TRASHFUTURE - There’s a Casino in My Trojan Horse feat. Molly White

Episode Date: April 5, 2022

This week, we’re speaking with Molly White (@molly0xFFF) of Web 3 Is Going Great (@web3isgreat) about a recent NYT article that simply cannot stop trying to sell crypto, all the while claiming to scrutinise crypto. Hope you enjoy! If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *SEE TRASHFUTURE LIVE ON 4/20* We're doing a make-up live show on 20 April in London now that we've recovered from covid (this time). Get tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/trashfuture-live-podcast-tickets-303412654417 *MILO ALERT* Milo has shows coming up in London and Brighton. Learn more here! https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

You know what? I don't think that Paris Marks or Ed or Jathan, as we were saying earlier, they would never play a drop of Paul Giamatti saying chicken nugget. No, no, absolutely not. They wouldn't. Which makes us, I think, of the circuit of tech podcast or tech pessimist podcast that our guest has done in the last few days, makes us the undisputed champion of most unnecessary probably worse. The most annoying podcast you've been on this week. Anyway, please welcome to the show Paul Giamatti.

I'm a little worried that they're going to have to one up you now and this will just sort of spiral. Oh, yeah, we're keeping this going until every tech podcast is going to become like a sort of morning zoo. Yeah, absolutely. And so if you haven't guessed already by process of elimination, hi, everybody, it's TF, it's Riley Milo and Alice. And we are joined by Molly White, the lead on chain imagineer and improprietist of Web three is going just great. A really, really informative feed of all of the ways in which the crypto world just turns out to be a series of scams

pulled off by the same people. That seems tech ops. What are you doing on a tech pessimist podcast? Yeah, the name the sarcasm does not come through very well in URLs. Unfortunately, I've had a couple of people think that it was a genuine attempt at chronicling that just the wonders of Web three. You need to do those tags people were trying to make on thing on Twitter for a while where it's like slash sarcasm. Yeah, because making jokes is ableist. I want to I want to say right off the bat, at the bottom right corner of the blog Web

three is going just great. There is a little flame icon that's playing on top of a gigantic sum of money. Can you tell me what that is? Yes, that's the grift counter. TM TM. It is the sort of running total of the amount of money that has been lost so far to the hacks and the scams and the rug pulls and all of that. So it's actually a kind of a conservative number. I don't include incidents where people have like accidentally transferred money to like the wrong wallet and it's gone forever. It's really kind of the malicious amount of money that has been sort of stolen. And we're looking at about nine point two billion right now as of the beginning of twenty twenty one nine

point two billion that is essentially as gone as if it became a fad for a while to throw banknotes down Wells. Yes, which would be cooler. Yeah, you would get statistically more wishes if you just put all of that money in quarters and wishing well at the Trevi fountain is like, I've only got a 10. Throwing fistfuls of 50 pound notes into the Trevi fountain. Bonding change from the shame. You could use a supreme money gun and just take him and just like send rack after rack after rack into like a well over a fountain. I think like a big credit fed like machine guns, supreme money gun, but it's feeding off of those like big racks of notes that you see in the backs of banks. So also before we before we get to I want to update on an old

friend. I've got a startup and then we got an article classic. I want to just like as we know there was recently an article in the FT. I screenshot it because it was very funny. It said what are you cloud stealing? What's going on here? Will Britain ever be normal again? No, no. Alice, do you want to talk about some developments that have happened in British politics? I kind of yeah. So you know how I used to say that there would never be a trans MP in my lifetime. And if I did, it would be way worse than any of us could possibly imagine. It's going to be way worse than any of us can possibly imagine because we have we have our first trans MP who is Jamie Wallace, who's the MP for the Conservative MP for Bridgend,

the Tory MP is the first trans MP who has been outed sort of against their will after a black male and then another assault after that and has now come out as transgender. And it will be in a sort of very early stages of like still using he, him pronouns, not changing like his name or anything like that. And the response from this has been the sort of tidal wave of insincerity and hypocrisy that I kind of I knew was coming, but much like a literal tidal wave, you don't really get the sense of it until it's bearing down on you. And so we've had a sort of a bipartisan consensus here. We've had Boris Johnson congratulates Jamie Wallace on his bravery the day after making a joke about how Keir Starmer would introduce a speech as to people assigned male

at birth and people assigned female at birth rather than ladies and gentlemen. And on the labor side, we've had, we've had West Streeting go on talk radio and go, oh, well, actually, yes, I do think that men have penises and women have vaginas. To Julia Hartley. To Julia Hartley, he's only just finished that class in primary school. So as far as he knows, that is correct. And West Streeting, just like a cursed fucking Chucky doll, just clapped with Julia Hartley-Brew or just clapping like a trained seal. The day that McDonald's stopped delivering to schools

was the bleakest day in his political career. West Streeting handing a crude crayon drawing of his mom to Julia Hartley-Brew and her going very good ways. Yes. Yeah. Him going on Julia Hartley-Brew's talk radio show to sit down and do the sort of like year three biology boys and girls have different parts. And then- Which for him is advanced. He's only in year one. Do you remember that? And then 15 minutes later, to the second, congratulating Jamie Orlus on their bravery,

right? So everybody is insincere. Everyone is terrible. We're now locked into this being the discourse for the next however long. We have once again gotten the politics that we deserve and we've gotten the trans representation of having a Tory MP who voted for all of the same evil Tory shit as every other Tory MP now being like fated for bravery by people who are like also being tremendously insulting and transphobic at the same time. And it's once again, right, the Tories having the agility that the Labour Party lacks to be like, aha, now we've got like a neoliberal trans MP. This is actually good for us in the same way that they keep harping on about Thatcher being like the first female Prime Minister. It's like

completely disingenuous. The Labour Party is so committed to these like winning over these weird freaks who don't like trans people or whatever that, despite being the nominally progressive party, they're less able to incorporate trans people because they don't have that same streak of like, oh, this is fine. So that serves our interests. You have a much smaller like sort of turning circle, right? When you don't believe in anything and when you don't have any beliefs other than like the enrichment of you and your friends, then when you stumble upon a new belief, you can adopt it very quickly, such as this one of my friends is incredibly brave. However, I still have,

you know, very grave concerns about, you know, this, that and the other. So I do genuinely believe that the last transphobe in the UK and the last dedicated marijuana prohibitionist in the UK are both going to be in the Labour Party. Yeah, it's going to be like the last two Jews in Kabul, you know. I want to ask sort of, I just want to turn to Molly before we go back to the Web3 stuff. What does this all look like from the States? I imagine it looks pretty fucking weird. I mean, I think we've got our own share of hypocritical politicians over here in the US. So I can't say I was totally shocked to see this happening.

Anyway, let's talk about an old friend, an old friend of the show. So Axie Infinity. Now, I actually also want to take this time to note that I'm actually retiring from the show because I have like nine axes. So like, I'm set for life. I have nine axes. I've got like nine people in the development. Nine axes of advance. Axie Infinity was like that sort of like pseudo Pokemon Go game we talked about. There was also kind of a job, right? And you collected these axes, right? Yeah. Now, here's the thing. I've got these and that basically there are now people working my

axes making money for me. I'm basically a kind of digital landlord. So I can retire from the podcast. There's nothing that might have happened recently, Molly, that would say, prevent me from doing this, has there? Molly, why are you touching your ear to that earpiece? Yeah, coming in just now. I mean, the biggest blocker would be if you wanted to have your grand winnings that people had earned for you in any currency other than the ones used on the Axie game. You might hit a snag with that, given that the bridge that allows you to take your SLP, your smooth love potions, which is just bizarre,

and sort of funnel them into other currencies has just become basically empty, thanks to a $625 million hack that happened earlier this week or was discovered several days ago, but happened considerably earlier. Smooth love potion is what LL Cool J causes come. Thank you. Would you characterize this as a sort of an all their apes gone style situation? Yes, or at least all the money that they thought that they could get for their apes is gone. Oh, no. I needed that for my apes. So one of the ways this happens, right, is that you'll get a smart contract and it'll say,

okay, you put this amount of like ether or wrapped ether in, and then it'll spit out a bunch of tokens on this side chain. So it's like another sort of semi-private blockchain. I don't know what any of that means, nor do I care. All I can say is that this doesn't sound that smart if it's that easily suborned. It was so easy. Okay. You know, remember this one thing, right? How it's hard to hack any of the major blockchains or kind of hard because to take it over and instruct it to do fraudulent transactions, or at least it's hard to take it over and instruct it to do fraudulent transactions because you have to take over like thousands and thousands of computers. But it's like, if you can do that, then you can do whatever. So it's like security only

in the sheer scale of the number of computers involved. Axie Infinity was like, look, we're just going to have nine nodes for this thing that handles like a multi-billion dollar company. Who would hack nine computers? Not even nine, five. You'd just hack five. I would get bored after three, to be honest. I don't know how hard it is to hack a computer, but I'm pretty certain I would want to pace myself after three. I wouldn't do five. So essentially, right, going back to this, in what turned out to be a very easy hack, they managed to just drain all of them.

