On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 08/27/21 (Celeb NFT buys, Visa's cryptopunk, Choke Point 2.0?) (EP.238)

Episode Date: August 27, 2021

Matt and Nic return for another week. In this episode:  Nic sells an NFT to Von Miller  OnlyFans and financial inclusion Visa buys a cryptopunk Do stablecoins have a future outside of the banking sector?  The history of Choke Point and what it means today Our merch supply chain issues  Tungsten talk Content mentioned  Iain Murray's OTB appearance on Choke Point Nic in Coindesk, OnlyFans Shows How the Banking System Is Politicized Sponsor notes  This episode is brought to you by Withum, a top 25 accounting firm with a cutting-edge Digital Currency and Blockchain Technology practice. To learn more, visit  withum.com/crypto.

This episode is brought to you by Witham. Witham is a top 25 accounting firm. They have a cutting edge digital currency and blockchain technology practice. Wherever your company is from a stage perspective, from pre-cede to IPO, they have tailored solutions just for you. They have helped some of the largest companies in the crypto industry with audit, tax, and advisory needs. And they've also helped a number of our portfolio companies.

To learn more about advisory, audit, and tax services, head over to on the brink. link slash witham. That's on the brink. Dot link slash with them. 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 to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of concentrated easing. print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden people started to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called a Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Welcome to on the brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm

Nick Carter. And just the NFT thing is out of control this week. Just Von Miller is back in my life. The last time he was in my life, it was losing the AFC championship game, him on his way to winning Super Bowl 50. So I don't have fond memories of Von Miller, but he's back. There have been some developments featuring von Miller somehow he bought an nfts of mine so that was the thing that happened just von miller out there just on open sea just trolling and just buying NFTs i mean you really should not have sold that nfts because the fact that von miller bought it now it's just probably what five x the price but how is i to know how could i have possibly known there's no way to know that so all right we'll give a little we can i guess we can give the story

Let me pull up his Instagram real quick. He's very proud of his NFTs. He really likes the Bored Ape Yacht Club. He's got a lot of those. Who doesn't? He loves those. So a while back, about a year ago, I tweeted that I wanted t-shirts from startups. I don't know why I tweeted that.

And I guess I was complaining about the quality because sometimes they're pretty scratchy. And then OpenC, Dan at OpenC was kind enough to send me one. And he also sent me a card and the card had a seed phrase on it. And so I put into MetaMask. And it was this color glyphs NFT, which, you know, to be perfectly candid with you, I didn't find to be very aesthetically pleasing. It was just a bunch of colorful lines. And so I completely forgot about it. And then about 10 months later, Dan messages me. He's like, you should check out the color glyphs on OpenC. And I look and they're trading at like, I don't know, 8th. Crazy. And he's like, I hope he kept the card. And in fact, I'd lost the old Meta Mask account, but I had kept the card. I put it on my fridge.

And so I retrieved this card and I put the seed in once again. And I list the NFT for sale. had basically a market price. And then the next day, someone with the open sea account name Von Miller buys it. And I'm like, well, that's clearly someone that's just a fan of Von Miller. And then the next day after that, Vaughn Miller posts a bunch of NFTs that he bought on his Instagram, including the NFD that I sold him. And like, so what is it worth now now that he's bought it? So, Von Miller has pushed the proverbial floor.

because the color glyphs are trading at like 17 eth, whereas when I sold mine, they were around seven or eight, eth. So his involvement has really revitalized the color glyph space. So how about Visa this week, too? Just what a week for NFTs. We got Von Miller. We got Visa buying $150,000 crypto punk. It is in putting out a press release.

Yeah. It is pretty astonishing. I like that they set the punk's background to be the Visa brand blue. Yeah. So they, you know, they bought the punk, but they had to situate it within their brand guidelines, too. And then we had Budweiser buying beer.eath. And then I believe did they buy rocket.eath or something? Yeah, there was something with rockets that I didn't quite understand.

But so, you know, after having actually made an NFT sale to a celebrity, I think I finally understand the NFT phenomenon. It's taken me a while. I totally get it now. I don't know. Well, you weren't a baseball card guy. I think you would have gotten it earlier if you were a baseball card guy. Yeah. So you had that advantage over me.

