TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #8: Team Lightswitch breaks down madness

Episode Date: December 22, 2017

Marty and fellow Team Lightswitch member Matt Brown breakdown the crazy week that was.

What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy, Marty Bent. Sitting down with another member of Team Light Switch today, a relatively new Bitcoin user. We've got a lot to talk about. Matt Brown, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. This is my second time recording. I don't know if we're ever going to drop the first one, but- The first one, it's too old now. The shit we were talking about, it's like old news, and that was a week ago. I do want to clip out the Roger Ver part, because it was kind of a transcendental look into the future of the fuckery that was going to go on.

It's true. It really was a prescient rant that you went on. Yeah, so what's today's date? The 22nd? Yes, the 22nd. It's December 22nd, 2017, the year of our Lord, and a lot of shit has gone down. This has been a crazy week. been a particularly crazy day. And the crazy news is predicated around one company that

has been hailed as Bitcoin's first unicorn, and that is Coinbase. The level of incompetence that they've shown this week is truly awe-inspiring. Matt, as a newbie, what are your thoughts? So, they have a beautiful UI, a perfect user interface. You compare it to Gemini, and you send a noob there the noob is gonna put money into coinbase faster than gemini every day of the week i am shocked shocked at their ineptitude i could not be more rattled at how stupid people are in the smartest space in the world i agree i agree and it is a bit of a black eye on the industry right now if for those of you that don't know or don't understand what's been happening with coinbase uh basically what was it wednesday night when they when they launched bcash on there

how like it feels like a month ago already it was like monday or tuesday or wednesday night out of nowhere coinbase decided to just add add bcash to their platform and bcash pumped and it was a really really weird situation because you had many things going on uh number one it was weird because coinbase has been saying that they're going to add bcash in January and the fact that they just launched it out of the blue out of nowhere without warning their customers was pretty pretty shitty on their part number two you had a very overt instance of insider trading like I've been getting dms of people that it's from San Francisco who have heard from the coinbase product who heard from the coinbase product team before

bcash was launched so the news was out there I don't really care about the insider trading and but it happened number three it i mean i can't say it happened for certain but it looks like it happened if it looks like a rat walks like a rat smells like a rat talks like yeah allegedly it completely fucking happened yeah um and then number three uh with the same situation you had uh cnbc one of their shows was like pumping bee catch they were like shilling hard and it was it was a weird combination of events happening at a very coincidental time uh and it was very very sketchy in my opinion i have no idea how roger ver bought an entire show on cnbc to shill he's got a lot of cnbc fast money turned into just a fucking bitcoin cash shill operation

like bitcoin.com wasn't bad enough i mean cnbc really has not a lot didn't have a lot of credibility going into this week i think they lost any shred of credibility that they had uh after after tuesday night um and then so that was earlier this week again it feels like a fucking month ago already uh today they halted bcash trading and there's been rumors swirling around that they may be insolvent and uh some dude named laurent he's uh he's been a great uh researcher in the space specifically researching uh the spamming attacks of a few summers ago and one earlier this year i believe he uh he believes he found uh one of coinbase's wallets i think it's confirmed that's one of coinbase's wallets and basically uh the way their wallets are structured is so piss poor

from an engineering perspective and from a cost basis perspective, like the way their UTXO set is set up. They're basically just giving miners money at the expense of their customers. Coin bases. Coin bases, yes. And so today they shut down Bcash trading. You can't even buy, sell, move, or do anything. I think you can move it.

You definitely can't buy or sell it. um so the whole situation is sketchy as a newcomer what are your thoughts i mean i'm not so like i said i'm pretty shocked at the ineptitude of the space i guess i'm not it's not the whole space no i know you're right you're right you're right you're right and and like i should say i'm a fucking noob and that the people who build all of this shit are probably the smartest people alive right now like santi and that shit they actually might be might be the smartest people. I mean, Santi's definitely a lot smarter than the people at Coinbase, but

the- Of course, Pierre, all those fuckers. But, we'll cut that. You're not a fucker, Pierre. Yeah, fucker's a good term on this podcast. An endearing fucker. So, I guess I'm not shocked that Brian Armstrong is sort of willing

