On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 10/04/24 (CZ Free, Visa's stablecoin, Satoshi unveiled) (EP.566)

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

Matt and Nic return for another week of news and deals. In this episode: Monad Madness CZ is released from jail Roman Storm's motion to dismiss is denied Mango settles with the SEC Swift is piloting digital asset transactions Bitwise submits and S-1 for a Ripple ETF Visa announces their Tokenized Assets Platform Franklin moves to Aptos The SEC's Gurbir Grewal steps down Sponsor notes Coin Metrics, State of the Network's Q3 2024 Wrap-Up: A data-driven overview of events shaping crypto markets in Q3–2024 Withum's Digital Currency and Blockchain Technology Team specializes in crypto-assets, offering accounting, tax and advisory solutions to fortify trust in a dynamic industry. Contact them today to get started. - withum.com/crypto

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

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

round of quantitative easing. You 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. And this episode is brought to you by Witham. So if you listen to this show, you know that we take tax accounting and auditing very seriously. And when it comes to digital assets, building trust in relationships with your counterparties like custodians, brokerages, and even the regulators is critically important.

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Witham is passionate about helping you. They're passionate about the space. So head over to witham.com slash crypto to learn more. Well, this might be, we might be setting the record for the latest we've ever recorded this podcast. It is late. This is a grind, man. I don't know.

how you stayed up. Yeah. Yeah, well, I just don't sleep. But you're, you know, you're coming off of, what is this, a three-day Monad event here? The Monad people love them, as I do, have asked a lot of me this time. Well, it's great. They're putting you in front of a lot of startups, just three days in a row, huh? So I'm judging the Monad pitch competition, Monad Madness.

And there were 20 pitches today. 20. Love it. You know how much of an attention span you need to sit through? They were good pitches. They're very high quality. Yeah, so what's your view on the Monad ecosystem right now?

I think the state of the Monad ecosystem is very strong. So tomorrow's the next day. We advanced eight finalists. So stay tuned on that. It's very exciting companies in there, the Monad madness. But yeah, it's been a long day. I spoke at Columbia this morning as well.

That's my kind of semi-annual pilgrimage to Columbia. Oh, great program they have up there at Columbia. Yeah, I mean, you know, tent, what did they have on Columbia? They had a tent city or like some kind of protest. Does it still up there? No, no, no, I didn't see anything. But anyway, that notwithstanding, there's some great academics at Columbia for sure. And so I spoke in Omede's.

crypto, well, it was an MBA program. I spoke to the crypto people about Bitcoin. Last year, it caused a whole scandal. Do you remember that? I do. What did you have on that side? It was like the future of the fee market on Bitcoin. It was quite a stir. Yeah, I was talking about, like, potential solutions to the security budget on Bitcoin caused, like, huge problems. Yeah, people didn't want to hear your thoughts on that. They thought I was corrupting the minds of the impressionable youths. And so, of course, I talked about the same thing again this year. What are the hot topics?

What are people asking in the Q&A? They asked about CryptoVC. Like, a lot of them want to be venture capitalists. I didn't have the hard to tell them, you know, what it's like. It involves recording podcasts at 10.30 in the evening. Yeah, you got to grind. I mean, you can't be a CryptoVC if you don't have a podcast, right? I mean, we've done this podcast for how long, five years.

Yeah, five years. I can't believe that, first of all. And then we've missed one week ever. Is that it? We've missed one week ever, but we actually recorded that week. We just forgot to upload it. We did not upload it. This is the last tape.

So, like, I'm amazed, I'm impressed at what we've done here. I don't know how the heck we did that. Well, the fact of the matter is you'd have to find two people that just don't take vacations. And I guess that's kind of what the situation is. We don't. We religiously do not take vacations. Luckily, we haven't enforced that as a corporate policy. Yeah, now that we've grown as a firm, we have to honor federal holidays.

I've never heard of half of these holidays. Yeah, there's new ones popping up left and right. Yeah. But so we adhere to those. We followed the law at this firm, to be clear. We do follow the law. We do. Well, speaking of Monad, we had a Monad focused podcast this week with Stephen from Kinsu.

Probably first of many. I really enjoy this Monad ecosystem that's developing here. We had a busy week of content. I just published something in CoinDesk about Silvergate, unsurprisingly. That was good. It was kind of like a rehash. Much shorter version of the very long article I published last week. So read that.

