TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #32: Josh Olszewicz

Episode Date: June 12, 2018

Join Marty as he sits down with a longtime crypto-Twitter and trading legend, Josh Olszewicz AKA @CarpeNoctom, to discuss a range of topics including TA, crypto-Twitter, how "the space" has changed and how the scams have adapted over the years. Tune in for some high qual reminiscing. Josh's Twitter: www.twitter.com/CarpeNoctem Josh's YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/carpenoctom Read his stuff: https://bravenewcoin.com/authors/josh-olszewicz/ Marty's Twitter: www.twitter.com/MartyBent

what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy marty bent saturday morning coffee podcast coffee drinking coffee on and off we can't get here in here at night all the time it's very excited for this conversation we're about to jump into this is somebody i've been following on twitter since 2013 i believe five years lurking in the bushes just watching him tweet about crypto you finally get to meet him in person excited to have him in the studio i'm sure some of you probably most of you if you're on crypto twitter know him uh i'd like to introduce you all to carpe noctum how's it going guys it's good to be here it's good to know about uh youtube creators podcast creators because i know how it

is we'll get to it but i know how it is starting out uh you know you're screaming in the wind basically right until you get somebody to say to signal like hey this guy's doing something real right check it out so yeah so thank you for having me well thank you for coming on yeah an inspiration oh come on we've got a lot to talk about i always tell people listen i'm just some guy who's like it's been here a while like i'm nothing special honestly like i imagine most people you know when you meet your hero and it's like a complete letdown like that's probably every interaction with me in real life you're living up to expectations so far stay on this pace and you'll be good all right sounds good um i brought the tether shirt today

you can't see it obviously if you're listening but uh there's no need to be upset i always keep one ironic crypto shirt on me at all times just in case something goes down just in case you have to hop in a podcast booth right so let's talk about you've been around for a while uh main topic i want to talk about with you in particular is crypto twitter yeah it's been an anomaly that's been growing yeah it's it's been insane some would say a cancer that's been growing on the internet for the last five six years i don't disagree with that it's gone from like um uh what is it what is it where it's like non uh non-spreading cancer like not metastasizing you know it was like a lipoma in the beginning it was just this thing that grows somewhere and

now it's like fucking pancreatic cancer you know it's just it's everywhere it's crazy it's everywhere and it's evolved a lot it has in not good ways in my opinion why why do you say that like let's talk about the good old days what were the good old days like yeah let's let's talk about the good old days um you know the good old days were like 2013 20 guys whale club all anonymous for the most part this was a team speak chat it was like i found it on like reddit uh bitcoin market subreddit which back then was also very uh decent and useful and vibrant um but now it's more like just a giant shit show like everything else but um i think every every reddit subreddit crypto related subreddit is yeah but even the

bitcoin subreddit was like amazing like i'd go on there every day and like check like what's going on you know but i rarely visit it now i don't go on it unless linked to it to to read stupid things yeah yeah so i don't even know how i you know i think i discovered bitcoin a little bit through reddit a little bit through slash dot a little bit through a buddy of mine who was into litecoin it was super early um and so i was connected to reddit anyway for like diablo 3 like video games you know uh so like let's see if there's any bitcoin stuff on reddit and there's there was and uh found this pod this uh team speak channel and uh then i was hooked uh i don't know like i was hooked because i knew nothing about anything i knew nothing about trading i knew nothing about

computer science economics nothing that's what i was gonna say what was your background you weren't a trader no biology so uh i tried to get into med school three times failed so here i am um it's not a bad fallback yeah it's been okay so far um but yeah to to know like where where things were then and where i've been as far as just completely rerouting my whole life course you know it's it's insane but so yeah from there there was like um just team speak just grew exponentially um yeah 2014 towards the end of 2013 2014 sort of died off with the market yeah and then um there were some like you're one of the few to stick around during the dark days yeah uh i was um it was weird i'd watch an andreas video and just buy more bitcoin

i would so i would dollar cost average all the way down right um and just say i think this is gonna be a thing i drank the kool-aid you know every day and it was a gamble giant gamble you know and it paid off i don't know like it was weird so what was it like getting into trading like what like obviously the gains probably drew you drew you in but you are very methodical with your trading process uh i would say yeah i think when i when i watch people do something and i have no clue what what they're doing i'm like drawn to it for some reason like a moth to a flame like i just want to know more so um i uh i was seeing all these people doing all this trading stuff and i had no clue and so i just started googling everything and like learning and listening and

a big part of it was talking to people on team speak who knew way more than i did yeah and that's definitely a key now for people like find a community with not necessarily one person like a guru but like people who you can talk to and bounce ideas off of because for the most part if you don't know what you're doing it's very difficult yeah you're you're running around blind yeah it's uh and it's a very vicious world i tried all coin trading before yeah not for me yeah it's not it's not for everybody i don't have the uh i don't have the uh emotional capacity to to trade i get too emotional yeah i treat uh treat um alt coins more like investing it's like i'll just buy the lows and sell it later yeah i don't pay attention to the charts really no no

the stuff i'm like trading trading i'm trading on leverage i'm trading these high high volume high liquidity high market cap stuff not like uh i don't know like clams or something so what can we dive into here we can take those many ways many ways i want to focus on uh crypto trading twitter in particular because like you said it was um it's a very like people are willing to give back if you approach them in the right way sure yeah right like if you're looking to learn something you just have to be able to approach somebody in the right way nine times that'll tend they'll be willing to help you out i feel like uh a lot of people like try to take advantage of that and and annoy a lot of like the ogs if you will yeah and that's when i start

getting salty and then everyone's like you're salty and then i'm like i get more salty like fuck you um yeah so twitter sort of was always in the background uh it wasn't in the beginning it definitely wasn't like this huge thing that it is now um but it sort of evolved between like team speak um there was slack there was irc there was uh telegram which is huge now there's discord but all the while twitter was like remained constant all these other things you need like specific permissions or you have to know like how to get to certain places uh for like channels you there's some exclusivity yeah there is uh in twitter there's you have to know you're looking forward to an extent but there's more openness as far as you know everybody's just shouting

in the wind right yeah so you can just follow whoever follow friday's huge obviously for that but uh yeah if you get a carpe noctem hashtag ff that's a huge deal the rare the rare uh you know it's it's become to the point where i have to like be conscious of what i'm tweeting because there's so many people well they'll uh accuse you of moving markets yeah like no matter what i'd say someone's gonna be like like the other day like i i tweet about eos and xrp i think they're both complete nonsense trash but um i'm gonna trade the chart like yeah so let's get into that like trading the chart verse like so i'm a butt mad bitcoin maximalist that hates all coins yeah i listened uh i listened to your re podcast before this i always do my homework on these

podcast people because you never know what you're walking into yeah you know things get cosmic on this podcast sometimes yeah and we uh i connected with you on that bitcoin maximalism you know i'm a i'm a bitcoin maximalist masquerading as a profit maximalist i like that description because i yeah i'll trade anything but uh what i believe in like my heart of hearts no chance i believe in most of this garbage and let's get into that so eos is launching today why do you think eos is garbage i don't i don't know if it's garbage yet but can you believe in anything that raises four billion plus four billion in a very sketchy way goes to all these roadshows in the u.s even though they're not um allowing u.s investment yeah um larimer's got a giant rap sheet if you

will as far as projects uh bit shares and steam it um he's had he's launched two successful blockchains. Yeah, people say that. People say like, look at the transactions on BitShares. They're all robots. You were tweeting about that the other day, weren't you? Somebody was. I was probably retweeting it. Yeah, it's like, are they organic? Are they of any actual value?

