The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Is Dumping, But SBF Is GUILTY AF! Friday Five

Starting point is 00:00:00 SPF was found guilty on all seven counts and is going to be buried under the jail literally forever, putting to rest the mass stupidity of crypto Twitter and all of those who said he was too politically connected. His mom and dad would get him out of it. Elizabeth Warren would never let that happen. Conspiracy theories often are stupid. And in this case, SBF is gone. Bitcoin is crashing to prices it hasn't seen since,

Starting point is 00:00:30 ChexNotes, yesterday, 48 hours ago. And of course, we've got a slew of other news. Nathaniel Whittemore is away today. My producer is completely missing in action, yet you still get me today doing the Friday Five. Let's go. Everybody, I am Scott Melker, also known as the Wolf of Wall Street. Before we get started, Let's go. Lonely, have no friends, but you just get me on a Friday ranting about all the things that have happened in crypto and the world, of course, this week. I was going to throw FOMC in there, but it's a massive nothing burger that nobody cares about. And we've talked macro to death.

Starting point is 00:01:39 If you guys watched Market Mavericks yesterday, my new show with Gareth Soloway and Mike McGlone. We really beat that one senseless as we did earlier in the week. So I don't want to talk about that. I made the title myself today. That's why it sucks. Bitcoin's not really dumping that bad. It's only $34,424, still just under 35, still well above other key levels, just not at $36K where it tapped. It would have been fun, though, to see SBF get convicted and then Bitcoin put in a massive god candle straight to the upside and go to $40,000. Something like that would have been fun. But since I'm alone and I don't have anyone else, let's take a look at a Bitcoin chart, which we wouldn't normally do on a Friday. As you can see, we need to avoid right here on the weekly, one of these ugly gravestone dojis that all the kids are talking about these days. You know that these gravestone dojis are

Starting point is 00:02:34 all the rave, right? That's this candle right here. When you have that long wake up, a small body, we've still got two days to even be concerned about that. And frankly, even if it happens, then you need to see confirmation in a big candle down. It's a weekly candle. We just got to overbought, as I said, to see a little cooling off before another move up. Nothing wrong there. But frankly, I'm still looking for a retest of this $31,800 at that high right here at a $31,000 area. No big deal, right? That would be completely healthy retracement, completely normal, a place that I would be bidding. Right now, market structure is very bullish, higher highs, higher lows.

Starting point is 00:03:11 You can see on the daily that we got to overbought. I talked about this in the newsletter. 88, about as high as it's ever been. It's gone up to 94, actually, once before. With clear bearish divergence printing, this is a great time for some consolidation to see a drop, to see RSI cool off. I'm not really worried about this, but I do expect a bit more retracement. Probably we'll put in a hidden bullish divergence afterway. But the bottom line here is Bitcoin is dumping. It's my title. It's not really dumping, dude. It's just chilling. Yes, I lied to you to get you to click and nobody showed

Starting point is 00:03:41 up anyways. My bad, guys. But let's move on to the news. The big story of the day, Sam Bateman Freed convicted of fraud in stunning FTF's crash. Still stunning. Jurors deliberated allegations of fraud for under five hours. They suffered through three or four or 12 or 97 weeks of testimony. Who knows? I don't remember. I don't remember.

Starting point is 00:04:08 That's all in the past now. But for weeks, they sat there and it took them five hours to say, oh, my God, this guy is so absolutely guilty. And this conviction caps stunning fall of Bankman Freed's crypto empire. Well, when the crypto empire is a house of cards built on utter outright fraud, yes, there's going to be a stunning collapse. The fact that this dude's defense the entire time was, bro, like I didn't know it seemed fine time. Not a very strong legal defense. And now he's facing up to 115 years in jail. Last I checked, people don't live to 115 years old.

Starting point is 00:04:50 But up to 20 years on each of these more serious counts with slightly less years on the other ones. And do the math, carry the three under the carriage. Dude is screwed, man. And you may recall, this gives us a great opportunity to talk about stupidity and humans. Because from day one, this thing went down, right? November, last November, now literally a year ago, we're about at the year anniversary of this collapse. The first day FTX collapsed, the first day, Sam Paikman Freed will never go to jail. Look at his political connections. He donated to literally everybody in the whole world who ever did politics anywhere. They'll never let him go to jail. He once blew a kiss

