The Wolf Of All Streets - FTX LIQUIDATING BILLIONS | VITALIK HACKED & 700K LOST | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

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Scott, what's that message you sent me seconds before the space starts? Market is dumping. Yeah, everything's, well, we obviously saw all coins were dropping, but looks like Bitcoin could potentially be following. Did anything trigger it? I don't know. Animal spirits, the ghost of Satoshi, I have no idea. I would say that there's people who are spooked by this FTX rumored sell-off potentially. But still, I mean, at this moment, I'm going to have to go look at the charts, still sort of holding support. Yes, let me have a look. So Bitcoin's down 1.6% for the day.

It's at 25.4%. Yeah, I think the key is it's not really about the percentage price on a day like today. It's whether it's going to sort of break this key level around $25,200 or not, or whether that's going to hold a support because that move down now just tapped that August low for the first time, which is also the key level we've discussed. We'll get into it, I think, more. But it was sort of $25,000, $212,000, $214,000 or so was the first higher high in the entire bear market sort of structure. So it's just really a key level in my mind. So we'll see what happens here. Right now,

it's just still kind of ranging sideways, but looking a bit iffy. Yeah, I was having a look. It just hit just below 25.3k, 25.28. So that 25, maybe since Gareth is here, Gareth, maybe you could tell us a bit about the importance of that 25.2K level and why it's so important. Yeah, absolutely. So I hope everyone's doing well. But basically what we have here is the low from August, like Scott said, was right around that 25.2K level level 25, three level. And then we also hit that same level on September 1. And again, September 6, and here we are attacking it. So in terms of a level, I mean, I think it's I think it's people stepping up just before the 25k. You have the bullish

mentality or the psychology of an investor or trader is to say, Oh, you know, there'll be a lot of people buying at $25,000. So let me just buy just ahead of that level. And I think that's what's kind of established this pivot point here. The problem is people that jump ahead usually end up taking losses later on. So my guess is, again, based on the price action, you likely have a move down to $24,800, which is that pierce of $25,000. And that is the low going back to June. It's the June 14th and 15th low. And that'll be the next stopping point. So 24,800. So again, it's going to be interesting to see. I was seeing a lot of the altcoins again, moving lower and lower and lower, never ending, it seems like. And this is just adding to that kind of this negativity in the

crypto sector that I really think started about a month ago when we've had that dump out where we dropped from about 30,000 down to this 25 and change level, where it's this negativity out there that is really what bear markets need to flush out those final hands. And again, how low it goes, we'll have to find out. But yeah, it's definitely not a pretty picture. I mean, you don't look at this chart and say, wow, that's a great chart, right? Especially, yeah. And I think, Gareth, especially in the context is something I was talking about this morning with McGlone and Dave Weisberger was when you see altcoins start dropping like this, it's not usually showing you that Bitcoin's about to do something strong to the upside.

But I mean, in this market, when things are sideways and you start to see things selling off, it usually ends up just showing you that Bitcoin's about to likely do the same thing. And Benjamin, obviously, we have you here. You're my go-to. If I see like a red across the altcoin market, I'm going to be like, get Cowan. Get him out here. We got to talk to him about what's happening with the altcoins. But this is pretty much still just playing out exactly as you've been talking about for

months, right? Yeah, I mean, and again, like sort of what Gareth was saying, how really everything kind of changed about what a couple months ago when Bitcoin had that move down. And it's really in line with what we've seen historically, right? I mean, Bitcoin sort of normally tops out halfway through the halving year. And when it goes down, alt coins just get wrecked again. And that's why the altcoin market is so brutal, because, you know, altcoins didn't really do that well, all things considered for the first half of the year, right? If you look at things like total three, I mean, it's basically already

near the lows, even though Bitcoin is still well off of its lows. So, you know, if the altcoin market can't go up that much when Bitcoin goes up, then what happens to the altcoin market when Bitcoin goes down? And I think Gareth is right. I mean, I think 24.8 is a pretty important level. Do note that in 2019, we sort of took out that June low, which is the same low as here today, which was 24.8, right before the death cross occurred and

the death cross is occurring tomorrow so if it wants to play out like 2019 it still has the opportunity to do so and that would basically be to take out that 24.8k level you know sometime relatively soon and then in 2019 you know there were there was a relief rally into the death cross but again everything for the rest of the year just resulted in a lower high so my expectation is that we will likely eventually take out that 24 8k level and we will experience some relief rallies but everything for bitcoin this year for the rest of the year which you know for the next like you know three to four months should be i would guess would just be another lower high and all altcoins will likely just keep going down. And again, just sort of one last thing.

I say this every time I come on here, right? There's always people that say, well, everyone's bearish on the altcoin market. Therefore, the contra trade is that it's bullish. But I mean, how long have we been hearing that? And how long do we just keep seeing altcoins push lower? Yeah, that all makes sense. Mario, do you want to sort of jump? Go ahead, go go ahead go ahead i was just going to jump in and just say and when what ben just said is you know people have been saying oh

everyone's bearish but but no i'd like that's that's just not true like if you've experienced the 2008 2009 financial collapse like we haven't even gotten to those periods of the dot-com collapse or or any of these i mean if this is the if is the if this is the crypto equivalent of the dot-coms like yeah that that that sentiment is not even close to negative enough to to really put in a low pivot except for that the coins are already down like 98 99 on the smaller well yeah but you know even larger ones 85 or 90 that doesn't mean you can't go down further don't get me wrong i I'm just saying, if we're comparing to the stock to that point in the dot-com era, that's about where they ended. But how many of those coins, like think about

the dot-coms and the crap stocks that basically went out of business and just, you know, evaporated. And have we seen enough of that in the crypto market yet? I don't know. Remember too, that the dot-com crash lasted two and a half years. You know, I mean, two and a half years from the peak. And we're about two years out now, right? Yeah, exactly. How long has this been? How long has this bear market?

