The Wolf Of All Streets - Market Analysis | BTC Long Term Predictions w/ @RTB_io | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: June 13, 2024

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Oh, wow. I'm a speaker and co-host and Scott is still a listener. Bad. So let's see the agenda today. We've got net inflows for Bitcoin spot ETFs at $101 million. We're back to inflows after two days of outflows. Let's see what else we have. Who's going to be talking about? Just sitting here waiting for my invite.

Yeah, for CS7, that'd be Scott's. Hey. Waiting for my invite to be co-host with you. You got your invite, bro. Can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you. Okay, so make sure you know you're on stage. I'm just waiting to get co-hosted. I just see us.

Here we go. One second. Here we go. Do you know what's happening with Do Kwon? Yeah, it's a pretty crazy story, I think, actually. I'm hoping somebody else can unpack it a little better because I've been traveling, and so I kind of missed it. But, yeah, I mean, there's a huge judgment with the SEC, which to me just kind of blows my mind when you think about it. I think here, let me look. Terraform agrees to pay $4.47 billion in proposed judgment with the SEC and $420 million in a civil penalty and would block Do Kwon from becoming an officer

or director of any public firm. But this is pretty wild to me that the government gets $4.47 billion fine and all the people who got absolutely destroyed get approximately jack shit out of this. So what's happened with Dokwon himself? Wasn't he in jail somewhere in Europe? Malta or something?

I think Montenegro. Montenegro, yeah. Getting extradited. To be honest, I kind of can't remember. I know the US kind of won the battle for extradition over South Korea, if I remember correctly. I don't know exactly where he is at the moment and I don't want to speak out

of turn. Maybe somebody else does, or we can look it up, but yeah, I mean, this is a huge kind of reminiscent of that finance settlement, you know, in the four billions area, but man, like, okay, cool. So he pays the money, they get disgorged and the money goes, you know, you have 4 billion and it funds our government for 12 minutes. It's just so stupid to me. Another piece of news here, I'm just going through the agenda. Biden's campaign is now accepting donations in crypto. But DB, have you been following the whole Doquan story in Terraform Labs? No, no, I've been diving into the Biden and Curve. There's a lot going on this morning. Yeah, so Biden's campaign is discussing with crypto,

with the industry to accept donations through Coinbase to attract voters who are interested in cryptocurrency and replenish campaign funds. Totally, totally. Let's not forget that Biden's friendly neighbor at the SEC who he appointed, Gary Gensler, is actively going after Coinbase. And let's not forget also that that would be the donation of unregistered securities

to a presidential campaign, according to this administration. But fine, I guess it's fine as long as uh it goes to him right we all know this is a purely political move to try to catch up with sort of trump surprise pro-crypto stance that we've been seeing escalating over the past few months but like it's so disingenuous so scattered the views of the administration are so conflicting clearly they have no plan here and they're just throwing at the wall to try not to hemorrhage voters yeah we talked to rfk when we met in um in austin we asked him that question um his thoughts on it and whether he takes credit for kind of triggering the change of uh change of heart when it comes to crypto um but we're talking about rfk before we dig into the agenda we've got the panel here as well he's been looking

at his poll numbers recently because i know there was a um i think they want a case against cnn or the the commission the election commission whatever you call it um ruled that the that not allowing rfk in the debate with trump and biden uh was against their policies which is really interesting so i'm not sure what that means and whether Kennedy will be able to debate Trump and Biden in that first debate. But yeah, I haven't looked at the poll numbers. But anyway, going back to the discussion, going back to the agenda. Go ahead, Scott. I was going to say, if you have a question about that, James Heckman just joined the stage and obviously has quite a bit of insight on RFK. James, do you think he'll be on stage with them at the debate? You know, I think Trump's ego will make that possible.

For sure, RFK is baiting him. He's going to challenge his manhood. You know, his numbers are uh strong enough to do it frankly i think i could see trump and um you've just gotten i think you have a debate separate back you're back sorry yeah yeah i i could see them essentially uh conspiring you know as long as biden remains in the race which I actually don't think is going to happen, and making this a Trump-Kennedy race. I think that'd be a really smart move. But there's no way that Trump, with all the people, you know, baiting him and taunting him to debate RFK, I don't see him resisting. I think his ego is too big. That's why I think

it's actually going to happen. Love to see that. I absolutely love to see that. I just, I really am shocked at how scattered the policies are here coming from the current White House. I shouldn't say that I'm shocked. And I think, honestly, even if it's forced and disingenuous, any warming of the White House towards the industry is probably a net positive. But I think we all know that it's not real, right, Mario? I mean, so.

Yeah. Hey, Scott, the one thing that you mentioned, which I think is really interesting, there are definitely people out there excited and trying to quickly erase memory and bring Trump in as suddenly a crypto advocate, I think maybe just the least educated might fall for it. We do remember that Bush had Paulson wipe out competitive banks, which is why Bitcoin was created. And then you've got Mnuchin,

the other Goldman banker that came in and ran the treasury for Trump and blocked or tried to block self-custody for crypto wasn't. But I think eight weeks ago, Trump said, hey, my number one priority is the almighty dollar. Then somebody, I think, whispered in his ears and said, hey, you've got 50 million voters on crypto. And then, oh, oh, is that true? Could somebody give me some talking points? And that's literally what happened. You know, he just- We have a lot of friends. We have a lot of friends whispering in Trump's ear right now, though. And a lot of them were, you know, sort of outwardly RFK supporters previously. And I think they still are. I think they just want to have a dog in the fight, whoever gets there.