They have to enter password on like five computers. The password wasn't just password. It had like a four instead of the A and it had like an exclamation point at the end. Oh, shit. Yeah. Yeah. You're never getting that. No, never. So basically, right, as I can see, this is not, and I sort of go back to Molly here, right? This wasn't like some fly-by-night enterprise. This was like all the biggest venture capital funds poured billions into this thing, right? Yeah. It had just done a series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, and there were several other pretty big name investors that

poured some money into it. I think it was around $150 million of capital that they put into it at a $3 billion valuation. So they certainly thought the company was worth a lot of money, although now that they've lost several times the amount of money that was put into the series B, I wonder if perhaps they're reconsidering the decision there, but... And what I find so funny, right, is that among the people who are insisting that this is the way forward, not just people who are scamming investors out of money, right, but people who are also, for example, going up to governments and sort of suggesting, oh, we can solve some social problem with the blockchain. Look how ubiquitous it is. Look how excited people are

at this technology. Look how rich everyone are getting. It's new. It's new. Yeah. You don't want to miss out. But these events, like the fact that in order to make this thing work, you needed to basically do away with all of the decentralization, but at the same time, not have any of the benefits of a centralized organization. It seems like, I was saying this to you earlier, Molly, like it's just like seeing a bunch of libertarians kind of reverse engineer why institutions are necessary through the process of incredibly catastrophic trial and error. Yeah. Extremely expensive trial and error. Yeah. I mean, I think that's kind of a common issue is that people come into this in sort of the wrong way around, you know, where they say, oh,

well, I've got this blockchain. And so now I need to find something to do with it. And so they sort of try to find, you know, applications that they can sort of slap a blockchain on to attract all the venture capitalists. But they're often not particularly well suited to a blockchain, you know, like with the problem with Axie Infinity is any video game usually needs to do kind of a lot of transfers pretty quickly. You know, there's a lot of logic involved in a video game. And so there's a lot of transactions that have to happen. But if you're operating on Ethereum, each transaction is very expensive and very slow. And so they basically said, well, we can't do that, we'll need to do something different so that it's faster and cheaper.

And so they made their own special little side chain that's not decentralized at all, but still sort of can hand wave at being decentralized because it's not just one server or a group of servers all controlled by the company. And that's where they really shot themselves into the in the foot because it's more vulnerable than your, you know, average standard database that is, you know, we've known how to secure them pretty effectively for, you know, decades now. But it is also, you know, trying to accomplish all these things that are not actually useful for the game. But useful for investors and people who want to be digital landlords, essentially. Yes, absolutely. It is, it is just, just to see, it's almost like a fractal

of just projects blooming and exploding. Like if you had Colonia Dignidad, but it was in a country that was all other Colonia Dignidads, each with like little tiny differences. Was Colonia Dignidad primarily known for fiscal insolvency and like insecurity? I think I more think of it as a kind of Libertarian intentional community that ran up against those ideas. I just like the idea of you being like, you know, the thing about Colonia Dignidad, very insecure password choices. Yeah, that's a big issue. They only had five compuses. Yeah, fortunately, I've bought or I've bought the collection of NFTs, Colonia Dignidadies. Speaking of NFTs, there was one, it's not even in the notes. It's something

that I just, I just saw you post about like just before coming on, Molly, is that it also was like the number of people involved in this world is so small that you said the identity of one guy who's the subject of a Department of Justice probe about one big heist was revealed to be the object of a probe was revealed to you wouldn't was revealed to be was revealed to be the same guy who did the same thing for another set of barely differentiable JPEGs. Yes, and there are several entries on the website where it's the same thing. It's, you know, just one person repeats the same scam several times, which is really easy when you can just be a JPEG of a monkey online and you don't have to tell anyone who you are and people will just

throw money at you for some reason. Awesome. Yeah, pretty sweet actually. I recall some time ago, Alice making a joke about how like being being a British policeman in a regional town is just constantly arresting the same four guys for the same five things and then hustling another four guys, you're trying to move into the first category and like the crypto market is basically the same thing where it's just like the same four guys constantly doing the same three scams to the same other 11 guy distributed finance has to be regulated by sorry police. Yeah, that's right. You yourself was saying an IP is that correct to the gentleman? Oh my. So I've got a it's not really a start up. It's a web three project, but I've got it

and boy is it gonna infuriate Milo specifically. Oh, okay, great. I love to take psychic damage. I know that because I've already spoke with Molly about it and I spoke with Alice about it earlier. That's right. Milo, you are the odd man out. I'm off in the way. Yeah, what's it feel like to be it excluded? It's gonna have a lasting effect on me. I'll tell you that you trigger that you owned right now. I'm deeply triggered. I should go and trigonometry Milo. I'm not gonna ask these two because they already know. Yeah, what do you think maker Dow is remembering Dow is distributed autonomous organization. Also, it's not by Peter Dow. That'd be much more fun. Every time Dow comes up and it's the only joke you can make about those.

It was what down. So I repeat that for me maker Dow. It's nothing to do with making anything. Well, of course not. Of course not maker Dow. I hardly know. Anyway, thank you. Thank you. Thank you 1970s Milo. 70s Milo is exactly the same with a much larger moustache. That's right. And worse views. So it has nothing to do with making anything. It's issuing something called the world's first unbiased currency. So it's a cryptocurrency, right? And it's unbiased. Is it like a coin that's somehow pegged to online content? Sort of, actually. Yes. Because it's like for the makers, like the creators coin.

Okay. You know what? I'm afraid you came too close. It's a coin. It is pegged to purely online content. No, it's a stable coin. So it maintains a value of one US dollar. Okay. Yeah. But you know how like there's other stable coins like tether, they were like, no, we maintain a value of US dollars because we have this big box of like, you know, crisp, crisp packets and receipts and chewed gum. Normally stable coin maintains the value of one horse because we have a horse for every single coin. I'll be more useful. No. So it's a stable coin. It's called an algorithmic stable coin. And so it's a stable coin that maintains its value based on the value of other cryptocurrencies through which it maintains the

dollar. Which fluctuates wildly. Yeah. So it's constantly, there is essentially, there is a, without going into too much detail, there is a smart contract that's constantly buying their coin, DAI, and buying or selling that coin or minting that coin or constantly buying or selling Ethereum to try to keep the value of their stable coins stable against Ethereum. So it's worth one dollar basically. That's completely insane. Well, they're doing Russian central bank shit for a fucking crypto currency. You're linking two things that you can't link with no plausible means of linking them anyway. It's like saying, I'm going to continue my garden fence past this post to the moon.

Wouldn't this require huge amounts of capital to manipulate the market in that way? Yes. Okay, cool. Great. Question two, do they have large amounts of capital? Well, they have a large amount of what Marx might call fictitious capital. Yes or no, please? They are probably the biggest stable coin other than Tether and US dollar coin. They're one of the big ones. I will say this is the first time I've heard someone say DAI out loud. I've only ever read it before. That doesn't grow great when you have to actually speak it. Yeah.

