Welcome back, everyone. I am Cass PNC.
I'm joined, as usual, by my partner in crime, Mr. Bennett
Tomlin. How are you?
Oh, I'm doing. How are you, Cass?
The same. We have a very special guest
today though, so at least that makes it a little bit better.
We have noted skeptic, writer, critic, I don't know,
researcher, I don't know what you want to call her.
Molly White, who does Web 3 is going great.
And we have her here to discuss, first of all, kind of Donald
Trump's latest crypto endeavors, the Trump wallet and these other
these other issues, but also what life has been like doing
crypto research and being critical of the space since the
collapse of FTX, which I think was the last time we had you on,
or maybe it was during the SBF trial.
So, yeah, so let's get started. Molly, how do you want to start
this? Let's let's talk about the crazy
Trump wallet. For background for people who do
not watch the Trump crypto space as closely as the psychopaths in
this room, Trump and his like meme coin end of the Trump
crypto empire announced that they were going to be launching
a Trump branded cryptocurrency wallet, which would allow you to
buy and sell various tokens with the Trump meme coin prominently
placed at the top. Which was a scoop that came out
and then was almost immediately, uh, dampened by the Trump sons
coming out and saying they had no idea what all of this was and
that they'd never heard about it before.
Is there any speculation as to whether they indeed heard about
it before and were lying? Or is that just is?
Is no one talking to? They'll be just like, OK, let's
move on. Is that?
Yeah, I think it's a little hard to say.
I mean, it, it seems a little weird to me that they would like
sign off on it and then as soon as it was publicly announced
totally go back on that. It's, I mean, certainly not the
the weirdest thing they've done, not.
From the Trump's, Yeah, I mean. Yeah, but I also don't really
see the benefit to them in doing that.
And so I, I suspect that there really just was no communication
and that the Trump meme coin team believed that they had the
authority to use the Trump brand to do, I guess whatever they
wanted or whatever they wanted in the crypto sphere or
something like that. That their licensing deal was
broad enough to cover this type of product.
And then the Trump sons, you know, were basically finding out
about it along with the rest of us and had a very different
opinion of that licensing deal. Yeah, so the Trump sons, even
when they're underoath, have a hard time remembering what they
did in regards to their various businesses and things like that.
So you always have to take their thoughts and what their role in
their own businesses was with the grain of salt.
Salt. The other interesting thing
about the wallet to me was that it was offering referral
rewards. Like in order to get people to
sign up for the wallet, you could get like if you went and
got other people to sign up for the wallet, you got even more of
the Trump meme coin. And so of course, they had to
have that kind of marketing mechanism in there of course
too. Yeah, I mean really, why not
just merge crypto with an outright market multi level
marketing scheme? You know, it just seems like the
natural evolution, especially when Trump is involved, The
perfect. Fonzie, like really what had a
broader level at a meta level? Like, for me, what it shows is
Trump has engaged so broadly with the cryptocurrency industry
and through so many different deals that even the people in
charge of managing his corrupt enterprise prices can't keep
track of all of the various corrupt enterprises he's engaged
in, which is incredible. It's just brilliant to watch.
Yeah, when I posted, I made that map of all of the Trump entities
that are involved in just the crypto end of his businesses.
I wasn't even trying to get into all the other parts of it, but
someone made a joke that was like, oh, they're going to be so
happy that someone has finally made an org chart for them.
And I was like, honestly, you might be right.
And ironically, I think they do not have like Eric and Donald
Trump could not tell you the names of the various entities
they're using in the cryptocurrency sphere.
Can you talk a little bit about how this Trump wallet has
resolved once Donald Trump Junior and Eric Trump did become
aware of what they were doing? Yeah.
So there was this sort of couple of days of just chaos and
uncertainty where people were like, did Magic Eden just like.
So Magic Eden is the crypto company that was partnering with
the Trump meme coin, presumably to actually do the development
work for this wallet or, I guess, rescan, a wallet that
they had purchased, essentially Slingshot.