But it does seem like the industry is moving in trump's direction at the moment no i mean i think that what people need to be concerned about uh you know same reason they should have been concerned about bush uh and his ties to the banking industry if you look at at at trump he owes international bankers 1.2 billion dollars in aggregate for all of his commercial properties combined. And those commercial properties are insolvent. I mean, all commercial real estate's insolvent. So you've got a guy who I think is compromised and will do whatever they say. And so at the end of the day, personal interests matter. Kennedy has no personal interests except

to decentralize banking um I don't think that's the case with uh with President Trump yeah so Scott you want to do a quick recap I've changed the title of the space as well do a quick recap from the FOMC meeting um yesterday and a bit of hawkishness coming out of uh Powell so maybe give a quick recap on how the markets reacted to to the meeting um and uh what you think what impact you think it had in crypto I know I know you think the FOMC is a really big deal when it comes to crypto Scott you keep talking about it well yeah I you definitely know my position there but it has been sort of an interesting week from a macro perspective because we've had so much data coming in, whether you believe it or not. The actual data, I obviously do not. We had the

job numbers last week on Friday. It was 275,000 jobs added, I think with 185,000 anticipated. But when you dug into it, it was effectively a completely fabricated number based on a guess. And full-time jobs were down over 600,000% while part-time jobs were up. And so I think people were having some difficulty parsing those numbers, whether they were bullish or bearish or whether they cared at all. We also know that those numbers always get revised quietly down the road and are fake regardless. And then obviously, people were sort of holding their breath for CPI, which was right in advance of the FOMC meeting and right in advance of PPI coming in today.

So I guess the quote-unquote good news is that CPI came in under expectation and PPI today also beat expectations, giving an indication that the market, that inflation may be cooling, although cooling, but steady. The dot plots aren't really showing it coming down any further. And of course, that means people think that there's more of a likelihood of rate cuts, which gets them bullish and markets generally go up because we live in the upside down. But really, with Powell, Powell hard to parse to me, I listened briefly. I read the comments. It seemed like he's literally never changed his course and people just want so badly to

hear him saying something different that they interpret it that way. Data driven, maybe one cut could be potentially two. I mean, we've been talking about cuts for a year and a half that haven't happened. Uh, so I don't see why they would cut at the moment unless it was in some way politically motivated um and people are saying he was hawkish i don't know if that means that he like coughed in the wrong direction or sneezed you know at an inopportune moment like the guy says the same thing every single time and we get into a tizzy try to interpret it the reality is you want to know what it did for bitcoin it went up it went

down and ended up back in the same place, the exact same thing it's been doing for three months. So I don't think there's anything there from a macro perspective that's really driving Bitcoin beyond boring summer and the halving cycle. We've got Matthew guys jumping in. Joe as well. I'd love to get your thoughts on the market's reaction and not only to the FMC meeting but the data that came in this week and the

CPI numbers as well. It's definitely awesome to see. I think that there's, it's always good to see more stability in the market or just understanding of how information is coming through and so getting to see a little bit of the CPI numbers cool off a bit certainly puts us in. I've been listening to Scott talk, like I think the last week or so about

this sort of boring summer and sort of this continued chop for a bit. And I think that that's probably the case that we're going to see. And on his stream this morning, too, they were talking about not trading very actively and staying kind of the course and not making inefficient decisions or tax implication decisions. We still just don't have a ton of information and things are going to be super volatile when you have any political candidate coming in saying whatever they want or accepting donations. This is all just a charade and a big show that nobody's really going to do anything post-election. We have no idea what people are actually going to do post-election.

So just be wary of what people say. The data from the markets or the data from the inflation numbers are certainly encouraging. But I think anybody will say anything to get a reaction from this particular community. And there's a lot of volatility that could potentially come. So just, I would say, be weary about that. I mean, Peter, what do you think from a chart perspective? Were you sort of expecting this boring summer post having choppy hangover? Yeah, I mean, super boring. I mean, I think Bitcoin is, is on one hand kind of holding well, you got to be impressed, we're still up above 65. But you you know, I'm bullish. I'm 80% committed.

But I think the market's got some vulnerabilities. I'm going to watch price really carefully. I think if Bitcoin cannot hold 65, it goes. I lost Peter there, Mark. Peter, you're muted. I think someone tried to call him. Yep, I'm on. Yeah, go ahead, Peter.

Yep, sorry. I don't know where it cut out. I don't know where it left me. It cut out three seconds ago. Oh, okay. Yeah, I just think we need to hold Bitcoin. Bitcoin needs to hold 65. If it doesn't hold 65 yeah sorry cut out again how does all 65k what happens

uh 60 if it can't hold 60 it goes to 48 to 48 yeah but i i think that you know these we're at some crucial levels so you know i gotta watch closely i mean i'm i'm committed i'm prepared to buy more but you know I also think there's there's some vulnerabilities. And so there's certain price levels below the market that if we take it out, take them off, I'll lighten up. Hey, it's important to note, when you look at Bitcoin relative to gold, we're 10% below where it was. Bitcoin relative to gold is full 20% below the 2021 highs. So yeah, I mean, Bitcoin's got some work to do here, folks. We did get ahead of schedule to some degree looking at the cycle, correct? I mean, the all-time high, I think, surprised people that that happened ahead of the halving.

So, you know, it's kind of Mike McGlone often talks about that gold-Bitcoin ratio as well. It just seems hard to utilize if you're looking at consistency and not somewhat cherry-picking dates. But you are correct. Yeah. and not somewhat cherry-picking dates, but you are correct. Yeah, I mean, and hey, I wasn't that enthusiastic, as I said before, about people plotting that Bitcoin against the dollar made a new high here in March and April. Well, you know, that's arguable. I mean, you know, a few thousand bucks, 5,000 bucks,

I don't count that as a new high. So I think Bitcoin still needs to prove itself. That's fair. That's fair. Joe, what are you thinking right now about where the market's at? Yeah, I mean, FOMC, I mean, what did Paul say? The same exact thing he said the last 12 times, right? It is not appropriate to reduce the federal funds target range until inflation sustainably towards 2%. So I think it's,

it's just a non story. I mean, if you if you look at it, the way you trade it is the last six times the markets kind of moved down anywhere from like six to 12% before the actual meeting, and then goes flat, and then actually moves up a little bit. So we should probably see another move up. And so it's been trading like the exact same way the last six times. Also, just real quick, like where's Doquan getting $200 million? And how is Terraform Labs have $4 billion? Like where and where is this money coming from? And then, you know, I'm calling bullshit, Scott on Bitcoin. I don't know, there's some funky business going on. Because you know, I'm calling bullshit, Scott, on Bitcoin. I don't know. There's some funky business going on because, you know, when you look at the ETF inflows and when you see the amount of Bitcoin moving off these exchanges, something funky is going on with BlackRock. And, you know, BlackRock has to be long. And all the little hedge funds surrounding them on Wall Street, everyone's short.

