We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC118: Deep Dive Aftermath of SBF and the FTX Disaster w/ Mark Goodwin (Bitcoin Podcast)

Episode Date: February 22, 2023

There has been a lot of news coverage on Sam Bankman-Fried and the FTX disaster and all the pieces that led to its final meltdown. Mark Goodwin is the writer of the newly released article covering all the ins and outs of this major financial news story. And we cover it all in this episode. IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN: 00:00 - Intro 01:33 - Mark's thoughts on the cover of the Magazine. 05:35 - The timeline of FTX's founding. 09:59 - SBF's network and how was it even possible. 25:28 - Why and how SBF donated to 456 individual political campaigns. 31:36 - Where did 80,394 Bitcoin go in the Luna Foundation? 39:09 - Who was Nikolai Mushegian and why is he important? 01:00:57 - The current digital dollar pilot program with the FED of New York and BNY Mellon. 01:03:43 - Mark's thoughts on everything being about the dollar vs Bitcoin. Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. Mark Goodwin's Article about SBF and FTX. Mark Goodwin's Twitter. NEW TO THE SHOW? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts.  SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: River Toyota Range Rover Vacasa AT&T The Bitcoin Way USPS American Express Onramp Found SimpleMining Public Shopify Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

You're listening to TIP. Hey, everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast. Boy, there has been a lot of news coverage on Sam Bankman-Fried and at the FTX disaster and all the pieces that led to its final meltdown. But it's been a little bit of time and a lot more facts have been learned about everything that's happened. More importantly, what are the broader themes and key interests that are materializing from the government, big banks, the crypto exchanges and other key players that were all involved. Well, to cover that topic and much more is the editorial director for the print Bitcoin magazine, Mr. Mark Goodwin. Mark is the writer of the newly released article covering all the ins and outs of this major financial news story. And we cover it all

in this episode. So sit back and get ready to hear some interesting and crazy stories. You're listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. Hey everyone, welcome to the show. I'm here with Mark Goodwin. Mark, welcome to the Investors podcast and Bitcoin Fundamentals. Thank you, Preston. It's absolutely an honor to be here.

Huge fan of the podcast. You guys always have amazing guests. Super happy to be here representing Bitcoin Mag. And yeah, thanks so much, Preston, for having me. This is the first thing I want to start off with. So I was up in Nashville at a meetup that they had, and I saw the cover of this story just sitting there on the side of the, in the room. And I was just like, oh, my gosh, that is something else.

So let's just start off with the artwork of the magazine cover because it is an eye grabber. Totally. We're a big independent media fans. There's a huge role that independent media has to play. We're always looking for opportunities to sort of lampoon and harpoon. these legacy institutions that have really failed us. Really obviously in the last couple years, it's been very apparent that there's incentives

and these perverse economic situations that are really leading to unfair and really biased media representations of these figures, right? Bitcoin Magazine, you know, we're a freedom money technology media company. We really look at our competition as being these, you know, the Forbes types and the Bloomberg. We see ourselves in that echelon.

And when we see a Forbes cover coming out with this guy that's very obvious for Bitcoiners that there's something clearly wrong here with what was going on at FTX and this is huge explosion, them coming onto the scene and an absolutely no pushback from any institutional media. We saw this as kind of two stories, right? It's really the story of fraud and criminal activity and re-apotification of users' funds and all of this just literal criminal activity that was going on, whether it's Alameda research, FTX with their security exchange token FTT.

They hinted at wanting to come out with a stable coin and all that. And so we really saw that as one side of the story. And then the other side, just this complete lack of any sort of media pushback on these figures. We really wanted to, okay, how do we really get our point across in a very visual way? The covers are the first thing you see, first thing you interact with. And so we wanted to do something shocking. We wanted to do something that would get people's attention. They'd see it at the airport, see it at Barnes & Noble and be like, what is going on over there?

So we have a wonderful team here of journalists, designers, publisher, president, GM, all the, you know, we all come together when we always talk about the cover. It's very important part of this thing. And right away, Mike Germano, our president was like, we got to have SBATF on the cover in some form. We got to destroy this guy. Two birds, one stone. We went at Forbes.

We went at Legacy Media. And then, of course, we went at this criminal activity. We thought it would be really fun to do like a fake cover and just sort of totally just make fun of this Forbes cover. It was very ripe. I mean, there was even a quote on the actual original cover that said, I got involved in crypto without any idea what crypto was. Like, that was literally on the cover of this Forbes list.

So we kept that. We left that on as the quote in full. And I filled in all the rest with just kind of funny little insider, how to start your own polycule and all these little things. We really wanted to go hard. And again, I'm kind of rambling, but it was so personal. I think a lot of us were lucky and saw ahead and had seen things like this before and knew not to have our money personally invested in it.

But it really messed up the industry really bad. When all that went down in November, we had people in our own company, you know, have to deal with some of the contagion from this thing. For me personally, it was a multi-pronged attack, very personal, really wanted to lampoon this guy and the legacy media that really failed us. You guys stuck a snout on them. Yeah. I mean, that's it, right?

It was like his face with literally a pig snout on his nose. And seeing it, I can tell you, like, you guys nailed it. And that's, let's dig into this. Where do you think the story needs the start? Because it goes in so many different directions. There's so many different tentacles. Like, where in the world do you even start? if you're going to give somebody a foundation on Sam and kind of all these other,

there's all these other actors that are, in my opinion, just as bad. And I don't know how you can get worse, but they're just as bad as Sam. Like, where do you start? It's definitely a difficult job to pinpoint exactly when this all started, when it all went wrong, when they started getting desperate and doing things. But to me, it's really a story, you know, zooming way, way, way, way back. It's really about the dollar and Bitcoin. And I think that's sort of the era that we're in right now.

