The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - The CBP #173 (Other Notable News Stories) - Swan Dives, Corn Rallies, Biden Bids Adieu

Episode Date: July 24, 2024

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES Join us for some QUALITY Bitcoin and economics talk, with a Canadian focus, every Monday at 7 PM EST. From a couple of Canucks who like to talk about how Bitcoin will impact Canada. As always, none of the info is financial advice. Website: ⁠www.CanadianBitcoiners.com ⁠Discord: https://discord.com/invite/YgPJVbGCZX A part of the CBP Media Network: ⁠www.twitter.com/CBPMediaNetwork This show is sponsored by: easyDNS - ⁠⁠https://easydns.com/⁠⁠ EasyDNS is the best spot for Anycast DNS, domain name registrations, web and email services. They are fast, reliable and privacy focused. You can even pay for your services with Bitcoin! Apply coupon code 'CBPMEDIA' for 50% off initial purchase Bull Bitcoin - ⁠⁠https://mission.bullbitcoin.com/cbp⁠⁠ The CBP recommends Bull Bitcoin for all your BTC needs. There's never been a quicker, simpler, way to acquire Bitcoin. Use the link above for $20 bones, and take advantage of all Bull Bitcoin has to offer.

Friends and enemies, welcome back to another episode of the CBP number 173. My name is Joey, that's Len. Guaranteed, neither of us are calling into events with AI voices, but I can't say the same for some of the people we'll be discussing tonight. Buddy, what's going on? How are you? I'm very good. I'm well, I'm alive, heart's beating. I'm able to walk around. I guess people could argue I'm not good. I'm well. I'm alive. Heart's beating. I'm able to walk around. I guess people could argue I'm not thinking for myself, but I like to debate that I am. So, yeah, everything is great over here, Joey.

Welcome back, by the way. You had a week off, and I want to thank Dean Linden for taking your place temporarily. And I'm not sure. I mean, I don't want to talk too much about it. I want to pass the mic over to you. But when you did the ad reads last week, I actually copied. You saw what I did or no? Yeah, I saw not sure. I mean, I don't want to talk too much about it. I want to get past the floor over the mic over to you. But when you did the ad reads last week, I actually copied. You saw what I did or no?

Yeah, I saw. Yeah. I made sure you were still part of the show. That's great. I appreciate that. I can't just, you know, I might as well include you in one way or another. I saw you in the audience briefly, but I had to make sure you were part of the show. I really wanted to join the chat.

And for whatever reason this year, we were up at the cottage. And there's no service up there anymore. We couldn't even use Spotify one of the nights up there. So I was having trouble listening in. And the video was pretty laggy. But no, Dean did a great job. I'm really glad that everyone enjoyed his appearance. He's always a good guy to have on the show.

He's been a great friend to CBP over the years. And I look forward to seeing what he's going to do next. I think he's a guy that everyone should be pulling for. Not too many guys who are honest brokers, strong men, family guys, et cetera, et cetera, working in the Bitcoin space. Everyone's kind of, especially now as things are expanding, seeing a lot of people come in, I would say for the Bitcoin space, right? Everyone's kind of, especially now as things are expanding, seeing a lot of people come in, I would say for the wrong reasons, but that's just my opinion. In any case, Dean, one of the best out there. We're glad he's able to help us out the last week.

And then, yeah, I mean, great. I had a great week off. I wish I didn't miss that week. Like that was the worst show to miss because I was at the cottage absolutely going full tinfoil on people after like you know 20 beers and a couple of mushroom stems like it was a mess a mess but we were having a good time everyone enjoyed the uh the back and forth the discussion always good to be with friends so um yeah excellent excellent i want to thank you again

len for uh for making sure that everything was a go last week. And maybe our buddy Madex too. Madex was very low maintenance about his interview from the conference being delayed until last week, which was excellent. I know a lot of people enjoyed that. I got some great feedback about that show. So yeah, but we are reunited and it feels so good.

Where do you want to start? You want to do the ads first? Yeah, it's probably best. And we'll do the boost and whatever else. Easy DNS. Oh no, I have it queued up. I can just do the one

I did before. No, let's do the live. Easy DNS, best place for you to host your domains, your friendly neighborhood registrar. Marketing, what can you say? You know, like we've used them

for more than a year now for canadianbitcoiners.com, which is gathering dust, but hopefully we find some time to, some time to spend some of our precious hours writing on there. I know you guys read it and enjoy it. And we're going to try and do more of that. If you want to get into a website and start something, Mark will help you. So you buy your domain with Mark or transfer one over if you want.

Either way. You can do your virtual private server stuff over there so if you want to do like btc pay server bitcoin relay uh or bitcoin node i should say um among other things you know nasa relay node list you name it many applications mark's probably got a million more he can help you with or help you think of and then on top of that len of course your own personal email over there you know me and you do that show access of of Easy, every week for EasyDNS. And every week, someone's getting phished in their email, ripped off on their website, scammed through some kind of like, you know, DNS shortcoming. Never happens to Mark.

It won't happen to you either if you bring your stuff over there. CBP Media is the code. Go now. Don't wait. Buy a domain, maybe something like AIJoeBiden.com or DEIComola.com or VicePresidentPritzer.com or 45and47.com or, I don't know, TooMuchSlope.com maybe. I don't know. There's many things you could buy. I'm sure they're all available. And maybe you could turn them for a profit down the road. Do that stuff with easy dns who's the other sponsor yeah full bitcoin and price of bitcoin went up quite a bit in the past little while so

maybe good time to sell good time to buy whatever the heck you want to do they got you covered on chain lightning fees i'm not sure actually i haven't checked fees in a while i'll be honest i'll pull them up i can do it on the fly. And fees are still really cheap. Around five cents per VBIT. That's awfully cheap. Consolidate your UTXO topic for another time. Either way, if you're going to buy from Bull Bitcoin, certainly do it on-chain.