If you look at the median value of those transactions, I'm guessing it's like less than a penny. If you've tried to use their DEX on BitShares, I mean, they're revolutionary in that respect, but you can't. I've tried. It just doesn't work.

so i don't know i mean and then steam it like i mean yeah so steam is probably more of a thing than most things but the economics of steven like just aren't there right are they uh i think the coin the total coin um uh what is it the total number of coins or whatever i think is just way too high yeah but i think it sort of needs to be for that market to make sense like to use it as upvotes and downloads or whatever um uh and they're kind of just like ripping off medium now yes because they like re-skinned and uh everything just looks like medium right the the blog site do they have claps yet i won't be surprised if they have like a non-value like voting system soon i don't know like i think that's where they're headed um i don't know like i don't

use steam it i've tried to like post my shit on steam it and it's just like too much of a pain in the ass yeah i don't go on steemit either yeah medium's free exactly medium's free it there's it looks like a component where you can monetize your stuff but for the most part it's free yeah that's very new for medium the monetization thing um yeah it's like why bother that's the biggest problem with all these projects how do these projects create a network effect to where they have value well to me it seems like it's a bunch of solutions looking for a problem definitely definitely and trying to replicate bitcoin success but i don't think it's going to happen like bitcoin was so organic and i do believe in the immaculate conception of bitcoin

we can we can listen back to this like two years from now and like eos is like you know a powerhouse but no well i had joe looney on here the dude who started rare pepe's a couple weeks ago okay and he he described eos as like the polar opposite of bitcoin like if the market decides that it one's complete centralization like like a completely non-decentralized network with a blockchain on it then eos is the perfect thing well there are so many things with this eos that aren't even in stone like it's like a lot giant lava field you know where if you step on it you're like oh i just burned myself because i didn't know that that was changeable you know things like the constitution things like let's talk about the constitution the 21 validator thing there's just

like so many issues um so in eos every time you make a transaction right the miner has to hash into the miner that mines a block has to hash the constitution of eos into that block so i saw that the panic guy on uh twitter posted about that i met him i've met him in person he's a nice guy um i i didn't know about that constitution thing neither did i i think it's kind of like dumb and stupid like who cares right i don't know it's just like this is a this is what bitcoin was created to get away from this shit and like again solutions looking for problems like you're just trying to you're trying to throw this shit on the current structure under which we we live and sort of apply blockchain to our existing political and financial infrastructure when

i think this is just going to like organically create a system parallel that we will eventually transition to so i think a lot of people are confused out there well i encourage everybody to watch a brendan bloomer uh he's part of block one of eos to watch his pitch like now and then like six months from now and see like how much eos is like shifting away from all those promises of like infinite transactions and like dax and daos and all this other crap has his pitch changed at all over the last year i've heard it twice from him like a few months in apart and it was it's always been the same like we're going to take over uber we're going to take over airbnb like that can happen with crypto i don't think it's going to be eos but it can be um but i don't

think number one like you're never going to get massive i mean not never going to get mass adoption but like normal people are not going to be using this stuff like do you think the crypto community can grow a network effect like the ux of using this stuff is so it's such uh sets such a high bar like barrier to entry and i don't think like if you walk on the streets in new york and you're just walking by people it's like we'll use ethereum as an example too like that's what i like whenever i'm like walking and talking to somebody like making the case for ethereum we're walking down the street i'm like pointing at people's like could that person use a metamax wallet could that person use them i couldn't even use the metamax so i used it the other day i was like

the the transaction fee thing um wasn't clear like what yeah anyway but yeah it's like nobody's going to be using this shit like the people like like can barely use uber and stuff like that yeah i mean it needs to be deep in the background right um many people have talked about this definitely but uh you know even with the visa thing that happened yesterday like visa went down okay um but it they could they could easily have like a backup system or something runs parallel where it's, like, decentralized, blah, blah, blah. Like, that's what it's going to be. It's not going to be people, like, pulling out their phone on a QR code

knowing that it's Bitcoin or EOS or Ethereum, whatever. I think it'll just happen, you know? Yeah. It's going to take time. Yeah, back to EOS. The other problems, you know, they have these 21 validators who are, they're going to say, are decentralized in some manner. That's not a level of decentralization I strive for in my coins that I invest in.

at 21 i don't know 21 is a big number your average six-year-old they're gonna have backups uh the other thing about these 21 validators is they're gonna make a massive fuck ton of money on inflation and doing their job of mining validating whatever um what's like no overhead they're supposedly supposed to be actually contributing back to the project i don't know they're like all these pockets of people like bitfinex wants one uh which is weird uh new york wants one there's like cities that want one new york yeah there's like eos new york if you if you like dive deep into the community you see like these areas of like physical geographic locations that are popping up as like they're just gonna pull hubs for like innovation for eos or whatever

god damn it um um and the other thing is larimer he's promising like all these uh transactions per second and in testnet like it's only reached like 6k or something really yeah that's interesting so in we'll see what the main net does i mean i i we've been talking to a lot of people about it i think it'll just crash and burn initially and the the honeypot is huge right like to to hack yeah and it's one event everybody knows what's going on like i don't know you imagine an exchange like sends the tokens to the wrong address to switch them over somehow and then they lose like all of the dal hacker comes back yeah now all your coins are mine some sort of like dns re hijack redirect i don't know like anything's fucking possible yeah this thing we'll find out in about eight

hours right yeah i haven't i haven't looked it was like 30 hours yesterday but uh yeah it's coming up we'll see it is pumping now as we speak as expected which was good to see i hold some eos right now um just because why not what does that mean like holding us you basically hold the erc20 token right yeah yeah until mainnet and that's another thing like eos could be put a lot of downward pressure on ethereum prices if uh they want to unload it could have and should have they did it the right way they could have uh just sponge it around with the uh like this mixer so So, Ethereum fees right now are going up, the gas usage is going up, all of this is sort of related to this giant mixer that's going on in the background, nobody really

knows why. Yeah, what is that mixer? It's like, makes up like 90% of the transactions, right? Yeah, that was, some like Russian team or German team, like 2017, ran this thing where they found like, most of the transactions were mixed. i actually asked them recently to like rerun their analysis because i i found it on github i tried to do it myself but i'm not like technically inclined like that so i asked them to rerun it but it was there in a different language i don't think they understood what i was

saying um but i don't get that i don't think that's the case currently uh it's just recently it just like picked up again but but if i was larimer bloomer all these people who are like eth is dead you know i would short it i would fuck with the fee market like it's a decentralized thing you can do whatever you want right do it pull the gianwu model you know exactly like okay eth it's dead come to eos look at uh bitcoin it's dead come to bitcoin cash uh because the fees are whatever bitcoin cash fees have been uh higher than bitcoin fees for the last 24 hours people i don't think you know not in dollar terms but in satoshi terms satoshi's per bite um back to eos uh so block one block one they're basically like the ethereum foundation would you say

equivalent there i think there's like been um some learning between all these projects as far as like how to handle uh the the crowdsourcing of the money you know like like block one it's in the caymans now um they have a eos foundation maybe i can't remember but uh everybody has a foundation like iota has a foundation and bitcoin had a foundation at one point um but uh i think that's very like just like legalese to avoid like being sued you know yeah um because eos is definitely a security xrp the security okay it's a security period end of story that's the standard Yeah, I know. It's just so funny to watch them pivot so hard when they know something's coming down.

They just did a redesign, didn't they? That's the thing. It's just this thinly veiled thing where we're going to get a new logo from the community because we're decentralized. And then either yesterday or the day before, they released this tweet like, uh hard hard work of six years pays off to release eos one or uh xrp 1.0 from our decentralized community like just like cramming down our throats like it's we all know it's not decentralized we're the first 35 000 blocks that's what i want to know where did they go yeah xrp has tons of

problems too for some reason that's like like newcomers like the last wave of newcomers ripple was like one of their like it's going to win it's going to be 300 people were telling me i was like that's a 30 trillion dollar market cap like no it's not when it was consolidating um i've told the story a few times now but when it was consolidating i was hearing in these back channels on telegram like all these people and all these random places were asking about xrp like not bitcoin not ethereum xrp um like nightclubs and music venues and like just like conversations with people on the street like uber lyft whatever um and at the time it was really hard to buy still is really hard to buy xrp like you can't buy it on coinbase you have to get a

plenty x account you have to get a bitrex account whatever um those were like closed at the time like to new people so it's really hard to get and um that was a big signal for me like fundamentally like something's gonna happen yeah eventually like if anything like i believe in technicals above all else but if i see the chart consolidating and people are trying to clamoring at the fucking door to get in like yeah i'm gonna pile take advantage of that what do you get from like 60 cents to three bucks or like uh something like that yeah it was it was nuts yeah yeah my cousin my new coiner cousin was like ripples good future man i'm like all right good luck with that well i feel like you're a maximalist of whatever you start with so like yeah uh there are a lot

of tron maximalists and like east you know the silicon valley eath heads are just all all over twitter but i'm gonna i'm gonna make a confession that i've been hesitant to make okay good thing i'm sitting down it's very embarrassing i was a varicoin maximalist proof of stake time man it's going to change the world the thing with all these icos all they're doing is trying to replicate the altcoin model like exactly with the crowd crowd fundraising whatever like how can we make something look like it's a project that's legitimate and get money for it while at the same time if it fails like the cops can't come after me you know yeah like we raised a million dollars we tried like oh well well that's