And I think that there's something artificial happening here holding price down. I really do. So I'm calling complete bullshit on it. And I think it's not sustainable. Yeah, I have a theory. I would think it would be miners. I mean, you got to imagine that there's, you know,

after the halving, there's some miners that have been tremendously under pressure and probably selling quite a bit of Bitcoin to, you know, stay solvent in advance of what they hope will be a bull run in the fall that brings them back to profitability. Yeah, I think it's a good theory. I think there's something even more synthetic happening. I just think that there's too much bullishness and buying that's happening where people have to be leveraged short to combat that. And so I think, you know,

we have some sort of breakout point here. And that like the second we break through that 73, 74 range, there's literally like just there's a gap to 90s. And I think that that it's going to be a melt up, but we got to we got to get there. And we have Saylor, you know, three hours ago, MicroStrategy announced its proposed private offering of 500 million of convertible senior notes. I mean, this dude just keeps on raising debt to buy more Bitcoin. He knows 67 is cheap. He knows it's going to feel cheap. And so does BlackRock.

This level will feel cheap at some point. He's also in a position where he can, you know, that MicroStrategy is so overshot that, you know, he can effectively take advantage of MicroSt for some reason believed he was going to get liquidated and it was going to crash the entire market. Now, hero once again, I think it should be a really good lesson for people in long-term thinking and not judging those situations in the moment. But I mean, to your point, we have insane buying pressure, right? I mean, we had a day of outflows, I think one day after a 19-day record run of inflows into the ETFs. And most of that at this point is not reshuffling, right? We've really seen the grayscale selling a bit. And I think this is just net buying that's new inflows.

And price is not really moving at all, right? So you got to have a few hundred million, if not billions of extra selling pressure. Does anybody else have a theory on where that might be coming from? Yeah, me either besides miners at the moment. So DB, what are you making of the market at the moment? And do you think that Bitcoin

is being manipulated to stay in place? I have to lean towards yes on that. And it's still boring. But in the same way, it's exactly what we knew. And your guest even said it this morning. What was it? Noel, I think, on your podcast. This is nothing to be unexpected, what we're seeing right now.

And it's post-halving. Typically, we see a drawdown, a boring summer, and markets start moving up into quarter three, quarter four. So I'm just not surprised with any of this. But with the big news we've had, the ETF and stuff, it does seem like there's a little extra downward pressure. But I'm not too concerned. I'm still just kind of waiting through the summer, not expecting much and hoping for good outcome quarter four. Okay.

DB, you said that you were watching this and I find it fascinating, but haven't dug in too much. I think we should talk about Curve. Curve Finance, obviously CRV. It was wildly in the news last year when the founder, Michael, is it Agorov or Agorov? I don't know how to pronounce his name. But effectively, had taken this massive loan in DeFi against his own tokens, right? The CRV token, which he had a huge percentage of the supply to buy two mansions in Australia, if I remember it correctly. Right. And then became at risk of a major liquidation.

I think at the time, I don't want to be misquoted, but I know it was in the ballpark of 40 cents or 42 cents or something. And I'm just kind of going by my memory. And we had Justin's son and a number of other huge whales basically come in and buy it at a discount and it's stabilized. And I guess he was able to deal with some of his liquid potential liquidations orderly. Well, I mean, I'm looking either today or yesterday hit 21 cents, right? So way below even the OTC discount that these people had, it dropped 38% yesterday in a day because we're seeing obviously movement and him taking more loans and those

getting liquidated on these moves at the time it was such a big move and he had money lent and borrowed on so many platforms that it was a systemic risk to defy is that still the case here db not as systemic it's definitely going to have a impact and i think it's hurt some protocols and what he was liquidated about 140 million a curve and the i think the big speculation i've been seeing is that some people think that this is partly a plan that he's going to walk away with the 100 million or whatever in usdt or usdc that he took out yeah so i mean he could just walk away with all this and call it a day i mean he's printing these tokens taking out a loan on it and it just it's crazy that the space we're in and how people

function but i guess uh about 25 minutes ago he posted that he's paid 93% of his debt down and he has intentions of paying the rest. We'll see. It's still down, what, 20% I think right now? And people don't really know. It's trading about 29 cents. Yeah, I expected it to rebound a little bit more. 21, 22.

So yeah, it's crazy. It just shows, again, how early we are in this space and how unregulated it is because people can do crazy shit like this. I mean, but DeFi platforms should not be taking self-printed tokens from a CEO who has the bulk of the supply as margin for loans when we know that these coins can move 50, 60%. We literally, we have like the AOL Herzog like the, you're arguably the founder of DeFi, literally. You won't say it, but I will, but you know, it created Bancor and the AMM, the liquidity pool. I mean, you literally invented all of that. When you did that,

did you have founders taking, you know, multi nine figure loans against their own positions at a systemic risk to defy on your bingo card? Yeah. I mean, you know, this has, you know, I'm old enough today because I'm, I've been through that, you know, through the early internet days and, you know, just like people predicted all kinds of awful, awful content, you know, just like people predicted all kind of awful, awful content, you know, being shared online that could not be shared in the regulated mainstream media at the time. And it all, you know, it was all true.