That's my two cents. Do your own research, though. It's not financial advice. Other exchanges, you see they're having some problems. But Bull Bitcoin, they're still able to provide you the service because they provide the very best in service.'s non-custodial when you buy it they send it to your wallet right away they're not holding on to your bitcoin this is what you want but they also give a few other options available to you if you want to pay your bills with your bitcoin because the price of bitcoin's gone up you may want to take advantage of that because you brought it bought it on a dip a long time ago you could do that so you can start spending your bitcoin through bull

bitcoin to pay some of your bills. Electrical bill, car payment, whatever you think you have. There's a lot of people that have a lot of these things in arrears right now, so you might as well get up to date and use your Bitcoin to pay for that. Other things you could do with it, you could buy gift cards and you could start spending that in the real world.

There's going to be a Home Depot gift card. You have to repair your house. You live in Burlington, Ontario. You need to repair your house. You got more, you know, you're a higher. You live in Burlington, Ontario. Need to redo your basement after a couple of days. Yeah, the floods. Yeah. So you could just use your Bitcoin to buy those gift cards.

You know, you're, you know, high society. You want to go to Starbucks and you want to get a $20 coffee. I have no idea how much they cost in real life, but either way, you could go through bull Bitcoin, buy those gift cards with your Bitcoin and you're good to go lots of different options use our promo code below and if you do that 21 bucks is going to be added to your account once you fund it holy cow three blocks were just found in the last two minutes wow bitcoin's done i was always reading this over ai joe biden switching from calling into kamala's uh you knowala's campaign trail events to mining Bitcoin. AI, truly multi-use.

Is AI Biden an HPC application? Are we going to see Iris Energy transitioning to AI Biden on demand when Bitcoin mining is profitable? Kamala, Karin Jean-Pierre. Karin Jean-Ppierre is out of a job if ai biden you know isn't around you don't think which station picked up the previous gal pisaki saki yeah mbc msdnc maybe they could pick up her as well like i don't know maybe cnn or fox i don't know i'm getting the feeling in the back half of the show. I'm going to be intolerably political and I'm looking forward to it. So why don't we start with the,

we go to the boost next. I want to do the boost. Yeah. Okay. We'll start with Rander three or three sats. He writes in. There's no fucking way. Trump and his team stage that way too many variables.

Name one person on planet earth that is trusting anyone to fire a rifle multiple times at their head outside with civilians around. Don turned his head 90 degrees and moved it forward a split second prior to the bullet reaching him. Complete fluke, run 10 simulations of this event, and he dies the other nine times. I wouldn't be surprised if one more attempt is made to kill him prior to November. The deep state is scary as fuck.

As long as the DEI Dorito guard is still heading up the Secret Service, then yeah, I would expect that too. I watched a bit of her testimony today in between my, you know, sort of regular work tasks. And Len, I don't know if you saw it at all, but it was,

I'm not the kind of guy who tweets like shocking, this, this, this, or shocking X, Y, Z. I got to tell you, I was close a couple of listening to her testimony a couple of couple of things she said about that day and the way that the secret service didn't secure that event incredible incredible the sloped roof thing like one of the one of the uh senators congressman i don't know, I got to brush up on my US politics here as we head into the thick of election season, noted that the roof the snipers were on actually had a steeper grade than the one that the Secret Service was saying was too sloped to place a sniper. And that they have no official policy on how sloped the roof can be or can't be. It's subjective, depending on which way the sun is shining maybe the wind is blowing a certain direction it just changes the whole thing

and there's so many dynamics to come into play plus you may not have anybody that's willing you know it's gone too tired i don't want to go up that ladder and shoot him down just let him do his thing we'll get him from a far away i don't know the whole thing is messed up and i don't know if we're ever going to get to the bottom of this. There seems to be a lot that is at play. Definitely more than we can truly fathom. Oh God. I tweeted some stuff today. I'm not even going to say it on the show because yeah,

boomer in the chat. Exactly. We'll both get Clinton, but there's a, there's a group who did some location data. Talk about another access of easy story these guys have location data from the guy's phone and we're able to pin down a few phones they're pretty sure are involved with this kid this 20 year old kid and some of the some of the traveling these phones

did len i tell you they weren't going to toys r us they weren't going to toys r us anyway um yeah lots of stuff to talk about when it comes to that incident. But maybe not for Len and I. Maybe not for Len and I. We'll see. I don't know. We'll see how the second half of the show goes. Anyway, thanks for the boost.

Well, Zordon313 says, he writes in, or she writes in, cheers, here's to getting filthy rich and dying in the arms of a beautiful woman. That was with respect to your Madex interview. Yeah. More time. of a beautiful woman. That was with respect to your Madex interview. He's full of good quotes. I've talked to him now for a total, I think, between the first time he came on the show

in the early spring when he was, I think, a little less polished. I hope he hears that. We did the second one in my hotel room over a couple of tall boys. That was a really good show. I think he was that. And then we did the second one in my hotel room over a couple of tall boys. That was a really good show. And I think he was really feeling the love. And I mentioned it during that interview.

I didn't listen back to it in its entirety. But a lot of love for that guy around the conference for a number of different reasons. Braving, kind of fighting through the injury that he had. Saying a lot of great things in our panel. And then just the appreciation for the art that he makes. Incredible, man. He's been so humble through all of it. like saying a lot of great things in our panel and then just the like appreciation for the art that he makes incredible, man.

And he's, um, he's been so humble through all of it. So yeah, I think, uh, I'm glad you guys enjoyed that. And then he's got much more to say.

I hope he, he finds his voice even more than he's started to already. A lot of integrity to considering what he gave up. Yes. Yes. When I say gave up with not selling his soul, essentially. Yeah. The Bailey thing.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to say that he did anything wrong. I think he did the right thing, but either way, wartime 333 sats. He writes in real news headline, a gross rat in New York rolled out a garbage bin.