to kind of play a little fast and loose with the altcoins, because it does make sense from like a- A revenue perspective? Yeah, from a revenue perspective. Like, everyone's a business. that guy that guy's got goals to hit i'm sure vc people are asking him to hit goals and he's like all right i know what we'll do we'll just add this shit coin and pump it and solves our liquidity problem on the back end yeah that's the thing though it's like the the move to add b cash was

so brash and so sudden it's like why it's too conspiracy yeah i mean yeah like why why do it that way why why roll it out that way and then shut it down a couple days later so this has led to a lot of people um basically insinuating that they may be insolvent they may be fractionally reserved um i don't want to cause a run on coinbase but i certainly will not be holding any coins there ever um i might buy live on the pod right now hey we've had a couple people buy live on the pod this is another buy my favorite live buy on the pod was when lewis bought when santi was in here it was the funniest thing i've ever seen just got just got duped i mean i just so let's also let's also paint the like let's do a little parabolic trav charting right now we're

we're at 13 865 i believe we fell to like 10 5 at some point today yeah 10 4 i think has been the true basement there's inspirational support at 12k inspirational support like shit is hitting all the fans in bitcoins like this is our bottom like i don't give a fuck because you know what it is i mean you got a bunch of institutional investors on the sidelines have been fucking hard for been like waiting for uh a dip like this and this was a considerable dip i think it was 30 from the top potentially i think the top was like 19.8 yeah yeah actually shit almost 50 percent um almost 50 it's the biggest dip of 2017 good we needed one it was hot it was a hot fall like i wrote about it this morning in the newsletter in i believe it was fucking the beginning of

november the price was at like three thousand dollars like we 6x since then at least so why why does brian armstrong i guess you can't really answer for him why does he like hold more ethereum than bitcoin and not believe in the long-term vision when he's running like the the current spearhead the first unicorn in crypto i like how could you not be long on btc if you're long on the industry i mean i can't speak for brian i've never met brian i don't know i don't know what he's thinking but i don't know people believe that i mean he's an ex goldman guy from what i understand and there's a lot of goldman people working on on ethereum like at consensus there's a couple goldman guys as well i'm not gonna get any goldman conspiracies but um that's actually

good to know let me double check make sure he's i know fred eshram or whatever their old co-founder was definitely uh a golden guy i would assume it's like in the spirit of competition so but yeah i mean i i can't i don't give a shit if you list like ethereum or litecoin or bcash it's just like the complete incompetence of the rollout of bcash this week is just is i mean it hit fucking zero on the on the exchange day yeah and what does that even mean it means that coinbase is incompetent like if like if you're going to roll this out and not have it ready to go like and fuck up your order books i'm pretty sure they opened it on tuesday or wednesday night whenever it was and closed their books within two minutes

and that's why that's why cnbc fast money tweeted out that picture of like the nine thousand dollar b cash and it really never hit that price like if you look at any other exchange i think at that point it was trading around like 3400 so that was a orchestrated pump and then they just took it offline because of the pump essentially i mean again i can't i can only speculate allegedly i can only speculate and cnbc and cnbc tweeted it very fast and then yeah tweeted it again armstrong is a golden guy confirmed and then tweeted it again today cnbc did like oh nine nine kb cash like they did yeah no yeah they tweeted it again even though it was like clearly a fucking no pump glitch yeah see that's this is where things are getting like weird yeah i don't like to get

conspiratorial too much but like this is an orchestrated attack on the beautiful the beautiful currency that is bitcoin yeah it seems as though but like fucking a man bitcoin's strong as hell i'm looking at it now it's back up to 1300 13.5 right now like it's fucking anti-fragile the honey badger doesn't give a fuck like that's the one beauty of the system like i've been saying for a while i was about to buy on coinbase i'm so out i'm so confused by even what's going on the price listed is is 13 130 on on coinbase for for me right now then you click over to the buy page yeah i'm seeing 14 3 7 on uh trade block right now gotcha all right so anyway so on the fucking on the dashboard it's 13.1 you go to the buy screen it's 14.4 gotta get your shit together

coinbase i mean all right now it's back up i we probably have bad wi-fi in the studio that's probably it all right the bar's still different um i was up i was up last night until like two in the morning watching parabolic drives live screen live stream the way he says hodl is like perfect it's perfect for his his little little character he's a canuck man he's got a nice uh oh yeah oh you know we just huddle we just huddle we huddle i was trying to maintain my business but you know it's uh we're getting too much so shout out to my patrons hey sorry just huddling my bitcoin over here just huddling like i actually look at it like a business i just huddle parabolic tribe this is this is an endearing impersonation no i love you i love you um yeah so fuck where