it's gonna circle back to eos again we raised four billion dollars and like block one and a couple other entities are in charge of basically investing that money in projects yeah so they get to pick the winners and choosers it's completely ass backwards like it doesn't make any sense yeah i was joking around too like the headlines recently have been like four billion dollar project uh raised on no uh no product or whatever uh the next headline is going to be four billion dollar project loses billions to hackers that's i was thinking this morning like when i was right now we're going to talk about yes it's like four million like it's the biggest honeypot in the know like it it's definitely going to get attacked and if it does get attacked successfully it's

going to be like a huge shit show in the media like yeah four billion dollars just yeah i mean and that's no reason to be determined that's no reason you can't speculate on that as far as trading is concerned um because you know people might say like you own eos but you think it's trash you own ethereum but you think it's trash it's like well again like back to the chart like i'll trade whatever the chart tells me to trade and i'll speculate on main net releases all day long you know like we'll see what happens um either way everybody's talking about it you know yeah let's dive into training a little bit more the charts do they talk to you uh and and how so they do you know it's um it's like a language i tell people too but uh i can't look

at a chart without a cloud on it anymore because the one thing i wanted to talk about is the ichimoku the clouds it's uh it's like a handicap now i just need it to like show me it's like so i tell people i'm the cloud pope you know it gets like it gets uh sent for me from on high somewhere so let's get a little educational here let's set the uh let's set the scene um there's a contingent of traders that think technical analysis ta is bullshit it means nothing there's another sect i think ta is very helpful you fall under that i would argue and then so your favorite indicator or i don't want to say is it indicator it's yeah it's indicator overlay whatever it's the ichimoku cloud overlay yeah um so let's dive into it

what is the argument against ta why do you believe in it yeah and why is this tool important to you yeah um so the the biggest thing is like if you don't use ta what do you use you can use fundamental analysis or FA, which is the other side of the coin. But the problem with most of this stuff is it's difficult to impossible to actually analyze anything with fundamental analysis. You can certainly look at wallets and adoption and things like NVT ratio, which is like network value to transactions, which is similar to PE ratios from stocks and blah, blah, blah. Like you can pour it in all this legacy. Thank you, Chris Berdinski. You can pour it in all the, and Willy Woo. You can pour it in all this legacy stuff to do

fundamentals but um at the end of the day part of the reason why i'm sitting here at all is because technicals work so well on bitcoin because fundamentals don't and everybody's looking at the same triangle everybody's looking at that same trend line all day uh because they don't know what else to to look at i mean so so let's tell the freaks out there who may not be trading savvy what we're looking at here on these charts sure uh so but but back to ta like yeah if again if you don't use ta that's fine i don't give a fuck if you think ta is garbage i don't give a fuck like i don't you don't need to argue with me about it i don't care it works for me it makes me money i don't care what you do not you but in general um because people always like coming at

uh noose is another one he's in new york actually too um anthony yeah annie yeah he uh he's like yeah i don't even bother arguing with people in public anymore about that because it's just like francis coppola just wrote an article about yeah that was insane like so javis tweet about it last night there's like a tweet thread then oh it's an article on forbes now like that's how desperate the media is to get something um yeah so ta you know it works for some people it doesn't work for other people whatever i don't care if it works for you great yeah i don't need to convince anybody I don't need to create buy-in the moment that you buy on a line that you drew or whatever and it works out like boom you're off to the races like that's good enough for me it's about probability

it's about if then statements it's about risk mitigation so yeah that's TA I first heard about Ichimoku Cloud on if you know what's his name I can't think of his name it was BTC VIX and somebody else on one of these google hangouts like in 2013 and they said it a funny way and it was really complicated looking so it's like again like i'm drawn to these things that are super complex uh so it's like what the hell's going on here i have no idea let's look into it and basically i am really lazy i don't like doing a lot of anything ever with you there yeah so what the cloud is able to do for me is to always draw all this stuff automatically so that So I don't have to do anything.

And that also removes my bias most of the time. You can read the cloud in many different ways, but it helps remove bias. And how do these clouds work? Like when the price gets a certain distance into the cloud, it's sort of an indicator to reverse trend? Yeah, so in general, the cloud is all about finding a trend and making sure that you're in 80% of any trend. So the first step is, is it a trend, yes or no?

And then what's the entry, what's the exit? like that's where the 80 percent comes in so it's not always perfect as far as uh capturing everything you know like it didn't capture 2017 extremely well because it didn't get you out at like 19k or something yeah but that's not the point the point is it captured 80 percent if you look on the weekly especially like it's captured everything since 2015 basically like it's done really well um so that's that's why i use the cloud so yeah there are different ways you can trade it like there are things that i've seen work really well um like sort of like cloud fractals if you will like um edge to edge trades keychain bounces basically it's just like it creates

dynamic support resistance and then if it breaks certain levels if it meets or exceeds certain levels that those are actionable signals that you can use and you take risk off the table or deploy risk accordingly right so either that's uh it's risk on risk off uh it's literally telling me what to do without me thinking about it what is uh your risk management uh strategy what's your bar look like my bar uh you know it depends on you know there are people who do really well on 100x all the time right these are people with a giant risk appetite um i don't think i'd be here since 2013 if i traded on 100x in the beginning you know margin trading scares me yeah there's a time and a place for it i learned how to trade on okex okay coin at the time which 10 to 20x rest in

peace right they're gone uh they're still there and they're still around yeah yeah oh i thought they got shut down technically if you're in the u.s you can't trade on their platform yeah that's what that's what yeah they're based i think they're based in hong kong which means they're not barred from the chinese firewall yeah whatever yeah um yeah so i learned i learned on margin uh if you talk to a lot of people like btc vixx i can bring him up again um you know he he him and flibber which is some random guy who's not really on twitter but he's on flibber he's on telegram uh i used to call him mom and dad they were kind of like the top of the the team speak at the beginning and they were very influential for me as far as like learning uh because they knew what

they were talking about and it's funny how uh whale pool in particular it's gotten all like it's gotten thrown into the tether bitfenix mix as well yeah so there was a whale club whale pool steak pool like they all like forked it uh based on uh all these egos that like can't uh mesh well with each other when things get stressful which is why like these communities keep getting fractured and like everybody just goes back to twitter you know like uh crypto picasso well you know people like him will have this like private group and then they'll like disband right but he'll pop up again a few years later with under a different name i'm waiting for ashtrake to come back yeah yeah we uh it's funny i think we talk about him more now than we did

back then um uh if you're not familiar ashtrake was this guy who continually tried to short everything he's probably the worst trader ever on twitter well there are people who just stayed bare too long there was there was a time and a place to be bearable whatever but uh the people are just trying to shove it down everybody's throats including their own every time when everything's moving up it's like you know you're gonna get bulldozed yeah um what were we just talking about uh cloud whale whale pool in the bitfinex tether oh yeah uh or whale club i don't know which one it is i don't know which sect it is just a random comment you know there's all these people who have nothing better to do than like speculate and be conspiratorial with each

other you know shout out bitfinex so um bitfinex yeah um he's gone or is he private right now no he's he's gone yeah definitely i don't know where he went i don't know why there's been some speculation as to why but i don't i don't know why yes for the free freaks that don't know who bitfinex is he's got a huge tether conspiracy theory uh that bitfinex and tether working together to pump the price of bitcoin yeah is there any validity to this statement uh no i don't think so no uh i can't like give evidence readily available other than um they do have a banking account it's probably noble i think noble it's probably in like puerto rico or someplace they probably don't know that it's tether noble uh that was another thing

i've heard like really yeah like the only reason they have a banking account is because they don't know they're actually banking for tether but i don't know how you can like uh take um have a flow of like millions of dollars and not realize like the point or purpose of what that is so i don't know that's all speculation they're getting fees yeah the blind eye has been turned in the past yeah so you know his big thing was uh the entire 2017 run was all pumping on tether but if you go back and look at it um things went up and down all over the place based on when tether was released so i don't know yeah i don't know either i've never even touched tether have you uh yeah it's it works great yeah it's a centralized stable coin quote unquote stable coin