Is he talking about mayor Adams? I am. Yeah, I do believe he's talking about him. But anyway, it's MoeBTCDick, 500 sats. Keep Dean coming. He's awesome. Yeah. He's welcome back on the show anytime.

100%. Yeah, he's the best. We like him a lot. And DoomDamazm, 521 sats. Thank you for your time. You're welcome. It's been a while since we heard from you. Mr. DeMazem,

you're always welcome to send over those Sats. Thank you so much. How's Keating before we start? Tomorrow at I think 7pm, but it could be a different time. I have to look at my calendar. Michael Geist coming on. U of Ottawa professor. I want to call him a legal scholar. I don't know if he'd call himself

that, but he should. Host of the Law Bites podcast and I think fair but firm critic of some of the recent policy around digital media, freedom of speech, and things in that vein here in Canada. I promise you, you will not want to miss this one. We very rarely get bad guests, but when it comes to really top of the food chain experts in their domain type people, Professor Geist is up there. And I'm really looking forward to talking to him. I'm glad that he took time to speak with the, to, to the audience here. So I'm looking forward to that. If you have questions, send them in.

I'm happy to try and work him into the interview. It's going to be very, very good. Anything else? Because I have no other things on my list of things to check off. No, we're, we're rolling. We need it. We need a guest for next week. It's a long weekend. So we're having trouble finding a guest, but but we have we have two more bangers after the long weekend uh that i think you guys are really really gonna like very topical huh are you gonna join me for one of them gnome is on the 20th right he's like way back i got two more i got two more solo ones before that

okay i'm gonna join i'm gonna join you for gnome for sure. That's going to be a fun one. He's a fun guy to talk to. Yeah, I got a lot of differing opinions, let's say. But I'll be polite. I mean, he's a quality member of the Bitcoin community, and I think he can handle it. He's a grown man by the sounds of it. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to speak on his behalf, but he could defend himself easily.

So yeah, bring whatever heat you want to bring, and he'll bring it and fight back but in the end we're all bitcoiners we exactly achieve the same thing exactly yeah all right you want to just dive right into the bitcoin related stories we got a few let's roll let's roll well okay first one it will be kind of brief because i don't have all that much information it just came hot off the wire today in fact with swan we heard what happened over there and that they are not going to be moving forward with their managed mining business. So people that are unfamiliar with this last year, sometime in the middle of last year, they announced that they got into Bitcoin mining. And that came as a bit of a surprise, given that there was no news to the lead up of that story. So somehow through acquisitions and talking to people and partners, they were able to establish a fairly substantive mining operation.

I think it was somewhere north of 1x a hash per second, which in the grand scheme of things is measurable. So with that, they had a mining business that they established and you and i we chatted about this at length as to the merits of this why they would go about doing this because you know let's be perfectly honest it's not something you could just set up cheaply to purchase the equipment to lead up to buy it you have to order it well in advance finding electricity that's available setting it up There's a lot to this. And what are the gains from all this?

The reality is, you know, it's not the most lucrative business to set up. Granted, it's Bitcoin adjacent business, but still, I'm wondering how this all fit. We talked about it, how to fit in with the whole swan situation. Well, apparently they're going to be cutting back on that. Their IPO, which they were talking about going ahead with it looks like that well the idea of that has been shelved temporarily permanently who knows so and they laid off a bunch of people today i don't want to go through any names or anything but a lot of people that were associated with swan be it media personalities or even people on the inside that were doing stuff like programming

engineers stuff like that essentially they cut the business in half from around i guess 160 to around 80 ish employees that's what we have 73 i think was the number i saw of laos that's significant and that happened really fast so like i talked about this in another chat with you. I still can't contemplate how they went into this mining business. Truly, there was miscalculations through here. Let's look at what happened in the past year or so. We've had a halving. Everybody knew about a halving.

The people at Swan knew about a halving. The price of Bitcoin went up. You could have predicted that or not predicted that either way that was outside everybody's control there's no other variable that was included in this from what i could see maybe i could be wrong because i don't see any new regulations that make bitcoin mining harder or running in a bitcoin exchange any harder i don't see any new taxes yet put on bitcoin mining or running a Bitcoin exchange. So in terms of doing business, everything is pretty much the same last year, two years ago, three years ago to it is today.

So not much has changed. They must have overextended themselves significantly and they must have not. Their numbers, at least their predictions were way, way off. And the result. now we have Swan. They're tightening their belt. Pacific Bitcoin is coming up in October. They're very much affiliated with that. I'm wondering if that's true.

Affiliated. They run it. It's their confidence. Yes. I was trying to be very, very. So I'm wondering if that's also going to go ahead considering they're scaling back their media spending. So again, I can't add too much to this because this is all relatively hot off the press. I'm sure you have some opinion you want to add to that.

Let's talk a bit about what we said back in January. And I have a clip here from Matt O'Dell. I don't know if he said it after us or before us, but I remember this clip when it came out. And I'm glad that our buddy Bitcoin Scribe found it today and tweeted it, so I have it ready to go here. A couple of things I want to note too from the chat, Gandalf astutely pointing out that all the Swan accounts, media or otherwise, no longer have the $12,000 a month yellow check mark. So that was an expense they decided to cut, $12,000 a month yellow check mark. Okay. So that was an expense they decided to cut $12,000 a month. They didn't just cut guys like, I don't know, who's a good example.

Like Lavera, who was like, I think their head of education. I'm not sure what that means as far as a role, but in terms of his influence in the space, at least sort of on my journey and in my realm, it's a big name, bright guy and a guy who's been an enormous net positive for Bitcoin, cut him loose. Sam Callahan, who hosts every Twitter space they do, their Swan dailies. He hosts all of them, I'm pretty sure, close to all of them, was hosting almost every podcast the Swan put out. Has a lot of friends in the space,

married to or engaged to Natalie Brunel, also works, I think, adjacent to Swan, with Swan, for Swan, whatever it is. That's a big cut. Tomer Strollite, Canadian, another guy who's a friend of ours. I got his book right behind me there, the Why Bitcoin book.