Yeah.
And so some people were like, did Magic Eden just totally make
this up? Like, did they have no deal
whatsoever with any Trump entity?
And there was, like, all of this confusion or, like, maybe their
Twitter account got hacked and they launched, you know, the
scam project. You know, there was all of this
confusion and then a couple of days later, Eric Trump
essentially announced like great news, we've come to this
resolution where the wallet is no longer going forward.
And the World Liberty Financial Project, which is a totally
separate portion of the Trump crypto empire.
And it is more closely tide to the Trump sons than it is to the
people who are running the meme coin end of the business.
They are going to be the ones creating the Trump wallet
because that was really the original source of the conflict.
Is that 2 portions of the crypto Trump empire was we're working
on what would presumably be a competing product.
And so, you know, Magic Eden is essentially out of the the
picture at this point, you know, sort of going back to selling
NFTS or whatever it is that they do in their day-to-day to
whoever is left buying NFTS, I guess who's.
Buying. Those and the the Trump Sons are
going to be the ones with their grubby little hands on the Trump
wallet branding, I suppose. And like, the fun little wrinkle
for me is like, Donald Trump himself might be kind of
implicated in the licensing deal that like with the Trump meme
coin people because that's through CIC Digital LLC.
And like, Trump's ethics disclosures when he started this
term listed him as the manager, president, secretary and
treasurer for CIC Digital LLC. So that makes it a little bit
harder disclaim knowledge of your licensing dealer, what you
might have signed there. None of it, like I've been able
to sort of clutch together a general idea of probably what
happened, but it still doesn't really make any sense because
like, ultimately Trump is behind all of these in one way or
another, generally via his sons, although he does have
substantial control over a number of these projects and
certainly knowledge of them. And so the idea that, like, this
could sort of happen without there being any connection
between this project and the Trump Organization or the Trump
brand or the whoever, you know, issued the license, it doesn't
really make sense because it is all ultimately flowing back up
to Trump. And so I think there is like a
disconnect there, but there is sort of no legitimate
explanation for how this happened without, you know, at
least one and probably more people screwing up pretty badly.
And I, I think your intuition is probably like about the
licensing deal is probably right.
CIC Digital signed a deal that was broader than they intended
it to be and thought that they had wink, wink, nudge, nudge
handshake deal with the Trump meme coin team to stick to meme
coins and the digital trading cards because there's a lot of
overlap in those groups, even though they're separate
entities. So and the Trump trading cards
and stuff like that. And then they, because of their
desire to have even more money, looked at the deal and said, you
know, and then. Then you have to assume that
these people decided that they were going to launch a Trump
wallet, presumably knowing full well that World Liberty
Financial was working on something along those lines.
Because one of the first things I wrote in my original piece
about this was like, hey, this looks like it's going to
conflict with the World Liberty Financial product.
And that was like, just me trying to write a very quick
article before they announced this this wallet.
And that was like the first thing that came to my mind.
And so how did that not occur to anybody in the Trump orbit
before this project was announced that like, hey, this
is going to step on their toes pretty directly?
I mean, maybe they decided that World Liberty is never going to
launch a product besides the stable coin that they held their
vote to launch a single avenstance back in December and
they have yet to launch that one instance and have held, well,
basically no governance votes or anything since then.
They might have been getting cynical about World Liberty
Financial's ability to engage with these type of problems.
Do you think that there's, I guess there's this is like AI
don't know how to frame this question properly, but I'm going
to try. I feel like, and I know you've
both done organization charts of, of this stuff.
There's so many different entities under the Trump name or
directly working with the Trump family.
It just wouldn't surprise me if two things happened here.
One, they signed this rush deal that they didn't actually take
any time to read or look over. And and then Magic Eden was
like, great, now we can do whatever we want.