I think it's pretty clear with stuff that the SEC is doing, certain moves going on in the, I guess, to put it nicely, the extended crypto community space. But really, it's going to come down to this final show between the U.S. dollar system and Bitcoin and how they are going to interact with each other in the future. And so much of this has to do with stable coins, regulation, offshore banking, reserves, fractional reserves and exchange tokens, right? I guess where this story started, I mean, Sam made his money,

his sort of first fortune before FTX, sort of exploiting the arbitrage situation that was presenting itself, that we sort of colloquially call like the kimchi premium, taking the higher price that people in South Korea were paying for Bitcoin in 2018, 2019, and even a little bit at the end of 2017. And I was doing this arbitrage trade

made up a ton of money sort of taking advantage of these U.S. dollar pairings and the premium going on in Korea. I think there's a huge coalition here, if you want to look at it in kind of a game theory standpoint, looking at it kind of this like bargaining problem. The U.S. dollar system, the U.S. dollar coalition is, we've seen it time and time again, they'll do anything they can to preserve purchasing power of the net U.S. system. And so to me, it seems very obvious that a lot of these bigger players, the stable coin issuers and these big exchanges that could create a token, just an exchange token right underneath them and print billions and billions of dollars of this token, whether it's FTT, whether it's B&B,

and then of course these stable coin issuers circle and tether, you know, now having, you know, plus a hundred billion dollars worth of these stable coins issued. To me, that's really where this all starts, is the U.S. dollar system trying to, you know, no pun intended, but tether itself to Bitcoin. So to me, this is really just a continuation of that. I see Sam as being very much so a part of this U.S. dollar coalition being so intertwined with the U.S. government system and Congress specifically.

And now we're kind of seeing a lot of the fallback from that, now that this is all that the chickens have come to roost. To me, yeah, the story really starts in 2017 after that big explosion. The U.S. dollar system really has no choice but to pay attention to Bitcoin. We see the founding of FTX and Alameda around that 2019. So that's really where the story gets started. And we just see this huge explosion. I mean, FTX just came out of nowhere.

I think that's the thing that I think never made sense for me. It was just the pace at which this became as big as it is because I was in the 2017 cycle. We were creating content in the 2017 cycle. And Sam was never discussed. I mean, this guy was a nobody back then. and then it's just like 2020 hit and this guy's got Tom Brady and like these like Bill Clinton. Yeah.

Like I don't know how that's possible without assistance. And I think people are just looking at it and saying there's no way. There's no way somebody can raise that much money and have access to these types of people and to stand up a national brand from nothing. How is that possible? I think you really nailed it. I mean, certainly assistance. in I think a lot of ways.

And I think a big part of it was really like kind of social conditioning, right? I mean, you mentioned the Tom Brady and the Tony Blairs and the Bill Clintons. And I think he really understood Sam did that the media was and these figures kind of were to be bought. And this influence, this sort of like we see as amateur investors or I say we in the general sense see like, oh, well, if it's good enough for Tom Brady, it's good enough for Bill Clinton. they probably did their due diligence. This is probably fine. We saw these big high-profile commercial ads with, you know, very big celebrities. And it wasn't just FTX, but we saw this really explicitly with FTX.

I have a hard time buying some of that. I have a hard time buying that Sam was this savant that understood that these people were to be bought. He's in his late 20s. Like, their form of, like, messaging inside this company. was signal, right? Like, that was their record keeping. Like, right. I don't buy it for a second that a person has the intellect to be an expert at raising billions of dollars, networking politically, running it by themselves. It just, it doesn't even seem, like, I don't know. I just, I don't see that happening with some. And when you look at Sammy, he's so awkward and doesn't seem like he would

be somebody that would understand the social dynamics of some of these things, like getting these people on board for that. That it's, I don't know. It just seems like there was a lot of help. Yeah, a ton. I mean, and I think a lot of it was from people kind of turning a blind eye, you know? I mean, they were clearly doing just a whole bunch of just illegal things and the way that they were basically taking and counting users' funds in one pool, be at FTX or Alameda,

and then just converting it when really playing. with users' funds. Meanwhile, having a meeting every other week with the politician and being so heavily involved in the campaign cycle before the midterm election. I agree with you, man. To me, it seemed like a lot of this was sort of a part of this regulatory regime that's here. We've sort of been talking about it for a while that a lot of these coins are securities. Securities law is pretty black and white. I mean, it's almost 100 years old now, 90 years old, since old Howie was slinging expected profits and a common enterprise on his orange orchards, right? Now we're seeing really Gary Gensler's lead SEC really cracking down.

And so to me it's all part of this regulatory regime. To me, Sam is sort of an actor in this big movement that's coming now. And FTX was really the start of kind of the, or their collapse was kind of the start of the error that we're now kind of going into, which is a whole bunch of reaction from these huge industry players like Coinbase and Circle and Cracken. And so to me, Sam was very much so playing a role for the U.S. dollar system to sort of help create a climate that this incoming regulatory regime has sort of the social consensus to do what they're about to do. Like, please protect us. Look at all this crap that's happening. Look how many people lost, you know, the entire life savings. It's like, hey, Sam was going in and having

meetings with you guys all the time and not one person went to actually look at the books and to check and see if this was legit. And so there's a huge failure from this regulatory regime with FTX that's now trying to pretend like they have a right to say kind of what's going on. And like the day after they filed, right, chapter 11, I think it was literally November 11th. Yeah, the press secretary for Biden is coming out saying, you know, we need to have, we need to establish rules for protecting U.S. investors and they didn't even wait, you know, 24 hours to sort of make a comment on it and to come out. So to me, yeah, it's very obvious that there was a, you know, a big financial incentive for U.S. dollar actors to make this whole industry look corrupt and make it look bad and attack

Bitcoin through this sort of adjacent failure of these altcoin securities. And it worked in a lot of ways. I mean, I had more people talk to me asking me if I'm okay, asking me what's going on in the last three or four months post this FTX thing. And so I think unfortunately it was a very successful operation. Obviously, we'll see what comes downstream. But if I was an exchange that ran a security token like FTT, if I was a stable coin issuer that didn't exactly know what this regulatory regime was looking to do next, I would be very concerned. So yeah, I agree with you, man. He totally came out of nowhere, totally exploded, totally got endorsed by a lot of these big media figures. So to me, it seems very obvious that this is sort of an operation to discredit this booming

industry at a really essential time, you know, when inflation's running so hot and, you know, the economy is not looking so great in a lot of ways. And some other metrics, it is looking better, but at this really crucial time when Bitcoin really should step up and take back that dominance from the extended space. Yeah, it's a real nasty thing. I think the story is really gross when you really get into it, all the offshore banking, you know, and the co-mingling of users' funds. I mean, this guy should be in jail, straight up. So he was a proclaimed effective altruist. What did you uncover with some of that organization and how does that paint is that organization what it appears to be on its face? Or is there something deeper? I've listened to some people pontificate on this connection between Sam and this organization, some of the people that are a part of that organization, how well funded that organization is. And then we see at the end after Sam is talking with some random girl that he's doing full-blown interviews with that I never even knew or heard of before.