DAI coin, it's the first Welsh cryptocurrency. I was thinking like Bond villain currency here. Okay. No, Mr. Bond. They say DAI is a stable decentralized currency that does not discriminate. And we're not racist. Yeah, that made my bowels hurt. Okay. Any individual or business can realize the advantages of digital money called DAI. Basically, what that means is there's going to be a turn that comes in about five minutes or so this is the thing that's going to give Milo his relaxation vein in the front of his forehead. Oh, lovely stuff. You can always tell he's relaxed.

Yeah. Yeah. The cool, relaxing vein. Comfort vein. So remember, it's a stable coin that based on the value of Ethereum will constantly buy and sell Ethereum or burn its own tokens to maintain a value of $1. And there's enough in how it works it's mainly like a bank lending against collateral. So you take any asset that's on the Ethereum blockchain and there's a proposal to let you use APES as collateral. APES. Yeah, I'm getting dirty APES. So you can APES repo'd? So you could lock your APE in a smart contract and it might get liquidated if its value drops too low. So basically, right? So you lock that away and then you get issued DAI

and then you can use your DAI for whatever. You can stake it, you can buy stuff with it, you can't buy stuff with it because no one actually uses DeFi, but you can like you have it basically and then you may, hey, I've got this. You have to of course, you have to of course put up more in collateral than you get and die because the only collateral they accept is so volatile. You're going to put up $110 to get $100. This is one of those tech things that's like, oh, we're going to solve the massive problem when the thing starts working. It's so long as it survives the massive problem, right? Your collateral is going to be more plausible the longer this runs on. However,

it's totally implausible now and this will stop anyone from using it. It's also so funny that they want it to be worth $1 and they could achieve this by just making everyone put in $100 to get $100 DAI in actual dollars and then that would just work. Well, they did that with Tether, right? And they were like, well, we don't want to just put in the number of dollars and then issue that number of Tether. We want to just issue Tether. Except the thing is that Tether actually aren't doing that because as we know, most of what's in Tether is, don't worry about it. So they just remember this, right? It's a way to basically get loans against collateral

and they automatically buy and sell and burn to keep it at one value, right? So they say, you can generate or borrow DAI by opening a contract and it's changing that for the DAI which they hold the collateral. No thanks. I have no time to DAI. Thank you. And then, you know, that's basically it, right? So what I think is very funny though is that on their coin offering sheet, they say, okay, well, what are the risks? Right. They say, all right. There's none. Don't worry about it. No risks here. Because remember, it's a stable coin that's always worth $1 but only just so long as, for example, Ethereum stays worth as much as it's

worth. Or thereabouts, yeah. Yeah, roughly. The value of that doesn't change. They've like incorporated. I've built my house on the most stable material of all, sand. It's a component of concrete. So like, I'm feeling pretty confident about this. In the Ozymandias poem, what's gotten fucked up, the stone statue? What's still cool? The sand in trackless ways. We see it differently. Yes. So let me say, this is from their perspective. Pricing errors, irrationality and unforeseen events. A number of unforeseen events could potentially occur such as a problem with the price fee or irrational market dynamics that cause inflation to value. Die or if confidence is

lost in the system, the market dilution could reach such levels that liquidity doesn't bring stabilization to the market. It sounds like they're foreseeing those events to me. And what that means, right, is that they're basically saying this is a kind of unregulated, almost bank that seems to rest largely who could issues a special dollar that they invented that's based on entirely on the worth of another special dollar that someone else invented, and everyone's staying really, really stoked about those two things for less forever. It's like a gas leak in the Federal Reserve. We're trying to become a central bank, having, I guess, found out the hard way why things want a central bank, but the way in

which we're going about it is extremely stupid. Well, obviously, if something unforeseen were to happen, like our absolutely ideal set of financial circumstances not persisting infinitely, then I guess something might go wrong. And I do love how these different projects are sort of cascading sort of, it's like each one is built on hopes and dreams, and then they build a new project that's based on even more hopes and dreams, but really depends on that first one, you know, continuing to exist. I've built my house of cards on satans. Yes, exactly. It's the worst place I could build that. It's the worst thing I could build that. Remember, because there's very little depth to the cryptocurrency market at all, right? They say,

oh, Ethereum, its market capitalization is, you know, however many billions or whatever, the cryptocurrency market capitalization is like however many trillions, you absolutely could not sell 5% of it without the market crashing, 100%. And so the idea that, like, because there's very few people actually engaging in this stuff, they're just engaging with it back and forth to one another to make the numbers big. And so like, you think about this, right? Who actually, I actually did some research on this, who actually uses decentralized finance, the numbers I was getting, right, was that in one quarter in 2020, like just under 80,000 unique addresses interacted with an Ethereum DeFi protocol, or like, and then a more recent estimate,

that's like from like a pro crypto research firm says as many as 4 million people use DeFi, which is like considering the claims that they're making that like, oh, we've invented a central bank for 4 million people, just fucking ludicrous. Yeah, and it's all fake numbers. There's no, you know, the, like trying to estimate how many people are actually represented by some number of wallets is largely impossible. You know, people intentionally set up multiple wallets to try to keep their identities separate. And so those numbers are really, they can kind of just say any number and you can't really disprove it because nobody really knows. Oh, I've got a business idea.

Is that what you say a number? Crypto wallet chains. I'll sell you for like several Ethereum, I'll sell you like an NFT of chain that attaches to your crypto wallet, as though you're like, yeah, but like a, like a hip hop punk guy from the crypto has 4 million users, which it doesn't. But if it does, right, then essentially this is like Croatia, if DeFi, if DeFi has 4 million users, this is like, like, if we've invented a new thing called the Croatian central bank. And it's gonna, it's gonna, it's gonna trade in dollars in order to like, try and like peg the Croatian currency to this. However, the Croatian currency is

predominantly used to buy and sell pictures of apes. Yeah, which is actually predominantly what the Croatian Kuna is used for. The one thing, right, is the, the other, even like 4 million people using DeFi as a high estimate, because most DeFi protocols, like most of the actual activities and tokens that are being traded. I have a list of countries by population here. I will tailor this joke to however many the number turned out to be. I mean, Molly, I don't know if you've noticed this as well, but it seems most of the projects are just infrastructure for other projects. None of them seem to have an end application. Yes. And yeah, I think, I think what you're sort of pointing at is, is if you actually

look at the number of transactions that are happening on these blockchains, and it varies somewhat by blockchain, but typically the overwhelming number of them are not doing anything useful. You know, it's not actually someone sending money to another person in exchange for goods or services or whatever it might be, even if that good or service is an ape. A lot of it is just exchanges, sort of passing money around between their own wallets or, you know, all these different things that are just not actually useful work. And, you know, especially when you look at how much energy is required to do those fairly useless transactions, it's kind of infuriating. The population of Croatia has been burning massive coal furnaces and each

of their backyards in order to move money around in between different ape wallets. It's like, yeah, it's like one person putting their dollars from one pocket into another pocket. Like it's not beneficial to anybody. My coal-powered pocket switching. Yes, exactly. How else am I going to get stuff from one pocket to the other? You got a better idea. You know the machine that turns itself off, right? Yeah, I love that machine. It's one of my favorite machines. What if that was coal-powered? Oh, then it'd be a great Australian invention. Yeah, the machine that fucks off. Well, this machine in the palm here. Okay, okay. So, cracking a little divorce. The other thing, right, is that we got this, we have to remember,

we have this coin, this thing that is allegedly worth billions of dollars. Riley, I'm very stupid. Explain this to me in terms of Croatia, please. Okay, we have the Croatian coin. It's circulating, but it's pegged to the US dollar through a third wildly fluctuating commodity. Oh, in relation to the Russian ruble. Okay, yeah, it buys or sells Russian rubles in order to peg itself at one US dollar. Essentially, yes, but somehow less useful. Oh, okay. Imagine if the Russian ruble was somehow less green. I mean, they're working very hard to make it less green every day. So that's right. So here's the thing, right? And that this only really works if people keep

pouring money into that third thing and the price stays stable. Now, I'd say, look, this is stupid, but it's just idiots that are going to lose money on this when it all fucks up. Like all of our bullshit, like since we moved from startups, like the machine that kills hotels or whatever, into web three, all of this web three shit, it only seems to take people for a right who are already throwing their money down wells, who are already like dual wielding the supreme money gun into a big furnace. Well, I would hate it if this kind of currency was say, for example, plugged directly into an organization that is, for example, ensured by some kind of a,