But it's something that kind of we adapt to a new freedom in that way. And the freedom to issue a new financial instrument by anyone and letting people experiment with them. A lot of people that are experimenting with newly made money that made from the excitement of everyone around that space. So there's a lot of experiments. There's a lot of experiments, there's a lot of failures, and it's a good thing because I think a lot of good things survive and we learn what they are. And the gain from that freedom to innovate that this technology allows us is...

I'm not sure if he had a call or something but yeah um i haven't asked you that question moving away from d5 i think you just got a call and then we'll get move on to the round table i want to get your personal thoughts again you always do this you avoid giving your thoughts your thoughts on the markets today and what you expect for the rest of the year has anything changed from previous discussions or do you still stand with the same position? Literally nothing. I mean, three months ago, I kind of, I guess,

went out on a limb. I don't expect predictions ever to be accurate, by the way. So, but I sort of said, listen, like we're in the, inflows were crazy and we were at, I think, you know, 80 fear and greed index and meme coins were going crazy.

And I sort of sent a tweet and I talked about on my show and here quite a few times. I said, I think it was like March 15th. So three months ago, I said, I think, you know, we could be topping here for a while and that we might be sideways for a very, very long time. All the signals that I was looking for were there, you know, a lot of altcoins, even though they were still down 80% since previous highs, you know, overbought on i like to look for bearish divergence with rsi when things are overbought i saw that a lot of charts and just the insanity of the meme coin casino and level of speculation if you remember at that time you had

people sending 30 40 million dollars to a solana address hosted by an anonymous person who then disappeared five minutes later and deleted the tweet. I mean, $30 million in 30 minutes to an unknown person just because they posted an address because you think you might make money. Those are signs of extreme froth to me. Right? That doesn't mean I wasn't saying VTOP was in. I was saying ATOP was in. And then, you know, looking at previous cycles, if you believe in the four-year cycle, you just expect things to get very, very boring after the halving for a while. And right now, listen, I mean, we have sideways and relatively strong Bitcoin. You know, I mean, Bitcoin at 68, 69, we're trading consolidating around the previous

all-time high from the last cycle. That's not particularly bearish. And I think people would expect that in a situation like that, you would see kind of an alt season, right? You would see massive movement from altcoins, especially quality names. And we're just seeing kind of everything slowly bleed out for months, even the meme coin hype outside of, you know, Iggy Azalea twerking for tokens. Just not that much, I think, excitement and enthusiasm. And that's because there's just... I don't think there's much new money in the altcoin ecosystem at this point in the cycle. So listen, I'm hoping that we follow previous cycles in September, October.

We see a major move to the upside. That's what we've seen previously. But my base case that this summer was going to be exceptionally boring has not changed one ounce. I think it's actually strengthened. And I mean, you got to think about this, like we're still sitting at 69,000 when you have one of the leading right now by the polls, presidential candidate effectively going all in in support of crypto, right? You have even a thawing of the existing White House, you have the Ethereum ETF

approval, even though we don't know when we'll get the s1s there's so many bullish catalysts and things are and bitcoin is frozen in space and everything else is sort of bleeding generally right so you would expect uh this is as many tailwinds and as much bullish sentiment i think as we could have imagined for this summer and still not much happening now we did go from 40 all the way up to 74 which is great but um i just think that that part of the cycle where we remain boring that's my thought what's your what's your strategy i'm sure if you saw i changed the title of the space what's your strategy moving forward again we talk about this behind the scenes but i'll i'll ask you i'll ask you no but i'm serious

no what is your strategy now last we spoke about it we were pretty i'll let you speak for yourself but pretty aggressive um looking at other you know asset classes a lot of vc a lot of venture investments as well um we do have meme coins on the show as well so it's but you i kind of sense you've become a bit more conservative over the last two three months um but correct me if i'm wrong what's your strategy that's a that's a hundred percent accurate and the other thing that i was seeing in February and March that we discussed, and you know this to be true, the amount of deal flow or pre-sale type investments just hitting random telegram chats and WhatsApp in my phone was just at a fever pitch, right? And OTC deals for coins you'd never heard of at discounts, which by the way, most of those are down now. If you participated in those in February or March, even if you got a 50% discount, most of those tokens are trading around probably where those people were getting their quote unquote discount, much like CRV is now below those other discounts that we discussed.

Yeah, I think now is just a good time to go on vacation, hang out. Maybe if you see something that's high quality, it's worth looking at. Listen, I think that in the long run, everything's cheap, right? So it's a matter of what you're passionate about and how you invest. But like, I see no reason to be exceptionally active at this point. The market's not showing much. What about listed tokens? What about listed tokens i've already had all their unlocks from previous cycles and they're still building do you think that

there's more opportunities there than new projects launching especially i do well i do right now but so like listen if you let's look at past cycles because nobody can tell the future and they may not repeat but i've continuously you and i have kind of talked about this privately i think that the pre-sale market this time i think that memes have taken some of the shine off of that because people are just skeptical of things that VCs invest in, but okay, let's put that aside. That's a narrative. If you look back to 2020, you see, we had this sort of fever pitch now in 2024 of people maybe who have been waiting two or three years for the bear market to end, trying to launch, trying to finally raise KOL rounds or pre-sales or seed rounds,

whatever it is, and then launching because the market looks bullish. But really, 2020 was not particularly bullish for those things. And there's only a very brief period where those were successful. 2025, like February to May, 2021, February to May was insane for those, right? Things were literally launching up 1000x, not 1000%, like 1000x at presale for, you know, at public listing from what presale investors had done. We see maybe now you see what you're like, two, three, five, and knowing that you're vesting if something launches up 300 right now there's a viable chance you lose money on that even as a pre-sale master