And he's saying, oh, yeah, all that effect of altruism stuff was just a bunch of crap. I was just purely using it for marketing purposes or whatever he said that it was for. There's a lot of strange things that kind of really don't make sense because he was really deep into this organization. And they seem to have really well-funded ties to various organizations outside of what I think appears on the face of things. So where did your research take you on some of that? I think, I mean, he really kind of said it himself, you know, like this was this. this EA, this effect of altruism, was sort of seemingly a facade, and it was sort of this a mask to hide a lot of the illicit behavior that was going on and making it sort of

pretending that it was this for the greater good. And to me, it doesn't stand the stink test when you actually look at, if you search FTX and look at the campaign donations that were being made by high-profile people in the firm and at the company, when you were seeing huge amounts of money going to both sides of the, at least of the U.S., sort of the duopoly, this sort of purple party situation that we find ourselves in now. And they were giving money hand over fist to both sides. It really seems to me like this idea of, you know, hey, we're effective altruists. We're here to do the greater good, save democracy. There was a lot of money being put in towards preventing another pandemic. They were putting a ton of money into these sort of political

industries, very captured already, I think, by a lot of these bigger actors in this sort of Purple Party scenario. So to me, it always came across as just a total affinity play and just sort of this way to hide the true motives of just kind of power grabbing and really trying to make as much money as possible while we sort of effectively, you know, create compromising situations within legislators to now be like, okay, well, if we want to go after these people, what does that mean for us? We have to claw back these donations. We have to send some of these things back. It was so perverse and across all lines. It really wasn't this is sort of like, you know, maybe traditionally liberal, effective altruism. It was really all across the board. To me,

they're hiding behind that as a way to sort of buy up regulatory goodwill. And we'll see how well that works. We'll see if, uh, what his sentence is. And so far it seems to be working pretty well for a guy that stole as many billions as he did. He's at his parents' house in Palo Alto going on VPNs and messaging people and doing all this stuff. It's, I mean, it's absurd. You would think someone that committed a crime this large that hurt this many people would get the full book thrown at him.

And so far it's been anything but that. So to me, that was kind of the idea behind hiding behind this mask was how can I acquire as much social political power as possible while giving away all of this money and getting a... I mean, again, that was a big part of the media play in the way that they covered this guy was, look at what he's doing with his funds. You know, he's so altruistic.

He's so effective. This just isn't something that a 20-year-old kid knows that hasn't spent an intense amount of time in the lobbying on the Capitol Hill. Sure, if he would have gone to Georgetown, worked in some congressional staffer's office for five years, or any of that type of stuff, that's not what he did.

He went and worked on Wall Street. Street doing arbitrage, high-frequency trading type stuff on the finance side. He had no political ties. He didn't know how any of this game, this political lobbying, pay-to-play type game works. I would say that his connection with his folks, so both of his parents are Stanford and his dad is sort of known as one of the, you know, the high-profile legal voices sort of within security law and banking in the United States. And it's very clear that his parents, were pretty involved in the peripheral sense if signing for real estate

and putting up things for bail and whatever. I think he definitely had sort of a family history of being involved in some of those fields. So perhaps he had some help. I really think it's sort of just incentives run awry where, you know, he was kind of forced in a scenario to, hey, things are maybe not going so great. How can we continue to pretend that it is

and that everything's fine? and that our balance at Alameda is not a lion's share of it in a token that we issued. I mean, how many billions were just in that FTT token when CZ sort of called the bluff and attacked the peg very publicly. You know, we saw that happen. And yeah, I mean, everything kind of downstream came from this factional fissure between finance and FTX. And so I think a lot of that does kind of come from, hey, let's use as much of this money as we have to buy up political power, buy up friends, and see how long we can kind of take this thing. And I think they did it better than anyone. Better is probably not the best word, but they did it more effectively than anyone and really fooled millions of people, it seems like. So yeah, it's really messed up how it all came down. But there is a connection there with his folks and with his father in particular for maybe knowing some of more of the ins and outs of how this stuff works.

And I mean, it's not a mistake that they founded themselves in the Bahamas. I don't think it's an accident that the first stable coin to be pegged to the U.S. dollar was the Sand dollar, which was the Bahamas dollar, which is pegged to the U.S. dollar. So the first really kind of CBDC, you know, government issued U.S. dollar stable coin directly was right there in the Bahamas around the time that this whole thing started. To me, it seems like a very active, a knowing position to try to purchase. political capital. And I think his father most likely probably helped him with that. Of course, that's speculation. But let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you

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56 individual campaign contributions in the span of probably a year, right? Like, this is the work of a mastermind. This isn't the work of, hey, I'm teaching some classes at Stanford and, you know, I've got some expertise in how to do offshore tax evasion type things without doing it, quote unquote, legally, right? Like, that was his expertise. They weren't like professional multi-billion dollar campaign runners of political contributions and lobbying efforts.

They kind of were, though. I mean, his mom definitely ran a pretty big democratic leaning pack. He had a lot of history with political fundraising. And I think Stanford in general, these huge endowment funds from these huge institutions and universities, they're a huge political force in both how they, you know, I don't know how to word this right, but in how they indoctrinate and educate the masses. They're very politically important. but also they have billions of dollars, right?

You know, Stanford, Harvard, some of these ivies. So they're really big political forces on their own, kind of by both of those polls. I would say, yes, you're right. It's easy to say, you know, kind of like, they aren't these evil political monsters, but at the same time, it's like, how hard is it really to buy a U.S. politician?

You know, it's like, you're right, you're totally right. Not a genius. I agree with you. Obviously, this fell and exploded in his face. The market called them out with their FTT sort of game. But I don't think buying a U.S. politician is that much of a genius move these days. Unfortunately, it seems like they're all pretty pay to play. I think that's really what we saw.