I don't know, federal deposit insurance organization, right? I see exactly where this is going. They got to a fucking like a much like a crew of armed robbers. They hit a small town bank. Yes, exactly. We are currently we are about to do a kind of, I guess you could say a crypto version of the first heist in the movie heat. Okay, wait. So the so the Croatian cryptocurrency guys, what they're doing is that they're rolling old sea mines down the hill, a Serbian bank. So basically, okay. So an application has been made originated by Huntingdon Valley Bank. Oh, geez, juice. Oh, wait, I banked there. Nothing bad happened to the Huntingdon Valley Bank, right? Oh, no, not yet. All my money is in the Huntingdon

Valley Bank. And all my Apes, I think it's in Philadelphia, right? But the app fucking is. Yeah. So it's a suburban village and suburban mailing address located in Philadelphia. Okay. It's got 500 million in assets. So it's a small bank. And basically what they want to do is and this is going to be really, really stupid. But the payoff is very simple is they want to be able to remember how I said, right, is the way you get that die is that you put something in like their vault, their smart contract, and it spits out die for you, right? The bank has said, hey, I have an idea. What if we set up a trust in Delaware, and then we put a bunch of our loans that we've made to various small town construction firms or people or whatever in that trust in

Delaware, and that trust in Delaware is controlled by the Maker Dow Distributed Autonomous Organization. And then they spit out die for us. Now, look, small banks do this all the time because you need to have certain kinds of diversification. It's like it's even, I think, part of the plus of like a John Grisham novel, like it's a great seed of corruption in American public life that you have to diversify a bank's collateral. And so they go looking for somewhere to do it because all of these banks are always fighting all these other banks to try and like not give away too much of their own shit to their own competitors. And so it leads them into all of these corrupt practices. But this, this is a new height of danger.

Well, this is, as you say, right? It's worse than a crime. It's a bungal. Where, yeah, so they have what happens, right? They take a bunch of loans to diversify themselves, right? They stick them in this trust. The trust spits out die. The bank takes the die. They convert it for dollars. They put it in their own accounts, and they issue more loans than they would otherwise have been able to issue based on how many dollars they hold. Which is, which is great until Ethereum collapses. And then the bank also has to like, it has to call in all of the loans that they have in the first place on the fucking like small construction business or whatever, whatever, whatever the fucking economic activity is

happening in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, that requires a bank loan. That's just going to be fucking gone at the hands of crypto for some reason. It's the way I see it, right? Is a tendril has poked through the veil to real space and has latched itself onto the global economy like through this tiny bank and has now just like put a sword of Damocles over every mid-sized construction company in this town. Molly, am I understanding this correctly? Has our fearless leader like explained this to me like well enough? Is this what's happening? Unfortunately, I think he's explained it pretty well.

Oh, no. And I think there's a little bit of irony here just in that so much of the sort of crypto ethos came out of the 2008, you know, subprime mortgage crisis that like that's sort of where Bitcoin even came from, right? And so now we've come up with like even riskier, you know, more house of cards schemes based on crypto that are sort of threatening the traditional finance market, which... So I had it backwards after all, it's not that your ape gets foreclosed, it's that you are foreclosed on by the ape. Right, yes. Yeah, it's like just imagine the movie Adam McKay is going to make in eight years.

Goddamn. Awesome. So I bet now you're wondering, what the fuck is an ape? We have to hope. Anyway, here's an actress who's currently underage but won't be then to explain. We just have to hope that Ethereum like collapses in time that it like impoverishes a bunch of people in Pennsylvania before this can like happen to more banks and we end up doing the fucking the subprime mortgage crisis again with apes. Enter Matt Hancock, if only. Well, it's just like if you think about this, you know, the I have a way of thinking about this. My way of thinking about this is that

now that we have this like purported central bank, now that we have all of these other instruments of financial regulation that have finally been invented by libertarians who have learned to the hard way, I just know in my heart that the way this is going to be presented is like, this is new finance meets like trad finance and they're working together to become stronger than ever. I don't think that's what this is. I think this is a bunch of like defy guys who crave the legitimacy and the safety net that is offered to trad finance and are prepared to incinerate as many people's homes and businesses as they can to get it. And I think they want to get into as many banks like this as possible in this manner so that when Ethereum or whatever else does

inevitably collapse, it's too big to fail. That's what I think is going to happen. What I think is they want to happen. Yeah, and I actually think it's not that different from what a lot of these organizations have already been doing, which is basing the value of their currency off of very risky financial instruments. Like if you look at what Tether is actually quote unquote backed by, you know, it's not a big pile of US dollars sitting in a bank account somewhere. It's like very volatile commercial paper, a lot of which has links to, you know, Chinese real estate, which is currently sort of going up in flames. So I think sort of the risky, you know, financial instruments that

are being consumed from the traditional finance system in order to sort of prop up these crypto projects is actually a lot more common than we might think it is. Oh, good. Yeah, it's really, it's, it's really sort of, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna like use like an inhaler. I'm gonna hit myself with the GMRT to make myself feel better. Chicken nuggets, chicken nuggets. If only Tether was backed by chicken nuggets, just the US dollar equivalent of chicken number, chicken nuggets. Yeah, that's right. Oh no, you've laced it now. That's gonna be a thing. I'm sure that exists. Almost certainly it does because they all like Rick and Morty, right? So. And you've just pumped the coin by mentioning it on a podcast.

Thanks for contributing to the financial crisis of 2024, Alice. Yeah, you're welcome. I love to be the reason why I'm never in a house. I didn't know there was gonna be a financial crisis. So I think, right, just sort of bringing this sort of segment round to a close, it is really bizarre, right? Because the last financial crisis, 2008, was caused largely in out of public view, where all of the risks were apparent. Kevin Spacey did it in that one room, yeah. But they were out of public view and it was mostly the risks were apparent to people who were in the know and sort of were in on the grift together, but it was kept secret. Kevin Spacey, the guys Kevin Spacey was yelling at. I'm not gonna get into the fact that so much of my knowledge of the financial

crisis is from the movie The Big Short, but most of it is margin calls, margin calls, excuse me, both great movies. But in this case, it's so weird, right? It's so weird and innervating to just see all of it happening in front of you and in the open and being like, I can do about as much about it. The movie margin call, but it's the margin call too, and fucking Kevin Spacey's burying an ape in his wife's yard at three o'clock in the morning. It's margin call, but all of the events in the boardroom are happening on the fucking Jumbotron at Madison Square Garden. And they're happening within the hearing of us, podcast idiots. So I'm a hearable. I want to move on, right? Because you want to move on from the machine

that kills small construction businesses? I don't want to move on from it because the reason why I don't move on for it is because we know for a fact that guys who had previously been small business tyrants, who had previously owned the kinds of things, the kind of businesses that are propped up by these bank loans, whether that's like laying concrete, dealing jet skis, franchising fast food restaurants, whatever. When they lose everything, one thing that we learned in the 2008 financial crisis is when those guys lose everything, they take to doing extremely cockamamie scams to try and get the good life back. They go and try and dig up duffel bags full of cocaine that they'd heard were buried somewhere. They get chased by fish and