But yeah, NFTs, I finally understand. And even though the ether rocks, I don't know about those, I don't know if they're really going to make it. These are the perfect digital native status symbols. No question about it. O'Dell Beckham has a crypto punk, I think. Jay-Z does too. Jay-Z has one. Yeah, so some of these celebrities are totally on it, even if they'd never done crypto stuff before.

So something's happening here. the numbers obviously reflect that. It's pretty interesting. It is pretty funny. All right. Well, that's NFT. Talking NFTs. We'll probably talk about it a little bit more in the episode. But why don't we hop into some deals? So here's a stalwart of the crypto space, the Bitcoin space, rather Blockstream. Everyone knows Blockstream. They raised $210 million in a series B from Bailey Gifford, iPhone X. and others. Congrats.

Very interesting. I think it's Bailey Gifford's second crypto deal. Congrats to Alan Farrington for that. And to the team of Blockstream. I saw some interesting commentary about Blockstream and potentially getting into ASIC manufacturing. I think they bought the old ASIC manufacturer Spoon Dooleys as part of the transaction.

Is that right? That would be really, yeah, that is right. That would be really interesting. So Blockstream historically been more focused on software development, of course. And the move into ASIC manufacturing would come at a really interesting time. There aren't a lot of players in the United States in that sector. I would say virtually none. They have been mining kind of a great deal in recent years, quietly, I would say.

But they have been mining and now potentially they will get into making the equipment. I mean, you know, imagine if something happens to Taiwan geopolitically. Yeah. Then I guess the world has an enormous shortage of basics. Yeah. So maybe there will be an opportunity for for U.S.-based manufacturing. Who knows? Yeah, it's a pretty brittle supply chain when you think about what would happen if China were to take some action against Taiwan here in the next couple of years.

So that is good to see. Next one up is hedgehog technologies. This is a company that's building a crypto-robobo advisor. raised $1.6 million from Dragonfly Capital. Then we have Inf Stones. I'm glad you got that one because I don't know how to say that one. So I guess it's sort of a portmanteau of Infinity Stones, which is a Marvel reference in case you're wondering.

I did not know that. So Inf Stones, which is apparently blockchain infrastructure company, raised 10 million in a series A from, from Quay. Quiming, Ventures, DHVC, Hachy, and others. Next one up is X-Rex. This is a Taiwanese trading technology company. They raised $17 million in a round led by CDIB Capital. Then we have Maker's Place, which is an NFT marketplace.

They raised $30 million from Bessemer, Pantara, Uncork, Coinbase, Ventures, and others. Now, staying on that tokenization and NFT theme, Royal, which is a music tokenization platform, It's started by Justin Blow, who goes by Bilau, also written Threlau, which is one that I've gotten wrong on this podcast before and gotten some feedback on, but I said it wrong. So DJ Blow raised $16 million from Paradigm and Founders Fund. Yeah, this is a journey of knowledge acquisition, especially in terms of how to pronounce some of these strange names. I mean, nothing's going to make you feel like a boomer more than to just. completely mispronounce someone's name and just realize that they're just enormous in the pop culture and you had no idea well it's kind of like dead mouse um is it dead mouse five or is a dead mouse

yeah that was another one that luckily we didn't have a podcast for me to botch that one but at the time i was botching it pretty heavily the some of these musician names with numbers in them i mean who can say really um lastly we have euler a define lining platform they raised eight million from Paradigm, Lemnus Cap, and others. Well, let's get in some deals of the week. So we are, let's just kind of hit on this again. So Visa buys the Cryptopunk. Budweiser purchases beer.

For 30 E. So it's like $96,000. They bought the Rocket one as well. Are we going to start to have this domain name bidding war here? I mean, is Sailor out there just quietly buying up domain names, you think, right now? This is what he did during Web 1.0. sailor did buy so many domains he sold voice to yeah um block one that's right that's right i wonder if he's active the interesting thing is

that there's you know in web 1.0 there was sort of one like venue for domain names which was you know i guess dot com was sort of the most popular and then you you sort of didn't have that many different sort of vintages of domains in in web 3.0 you could buy the dot eths or you could buy handshake names or there's sort of a half dozen other name spaces out there so it's not it's not just a bet on the domain name it's also a bet on the bet you have to bet on the namespace it's becoming popular whereas there was no question that you know sort of dot com would be important or whatever. It was a fan of the pod, a brinker, if you will,

Ty Danco in Boston, who has been really ahead of the game on this Ethereum, the dot-eath addresses. I remember when this first rolled out, we were at a meetup in Boston, he said, this is going to be a big thing. You're going to want to go buy a bunch of dot-eats right now. And I wish I owned beer.eath. Well, I looked to see if nick Carter.eath was owned, and it is very much owned by someone that is not me.

