinerated all of the technology at one of these banks. Talk about something that would just like just chaos, right?

That's like the social fabric breaks down. Do you think that some intern just printed out the internal ledger and they just have it on paper? I mean, you would hope that, I mean, this could very well be like a money laundering bank. So I don't know that you feel bad for them or anything. But you would hope that there would be backups like that. It makes you really hope that U.S. banks are sound and resilient from that perspective. Yeah, what was the bank that they lost control of their internal ledger like synapse? Was it synapse?

Synapse. Yeah, it was like a banking as a service. platform. Yeah, and they just couldn't figure out who owned what. So this happens here. It does happen. It's back up those databases. Maybe you should hash them, put them on chain. Is that a good use case for a blockchain? Yeah, I mean, you could, you know, you could have a distributed network of nodes where every node in the network has a full replicated copy and then you have consensus around the nodes. That would seem like actually a really smart thing to do. One way to do it. But, uh, a whole blockchain.

Lockchain fixes this. I would think in some respects, a global notary system that's impossible to take down would fix that. Yeah. Do you think that with the chaos in Iran, there will be more stablecoin usage? Or do you think Iranians will know that the stablecoin issuers are kind of on the lookout and they'd be freezing Iran-linked stable coins? I was talking about this last night with someone. And they listened to our podcast last week when we talked about one of the good things about stable coins is that you can actually freeze them. And if bad people on sanctions lists get them, then effectively you can't spend the money.

So North Korea is not out there trying to hack stable coins because they know that they can't use them. Now, the tricky thing about that is that one of the killer use cases for stable coins is people outside the United States that wouldn't otherwise have access to U.S. accounts are saving like their life savings in these stable coins and did they know how fragile it is so i worry about that you know it's yeah you're not holding a bearer asset i mean i suppose like worst case if you're very worried about this you can just swap into bitcoin that's what you would do so i think the combination of stable coins and bitcoin gets you to a good blend of sort of resilience plus convenience and you swap it and out depending. I mean, if you were just thinking about transporting your money over a 10-year period

and you didn't want to open up your wallet for 10 years and you lived in a foreign jurisdiction, would you want Bitcoin in that wallet or USDC? You probably want Bitcoin and I do think this is going to be one of the effects of genius. So I think it was very good as far as preserving individual privacy and the ability to transact P2P. Or it's this system that we call permission pseudonymity, right? Where if you're creating a redeeming a stable coin, you're known to the issuer, but then otherwise you're not really. But then the issuer can do some forensic stuff and figure it out if you're some illicit finance group and they can freeze your coins. I think genius did a good job of preserving this.

However, I think the deep. is that the government's going to ask the issuers to freeze a lot more like much more aggressively yeah that's my guess so I don't think circle freezes very much like I don't know how many wallets it is a thousand something like that they're not very interventionist and I think that's the unspoken deal here you get you get regulation you get much more deeply intertwined to the US financial system government imprimatur, but we're going to ask you freeze much more aggressively. I guess that'll depend on the rulemaking that comes down from the agencies, though, right?

This bill will pass and then there will be a set of rules and interpretive guidance maybe that comes from FinCEN and places like that. Yeah, because the deal is not fully codified when the bill passes. No. Like there's always ambiguity and interpretation. I wonder it's a noble thing, but when does it go into effect if it passes? guess. Yeah, I don't know, actually. Yeah, I don't know. It'll be interesting to see, but, you know, ultimately, I think if you're a bad guy internationally, you probably want like Monero or something,

right? Like, you're going to want something that's maybe not Bitcoin and not a stable coin. Do you want to do this new segment that we came up with just before the show? Yes. Okay. So older listeners will recall the fud dice. So is this what they look like? No one can see this except for Matt, but this is a 12-sided dice with a different Bitcoin fud on each side. And I think we sold them in 2018. Yeah. I think I sold the very first batch on Lightning. I actually think it was one of the very first products sold on Lightning.

It was. I remember that. That was like eight years ago, yeah. That was a long time ago. And they're collector's items now, I think. Yeah. I would allege that they're collector's items. There's four versions of them.