And it looks like... I'll leave 10 minutes. Looks like your token addresses, token 249 keynote is finally out there as well. So we'll put that in our newsletter. Yeah, that was, you know, here's the trick to being relaxed during a keynote speech.

Do you want to know the trick? Yes. The trick is to learn how to fight, first of all, and then do that, go into the ring, fight. And then after that, nothing is scary anymore. Yeah, so no butterflies whatsoever. No, I was so relaxed because it's like I remembered how bad it was, how scared I was when I walked into the ring.

And I'm like, well, this isn't remotely as bad. All I have to do is stand up and give a speech. Yeah, I could see that working. But you've never really been nervous giving speeches before. I was nervous. I was always nervous. Really? But I feel like I did a good job, but I was always super nervous.

now on a go-forward basis, no butterflies. Isn't that crazy? It fixed me. That's good. It's good. Yeah. So it's advice, which works, but I don't know if anybody's going to want to follow that.

Yeah, that's tough to follow. You could also just join. What is the club that is in like every city? Toastmasters. You could join the Toastmasters. Yeah, there's probably like other ways to get over your fear of public speaking that involve less physical pain. Take MBA courses on public speaking.

There's other. stuff you can do besides karate combat yes those simpler ways uh not a lot of deals this week plenty of news though yeah a couple deals here uh matrix port uh the crypto financial services platform they acquired crypto finance a g which is a swiss asset manager then we have already technologies a web three financial infrastructure provider there is eight million from hongshan hive mind and optos labs then it's mesh map this is a decentralized protocol for mapping i kind of like this idea we've seen a bunch of these over the years. They raised 4 million from A16Z Crypto Coliseum Latus in EV3. That's the escape velocity team. The mapping thing is very intriguing to me.

Are you believer in the decentralized mapping? It kind of depends on the model. I mean, historically speaking, I think the role of the token has been what has kind of limited the adoption here for a bunch of these platforms because the token itself, has security-like properties in some of the designs I've seen. Well, we'll keep you updated on mesh map. Next one up we have is mine network. They're an encryption-focused blockchain. They raise 10 million from Anamoka brands,

arxtream capital, and cogitent ventures. And the last one is second live. This is a social Metaverse platform that raised 12 million from crypto.com, spark digital capital, cipher capital, and others. So not a crazy, busy deal week this week. But a lot of news. And before we jump into the news, let's do the metrics minute brought to you by coin metrics. Today we're looking at quarterly update on crypto markets.

As of Q3, Bitcoin has risen 54% year to date, while Eath is only up 15%. The best two performing assets in Q3 were Suey and Ave, among assets with the market cap greater than $1 billion. Bitcoin saw bouts of volatility. this quarter, the realized volatility briefly exceeding 200% in August, the highest since FTX's collapse in November 22. Bitcoin's 2% order booked up expanded 250 million up from 50 to 100 million earlier this year. With a slight uptick in total network activity fees on Ethereum rose from a low of 370th in August to 2,500th daily trending towards deflation. since the custodial transition of WBTC from BCO

350 million in WBDC remains locked in Maker now known as the sky ecosystem while AVE recorded an all-time high of 2.2 billion in WBTC supplied as users migrate assets that's your metrics minute all right pretty good metrics minute there so a lot of news I mean Bitcoin is trading like there's going to be a war in the Middle East I would say

well I think there is a war in the Middle East I guess yeah not a declared one but I suppose you're right so Bitcoin sold off this week on a lot of unrest I would say we also have a port strike which is now over I don't know if you saw that while you're at dinner so you were worried about the port I wasn't worried for the record and then the guy in charge of this thing ended up being some kind of gangster guy so like We're not that sympathetic, I guess, of the longshore men anymore. Well, they got, like, what was the subtle? They got a 60 plus percent pay increase. So I guess that guy did his job. But I wouldn't want to mess with that guy. They got their concession. No, they didn't get the, I think they asked for 70-something, but they got 60-something.

The original offer is the guy who's in charge is like the most unsympathetic labor leader of all time. Like he's wearing like a big old Rolex and he. as a Bentley and lives in a gigantic mansion. It's just not like your typical, like, working class guy. Yeah, but if you were a longshoreman, that's probably the guy you'd want representing you. Well, you want the mafioso. Like, you want a guy that's, like, really good at cutting deals, I guess.