When we look at that 400 plus donations in a year, it's like all across the board. Yeah, I think it's it's... Let me push on this one, Mark, and I know we're jumping around a lot. And I really want to kind of get to the essence of like how the story unfolded, which we're going to go to next. But the last thing that just like, I'm looking at this and I'm saying, And there's no way in hell that this is just Sam and his mom and dad being like the mastermind and a couple other people here. Posting the bond after he comes to the states.

Like what was the amount? I can't remember the amount. I know it was hundreds of millions of dollars. Like what was it? 400 million for posting bond. One of the bigger posts ever. And apparently it was paid. Than a day or so.

Yeah. And a part of it came from his parents' real estate investments. Apparently they put up their house. But I mean, I don't think their house is worth 400. million dollars or whatever it is. Yeah, Preston, I agree with you, man. How is that possible? How is that possible? It's insane. Look at this. You really do it. It just blows your brain with all these possibilities of like, who really is in this coalition? Yes. Like who is really in this US dollar system coalition, this regulatory regime coalition, this, hey, let's get everybody using stable

coins. So we have as much money velocity and as much users on the US dollar system to offset There's massive amounts of price inflation that we're dealing with. And then you see these news stories. And we've just seen time and time again that it's like there's always this hidden hand that comes out of nowhere and drops that bond, right? And pays that bail bond. Yeah, man. I guess my point, Mark, is like instead of just putting the snout on the cover,

I think he should have been holding like two raw fish with the snout on his nose for the cover of the magazine. Because it just stinks. It stinks to high heaven. like I don't buy any of it for a second. People, and you can, you can piece these things together and say, oh, well, it could be this and it could be that. But at the scale that we're talking, it is so massive.

And I think that's another thing that's lost on so many people that are just hardworking, everyday people that go out there. They make 100, $150,000 a year in their daily life. Like, to them, I'm sorry, like $7 billion, $9 billion. Like, it's just, it's unicorn money. at those valuations to construct that much and stuff, that much buying power into something in the matter of like 24 to 36 months is, I don't want to say it's impossible because it was done. But what I guess what I'm saying is that doesn't happen through a normal startup founder.

Like there is outside help. There is somebody with deep intellectual understanding of how to construct something and hide all of the assistance that, had to have been helping to do this. Like, I just don't buy it for a second. I just... Yeah, totally. I know, I agree with you 100%. I mean, you look at the VCs that were behind some of these projects

that directly led to these multi-million dollar valuations. Like, we're behind the Solana explosion, you know, the pushing Solana stores and Solana phones. And then the chain is going down every two weeks. And, you know, it doesn't really offer anything that Satoshi didn't sort of solve by taking away the power of these trusted third parties. It's like FTT and Solana, which were directly connected to these huge dollar valuations coming out for these projects associated with Sam. Who is the money behind all this? Where is this all coming from? I think it is as much Sam using

the media and using these political connections to appear to be in good faith. And then also a lot of people using him. And I think that's a big part of what you're getting at is that there were clearly these people that are significantly more rich than Sam that were using these huge bags of these tokens that were issued for basically literally no cost, no economic cost. Then these people dumping billions and billions of dollars of Solana, billions and billions of of dollars of FTT. Incentives are really wild. They were able to pervert away good custodial practice.

One of the big reasons why FTCS really took down so many people is because when they partnered with you and they had, you know, hundreds of companies that were sort of under their wing, they made you put all of your funds on their books. That was a big thing they did. And so when they went under, there was 130 or something companies that filed in that same week that were just like, well, if they're down, they have all of our money. How many startups were preyed on by this coalition and then they just got their legs kicked out from underneath them. I agree with you 100%. It stinks to high hell. Absolutely should have had two fish on that cover. I don't think this story is even close to being over. Yeah, I don't either. Mark, let's go here. Let's go here.

I think this is a key event. 80,394 Bitcoin valued over at $3.1 billion on May 5th, 22, owned by the Luna Foundation. It's a top 10 position in the world for Bitcoin holdings. Where did it go? 100%. To me, that was a huge part of this story, was looking at where did all this? this Bitcoin go. We know that the U.S. dollar system, this coalition is using dollar entities to sort of pervert away the normal economic incentives that would exist on a Bitcoin system. You absolutely see this in the Luna fiasco. You also absolutely see this in the core scientific and some of these bigger mining firms as hash price is plummeting and they're making less and less money per hash. We're seeing the hash rate explode at the same time. So we're clearly seeing

US dollar sub-subsidized almost business model come up overnight. To me, I think these huge mining operations and this Luna fiasco are very similar. And that it was like, how do we use US dollars to create a yield and to pervert away normal custodial actions? Or how do we subsidize US mining, use US law to mine thousands of Bitcoin and then file chapter 11 with 11 of them on the books, you know, a year later or whatever? Where did all that Bitcoin go? Where did the Luna Bitcoin go? And when you actually look at it, we'd now have, you know, blockchain don't lie, right?

We can actually sort of audit this and look at where a lot of these went. And they got market liquidated along with a bunch of other on Binance. There was like 30,000 Bitcoin that were liquidated on Binance right after that, you know, that peg broke. And we're seeing a lot of, why did that happen? What were they trying to do? What was Luna trying to do? They were trying to build a stable coin. They are trying to build a stable coin

and how many weeks later were they add zero. I think that's a really interesting thing. This is very much so the stable coin wars. Luna was trying to create a Bitcoin-backed stable coin and someone said no. Someone in this coalition went, absolutely not. And they attacked the peg,

broke it algorithmic way, and it created an algorithmic death spiral of let's liquidate as much of this Bitcoin and other crap that was being held and just instantly liquidated on Binance. 30,000 plus Bitcoin liquidated on Binance, where did that go? We're seeing massive outflows from Binance. Some of the biggest outflows ever since June of last year.

Just huge amounts. You know, six figures of Bitcoin terms being taken off the books in that kind of six-month period. You know, you're looking at that and you're like, where is this core scientific Bitcoin? Where is Luna's Bitcoin? We know that it got liquidated on Binance, but they're not holding it now. And then you look into Binance's role in the FTX implosion, and you know, they were, they didn't hide it. They were very public. They went out and they attacked the peg.