are we now i mean i think i would not recommend coinbase i've stopped i stopped recommending coinbase to people earlier this summer um but i'm definitely like some people ask me have been asking me like oh is it okay if i buy on coinbase i've been like yeah yeah it's fine like whatever like they sell now like now i'll tell people go to gemini download the cash app they're going to roll out bitcoin functionality soon um so use local bitcoins if you have to meet somebody in person make sure you meet so what does that what does that mean for bitcoin and bitcoin's upward velocity if we hit a limbo where coinbase usership drops and we don't have the cash app yet that's a good question i don't know i mean we could consolidate for a little bit and run sideways

uh again the bitcoin protocol itself doesn't give a fuck it doesn't even know any of this shit's going on like it's software that's running flawlessly but yeah it's uh it's definitely a hit like sentiment it's definitely a sentimentality is that a word i don't think so um but it's definitely a hit to the psyche of the public and their faith in bitcoin so that's been bitcoin's achilles heel i would argue the first decade in is exchanges being shoddy shitty uh and pretty terrible custodial services um but people conflate that to bitcoin with bitcoin uh and wrongly conflated with bitcoin because bitcoin has nothing to do with the exchanges they're just on and off ramps to to bitcoin they're important they play a role important role

but i think these situations that have been happening with coinbase specifically over the last couple months uh i think it's really lighting a fire under the community's ass to to make things like decentralized exchanges a thing and and bring them to the floor gotcha the basement on gemini was only 11 731 yeah i mean the uh the print like the the arbs between the exchanges is pretty crazy right now like i was quoting 13 four from bitfinex it's at 14 2 on bitstamp 14 4 on gdax right now and china's chilling in the mid-14s as well so yeah man i mean i think this is a good example of pointing to the anti-fragility of bitcoin like this is something that a lot of people

if this happened five years ago i think i think we would have seen like a much bigger correction but now people sort of understand that these exchanges aren't bitcoin um more people are understanding there's definitely some people who still think and i think a lot of people too there have been so many eyes on it that it is viewed probably more widely than in the past as an opportunity to buy it yeah exactly this is like what people were the the no-coiners on the sideline were like oh when there's a huge correction i'm gonna buy and i think that they they actually did a little bit this time we just heard frankie borelli the pizza maker got some he was frankie borelli got some he was talking shit on me the other day frankie borelli the pizza

maker not on casey radio on sirius xm on sirius xm he shot that out to the world national he was roasting you i might have to uh i might have to challenge him to rough and rowdy too no no frankie if you're listening to this no he won't fight he's not a fighter i i can tell i can tell frankie i'll do you hear that frankie we can tell we can tape we can tape my right arm behind my back and i'll fight you oh wow marty marty stop it it's dave's guy it's dave's guy with team lights which are watching the fucking wall bro i'm kidding frankie it's all love it's all love team lights which is a subsidiary of team portnoy at the end of the day that's true that's true we're all in this together the blog never sleeps and we're teammates just hey if you're gonna if

you're gonna but you were talking shit on bitcoin and then i'm but no that that's what we that's what like you need though you need the no corners to be like oh it's going up too much i can't afford it it's too high i'm not gonna buy it an all-time high then you get a massive correction and they buy and that's how we have such strong support at 1200 or fucking 12k 12k yeah strong support at 1200 like that was this time last year it's crazy to think like i wrote about it's crazy I wrote about it in my newsletter, in the holiday send-off newsletter of Marty's Band. Subscribe, subscribe, subscribe. Link in the bio of my Twitter account.

It's been a crazy year. So we started out the year. We had a couple China bands. We had a couple ETF bands. We had ASIC Boost, which was a discovery that some miners had an unfair advantage over others. We had Amplead, which basically proved that Bitmain, one of the big mining companies in China, had produced hardware with backdoors that could be shut down remotely. That was a pretty big drama. And Roger Ver, I don't even think you know about this, but Roger Ver had another fork attempt in the beginning of the year, Bitcoin Unlimited.