It's tough, you know? And that's interesting to me that they cut those people along with some engineers, like you mentioned there. Mining is a cutthroat business. And our buddy SB has done a lot of work that he shared with us privately and shared with us and the listeners on the show. And every time I'm finished talking to him, whether it's offline or on the podcast, I'm always left thinking the same thing. And like you mentioned there, and I even think this without the data, but when you see the data, the way he lays it out, it's really even more crystal clear. Mining is a nearly impossible game to break into.

And to me, if I look at Swan, what do I see? I see, God bless Corey. I think he's done a lot of good things, but I see a guy who really got carried away with image and media. He had that tweet a little while ago, what if you had $30 million to put into a media company or something like that? And Brandon pulled it up in one of our private chats today. And we had a bit of a giggle about it. And I shouldn't say giggle. I don't want people to get laid off. But this is all a little bit too predictable at this point. It's not the first time a company's got too far over their skis and made some mistakes in capital deployment, capital allocation, and even more importantly,

just human resource allocation. Anyway, going back to what I was saying earlier, there's a lot of stuff that I think is worth talking about on the mining side when it comes to Tether too. I don't think Tether's a bad actor, so SB, don't get upset here and flood the comments or flood our Telegram chat. I don't have a problem with Tether, but I will say that Tether now, my understanding is they gave Swan some big amount of money to start this mining venture

in what I can only imagine was a trade for a portion of the equity of the company. That to me sounds about right. I don't know exactly what the portion was, but to me, it sounds about right. So now you don't have the mining company and Tether owns a huge part of one of the major American exchanges slash media outfits. They didn't get rid of all the media, but they did get rid of a bunch. That's weird a little bit. Like Tether now is sort of on the exchange side. And if you believe people like Mark Goodwin and Whitney Webb and other people who we've had on the show, Len, have this belief too,

that Tether is going to wind up being sort of the nation state bridge between Bitcoin and politics. It's not great to have Tether on board with a big exchange like that. Putting all that aside, let's watch this clip about the fundraising that Swan did or maybe didn't do and the capital allocation they did or didn't do. This is what I was talking about here from one of Matt and Marty's shows back in January. And like I said, we talked about this too, but not in as much detail as these guys had. Obviously, we're not quite that inside. Okay. So this press release a month ago said they deployed $150 million in 2023.

1031 deployed $100 million in early 2023, 2022, and late 2021. To 36 companies that are all listed on our website. Those founders come to retreats. They talk to each other. Everyone knows who they are. There's a lot of validation that that money actually went to support Bitcoin companies. Swan is claiming they deployed more than that. And nobody knows anywhere where that money went. I haven't even been able to source $500K worth of that $150 million to someone that can vouch for it.

What else do they say? They're well on the way of meeting their target of allocating $1 billion by 2025. Yeah, it just doesn't make sense. Just throw out that bullshit number. And then we keep going. In 2023, in the bottom of the bear market, with rates at all-time highs, well, all-time highs for 20 years,

with VC funding completely dried up, money very hard to reach, they claim they raised $195 million. And I don't know a single investor. If you're one of them, let me know. Haven't been able to find one. The company expects to cross $200 million annualized revenue in Q1 2024 and plans to raise an additional $150 million because that $195 million can't cover the bills. So they're going to raise another $150 million next year.

That $200 million revenue number does not add up based on what we see in the space. It doesn't even come close to adding up. And we have not been able to get any explanations. So to me, I see red flags everywhere. To me, I see many people just blindly following Corey here and being afraid to speak up. And I hope more people speak up.

Or I hope we get some real answers here. So these guys, you know, in terms of like, what's next for Swan, you know, clearly there is a management issue there to put out those numbers, 200 million in, in,

in profit in the, you know, in profit, annualized through Q1 of this year, way off the mark. Already had $200 million raised and they needed to raise another $150 million. All while fees were very high, the mining should have been somewhat profitable. All while price was ripping from 15k or 20k all the way up to 75 during the same time period not only could they not keep the mining thing open not only could they not keep the ship afloat they had to cut half the fucking boat off and let it sink you think they make it another two years no i wouldn't not with the current management no fucking chance no fucking chance you're not gonna you're not gonna get you are not gonna get the same level of interest and new eyes

and price appreciation at the same time that you just got over the last six months between the etf i guess it's almost august now oh my god this year's flying between the et, I guess it's almost August now. Oh my God, this year's flying. Between the ETF, the price appreciation, price appreciation, say that 10 times fast, among other things. I just don't think it's feasible or likely or even possible that with that group of management. Well, you know, I just thought about it. Maybe they could be around for quite some time.

It really depends on how much belt tightening they do. I can't say for certain because I don't know. But in terms of overhead, if you really want to go lean and mean, how much spending do you have to do to run? They took the fucking yellow checkmark off the Twitter account. They're doing a bunch of things like that. Bitcoin. And again, this is I want to give scribe credit here he noted that around 1 15 there was around 16 bitcoin jobs that swan had posted yeah 15 minutes

later they had zero so today that was today so 1 15 p.m today there was 16 jobs on bitcoiner jobs for swan and then what was it half an hour later you said they're all gone so they acted swiftly to make sure everything was done to tighten belts now if they want to continually go down this path and stay like that i'm not sure how much salary they're paying people i'm not sure in terms of what they're building under the hood but if they want to go lean and mean maybe they can survive it really depends on how much they want to stomach you know how the tight times ahead if they want to go ahead and forego salary if they want to go ahead and maybe forego rolling out something that they had planned and just go strictly you know whatever they're doing right now maybe they could survive