Sorry, I was just arguing with the delivery driver. How long has this bear market lasted, by the way? How long has it been? Well, I mean, it depends on if you measure it from april of 2021 or november if you measure it from november we're not even at the two-year mark yet if you measure it from april then the two and a half year mark is going to hit here in october um if you measure it from like april of 2021 but again like just looking at the altcoin market and comparing it to the nasdaq if it wants to follow the dot-com crash basically what it would mean would be

altcoins basically bleed for the next three to six months and then sometime late this year or early 2024 they actually find a true bottom and then start which aligns with the four years exactly i mean perfect exactly i mean again like the altcoin market last cycle did not even bottom out until two months before the having right i mean mean, like, it's not that this time is different. It's like, this is what it did last time. So when, so you said, Scott, it aligns with the Bitcoin halving. So what month is that exactly? Well, here would be, what Benjamin's basically saying here

is you would look for a first quarter 2024 bottom for altcoins. Then we would likely see, you know, obviously start to see the market start to heat up through the summer, but probably chop through the summer. And then we start to see a bull market at the end of the year. I mean, if it's like the other cycles and that would align with a lot of different things and once again, would make it that we didn't really have to have these conversations over and over again, because it would be exactly like the times before. Well, think about how everything else played out, like, because it would be exactly like the times before.

Well, think about how everything else played out, like, you know, more or less the same, right? Bitcoin peaks halfway through the pre-having year. Bitcoin, you know, found its first bottom at the end of Q4, you know, in Q4 of 2022. I mean, are we all just overcomplicating the same pattern? Yes. Yes, I think Peter raised his hand. Peter, I would love to hear your thoughts as he raised your hand sorry go ahead yeah i mean the last two times that we've had corrections in bitcoin of approximately 80 or so we haven't gotten quite there almost you know it's just been on average 40 months before we see a new all-time high.

So this is just not surprising that the market's chopping along. I mean, I really don't. And by the way, I use that April 2021 high, the Orthodox high. So, you know, go 40, 41, 42 months from there and, you know, probably then subtract another four months in terms of where the market turns back to the upside. I mean, the market's vulnerable here. We could easily go back for sure to $16,000, $17,000. I can't rule out a new low.

Yeah, but so, Peter, just by that that rationale just doing the quick math that once again puts us at uh late 2024 early 2025 correct yeah before we see a new all-time high before we take out that 70 000 level correct yeah it's just aligned with every halving cycle it's incredible go ahead and mario i know that michael uh has limited time here. Yeah, I want to dig into what I want to get your final thoughts. I want to get into the hack that Vitalik went through. Just kind of get some more experience. You've got a few people on stage that were hacked. So, by the way, Ryan, you don't accept the co-host invite.

But, Gareth, get your final thoughts on this. The fact that we're going to be in for a long sideways movement after April, after we bottom in April, and then we hopefully get a bull market by the end of next year. Yeah, I was just going to just mention one last thing, which was the interesting thing about this cycle is that if you have, this will be the first four-year cycle in Bitcoin. Like if it plays out just like the last, the positive to it is it gives us a lot of information that the Fed tightening doesn't necessarily screw up the four-year cycle. And I think that as an investor, that's a big thing, right? Versus having to always worry, is the Fed going to be raising rates or cutting rates? If

the four-year cycle plays out the same way, then that's great information going into the future cycles. Yeah. So I wanted to, Scott, do you want to to read is this a quick pieces of news i want to quickly go through it's about five and then we'll get into the hack um vitalik's hack so we've got obviously the ftx news that ftx liquidations could be could be coming in soon and so we'll probably be hit the hardest i think that you know most of this should have been already priced in so i don't see much pricing back there but we'll discuss that in a bit. We also have FTX trying to claw back celebrity payments. We'll discuss that briefly. And Sam, something funny about Sam,

he's trying to get out of jail now. His complaint is that the internet is not, he's having a lot of internet issues. So he's trying to, you know. He does have to review like 4 million pages of documents though, which is a bit challenging with bad internet. Yeah. So, you know, his argument in this case makes sense um we've got a funny story of someone overpaying five hundred thousand dollars for one bitcoin transaction but the more important news

is two first frantech volume has surpassed nft volume probably not important for most people here but pretty surprising frantech now is more volume than NFTs, but then again, that's not really much of an achievement in today's market. And lastly, the most important news for me is the G20. And I'm trying to, we've talked about this a few days ago. The news today is that members are working towards, quote, a modern international tax system appropriate to the needs of the 21st century. It's actually a tax system for crypto. But let's dig into the vitalik hack um so i think

you've all seen the hack it was on there was a tweet on his page that said the following to celebrate pro dank sharding pro sorry proto dank sharding day coming to ethereum consensus is marking the moment with a commemorative nft proto honors the work of the devs who made this possible the collection is free for the next 24 hours claim your piece of history so vitalik is based on this seat launched an nft collection um what do we know about the hack i know someone's trying to unmute yeah i don't know if i can have i think we can dig into it a minute i just like on the broad strokes i think what's really notable here and why when this story came out i was pretty pretty adamant that we talk about it today. We invited Peter Haseeb, a few people, Michael Turpin, of course, myself, who've been through SIM swaps, is that your expectation, obviously, is that nobody on the planet has better OPSEC

than someone like Vitalik Buterin, right? They're going to have their wallet secured. They're going to understand how to secure all their accounts. But this can still happen even without them getting their crypto stolen. Obviously, it's very easy to hack their Twitter account, send out a phishing link and catch people unaware and for a hacker to make a ton of money. And so to me, it really highlights the importance of for the average person, A, avoiding those type of phishing links, but also understanding how to secure your social media so that you

don't become a victim of this on the other side. Really fast context. Hasib is here. We're old friends at this point, but we became friends because I got SIM swapped and Charlie Schramm immediately introduced me to Hasib. Hasib helped me out tremendously. And then Hasib said, well, listen, I have a secure phone service. I can secure your SIM card. You'll never have to worry about it again. And I said, man, listen, I just got SIM swapped. I don't really trust anyone. And he said, I can SIM swap you in five minutes.