Starting point is 00:05:40 at Maxine Waters. Have you seen him hug Gary Gensler? Elizabeth Warren and his mom are best friends. His dad's the greatest lawyer in the world. They'd never let it happen. This guy is literally going to jail for every crime he committed. He has more charges coming to him in March. And the United States justice system in terms of SBF and let's be honest, in terms of crypto in general has been nothing but absolutely amazing, right? Amazing. Dunking on the SEC left and right. They've been going after SBF. They've been charging other people, right? SafeMoon right here. Let's look. I didn't even mean to bring this one up yet. There's another story, but I'm out of order. Safe moon execs arrested by DOJ and fraud us. These guys were buying McLarens and condos and stuff, right? I mean, the United

Starting point is 00:06:37 States justice system doing pretty good on account of the United States. This dude over here, he can appeal. Yes, he can. And he can lose. He's going to jail. He's not even getting sentenced until March. He's going to sit in jail for the next four months, just waiting to find out how long he's going away. This idiot, this idiot went on Mario's spaces and other places and completely incriminated himself in advance of this. People were still like, he'll never go to jail. It took one month for them to arrest this dude, put him in one of the five worst prisons on the face of the planet in the Bahamas. And people are still like, he's in jail, but he'll never go to jail.

Starting point is 00:07:14 Dumb, dumb. And by the way, if you have half a fucking brain and you actually think about what would happen if there were a bunch of politically connected people that he had greased their palms and they really wanted people not to find out about it. He would get Epstein's, right? You think that because he had political connections, these politicians in theory would want him walking around telling everybody about everything he did. Oh my God. It's so dumb. Yes, he is connected. I know this. Who cares? Do you guys know how connected Bernie Madoff was? Bernie Madoff was a hundred times more connected than Sam Bankman Freed. A hundred times more. But anyways, even Attorney General Merrick Garland had a statement. He said, Sam Bateman Freed thought that he was above the law. Today's verdict proves he was wrong.

Starting point is 00:08:09 This case should send a clear message to anyone who tries to hide their crimes behind a shiny new thing they claim no one else is smart enough to understand. The Justice Department will hold you accountable. I'm grateful to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York and the FBI for their outstanding work in bringing Mr. Peckman-Fried to justice. Dude is going to jail for a very, very, very long time. And if you really believed that you could commit a crime this gratuitously in the face of everyone and just get away with it, then you need to take the other pill, stop doing drugs, sleep a little bit more, go hug your wife, and get some perspective because from day one, and I beat that drum from very day one, that was stupid. But what's crazy is that SBF Sam Bankman Freed has been found guilty. However,

Starting point is 00:09:01 around 40% of Congress received donations from SBBF and FTX that were mixed user funds. 40% of Congress took money from this guy. Only a few politicians returned or donated the funds. Here's the full list of everyone who has received funds from FTX and Sam. I mean, this is like, it's like a beautiful mind, right? Like just writing names and things and the numbers are going by. I mean, literally nobody can keep up with how many people he gave money to. Are they all going to give the money back? Will there be clawbacks for FTX? I don't know. But seemingly it's one of those things where if you just give it to everyone, then nobody has egg on their face, right? Yeah. Tenacious B here says Solo Scott is generally more belligerent i like that to be

Starting point is 00:09:45 honest i had to scramble to put together a show like 30 minutes before after having a night of insomnia yeah and uh had some horrible uh news yesterday a lot going on and yeah so i'm pretty uh i'm not in the best mood today i'm gonna be honest you don't see that from me very often don't see that very very often so probably good that Nathaniel's not here. Oh, by the way, let's talk about shit that's kind of messed up. Senator Cynthia Lummis, who we all love, I love her. She's great. But man, has she missed the boat on this? And there was this story going around, obviously, that she had apologized. What was she apologizing for? Well, we all saw that Hamas got $475 trillion in crypto so that they could do terrorist shit. No, but that's what Elizabeth Warren thought. She wrote a letter with

Starting point is 00:10:34 105 senators after the Wall Street senators and congressmen. After a Wall Street Journal article claimed that Hamas had taken tens of millions of dollars in crypto donations so that they could go do their terrorism. Turned out, Che Nalysis pointed out, it was like $47 and a bag of Skittles. And then Elliptic, who had been referenced in the article, said, yeah, this is complete bullshit. And they still wrote the letter. But what was curious is that Lummis, who we all have come to know and love, she doubled down even after the fake news was pretty much publicly known and sent a letter to the DOJ and says, it's time to finish your investigation of Tether and Binance and come with some charges. And we were like, damn, dude, that's aggressive. Well, here is what people were

Starting point is 00:11:21 claiming somehow, and I don't really get it uh and for some reason i can't click through to uh get the whole thing here we are um here we are is that she apologized i read this i don't see an apology what she did here she said it an inaccurate report last week uh claimed hamas raised nearly $100 million. It was less than $500,000, blah, blah, blah. The reporting, all the stuff I send you. Then she goes on to say the Cato Institute detailed how the false report about Hamas was part of a larger trend where the anti-crypto community scaped out crypto assets as a tool for illicit finance. You get this busted grill all up in your face piece.