I guess, well, they got a great deal. Yeah. Now I have a, basically I have a CVS pharmacy full of pamperes and wipes at my house right now. So I'm pretty stocked. So the longshoreman crisis didn't come to pass. I mean, are we more or less sympathetic to the longshoremen post this crisis? Well, I mean, it sort of highlights the fact that this is a pretty fragile system when you really go deep. And you'd have to think that some of these people that own these ports might be thinking about automation at some point in the future.

I know. I feel like this whole thing backfired. Yeah. I mean, like I don't want to be held hostage. Let's go build a bunch of. automation stuff here because this can't really be happening. So first big piece of news, CZ, Mr. CZ has been released from prison on Friday. He served four months.

That sentence followed a guilty plea of charges of failing to enforce anti-money laundering policies. He was fine 50 million, which I think he can afford and Binance itself paid $4.3 billion. and he is a free man. So he got off pretty good here, I would say, all things considered, just given everything that was going on and all of the ways this could have gone, I think he would take that deal any day. Yeah, I mean, typically as an executive of a financial institution,

you'd not go to jail for BSA violations, so I still think he was hard done by, frankly. Yeah, there's not a lot of bank executives that have ever gone to jail over BSA violations. No, but he's out. now. So will he return to crypto? We don't know. Time will tell. I'd love to see his next chapter. I mean, he's going to be what top 50 richest people in the world right now. So it'll be really interesting to see where he decides to spend his time. Next up in similar litigation news, not as happy. Roman Storm, the tornado cash co-founder, is set to face trial for alleged

money laundering charges. A U.S. judge rejected his motion to dismiss. So it's kind of not trending well for Roman over at Tornado Cash. Yeah. I mean, I guess now we're going to have a trial. It'll be really interesting to see the kind of the First Amendment points that get brought up at that trial around the relationship between code and free speech and whether or not the protocol development is basically just a free speech expression. I'd have to refresh me. myself on the way that tornado cash worked. I mean, there was some sort of a fee element with the token. So I don't know, he did make some money off it, as I recall. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. That's right. I think the tokens value in some way was related to the usage of the system.

I think that's going to be a tough one, actually, for the crypto space. Yeah. All right, another enforcement action here, Mango Labs and the Mango Dow, which I guess were the governing entities behind this mango markets, which was exploited by Avi Eisenberg, they have settled with the SEC for $700,000. They've agreed to destroy the remaining mango tokens, which the SEC said was an unregistered securities offering. So it's about two years of turmoil here. They had, what was that hack? It was like $115, $116 million. Any surprises in this one for you? No, I don't think so. I mean, The SEC kind of went scorch earth on them, but not that surprising at the end of the day, kind of tough end for Mango.

So a lot of SEC related things this week. So Bitwise, which is, of course, one of our portfolio companies, asset management firm, they submitted an S1 earlier in the week for a ripple ETF. And then a couple of days later, I guess it was yesterday, the SEC filed an appeal to the XRP case. So they are protesting. They said they're not done fighting this, which how much money has been wasted on this case? It's just staggering. The U.S. government has spent so much money on this.

But they're not done, so they're going to appeal this. Not that surprising that the SEC appealed it. I mean, it was a kind of very surprising decision from, I guess, Judge Torres, was it, that the secondary sales of XRP were not securities, which other courts. courts kind of disagreed with. So it looks like they're sort of digging in their heels on that one. So they're digging in their heels, but earlier that day, Gerbier-Griwal, the director of enforcement at the SEC announced that he is stepping down in like nine days. That to me was very surprising. Usually when there's someone stepping down that senior, there's a longer

transition period. I wonder what happened there. Yeah, he was kind of the star of the show over there. he presided a lot of those over a lot of those SEC enforcement. It seems very abrupt, actually. I'm sure there's a story there that's not being told because it's a little bit surprising. Now, do you think it has anything to do with the House Financial Services hearing last week when all five commissioners were up there and Emma berated Gensler for not having any senior leaders

take the fall for debt box? I guess we don't know. very swift change of leadership over there. I thought this was interesting news. Swift, of course, I don't even know how to describe Swift, the messaging layer really for global payments. They announced that banks using their networks will be able to trial digital asset transactions in 2025.

Do you think that this is going to involve the public blockchain or is this just going to be kind of one of those private blockchain pilots? I mean, this could definitely be a private blockchain. but I don't really get this because Swift is just the messaging layer. So they don't actually send the assets themselves. They send instructions on how to move the assets. So, you know, if you're a bank and you're using this for digital asset transactions, wouldn't you have to have a way to hold digital assets in the first place?