just on their name alone but i don't know we'll see and again with their association with tether is this going to muddy the waters as well i don't know question i don't have an answer for i'm being told in our our private chat here that the uh the check mark line is 12 000 in annual cost reductions not per month so that to me is like that's really pinching pennies that is really pinching pennies uh at the cost of your public sort of your public facing i don't know legitimacy is wrong word but certainly it affects the way people view you so in terms of the podcasts that they were sponsoring and i don't want to go into numbers who are they who are they sponsoring you've mentioned it was it lavera they're sponsoring lavera lavera lavera was being sponsored by them

yeah but he worked for them so i don't know how much they were okay fair so i mean i don't know so in terms of the ones that maybe they're sponsoring do you think that blue check mark was a greater number or lesser number than what you're paying for like i don't know i mean if they're cutting back this they're cutting back so i mean we're probably smaller than lavera show so significantly yeah it's actually not it's actually not significant last i talked to um someone who knows but yeah but um i still think like really depends because the thing is they were running and all caps is pointing this out too, right? Like they had so many media partnerships, but all caps, the thing I would say is that, you know,

you know how many of those were partnerships and how many were just like, we'll take this podcaster and make them do a show for Swan. A great example is Natalie Brunel's hard money, right? She was doing hard money for Swan, which Gandalf, again, pointed out to me today that hasn't been released in a long time. So I don't know what the partnerships look like. I don't know what the accounting looks like. I don't know what the balance sheet looks like.

But I do know that if they were off by that much during what should have been a fairly simple time to keep the ship floating. I can just imagine what the next bear market is going to be like, man. I don't know what to say about that. I think Corey... Do they make more money in a bear market because maybe more volume? I don't know. I don't know.

Here's my question. If there's a spread in every buy and sell they make, regardless if it's $50,000 or $50,000, that spread is... Corey's been really vocal. Actually, regardless if it's 50,000 or 50,000, that's predices, you know, Corey's been really vocal. Uh, actually he did it on this show.

He's very vocal about people making bad decisions, uh, in the name of image, right. In the name of like, you know, growing their profile. And is it fair to say that he really sort of fell on the sword here a little bit in terms of that, you know, that that way of looking at things? I mean, he gave it to Pomp pretty good.

We had a clip go somewhat viral early in the CBP sort of lifetime. And, you know, I look at the clips like Pacific. It's him shooting three point shots. He's on major news networks. He's the face of the franchise in a lot of ways. And again, Bull is a sponsor, so I don't want to say anything too biased here. But when you see Francis's face on TV or on YouTube or on Twitter, what's he doing? He's talking about Bitcoin.

And he's talking about the mission and the bold Bitcoin ethos and what makes this thing tick, both in terms of the network and in terms of his company. Did you see that from Corey? No. No, but he's more of a personality. That's what I'm saying.

He was critical of those types. Right, but he was IPO-ing. Once you go down that path. So, okay, here's another question for you. Why stop the IPO attempt now? Presumably they need money now. Bitcoin still has a lot of popularity. Crypto broadly has popularity.

Isn't this the time to look for outside money? So the people that were probably helping them do the ipo were probably hoping that they were going to make quite a lot more because the valuation of the company would be significantly higher and since it took a massive haircut since then the company that's administering this ipo is probably not going to make as much and they're not going to to put their name alongside it or do the hard work so it just probably isn't worthwhile for them and so total speculation on my part i could be and who's that we're talking in another chat today i don't know if it was the one that you and me are in with like all the all the boys there or it was the other

one that i'm in uh they wanted a cfo about a year ago to help them go public cory was very public about that and i don't know if they ever hired one but you know scribe and sp for sure we're looking today and they couldn't find who the cfo is was anything so they never even fill that position then i can't say i don't know either i don't know interesting times man um yeah i wish all those swan guys the best and you know i hope they turn it around i think that's i may not agree with all the tactics and and means but i think it's it's a good thing to have bitcoin companies who are bitcoin only and those guys are indisputably you know bitcoin only so let's um let's see what happens i guess it's a tough business to be in no shit shit. No shit. Let's talk about Craig Stephen Wright because he's not Satoshi Nakamoto.

No. And these are not my words. No, no, no. I'm just reading what is written on his website. On his splash page, you go to Craig Wright. And his Twitter page. His Twitter page. So you go on these things.

You can see it says, Dr. Craig Stephen Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto. Again, not my words. It's on his webpage. It's on, not my words. It's on his webpage. It's on his Twitter splash page. It's on there. So either way, it also reads that Dr. Wright is not the author of the Bitcoin white paper. He's not the owner of the copyright in the Bitcoin white paper. He's not the person who adopted or operated under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto between

the period 2008 and 2011. He's not the person that created or operated under the pseudonym satoshi nakamoto between the period 2008 and 2011 he's not the person that created the bitcoin system and he's not the author of the initial versions of bitcoin software that's what you call owned and this is all a result of a recent court case in the united states copa versus quick right order reverse quick versus copa i forget which way it is but either, the judge imposed a ruling that he must display the message that I wrote on his website for a period of six months for a person. Let's be honest. He portrays himself to be a very proud individual,

right? This has got a fucking sting and it's got to hurt really fucking bad. And remember, he made a lot of people very, very unhappy. And they put him a lot of people very, very unhappy. And he put a lot of people through the wringer because he's rather litigious. Right. He's the past few years.

He's put a lot of people through court cases. I'm looking at people like Peter McCormack, Hodlnot and a bunch of other people as well. Chilling effect on the development community overall. Very chilling effect. Yeah. And remember, some of the bitcoin developers decided to leave and then i guess they went anonymous but either way he hasn't been this is for you know one would say not very good for what's going on so this whole uh this whole judgment by the judge

judge meller i believe is the name and had him forcibly put this in his website is pretty damn funny. But anyways, I don't think this is the last time we're going to hear from him. I think that he's going to come back in one way or another, but at least for the time being, enjoy what we have. Why did we have to go through this like just because this guy refused to admit something that everyone outside of the bsv crowd already knew to be true i think a lot of people even in that crowd even acknowledge what there's there's holding the bag you think yeah a lot of people i think are just there's a lot of hopium there that maybe the price of the coin will... The courts didn't do their job in this until the very end of the line.