So basically someone is squatting on my name, which I find to be a little rude. So if you could just give it to me, that would be great. Thank you. Well, here's what we're going to offer. If you own nick carter.dath, do you want the nick underscore underscore carter. Dot Heath or just the Nick Carter.

That's no, I don't like the underscores. That's also because the name space squatting. I want my real Twitter name too. while we're at it. Well, so if you own Nick Carter.eath and you can prove it, then you can come on the podcast. And we're going to offer you five minutes on the podcast. We're going to ask you

a couple questions. Why did you buy it? What was the rationale? And, you know, in lieu of a payment, maybe that is sufficient. I mean, I get the feeling that I'm going to be taken to the cleaners on this thing. I might have to give up

all my profits from my color glyph to acquire this, this premium property, which shouldn't be relevant to anyone else. I mean, it's my name. Noted Ethereum skeptic Nick Carter to own that namespace, come on. Yeah, that's worth a lot. I mean, really some Dow should probably crowd fund it just for the PR benefit. But yeah, so whoever you are, if you're listening on the off chance here, a Brink Nationer, I'd like it. Thank you. All right, so let's move on with some news here. So FTX, which is, of course, the Antigua-based cryptocurrency exchange.

They have signed a $17.5 million deal. They will be sponsoring the UC Berkeley Athletic Department. That's pretty cool. But, like, why UC Berkeley? Sam have some affiliation there? Isn't Alameda city in California near Berkeley? Yeah, maybe there's some personal tie there. So he might be from there.

His parents work there maybe? FTX. I now live in a certain city in South Florida, and FTX paraphernalia is just emblazoned throughout the town. I can't go anywhere without seeing their logo. I mean, obviously the stadium, but it's just everywhere. The idea of sponsoring colleges and college athletic departments, that's a good idea. There's a lot of new crypto folks coming out of colleges.

That's right. FTCS, it's sponsored Babs in college. It's some up-and-coming crypto traders there. They got a crypto club. There we go. So Microstrategy somehow bought some more Bitcoin.

I didn't think it was possible. They're really squeezing all the pips out of the lemon here. I think they sold, they disposed of some asset. Like, was it their ATM business or something? I think he was, he sold a a box full of staplers and bought more Bitcoin.

So they found something, the family silvered hawk and managed to buy more Bitcoin that takes their tally to 108,000 Bitcoin. I remember thinking they would never get over 100K. And here we are. But I also thought it would be nice, you know, nice to stop at 100K. It'd be a nice round number. It's like, yeah, the threat now is that what if it just buys all the Bitcoins. That is a genuine possibility. So here's some interesting stablecoin news. Actually, there's a lot of stablecoin stuff to talk about, I think.

Paxos rebranded their PAC stable coin to Pax dollar, USDP. I kind of like this. If nothing else, just for optics, it makes you think that it's a dollar. Right. So Paxos, I remember issuing some pretty critical comment. on Circles disclosures or rather centers regarding USDC saying PACs dollars are backed by short-term treasuries which are effectively dollars not exactly the same thing but close enough whereas the they had some you know pretty critical things to say about circles mix of collateral

their asset mix and then now circle has maybe in response to that or or response to pressure from policymakers, they've also announced their decision to move towards a less risky portfolio of assets and effectively back their stable coin with Treasury's short term. Yeah. So I think this is worth spending a little bit of time on. So my guess is it's not in response to Paxos coming out and, you know, Paxos had that pretty aggressive blog post pointing out that their stable coin was backed, as you say, by cash and short-term treasuries, whereas the USDC version had commercial paper in there. I guess the question is, is this a response to the recent Gensler, saber-rattling that decentralized and centralized and centralized stable coins could be at risk