None of the U.S. banks are actually holding any, like what asset are you actually moving here. Yeah, U.S. banks are still basically prohibited from touching crypto meaningfully. Is this just going to be for offshore? There certainly are a lot of offshore banks that touch crypto, but onshore banks are basically not allowed to do anything with crypto. I mean, could this be a proof of concept where you hit a couple buttons on the machine and, hey, we just moved a digital asset? It's a fork of Bitcoin and we just moved to Satoshi or something, like, I guess. But I would think that you'd actually have to have the infrastructure built out around custody for this to actually matter. Yeah, I mean, I guess why do you even need?

need SWIFT. Why do you need SWIFT for digital assets? Well, I think there's a, there's a role for SWIFT to play, because digital assets do settlement. But if you look at traditional payments, there's the messaging and the settlement. It could certainly help to have a messaging layer for crypto. I think that would actually augment the system. I mean, I think that's what like Noda Bena is doing on the travel compliance side. I don't really, I don't know. I think the role of Swift going forward, at least for digital asset transactions, is very questionable. I'm interested. We'll see what they come up with here. We're going to keep monitoring this story. Let's talk about stablecoin developments. Visa announced the Visa tokenized asset platform, VTAP, which is a platform for institutions to issue and

manage digital assets, including stablecoins. They also announced that the Spanish Bank, BBVA is going to launch their own stable coin in 2025 using Visa's platform. So talking about banks not doing anything in the U.S., here's a Spanish bank that is launching their own stable coin. Yeah, it's pretty remarkable. You know, look at banks like SOSGen or standard chartered or BBVA or Nomura, all actively getting involved in public blockchains. where the stable coins are tokenized securities or something else.

U.S. banks are just nowhere on this. Clearly there's an appetite among the banks to use crypto. And we knew the visa was interested. Of course, they worked with us on the stable coin report. It just so clearly shows how much regulatory issues in this country have held back the banks because there's such clear appetite for banks to touch crypto overseas. Yeah, well, this is great. Obviously, Visa has a huge business internationally. This kind of puts them, would you say this puts them in kind of the Paxos competitive category at this point?

Yeah, I didn't realize Visa would get into the stable coin issuance business, but why not? I mean, they've been very vocal on stable coins for a long time, and it's a good line of work if it works. You know, there's huge opportunities to monetize the float if you are a successful stable coin issuer. Yeah. I mean, I guess they have the network. And so they don't have to actually be the underlying sponsor of the stable coin. But just use the visa technology. The distribution there is incredible.

You'd have to think that MasterCard and Amex would be thinking about this too. For sure. Also on the asset management side, Franklin Templeton extended support for their tokenized money market fund. Fob excess to the Aptos blockchain. So their tokenized funds is the second largest on the market behind BlackRock's Biddle is also available on Arbitrum, Stellar, Polygon, and Avalanche. So really interesting moves from Franklin Tumbledon, one of the most crypto-native asset managers out there. We were talking about this with another investment group this week just around the adoption of stable coins on Stellar. And that remains really high.

kind of surprising how popular stellar is for stablecoins. Yeah, that's right. It's kind of like a sleeper blockchain on the state. They don't make a lot of noise about it, but there's secretly a lot of stable coin transactions on Stellar. Why do you think that is? Just kind of a first mover type of thing? Yeah, I think their go-to-market's been quite good on stablecoins.

I think they had a very deliberate positioning towards the stable coin space and have quietly amassed, you know, reasonable market share. What do you think Jed McCaleb's up to? Is he still involved in Stellar? No, I don't think so. So he did, you know, he went from Bitcoin. He was an OG Bitcoin person. Then he invented Ripple and then he left and then he invented Stellar.

Was it Jed that built this big surveillance network in San Francisco or was that one of the, was that like Chris Larson? There's like someone in the ripple. I think that's Chris. Chris, of stuff. You got a lot of negative headlines for building this big, like, private surveillance network in SF. Yeah. Yeah, that was Chris Larsen. Yeah. Well, do you think this HBO documentary on what's it called revealing Satoshi? Do I have to get HBO again for this? I mean, I'm curious. Do you think it's a lab leak hypothesis? That's my guess. It's the big one lab leak. People

online are saying it's Len Sassman. Oh, but I feel like we already looked at Len and decided it wasn't him. Yeah, but that doesn't mean that these reporters who spent probably like two months of their lives looking at it came to the same conclusion. Yeah, I mean, like some of the circumstantial stuff around Len makes sense, like he died, right?