that allows you to use uh it as a safe haven it allows you to go back and forth on the exchanges it works great yeah let's talk about stable coins what do you think about uh like basis and what's the other one that's coming out uh that status there's a lot coming yeah i think when they saw the publicity of tether and like i don't know how tether makes money like tether i'm pretty sure tether is like two people and that's it like it just it's self-sustaining yeah it's on top of omni coin right yeah it's on top of omni which is sort of off bitcoin um yeah i don't know how all these uh so all the the stable coins had to make this another coin uh like dao or not dao die die maker i don't know all the pairs but um so there's the stable coin and then the coin that

like supports the stable coin basically because by itself obviously a stable coin unless you just created out of thin air right stable coin oxymoron is anything ever stable the people who know more than me tell me that stable coins are never going to work but i think it was ari paul like i can't remember who i was talking to i think ari's under that camp as well because they're just susceptible to black swans like they're stable until they're not and then when they're not they're never stable again yeah but they work when they for the most part they work when you want them to work i mean loom dart said it best like all these projects trying to get freaky with algorithms to create a stable coin and phil potter at bitfinex is just one dollar equals one tether pretty pretty chad

pretty pretty simple yeah he's he's actually leaving bitfinex yeah that's been the rumor right there's it's pretty sure it's public now like i've well i have to be careful what i say most of the time because i'm just in like back channels right and telegram and there's people who say stuff that i shouldn't say out loud publicly um but no he um there was some article i think somewhere that said he was yeah no uh that came out like a month ago so i'm pretty sure it was like bitfinex executive gonna start yeah slowly uh departing but if you were a billionaire right would you work a bit would you want that stress like bitfinex fucking tweeting at you and yeah pulling up your your audio clips from conference calls on team speak um but no one thing tether

could do for itself is like do the audits that they promised they were gonna do you know like do some sort of audit anything does anybody know who runs tether uh it's supposed to be craig sellers but i don't i don't know who it is like i don't know it's just like this shadow stable coin that works and i don't worry about it uh i can see the where people are getting worried because they're creating millions of dollars seemingly out of nowhere right so until it's until it's audited it's like is the money there or isn't it there yeah and at the end of the day that's all that really matters so yeah they could use a pr team like of two more people or something you know and i don't know but no no auditor wants to touch them um free freedmen

uh why wouldn't they want to touch them i think there's just too much liability honestly like nobody wants to do anything what if they audit them and find out that like it's fraudulent like couldn't they get rewarded for that maybe i don't know that's a good point but bit track's just got a bank after how many years right like it takes a while for these legacy institutions to come Let's talk about that. Come online with all this crypto stuff, you know? Bittrex is about to have U.S. dollar pairs for all coins. What does that mean for this market?

I think in general there are too many pairs, too many coins. Yeah. Liquidity is garbage. If you look at Binance, to me Binance is just a rolling pump and dump because it's like, oh, something's going up. Everybody piles in. Algos pile in. People pile in.

And then it's just a ghost wasteland. Yeah. Because there's no active trading. Rest in peace Matt Brown's Tron bag. um i mean it's somebody works here barstool got really in a tron on binance on the run up in december he thought it was gone to the moon but that's been uh the problem with exchanges from day one like cripsy was the same way like things things were just a rolling bump based on whoever was talking about in some irc channel like will long with dogecoin or whatever

like that's just how these things work they're just too many pairs so i think uh they need to be careful listing usd pairs like yeah it's great we have on ramps for altcoins now whatever but i don't think it's going to work out so well no when there's a million different pairs you look at bitmex there's like four pairs on bitmex and uh there's still shit liquidity on most of those like if you try to trade eth btc on bitmex good luck if you try to trade stellar on bitmex good luck that's why all these exchanges have these contests uh where it's like if you um trade on the coin will reward you like it will put you in a raffle to win like a hundred stellar i don't know like there are all these like especially an okay coin i see

trying to manufacture liquidity yeah there's there's too many exchanges arguably uh there's too many pairs there's too many coins blah blah blah this is my old man you know uh talking but um no but it's a good point to bring up because it really puts the re like the newer retail investors like at a disadvantage well how does a market maker deal with all these pairs i don't know i don't know how market making really works like bare bones yeah what's what's the total like i'm trying to think of the price right now what the total market cap of crypto is it's not too it's like it's small yeah it's like 200 million right or no no it's like 300 million yeah billion billion billion excuse me yeah um with a b but like how do these fx pairs there are i'm pretty

sure there are fewer fx pairs than crypto yeah i worked for a managed futures fund and we traded i believe we capped how many pairs we traded at like 12 yeah because yeah they're for the most part most of this stuff is just zero volume yeah zero volume until there's like some announcement which is why twitter you're coming full circle back to twitter uh you're like justin sun or who the fuck ever just tweets this nonsense about like we're better than everybody else we've got a partnership with alibaba uh or iota like we've got all these great partnerships with all these garbage companies not garbage companies the companies are real the partnerships are garbage um and so is their so is their code and ripple's the same way they're like we have all

these partnerships like every week i i see this like um so i worked for an ico for a little bit So, in the background, I saw the insidious side of PR and marketing, and I could see it now with all these other projects. You get this announcement that's seemingly meaningless, but you spin it up in all these articles on these just junk websites like Cointelegraph. Cointelegraph, they've got fucking ads in Times Square right now. Do they? Yeah. Apparently, it's like eight grand just to get an article listed. like they don't do actual journalism like they just charge everybody for articles that's what

somebody was saying about tron they were like doing research on tron and figured out that every article ever written about tron was a paid article yeah which is one reason why i avoid doing like videos or whatever on mini projects i was just talking to some guy yesterday who's like have you ever considered like doing uh reviews for icos or whatever and i'm like no because even if i say it's it's complete trash which most of these are all they want is a mention it's somebody with a a profile so they give views like they don't care no and i just don't want to be a part of that so neither do i yeah it's uh that's why i wrote my newsletter and focus on bitcoin specifically it just feels icky man it does it's not how it used to be no so are you basically are you

basically are you a bitcoin idealist like do you see like are you in this for sound money what uh what like philosophically drives your interest in crypto yeah other than profits i mean i definitely it definitely opened my eyes to a lot of things so i came in with a ton of college debt though i had no clue how i'd ever repay yeah uh which is why i was tweeting at peter brandt yesterday he was talking about college tuition how like you know it was to just get six jobs and you can pay your college tuition he said that yeah go fuck yourself so i went after him but uh yeah so i had all this debt i'm like how the fuck am i gonna pay this back i'm trying to get in med school i i don't want 300 grand more of debt before i pay off this

50 to 70 grand whatever it was um so i was like i need but i was basically desperate like that's how i got here you know yeah like looking for some some way out um and i had this like small amount of money in some mutual fund um like let's let's go risk heavy and see what we can do um so yeah bitcoin has really opened my eyes like debt sound money um libertarian ideals i'm not really i'm not really like identifying with most of the libertarian stuff but yeah that's uh that's one thing i call my family and friends like you're like a libertarian heart i'm like i'm not a libertarian i'm just like for sound money i think sound money is a good idea that's like i don't know what i am well student debt's like 14 trillion right now 1.4 trillion okay 1.4

that's better um all these debt uh debt to gdp ratios are super high in most of these countries like there's all these issues that are just like in the background everybody's got their head in the sand yeah that's what i want to get uh brendan bernstein on here because he's got he's had a lot of good uh um like macro fundamental well your background's economy yeah yeah economics yeah i studied economics in college um but yeah with like the debt like if you look at the debt in the world it's just at some point like mathematically it's impossible to pay back like if you were to be as productive as economy as you needed to be to pay back the debt there's an argument to be made they would destroy the earth in the process like just like consuming so

much i can see that and so student loan debt car debt and housing debt in particular if you look at them like the fundamentals are shit right now like you have delinquency rates is what you want to look at and so 90 plus day delinquency rates in student loan debts car debt and um housing debt is going back up and that's basically what was the tipping point for 2008 yeah it was those things going over people defaulting on those loans and obviously the mortgage-backed security is falling to shit yeah can you do a loan car loan past five years now i don't know i don't know i don't own a car like i don't know that's right it's new york so yeah uh i know because i know that was a big deal when that like first started like five-year car loan like that was unheard of right uh yeah