Caroline came out and said, hey, we'll buy it all back up at 22 bucks. We'll buy this FTT. CZ said no. This is another example of you're not a genius. In fact, you're quite an idiot to come out and to say that publicly. Like they were a bunch of amateurs. If they're so brilliant and they're able to do all these brilliant things, what in the world is Caroline from Alameda coming out and basically saying where her resistance levels at, literally to the entire planet. It's insane. Totally mind-blowing. And then also, you know, you look into the Luna stuff and you see that the Genesis group was behind, you know,

they put up a billion dollars to be on the other side of this Bitcoin trade. And you see their connection with Three Arrows Capital. That is all gone, Capului. It's like, how do you lose a billion dollars in value in like a week? because you do something like that. And now we're seeing this contagion going through the Genesis group. And Three Arrows is out. We're seeing Barry Silbert's digital currency group going through.

A lot of the market is just really concerned with things because we've just learned a lot of these people we thought were these brilliant masterminds are really, no, they're commingling users' funds. They're making bad bets. They're doing legacy things. They're doing legacy things on the new future rails where none of that can be tolerated for any type of long duration or period of time.

I think one of the things that's been really interesting with this whole process for me is unlike a lot of the legacy stuff, there are receipts for all of this. Looking at tweets, you know, all these people are very open. They're all younger. Maybe they haven't done their homework, but they're saying things publicly. That's really insane. There's cryptocurrency receipts, right? You know, whether it's, you know, looking at, okay, where did the Luna liquidation?

go. It's like, well, we can just literally look at it and see that it went to Binance hot wallet four or whatever and they liquidated it and then it left. But it's a lot harder to commit fraud and crime at this high of a level when there's literally receipts for pretty much everything. But yeah, man, I really do think the stable coin war is really a huge part of all of this. And I think Luna was a big part of that. They tried to do this algorithmically independent from these privatized issuers, these banks, these people that are, you know, shareholders of the Fed of the U.S. dollar coalition, then they obviously saw Luna as in some way as taking away some of their privilege.

So they were like, how do we attack this? Let's break this peg. Liquidates out. You know, a couple of days before a lot of this stuff went down with FTX, Sam was on a podcast talking about they were waiting to find the right partner to start a stable coin. That was a couple days before a lot of this stuff went down. Obviously, I think the coalition didn't want that to happen to some degree.

FTX was basically going to do what Binance did. And Binance, I believe in September, put out a statement that was like, hey, in a week, we're liquidating all of our USDC positions, all of our tether positions, and we're going to replace them all with this Binance USDA, this BUSD, which was their stable coin. So now that stable coin is up to multi, I think like $6 billion or something. There's a relatively big issuance there now. We're seeing some issues with finance, you know, some market faith being locked. in Binance, we're looking at some of their funds, we're beginning to kind of see a similar

situation to FTX, where it's what percentage of the Safu, you know, the Seifu fund is in B&B and in BUSD. I mean, it's, I think it's almost like 70%, and then the remaining quarter is in Bitcoin. And that doesn't even come close to covering their actual liabilities, if anything was to go down, right? You can't create a stable coin or create an exchange token and then have that be a, you know, a lion share of your assets on books. That's what caused the whole lack, the lack of trust in FTX in the first place was a coin desk reporter, Ian,

did a piece where he was like, hey, like 40% of Alameda's books are in this token. And then like five days later, they filed Chapter 11. I mean, it was basically that fast. So how many exchanges are doing that? How many other people are messing around with stable coins are fudging their books

and thinking they can kind of get away with it when, you know, we have cryptographic proof that this is how much, you know, USDC they have. This is how much BUSD they have. So interesting times for sure. There was a really strange event that happened right before all this happened that Sam's company blew up. The name is Nikolai Munchkin, I think is the name. Tell us who this guy is, what happened, and why he may be important.

So Nikolai, again, back to Stable Coins, the Stable Coin Innovator. mostly sort of in the Ethereum ecosystem. He was the, I believe, the co-founder, if not the founder. It's a Dow, so obviously I'm sure there were multiple founders, but of MakerDAO, which was one of the bigger DAOs. And they were a big part of the, they had a stable coin, I believe it was DAI, di, algorithmic stable coin that was, you know, billions of dollars. Again, and sort of this alternative take on this new type of bearer instrument,

this digital dollar, this quote unquote stablecoin. They had actually created a pretty robust system with some users. And again, you know, this is all, it's very away from Bitcoin and how much of this is decentralization theater. What's hard exactly to say, but this sort of prominent cryptographer and stablecoin innovator, and he had come up and basically posted and said that there were government intelligence agencies that had tricked him and his girlfriend had set him up and his ex-girlfriend was the spy working for this U.S. intelligence and Israeli intelligence. And he basically posted

and said, hey, these guys are after me, they're going to kill me. And around the exact same time that that happened, two really important things happened. And one was that Maker Dow as an entity had a vote to stake billions of dollars of USDC, which was part of their stable coin situation with Coinbase. So basically put, you know, $2 billion or so into Coinbase's cost. offers, which was voted on as sort of a community proposal. Meanwhile, he's tweeting about these intelligence operations sort of closing in on him. And then he was found on the beach sort of washed up with all of his clothes on. And he had apparently gone for a swim with all of his clothes on and then passed away.

Raises a ton of flags, again, in this sort of this Caribbean aisle, this stable coin coalition. So I think a lot of people got really kind of spooked out by that. And then we're thinking maybe that there is, again, this is sort of a hint or an inkling at this bigger picture, this hidden hand of these people. That U.S. dollar is a really important instrument and it's really important for the preservation of the U.S. government and of a lot of these, again, this dollar coalition. So we see someone that actually created a product that sort of took away some of these special privileges from the Federal Reserve from Congress and then, you know, winds up dead on the beach and billions of dollars worth of this community that he was. as a part of decides to completely give up any sort of decentralization and literally just put their billions of dollars into Coinbase directly. I think that raised a lot of spider senses on a lot of folks out there. I'm just kind of looking in at the situation, knowing that

there are bad actors and just seeing this like, and again, who knows? I mean, I don't know this guy. He was down in the Bahamas and I think it was, what, two days before he died, this was the tweet that he sent out, intelligence agencies and pedo. elite are running some kind of sex trafficking entrapment, blackmail ring out of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean Islands. They're going to frame me with a laptop planted by my ex-girlfriend who was a spy. They will torture me to death. And that's the end of the tweet. I don't know if that was his last tweet, but it happened two days before, I think it was two days before he died. You know, for someone who I very much so understand there's a lot of evil in this world, I think

the world's great. I love humans. But I know there's a lot of nasty, perverse economic the consentives that have been going on for years and years and years and years. That's much bigger than me. But when you see something like that, it definitely does. It's very concerning. All while this is going on and we're seeing, you know, more public facing sort of psychological operations of destroying public trust and cryptocurrency. And then we're also seeing, you know, okay, that's some evidence that there's something really disturbing going on here. And that maybe this dollar coalition is violent. Maybe there is a conspiracy. here in the literal sense of hurting people and killing people and spying on people.