They're four. Yeah, you've got to catch them all. So there's the black one. There's the first one. I think orange was the second. Then there's a shade of blue. And there was a white one, which was a special edition. We did for a conference. That's right. No one has that one. I don't even have all four. I'm the orange. I've got all four. I've got some extra oranges for you. So and then do you know that tether made their own version of the fad dice? I have the tether one. Someone sent me the tether one. It's much bigger. It's like a paperweight. Oh, is it? Yeah. They just ripped us up. You'd think that they could have maybe like sent me one because it was sort of my idea. Yeah, I've got it with all my trinkets over here. All right. So I'm, should we run through the fuds on the original dicency in the last eight years, have we addressed them or not? Yes. Let's do it.

Okay. Why don't you start? All right. Let's start with, uh, high fees. I would say Bitcoin, Bitcoin itself. hasn't really done anything to address this beyond Segwit pass and then taproot passed. And you can, you know, Bitcoin block space grew a little bit. But it's really that there's other blockchains that our act as like spill over block space.

So I don't think fees are ever going to go up on Bitcoin ever again, if I'd guess. And maybe it's fud in the other way that fees need to be higher. Yeah, that's kind of on here. All right, deflation. So I guess this argument was that if the whole economy was in Bitcoin terms, there would be unacceptable deflation and no one would provide credit, basically. Well, I think we've had a lot of inflation since we put out these fund dice. That's very true.

All right. Next one up is it's too volatile. Still pretty volatile. Yeah, it's volatile. I mean, the volatility has come down in the last eight years. That's for sure. Um, selfish mining. That's a more niche fund.

Yeah, we don't hear much about selfish mining these days. Well, it's actually true. So you don't need 51% per percent. It's been like proven. I hate to give Goun credit, but he was right. This is a understood thing now. You only really need 33% of the hash power. Yeah. Yeah, fair enough.

But, you know, it's still hard to get that much. Dev incentives. No dev fund. This was around the time. We put this out where. devs and other platforms were getting very rich, and I guess the Bitcoin developers weren't. And I think that's probably still the case. That's still the case, but there's a ton of organizations that fund devs in Bitcoin,

so it's not really concerned. Energy waste. Well, how much ink was spilled on this one? Many pixels, some ink. AI has really taken over the mantle for wasting energy. And a lot of people's... You just don't hear about it anymore. You never hear about it.

No Turing. I guess no smart contracts, right? Yeah, so not Turing complete. I would say we're on the cusp of actually addressing that with new L2s. BitVM, yeah, BitVM really. Yeah, BipVM basically address that. Yeah, small blocks. Well, that's a good thing.

Yeah, we like the small blocks. It's not even fun. I had a cup of coffee with the big block camp. Yeah. 21 cap. That's a question. That remains fud Yeah

I mean and when I say fud I don't mean that it's unfounded Like this is You know It's like a reasonable concern to have The one that's not on here is quantum Quantum's not on here Quantum's good fud

Stability block reward I guess Is the 21 million right so That remains a fud I'm looking at this The blue dice We had an entirely different set of fuds on here Tether was one Silk Road

was another one. No merchants, doesn't scale, Ginny coefficient, forks inflate. I mean, this is all been addressed, I would say. China control?

China's not in the game anymore. That's been addressed. Yeah. I mean, as far as I concerned, we fixed almost every fud. There's a few fud left. Maybe it's time to do another roll

of the fud dice, or we could do a stable coin to fud dice. That's what I was thinking. I do see a lot of stable coin fud, but a lot of the fud a very long-winded. Like, it would, you know, like, very hard to put on the pain of a centimeter and a half die. Yeah, it's like, hey, short-term treasury funding discrepancies.

It doesn't really roll off the tongue. I don't know. Maybe we'll bring back the fun. Maybe we'll do the fifth edition. I think we should. Maybe let's have third-party fulfillment on that, though. Yeah, I mean, I remember mailing these out. Yeah, I think you spend like two.

days in the Cambridge mail box It was such a bad use of my time too. Yeah. It was horrible. Like there's definitely third parties that'll do it for you, right? Yeah, I think we can figure that out. We have the technology. I don't

know what I was thinking. I should have just been doing deals. Like, that was such a great time to do deals. It was. I was mailing out dice. It happens. All right, I think that is it for the week. Markets are closed today. we'll see how circle opens tomorrow i just this thing just going straight up i i cannot believe it defying gravity and i guess uh we'll find out if it's going to be world war three soon enough we're in suspense

yeah it's what they said decision coming in two weeks yeah it's a long time to wait all right everyone have a safe and healthy weekend and we'll see you on monday