wildlife cops. And so this is going to be a huge boost for the guy economy. We're going to get some great guys out of this. Oh, no, definitely nine different kinds, nine different Republican Congress people of a political tendency we haven't even heard about yet are being created right now in the Delaware trust between MakerDAO and HVB. Incredible things are happening in Delaware. That's true. So I would, however, like to move on to the final segment, which is final segment, which is, Molly, you and some friends and compatriots recently reviewed, let's say, an article in the Lying Failing New York Times by Kevin Roos, a allegedly tech critical journalist offering a, hey, you know what you need to know about crypto? I'm going to give you the unbiased

inside scoop. Yes. Yes. Kind of an interesting, I wouldn't say tech critical, but definitely allegedly a tech journalist and has recently made sort of the pivot into crypto with several pretty incredible articles that have served to pump the prices of various crypto projects, much like you just pumped the price of Nugcoin. I'm so mad about Nugcoin because I know it's going to become real if it's not real now. This is insider trading. I have loads of money in Nugcoin. Remember, it's not illegal. It's not illegal. It's not illegal for this guy to be heavily invested and nothing is pumping. And even if it were illegal, there'd be no way to fucking prove it. Nugcoin serves as a utility coin for the NugNet platform that brings together cannabis growers

and dispensaries and interact. I'm going to shoot you with a gun and pump your life. Let's go. Let's do it. By the time, by this time, we will have Nugcoin and NugNet with a broad network of growers and investors. I hate you so much, dude. Metaverse and NugFTs, we are more than ready for the negaverse. We are moving towards forward in the development of a P2E cannabis growing game in Decentraland. If you are the owner of the original NugFT strain, you'll be able to harvest that strain as NugFT. All strains within the metaverse will be available as commons. Well, NugFTs will be considered first editions. In-game merchandise will also be available for Nugcoin. I'm going to get a sniper rifle. What are you going to do with it?

I'm going to shoot you with it to death. Are they really? Is it real marijuana that they're harvesting or is it metaverse? Conceptual marijuana. It appears, well, it's one of these things where it's like, oh, if you hold the NugFT, then you get invited to events. It's like being in an email chain. There's no physical Nugs to be found. Well, that would depend on somebody, I think, giving you a Nug. No, this is purely a picture of some weed. Okay, great. For the metaverse. You can have to remember, when you go to work in the metaverse, wearing your Iron Man suit, not to bring your picture of weed with you. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Love a picture of weed.

Yeah, you can't smoke your weed NFT before you go to your metaverse job or you might get fired. Oh, I hate the future. It's amazing how they've managed to make being a weed guy more lame. I didn't think being a weed guy could be more lame. You and some friends have written a a scathing takedown, you might say, of this article by Kevin Roos. And it's one that I think is worth going through because it's, I think, how, if you read tech journalism, it's how most normal people just think about crypto now, because it's sort of the summary of most common sense opinions that are impropagated by places like the New York Times

or sort of other places covering it for a mass audience. So I'm going to read from this article and we are going to talk about what Kevin Roos says. Yeah, you're going to talk about, I'm going to sit here seething about Nugcoin. Yeah. Well, Alice plots to murder me with a gun. Yep. Yep. Yep. To kill me until I die with a gun. Have to get a metaverse gun to kill him in the metaverse. That's all right. You die in the metaverse, you die in real life.

I know you do. I'm going to assassinate Riley's metaverse avatar. So until fairly recently, if you lived anywhere other than San Francisco, it was possible to go days or even weeks without hearing about cryptocurrency. Oh, they're good old days. We remember that. I wish. Assuming you, of course, had no internet connection.

Yeah, of course. People wouldn't shut the fuck up about this since 2013. Wait, can I just unplug that? Yeah, you can just do that and you don't even have to work. That would really get in the way of us finishing the show, but later. Oh, shit. Yeah, okay. Now suddenly it's inescapable.

Again, Kevin, why? Why is it inescapable? Because of tech journalists like Kevin. Yeah, because of you. Just because of the sacrifices I've made to Baphomet, now it's inescapable. Look one way. And there are Matt Damon and Larry David doing ads for crypto startups. I mean, I feel a little touch of sympathy here because it is inescapable to the point

that if you make a joke about a cryptocurrency that you thought would have a funny name based on a line in a movie from 2007 on a different podcast, that's real, it turns out. Now, however, the meaning of Nug is different in Nugcoin. I don't care. It's a weed Nug, not a chicken nugget. There's probably a Nug coin on some other chain that represents metaverse chicken nuggets. Can I interest you in one of Pepsi's new mic drop NFTs, or maybe something from the Applebee's Metaverse Meals NFT collection inspired by the restaurant chain's iconic menu items?

You're bothering to go into the virtual realm so that you can go to an Applebee's? That's a cheap restaurant. You can just go there in real life. What if you're in Britain? Yeah, no, you make a good point there. You could go to an equivalent restaurant. You could go to 2Gi Fridays. The British person's fondest dream is to go to an Applebee's.

You could go to a little chef. There you go. I should bet you should do proper British metaverse. Have a metaverse little chef. That's what I think. Yeah, I'm in the metaverse of winning the NFT. This is another funny one that I especially draw your attention to, Molly, as well. Today, the crypto market is valued at $1.75 trillion.

Sure, that is a real number. You could realize that valuation right away, like that. Absolutely, yes. No source cited for that, by the way. We just had to guess where maybe he pulled that number from, which I think is actually just the ticker at the top of the CoinMarketCap.com website. Every time I googled the number 1.75 trillion, it was just other websites directly citing CoinMarketCap.

Some questions there on the research quality. Well, you know that that's a good valuation because they did the valuation of themselves. Who would know more about how much the stuff was worth than the people who made it? And also, if your thing has no value other than just to trade for other things, which are only valued at how much money of the real money someone's willing to dump into this thing, then that's totally a real and legitimate number. And you should get in before it goes to two or three. As it's gone mainstream, again, Kevin, I wonder why.

Crypto has an unusually polarized discourse. Its biggest fans think it's saving the world. Well, its biggest skeptics are convinced it's all a scam. An environment-killing, speculative bubble. That's just classic New York Times neutrality there. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it is well. Well, this one side says it's saving the world.

This other side says it's all a scam. But we're going to get to the bottom of this yellow cake situation. One person says poll pots are genocidal maniac. The other person says he's a much misunderstood man. Who's to say? No one can say if it's good or not. It's just very polarized. You know, one of the things about what happens when one group of people are

right and another group of people are wrong is that there's a great deal of polarization between them. Say, its biggest fans think it's saving the world. Well, its biggest skeptics are convinced it's an environment-killing, speculative bubble orchestrated by grifters installed to greedy dupes which will probably crash the economy when it bursts. Does anyone remember what we were talking about 15 minutes ago? No.

It's cool how he's doing. It might be in the New York Times, but he's doing the spectator thing of including a paragraph which is like obviously true to then go, but that's not going to happen. Anyway, onto my opinion. Yeah. I've been writing about crypto for nearly a decade. Really?

And you still write like this? You still say this? You've been writing for a decade and you haven't like contended with a stablecoin, for example? And mostly recycling the same article. Yeah, it's the best. It's the best own on people who disagree with you, which is to repeat a very well thought through and accurate criticism of the thing you're writing about in a silly voice.

Oh, I'm going to fucking listen to the clout court Twitter account. Oh, it's destroying the environment and none of the coins have any inherent value, and most of it's just people shuffling their own money around to make the number go big. Blah, blah, blah. Have you ever considered that it's cool? I agree with the skeptics that as much as the crypto market consists of overvalued, overhyped, and possibly fraudulent assets, and I'm also unmoved by the utopian sentiments shared by pro-crypto zealots.

But as I've experimented more with crypto, including, and this is the biggest fucking line in the entire thing, including accidentally selling an NFT for more than half a million dollars at a charity auction last year, I've come to accept that it's not all a cynical money crap. Yeah, more than a few people said accidentally what? Like, that's just such a casually, you know, he just casually drops that into the article, and it's such a bizarre. I don't know why the Times decided to allow him to do that. It is completely against basically any reputable publications, ethical requirements,

but Kevin Rus has a very rosy view of crypto, and I suspect some of it comes from that accidental $500,000 sale he made a year ago. Yeah, no. Now, as it looks like a cynical money grab environmental catastrophe that none of its stated aims are possibly achievable, but once it sort of made me a life-changing amount of money, I've come to accept that maybe something of substance is actually being built. Like, for example, this extension to my house. Yeah, I felt really moved into a bigger house.