right you're up two times with uh no tokens vested so i think that uh people who are expecting those to go nuts this wouldn't have been the time to expect that at all right i think people are just have their finger on the trigger to get their coins into the market right now't have been the time to expect that at all. Right. And I think people are just have their finger on the trigger to get their coins into the market right now who've been waiting for years, but that's more likely a 2025 thing. If the cycle repeats, I would say, you know, for VCs, a lot of these people are probably looking to your point at longer existing projects that are fundamentally built in that they can get a discount on and

bulk on a token, hoping it goes forward. Much like how the FTX estate was selling Solana at $60 with a long vesting schedule. I would love Vinny's take on this actually, but yeah. Yeah, I was going to go to Vinny as well. I want to ask one last question, Scott, and then we'll go to Vinny. Why don't you go to these tokens? Listen, you talked about OTC deals, but then wouldn't it make sense, and I'm kind of giving out what we're doing, wouldn't it make sense to go to these tokens, the projects, the big times of the last cycle, the star atlases of the last cycle,

go to them and say, hey, we'll do an OTC deal. We'll help you get the word out there. Use your audience to get a good discount with a short to medium-term vesting schedule for these listed tokens that don't have a whole bunch of VC unlocks. That seems like a smart strategy, no? I mean, potentially, but that means they have to be sitting on a ton of supply to be able to sell that. I mean, listen, I just kind of superficially take what comes. I don't pursue anything like that. I'm holding every Star Atlas token I ever owned from the last cycle, by the way.

Probably down 99% from the peak. Um, Do you have any ships though, Scott? That's the question. Dude, I'm literally doing a space right now from my virtual down 99% ship. You have a ship Vinny? I, by the way, I love those guys and we've spent a lot of time with Michael, uh, at all the recent conferences, including Ayal and James. He was on the DNA yacht almost the entire time. He's a great guy. I think that they have a lot of potential. It was just one of those things. And I was not selling investments because I believed in them long term. I'm never selling my ship. What's your ship worth? Do you know? And what did you pay for your ship? And what is it worth? Is it outperforming the token? Man, this was an

expensive ship, man. This is like, I can't even explain to you. And no, it's not worth more now. But I love the ship. I like it. So you can live on it in the metaverse when we all pour in the real world. Just going back, Vinny, I would love to hear your take on, you know, Scott kind of gave out his strategy and his thoughts on the markets.

Would love kind of a brain dump from you as well. Yeah, I posted a bubble warning on the i think it was 8th of april and everyone hated me for it i said you know this is like i'm getting people who know nothing about crypto now telling me uh what to buy where to buy it where to buy it and this is like the same behavior i saw in 20 uh 2021 and 2017 2017, this looks very tough and proved to be, I think, the same week where everything topped out. So I agree that we're seeing the signs of frothiness that we saw last time over the past,

you know, the early part of this year. I think macro trumps everything, guys. So if you're not paying attention to the macro situation, you're missing off the game here. Because if you just look paying attention to the macro situation, you're missing half the game here. Because if you just look at crypto and even Bitcoin and you map everything back to the macro situation, it literally

coincides with large injections of liquidity in these runs. They always come with systemic liquidity. And I think where the Fed is right now after yesterday's meeting, and I chat to a lot of guys like Craig's down there, I see, and a few others.

And I think there's a, you know, and the tweet I put out yesterday was one which, like what I said was, what Powell's trying to do is signal the start of a cutting cycle. And he's just unwilling to do that. He doesn't want to cut and then raise, but then it looks like after Burns in the 70s again.

And so he's kicking the can down the road as much as possible because he knows once he does the cut, there's going to be a ton of liquidity coming in because everyone's going to expect this is the start of the cycle. So he's trying to prevent that. And I don't see a reason for him to start that cycle right now. So, you know, there are other ways to deal with this. And, you know, Craig Shapiro superior is going on about uh you know why aren't they tightening

and doing qt instead why aren't they adjusting uh the balance of of risk of a hike and a and a cut the same time uh why is the bar for cutting uh you know much lower than the bar for hiking so these these are the issues which are going to grapple the crypto community and so let's start with how it affects us like it isn't enough liquidity for bitcoin and ethereum also always going to get hammered um because alts run after and you're looking sorry it always runs after bitcoin runs and ethereum runs and then the money flows downhill it's the same as uh in the stock markets, right? The blue chips, you know, ignore this current cycle that's very wonky with the MAG7. But blue chips, in any bull run, blue chips run first,

and then it goes to medium caps, then small caps, and things start to kind of catch up as people diversify. Not sure. Can you fix your audio? Is there anything you can do for your audio? I want you to continue to just fix your audio if you can. I'm in a car right now. A few people mentioned.

Okay. Oh, good. Yeah. Go ahead. Russell too. Yeah. Well,

I've had, I had chart guys on Dan today and he talked about it last week too on YouTube. And he said, basically if you want to get sort of a corollary in the stock market to Vinny's point, you know, Bitcoin versus everything else, you can kind of look right now at like an nvidia or apple or the big tech that's

moving the market versus iwm you know the russell 2000 which are the small cap index that is trailing massively so maybe that you know if nvidia starts to plateau people just like in the crypto market start to look for smaller things that'll move more and maybe you'll see the russell move really um yeah i mean i i agree but again if you look at the macro situation if things break and we use liquidity in in elsewhere in the economy or economies of the world how does it affect crypto and And I think that I still think Bitcoin is a risk on assets. And so if everyone goes risk off and look what happened in March of

2020, Bitcoin didn't perform like a risk on assets. It was a risk on assets. It didn't perform any other way. So people crashed in a big way. We've always seen this. So when markets crash, Bitcoin goes with it.