Like he was immortalized in Bitcoin and that's when someone put the Askey Bernankei in the blockchain, I think, to memorialize him right in 2011 that's exactly right yeah that's that's right and once he died satoshi stopped posting yeah that so the timing lines up there's also some so he was living in i think like belgium and this was people think that satoshi had some european qualities in terms of the syntax zone or certainly the way that he yeah he used british english half the time british english it's obviously like the original timestamp was the the london newspaper right so uh and then

some of the time stamps around saying this happened yesterday would only make sense if you're in europe yeah i i soon remember the evidence against it being len and i'm going to have to look at this again is len himself publicly said he didn't like bitcoin a few times but that could have been misdirection for sure totally totally and he worked with hal finney he worked with he worked with a bunch of these guys. He was roommates with Bram Cohen, who was also really early on the mailing list. I think he had the chops. Oh, for sure. He had the chops. Yeah, for sure. And if you're going to dock Satoshi, it's probably best that it's someone that is deceased because, I mean, it's probably not good to dox atoshi one way or the other. It's probably bad for their family,

you know, that happened to Hal Finney, of course. But it's probably for the best if it is someone that's dead because they're not going to get extorted. Well, yeah, they're not going to get extorted. But there was that blog post that's, I forget who wrote it. It was a few years ago talking about this theory that it was Len Sassman. And then people started reaching out to his family. And I think there was like a reply from the family that the laptop was encrypted so we can't even get access to it.

But someone's like you'd worry about personal safety, someone trying to go get that laptop. Yeah, without a doubt. anybody that's connected to him, it's just not going to be a good time if the documentary says it's him for sure. But from the perspective of Bitcoin, the asset, I mean, it's good that it's not someone that's alive, I suppose. Yeah, because like you kind of just like don't want Satoshi to come back and sell the coins

or disavow Bitcoin, you know, selfishly. It's kind of best that Satoshi stays in the past. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. We have no, we don't know what Satoshi's views on, you know, all of the hot button political issues are. And I think it's probably going to ask. Like, I don't know if we want to find out what Satoshi thought about contemporary political issues. Right. Or anything for that matter. It's like, yeah, you want to find out that Satoshi's like a Yankees fan. Like, I don't want to find that out. Yeah. I don't know if I want to know mundane details about the life of Statois. Satoshi should be a mythical figure for this. sake of the Bitcoin mystique. But it's, yeah, so it looks like they have Adam back in this documentary. Well, do you know when it comes out? Yes, next week. Oh, wow.

Okay. I mean, look, the last time the MSM thought they had Satoshi Newsweek kind of got that one wrong. Dorian Nakamoto. Like in 2014. Was that 2014? Yeah, Dorian Nakamoto. Poor guy. They got that horrendously wrong.

Yeah, that really, that was a tough break for that guy. You don't hear about new Satoshi's every day. So I'm curious what they found. So I'd be shocked if they proposed the lab leak theory, which I think has a, I don't know, somewhere north of a 30% chance of being the true story. Yeah, so if you're not familiar, the lab leak theory, which is like total supposition, it's not really based on any fact pattern or anything, is the idea that the U.S. government invented Bitcoin as a secret project. And then the government didn't authorize the

dissemination of Bitcoin the protocol, but some technician or cryptographer working at the NSA, it was like, oh, this thing's too good to keep on the shelf. Let me just release it into the wild. I think that's a, I think that'd be great for Bitcoin, actually. So I have a derivation. I have a derivation on the lab leak theory. I don't know if you've got, we might have talked about this. tell me. I think that has a decent chance being true. I don't think it's north of 50%, but I think that has a decent chance of being true. But I don't think that it was necessarily a rogue employee that just did it on their own. I think if that were to be true, then someone in the U.S. government still has the keys and just waiting for Bitcoin to hit mass scale so that

the U.S. can actually recalibrate its monetary system from position of strength. So that would actually be, it kind of depends on who is in charge when the Bitcoin, let's say that the government does have the Bitcoins. It depends who's in charge, right? So like if it's Trump, he did say he would create the reserve. I don't think that this is like a presidential thing. I think this is like some rogue CIA person that it thinks that they have the best interest of the country at heart. if the U.S. government invented Bitcoin and then held on to 10% of the Bitcoin, 2 million Bitcoins for 15 years

as it monetized and became this trillion dollar asset, that would just be one of the wildest stories of all time. Oh, it would be better than the Louisiana purchase in terms of a chess move. Right. And I think we did the math a while back, like the amount of Bitcoin that the U.S. government would have to have to match the amount of gold that they have, relatively speaking. I think the U.S. has like 3.8% of all the above ground gold. So if they did it this way, they'd end up with more Bitcoin proportionally than they have gold.