Yeah, how I learned to stop worrying and love the ape. So, my position has evolved from an apartment into a two-bedroom. In Kevin Rus's defense, the money did go to charity. However, Kevin Rus has also notably started campaigning for journalists to be allowed to hold crypto. Yeah, because he was like, oh, if I could hit, if I could hit. He was at a charity casino, put like a stack of 40 chips on like 23, right? And it hit. And he was like, I just, journalists should be allowed to play roulette.

He says, so let's look at some of the claims. And he makes, so he says, look, crypto well ideology is going to be a transformative force in our society in the coming years. Well, he's not wrong. Molly, well, how do you assess that claim? I mean, he's not wrong. It has transformed several things in pretty terrible ways already. So, I can't disagree too hard with that, but he does just sort of take that on faith

that it's going to have this enormous transformative effect on society with the implication that that will be positive, which is kind of a strange thing to say in an article that purports to be very neutral. Well, it's the implication seems to be that people are going to, I think, interact with it voluntarily to their benefit in ways that they couldn't possibly imagine. That's the heavy implication as opposed to say interacting with it involuntarily, not to their benefit. Like if, for example, it's 2025 and you've taken out a loan at Huntington Valley Bank.

So, legally, that is not a investment advice by Huntington Valley Bank. The scheme could actually work very well. Legally, yeah, we're not telling you to take all of your money out of that bank. It is not the position of Tractionary Podcast that you should take out a loan from Huntington Valley Bank and subscribe to the Patreon at the highest tier. We're not saying that. The crypto boom has generated vast new fortunes at a clip we've never seen before. The closest comparison is probably the discovery of oil in the Middle East

and has turned its biggest winners into some of the richest people in the world. No, that's not comparable. We're not going to, there's not going to be a fucking crypto state. Like as much as Naia Berkeley might want it to be. No, no, that's not going to happen. They're having to stabilize the value of their petro apes because they keep climbing too much. The reason why you can have a petro state is because petroleum products are useful for other things.

Can you imagine how cursed the crypto UAE would be? I think we're already going there. They're trying to do that. They're trying to do that. All of these petro states that are now like, oh, shit, we're going to do something about this because we've probably already hit peak oil and therefore we need to find something else to prop up our economy. They're all doing crypto now.

Yeah. Oh, you think that fucking Neon isn't going to have a crypto intentional community? ExxonMobil actually is getting into Bitcoin mining. I just found that out the other day. How can we destroy the environment in a new and different way? Very much like cigarette companies getting into vaping. I do love how the game at this point. I love how crypto and Web 3 is going to remove all the power from the big powerful companies

with ExxonMobil mining Bitcoin. And also they say like, the closest comparison is discovery of oil in the Middle East. But again, what did the discovery of oil in the Middle East do for the global economy? Made everything way better. What did it do? It turned Britain into a fucking gun store for the Saudi government. It created, I won't go too much into this. I think I've talked about it before, it created the phenomenon of petrodollar recycling,

which basically is why so many states in sub-Saharan Africa have interest payments on their debt that is like, I don't know, bigger than one another's GDP. Like, that's what it did. It's just not asked what it did. It was just big. All he's just sees a big number. It's good. It'll be good.

It'll be good. God, I hate the New York Times so much. Crypto's madcap meme crazed online culture. You thought this would fucking get Milo, but now it's your relaxation vein that's going on. Well, I thought that the... No, actually, I can see it. This is Henning Vines that has popped up. Hello, Ryle's by annoyed.

Crypto's madcap meme crazed online culture can make it seem frivolous and shallow, but it's not. So... Oh, okay. That's a relief. Clear that one up. It's not. You have once again fallen for my Kevin Ruse. Yes, it's actually all fine.

Let's see you come up with that kind of joke, Jason. I'm sorry, I love you. Crypto currencies, even jokey ones, are part of a robust, well-funded ideological... How's it well-funded? Why is it well-funded? Again. Why is it well-funded coming from? No link.

No citation. Just statements. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Yeah. Much like the discovery of oil in the Middle East. A lot of it's funded by oil from the Middle East. A well-funded ideological movement that has serious implications for our political and economic future.

Bitcoin, which emerged under the ashes of the 2008 financial crisis. Again, I think a really interesting article would say, and also is sowing the seeds of the 2008 financial crisis. First caught on among libertarians and anti-establishment activists. You think you're going to make it to 2028? I'm an activist. First caught on amongst people who wanted to buy drugs, child pornography, and hit men. Yeah, it was created by the libertarians and the anti-establishment activists.

It was the early adopters who were the Silk Road guys. The amount of stoners who will never recover from the fact that they had like four bitcoin in a wallet somewhere in 2009, and then they got so stoned and lost the hard drive that's now worth like whatever, $200,000. There's still a guy going through. I think four bitcoins got to be worth a lot more than that now. Yeah, it's worth like $200,000 or so. That's what I said.

Yeah. There is one guy in Wales who's just mournfully going through. He's trying to get the council. He'd offered the council half of the money if they help him find it. Yeah. The funniest British local council move. They were just like, no, we need money. But I've lost my die coin.

Can anybody please help me find it? So, but the other thing, right, is it's turning back to money as well. For as much as it talks about like a kind of intentional community of mutual respect and freedom or whatever, unsurprisingly, it's always been ridiculously right-wing, right? Yeah. I mean, the whole thing came out of the idea that like the central bank is causing inflation to hurt your wallet. It's got some really sort of right-wing conspiracist origins that are sort of weirdly downplayed

these days. And to give it legitimacy as well, right? He says, and now it's starting to get political. Not that it was ever political before, right? It's now starting to get political because we're seeing a swell of crypto money headed towards the U.S. political system. And again, it's not like fucking Herbalife ever spends millions of dollars on lobbying either. Lobbying is totally good.

No, that means it's legitimate. Yeah. That's right. Like what I'm saying, I guess, is that despite the good... Such fucking... What a crack piece of writing. What I'm saying, I guess, in an op-ed, fuck off, is that despite the goofy veneer, crypto is not just another weird internet phenomenon.

It's an organized technological movement. It's much worse. That's right. It's armed with powerful tools and hordes of wealthy true believers, which holds nothing less. It's armed with wealthy true believers who have hordes of powerful tools. Gotcha. It is so awesome just listing things about it, which make it bad,

and then going, which is good, I presume. Yeah, it's just all he's saying over and over and over again is, people have made lots of money from this. It's all different facets. And I could be one of them if I was only allowed to hold crypto. Someone did speculate that this 14,000-word article in The New York Times was all part of Kevin's campaign to get the New York Times to allow him to hold crypto, which points to him.

I mean, at that point, you just make more money going and doing comms for a Web3 company, right? Why stay working in New York Times if you want to be crypto rich? I love how much of an axe to grind all of the New York Times worst employees always have. Like when Barry Wise was still working there, and half of her output was about how people in the internal slack were being mean about her shitty columns. It's a great place to work for like blowhards, and I respect that a great deal. They took Barry Wise to cloud court. The second reason to pay attention to crypto is that understanding it now is the best way

to ensure it doesn't become a destructive force later. It's already a destructive force. Yeah, and when he says understanding it, I think he means taking it seriously. Yeah, buying it. Buying it from me, Kevin Roos. Have you checked out this Nugcoin that I have to sell? Rooscoin. Yeah, I don't want to buy Rooscoin.