Starting point is 00:12:03 This Elizabeth Warren. And then she goes on to say, after reports that Binance and Tether engaged in illicit activities, I sent a letter encouraging the DOJ to finish its investigation, follow the evidence, and consider criminal charges because illegal activity is illegal

Starting point is 00:12:17 no matter who does it. Make no mistake, crypto assets are not the problem. Bad actors who exist in every sector are the future for crypto assets in America is brighter than ever. Show me the problem. Bad actors who exist in every sector are. The future for crypto assets in America is brighter than ever. Show me the apology. I like this woman. Don't get me wrong. But literally, people were reporting that she apologized. Actually, she just made it super political, even though a bunch of people from both parties actually signed those letters,

Starting point is 00:12:39 right? And said, this was fake news. It's aggressive, but also screw Binance and Tether. I don't apologize to anyone for anything. So I think that this was a curious story that she did go ahead, give her credit, point out the fake news, but apologize, I think not. And let's talk about someone else who never apologizes for buying Bitcoin. MicroStrategy acquires an additional 155 Bitcoin for 5.3 million. I want to be him. The company now holds a cool 158,400 Bitcoin worth over 5.4 billion with a B dollars. And who wouldn't want to have $5.4 billion in Bitcoin? Actually, you've seen those interviews on the street where they're like, to a girl, they're like, would you like $100? Would you like one Bitcoin? They're like, oh, $100. It's like right there. So maybe that person,

Starting point is 00:13:36 maybe that person wouldn't want all of these sweet, sweet Bitcoins, right? His cost base is around 29,500. This dude is way, way up now, almost 20%. Bitcoin price cools off, but you can never have too much Bitcoin, says Saylor. Right. He's right. He's right. 30% monthly game, October, very real. And then he goes on TV and has some absolutely epic quotes. Points out some really accurate things. Most of the natural sellers of Bitcoin in the market right now are Bitcoin miners and they have to sell to cover their electricity bills and capital costs and retire their date. That's about a billion dollars per month worth of selling into the market. The protocol forces that to be cut in half as of next April or late April. So you're going to see 12 billion of natural selling per

Starting point is 00:14:24 year converted to 6 billion of natural selling per year converted to 6 billion of natural selling a year. The same time as things like spot Bitcoin ETFs increase the demand for Bitcoin. So that's why all of us are fairly bullish over the next 12 months. Demand is going to increase and supply is going to contract. And this is fairly unprecedented in the history of Wall Street. Yeah, you get the idea, man. Michael Saylor, bull, bull, bull. Michael Saylor, bull, bull, bull, right? So we all know that Michael Saylor ain't going to stop anytime soon. We've all been proved here that dollar cost averaging into Bitcoin is a really good strategy, even if you're still dollar cost averaging all up in the 50s and 60,000s because the reality is that Bitcoin doesn't

Starting point is 00:15:09 spend that much time at the high prices. If you look at the cycles, it's like parabolic up, slow down for a really, really long time and parabolic up. So even if you buy at the highs and you keep dollar cost averaging, you end up spending most of your time buying Pondilos. Pondilos, as they would say in Jamaica. Coinbase beats Q3 estimates. USDC interest income rebounds to $172 million. Beating analyst estimates, Coinbase generated $674.1 million in revenue during the third quarter of 2023

Starting point is 00:15:42 compared to $590.3 million for the same period in 2022. Transaction revenue declined again, and Coinbase expects the first quarter will be about the same. Now, you can dig into all of this, but frankly, nobody cares. The bottom line is that it's being skinned as positive earnings for Coinbase, even in the face of checks notes, an SEC investigation and charges by the SEC. You guys remember that? Remember when we cared about that? Yeah. We cared about that for a while. Yeah. Phil Boswani says that compared to Apple's pennies. I don't even look that deeply into Apple's earnings. I just know that they didn't do as well in China as they were supposed to in China.