I don't know Hodlnau personally. I've never interacted with him on Twitter. I know we offered to give him a chunk of change for his legal defense. He turned it down. So I assume and hope that he's doing okay. But yeah, Boomer in the chat. I look forward to never hearing his name again either. The question is, Len, how does he remain relevant now?

Is there a move? Because now, legally, I think he can't just go around saying that he's Satoshi. He can't suggest he was part of the dev team. He can't suggest that the million coins are his. But slanderous. Something that's slanderous. You don't have to say that he's not Satoshi. You could say something, not saying I'm saying this,

but if one person says you're a fucking idiot, that's slanderous, right? Just some person, yeah. Just because the way that the laws are set up in the UK, he could take them to court. And as long as he has somebody willing to back him and i'm not sure if that person's going to continually back him then these things can continually go on but once that money train runs dry and it may have already

i don't know then we'll probably stop hearing from him but yeah i mean all caps all caps always knows he's in the chat saying he's been referred to the attorney general for prison consideration is that how do you do that is there like a form i could i got some people i'd like to refer to the ag for prison consideration no but how does um is there a form what is it like an online is it in the same place where they do uh feedback on cbdc's same like there's a different link where is it no the allegation is that he lied in court. And so because of that,

then he's going to have to be subjected to some sort of sentence. Oh, well, good luck, Craig. Been nice knowing you. So for home miners out there, there's a new bid ax that has been revealed just recently.

It's called the bid ax hex. And this comes with six BM1370 chips. And those are the chips found in the Antminer S21 Pro setup. So that was the relatively recently released ASIC from Bitmain. With this configuration, it allows the new Bit axe hex to hit six terahash per second and at a power efficiency of 15 joules per terahash so those with respect to the power very respectable efficiency numbers the six terahash it's not going to earn you all that much maybe five to six hundred sats a day and my math could still not be right but that's how much you're going to be getting. So you could, with what I provided everybody here, one could do the math to see how much you're going to earn

based on the electricity consumption and how much you're going to be paying for that electricity. But also take into consideration the cost of buying the equipment. And I tried looking around for the price of the unit. Decentral has a coming soon page listed. So there's no price there, but I did found another vendor did list it for 400 us dollars.

Yeah. Tiny chip club, right? I can't remember the name of that. I just, I'm pretty sure I'm looking at it right now. Yeah. Okay.

The three 99. Yeah, it's 400. Yeah. So there you go. If that's the price, it's, you know, say what you want steep, not steep, whatever the heck it is if that's the price it's you know say what you want steep not steep whatever the heck it is that's the price of this unit you'll never make your money back even

if you get power for free and you know it just you got like the this perfect setup you'll never get it back this is a great like tool just to learn about mining maybe even contribute to the overall system but really you're not going to earn a lot and if you're going to solo wine you're going to This is a great tool just to learn about mining, maybe even contribute to the overall system, but really you're not going to earn a lot. And if you're going to solo mine, you're going to get nothing in the end. Still a really cool device. I would love to talk to Jonathan about Decentral

a little bit more about this because there's been a lot of development on the BIDAC side since he's last been on the show. But nonetheless, if anybody wants it, check it out. It should be coming in a not too distant future future it should be available on a lot of different websites we should bring him back on because i i do still want to talk to him about um like his sort of longer term views on something like the bid axe and just the model right like

i'm i'm in the camp and i know he's in the camp because we spoke to him, that home mining has to make a return. The question is, can home mining ever become the default expectation for Bitcoiners? The same way that right now running a node and having a hardware wallet is a default expectation. Is it ever going to be the case where part of your onboarding, official, unofficial, whatever, is spend $200, whatever these things cost in five years, I don't know. Spend $200 and get a minor, get a little guy, get something to contribute, put it up. It's like a badge of honor, whatever. I don't know. I still think it's cool.

I haven't bought one. I've been meaning to get one from Decentral, but I haven't gotten around to it. I'd be open to suggestions then like which one you think is the one uh for me to learn the the you know the ways of uh the network on do we have some treasury money with our our fiscal year ends in like uh five weeks so we got to spend some money here uh maybe yeah get some keep it as you can find just if you really want but i don't think it has anything like it won't be part of your onboarding kit. Mining is a totally different thing. It does contribute to depending on the pool you use.

It could contribute to the overall security in a very, very small way. But that's all it does. The node part is the most important thing, I would say, because it gives you the ability to broadcast your transactions without relying on somebody else. And it gives you the ability to verify that whatever Bitcoin you've received is indeed received. So those two things, by running a node, is the best thing you could do. And there's a lot of different options you could do with running a node. You could even run it on your everyday computer. As long as you have the storage, you don't have to run it all the time.

Just close it down and just re-sync it whenever you need it. So there's lots of different options available to people. But that's the more important thing. I think it's a harder sell, in my opinion. What do you get out of it? Yeah, all caps in the chat saying running a node is free and more powerful than running a home miner. Agree? Disagree? For sure.

It gives you so much more power. You're voting with your computer, which network, which chain, which whatever it is you're supporting. That's what you want to run. That's what you want to support. That's what you're verifying.