It's highly correlated. Now, there is an argument that the dollar is going to go to shit and whatever else is going to die because the government's debt is too high and therefore Bitcoin is going to run. Yes, but we haven't seen anything like this before. So it's uncharted territory. As far as I'm concerned, it's totally linked to run. Yes, but we haven't seen anything like this before, so it's uncharted territory. As far as I'm concerned, it's totally linked to liquidity. I think right now the Fed's screwing up and

we're going to have to see what happens. Sam, go ahead. Hey guys, yeah, I think Vinny's spot on there. The crypto side is the Bitcoin side. The Bitcoin side is the macro side, the macro side. But then there's a layer deeper, which is the unknown, which is the geopolitical side. So the one thing that the Fed is doing is, you know, we don't have free markets

anymore. We only have Fed markets. America has given up on free markets they don't believe in free markets anymore um and so the the the only layer above that is what happens on the geopolitical side how long is the u.s dollar allowed to continue to be a fed market and how close to full-out socialism and communism is america willing to go and those will be determined by how they react to the larger geopolitical events because i know it's my favorite phrase that no one likes me saying but the dollar is a ponzi scheme and the only thing that conversed it is the geopolitical event now but then that does bring it to the whole, if you think about the crypto market as a function of like stock markets, and the big question and the big thesis and the big thing

that we're all going to be answering is like, firstly, how does how was Bitcoin going to react to a QT market rather than a QE? We saw that. And how is Bitcoin going to react to a radically changing world order? And those are the questions. And is Bitcoin just going to be a risk-on asset and risk-off asset? And that's the thesis that I think everyone is going to be living through. And that's going to determine Bitcoin's success or failure. Yeah, that's exactly the way of summarizing and characterizing it. I will say one thing, which I think that people get wrong here,

and not that you said it, but America supplies defense to the rest of the world. A large portion of the defense budget is for allies, and we've got 12 aircraft carrier groups and whatever else and so the US dollar is not going anywhere because countries like have to trade with the US and I just I don't see the dollar basically disappearing overnight like

people think in crypto and bitcoin taking over and everything collapsing I think there'll be some tough times and some love to take but you know we export global security and that's a, that's a big thing. And, um, so yeah, like I don't see the imminent collapse of the dollar. I just don't see that happening. And maybe it does happen, but, uh, you know,

I just, I think that happens. The world is such a, it's such a bad place that I won't be on spaces talking to you guys. I'll be bunkering down somewhere. Not necessarily, Vinny, because we weren't alive, but we saw what happened with the British Pound. It was a 20

year slow cycle. It was still a significant player in the end, but it just wasn't the leading player. And so... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree with the slow decline. I'm with you. It absolutely can and probably should

decline slowly over time as the new world order forms. But it's not going to be an overnight thing. And at my age right now, I'll be like into my golden years at that point. It's not something I care about watching a slow decline. I'll be like into my golden years at that point. So, you know, it's not something I care about in terms of watching a slow decline. I do think it's possible and probably likely it

just declines slowly, but everyone who's out there thinks it's going to crash overnight, but going to shoot a million dollars a coin, I just don't see it happening. Not a world you want to live in, by the way. And I'd also say, I'd also just push back on the u.s defense being you know the the exporter of defense yeah it is but that but it's become an attack budget so while it may defend america it caught its foreign policy is extremely harmful to many other countries and so maybe federal you know central banks allowing for countries to commit such atrocities might be a more peaceful force to the world. I think the best option is that everyone else provides their

own defense. Like, I think, you know, the rest of the world needs to start spending more money on defense and not relying on America for that. And I think that's a good alternative, where we have a decentralized global defense where you patrol the seas and yeah but america is busy paying for 12 aircraft carriers china's got one and i think one in construction and i think the rest of all combines that's like six uh like and these are carrier groups right and america's carrier groups are better equipped than anyone's so i'm just saying like i i'm all with you i think we should be spending way less in defense um and and passing that cost onto the rest of the world but we we haven't and so the money has to come from somewhere that's why i don't think like you know

currencies need need you know need military you know historically i just don't see how how we're going to move off the dollar onto bitcoin or anything else uh at this point yeah but it then relates back to the fed, because the Fed is choosing wealth inequality. So it's allowing mass homelessness. It's allowing the middle class to be completely destroyed in order for money to go back into the military-industrial complex. The money does come back, but it goes to the wealthy. It doesn't go to everyone else. And that causes civil unrest, and that's where we are now. And populism.

What the Fed's allowing is people to have this notion that everything always goes up and recessions are bad and we should never have a recession or we should never have the S&P dropping 20%. The Fed put is the biggest issue right now

because investors are just not put at risk for their investments. And so this is the fundamental issue. the fed is intervening in free markets in a way that is just very harmful to the u.s and the global economy and so at some point it doesn't work and it breaks and we go back to you know just investing research and like not being passive investing and uh watching everything always go up further and if things things go wrong, the Fed's going to inject equity. Like the banking crisis, right? I actually think that saving the banks last year was actually the right thing to do.

But a lot of the bank shareholders in the regional banking crisis that's going to come, it's going to happen, they're going to get wiped out. I think deposits need to be preserved. And so, but shareholders need to be wiped out. I don't see why regional banks these you know they still have equity on the back

they have equity you know they're still trading at whatever multiples of earnings and stuff but they've got these underwater loans

commercial real estate bonds treasuries whatever I mean look this is the problem is the Fed

gave guidance in 2021 that you know you buy these five year ten year holding maturity type um instruments you put it on your on your balance sheet uh you know it's good as collateral and and then all of a sudden the dot blocks change and now we've got high inflation and so the fed's trying to sort of keep everyone together and at some point something's going to break and they're going to just give it and, you know, I guess I'm a free market.