for being securities? And the read between the lines was, if you're a centralized stable coin and the basket is composed of securities, if there are securities in that basket, it's a commercial paper. I mean, this is, you know, you'd be buying a security. Does that make the stable coin itself a security? So I guess my my hunch here is that they just believe that moving this to 100% cash and short-term treasuries makes this less of an issue in the eyes of the SEC potentially. Well, I will point out that treasuries are also securities. They are in- They have Q-SIPP, right? So, yeah. I mean, I don't actually find the securities, non-securities, you know, distinction to be useful here at all. I mean, I did, you know, try and point out that

if you looked through the lens of Howie, that stable coins obviously don't pass Howie and, you know, but as it turns out, a number of sort of crypto lawyers weighed in, there's other tests for securities aside from just Howie. So I guess in two months' time, we're all going to know all the other Supreme Court decisions that pertain to other genres of securities. So our legal education continues. The kind of second order effect here that I think is going to be interesting to see is that this puts a little bit of pressure on the circle business model, I'd say. So we had this conversation last week around, you know, you can make a lot more money on

a stable coin if you're investing it higher, you know, further out the risk curve, so to speak. And so the yield on cash and short-term treasuries is less, obviously. And so, you know, luckily Circle has a diversified business model, and there's other things that they're charging for, API services. They have interest-bearing accounts on dollars and things like that. So it's just interesting to see how this will affect the various stable-coin issuers if we move to a regime that is pretty much just short-term treasuries and cash in terms of the big stable-coin platforms.

Yeah, I mean, I'll be more blunt. If this becomes the de facto or de jure standard, if a law is passed requiring that stable coins operate like this, you will not be profitable as a stable coin issuer. There won't be a business model there under this interest rate regime, which is not going to change anytime soon. It's not like we're going to get Paul Volker who's going to hike interest rates to 20%. So you can't make money as a stable coin issuer.

And so as we said last week, that probably has a chilling effect on the vibrancy of the stable coin space. And it probably benefits the largest issuers that can just do it as a small piece of their business. Well, so it's, yeah, I mean, it's said another way. It's like you can't do this as a standalone business in the same way that a bank can't do checking accounts as a standalone business. It just doesn't make any sense. So what's going to happen is that you're going to either see some of these stable coin issuers fall off the map or they're going to try to become banks and diversify their. But banks are allowed to hold, you know, longer maturity.

I mean, 30-year mortgages, right? Like, banks have this, you know, enormous maturity. That's what they do. They do maturity transformation. Now this emerging standard for stable coins is, even though they're, bank like they're not allowed to do maturity transformation or, you know, any kind of, you know, risk transfer. So I find it curious that stable coin critics are sort of, they accept the bank business model, but they're sort of Ross Bardian, you know, when it comes to stable coins,

you know, it has to be full reserve every, has to be 100% liquid, you know, at any, like, that's just, you know, that's, I don't know, it, it doesn't seem to comport with the way of things that actually work, you know, in financial services. Yeah, that's a great point. So we'll see how this unfolds. It'll be interesting to see what, if any, impact this has on the market. So substack is now accepting Bitcoin payments. I actually pitched an idea to substack recently because one of their product people got in touch. I told them, and if they do this, I just want to say it now so that I get credit for if they do it, they should become. a physical publishing house.

Like they should get into the business of publishing physical books. Oh, so this is like Amazon opening up stores. Everything just comes full circle. Exactly. So they should circle back to physical publishing because they have a great brand. They have a bunch of good writers. They have a lot of data on, you know, who likes whom and which writers are like who would be successful and they have really high granularity data.

And so, you know, I don't think it would be that difficult for them. create a substack branded publishing house and compete with these legacy names that no one cares about. You know, I mean, what zoomers or millennials care about random house books or Penguin or like Oxford University Press or what, you know, come on. Like no one cares about the old legacy publishing names. And the process of getting a book published is incredibly Byzantine and complex. So substack should just offer to its top 1%. newsletter writers that they should offer them book deals, basically. So basically you're saying, hey, substack, you're in this 95% gross margin

business. You should definitely move over to this 10% gross margin business here. Yes. Have they got back to you on that? That's a really great idea. Yeah, they didn't seem to have a ton of appetite for it. But who knows? I don't know.