uh so yeah i mean i i came for the money stayed for the tech right that's what everybody likes to think um i don't know like andreas is a very uh eloquent and uh i don't know like persistent what he says makes sense to me i don't know like he could be a cult leader very easily and in some respects he is because you know not a cult not a cult but here we are the one thing though i always question whether or not i'm in a as you are now too but that's like one thing like i look at my wife i'm like we're not in a cult are we like i'm not in a cult like i'm not i'm not brainwashing you am i like this makes sense right you don't think exactly you don't think you're in a cult until it's hindsight right um i just finished watching

wild wild country on netflix i don't think we're gonna end up like wild wild country i hope not um but the other thing i was reading this book about like um social uh what is it like the mass movements of people or something i can't remember the name of it uh it sounds familiar it was like right in the 50s yeah um and one thing that was striking to me was the author was talking about um people actually when they believe in something enough like they will move they will physically move their geographic location so they were citing like mormons and puritans and all these other like groups these mainly religious groups but um so it makes sense that like we're talking now in crypto about people buying islands and like

creating nations uh puerto rico is basically already it's already there like brock pierce and whoever has like this area in san juan i think uh which is like run by crypto people basically brock pierce weirds me out yeah he's a little weird he's a creeper don't trust the child actors in the space right creighton and brock pierce yeah um but it is moving that way so it makes sense like as crazy as it sounds like terraforming an island and like creating crypto community like that could be a thing and then then you have a cult compound right exactly and that's that's where you think about like what was the first season of silken valley the one uh vc that was his that was his uh his goal was to build like a floating island he wound

up like dying on it yeah and it's just like uh stuff like that like i don't agree with i don't think we should be doing like floating islands and doing all crypto there i think it's gotta be organic like bitcoin's just a tool that's what people have to realize like if you want to hold wealth throughout time like bitcoin's a tool to do that you don't not everybody needs to use it it's just one option of many that we have right now and there's an argument to be made if there is a financial global financial crisis more particularly a currency crisis that bitcoin just so happens to be a good fail safe like in case like it's not we don't need to on-ramp everybody right now yeah just the tool that could be used you don't need to on-ramp everybody you

don't need to make it like this this giant thing for commerce no like i use it when i can but i don't go out of my way to use it you know no so it's really not uh like like bcash like it's funny it's funny to see all these projects just copy everything bitcoin's ever done right or everything any altcoin has ever done and it's like the cycle just repeats itself like it's all this like rote script that everybody does just to the key like it's all straight like trying to get merchant adoption trying to get fundraising trying to get all this other shit you know bcash is on a zeta coin tip right now down in africa feeding feeding children have you seen that yeah ebcash brian armstrong talking about that uh was he yeah he yeah coinbase i think coinbase is massively

anti-bitcoin i've said that uh before but that's been said on this podcast many times i think it's it's undeniable brian brian armstrong pushed for bitcoin classic xt bitcoin unlimited i believe as well and then segway 2x and now i think uh his inability to push this through has driven him crazy and i was just focusing on toshi which makes no sense to me either have you used it have you downloaded it i encourage everybody to download it just to see how much of a joke it is i've i haven't downloaded myself but i've watched somebody use it and i was just like yeah it's a miserable experience we talk we've talked about this before on this podcast as well but like coinbase like you had the like the best opportunity in the world just focus on creating the best on

an off-ramp for buying bitcoin specifically do that really well and you'll be successful in the perpetuity but he got too enamored by the flashy all coins and stuff like that that their focus i would say got got sort of derailed and it is hurt there i don't think i don't think coin i think coinbase is going to be the myspace of like the bitcoin company world i mean they're they have all this money they're doing all this m&a all this hiring and so far in my opinion they only have much to show for it they're going after like custodial solutions and institutional investors but maybe it'll work out down like you know six months from now you know when ethereum when they listed ethereum everybody was shitting all over them but that worked out in 2017 when uh things

went bonkers you know yeah but then like their bcash launch was such a shit show it's like wow i can't believe you're like held up as the bastion of this fucking industry which they still haven't answered for it's like right it's like the bitfinex hack i will i will never let that go until they come out and say like here's what happened here's like do a post-mortem on the bitfinex hack do a post-mortem on the bcash launch right because it was unbelievable what they did phoenix hack was what 116 000 bitcoin or something like that uh i think it was like 60 million at the time i don't i think it was 60 or 160 million it wasn't that much money but it was at the time it was a significant amount of bitcoin yeah right yeah yeah because

The price was at like $500 or something like that, right? It was 2016, right? It was. It was probably like $700. Yeah, I just know. I can visually see it on the chart, but I don't know the price. I'm such a visual person. That's another reason why I think I've done so well with charting.

I'm just super, super visual. Like photographic memory type thing. Yeah, but these companies need to answer for these issues. like they're just these open scars that i've never healed basically right yeah i mean i was getting dms from like people in san fran like who weren't working at coinbase like that were on product teams and we're like yeah the coinbase there were some people coinbase like telling us that they were going to launch bcash like there was definitely some inside shit going on there yeah and it was very in the because you had the launch coupled with like the cmbc fast money like

pump it was just a very weird like coordinate it seemed very coordinated actually it was terribly coordinated but it seemed coordinated yeah they tried to they tried to really do something yeah like start with a bang yeah and i don't know why it ran up to like 9 000 like at one point like somebody paid 9 000 for b cash i'm sorry and that that's back to like this thing we have too many pairs not enough uh the order books are shit like uh yeah you fucking launched that that market without a fucking order book yeah that's why the stupidity level maximum um and then uh you know people argue with me about charts and i always tell them look like things happen on order books that you don't necessarily realize when you see it on the chart like uh which is one reason i'm

like lenient on drawing like lines through wicks and things like that like sometimes the order book is just trash it's the reason why we went up to 20k the order book i don't know if you were watching coinbase at the time but it was moving like 100 bucks every few minutes yeah because there was no there was nothing for sale like that's what happens like at the top i guess but uh there was no market maker doing anything to to mitigate that problem it'll be interesting to see like i've always been saying like bitcoin's gonna hit the scene in earnest like when there's a huge geopolitical situation or currency crisis and the liquidity crunch that happens when that when an event like that occurs is it's going to be fucking scary i don't plan on selling any of my bitcoin if that

happens like yeah this latest uh so i write for brave new coin uh shout out to brave new coin um and i try not to so i try to all the content i create i try to make it something that i want to read that people other people want to read right like i don't i don't really know anything about anything but i think i have a good grasp on like what interests people right yeah like makes stuff interesting um so like this past week like the news in general has been slow so i always like to write it like a little bit of fundamental analysis a little more about technical analysis but uh i was trying to think like what i read about this week so i just went through like all the countries and all this stuff that's going on and it's like there are these

trade deals that are falling apart all like tpp and nafta euro is falling apart eurozone is falling apart italy's falling apart greece is still in shambles uh there's the tariffs on steel tariffs on steel tariffs on china there's reciprocal tariffs uh there's there are all these open issues it's like uh i don't ever remember a time where it's been this crazy maybe it's just because i'm like plugged into it all i don't know there's a lot of tinder out there no it's it's pretty heavy and then like yeah unpredictability of like the trump administration period like it there's a lot of chaos out there right now which leads to volatility brexit brexit everything who else is trying somebody else is trying to i don't know i don't is there another

referendum in another country i think italy right italy well italy there's a giant thing recently yeah i went to a referendum but like you're like germany so if you freaks that don't know how to eurozone works the eurozone got together basically to create an economic free-flowing economic like where people could basically migrate from country to country and work without having to go through like visa stuff correct correct my correctness i assume yeah and makes sense on paper to me exactly so there's a difference so there's a eurozone then there's the euro so england was in the eurozone but it used the pound it did not use the euro um so there's two things there's the economic uh economic uh group the economic coalition consortium and then there's the

currency there's the currency part to it so it's two parts you can be in the eurozone but not use the euro but they also have like a law piece to that right yeah there is the euro there's a euro zone like litigator or whatever yeah which is one of the reasons why brexit it's like fuck off you're controlling us you're in brussels or wherever the fuck you are exactly well that's what i was getting to like germany being the economic powerhouse of the eurozone drives a lot of decisions and people are starting to get pissed off about that and germans are starting to get pissed off as well because they have to uh basically compensate for worse performing economies so they're they're spending their tax dollars to help out people in italy and greece so there's

just like a lot of conflict and it'll be interesting to see how it all all pans out this eurozone experiment might not uh might not pan out well it's like if there's a nafta coin like it's the same thing like everybody pissed off that we're paying for mexico like i think we benefit as consumers from cheaper prices from nafta but in general i think nafta is just a disaster for everybody it's like tbp like how free trade just doesn't work i don't think like you're because all the jobs get sent elsewhere right like that's what happened with mexico everybody went uh companies went to mexico yeah and as they should like do what's within the confines of the law like i don't blame them but go find the lowest means of production exactly like

uh path path at least the resistance right yeah um so yeah if we have a if we had a nafta coin like i couldn't even imagine what it would be like it'd be insane right because like you have canada with oil like their currency is pretty much uh tied to oil from what i know yeah so it's all that the world in my mind the world is like like you said there's a lot of tinder it's pretty dry it's like it's ready to go you know uh so we'll see but and uh that's another reason to be hedged at least a little bit into metals or i'm not a big metal guy personally i like i like the silver chart so silver looks really good to me uh it's like 2x from here but Our boy underscore TM3K, big silver guy.