I'm a free market capitalist. I just think that free markets, governments should not be intervening in free markets. And eventually, and they can for a while, but eventually the numbers get too big. Exactly. And isn't it ironic that now China is letting banks go bust while the Fed's saving them? They don't have a choice. This is my point. And when something breaks in the U.S. economy, the they don't have a choice this is my this is my point and and when something breaks in the u.s economy the fed won't have a choice either as much as they think they do

now it's going to be too late and it's because of them listen they got us into this mess in the first place by having a lack of foresight you think they've got the foresight to get us out of it right now i don't yeah scott i think we think we should move to discussion to the roundtable, which is the reason that me and you went to Austin a few weeks ago. You know, it's got to be compelling if we got you out of Dubai. First of all,

we got you out of your house, like into the streets of Dubai. Then we got you to the Dubai airport. Then we actually got you to fly all the way to Texas. And you tempted me with RFK, which is a close friend of James's. So yeah, it worked. But I'll be going to LA again end of June. And I might actually go to Nashville to the Bitcoin conference as well

because it's right after it. So it's not that long of a flight. So if you're going, it'll be good to catch up again. Yeah, we're all going. You are going? Oh, shit. All right, cool. Yeah, for sure.

I'll let you do the intro. We've been working on the roundtable for a while. We've had the pleasure to meet James and Eyal. So we'd love to give you. Oh, shit. All right, cool. Yeah, for sure. I'll let you do the intro. We've been working on the roundtable for a while. We've had the pleasure to meet James and Eyal. So we'd love to give you the mic, Scott, for the introduction on the roundtable. And let's not be clear. This is not my roundtable, which is the space that we do, the crypto space that we do, the other account. This is a very different, more interesting roundtable, Scott. I like that you gave it preference.

I dig that. So I pinned two tweets actually up in the nest for reference for people obviously we had the announcement that many of you probably saw about the roundtable forum uh james and they all being the founders and then myself mario all point daily cryptos rs all being involved i'll let those guys break down exactly what it is and why it's important i just want want to tell you guys, I also pinned another tweet up there, which says I'll be discussing RTV with Mario, James, and Eyal, and you can comment and discuss. And there's a link there.

For me, one of the very compelling things about being a part of the roundtable, which once again, I'll let them more thoroughly introduce, and then we'll get into discussion, is that anyone who has a sizable audience and either uses X or uses YouTube, you know that it's literally becomes a certain size impossible to engage at all with your audience. It's so much spam, so many bots, so much nonsense. You can't even find a real comment from a real human. Well, you have to be a real person and a real human to do

that. So we've actually been pushing our communities to comment and converse with us on Roundtable, which has been absolutely amazing. So even if you want to talk about this spaces right now, there's a link above. You can go to that. And we all are committed because it's a smaller community where we can actually talk to the people that are real. We've been committed to actually engaging with those people. So I encourage you to check out the two above. I'd love to just go to James and they all give us the brief introduction. And then I know that you guys want specifically to talk about the utility of the token and what's happening on that end,

because it's a really interesting sort of nuance. But James, go ahead. Yeah, no, thanks for inviting me on this conversation. What a bunch of brilliant people and really excited to be working with you and Mario and others. Aiel and I really, we came together a few years ago and realized we've been working on decentralized technical platforms. For me, believe it or not, since the late 80s for publishers and eventually for my years at Yahoo and News Corp and with Hulu and MySpace, but essentially a lifetime mission to be able to break away from global

centralized financial systems and break away from global centralized financial systems and break away from global centralized advertising systems. And of course, break away from what always happens, whether it's newspaper, radio, cable, and then eventually the internet, where it all consolidates under control of a handful of investors. And that's really been my mission. And Ayal, of course, he built the very first social video platform before YouTube. He built, inarguably, he was the inventor of decentralized finance. And we realized we needed to work together and create an opportunity that doesn't compete with social media, doesn't compete with Twitter or Instagram, but for professional journalists and professional

media brands, for them to have 100% of their content protected on the blockchain. But what really IL brought to the table is a monetization system, one that is no chance that can happen to the Canadian truckers, no chance you're going to have your PayPal account blocked or GoFundMe. This really is an end-to-end ecosystem uniting some of the greatest minds in the world and will continue to grow, but also a real-time payment system. And that's really the whole point of the DAO that IL's investors set up a few years back with Binance Labs, so that there could be a payment system so we could assign revenue to the people who are grabbing a great voice, not depending on the advertising market, not depending on fiat currency.

So those are grand generalizations. But it is live. It's working amazingly well. The video platform where people can talk to each other, go to dinner, come back and answer the questions and video is amazing. I'll just put that out to the marketplace a few days ago. But we're very, very excited about this opportunity. We want to align with Twitter, we want to align with people who have great social media accounts. But really, this is a professional only community platform.

And I think it'd be great for free speech. So I, I'm sure those are a bunch of generalities. Maybe you could be more specific. Yeah. I think that, you know, if we're looking about the, you know, web three social space in general, I think we can say that, you know, we have the Twitter model, which is, you know, Web3 social space in general. I think we can say that, you know, we have the Twitter model, which is, you know, products that you have a lot of people that you follow them. And, you know, basically that's how the curation happened. But also the other successful model is the Reddit model, if you will,

which is a model of communities, which I always believe is going to be the model that, you know, can break out in Web3 social, because you don't need to kind of move the entire Internet to a new platform. You actually do that community by community. And I think that, you know, for me, what excites me with this partnership is that we're actually you know having access to huge communities that share interests uh whether it's on crypto whether it's on hockey whether it's on other things and and just by the fact that they are coming to the same you know destination we are using

our technology to create a community out of them and make that a Web3 social community at that. So creating a network effect between all the publishers in the world that would do that. And by that kind of start decentralizing, I think the most centralized, the most powerful, the strongest power center on Earth, which is the very central... I think I've got another phone call. That happens quite a bit. I think just kind of... Do not disturb. Maybe...