Maybe it could be a loss leader. it's just a reminder you know like having a book on your bookshelf is a very physical reminder that this company exists well yeah I am a big fan of the physical books all right let's workshop that idea a little bit more so yeah moving on here so the founder of BitStamp

is suing the company and its new owners over the treatment of his remaining shares looks like a little squabble around what the share price is for BitStamp which, you know, it's got to be a pretty valuable company. It's a private company and exchanges are taken off, so we'll keep an eye on this one. Yeah, Bit Stamp is, I believe, the longest continually operating crypto exchange. I think they've been in operational for nine years since 2012. Yeah, they're very early along with BitFinex.

That's the longest track record of any currently active exchange. That's got to be worth something. It's definitely worth something. Speaking of exchanges, the UK's FCA has said that they're, quote, not capable of supervising finance. No surprise. I mean, who is capable of supervising finance at this point? That's got to sound pretty good, I guess, of your finance for probably what, the third most

important financial regulator in the world to say they do not have the ability to regulate you. Yeah. I there really no one has the ability to regulate that it's unclear where Binance is there's a lot of questions there I mean in theory there are servers somewhere on earth there must be you know so it's kind of like the Pirate Bay you know like they had servers so at the end of the day if you're if you know there's a bunch of Binance smart chain servers or you know just regular core infrastructure running. That is based somewhere.

Yeah. I don't know. I mean, maybe there's a gray swan we've been discussing with Binance, somehow getting taken offline. Maybe they've just transcended the notion of nation states and, you know, the corporeal world. Maybe they are, you know, supreme.

Well, Blackstream had that satellite. Maybe Binance has just got those servers up on a satellite somewhere. They're not actually in a country. That would be true. Or if they had them in Antarctica, then legally, you know, they couldn't be seized, I suppose. You know, maybe they're just out on the open ocean. They're on a whaling vessel. It's possible.

There's some new interstate arbitrage. So you had an interesting article this week for CoinDesk on the recent OnlyFans episode. here. So let's talk a little bit about this. For those of you who are not familiar, why don't you tee up what happened with OnlyFans? Well, Only fans said that they would be pivoting away from sexual and explicit content on the platform, which doesn't make any sense because their whole, you know, raison d'etra was sexual content. They had some like 130 million subscribers and over a million creators, I suppose they're called, euphemistically. And so it didn't make any sense for them to effectively ban explicit content on the platform.

They did say that they would continue to allow tasteful nude pictures. So not fully puritanical, but basically cutting out the core of the business model. Then they sort of reversed themselves and said, okay, we're not going to do that actually and continue to you know share your explicit pictures and things like that so what was most interesting about this to me was that Tim Stokely the founder said that the banks forced them in particular B&Y Mellon which was a large intermediary between their clients and the creators. So apparently this guidance was handed down directly from the banks.

And this, you know, this was surprising perhaps to some people who thought, okay, why do the banks care? Why would a bank have opinions about this stuff? But also really not surprising to a lot of people that have actually followed this stuff because banks and payment processors have been excluding sex workers from internet financial infrastructure. since around 2012, 2013, on a pretty on and off basis, but pretty consistently, if you were a sex worker, you could expect to get your account shut down on all of these platforms, basically. And so I wrote an article saying, you know, explaining the history of financial exclusion, which really traces to state mandates.

And, you know, the most infamous example of this, we did a mini series on this show. We did a great episode with Ian Murray, who's one of the key historians of this thing. There's an operation called chokepoint hatching around 2012, where the DOJ and then the FDIC basically got together and said, okay, well, we're going to chase away these high risk payment processors that have high fraud rates and service these pretty scammy industries, like payday lending was a key target. And the way we're going to do that is we're going to tell banks. that we're going to issue expensive subpoenas and investigations into them if they don't persuade these payment processors to cut off these industries.

So the chain of command is government banks, payment processors, and then categories of commercial activity. So it's kind of a three-step thing. And that was sort of all well-in-goat, but then the scope immediately ballooned out of control. And so by 2014, sex workers, were getting kicked off these payment processors. That was actually, they were the canary in the coal mine, believe it or not. That was where most people found out that this was happening.