And the early 20s. Every time anyone in the New York Times internal slack post the axe emoji, yeah, that goes up. RoosTokenInfo, thebittimes.com. Excuse me? I'm looking. RoosToken, the contract, the RoosPrice. It's based on the number of times you see RoosBolt on them. It's a decentralized financial payment network that rebuilds the traditional payment stack on

the blockchain. It utilizes a basket of fiat peg stablecoins algorithmically stabilized by its reserve currency. Oh, it's dye. Rooscoin. This is also my advice, yeah. I do have a fiat backed stablecoin. It's a stablecoin that's worth exactly one fiat to have all the fiat's in a vault. We were actually talking about a no-coiner conference on how we should get the fiat

organization to sponsor it. Isn't that just the meeting of, like, the Fed? Yes, right. That's just the monetary policy committee. And they do it on that test track on top of the fiat headquarters. In the early 2010s, the most common knock on social media apps like Facebook and Twitter was that they just wouldn't work as businesses. Pundits predicted that users would eventually tire of friend's vacation photos.

They still don't. They're just, like, beloved by data thieves and cranks. Yeah, they didn't work as businesses because money was free and they kept getting investment. They didn't have to make a profit. Learn anything. And also, it's like, wait, even beyond that, right? We're saying, well, we didn't understand social media enough. And therefore, we have, like, I don't know, trolling and Russians.

And we have, like, yeah, there was a Facebook group called Blacks for Trump that afforded it. The Russians didn't exist before social media. The Russians were born out of the game Counter-Strike. Yeah, exactly. You know what I mean, right? Like, the idea that they climbed out of a primordial chicken soup. You have to engage with it positively or else it'll go the way of social media and have, like, alleged destructive consequences for, like, political or economic life.

And just as he was saying, that Sukhoi Bitcoin emerged. So, are we making the same mistake with crypto today? It's possible. No one knows yet whether crypto will or won't work in the grandest sense. Ah, no, that's some fine hedging. Normally, on this show, what we do is to say that prediction is a mug's game when we're about to say something that might be wrong. But this guy, that's why he's in The New York Times and we have a podcast.

Yeah, absolutely. It's just stroking your chin and high-mindedly being like, I wonder if this thing that exists mostly to perpetuate itself will achieve any of its missions that involve transforming society outside of the on-chain world? Ah, one can only speculate. It could be fast. If only there was an entire group of people speaking about the likelihood that it does that. Drunk driving, it has been said, may kill thousands of Americans every year.

But it also, and I can't stress this enough. So it says, if you look past the carnival barkers and the convoluted jargon, you'll find a bottomless well of weird, interesting, and thought-provoking projects. You sure will. I talk about them on here. You talk about them on here. Into which cash is being fired. It says, and if you learn the crypto basics, you'll find a whole world opens up to you.

You'll understand why Jimmy Fallon and Steph Curry are changing their Twitter avatars to Cartoon Apes. Yeah, they're idiots. Because they're being pained to do it. Yes, I love the sentence. If you learn to do some crypto basics, you might find that a whole world opens up to you in his neutral explainer of cryptocurrencies, which takes no science. Yeah, you could start doing research chemicals for fun.

Any number of these things. So you could start drinking from a bottle of poppers, and that is investment advice. He says, what are the actual uses of crypto beyond financial speculation? And boy, does he not have many in a 14,000-word article. Hiring hitmen, buying drugs, buying child porn. The problem is, it's also the world that opens up to you, I guess. Alice, the other thing is, it's no longer that anonymous. You can't do that stuff with it anymore, really, except maybe with Monero.

That's actually an improvement then. We've managed to, we have learned something. We've made cryptocurrency a worse place to do all of these things. Cryptobros have destroyed the hard-working pedophiles and the businesses they've built over the years. The trad pedophile, who's like, oh, we had a golden age there, but then these fucking libertarians ruined it. Pedophile being interviewed like a Welsh miner going, like, you know,

we had a good business here until these big companies steamed in. ExxonMobil has been terrible for the pedophilia business. Right now, many of the successful applications for crypto technology are in finance or finance adjacent fields. But again, they're not really. No one's actually transacting in any meaningful way, except like one blockchain that has a token that helps provide liquidity to other blockchains that all help provide liquidity to other blockchains.

No one's actually using it. Yeah, I feel like you could have defined successful there. Like, I don't think it's accurate to say that they're successful businesses, but they have been very successful in attracting VC funding. So they don't provide anything of value or any service of value particularly, but they have gotten a lot of money in his defense. It's actually, it's actually so, so inefficient at transacting that as we saw in our very first segment, if you want to transact a lot, then you have to create your own little

end run around that and then watch as that gets hacked. Transacting is about the grind. How much of you transacted today? I find transacting is mostly about pitching the voice slightly up anyway. These do I transact like an AGP? Non-financial uses. I told you last time, yes.

These non-financial uses are still fairly limited, but crypto fans often make the case the technology is still young. But again, Molly, is the technology still young despite the fact that most people believe it is? Absolutely not. In fact, the whole article is titled The Latecomers Guide to Crypto. So it's really weird that he said several times in here that it's still the early days of crypto, but I've made the argument repeatedly that it's not the early days. Bitcoin was invented in like 2008 or 2009, which in technology years is like 100 years ago.

You know, we've had a lot of technological progress since then, but blockchains have yet to find a particularly valid use case aside from, again, ransomware buying drugs on the Silk Road. Six Fast and Furious movies since then. Yes, progress, I'm telling you. Yeah, exactly. Still haven't been able to find a niche for them either, but... Paul Walker coin.

Here are some of the non-financial uses he does come up with, which is really funny. Storing medical records. Terrible idea. It's like he found the worst possible examples. Like why would you... All of my doctors fucking distributed ledgers to agree. Yeah, but also it's like, it's pretty public. Like you can scrape that stuff so easily.

Yeah, not to mention that these companies and organizations seem to get hacked, you know, every hour practically. So I'm not sure also, you know, that I wouldn't say the hospital industry is particularly quick to adopt new technologies. So it's a little bit bizarre that those are being sort of carded out as the go-to example. And because it's pseudonymized, it's like all of my medical records are public, but then at the top, it's a pseudonym. So it's like, well, these are the medical records of Riley Q, or if that's too obvious, Arquin.

So medical records tracking streaming music rights. Also terrible. Every artist who gets involved, it's just used to defraud actual artists by people who are like defrauding them. I mean, us is do love to be defrauded. I'll say that. The use case of DRM, but worse, has been so common in these Web 3 projects for books and music. And it's like, everyone wants to do DRM all over again.

They just look at whatever's around them and they just think, could I crowbar this onto a blockchain? And it's like, oh, what do I do? I stream music. Can I put that on a blockchain? Ah, maybe. DRM sure for that real money. That's right.

I go on social media. So they're like, oh, what? I could host a social media platform where you could never delete anything ever. Cool. Awesome. Yeah, we love that. Imagine if you could never delete a post in social media or if someone else posted about you.

It's called the International Space Station tweet. Or if someone else posted about you, you can't get it taken down if they post your personal information. Nope, that's on there forever now. All you can do is just click on a button that makes it more and more deep fried. As you said, it proposes to make the entire internet into Kiwi Farms. And again, you can get a sense of the background and animating impulses of a lot of the guys behind crypto stuff.

Yeah, I mean, there's this sort of overwhelming sort of belief, it seems like, that any form of moderation is bad when, in fact, I would say that probably the majority of actions taken by social media moderators are actually probably pretty good. Most people wouldn't dispute the people who are taking down child pornography or doxing material. That doesn't tend to bring up a big argument. All of the fucking poor Facebook moderators who were traumatizing

with endless gore videos because they have to watch some Mexican cartel behead somebody. So he comes up with what must be the worst imaginable use cases in a world of no good use cases. So I'm going to come to the end here. But he says, okay, so at the end of it all, is it a pyramid scheme or a casino? And he says, he interviews, what are the small number of people he actually quotes in this article? Going to the Luxor in Las Vegas.

Is this a pyramid scheme or a casino? Thank you very much, Alice. I really enjoyed that. No worries. Matt Huang, a prominent investor, spoke for many crypto fans and he tweeted, crypto may look like a speculative casino from the outside, but that distracts from the deeper truth. From the inside, you can see it's four triangular walls,

Slating's one central point. Slating? Slating. Is that some sort of extra fancy British word? It's Swedish for slanting. The casino is a Trojan horse with a new financial system hidden inside. Thank you so many metaphors here. It's a casino with a Trojan horse inside.