TM3K. Big Z cash guy, big silver guy. Yeah. He, you know, I think he's like big into drugs, whatever. That's fine. But it's recently made me like think about drugs and trading again because how that affects people in general. Are we talking about cocaine in particular or?

Just anything like uppers, downers, mood stabilizers. um so for me i i have this thing that's similar to rls like when i sleep i my legs like move a lot um so i they gave me like this dopamine agonist and what dopamine does is upregulate your like wanting for risk basically and they're like warnings like uh it may cause gambling addiction things like that so like when i take when i take that i have to be cognizant of like what i'm doing training wise because i i definitely uh was taking on more risk really oh yeah It's crazy how the chemicals in your body can really drive these. Yeah, but, like, caffeine, for, like, an upper for me, works really well.

If you're on, what is it, ProVigil, NuVigil, have you heard of this? No. So the Army, like, developed it, similar to, like, it's a similar stimulant to MDMA, not MDMA, methamphetamines, but it doesn't give you, like, jitters, you know? It's like Adderall, basically? Kind of. It's really hard to describe, at least for me personally. They give it to me because I like borderline narcolepsy or something,

but it's hard to describe the feeling. I'm pretty sure my brother's narcoleptic. It's hard to describe the feeling other than I've never felt more awake than when I was on ProVigil and NuVigil. I don't know. It's just like this vigilance thing. It's not hypervigilance. It's not like jitters or anything like that.

It's just like you're really aware and I don't know. In the moment. Yeah, so a lot of executives take it. A lot of stock people take it. It's really good for crypto because it's 24-7. You're making trades at 3 a.m., 6 a.m. You're up. For me, the days of the week are meaningless.

Everybody's working for the weekend, right? But I don't really... The clock is whatever for me because I'm just up all the time. Is there better trading like during Asian market time? Western market time? What's a better trading time? So on Friday, Thursday, Friday, again, the days of the week, I don't even know what's going on right now.

But I just gave some talk to some people in D.C. We were talking about trading in TA, and somebody asked me about this. And so in Forex, it's a known thing. It's called kill zones, where basically all the markets open at specific times around the world, so markets move based on who's awake. Yeah, exactly. So you have, like, U.S., London, Asia, all these markets. that slowly roll open and you can see it on the chart volume goes up um in forex so in in uh crypto

definitely like sometimes asia will move the market sometimes the u.s which has been predominant lately will move the market um i think that'll change with the ico cool down here well at least more westerners being wary of of getting into ico games yeah but like the laws are nobody's the The laws exist, but they're not being enforced, I feel like. Yeah, the SEC has the ability to go after the low-hanging fruit scammers that are blatant and obvious, like Paragon and... Titanium, what did they just take down, or what was it? I don't know, something like that.

But in general, anybody can buy anything they want, whenever they want. There are ways around everything in crypto. If you have a VPN and access to Binance, you're okay. Yeah. So, yeah, you'll see that in crypto. like you used to see it in a lot more when the chinese exchanges were active more so now or more so then than they are now but um you'll definitely see like u.s hours um even on friday at like 4 30 past 4 30 you'll see like a giant uptick in trading volume you know who is trading at four

five o'clock on a friday u.s time like my guess is these stock people right get off work and yeah good trip damn and you'll see you'll see the same thing at 9 9 30 well it's crazy you're seeing like a lot of people like some dude just left the gold like he had an opportunity to become like c c suite level goldman which is like i made too much money at uh in crypto like i'm gonna go trade that yeah sony was just drawing talent it is it's like the brain drain of uh the olden days of finance like but it's the brain drain to crypto versus just to uh finance and stocks in general yeah and i always said like to myself like i always poo-pooed like any brain drain away from because i tried to do like medicine obviously but so i tried to like be a functioning member

of society right to give back uh but then like you're in it you're here and it's like why would you do anything else because it's just it's so lucrative it's so loose with your time as far as like what you want to do put into it like most of the days i honestly feel like i go and i'm shaking the money tree like it's honestly that insane how easy it is sometimes um how does it change how does it change your perspective on life like you said you taught i mean you've taught yourself so let's talk about that your biology major thought you're going to be a doctor like you self-taught yourself how to trade and it seems like you're doing well like it's it's has crypto liberated you uh yeah because any other job is just not the same you know you're

The other part of it is you're by yourself. And the lows of trading, I've never experienced anything lower than the lows of trading, anything higher than the highs of trading. That's another part of the addiction that's coming out now a lot with people, like gambling addiction, which I can totally see because the highs and lows are uncomparable to anything. But, yeah, it's definitely liberated me from working with shitty teams on jobs. Like, why bother?

But, yeah, it's totally changed everything. changed my life dramatically yeah uh overall benefit oh for sure yeah yeah i think everybody it's like going to a nine to five being stuck in traffic well that's the other crazy like this so bitcoin's an emerging asset class and a lot of money is to be made when a new asset hops on the market doesn't happen very often at all sometimes it takes millennia for like a new completely new asset to show up yeah somebody's comparing it to like egypt when they created whatever they some sort of money they graded i don't know but um yeah i mean it's probably it's like the birth of fiat currency but the birth of the next i would say it's like the

birth of when people figured out that you could burn oil for energy like that was probably like the last huge i'm trying to think of my mind here i could this could be wrong but i was like i can't think of anything like other than like combustible people find out that oil is combustible and usable for energy i think it's an innovation on that par and they don't come around that often yeah i was listening to like freakonomics or some podcast and they were talking about uncertainty versus risk and how uh risk it most people can calculate but uncertainty nobody can calculate like you can calculate it but most people can't calculate it very well or easily um so uncertainty is where the money is like these new industries like uh if you look at how all the railroad people got rich

it's like there were businesses that just created were created out of nowhere that no one knew was going to go anywhere and then crypto is a lot of parallels to that for sure yeah and what i want to jump into is that has created a lot of people with fuck you money who are able to like yeah be like i i can do whatever i want and it gives people courage kevin fam carriage to talk about to talk about uh he's a funny guy like how is uh i mean but it's true it's like i call him the militant bitcoin maximalist you know i have that's a good description oh kevin if you're listening you need to get to new york you need to get in the studio we're keeping our shirts on on this podcast though i'd like to meet him in uh real life as well uh just because he's he's so um

persistent well persistent abrasive is another way to put abrasive yeah you know i i kind of agree with some of the stuff he says i kind of don't but uh it's good that someone's saying it i don't know it's a shtick it's a shtick that's what people have to realize like he i mean i have never spoke to him about whether or not it's a shtick but in my mind it's like dave portnoy and then dave portnoy is a shtick like the dude who runs barstool um i was like who's that okay but like it's a shtick like he is intentionally being abrasive and i would actually argue like he is doing a good thing because it's making people think about uncomfortable truths that a lot of people want to avoid but it's better to uh he would you would call him a bitcoin maximalist

militant i think he refers to himself as a white blood cell that makes sense then trying to rid the world of the cancer growing on twitter yeah yeah um yeah so when you when you're trying to like build an audience or like content creation or whatever we like youtube you want to talk about um it's for for me what i learned is like it's all about like keeping in your niche so carve out a niche for yourself figure out what whatever that is and like sort of stay in your lane sort of thing yeah um shoot from the hip stay in your lane speak from the heart you know uh and you'll find that like yeah if you're creating value people will listen um and one of the reasons i started writing and started doing youtube is like i was