And there came to be 30 categories of commercial activity that the FDIC said were, you know, liable to get you investigated as a payment processor. And so this wasn't a legal ban, right, because the First Amendment prohibits that. basically prohibits the government saying you can't engage in this form of otherwise legal business. But it was a de facto ban on these industries because these agencies were telling banks that the agencies regulate the banks, so they effectively control them. You can't really support these industries. So it was this kind of sinister informal thing. And that was the problem was because it was done in an extra legal way. It was done sort of outside the scope of the law. And it was

also pretty random the industries they selected like the big ones that people are mad about are firearms manufacturing uh fireworks but you also had uh you know credit repair services obviously adult content um you know all sorts of stuff um some of which was you know probably illegal some which was not illegal at least in many states um and you know eventually sort of in around in 2017 there was a congressional bill pass, which prohibited this. And then under the Trump OCC, they passed a fair access rule under Brian Brooks saying, well, actually, you know, banks have to be egalitarian in terms of the industries they provide services to. But the new OCC rolled back that rule and banks have also been very political in the last year or two. So choke point is gone in terms of, you know,

an explicit operation, but it is now that guidance has just been internalized by banks. And apparently, they're still going after your sex workers. And so the point of this column is you can sort of, you might, you know, be in favor of financial censorship if it sort of disempowers your political adversaries. But the problem is, is that once put into place, that machinery, you know, is likely to be used indiscriminately. And also, if you lose control of the government, then now this machinery of censorship can be used by the other side. So, you know, regardless of your political affiliation, it's probably good idea to oppose this stuff. And so obviously this just screams out for the need

for a neutral payment infrastructure that anyone can use. And so what is your, what is your diagnosis of where we stand in terms of people's willingness to use a neutral payment infrastructure? for these type of things and just where the market is from a readiness standpoint from a UI perspective. Well, I think the adult industry has been embracing crypto. It fits and starts, you know, with certain payment coins, but it didn't make sense to use volatile coins for payments. I think we'll see stable coins adopted for payments on these platforms or to adult entertainers. So I think that will be pretty normalized within the next year. Aside from that, I haven't seen really any payment processors emerged that strictly used

something like stable coins to service high-risk businesses. That's the euphemism that the FDIC uses to service these sort of politically exposed businesses. So there's a lot of work to be done there. But, you know, there's other stopgaps like Wikileaks was deplatformed in 2011. And they regained access to financial support through Bitcoin. SciHub, which is this great service, which provides, well, sort of black market academic journal articles, which, you know, I don't feel bad about using SciHub to read. journal articles because I'm just trying to access the world's scientific information. They accept Bitcoin donation. So, you know, we're sort of getting there, but there's sort of, I don't

know, I think there's a lot of work to be done. On the stable coin front, if we move to a regime, which is more regulated, more of these centralized stable coins that have, you know, they're operating under some sort of a bank charter, one could argue that this problem doesn't get addressed and that, yeah, you know, this is just, this is actually not a neutral. settlement infrastructure. Right. The more regulated you are than the more likely you are to be subjected to choke point 2.0. So that's another issue with stable coins getting bank charters is the depository insurance,

the FDIC, was one of the ways that the government was controlling the banks. And if you have that, you know, if the insurance is to have. to a political mandate, then you're going to have to internalize the mandate. So this is why, I think, ideally, stable coins would be more private, and they wouldn't be brought into the umbrella of the sort of PPP, the public-private partnership the banks operate as. But it seems like the political wins in Washington are pushing stable coins into being regulated or effectively saying,

if you aren't regulated as a bank, we won't let you exist. So I guess this may accentuate the need for a non-sovereign, you know, virtual currency to be used there. Or maybe people just start paying with NFTs, you know, it's cryptoglyphs. I mean, obviously this makes the case for, you know, truly decentralized cryptocurrencies, but also I would say for stable coins, which are more autonomous and are maybe issued against crypto collateral. Right. or even Eurodollar-style stable coins like Tether, for instance, where they're less accountable, at least currently.

Who knows what will happen? But, yeah, so there's a weird paradox where if stable coins are invented to increase financial inclusion, if they get brought under this bank charter umbrella, then they become beholden to the state. So I think that's all the news for the week. If you want more news, check out your appearance on The Best Business Show. that was a good one with Pomp and the Pomp brothers.

So the best business show I predict will be bigger than CMBC within 24 months by listeners. Wow. And probably before that, yeah. So that's a bold prediction. But I found out that CNBC doesn't get that many actual viewers. Really? You know this? No, I did not know that.