And this is after I'd been through T-Mobile saying my account was completely secured. I had every extra thing. And literally 90 seconds later, I gave Hasib permission to basically do it as a white hat. And he did it and converted me to his service. And I've had no problems since. But he's the absolute master of understanding the SIM swaps here. And Peter, you've been SIM swapped recently. Your Twitter, you had a similar situation where they were tweeting links from you.

And Michael, obviously, you were the victim of one of the bigger SIM swaps in history. So that gives the context of why, me this is so important because people, we just keep getting, seeing these things happen, huge names getting SIM swapped and then people end up ending up being victimized. Quick question. Have we determined that it is a SIM swap? I haven't seen that definitively because you can obviously get into the Twitter via a SIM swap, but you can also get in it simply by finding out what the password for twitter is uh from what i heard so michael you might be correct but what i heard was that uh he he was sim swapped but that that could be inaccurate i don't want to uh we'll get her research team on that right now but i believe

that somebody brute forced basically into his twitter through his phone is that is you were obviously sim swap michael i mean maybe you could tell us the the brief story of what happened with you and any lessons you learned there well i think for the most part um you know besides uh obviously my litigation against the the hackers and uh against the at&t i've been a proponent of getting the laws changed. And under the, I did an open letter to the FCC, because it's pretty simple to change that, to eliminate this, and other nations have done it. You simply make sure that the passwords are covered. So when you get a pin code, and oftentimes they will tell you that, oh, you now have a celebrity pin code, it's like a couple digits longer. What they don't say is that it doesn't matter how many digits it is,

as long as somebody from AT&T or Verizon or any of the other carriers can automatically override it with a $9 an hour employee, it's meaningless. And so what you need to do is you need to simply have it by law covered so that you punch it in the same way you do your PIN code at an ATM. If you go into a bank and say, I forgot my PIN code, can you look it up for me? They can't do that. Otherwise, they'd be able to print off a card and drain your bank account to whatever the daily limits are.

And under Trump's administration, I got ignored. Under Biden's administration, they actually did start a proposed regulation for this. And AT&T's lobbyists have gummed it up for more than a year, saying that any change would hurt the little guy, which, of course, is ridiculous. Yeah, I mean, to be clear, what Michael's talking about, you can have all the protections in the world, but if an employee takes $100 to pay you off and swap your SIM, it makes no difference, right? Or if somebody gets your information on the dark web or someone else, and let's be frank,

I think everybody's information is out there. Right, which is what happened in my case. Jameel Smith got a couple of hundred bucks from the gang. This is, in my case, it's also been, you know, proven in discovery. And it was not the first time he did it. So, you know, that's... Michael, can you explain, did what exactly? Just for us, I've never been SIM swapped.

Took a bribe, took a bribe, took a bribe. So in the early days of SIM swapping, it was about, you know, trying to spoof someone into tricking them. And then the criminals realized that there's a simpler way of doing it uh most of these gangs have did michael yeah i lost michael there yes essentially scott oh you're back michael yeah go ahead sorry sorry sorry that was an alarm going off that I have to leave it in the mirror too. But no, what happened was the employees are targeted by the gangs.

And each of these gangs has a half a dozen or more people basically on payroll. And Ellis Pinsky, who agreed as part of, settlement with him to testify against AT&T. I mean, he has said, and this is public record, you know, that he had all these people on payroll and they would take anywhere from $100 to $500 to go in and just say that I was in the store and I looked for an upgrade. I put in my driver's license. It didn't scan. So they did a manual override. That's how easy it is. And that needs to be stopped. Yep. No matter how many

protections you have from corporate, to be clear. And like you said, the other path, by the way, Mario, is the more common. What was more common was that they socially engineer you basically, right? They get your phone number and a bit of information on you. And then they call and fool an employee into thinking it's you. Swap your SIM into their phone, and that's the other way that it happens. It just seems like I see – I'll let you jump in because obviously Scott told us his story with you. I feel bad for the people that hacked you. Scott came out probably dry, nothing at all.

Yeah, but the people who hacked me were very public about it. It was another gang. Like Michael said, it was some guy, Bobo, literally, somewhere in Europe and was bragging that he had sim swapped me and all this. I didn't lose any coins, but it was a nightmare. Hold on. So they were bragging about sim swapping you, but they were not doxxed. Yeah, it was just an anonymous person, correct?

Yeah, it was some famous hacker apparently named Bobo. This is as far as we got, who was ondit message boards and saying that they had sim swapped me yeah so so i see um can you like it for me it just sounds so easy like if you if i can know some information about your date of birth your your address um um i don't know if you have like a passcode what what information do you need and how common is it uh sure so first of all, you need only three pieces of information to sync up someone. Number one, you need the telephone number. Obviously, it's very easy to find. The Twitter hack database available.

You can go online, put someone's Twitter username, and it will give you a telephone number of theirs. You can also verify it by clicking a forget password on twitter and it will verify this number using this this person using this number super simple takes like maybe two minutes to do it once you have the number you can just find their account number and pin account number is again it's on top of your bill so what people do is they can you can literally walk into store and tell them oh i forgot my id or something and they will give you an account number. And same with the PIN, too. PIN is a four- to six-letter code that you can get.