It would be an incredibly powerful maneuver if they're able to pull it off. Yeah. I mean, we're in late night rambling territory now here, but do you remember the Winklevoss twins? One of them wrote this Reddit post that was expunged, talking about mining gold on asteroids. Yeah, when they were pitching Dave Portnoy on Bitcoin, that was what they opened with. They actually brought it up then, yeah. It wasn't like the last thing that meant, it was the first thing that mentioned. Dave Portner was like, what is going?

Like, he was like so confused by this, but their whole thesis was, we're going to, we're going to lassoe a bunch of asteroids and mine the gold from them. it's going to devalue the gold, and so we're going to need Bitcoin at that point. Yeah, we're going to send Bruce Willis and the whole gang from Armageddon. Ben Affleck's going to go up there and just going to start drilling for the cold on asteroids. The crazy thing is I kind of believe it. We probably will have the technology to nod an asteroid in our direction at one point, and it will provide us with trillions of dollars of gold.

I do believe that. Well, so my reason for bringing it up is if we're giving so, we're getting a lot of credit to the U.S. government, on this Bitcoin theory here. But, you know, if they're really that good, can we just get up on one of those asteroids and just start getting some gold out of them? Like, what's taking so long with that?

I think it's technically quite complex to marshal an asteroid and coax it into dropping its gold reserves on us, specifically. I mean, I'm not saying you send, like, the Boeing plane up there, but can we send, like, a SpaceX plane up there? And, you know, like, maybe Elon could do it. Yeah, I think Elon could do it. Yeah, I think Elon.

I know if the public sector can do it. Let's maybe put Mars on hold for a couple of years and just go mine a few asteroids. Because if you do that, it solves the debt problem overnight. It really does. Like, people are talking about this debt thing. Like, it's something we can actually fix. It's like, all right, we're going to devalue the currency or we're going to go find a bunch of gold in Greenland and take over Greenland. I mean, there's pretty limited options here.

Yeah, there's in other ways. We find a space rock. Right. we somehow gravitationally persuade it to make its way in our direction. And then we're debt-free. I mean, how is that not a winning political stance? We have a VP debate this week. First of all, we don't even talk about the budget deficit at all in that debate.

They didn't. Or the national debt. That didn't come up once. Like, we're talking about a lot of things that are a lot less important. But if you were to run for president on let's go up and get some space rocks and see if there's gold in them, how does that not win? there have been presidential runs focused on monetary policy well i'm jennings brian for instance yeah didn't really we could he he lost this there could be a campaign predicated on primarily focused on the gold mining asteroids okay it's not too late i don't know if it's you or me

but maybe someone listening is thinking of adding that to our platform i'd like to insert that into someone else's platform. Yeah. Get the gold. Everybody else's gold is worthless. We have all the gold at that point, probably. We're debt free. They're in some kind of debt crisis. It kind of works. I like that. Maybe, yeah, I think we know some people that could pick this up. Yeah, this is an underrated policy position. Oh, that was talking mining gold asteroids in the middle of the night. Yeah, so I agree with you. I think it's 20 or 30% that it's the lab leak.

And then I don't think there's anyone that they've never fingered a Satoshi that like probably all the people that could be Satoshi. We've at some point, someone has claimed is Satoshi. I don't think there's any new names that are floating around. I'd be very surprised. Yeah, I mean, so Tim Bernersley's name has been out there. Hal Finney, obviously, Bram Cohen,

Nick Zobbo. People have said, Nixabo, Lenn. Like those, that's kind of the short list. Like, there's not a lot of other names.

No. No. So it's going to be one. So I just saved you 999 for HBO. But we're not allowed to speculate, apparently. It's like rude or it's like bad taste

to speculate about Satoshi. So, no, this is all on the Twitter today. everyone thinks it's going to be one i actually hadn't seen that at all but i'm on the edge of my seat what do you drink there is that a red ball uh yeah i would never like you know consume an alcoholic beverage whilst recording the show that would be totally inappropriate so good good to know good to know all right well i think that's it for the week uh we'll be back with another episode on monday everybody

to have a safe and healthy weekend.