Like a few hundred thousand, maybe. So can the best business show catch it? I would argue yes. especially if they keep bringing on high caliber guests. So I was in studio with them yesterday and we rolled the fud dice and then our merch guy told us that our merch shop sales exploded. That was funny. The merch guy was just like, what is happening right now? It's the best business show effect, you know?

The best business show. So we actually did a merch exchange. So they gave me a hat which says Bitcoin 100,000, which is a great hat. I actually really like it. And I wore it around town yesterday. And people were like, yes, I hope that happened. I'm getting. I'm not kidding.

And I gave them prototype hats that we designed for our merch shop, which we have not sold yet. We're still workshopping them. They're almost ready. But let me tell you, the three pomp brothers loved the prototype hats. So we got some user feedback. Well, as you said, you know, you get it's a. hat that has Bitcoin, the American flag, and it has camouflage. That's a pretty good combination. Those are three of my favorite things. So we will make them available at some point, but we just

have an incredibly high standard for our merch. You got to get the fabric right. We've had a bad runs at this, I'd say. We've got to crooked. You know, you got to, I don't know what's going on with these supply chains. We've, we've had, I mean, as with the dice, we've had supply chain issues, even before the pandemic, we had supply chain issues. So if you know anyone that can make a really sweet hat, I guess, just get in touch. On the brink. Dot shop, we would love to figure something out. But it has to be at a reasonable price point, because we also care about Brink Nation. So we can't really charge too much. But rest assured, you'll be able to join the Palm Brothers soon with these great hats. It's my design. I mean, I'm not, yeah, it's not the most revelatory.

design. It's, I mean, it's just a Bitcoin B with some camouflage, so I wouldn't take too big of a victory lap necessarily. Well, so it's a U.S. flag, but instead of the stars, there's the Bitcoin B. It's very clever. I think they got a kick out of your having was priced in merch too. Yeah, that's that's a, that's a classic. But yes, I think our Fudd dice are very close to selling out. So just FYI. Yeah, we're not going to do another round of fud dice until more regulatory things happen in the next year or two. So that's the last one in the while.

So I was thinking for the V5 of the fud dice, we should go tungsten. What do you think? Tunston. People are loving the tungsten references. So I talked about tungsten cubes. I own some. I've given them as Christmas presents.

There's nothing better than just a big old fat cube, but tungsten, which is incredibly heavy, like, you know, deceptively heavy. And a lot of people, Demme, said they bought them too. So honestly, we should really be sponsored by Midwest tungsten, which is the manufacturer. So you can buy a four-inch tungsten cube right now on Amazon

for $3,000. That's a steel. It's pricey, but it's the metal with the highest melting, point of all the naturally occurring metals. So you're really getting some bang for your buck there. And so you're just storing value is the idea here. So I cannot believe these are on Amazon. So you can buy a one centimeter one for $20. That might be able. That's the entry level tungsten cube. It's a great gift because if you hand it to someone, they're just completely taken aback by the

weight. And by the gesture. They're taken aback by more than just the weight. So, I mean, there's not a lot you can actually do with it. Like, Well, Tungsten does have lots of industrial uses, but you know, you as a regular individual will not be able to utilize it for those things. But it is cool. So I think we should make our next run of Dice Tungsten, but that's going to be difficult because Tungsten is very hard to work with because it's so hard. What if you could have some sort of a – this wouldn't be the best OPSAC, but what if you could have some sort of a way to tie a private key to a bar of tungsten? I don't know if you would want to. I think it's somewhat brittle.

So that's why people do titanium for their or, well, a lot of people do aluminum, which isn't probably the best idea for their seeds. But I think stamping it on a more malleable yet high melting point metal is a good idea. So that was talking tungsten, this nice little trip down the periodic table of elements this morning. Another fun fact about tungsten, I mean, its density is almost identical to gold. Really? So why don't we value tungsten in the same way? Because gold is more chemically inert and hence stable and easier to work with. I mean, its melting point is so much lower.

So you can't actually smelt tungsten in the traditional way. The melting point is like 5,000 degrees Celsius. Wow. So gold, you know, can be smelted and, you know, manipulated. Tungsten can't really do much with it. Well, that's why you listen to this show. Good talk about tungsten. These chemical properties matter. So I think that's it for the week, everyone. Hope everyone has a safe and healthy weekend,

and we will see you on Monday.