The challenge is that we are dealing with people who actually get employed on these stores just to SimSap people. They don't have any other purpose. They just get in the store. Their goal is not to make $10 per hour, but they're going to SimSap because every SimSapper is making, every SimSap they get paid around $500 to $1,000 per SimSap. They do 20-30,

they make like 15-20K, they move on to a different store. And because these stores are not connected to the main corporate stores, employment-wise, because they are not W-2, they're more like 1099s, they don't even have a record.

So if they, like in banking, if you get fired, you cannot work on another bank. But in cell phone store, it doesn't happen. So you can switch between store to store and make a shit ton of money. And that's what is causing us.

And that's a criminal, it is a criminal offense, yeah? So these guys, when they're caught, they go to jail. I'm not saying it's not worth it for them, but they do go to jail if it doesn't work, correct? It works. The challenge is that how it works is michael turpin is very well

versed on that the way it works is first of all a lot of these people are youngsters so they're up uh they're underage so they can't be you know like penalized as regular people right that's a challenge the second part is it's a part of a cartel like if i work in a store i can just say that oh i got sims app someone came with the id like scott came with id um and i can just pretend i just got doxxed right like i just i just got like i i made a mistake and it's a part of a cartel i believe a lot of people within the exchanges and a lot of people within the banks are also part of the cartel because a lot of hacks that i saw happen right after they put the money into exchange so they put the money into exchange in three days they were hacked like yeah i see the reason i knew that the thing that gave me the tip off like as

you know just so people know is that first of all i saw my phone service go dead i didn't think anything of it but immediately luckily because i was getting them still, they had also hacked my email, by the way, which is what they do. But I started getting these reset for everything. A Coinbase, which I didn't even have any money on Coinbase, but a Coinbase password reset. Did you reset your password? Blah, blah, blah. You get a slew of all these things. And then you realize that somebody is basically trying to do an SMS authentication to go in,

and that's what they do, right? I mean, is that if you're using SMS authentication, which almost everyone is on Twitter, which is how these accounts happen, they take over your number, they reset your password, that goes to their SMS to get the code instead of to you because they now have your phone, and that's how this happens. And the challenge with the SMS to FAA is like, you know, I think my bank doesn't support any other form of authentication.

That's one of the top banks. IRS doesn't support it. Uh, you know, like, and frankly, like even this is like, and I think on, I know on Twitter,

there was 97% of people use SMS to FAA, 97% of people. That's crazy. That's crazy. I know. Twitter, there was 97% of people use SMS 2FA, 97% of people. That's crazy. That's crazy. I know. That's insane. But can you tell us? What do you think on Coinbase would be?

I think I saw the report like three years ago. On Coinbase, what would be SMS 2FA? What's the percentage? Take a guess. What percentage of accounts have a 2FA? SMS 2FA. SMS 2FA. Oh, it's got to be like 90%.

For a long time, they didn't even offer any other kind. Yeah, it was 90, 90, 92% or something. I would almost argue, I'm not going to say this practically, but SMS authentication is almost worse than no authentication in some cases. We can debate about this all day long, but again. Hold on. So I've got two questions for you, Haseeb. And by the way, David, you're now my favorite speaker on the show. You should see

what he tweeted, what he commented, Scott. Check your notifications. Silver, what did he say? Silver Miller, victim of crypto swim fraud. It's like, you know that better call Sal to stop a banner like this? He's not billing us, but he's farming our listeners as we speak in real time it's epic i swear i will go to you david

in a bit in a bit just understand your services a bit better no jokes aside uh i see my question is how did you get uh scott's um sim you know scott was pretty hesitant to give you to use your service which i'm curious about without shilling it like what is it like how can you offer a service why should we trust another third party but then you also so scott said he wasn't interested and then you you managed to swap a swim stop swap him in in a few minutes and then he was convinced how the hell do you do it so first of all uh people should know that i've been a victim of since i poor time myself too uh and that's how we started a service like i used to run a bitcoin atm operation for people who don't know the company went public two months ago one

of the few companies that went public in crypto um and then um uh yeah so i was a hacked victim so i started looking into forums where these hackers hang out uh they were og forum they're like a lot of forum where you can buy Twitter usernames, hacked accounts, and everything. So I started looking into why people were hacking me. And I figured out how do they attempt it. So I know that FCC has a rule, which is like, you know, they said that within four hours, a number has to be swapped.

So if you're changing carriers, within four hours, it has to move. So carriers have automated it. They said as long as this information is correct which is account number telephone number a pin number let the number go regardless of whatever protection you have on the phone it does not matter at all so i knew that i asked him put all the protection on the phone because t-mobile or any carrier will say, oh, we have put all the protections. And just give me this information, I'll SIMS up you right away. We just put the information in and it just SIMS up. That's pretty much what happens. There's no rocket science there. And the way we did it was we put extra check because I came from a crypto background, so

I knew how it happened. And we made it impossible to make any change. Like on our website, you cannot even make a change on that account. Not even I have access to do anything by myself. So it's like we have within our company, we have multiple multi-factor authentication and there's no plan. Like we cannot even change you from family plan to another plan because it costs so much money. So just putting extra authentication and i just built that there should be a service for people who are important they don't have to go to like a regular cell phone

service so like a vip or business class for cell phone hold on yeah but then why do you accept scott i don't understand like how what do you consider as important uh important people like we work with mostly celebrities and uh and fortune 500 companies that's all it was the last cycle we were all rich at some point of time in our life mario yeah you know it was different it was different time uh time in the world peter peter you've also you also recently were a victim of one of these major twitter hacks i would love to hear your story i assume it was a sim swap as well i I believe. Yeah, it was a SIM swap. August 11th, I was back down in Tucson for a couple weeks. And just like you, phone goes dead. But before the phone went

dead, here's the key deal, is we started getting slammed. The numbers started getting slammed with text messages at a rate of about 200 a minute. Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. Because disguised in all of that was T-Mobile's text message, which basically said, there's a SIM request, request press one they want you to lose it in there yeah yeah oh but if you don't press anything it gets swapped and so the default was to violate my privacy the default was not to protect me um i can't say a lot about how it broke down at t-mobile because we're in some litigation with that. But nevertheless, within five minutes after the SIM swap, they took over my Twitter account and they tweeted out basically a scam crypto promotion, which drove people to a website that had already been prepared in advance with my picture with the company name.