just seeing so much garbage out there i couldn't just like sit idly by anymore and had to like i had to contribute to the conversation yeah let's jump in your youtube channel when you started you have like 21 000 subscribers now i saw yeah i don't really pay attention too much but yeah something like that yeah i was i research for this podcast okay right right research um not to not for me to sound like super humble like oh i don't pay attention youtube 20 2016 something like that 2016 i think and if you watch my early videos they're all shit shouting in the wind like just terrible audio don't worry about it you know like you just i couldn't even breathe the first episode of this podcast like i had a script written for this podcast for the first one it

was terrible yeah that's how i started videos too like i had a script and then you just realized like just be yourself yeah and you're good man like you anybody um and and that's the thing because like the space is so wide open right now that you can find very like niche this is my niche podcast on the smart people like i found my niche i have the newsletter as well i ship post in the morning to everybody um but yeah if you find your niche there's so much opportunity in this space in particular if you provide value like there's that's the thing like we're on board like this is a completely new market people are becoming more and more curious about it more more and more people want to learn and there's only so few sources out there so if you can become a source

like you were saying like you have these telegram communities and these small communities and that's it's only going to get more prevalent so there's definitely a lot of opportunity when it comes to education oh for sure and there's value in like uh sharing with people as you're learning too which i'm seeing a lot more of now yeah than i did a few years ago uh like me like when i started trading i could have done something but i the other part of it is i'm seeing people who are trying to get this audience where uh they like don't deserve an audience or they're just trying to like reap in those ico uh reviews and uh ad revenue ian bielma is that his name or whatever the dude who uh had his private keys in ian bolina uh supplement you know i mean these people

i don't know i don't haven't met them i'm sure they're decent people i don't know but just viewing what they do uh because i've uh gotten on youtube and like i'm part of like the meta conversation around what youtube is and does and like the ad apocalypse all this other crap um i'm super interested in just because i'm a part of the community sort of uh so when i see like all these uh crypto channels that are popping up just to do like ico reviews and stuff it's just like it's like you know yeah i'm not that i don't want to be a part of that uh i don't know no and that's again going back to like i don't like when people like i don't want to say i don't like i was just like i'm not the type of person to be like oh my god i hit 10 000 followers it's like the

people that like just hop on the scene like want to talk about icos and show their block folio every day or people just want to be popular they're not really providing meaningful content at the end of the day yeah but a lot of people get drawn to that right it's easy they don't realize that that's noise not the signal that's that's the hardest part when you get into the space is finding the signal it takes years it took me years i was a vericoin maximalist remember that's right that's right um yeah and it's getting harder because there's lots of fracturing like we talked about yeah with the communities yeah satoshi nakamoto institute even had a fracture we've got uh we've got feuding bitcoin maximalists like even within bitcoin maximalists like

world there's feuds should you be the index should is bitcoin maximalism the bitcoin index bitcoin and its forks index where is it ptc in particular the raging debate well anybody can fork like if i fork if i fork right now and i sell you one coin for 10 million dollars then we can make the market cap 10 million times the number of coins like so the whole like uh percent bitcoin's uh what is it called index oh the um percent of the pie of bitcoin the uh market cap dominance yeah market cap dominance like that's just the garbage metric because anybody can create anything let's talk about that bitcoin's losing its dominance so if so you can curate it if i that has value i think like if you curate it and say let's include ethereum and some

other shit i don't know like you make some metrics whatever but you can't just throw everything in there you know yeah i think that's what um i think that's what on-chain fx is trying to do just bring more signal to that yeah type of indicator um it's interesting but i would argue that like bitcoin is the only blockchain that like does what it markets that it does what it marketed it would do out of the box which is enable peer-to-peer censorship resistant distributed transactions i haven't seen any working dabs that like are or being used on the world computer and then beyond that like maybe there's like like laycoin would you consider that like i'm working like it works yeah the network effect isn't there

yeah i mean like what's like the test net for bitcoin right like they got segwit first they got uh whatever else first people people even get pissed off when you say that about like yeah i know they do but it is a test net hey you're a big proponent of that aren't you What? That Litecoin is a testnet. I'm not like a proponent, but it's just like, that's what the way it is. Yeah. Like you said, like Bitcoin is, I don't know.

It's the one and only, right? There will never be another one, ever. Even if it goes to zero, there will never be another Bitcoin. I think if Bitcoin goes to zero, like this whole space falls to shit for at least like a decade, maybe. I don't think it will go to zero, but like, it would, uh... it would very much damper the space because i i think it has to succeed for the rest of the space to succeed right i think so i'm on board with that i think the scammers need to be put in jail like there needs to be more of that uh because i'm still seeing way too much of that um

yeah it's pretty brazen it's very brazen and that's like i had matt corralo in here last week and he was saying like i could ease like easily like profited off a bunch of stuff like being an advisor to stuff and stuff like that like it's just it's not like again like you said like it gives me like an icky feeling it's like i don't want to be associated with it because again and i talk about this a lot on this podcast this is a long-term reputation game oh for sure there is going to be a rapture one day oh yeah it's gonna come yeah because there's marty the brand the brand there's carbon octum the brand and nothing is faster than trust and as soon as you lose that it's gone right exactly unfortunately in crypto a lot of people are forgetful about a lot of things

that happened uh years ago months ago you know they just and these new people just uh it's like a wave you know when the wave fills the beach wave comes out when they're scammers and it comes right back in i got into we got into a brian kelly debate some with some people like last week or week ago like if everyone is pumping nautilus coin on fast money yeah he should know better than to be telling people how to buy ripple at three dollars but he keep they keep doing that though they pump bcash they pump uh ripple it's like but the argument is like oh my god but he's been such a great advocate for crypto but it's like ah has he it'd be funny if to find out one day that they were getting kickbacks somehow to like promote that stuff oh what's the uh

what's the uh conspiracy theory with uh fast money in particular is like the producer her husband is like a bcash yeah i mean that's a fact that's not a conspiracy yeah uh one of the producers husband wives i can't remember um is part of like the bcash foundation or something yeah yeah they're always pumping in the funniest part about cnbc fast money pumping is that they use coinbase charts and just draw like shitty lines on them like like lines that they draw with their finger yeah it's fine i mean it's uh the point we're trying to make here is don't go to cnbc fast money for your crypto news or do and just do the opposite that's true use the counter indicator yeah i mean that whole network's a counter indicator like framers not not really

doing anybody a service either so that's what you yeah that's what you should come to expect with cnbc i just uh i posted some article where they were like the u.s economy uh is unstoppable right it's like oh that's not a good sign when you've seen articles like that go look up 90 day delinquency rate freaks they're on the rise again and once they hit a certain point now all these debt derivatives go to shit it's scary out there and i would argue we're we're less we have a less stable base than we did in 2008 if anything we've only made the system more complex and riskier and therefore more fragile to an extent so i said i don't want to be like doom and gloom let's also caveat this with people have been calling like a crash of the economy for

for years like nobody knows when it's going to happen right i was just like we were talking about earlier there's a lot of tinder there it's just like i don't see how you go forward without like some event happening yeah like in like the tax cuts and um i don't know the ratio of like stock buybacks to wage growth but uh i'd imagine it's heavier on stock buybacks yeah like repatriation of money and blah blah wage growth and then you have cpi cpi is a shit metric for inflation like if you look at real inflation like you're talking about student loans like these are things people need to buy like loans houses health care food if you look at like food energy health care tuition costs the inflation has been insane the last like two decades uh and this is where people are really

spending money on then wage growth has been nowhere near like it has been has not had the same pace of growth as these prices have and that's it's getting it's very interesting because we were creating these very deflationary technologies where you can spin up something if you know how to use software and write software you can create a product for free basically and and give it to the world give utility to the world for free so we have this thing where we're creating technologies that are basically depreciating prices we're trying to increase wages and increase prices of everything like externally that's not technology and we're having a butting of heads i would say of differing like of uh deflationary reality from a tech perspective

and a need to pay back debt which is an interesting uh scenario we found ourselves in yeah and even like going to these cities like san francisco or new york new york city because we're here seeing these people who work in retail or fast food or uh restaurants whatever it's like how do you make enough money to live here because like when i was in that industry i worked in hospitality like serving tables basically um in my youth and i was a busboy for too long and it's like how do you support yourself let alone a family on that salary i don't know man i don't know you don't like on like after taxes especially in new york city like how do you live i i don't get it like that doesn't add up like i could barely pay rent right volunteer working at