And obviously there's an insinuation there of some sort of sexual abuse. I don't know how that necessarily plays in. But this is a hint at sort of this bigger coalition that may be behind some of the more perverse actions of this regulatory regime. It's really scary. It's really disturbing. Obviously, my heart breaks for his family. It seems like he was clearly going through a lot.

I don't know how much of it. It's hard to say what's rooted in reality and what's not as, you know, just being so far away from all this. You know, we know a lot about what goes on. It's another data point, yeah. Yeah, we know a lot about what goes on just right over there in the Caribbean Islands, whether it's through the Epstein, Maxwell, Little St. James Island. We know that there's some stuff that hit some of those boxes that Nikolai was talking about, unfortunately, right there in that area.

There's a big of a lot of just offshore Tom, going on, you know about that. So when we get a data point like this, it's definitely, it's concerning for sure. And that's why, you know, we included it in talking about this story, not that we want to insinuate, you know, that Sam is working for intelligence agencies or Sam is doing any sort of this direct, you know, abuse. Obviously, we don't have any evidence of that. There's nothing that we couldn't possibly say that. But when you're trying to piece together, understanding that something bigger than what we really know on the surface is going on, and you see something like that happen, it's really hard to kind of look at this as a coincidence

all the time. There's just too many coincidences that happened here in the span of kind of, this story sort of takes place really over kind of like three months. And that happened very, very prominently in that. So yeah, it is sort of disturbing. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up and customers now expect proof of security just to do business. That's why VANTA is a game changer. VANTA automates your compliance process and brings compliance, risk, and customer trust together on one AI-powered platform. So whether you're prepping for a SOC 2 or running an enterprise GRC program, VANTA keeps you secure and keeps your deals moving.

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All right. Back to the show. Mark, let's talk about OFAC compliance and ETH and how this relates to stable coins, because you keep bringing up the stable coin coalition idea. And I think that it's really important for people to wrap their head around, 70% of validation happening on ETH is OFAC compliant and its exchanges that are basically the ones doing all of this validation. Maybe talk about some of the more recent news that's come out with respect to the SEC and how they're treating some of these exchanges, but give people a big

overview of some of those ideas. Yeah, totally. I think stable coins are sort of the end game of how the U.S. dollar system wants to see the digital currency revolution sort of take place. I just finished writing a book called The Bitcoin Dollar, and it talks a lot about the first half of the book is really about the history of kind of the modern dollar system, talking about some of these instances of coordinated central banking, whether that's the Plaza, Accord, Redden Woods, a couple of these other things. We're beginning to see kind of how interest rates run things, how the dollar system is this reserve currency, how there's very clearly an attack from non-dollar fiat coalitions,

you know, against the U.S. dollar reserve currency status. And Bitcoin in many ways was obviously created directly as a reaction to the great financial crisis right there in the Genesis block. You know, there's the chancellor on the brink inscription there. To me, stable coins are playing this role where the U.S. dollar system is again trying to connect itself to an energy commodity. In this case, it would be Bitcoin. My thesis is sort of that in March of 2020, that was sort of when the petro dollar died

and when the US dollar system sort of moved to this Bitcoin dollar system. We want to be able to print money. We want to be able to dilute these inflationary effects from monetary inflation, like increasing the amount of units. So how do we do it? We tie it to an ever-demanded energy system that we basically force a monopoly for people to have to go through the U.S. dollar to be able to get access to this commodity. Petro dollar was obviously that system before.

You see us go off the gold standard in the 70s with the Nixon shock, and then we spend the next three decades, you know, just mucking around in the Middle East and creating this petro dollar system. So my argument is that sort of in 2020, we pull out of Afghanistan, we revert to a new energy system, a new pegging, where we've created basically a monopoly, certainly in the high 90 percentage of all Bitcoin pairings are done in U.S. dollars now. You want to buy Bitcoin, you basically got to buy dollars first.

Again, the petrodollar wasn't a monopoly 100% in that same way. Neither is this, but the lion's share, the vast majority of Bitcoin trading pairs are U.S. dollar denominated. And then we're seeing, you know, like cash app and Strike and some of these bigger kind of institutional lightning players. I think strike just came out yesterday with the new API for sending dollars on the Bitcoin network. There's obviously a huge incentive for the U.S. dollar system to get as many users as possible. They love stable coins. That's sort of my argument. I don't see tether and circle as competitors to the Fed as much as potentially partners in this coalition. I think stable coins have a huge role to play in sort of Bitcoin's future and then us as kind of sovereign individuals. figuring out how to sort of navigate this digital world.

So to me, I don't think stable coins are going away at all. Obviously, the SEC is beginning to sort of king make. And so that's kind of the situation that I think we're in right now is obviously in regards to the Ethereum situation, which was kind of the point of the question, we saw a massive swell around the same time, 2020 to 2022 of stable coins on Ethereum, a huge swell. And so what actually kind of happened, there was sort of this backdoor co-option where the U.S.

dollar system kind of drank Ethereum's milkshake and actually created a situation where the lion's share of the wealth on the system was actually in the form of these stable coins. And so what that really did was it sort of took away the lever of these decentralized agents within the Ethereum system from really being able to break out of the U.S. regulatory regime. clearly the majority of ETH validators are based in the United States. The regulatory regime has said as much. And by creating $100 billion worth of stable coins on Ethereum, you've put the validators in sort of this standoff where it's like, hey, if you want to try to slash people out, you want to try to fork off and get rid of some of this OFAC compliant,

heavy portions of stake on the system, you no longer have that lever because if you try to fork away from USDA, You try to fork away from Tether. You're leaving $50 billion worth of value. That's a non-native asset that they can choose to blacklist and censor from the, hey, let's call it team good guys. Team good guys want to fork away from Ethereum. They no longer can because there's this financial difficulty bomb that's basically being upheld by, again, $100 billion worth of stable coins. We're seeing all the people that want to participate in the Ethereum system have to go along with OFC.

and yeah, we're seeing 70 plus percent of blocks coming out on the Ethereum network. It's captioned. I'm in total line with this blacklisting. And so we're seeing, again, this is sort of a, it's a decentralization and kind of name only. And these guys really lost the ability to have any sort of power over the U.S. regulatory regime that's coming and that's here by allowing the U.S. dollar system to create such a stash, basically, on the Ethereum system. I kind of went there. And I think what I'm just trying for people that aren't intimately familiar with the technology or even what Ethereum does and all that kind of stuff, I think in the essence, it's just there's regulatory capture now at this point. And if the U.S. government doesn't like the way that one of these large stable coin operators are functioning or what they're doing, they kind of have a huge amount of influence through the exchanges that are providing the staking service to get what they want.