Starting point is 00:16:24 Right? But here's the most important thing for my friend, Matt Hogan. The most important stat in Coinbase's Q3 earnings is this. Transaction revenues, $289 million. Subscription and service revenues, $334 million. It's the first time non-commissioned revenues have exceeded commission-based revenues. People worry too much about whether there will be a compression in crypto trading commissions. Of course there will be. Commissions can and will fall to zero over time in crypto, just as they did for stonks. But Coinbase's total revenues will grow as they do. Schwab is the model here. They used to make money from commissions. Now

Starting point is 00:16:59 they make money other ways. If you get people on the platform and interacting with the brand, monetization will sort itself out. Now I'm going to cough. I was nice enough to mute it. You guys may have remembered that in the past, this was years ago, back in the chart of Palooza days where we used to just trade all day on here, the fun days, where I once coughed into the mic and a guy went literally ballistic, said he was unfollowing me on every platform because it was incredibly rude that I would dare cough into the mic in the direction of my audience, which is apparently every direction of my audience. But yeah, Coinbase performing quite well. The stock was up yesterday, actually down

Starting point is 00:17:40 after hours and about to open down because good things are bad and bad things are good in this market. But listen, it's nice not to be talking about Coinbase trading down at $32 and to be talking about numbers like 80 something, whatever. My cost basis on Coinbase is still somewhere in the low to mid 100s. I am way down and sleeping well at night. Well, actually not sleeping well at night, but it's not because of that. The next obvious narrative thing that we have to talk about really might be the last of our five stories is Solana season, bro. Solana went absolutely nut balls this week, pumping massively up 4,900 and a million point two percent in a matter of hours. Solana.

Starting point is 00:18:28 Not up that much, but people wondering why Solana is up so much. We've talked it to death on Crypto Town Hall and here. Fire dancers. Person that dances in fire. And also allowing Solana apparently to process tens of millions of transactions every second, millisecond, gigilisecond. Basically, the narrative here is that you now have a layer one that can scale for mainstream adoption, handle every single transaction anybody wants to do. And you don't need other blockchains or other layer twos. We'll see about that.

Starting point is 00:19:03 But maybe the real narrative is that Sam is gone. The FTX estate is kind of fine. They're staking their Solana rather than selling it. We know that every single time there's a known for selling event in the market of literally any asset that it's a complete nothing burger. How many years have we been talking about how Mt. Gox coins are going to crush the Bitcoin market? Celsius is selling all of their altcoins. Voyager is selling $10 billion worth of Doge. No, right? None of that stuff ever matters. It's all stupid, brainlit, smooth brain narratives that we see constantly like SBF is never going to get in trouble. Guy sitting in jail, and people on the internet going,

Starting point is 00:19:52 he'll never go to jail. While he's in the jail. They'll be like, he's not really in jail, dude. It's a body double. It's not really him. They found another cherub with curly hair and free no breath yeah but solana you know a lot of fundamental things happening a lot less fear now they survived from ftx and of course the solana break point conference which just is ending right now

Starting point is 00:20:23 probably it was this week. But Solana is not the only coin that has a conference. And if you want to talk about the fact that maybe there is a narrative here that these conferences help these coins, well, we have the announcement. Okay. Let's make sure I got my screen up here. What are we looking at? Coinbase. Here you go. Oh, and this is further evidence, by the way. Layer 1's kind of going up. Massive growth in TVL. But you see Solana, huge. Sui, huge. Near, huge. The others, not so much. And you're actually seeing some TVL leave layer 2s on Ethereum. So this is clearly a time for layer 1 narratives. You can see Solana's chart. huge the other is not so much and you're actually seeing some tvl leave layer twos on ethereum so this is clearly a time for layer one narratives you can see solana's chart there it is massively

Starting point is 00:21:10 up went as high as checks notes about 47 actually this kind of looks like a spot to buy to be honest 39 if you believe that solana is not done 39 i'd be looking at 32. But yeah, these are the highs from before FTX. It's testing it right now. But who else has a conference coming up? It's NerdCon. I mean, NearCon. And look what Near did when they announced their conference. Up from about 0.97 to a high of 1.5. NearCon. It's coming for you. Who else has a conference coming up in a couple weeks? It's XRP Ripple Swell. It's the swell. OpenAI has one too, but it's Ripple Swell.