And when they decided to announce that they were going to
do a wallet, like I, I bet they just weren't, aren't, weren't
they going around in the Middle East and following daddy around
and like, aren't they busy with bribery and like other stuff so
that they they don't have time to take calls from like magic
Eden NFT marketplace? Like, I'm just curious what you
think, if it's, I guess I'm wondering if there's purposeful
complexity to this so that it's difficult for anyone to
understand or follow or relate back to the Trump family in any
real substantive way, Or if you think this is just people who
don't know what the fuck they're doing and they're just going for
it. I mean, I would say maybe both.
I think both are probably possible.
Yeah. I mean, I don't know, it it
seemed like it really blindsided the sort of magic Eden Trump
meme coin end of things, who clearly did not have a a
response to this prepared. I mean, if you look at the
answers to questions posed by the crypto community around
like, why are the Trump sons disavowing this magic Eden and
the meme coin team and various people associated with both
either didn't respond or they were like, no, no, no, like it's
totally cool because it's the Trump meme coin.
And like sort of just didn't answer the question around the
fact that like the Trump sons were just saying this wasn't
allowed. And so, like, I don't think that
they made a calculated decision that they were just going to
like, go up against the Trump sons and their planned project
and expected this kind of backlash because they clearly
weren't prepared to respond to it and then had to sort of tuck
their tail between their legs and, you know, walk away when
and the Trump son said, you know, we've reached a deal, that
this is not moving forward. That doesn't seem like, you
know, the the work of a mastermind at play.
So I think it was probably just incompetence, frankly.
They certainly seem incompetent. I'm getting a kind of
incompetent vibe from them in general though.
Like there is there's a tiny part of me that likes to invent
conspiracy theories and there were a whole bunch of people
online who were like talking about the Donald Trump, Elon
Musk blow up as a kayfabe as them acting out like a heel turn
to try to eventually come back together.
And in a certain sense, that's what World Liberty Financial and
the Trump meme coin kind of organized or facilitated here,
because the Trump meme coin served its purpose of allowing
people to purchase access to Donald Trump and his dinner and
stuff like that. And now World Liberty Financial
made the final payout to the Trump meme coin team by buying a
bunch of their tokens. Trump meme coin team doesn't
have any more projects and World Liberty has the unequivocal
claim to being the official Trump wallet.
My guess is it was actually a bunch of sloppiness and anything
they figured out was done after the fact, but it's possible to
construct a narrative that this was like them killing off the
highest liability project. I think perhaps maybe one of the
smarter moves would have been for World Liberty Financial to
just sort of absorb it, because then they would at least have a
technical team with them that might feasibly launch thing,
which the World Liberty Financial project seems yet to
have done. Hey, they kind of launched a
stable. Coin, kind of.
They haven't figured out like how to do attestations or audits
or have like a. So like every other.
Sign up Yeah, every other stable $2 billion from MGX.
Maybe they can get Lutnick to just vouch for it with a pinky
swear. It's worked before, hasn't it?
Do you expect any? Like there's not gonna be any
and nothing is gonna come of this, right?
Like this is other than whatever some shitty Trump products.
Like, I guess I'm saying no law enforcement actions, no civil
suits. No, like nothing.
Yeah. Right.
No, I mean, the Trump sons, you know, they threatened to cease
and desist. That was clearly resolved with
whatever deal that they reached. And, you know, I don't think
anything was really illegal about it.
I mean, perhaps there was a violation of whatever Trump
licensing agreement happened, but that's clearly been
resolved. So, yeah, I mean, I don't think
there's going to be anything substantial as a result of this.
Maybe there might have been violations of some ethics rules
that. Started a long time ago.
Didn't that's just taken for granted at this point.
This is this is small potatoes compared to most of that.
I was looking forward to seeing how that, so they did have that.
You know, there was this wait list sign up for the Trump
wallet and there were going to be these distributions of all
these Trump meme coins based on some referral program.
And one person was going to receive a distribution
equivalent to $100,000 worth of Trump tokens.