This whole movement, I think this is so important for people, this entire movement is about decentralization of money away from state, the whole thing. And again, Bitcoin seems to be the only thing on the planet that has achieved that. When we look at every other crypto token that's ever been issued, there's centralization forces, there's regulatory capture, there's state capture that's taking place. And I agree with you, these stable coins aren't going anywhere. I think what's happening, and I'm curious if you would agree with this, is who's ever pulling these strings? I think Wall Street banks are pissed that they had been left in the dust, and all of this snuck up on them extremely fast. And I think that they're trying to get back in the game with a lot

of the antics that are being played politically and behind the scenes, and they're looking at a lot of these founders, call it Brian Armstrong or any of these young tech people that were leading these billion dollar enterprises, these exchanges, and they're saying, these guys aren't going to be in charge. We're taking over here. And we're going to do whatever we can in order to throw these people in prison, make them look like fools, just take them to the woodshed through the means and the financial means that they have at their disposal and all these underhanded games that are played on Wall Street. And I think that they're taking full maximum luxury to put all these tech founders that were maybe be here from the beginning right in their place. I think that's what's playing out right now.

A hundred percent. I mean, it's money creation or credit creation by these big private banks. You know, again, should they really even be called private when we bailed them out with taxpayer money, you know, a decade? Not really. Why is Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Wells Fargo, why are these huge institutions going to let these young tech upstarts be able to issue their own money in a high-rate environment where, hey, the U.S. needs people to buy tea bill? Who's the best person to buy T-bills and create this money? It's stable-coin issuers. So what does that mean?

Are we going to see Tether and Circle become trillion-dollar companies? Or are we going to see Bank of America buy up half a trillion and T-bills and start making their own, printing their own money, basically? And again, I'm using printing loosely. But, you know, that's such a privilege of these sort of de facto shareholders of the Fed and these J.P. Morgans and these institutions that have done the game better. than the Sam Bankman-Feeds and have purchased political power over the years. And there's no better way for them to relinquish control and to have that ownership

popped out of their hands than to get some type of political legal reading on what they've done wrong with some type of massive billion dollar fine that they can't afford the pay. And then all of a sudden, J.P. Morgan comes to the rescue and says, oh, well, we'll buy that. We'll solve that for you, but you got to give up control and you got to give up equity of ownership of stable coin XYC. I think that's the game that's being played. I absolutely do too. I think the U.S. government ultimately needs stable coin issuers to be happy and healthy and spreading that greenback across the world. They need that. They really want it. They need to offset decade high inflation. And then we do that as you increase the users of the system and you have as many

people using the dollar as possible. I agree with you. It's like, hey, okay, well, let's take the power away from these decentralized algorithmic attempts. Let's destroy Luna. Let's destroy MakerDAO, let's destroy some of these algorithmic attempts at stable coins, which again, I think have severe technical flaws regardless. I have a lot of issue of this idea of a decentralized stable coin is sort of ridiculous. It's like, no, it doesn't matter how decentralized maybe the issuance is or maybe the peer-to-pure transfers are.

It's still at the whim of 12 Fed governors and whatever, right? It's like, it's obviously not a decentralized stable peg. It's connected to this huge, huge industry and this huge, huge institution of the U.S. dollar, which is obviously pegged to a lot of other things, CPI and all this other stuff. So I agree with you. I mean, people need to buy T-bills. The government needs people to buy as much bonds as possible. And they want as many users using the dollar.

And that to me is just like stable coin slides right into that little. It's the only buyer. It's the only thing that could possibly soak up all of this. This disaster is a stable coin. It's the only thing that can soak up the treasury markets sell off that we expect in the coming five years. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say, you know, some of the auditing stuff from some of these bigger stable coins, you know, maybe there's some discrepancy there. But they have been en masse, you know, one of the larger buyers of T bills, short duration bills. And I don't think that's going to stop.

If anything, I think once the kingmakers are sort of made, I think we will see that explode. And when we do see that explode, I think we will see a great appreciation in Bitcoin as well. I think that they're very symbiotic. I think, Mark, let me ask you this. So when we look at the government issuing a central bank digital currency that's coming from the government versus a private entity that is basically creating a shell that becomes the buyer of last resort of all the treasuries that are going to continue to sell off because they can't get inflation under control. and they're in a debt spiral. It's almost like the U.S. government, I can't speak about all the other G7 countries.

It's almost like they have to have the private entity in place from a legal standpoint as opposed to issuing CBDCs. I completely agree with you. I actually think the U.S. dollar will be one of the last, if ever, countries or Fiat systems to actually have a directly government-issued CBDC, versus basically every other currency. I think we'll see CBDCs very quickly government issued money as sort of a relation to,

okay, how do we react to the Bitcoin, the dollarification of Bitcoin and the dollarization of the world and pointization of the world? How do we react to that? Let's print money. Let's create a credit scenario where we can create M1 and let's send this out and get as many people using our fiat and buy as much Bitcoin as possible.

I absolutely see that happening. The dollar system, though, it's a little more interesting. It's like that's never really been the way it's worked. It's always sort of flown through these private banks and these big institutional banks. And again, it's something that we've seen the U.S. system do a lot is blur the lines of private and public companies. And they generally hide behind private companies that they subsidize with huge government contracts, with bailouts. we see these huge banks that are too big to fail. They're private companies.