And so the thing was extremely well orchestrated. In addition to that, of course, there was a request to reset passwords at crypto exchanges. They did go for yours as well. That's interesting because that's more of a two pronged mind that there wasn't an intention. I don't think of scamming other people. They were just trying to get my money. In this case, they were setting you up, A, to use your Twitter account to share phishing links and get other people's money. But they did also try on the back end to get into your exchanges as well. Yeah. Also, they directly went through my DM list.

And so they started getting my DM contacts. Crazy. Mario, I don't know if you know this really quick but michael turpin who was here before and he left he was sim swapped for 22 they got 22 million dollars from him i know just to give people yeah just to give people the context of how big this can be especially when he was sort of one of the first high profile people in crypto to have this happen but an absolutely absurd and massive hack of an individual um the question and that one goes to hasibo anyone else um if you if you if you have two-factor authentication does that fix the problem or sim swapping still can happen with two-factor authentication it can happen it can

happen so the challenge is that it all depends on i think twitter by default is putting your telephone number in the account um and i i think i should write a guide on that too in the challenge like my account was verified before twitter launched blue so for us it's not required but people who registered after they need to have their telephone number in the account to be verified you can remove your after but by default it stays there so uh so yeah you set up another factor but it's like a lot of time you set up like oh i want to have a hardware key as a two-factor but if the hardware key is not it's missing they will revert it back to telephone number i'll jump in uh to answer that also it's

really crazy for original crypto people that use Google two-factor authentication, the original setup, if you set up your Google Authenticator a couple of years ago, it defaults and would send to an email address. And most people back then were using Gmail. And the easiest one to hack with the SIM swap was Gmail. They would get into your Gmail first, reset your authenticator and can still get in through your authenticator because you hadn't fixed your 2FA.

Another crazy fact about this, I've done over 500 of them now. It's actually an old picture that says 350. Another crazy factor is most people are actually getting hacked because of the Ledger hack. And now with FTX and Voyager, with all that going on, there was an API leak at a Coinbase where they were able to go into Coinbase, see your account balance, see what your two-factor authentication was, and they were able to confirm the last two digits of your phone number. And so ultimately, what these hackers did was they took all of these emails, went in through the API, and got into everybody's Coinbase accounts.

I mean, it's absolutely crazy how easy it is. Now, all these things are being fixed today. But, I mean, we're still two years into litigation. T-Mobile was by far the worst. Verizon had the most high profile. And AT is getting a little bit better. Yeah, T-Mobile was by far the worst. Verizon had the most high profile and AT is getting a little bit better. You said two things. First, David, I don't understand. When you said they saw your two-factor authentication details in Coinbase, Coinbase stores that information?

Yeah, there was a leak that you were able to sell that was sold on the dark web showing an email, an account balance, and what the two-factor authentication was and what the last two digits of your phone number were so what kind of tooth that what kind of two-factor authentication like whether it was google or tech you couldn't actually get someone's six-digit code okay okay that's i'm posting a picture to the feed right now of what information you were able to say so that you can kind of look at. Now, this is obviously old. This isn't new.

You can't do this anymore. This was at the time a couple of years ago. But this was the type of information that was leaked on the dark web. I just posted it. So you were able to see your MFA was two-factor, like SMS. Yeah, once they see your SMS, you're a target, right? I mean, that's really the crux of it. Yeah, I mean, nowadays on T-Mobile, it's not just social engineering.

You can go on the dark web and for $250, buy a key blocker that actually lets you into T-Mobile's login platforms. Now, obviously, everyone's trying to get better nowadays and our litigation goes back a year or two but I get calls every day. People are still getting sim swapped and like everyone else here, I'm not just the president of the hair club for men. I'm a victim also. I was sim swapped

but like everyone else, they went for my Coinbase account because I go everywhere i say my i sue coinbase every day but i let all my cryptos there and they weren't able to get through there are a variety of easy measures that people should be taking but still happening every day can you can you tell us what those measures are david so the first measure is that you should not you should use coinbase offers vaulting i don't understand why anyone wouldn't use coinbase vaulting it's a free service they offer but it's two emails in 48 hours so on most sim swaps when

you learn that you're sim swapped like i got sim swapped at 2 30 in the morning so i wouldn't have known until i woke up at about five like 6 30 in the morning for four hours and they can empty out your accounts in about an hour but if you use any service that any of the exchanges, they allow for delays. You can sit, you wouldn't, you would wake up in the morning, you would see that your account was compromised. You would go onto someplace like Coinbase or Gemini, say my account was compromised and you wouldn't lose your money.

A second thing is you shouldn't use... Hold on. So David, so what does vaulting do? It just delays everything by 24 to 48 hours. So you have time to... Yeah, just delays everything by 24 to 48 hours, so you have time to act? Yeah, it delays everything by 24 to 48 hours. So if you're not day trading, you can lock up. You can't get your money out for 48 hours as a, yeah, it's like having a market. Yeah, it's a very simple solution. I love it. Yeah, another simple solution is to use like for people use a YubiKey or some sort of, you know, device that you have to actually plug into your physical computer and touch, which has become much more popular.