And I was kind of looking forward to watching that and
seeing like to what extent people were able to game the
referral program or like maybe the $100,000 winner just
happened to be a staunch Republican who was outspoken in
favor of Trump, you know, like that type of thing.
So. How many just and sons can
Justin son refer? Yeah, exactly.
So that was gonna be fun, and that has been taken away from
me. But honestly, I think the drama
and the sort of embarrassment around all of this has been
worthwhile ultimately. Do you think there's anything to
be said for the Trump meme coin still?
Like I obvious I don't even know what it's trading at now.
I know that it went up briefly in price a little bit like when
when the dinner stuff was gonna happen.
Has it kind of stayed there? Started.
To go down like part way through the.
Yeah. Is everyone selling it once
they've gotten in? I think, yeah.
I mean, so I think what we're seeing are these sort of
repeated attempts by Trump and the meme coin team and sort of
those in that orbit to pump up excitement in the meme coin to
drive the price higher. We keep seeing them pulling
stunts like this, whether it's the meme coin dinner or, you
know, the announcement with this, the world liberty or not
world the the wallet. You know that you could earn
these tokens and maybe that'll drive a bunch of trading or
obviously people buying the token through the wallet.
But it seems like they're getting to the point of sort of
diminishing returns where each new exciting announcement
doesn't really generate as much interest as previously.
You know, and it's, it's kind of the same thing with like the
Trump tweets about crypto or, you know, Trump family tweets
about crypto, where like it used to be that anyone mentioning
crypto used to, you know, generate a lot of trading
excitement. And now it's just kind of like,
oh, they're pumping A token again and no one really cares.
And the the price maybe briefly spikes like a small amount, but
not that much. I think they're sort of having
to resort to more and more sort of extreme plans to pump the
token and it's not really reacting in the way that they
would like it to. I guess I'm also curious just on
a more, I don't want to call it existential, but a broader, like
a broader sense of the term. I assume you're like Bennett and
I where this is like naked corruption and it's like it's,
we've never seen anything like this before in our lives.
But I'm curious if you're like optimistic or pessimistic about
like, you know, ensuring that this kind of thing doesn't
happen again or that, like, do you think there's going to be a
future where regulators and law enforcement try to come down on
like the president grifting or do you think those days are dead
forever now? I, Bennett and I just Bennett
just played a video, an old video of us talking and me being
for for the first time and for who knows what, how many years.
I was like, oh, I'm so optimistic about, you know,
like, I think law enforcement's finally getting it together and
regulators are going to finally stop the scammers.
And then Ben, it's like, no. And he?
Was almost exactly. Destroyed, completely destroyed
me and you just see the life drain out of my body as he keeps
going and destroying my my hope and I and I just want to see if
you're ready to take me down again or if you would prefer to,
you know, be the optimistic side instead.
Yeah, I don't see much hope for that, at least in the sort of
foreseeable future. I would like to think that at
some point things will get honestly so bad that there is
sort of a required reaction to it and that we do sort of swing
the pendulum back a little bit in terms of corruption, open
corruption, you know, dealing with that kind of thing.
But right now, there's no room for regulators, law enforcement,
anyone to step in on something like the Trump meme coin.
You know, as far as the types of things that even Congress could
be going after to try to, you know, go after Trump and, and,
you know, impeach him or, you know, impose some kinds of
consequences. I wouldn't even expect it to be
this, you know, so it, it does not seem particularly optimistic
that it will be regulatory or legal intervention that will be
the demise of these projects. It's not to say they won't have
a demise, but I don't think it'll be at the hands of the
SEC. Yeah, Like either Trump is
successful in his fascistic autocratic consolidation of
power, or there's a swing back the other way because he fails
to consolidate the power. And like, if Dems take enough
seats in 26, I'm sure every single committee head will try
to come up with their own investigation that they can talk
about to the press as often as possible.