Oh look, you're waiting to be led in the book. The Trojan horse is full of Greek apes. My Trojan war themed casino. Go inside the Troi, into the casino. I'm going to throw a plate. Yeah, the early Greek Air Force. Yeah, that's right. Before they had plates.

The Greek army using a hotplies, using a big plate as a shield. I love that. It's just like a casino is a Trojan horse with a new financial system hidden. These are all good things. A new financial system that, again, we've argued isn't actually that new. They were like, wait a minute. They regulated all the stuff you can do with money, or at least they regulated a bunch of it.

Someone else already did supply chain financing. What if we invent money too? What if we did money too? And then we could put the money too into a casino and put the casino in a Trojan horse and send that into Troi, which I guess is the world. And famously, after the Trojan horse got into Troi, it did great for Troi. Yeah, because then they had a big horse. They had a casino inside.

With all these Greek apes. That was a weird peculiarity of Troi law, was that you could only, illegally, you could only have a casino if it was inside a horse. So they says, you could argue at that position, or dispute how much this new financial system is actually worth. And I will. But crypto investors, and me by implication, clearly believe it's worth something.

What? What specifically? It's like with that expression. It's like that expression where there's smoke. There's probably good things. Go check it out. Yeah, go sprint at it as fast as you can. And you know what?

Start taking your money gun and firing your money over the source of whatever the smoke is. We need suppressing money. Pour it on him. Danger close. Danger close. I need a rack. Partly that's because it's totally unregulated, but that's only because it's still early and making new rules takes time.

It's not early. It's not early. And it keeps getting more and more regulated. As all of these guys figure out why regulations exist in the first place when they're on the wrong side of something. So, okay, here's the conclusion. It's fun to laugh at the often cringe-worthy ways crypto fans try to entertain and inspire each other. Again, how come in a financial system of sort of legitimate investments,

you constantly have to entertain and inspire each other? That seems like a question worth asking. It does not get asked in this article. Hey, Roddy, this is men supporting men, okay? This is real. This is taking the toxicity out of masculinity. By focusing too much on their behavior and customs, might mean missing what's genuinely novel,

and depending on where you sit, either exciting or dangerous, about the technology itself, very little. It's not being in Blofeld's ballroom, depending on where you sit. It's either exciting or dangerous, which is why. And that's why we're inviting you as a society to touch your hand to this metal plate. Yeah. Just sit down in this chair that is above this slowly closing trapdoor.

That's something we're not going to open again. Are those shocks under that? Don't worry about it. Which is why when I asked my friends, which is why when my friends asked me how to talk to their crypto-pilled relatives, shut the fuck up, crypto-pilled. I advise them to start by trying to understand what's gotten them so excited in the first place. I'm ape mode, crypto-pilled.

So, at the very end of this, right, it is yet another crypto journalist who's unable to talk about how this is fucking stupid. And I just want to bring it back to the realm of ordinary people, right? What's in this for ordinary people, do you think? I mean, that's one of my biggest concerns. That's why I've gotten into writing about crypto and talking about crypto in the past, you know, half a year or whatever, is that it seems like more and more these projects are trying to appeal to ordinary people.

And outlets like the New York Times are helping them enormously by publishing these entire enormous articles about, you know, pretending to be very unbiased while basically selling you crypto. You know, I didn't really have any issues with crypto back in, you know, 2010 or whatever, when people were just, you know, using it to, you know, transact to- My child pornography, as was their right. Back when it had soul. Back when it was sort of like the niche investors who were trying to mine it, you know,

and again, in like the ICO boom, I didn't have too much of an issue with it either because it was all just sort of, it was early, so it was primarily just risky investments that were happening by people who sort of knew the risks that they were taking. But now that it's being sort of bundled up and repackaged as a way that you can, you know, invest your retirement savings or, you know, maybe your grandma should get into it with her pension, you know, or all of these different things, you know, even children should be getting into this with these NFT games. That's where I get really, really concerned.

And so, you know, this sort of presenting of this article towards the average person, the person who's reading the print version of the New York Times with their coffee, really concerns me. Oh no, my retirement apes. Yeah, that's, I mean, you know, because that's the thing, right? It tends to be, you know, ordinary people who end up holding the bag because they keep getting promised at every turn by supposedly neutral authorities, by Huxters selling the latest cure, even in ways that they didn't know about, by say,

getting involved with a bank that's getting involved with one of these blockchains, right? They're exposing themselves to possibly having a, having a worse life than they could otherwise have had to enrich, you know, one of, you know, four guys who it turns out is just, you know, the same guy behind the same blockchains. With a different eight picture, yeah. Exactly, yeah. Four guys is one guy with four different eight pictures. So, you know, I mean, as much as it's silly, it's something that is,

I think a real danger to people we actually, you know, care about. Yeah. As opposed to just crypto investors. Yeah, it's sort of, I feel like I've noticed a big shift almost in the past couple of months that I've been doing. My Web3 is going great project where it was funnier at the beginning, you know, like when people would buy a dumb JPEG with way more money than they should be throwing into something like that, and then it would get hacked, and then they would say things like, all my Apes gone. And, you know, it's kind of easy to laugh at those situations

where it's people who made dumb investment decisions with like more money than they knew what to do with. But I feel like recently I've been seeing more and more examples of people who in exchange is hacked or a DeFi protocol is hacked, and they say things like that was my life savings, or recently there was one where someone had not only put in their life savings, but they'd taken out a loan from a family member and put it in there, and they were basically begging to get that back because it was going to ruin them. And like, that stops being funny, you know, that's hard to laugh at, I think. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's, you know, it's just another one of these,

another example of one of these, you know, like very exciting, fun, boosted tech developments that's just, you know, the same shitty wine in new bottles. It's going from affecting nerds to real people, and that's the real tragedy. And as a nerd, I'm only okay when it is nerds who are being impacted. Yeah, exactly. That's like nerd on nerd. That's like blue on blue. Once it starts affecting civilians, that's, you know, really dangerous. So I just want to say, Molly, it's been a real blast having you on the show today. Thank you very much for coming on, and I recommend everyone checks out.

Web 3 is going just great, which we will, of course, link in the description. Thanks so much for having me on sarcastic website. Yes, a very, very earnest title. Absolutely. Well, with that being said, don't forget, we have a Patreon. It is $5 a month. You can subscribe to it and get a second episode every month. Milo, you look like you have something to say. Oh, thank you, Riley. I have plugs, plugs, plugs, plugs. The 12th of April, Smoke Comedy, that's in London, you can come to that.

There's also the 1st of May, I'm filming my show, Pindos, which some of you may have seen. It's the show from 2019. It's a good show. I'm filming it. It's a big venue. I'm not going to lie. It's a bigger venue than I was looking for. Please come. It's in London. It's Sunday afternoon. What else are you going to do? 17th of April, I'm in Brighton, my favorite city in the UK. And I'm saying that because I want to. You can get tickets to that. There's a link to my website in the description, which has all of the dates on it.

Are you doing anything with your friends in April? Oh, yeah. We've got the Trashy July Show, which is almost sold out. So, yeah, bruv. So, do you get fucking, get your tickets to that? Or maybe don't. And also, I can trail this on the 3rd of May. There is going to be a Britonology live show. It's very limited tickets, and it's also going to feature Johannes von Klobkens. Yeah, it's going to be one ticket. I'm going to be the one with the ticket.

Yeah, Riley's going to be there. Tickets for that are on the Trashy July Show website, but you're going to want to. God, we used to do long plugs, then we didn't do very many plugs. Now we're doing long plugs again. We got to let all these people go. So, once again, Molly, thank you for hanging out. Thank you for listening. Don't forget to subscribe to the Patreon and check out Web3 is going just great. Bye, everyone.

Bye. Bye.