I read about it this morning in a little newsletter. And that failed. like they literally tried to run that network and the nodes crashed uh that caused a lot of fun then we moved to may we have consensus and the new york agreement where they want to do segue 2x the bunch of vcs and like less than 50 people met to decide the future of bitcoin which is pretty hubristic and then we had the summer of the the apparent flippening when everybody thought ethereum was going to overtake bitcoin's market cap uh what else happened this summer um a parody hack a couple parody hacks a few parody hacks um yeah then we have bitcoin cash

in august or bcash in august fork off uh and then this fall we've had the insane price run from like three grand to almost 20 grand and couple that with a bunch of fud bcash giving a pretty weak effort to to manipulate the markets in my opinion and uh And now this Coinbase shit, it's been a fucking crazy year. So much goddamn news. And that's why you have to realize you have to find your Bitcoins in. We've been talking about this all week here at the Barstool offices. You have to find your Bitcoins in where you know there's going to be news,

there's going to be shit happening all the time, and you just got to be able to flow with it and know, not know, but if you truly believe in this investment, just at the end of the day, I have a long-term view. It's like, all right, I am in this for 10 years. and again i practice what i preach i only put as much money as i was willing to lose into this so i'm not stressed out at all i'm not like it's not like i took a mortgage out on a house to buy bitcoin so don't like i was reading some terrible stories on reddit of people who took out like 40

grand loans with 25 interest rates from like loan sharks to buy bitcoin at the top and they're pretty fucked right now so i all right so i'm working on my zen i think i'm getting there this was big for me this was my first big correction the last time it was at 13k i literally didn't sleep for an entire night reading reading the nakamoto institute because i literally thought it was never going to stop going up so this has been a good correction for me and i'm i'm underwater on on a couple buys more than a couple buys and i don't give a fuck i if i if i took out a fucking huge loan from a loan truck i still wouldn't give a fuck because i think we're gucci Yeah, long-term view, still Gucci.

O' I don't even think it's that long-term. I'm thinking Q1. We're touching numbers we've never touched. Take that to the bank. This is not advice, but we're touching a new all-time high in Q1. We are not your financial advisors. This is not financial advice. But, with that being said, there's a lot of good fundamental news going into 2018. I believe NASDAQ's working on a couple ETFs. I think we're finally going to get an ETF approved. Not that I completely agree with the etf model it's just good news and it makes wall street people more comfortable with it for some reason um yeah and on top of that like you have nations like again like the geopolitical

situation around the world i don't think it's gotten any better uh zimbabwe and venezuela are still in pretty terrible financial straits you have things like spain's uh referendum a few months ago stuff like more stuff like that's going to continue popping up um this this this debt crisis that the world finds itself in uh continues to get worse um so again remember remember why you're invested in this if you are it's it's a hedge against a global monetary meltdown pretty heavy shit yep we don't need debt some debts okay yeah we do need debt that was a lot but we don't need we don't need all this fucking debt what we what we don't need is somebody who can just print money out of thin air and and inflate the money supply um

hmm so where else are we so again i want to stress the importance of finding your bitcoin zen go read some rothbard read some stoics read read uh highly recommend meditations of marcus aurelius that man was smart as fuck and the way he spoke and wrote back in the day like uh those words travel throughout time very very very applicable to life all right what else you thinking what do we got here how long have you been recording parabolic traffic just tweeted or no it's old never mind fuck dude thought he just tweeted something bullish would you uh would you kiss parabolic trap if you ever saw him in person no i actually think that that this has kind of shown me that like the charting is like

like he's been right almost every time but like the charting's a little silly yeah there's no way to chart this shit there's so many external factors i mean it's obviously resilient as fucking like like a hard motherfucker but yeah everybody has a plan to get punched in the face like ta charts like our plan until you get punched in the face until coinbase yeah there's rumors of coinbase being insolvent yeah exactly um i think this one's just going to be quick and dirty i got the wife about to pick me up to head back to philly um yeah i gotta go christmas shopping yeah yeah um yeah so everybody have a healthy happy holiday except for you roger very fuck you roger roger roger from bitcoin jesus to bitcoin judas false prophet early on in the days but

fire kill him but with that being said roger did do a lot for bitcoin in the early years and we would probably would not be where we are today without his efforts then but you know the old saying you die a legend or live long enough to find yourself becoming a villain yeah you two-faced

rap bastard alright that's all everybody happy healthy new year peace and love