And also to email, you shouldn't just use your like, I mean, the amount of people in crypto who have lost AOL accounts I see all the time now. Like, I mean, who's still using an AOL or a Yahoo account? But these are the people, you know, it's now grandma and grandpa are getting hacked every day. It's not the original Michael Turpin's.

Like, Turpin, and he's been very public about this. We had dinner last week. He had, he was telling me, like, you know, his original,

he lost the 22 million were mostly ICO tokens. But he was storing that information on an Excel, Google, I think it was a Google spreadsheet. Yeah, it was a Google spreadsheet.

It was a Google spreadsheet that had everything. I mean, people, OGs are getting better about OPSEC. Okay, fair. So I think the answer to everyone is take this seriously. But you said, we shouldn't be too concerned because one thing you also said at the end is that service service providers i think you mean phone providers are becoming better at that nah no they and they by the way i mean you you can see the evolution of how this all happens whatever steps the phone companies and such take to prevent this the hackers are going to get one step ahead they always have well criminals criminals always do so hopefully guys like me have a job i'm with scott you know i'm i need to keep happening um in other news scott we've got two other pieces of news the india one we've talked

about it already uh but that's you know for me just two things coinbase is not getting banned in india i think they've been banned since june not banned but they've helped fake news accounts yeah so they've helped the people to people are not allowed to open new account on coinbase or at least send money to their coinbase account since june so it's been around for a while and but anyone that has an account has money and it could still use it so it's nothing new the only developer now is actually actually nothing there's there is no developer there's just a bunch of accounts that had that breached terms and service one reason reason or another and they were asked to kind of close their account and take money out but the coinbase is not being banned in India, and India is working towards getting more

regulatory clarity. We talked about this earlier at the G20 summit, but also on a local level, we've got India heading in the right direction. So that's on the India news. The point here is that India will decide its stance on crypto over the next few months, and that's based on the G20 deliberations. And they've been urging other members, other G20 members to do the same. But the other piece of news, Scott, is FTX got a lot of liquidations coming in, a lot of fear there. I think it's

already been priced in. Where do you stand on this? Yeah, I think, well, I think that the market might be reacting to it as a narrative more than it has anything to do with the actual liquidation, which could have had something to do with some of the downside we're seeing today. I did just see that in our news group that the current assets of FTX exchange have been published in court files, which is interesting. I'm literally digging into it right now. I don't know where it is. Yeah, I'll let you dig into it. Let me ask David a quick question on this. 1 billion in Solana they have, by the way. $1,162,000,000 worth of Solana. $560,000,000 in Bitcoin.

$192,000,000 in ETH. Dig beyond there. What were the numbers before? What was the estimate around a billion? I'm not sure. This is different, obviously, by the way, than what people are saying would be sold off immediately. And we know that a ton of that Solana is vesting and you know they don't yeah till 20 till 2028 but that's

but that's really crazy that's 15 percent of supply of total supply total market cap of yeah total market cap of of uh of solana is just over seven billion and they've got a billion out of it so that that's actually a lot of pressure on Solana. Again, that's already – but then if you think of it, that's been priced in as soon as FTX got hacked. Yeah, there's a reason Solana was $8 already. Yeah, it's $17 now. But David, I want to ask you a quick question on this.

In the filing, in the documents, the U.S. trustees trustees opposing the motion of FTX converting its crypto into fiat, citing a violation of local rule 4001-2 applicable to cash collateral and financing requests in bankruptcy cases. So my question to you is that, you know, what does that mean? It doesn't seem anyone's hopeful that FTX won't be liquidating their crypto. But, you know, is there any hope that that liquidation doesn't even take place? You are so beyond my knowledge of bankruptcy law on that one, but that will be an issue that gets resolved. In the other bankruptcy cases, they've successfully done that.

I think that's more about a timing issue. They will end up being able to convert it, but the trustee and the committee will eventually – the trustee of the committee and Sullivan and Cromwell for FTX, they'll eventually circle back. It will be sold. I think there's just issues about when they want to sell it and other things, but it's not a, no, they won't be able to sell. Yeah, and so is there any possibility

they end up distributing the crypto as crypto instead of distributing it as cash? Or there's no way that could happen? Voyager did it. It's possible. One of the issues, and this was a little different than Voyager, is because some of the crypto that's missing, how do you distribute to one person and one crypto and then say to another person, you're not getting your crypto? The committee has taken a position. My presumption is there's enough large amount of crypto here.

Some people will be able to get it back in crypto. But's a problem you know let's say you were holding a different coin why should one person get crypto and another person not it's a big issue i eventually it's going to come down to some people will get crypto i think interesting i could go i go ahead and said shed some light on this uh the objection by the U.S. trustee. The U.S. trustee generally, you know, it's an arm of the Department of Justice and effectively, you know, a hand helper to the court and needs to make sure that all procedures are being followed properly. Essentially, you're not allowed to go ahead in a bankruptcy case, a debtor is not allowed to go ahead in a bankruptcy case. A debtor is not allowed

to go ahead without permission and spend cash on things that are outside the ordinary course of business. They need to get permission. And there's a tension here, as there is in bankruptcy cases now, oftentimes, especially with crypto, regarding confidentiality, right? What you don't want to do is for the trust, for the debtor to go out there and spell out exactly its liquidation plans, because then everyone's going to go ahead and effectively time the market on those trades, right? And the debtor is saying, look, I need some flexibility and I need some anonymity in, in, in,