Starting point is 00:21:53 And that's going to be happening over here in the next week in Dubai after they had a lot of good news from the Dubai Financial Service Authority. XRP also up, to be honest. XRP looks good anywhere above 58 cents. I looked at that, but that's not it. We had NerdCon and RippleSwell, and we even have ApeFest Hong Kong. And if you were here on Wednesday, we had Chris Inks talking about Ape. Look at ApeCoin off the lows of 0.994, hitting a high all the way of 1.4. Huge moves. When there's a conference, apparently you just buy stuff. Who else has a conference? It's Cardano. It's the Cardano

Starting point is 00:22:33 Summit. Here it is. You guys see it? See it? Oh, download the app. They blew it. Here it is. Look at it. There's people moving and there's things and there's guys and they're all doing important stuff. Look at them. Also in Dubai right now, ADA up big time, 24 up to 30. That's a weaker move, dude. It's pretty still, still, still, yeah, pretty good. But clearly we have a narrative here that all L1s are going to pump because there's conferences and it's all great news. And yeah, whatever, whatever. D gentlemen, Rick Wilson says, you crack me up, Scott. You say what I'm thinking so much. That's because I live inside of your head.

Starting point is 00:23:17 Yeah, guys, that's all the news that I pulled up because I did this myself. The guy with Cardano in his name says Solana shuts down too often. Well, I mean, Solana hasn't shut down in I think 10 or 11 months. They did massive upgrades from that and it hasn't been an issue at all. And listen, I know you're a Cardano fan,

Starting point is 00:23:37 but Cardano has done nothing yet. I get it. They're doing peer reviewed papers on the whatever. And I have nothing against Cardano, but like, dude, show me the development and show me the progress. Whether you like it or not, a lot is happening on Solana and we're seeing it every single day. Yeah. When Bitcoin has its Miami conference, the price tends to go down. Well, yeah, that's because it's...

Starting point is 00:24:00 If you've ever been there, you'd see why. Because you go there and you go, dude, I want nothing to do with a lot of these people man anyways yeah next i'm just reading comments now because i'm here alone and literally nobody can stop me solana cardano cage match would that be anatoly and charles fighting that'd be kind of cool what else do you guys say up here i mean look i'm gonna look through the comments look for the comments i'm really hoping that uh i can find uh my producer um you know by like monday it'd be really helpful uh so that i don't have to figure out how to be a producer uh sailor's conviction is insane and toby thinks he'll be pardoned by Biden. You're talking about SBF. Why do you think Biden cares? Well, how does that benefit Biden?

Starting point is 00:24:52 How would that help him? Do you think that that in any way, shape or form, don't you think Biden would literally have the guy disappeared before he would publicly pardon a guy that was just disgraced? God, you guys, stop. Stop. The guy's going to jail because he's a criminal. Everything is not a stupid conspiracy theory. Every person is not politically connected and going to fly off. He's on Mars. SPF's not even in jail. He's on Mars right now. It's where he is. God, man, he's not going to get pardoned. If he does, I'll eat my

Starting point is 00:25:28 words. But come on, man. Biden doesn't even know who SBF is. Biden doesn't know who Biden is. Yeah, it says, Scott, I'm still practicing golf. My game is terrible. I don't play that game anymore that much. Anyways, guys, that's all I, I, I don't play that game anymore that much. Anyways, guys, that's all I've got. I'm going to cut it before I do something stupid or say something stupid. Nobody wanted to hear this Friday. I need, I need NLW and Misha back. It's all stress right here. Doing this by myself. Real talk with Scott Melker. Yeah. SPF will start another Ponzi in jail, probably. Oh, pump it up? Don't you know, pump it up. Don't you know? Pump it up. You've got to pump it up.

Starting point is 00:26:26 Don't you know? Pump it up. You've got to pump it up. Don't you know? Pump it up. You've got to pump it up. Don't you know? Pump it up.

Starting point is 00:26:35 You've got to pump it up. Don't you know? Pump it up. You've got to pump it up. Pump it up. Bring back the old days, man. Good times. Fiboswani says Benny Hill is still his favorite. Man. Whatever, guys. man whatever guys never been a long week now i have today uh twitter spaces

Starting point is 00:27:34 45 minutes and then after that i'm interviewing paulo arduino from Tether. And after that, with this attitude, I'm going on Yahoo Finance to talk about SBF with a bunch of lawyers. Give me a break, man. Give me a break. Guys, it's been real. I'm glad that half as many people showed up when it was just me as it normally showing up.

Starting point is 00:28:01 Really appreciate it. It's flattering, guys. That's all I got for you. I will talk to you maybe another day if I can find a producer. Bye. Let's go.

The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Is Dumping, But SBF Is GUILTY AF! Friday Five

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