There you go. He's back. Yeah, so, you know, it's an application where 5 billion people are essentially using it for 3.5 hours per day on average. So definitely something that affects the human consciousness more than anything else. And today it's very, very centralized. and other examples that obviously such you know centers of power they attract the attention of you know every every party on earth that wants to you know more power and more control and and that's very problematic and that's kind of our focus i mean i just give you a couple examples uh you know during covid a whistleblower uh brought out the data of all the damage and the deaths

and the broken hearts of our sailors and Air Force and Marines because of the forced vaccines. And the data was put up. And I got a call from Dr. Malone, who you guys all know, the inventor of mRNA, kind of the industry whistleblower. And he said, this data is horrifying. And I know that the DoD is going to alter it. Can you quickly save it? And we put it on the Bitcoin blockchain. And it just triggered two and a half years ago. And I'm a media guy. I'm not a digital media guy. I'm not a crypto strategist or haven't been a longtime investor. But the fact that we were able to snapshot that data showing the thousands, the tens of thousands of horrifying effects of the elite young men and women who were harmed by the vaccine,

it hit me that they can never, ever change it. And I just happened to meet Ayal right after that, and him with his great talent, able to make sure that what anybody's writing, it can never be removed. The data can't be removed as well. And now on the other side, kind of at that same era, is that people stopped getting paid, right? You had journalists that were cut off from PayPal. Stripe cut them off. Bank accounts were raided. And so here you are, if they didn't have the nerve to kick somebody off of Twitter, and I think, what was it, Zuckerberg admitted that they eradicated 75,000 Facebook pages for telling the truth. If they didn't have the nerve to take somebody off

the platform, they simply defunded them and cut off their food supply. And so here it is, if people want to support this service that's fully built and the genius architect that IL is, we have a completely decentralized system storing all content, making sure that nobody can ever be platformed, and nobody can be cut off from being paid. And so I think that parallel universe end to end is really important. And so we do have a token, it's RTB and you can find it on Uniswap. Right now we're just rolling out. This is literally the first announcement of it. And IL's amazing team in Tel Aviv have been working on this now for four and a half years on this project. My media team joined them about two and a half years ago.

But the key thing is, if people can't eat, if they can't, you know, pay their editors, and they can't pay their writers, well, it's almost just as good as deplatforming somebody. So if we ever come to a situation, again, where people are being harmed, if the people can't get the information, this is a platform that's forever. The information isn't going to be altered. And the people risking their careers and lives to tell the truth, they can still get paid. Literally, they can be cashed out by the hour. It's an incredible system. I'm really proud to be associated with the work that IELT did and hopefully brought a lot to the table in terms of the user experience. And I just want to tell you how much I appreciate Scott and Mario for being supportive and our community is going to

continue to support what you guys are doing. Can you talk a bit more about, you just talked about, obviously, the censorship side and the payout. So clearly there's a, as you mentioned, the token RTB that's involved in that. What are the actual mechanics of that? I guess maybe y'all can answer this in the utility there. Yeah, it's, you know, it's actually very, very straightforward. One thing that the token allows you is to buy the ad space of every forum on the planet. So you can buy whether it's on different servers or different blocks. It doesn't matter. The same token will allow you to buy ad space in whatever specific forums you'd like to buy and you use it there's a

bidding system it's a self-serve system that you know everyone can go and just buy ad space in the different forums and so that's the straightforward kind of thing the other i think more interesting thing that um we we we recently started playing with is using the token in order to directly tip the creators or the commentators or whoever you want, basically, whoever you reply to. And I think that's the point that you attach a tip to something that you write. So if you appreciate someone, you know, you can write something nice and attach, you know, keep in the token to that person. And, you know, you can support them this way. And everyone can see that.

And whatever you write actually get precedence. It's bold. And, you know, the person more likely to respond to. So, you know, all those things are just not... James? to so you know all those things are just not james yeah yeah well hey i think this is the number one thing and it's it's a little bit like listening to you all talk about uh where where bitcoin is going and the hesitancy let me just make uh two things. Number one, we're not competing with social media. This is a white label installation. So the street right now is using it. They have over 30 million investors. So if you look back in the past at Steemit, at its peak, it had a quarter of a million investors.

Hive's super small. Voice never really happened. So just to be clear, because people think, oh, is it viable? Is this another idea? No, no, it's done. It already is the platform installed in the street. 30 million users are going to be getting exposure to this. We'll be announcing in the next two days a multi-billion dollar huge agreement with another major media company. And so we have the audience already. I think that's number one. The second thing is revenue. We've got a very, very large sports business. We have a very, very large finance business. And the street really is focused on crypto to be the leading source for that. And we've got something like 15 million crypto investors just to start. So this platform is fully installed and integrated and up and

running. And of course, we have millions of dollars of revenue that are flowing through it already. So on the viability front, already a seven-figure business, already reaching tens of millions of people. And we have had the opportunity to bring in some of the top influencers and media brands, and you'll see them roll out over the next week. So the final piece is bringing consumers and the journalists in a space where they're financial, the monetization is safe and we built that and that their content is safe forever and that they can never be deplatformed. But again, you can have all the greatest ideas in the world, but if you don't have millions of dollars of

revenue flowing through and if you don't have millions of dollars of revenue flowing through and if you don't have millions of users, it's not going to work. And that was the key. I appreciate you, James, joining. And they are as well. Scott will probably be talking about Roundtable. I think me and you do a show on there once a week, and people can check it out.

But yeah, it's going to be a good journey. Again, anyone else check out the roundtable and the handle is in the title. There's also two pinned tweets and James, real pleasure

to have you on stage again for everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, quickly. Yes. Right.

Just quickly, the roundtable account is on stage so people can follow it there directly. Oh, it is. Cool. Yeah,

it is as well. Last thing as well, Scott, thank you for sharing your strategy for 2024. I think a lot of people learned the secrets to your wealth. Wait until you hear my strategy for 2034. It's going to blow your mind. We'll do that on Monday, everyone.

So see you all on Monday. It'll be Scott's 2034 strategy for crypto. Thanks a lot, everyone. Really appreciate it. And see you on... Oh, sorry. See you tomorrow, not Monday. Bye, everyone.