in some sense in terms of going out there and selling it. The trustee has, unfortunately, no upside in this situation and frankly, just has to say, look, you've got to give people notice on these things. Maybe you could go ahead and file the notice under seal so that it doesn't get out there publicly. But frankly, you can't just go ahead and do this because it flies in the face of the bankruptcy rules, bankruptcy code as well. And so therefore, there's just this tension. Like David said, I agree, this is going to get worked out just like customer lists gets worked out and things like that. I think this will come to an easier resolution than customer lists. And everybody

wants the highest value to go ahead and be garnered by the sale of these assets and obviously doesn't want to go ahead and give the market a heads up exactly how things are going to be liquidated. It's got the question to you, man. It's probably the last question that I have is do you think that's all been priced in? I think the markets – I just don't expect it to impact the market much. It's a bit of selling pressure. But the selling pressure other than Solana is very limited. There's enough liquidity there for the amount that we mentioned amount of holdings right now i just uh actually posted

the chart it's about 1.1 billion in solana as we know like i said those are it's not all uh at the same time 560 million bitcoin 192 million eth and it goes down dramatically from there i mean we do know that small sales can rock this market right now because there's so little liquidity on all coins but but to be frank i don't know who's doing the selling or how it's going to work I mean, we do know that small sales can rock this market right now because there's so little liquidity on altcoins. But to be frank, I don't know who's doing the selling or how it's going to work. But didn't we see that they are working with Galaxy and Mike Novogratz to handle the actual liquidations and all the actual trading? And I can't imagine that those guys are going to just, I mean, they're not going to just openly dump all this on the market. Like I said, I think there's a narrative thing. I think people are scared and it doesn't take

much right now to see sell-offs in altcoins and a small sell-off leads to huge drops because, like I said, there's no liquidity. To me, this is just a narrative. It'll be forgettable, but it doesn't take more than a narrative to see a few percent downside. But will the actual selling of some random coin by FTX dramatically move the market? No, because they'll probably use... Except Solana, but then they get Solana's... But that's over a long time.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And like I said, if they took a billion dollars in Solana, which they can't, by the way, I'm not saying that, and sold it all at once, yeah, it would destroy the price of Solana dramatically. But these guys are going to use market makers and they're going to be selling exceptionally slowly, I would imagine. They'll do some of it OTC. So I think the narrative that people should understand, it's not like FTX just said.

How much did they spend on the entire bankruptcy process? Do you know? Last I had checked, FTX was in the lead by a massive amount, which is kind of crazy considering that they only started in November and a lot started in June or July. But they were over $300 million. So if you did the math, I think it was about $1.4 million a day since the collapse they've spent on lawyers' fees. And by the way, they're nowhere close. They're nowhere close to be done? No, they're nowhere close to be done? No, they're nowhere close to be done. Now, I will say in defense of all the other ones, like if you were a Voyager creditor

like myself, obviously, you know, we saw failed deals with Binance and FTX that were both exceptionally expensive. It was literally just a waste. They could have liquidated on day one. In the defense of the FTX lawyers, I'm not saying they're worth that amount of money, but they have recovered seemingly billions and billions of dollars of money that will eventually go to creditors. So 300 million to spend on lawyers who have discovered billions that should eventually be chopped up, that might actually be a somewhat more justified expense. You're just being nice because David's on stage, but I'll give it to you. It's not even that. I'm saying like if if ftx had liquidated

on day one and they had never gone and found those assets and that had you know people would have gotten maybe a lot less than they will in the future after having the lawyers help that's not the case with a voyager like you know every bankruptcy here is different they're all complete fucking scams but yeah but what do you say when you say lawyers found those what do you mean found those what do you mean lawyers found those they just do you mean found those? What do you mean lawyers found those? They just see a bunch of accountants. Yeah, like what do lawyers do to find these things? Like these are just hidden wallets and stuff. Don't you have people, analysts, accountants looking through paperwork and wallets?

Yeah, I mean, ultimately, there's a lot of work that goes into this. But think about it. If the FTX case, and remember, most of it was international, not FTX US where the money was missing. On day one, there was an $8 billion hole. Right now, that hole is supposedly much less. And if they do cover up the $8 billion hole, then you pay your professional's top dollar. Of the $300 million, you have to remember, a lot of that is other professionals working alongside the lawyers to cover those costs. And those are the people that you're talking about.

Those are the, you know, I think Chainalysis, TRM are on board. You have the different companies. You had to unwind all of the investments. You had to do all of these other things. So, again, as long as the ultimately if there is much less of a loss. Now, ironically, that helps SPF in his argument if there's no money loss, that these lawyers did such a fantastic job.

But at the end of the day, you got to pay your professionals top dollar to get good results. So I'm all for that. SPF can complain about that in 30 years when he gets out of jail. What's the difference between the money that they've recovered so far

and the money owed to users? Does anyone know the difference between the two? What's the hole now? We that they've recovered so far and the money owed to users? Does anyone know the difference between the two? What's the hole now? We don't know exactly, right, David? I don't think we know the actual number yet, but it's much smaller than what was projected in November 2022. I mean, they've recovered. Is it still 10 figures? Is it still in the 10 figures?

A billion dollars here, a billion dollars there. It adds up eventually, but not under the actual hole. But I think we're approaching much smaller than 10 figures. Yeah. Wow. That's pretty successful. Yeah. Cool.

So, I mean, you know, like you said, those people all work for the lawyers, Mario. So somebody's got to pay them too at an extreme premium. Yeah. And by the way, the market has recovered. Scott, how's the market now? Because when we started this space, it started dumping. I don't know. I just see a whole lot of red still. No, Bitcoin's down further than when we started. It's still dumping. And now it's kind of below those levels we were talking about. It's at 25,138 at the moment. I think when we started, it was about 25,425. So it's down another 400 bucks or so.