that job you know don't even get me started on the rent here i miss chicago chicago i paid like 400 rent in college and here it's quadruple that yeah you're splitting it with two people yeah and i live in just outside of dc and it's bad and it's only gonna get worse because amazon's probably coming to dc and then there's like a million people and then they all need places to live and blah blah blah so it's only gonna get worse in dc yeah it's interesting well real estate is a it's a finite resource too so that makes sense like if you're getting a lot of people but it's not fun to pay that rent no especially if you're like like you're saying like a retail or fast food worker like yeah it becomes impossible the other thing is they have like these people

have to live they can't live in the city obviously because they can't afford the rent so they have to live farther away and then it takes longer to get to the jobs blah blah blah like even in dc as it is people are like doing these 90 minute commutes one way dc traffic let's talk about it how terrible is it these days it's real bad and nobody can drive because everybody's a transplant internationally or otherwise and no one knows anything about anything it's amazing how these people get um licenses but yeah it's bad man yeah i like because we i used to live in charleston from philadelphia i used to live in charleston and we would my dad for some reason was such a hard-o instead of flying to and from charleston to philly when we visit family we drive and no

matter if we're coming from charleston to philly and hitting dc like later in the night or from philly to charleston hitting dc in the morning traffic was always terrible yeah you could be driving 4 a.m at the highway and it's just like bumper to bumper it's stupid it's so stupid uh dc how's the dc uh crypto community uh you got mirage down there you got coin center down there mirage i got des desiree shout out to them um coin center shout out to coin center it's definitely growing yeah i don't know i'm whenever i go to whenever i meet people in person i always feel like there's a just a bigger audience online anyway so it's like why bother yeah but um it's nice to meet people in person right no that's like one of my favorite parts

about this community if you will is like meeting people in person yeah so it's growing it's very easy to have conversations like all right we already have like a mutual interest exactly dive into yeah i mean the community in dc is definitely growing yeah it's not as big as sf that's for sure sf i think is focused more on like individual projects or like daps and ethereum but uh dc is interesting because there's a regulatory government thing going on everybody at these meetups is like lawyers or regulators like that's why at the thing i was talking at i was like thinking like i need to be careful what i say because i don't know it could be a could be a narc in the room i could yeah i could be like a subpoena for something i don't

know uh so it's an interesting thing because there's a lot of like professional professionals there you know yeah lawyers and whoever else so how do you think this regulatory landscape plays out i think there will be a lot of forgiveness and then like a going forward these are the guidelines that's all the reason why i like the ari paul conversation because i agree with him on we need no gray areas in uh icos crowd fundraising whatever because it punishes the people punishes the good actors and gives the bad actors way too much wiggle room yeah so when i hear uh Is it Jake Clayton? I think Jake, yeah, Clayton out of SEC say we don't need any new securities regulations. They've been working for X number of years, blah, blah, blah.

Like, I get really disheartened when I hear that, as much as I'm not, like, a pro-government person. Like, just seeing what we're seeing, it's like there needs to be something done. Can we self-regulate, though? I don't know, because even if we have regulations here, everybody will just go elsewhere, which is basically what they've already done. You know, they're out of Switzerland, they're out of Singapore, they're out of some Cayman Islands offshore. you know whatever yeah um so even if we have regulations here will it really do anything probably not no yeah that's true it's just difficult to be a part of the community i think somebody who's trying to like stay true like true north you know it's like i don't want to be

associated with all this strong shit it's like it's like ulysses and the sirens you got to tie yourself to the boat and and the sirens are the altcoins and all these shit ico projects but then you and i get pigeonholed into these groups that we're clearly not a part of like when i see these articles uh from bi business insider uh like zoe bernard for instance writing these articles that are like shitting all over like libertarians and all these other people and it's like crypto bros you know um baby getting thrown out with the bathwater type shit yeah and the articles on like new york times uh that article or it was like everybody's getting stinking rich except you and these like bros wearing these these ugly sweaters which are pretty cool by the way but uh

yeah it's like i don't identify with those people i'm just like some dude you know like i'm not i'm trying not to be a scammer i'm trying to be like legitimate and blah blah blah and it's just like well that's why we need more kevin fans we need more white blood cells just to publicly shame everybody i think public shaming goes a lot goes a long way to a certain extent but then you have the bots and everybody defending. Anytime I shit on IOTA, it's like I get all these bots

after me. It's really bad. IOTA specifically. I can't not get pissed about IOTA because it's such a garbage project and it just keeps going up. I haven't even been following all coin prices. Is IOTA hot right now?

I don't actually know the chart of IOTA right now. The coin was pumping on Biffinex when the network was not working, when it was down. Maybe there's some game theory behind that as far as people not being able to move stuff off Bitfinex and there was some sort of constraint on supply or whatever. But yeah, when I see that, it's just like,

oh, again, I don't want to be part of that. It's just like somebody recently was writing about the use case for crypto is speculation. like it's there are no there's no better way to use speculative assets it's true maybe that's the way we bootstrap bitcoin into mainstream or into a store value you know maybe we need to go through this shit i mean we need these shitty projects yeah even like barry silver like greed and spec is what fuels everything in crypto right yeah still pumping etc yeah that's the one altcoin i've actually lost money on for the most part i don't lose money on all the coins just because

because i'm super patient but uh etc i just i was done i sold it like for tax season or something i was like all right this is done there's uh yeah like what like is anybody using it i don't think so no again they're trying to do these like airdrops that's part of like this rote script of like trying to make uh drum up some pr and blah blah blah but calypso or crypto whatever it was yeah i don't think uh there's again there's not enough users again the ux isn't there impact to eos guess what they're gonna do all these airdrops they're promising to people like i so about a year or i don't know if it was a year ago probably in the fall i think i watched uh uh an interview i think it was with jason calcanis um with brock pierce and vinnie lingham talking

about eos and they were saying like yeah as soon as the main net launches it's gonna have a thousand working dads and i was like fuck you no way well they have like uh this like billion dollar pool of money that they're uh you mentioned it earlier that they're selecting projects to promote or vc basically you know um yeah again back to eos like the proof of stake problem is um in their case what is your reward and it's uh just being able to use the network so that the reward stays within the network like there's no uh impetus or incentive if you don't use the network to prove to stake so i don't know maybe it creates buy-in in a certain way but how much money do you need to be like a staking validator on es is it a um i'm not sure is it

only the 21 validators yeah well the 21 for sure but uh you can like it's sort of like i think it's like dpos or like it's a representative democracy where you like you put your money behind these people it's gonna turn out terribly you can't we'll see man you can't design like that's it like people like one governance so bad it's like you can't design governance in these systems it's emergent tezos that's launching soon too right yeah when's that launching i don't know i hope it goes to zero just like just like just like eos i mean we're all getting our tote bag soon people be patient they're coming out that was one i avoided and then uh augers shopping July 9th. I'm actually excited to see

what happens there. Yeah, I bought some auger a while back. Let's see what it does to the Ethereum network as the Ethereum network can handle a prediction market. Yeah. I'm interested to see if there'll be a lot of people using that either. Again, like who the fuck can use

MetaMask? Something like that. Yeah, there's a learning curve there. Yeah. It's been a great conversation. Yeah. Do you have a parting note for the freaks or anything? Anything else you want to talk about before we leave? What do I want to talk about?

I don't think so. You know? We covered a lot. Just be cognizant of who you're listening to and what they're selling you, you know? Yeah. In general, for the new people, because there's a lot of people selling a lot of shit. There's a lot of shit out there. There's a lot of traveling snake oil salesmen who just roll around on various platforms

and content and just try to connive their way into money, you know? They make a lot of money. oh they make a shit ton of money which is why they're here like it makes sense yeah I get it yeah

but uh yeah again I'd like to think we're idealists alright I'm in this for sound money to change the world for the better I think we're gonna do it

I'm not in a cult I swear to god we're not in a cult I'm doing the right thing okay I say this in the mirror five times a day yeah this is good

I promise right but it really is um I don't wanna take up your whole New York City day thank you for coming by man it's been fun

thanks for having me thanks for putting us together on the quick that was yeah real quick thanks shout out Zookie Chalock for hooking it up in Chicago

for uh cause he tweeted you know we should go on TFTC I didn't even see the tweet that you're in town yeah until he uh

until he added you and me um yeah you can find more about Carpe Noctem on Twitter at Carpe Noctem

seize the night people that's right I'm Marty Ben at Marty Ben on Twitter if you like this podcast please subscribe rate share with your friends tell people that are looking to learn about bitcoin about us i also have a newsletter too you can subscribe via the link on my twitter page peace and love