And you, nobody could take that away from you because you have the ability to run that software and keep it up nobody could take you to could tell you to take it down and change it that's your choice yeah i'm getting so it's very powerful out here for not running a node okay let's go on the next story uh we'll get you on jp morgan they did a study on u publicly traded Bitcoin miners and 14 tracked Bitcoin miners that are traded on US exchanges. And it's estimated that they make up around 26% of the overall hash rate. So of the 14 publicly traded miners in US exchanges, they make up 26% of the overall

Bitcoin hash rate, which is, you know, apparently, according to JP Morgan, this is a new record high. And this does not take into consideration privately owned operations like what Bob Burnett's running, or even garage mining setups,

which probably could almost fuck all the network, but still, you know, death by a thousand cuts, it probably adds up to something. But not all companies that are publicly traded in the united states operate 100 in u.s soil like some data centers they have are outside marathon for instance they're expanding outside the u.s quite a bit these days even mining a shit coin since 2023 that's just something else to consider but either way so I just look at this number, that's pretty interesting, because in terms of the hash rate, the hash rate itself has been kind of flattish in the past couple of months, right? And since the halving, it's only been up 5.6%.

And 2.4% since June. So, you know, it's not going nuts. So 26% of the overall hash rate, just attributed to publicly traded miners, we have HPC opportunities that are now in a mix. It's a new stream of revenue. So I'm wondering now if that number 26% is going to be sustained. Because now they have this new opportunity

to make money potentially more i don't know and if that's the case then they're less apt to mine bitcoin and go with something else that provides them a better rate of return so good bad i don't know it's just something i found to be rather interesting you need radical price appreciate appreciation man am i fucking up that word a bunch tonight having a biden moment here uh you need radical price appreciation. Man, am I fucking up that word a bunch tonight? Having a Biden moment here. You need radical price appreciation to depressed is that they know the hop is coming. You know, that 50, 60% month, that 100% quarter is coming. And I got to be honest, it feels like we've been knocking on the door a few times here over the last four or five months. We get to 72, then the 75, but we never really see the punch that we got in 2020, which is the having that a lot

of these miners are comparing it to. And I think a lot of Bitcoiners are comparing it to as well. I know I do this even against my better judgment. I still remember going from 3,000 in the COVID low to 20K later in that December. And then before you knew it, it was 69K in, I think, March for the first time or April for the first time. You get these monster moves over the course of a few months. And that potential keeps you coming back to the trough as a miner, especially when there's no other alternative in terms of uses for your hardware and maybe more important, your power. Preston Pyshko With this other constant flow of power supply

or power demand, I should say, vis-a-vis AI, it's hard for a miner to justify staying on Bitcoin when the reward is significantly lower or the allure has faded or investors don't understand Bitcoin and want to see more AI in terms of the piece of the pie and the power application or power distribution. All these things make it difficult. This is why when we, you know, you and I have talked about this a lot over the years, and I think we're going to be talking about it more and more.

I actually messaged Dan Roberts of iWritten to see if he wanted to come on the show. He never wrote me back. I should just email him. But the thing I would say is like you know the miners you're gonna see who's really a bitcoin miner and who's a power or who considers himself a power allocator uh do i am i worried that ben ganiel is going to uh you know stiff his um investors and stiff his board and stiff his, you know, CFO, like we had on a couple of weeks ago and say, yeah, listen, I know we're a Bitcoin mining

company, but there's more money made in HPC. It's in my view as a Bitcoiner is short-sighted because the short-term allure of price appreciation, price appreciation is not the thing that should keep you in the game as a Bitcoin miner. It's your conviction that over five years, nothing is going to perform better. And the people asking you to draw pictures of AI Joe Biden with Kamala Harris and Montel Williams in the background of the Oval Office is not a sustainable business model. And by the way, JP Morgan, Goldman, a lot of these companies and a lot of these big banks just came out almost in unison last week or the week before saying, this AI thing is overblown. It doesn't do a good job replacing low cost work. It doesn't do a good job replacing high cost work. And everything it does cost 20 times more than it should.

Not only that, but these companies who've deployed something in the neighborhood of like $5 trillion, something like that over the last five years in chips, they're not seeing any returns for that invested capital. And if you invested that capital anywhere else, these boards, these CEOs would all be terminated. And so to me, I think that's actually a likely outcome that AI flounders and fizzles and people get tired of it. And universities start to crack down on it as they have many other things over the years. It seemed like these panaceas of scamming the system, improving responses, whatever. The medical profession, same thing. I just don't see this thing as the golden goose that everyone else sees it as. And I'm shocked actually that a lot of

these banks, most of whom I disagree with on almost everything, seem to have the same view. But then I think about it even for me and you. Me and you try and use it for the show once in a while or did when we first started the website. It fucking sucks. You get a summary of something, a subject matter back. It sucks. You end up having to rewrite it and re-research it anyways. That's part of the reason that maintaining a website is so fucking hard when you have a full-time job, plus the podcast, plus kids, plus social commitments, plus all this stuff. You can tell that... I don't want to call Marty and Matt out, but if you look at the stuff on Marty and Matt's website, on TFTC's website, it's fucking AI. A lot of it looks like AI. And it is what it is,

but to me, the miners have to realize that the allure, it has to be the same now as when it brought you in. This world-changing asset class that you're early on. You can educate on, you can get in on the ground floor, you can own some, you'll be able to deploy that capital later. You can build out power relationships, build out hardware relationships, set up logistics that makes sense for AI photos and stuff like that. That's not it, man. And it's not going to be it, um, in five years. And you and me talked about this and I talked about it with, uh, Oh God, I can't remember his name. Uh, Jeff Lucas from, um, from bit farms too. You know, they, they view HPC as part of the pie, but it's Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin over there at bit farms. And I think a lot of these other companies are going to regret seeing things on a shorter time horizon for the moment. People that don't have a short time horizon, they're looking very long.