Hold on. Is that major, though? Like being below $25,200, that's a number that you and Gareth and others mentioned a lot. Is that concerning or not yet? We can round it. We need to close there. Yeah, I would say it's concerning. But listen, you know, market's going to do what the market's going to do. But, you know, I'm looking at on Coinbase, the low of this entire sort of cycle in August was $25,234. Now we're at $25,079,

considering continuing down. But like I said, that $25,200, that was the first level that was broken on the upside to sort of end the quote unquote, bear market, right? The bear structure, all the people who have come on and said, hey, we're back in a bull market, kind of got to hold $25,000 structurally to keep that argument. But by the way, that's on the weekly chart. So you got six more days really to take a look at that. But this is really a key area. And so even though it's only $300 or $400 drops here and there, this is the area that you want to see hold as support. So the smaller moves are a little- So what's more important, $25,200 or $25,000? That's all the same, to be quite honest, in my mind.

I would say, for me, looking at it technically, $25,214, but it's grasping at straws. Did you say $25,214? Yes. Well, every exchange also has different lows and different prices. So unique to this market is that each exchange has its own chart. When we saw that drop, obviously, in August, I think I stopped using Bitstamp, which I've been using forever. That didn't even drop below 26,000. I think Binance went to 25,100, OKEx to 24,200. So when you get these high moments of volatility in a somewhat illiquid

market like this, the charts can look actually very, very different depending on the exchange that you're looking at. Cool. On this depressing note, I think we can wrap it. I know, Scott, you're heading to Singapore tomorrow. I'll be skipping this time around. Can you meet me in the airport? Hold on. Are you messing around? Do you have time or no? Don't mess with me. I have two hours tomorrow night in the Dubai airport, and Gaurav, your buddy, is on my flight, the second leg. Yeah, I know about Gaurav being on your flight, but that means I have to check in.

Will you have time to check out? Because I can't get through security unless I have a flight. I have two hours. What do you think? You're the Dubai guy. I would say yes, 100%, but I don't know about you man i don't know how how how we can discuss this not in a public we gotta no bro we're discussing it we're discussing standing with our cell phones out and our two-factor authenticators on the corner of yeah

no maybe we shouldn't you know discuss what's your flight what's your flight number scott yeah i'm good thank you guys i appreciate y'all we. We'll see you. So Scott and Rand will be in Singapore tomorrow. Sorry, whatever, a couple of days, whatever it is. So you can meet them there. I will not leave me alone. I appreciate you all. We'll see you again tomorrow morning. Scott, any final words? No, man, I think it's good.

I just really want to stress to people how important it is to to take your security seriously and you said it earlier this is not a shill at all i have no no reason to say it but hasib and his company if you're in the united states maybe you guys have gone abroad as well but you you can very easily just take this one uh major headache off your plate by uh just getting your sim secured yeah one other thing hasib if you could please message me, I'd be, oh Scott, if you could connect us on WhatsApp, that'd be great. Of course. I'll give you my S+, 614-228-3421, Haseeb. Please do connect with me on WhatsApp, it'd be great. Also, two other things, guys. AscendX, we've partnered with AscendX, so anyone that has a project that wants to launch on AscendX, hit us up.

We've got a very close partnership where you can list on there pretty quickly at a pretty good price if you get approved. And we work with you as well. We work with your team. So if you're interested, hit me or Ryan up. Just DM us. Not Scott. Scott is unaffiliated with this. No, with that.

But, yeah. Generally, my DMs are open now, though. I just want to. Yes, you can only message Scott. I know, but only message Scott if you want to sponsor the show. Me, Scott, and Ryan if but yeah. Generally, my DMs are open now, though. I just want to... Yes, you can only message Scott. I know, but only message Scott if you want to sponsor the show. Me, Scott, and Ryan if you want to sponsor the show. Me and Ryan if you're interested for a SendEx. And lastly, the...

Oh, Ryan's not here. The ugly logo, the red one on stage with the white circle. Just go to that one and follow it. Go to your phone. It takes you a minute, please. Follow that account because we're going to be hosting spaces from there. Again, Haseeb... Hey, Mario, really quick. Plus, hold on, hold on bro i need to i need to give my phone number

to his seat please it's important hasib it's plus six one four eight two two four four three four i just need him to message me on whatsapp about phone security and sim swap i can make this happen you know like it's right we don't need to do it on the public forum but i'm just thinking like how brave of mario is to give his number publicly he's doing it on purpose he to do it on the public forum. I'm just thinking like how brave of Mario is to give his number publicly. He's doing it on purpose. He's doing it on purpose to make a point. Sim swap him. Scott, do you want to say something?

Yeah, the final point here was that I just saw in our news group, Bankrupt FTX has $7 billion in assets, including 38 properties in the Bahamas worth 200 million court filing shows. So to give an idea, I don't know if that, I can't remember what the exact number was before and the assets they have, but to answer the question right now, they have 7 billion in assets. I'm looking at the same filing. It's 8.7 billion missing, 7 million. So 1.7 billion still missing. Well, yeah, but that's a hell of a lot better than eight if it costs $350 million to find to the point.

Yeah, but I'd say based on the Voyager experience, what we saw there, I think they would have found the amount for a lot less money. The bankruptcy process in the US is mind-boggling to me. I agree. I hate it more than anyone. Yeah, I highly recommend

if you know any bankruptcy lawyers, everyone, make sure you unfollow them, and I think we've got to make a rule as of today, Scott, no more bankruptcy lawyers on our stage. Would you agree? I don't think we've had any bankruptcy lawyers, just lawyers. David is not a bankruptcy lawyer.

I was just messing around. My joke doesn't work if he's not a bankruptcy okay damn it all right well i'll take my joke back all right everyone i'll see you tomorrow we'll see you tomorrow bye