And these are the one issue this joins. But then we see it kind of like a, you know, like a Facebook or a Twitter or some of these big platforms that have had tons of government contract, government meddling in them. But they hide behind being this private company. But they're really intertwined with the U.S. government and with the U.S. government contracts. And so we've blurred this line between private and public. And I don't see that changing. I think that's such a huge right to reserve is the right to refuse service to anyone that they want, and blacklist anyone that they want.

As a private company, they reserve those rights versus if there was a direct issued CBDC. I think they'd actually probably constitutionally have a lot less of rights. I agree with you, man. I see the CBDC from the U.S. standpoint coming far later, if at all. And I definitely see the private stable coins being a huge part of the story. And I think we'll actually see that this year, man. I mean, the digital dollar, we're in that pilot right now, BNY Mellon, J.P. Morgan. We're seeing people present these products and projects to the Treasury, to the Fed, to the Biden administration.

You know, I think we will see a digital dollar, but in the form of a private entity, like a J.P. Morgan or a B&Y Mellon. And I think that's the way they'd rather it. I agree. I think the very last point there is really important. From an incentive standpoint, they're highly incentivized to want to take this on to create revenues for themselves, as opposed to not doing that. And the government itself is basically becoming the buyer of last resort for all the treasuries. So I think that when you look at it just from a profit standpoint, they're highly incentivized to lobby on behalf of them taking this over. Like you said, the pilot program, this started on November 15th, just four days before the SBF tsunami crash to shore.

This is from your writing here. BNY Mellon, as well as a dozen others or so, other bank institutions announced the start of a 12-week digital dollar pilot program with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. We're in that process or just getting ready to come out of it. And boy, things keep getting more interesting by the minute around here. Crazy. And to me, it's really all the same story, right? I mean, I think we, this is the showdown, sort of this currency, US dollar currency versus, I mean, I guess Bitcoin's a commodity. It's kind of hard to figure out what it is. But, you know, we're seeing this big economic story play

out and stable coins in the US dollar versus Bitcoin. And maybe not even versus. Maybe it's totally within the, I mean, I would argue it's within the US dollar's best interest in regards to retaining net purchasing power to tie itself to Bitcoin. You know, we need our debt service has gone crazy. I mean, we're seeing it. We're about to smack into the debt limit again, that old story happening again. And it's like the US dollar system has to make some choices. And how is it going to pay this huge debt service that's just spiraling out of control?

And it's like, well, you're going to have to print. You know, you're going to have to create credit to pay off this debt. How are you going to do it? And to me, it's like, I really see the only people. that can meet that credit demand is stable coin issuers. And I think the world is willing to take on the stable coins and use them. I think there were U.S. dollar users all across the world. I think we're going to see it in this.

Really, I think this year, man, I really think we will. And definitely into the happening cycle next year, you know, it's going to be hard for them to continue to raise rates. And I think they're going to have to issue a lot of money. So again, I think Bitcoin can always go lower and take long think always. But eventually, you know, that's going to be. going to have to happen. They're going to have to deal with this $31 trillion of debt. And they can't exactly just do a Paul Volcker and make rates 10% because our debt to GDP ratio is over 100, right?

Interesting times for sure. It's going to get weird. It's going to get weird. I like that. I agree with you. And I'm very bullish on Bitcoin for a lot of these reasons because it's, you know, this is this demand elastic database that is actually arguably literally designed. for this exact moment from the fiat as a political lever and creating kind of an ideal neutral money where we can relate our inflationary targeting to this sort of neutral database commodity. It's really fun. I mean, Bitcoin is definitely a speed run of monetary policy and macro and political history and all that.

It's fun to like, we've been in this space for years and big Austrian economics fans and, you know, kind of looking at the dollar system and how it's all going to play out. and now we're actually seeing these mythical entities like making their move, you know? It's like the dollar system. We all know that it exists, the Fed and all this, but it's like, who's really the ones being the market makers of the global economy? And now we're kind of, maybe we don't know who they are, what their names are, whatever, but we're seeing the coalition.

If you just sort of connect all these dots, you're seeing, you're seeing them make their moves right now. It's a fun time to be a bitcoiner, you know, if you're really nerdy about all that stuff, you know, because it's like, you can see the ripple. in the water now and just be like, oh my God, look, here we go. There's another move, and it's real. Well, Mark, I can't thank you enough for making time to come on and talk about this amazing article. If people, I believe it's, if we're in the airport, where can people find the hard print of

this? And I know it's online as well, but give people a handoff. Totally, man. You can get it at Barnes & Noble, participating Barnes & Noble, mostly all across North America. You can find it at some airports, some other newsstands here or there. We also have some international shipping now. So we have an EU distributor. But yeah, you can definitely find the print magazine at store.bikoyn Magazine.com.

Tons of great writing in there. I did this piece. I did the research for this piece. And then I co-wrote it with our managing editor, Peter Chihuahua. So he was a huge part of that. Obviously, Joe Rogers is our GM. Rizzo is our editor-in-chief. Mike Tremano, our publisher, and then our amazing designer, AB.

And that's kind of our core team there. But you can definitely find it on Bitcoin Magazine.com at our store. How about your Twitter handle? We'll have that in the show notes too. Give a people a hand off to your Twitter handle. Follow me at Mark Goodw underscore IN. So Mark Goodwin with an underscore under the between the W and the I. And then follow us at Bitcoin Magazine and at the DTC MAG.

And that's our sort of print focused one. Yeah, man, it's a lot of fun. We definitely take it as a great responsibility to serve our community. We love the Bitcoin space. We have like 300 plus contributors that write for us that have written for us online, you know, a ton that have written for us in the printmag. We're a very free speech technology platform. If you got an idea, send us an email, editors at Bitcoinmagizing.com.

We love Bitcoiners. We want to take care of you guys. You guys have taken care of us so much. So yeah, definitely check up Bitcoin Magazine. And yeah, Preston, thank you so much, man. It was an absolute pleasure to be here talking to you. I love the podcast, the investor podcast. Amazing.

Absolute pleasure, man. Thank you so much for making time and joining us, Mark. Cheers, brother. Thanks for having me. If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin-specific shows come out every Wednesday, and I'd love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that.

and it's something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm. So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening, and I'll catch you again next week. Thank you for listening to TIP. To access our show notes, courses, or forums, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permissions must be granted before syndication or re-broadcasting.