The Mt. Gox creditors, these guys have been waiting for their payday for about a decade or so. It looks like some people are getting notifications and getting issues of people logging into the portal, the Mt. Gox portal, because it was showing an error saying it was temporarily down for maintenance. So this is getting interesting, Joy. There's a reason why it was temporarily down for maintenance, because one Redditor user was getting notification one time, 22 incorrect login attempts. And another one, another person, 15 incorrect login attempts and another one another person 15 incorrect login

attempts so it looks like people or somebody or hackers whomever trying to brute force into people's accounts it's a way to get access to it and potentially drain the accounts because if you think about it the email addresses in order to log in, that should be publicly available. It doesn't take much effort, I think, for somebody to really find this, to see the names of the individuals and emails associated with the account and use that and try just to brute force your way in. They're saying people that have two-factor authentication, two FA accounts are probably slightly safer, but nothing is bulletproof.

So they are saying, though, that the creditors should be safe as long as they have the 2FA. But there is a potential here that people might be mount goxed again. Imagine going through this. And if this happens, it's not like they're going to be able to go to court and get it. This is somebody hacked into it. Right. This is pathetic.

And I feel bad for the people waiting. But make this be a lesson for people out there. Never leave your Bitcoin on an exchange. If you do, look what happens here. A decade later, they're still trying to get their Bitcoin. And they're getting pennies get their bitcoin and they're getting pennies in a dollar so do yourself a favor learn how to use something like a cold card properly secure it offline cold storage whatever you're going to call it that is the way moving

forward don't be like one of these people use them as an example it It's ridiculous, man. I mean, how is it possible that Mt. Gox's security suite has not been beefed up, given that they have, I think last I checked, 140,000, something like that, Bitcoin? What is that worth? That's 70K per Bitcoin. A lot. The answer is a lot. 300 billion, something like that. I don't know what the number is but it's fucking high and you know like these these guys are they're in they're incompetent aren't they like

what else can you say how can there be 22 attempts if i fuck up my amazon password once or twice i'm locked out until i can like go back to my phone and get the whatever uh the the uh rolling 2fa thing you know like that like That's like, to me, if you can't figure that out at Mt. Gox, you got a problem. And also to your point, one of the reasons Bull is such a good exchange is because not only do they have this non-custodial ethos,

but as part of your process, they'll show you how to put together an offline wallet, a cold card, you name it. Their support team will help you. And again, yeah, they're sponsored by Joy, quick pump in their bags. I mean, I used Bull before they were sponsored. So it's not like I had to open a new account when they became sponsors of the show. I think all competent Bitcoiners need to be using these exchanges. And, you know, to me, Len, getting Mt. Gox a second time, you know, what's the saying? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, won't get fooled again.

I'd love to throw a shoe at you next time, Joey. That was when politics was much more serene and respectful. Only shoes were being thrown. Where you're looking through the binoculars with the thing still on. Different time. I guess we have time for one more. Yeah, sure. BlockFi users who got rugged may soon start getting a portion of what they're owed.

It's being reported that the first distribution of digital assets will be taking place this month and talking about July 2024. And Coinbase is going to be involved in the process. You must be liking that, Joey, because are you still an investor in Coinbase? Yes. There you go. So this is good news. We're pumping their bags, too. So yours, too.

So remember, BlockFi was part of the 2022 collapse that took place. FTX, Voyager Digital, a few others. Three Arrows. Yeah. Maybe a little after, but yeah. Luna, but that was not even an exchange. It was a shit coin. Either way.

So the distribution of this, it's going to be done in tranches. And clients will be receiving emails before this takes place but as for block fi says here quote non-us clients are unable to receive funds at this time due to regulatory requirements applicable to them so rugged again if you're not not non-us client but then i don't know the block fi service people outside the u.s i'm not sure i never really i never tried it so i can't say but i thought it was u.s only but either way i could be wrong it is what it is block fi users at least the ones that got rugged it looks like you're going to be getting some of your money back so good for you i guess yeah block fi nice one

rocket ship hop on board. What's Zach Prince doing these days? Shouldn't that guy be in jail? He's their CEO, right? Zach Popper? No, Prince. Zach Prince is their CEO. Zach Popper. What's that?

Zach, he's no longer Prince. He's now Popper, right? I don't know. He's from the Penthouse to the Outpost, right? I got to bring something up here there's a guy in the chat who i've never seen before x who says that leaden collapsed and got injected by got an injection from investors to plug the hole i don't think that actually happened i've never talking about somebody else no he's talking about leaden and like i like maritza i don't marito would came marito came on the show and and told us Are you talking about somebody else? No. He's talking about Lennon. And I like Maurizio.

Maurizio came on the show and told us what was going on. Apparently they did. All caps as did. I don't know. I got to find out more. But I've never heard that story before. So maybe. But yeah, I mean, going back to BlockFi.

Listen, I mean, you're using any service where someone else is holding your coins for you and you're getting whatever interest, feedback, yield, you call it whatever you want. There's risk there. If you hold your coins on an exchange, there's risk there. The only way you can really be sure that your Bitcoin is in safe hands is if those hands belong to you. And if you don't do that, then you're asking for this kind of trouble down the road. And I think we talked about this in the past too, Len. I would love to go back in some of our old episodes and sort of review what we said.

But we must have noted that when the price of Bitcoin, we did this show for a long time when the price of Bitcoin was like $10,000, $12,000. And yeah, when FTX went down, it went down to like 15 grand, right? So maybe that was the lowest. We always said that you have to buy and hold and secure. And we're not the only ones who do this. MBK says this all the time too. You have to buy and hold and secure like you are worth 10 times more than what you're buying. Because that's the end game here. And I think that's good advice.

You know, you got to ask yourself, what's your risk tolerance for stuff like this? In my opinion, probably it should be zero. You should be storing all your own stuff uh regardless of where you're buying it i agree 100 why risk it it makes no sense to do it especially looking at what's going on with fiat currency anyways that's it for the bitcoin related stuff joey we got lots to talk about in notable news do we ever okay uh great stay here if you're on video if you're on audio see you tomorrow thanks for coming and uh len get us out of here don't be a cock