So one of the subcommittee's might start an investigation
into something Trump crypto related, but you're not going to
see any legal action until at least like, what, 2029?
And even then, like if you want it to come from like regulators,
like a civil action, those are going to need to be like
refunded and rebuilt, right? Like get the new commissioners
in, get the yeah, like higher enough staff, higher enough
lawyers, higher enough investigators.
Like there's not, there's not going to like in the SEC right
now. I don't think there is a
thorough or complete Trump mean coin file that like someone
could step in and use as like the basis of a suit.
And so there's a lot of barriers in that regard as well.
Plus, I think there's the concern that Congress is going
to pass legislation that is going to make it more
challenging for regulators going forward, so that in order for
regulators to get back into the game, they're also going to have
to 1st handle these new laws that have come in.
And that's not a quick process. Yeah, yeah, I mean, every time.
Rustin Benham is they'd take him down to Capitol Hill.
He's like, I mean, the CFTC is a competent regulator, but you
guys have seen our budget right in the staff numbers.
You got to fix that if you want us to take over a crypto.
And all the Republican congressmen are like, yeah,
CFTC's got it. Listen, he said.
They're a great regulator. Yeah, we stopped listening. 6
words in. So I'm not optimistic for at
least the next, I don't know, four or five years.
And even then, like Trump tried a coup and like had very few
consequences. So like, isn't red coin that
bad? Right.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I, I hear that I but this.
OK. So on that depressing note, do
you like, are you at all surprised?
Right. So we had the jury, the, the
verdict for SPF in November of 23 and then we had him sentenced
in March of 24. And now we're a little over a
year out of that. And there's no rules, there's no
regulations. Crypto's booming.
Prices are at all time highs. Like, are you at all shocked by
the speed at which this happened?
Like we went from I, we've, we've had journalists on here
who said like, oh, I think this is the death of crypto.
We've had people on who were like, oh, when, when SPF, when
FTX collapsed, like I, I was pretty sure it was over.
And I think Bennett and I both were like, no, it's not over for
sure. But I definitely did not expect
to see this trajectory. I you can find clips of me, I
thought there was a chance it got kind of regulated to the
periphery in the United States, but that was contingent on Dems
deciding that the political cost of being associated with SPF was
really high and then maintaining control after the 2024 election.
They didn't seem to care that much about the SPF thing.
They got over it pretty quick. The Republicans, I guess,
couldn't make it stick and then they lost.
So. Yeah, I mean, I think the only
thing that surprised me was the speed.
So I had a lot of people saying the same things.
To me, that was like, why are you even still writing about
crypto? You should go pivot to AI like
everybody else and start criticizing AI or whatever.
And I was like, I don't think this is dead.
You know, there's, I was like, certainly it is down, you know,
prices are down, but there was really no change in the
circumstances of things beyond the sort of price change and I
guess minimally more interest from regulators.
And so, you know, I was basically saying like, look,
crypto is cyclical. We see these intense like boom
and bust cycles and these periods of sort of dormancy and
then things go right back up again when there's sort of a new
story or a new shift that they're able to make to drive
the prices higher. And so I, I expected that, but I
did not expect it to be this quick.
I, I thought it was going to be a more a slower turn around and
I think that's because I really did not anticipate the extent to
which crypto was going to get into political campaigning, you
know, lobbying. You know, they certainly had
done some of that, mostly with FTX and SPF doing their end of
things. But when the whole industry
really dove in with the Super PACs and that type of really
overt sort of political messaging with Coinbase, you
know, sending out alerts to people through their app around,
you know, getting out the vote and that kind of thing that I
did not quite anticipate. And that, I think, is why it was
so fast as they were able to get, you know, the political end
of things behind them. Yeah, Sam Bankman freed really
woke them up. Like they went from donating
very little to realizing that if they spent a lot, they could buy
more connections than they thought.
We hadn't Natash from Slate on and we haven't put it out yet,
but we but we talk to him about the two.
I guess I'm this is again a double question.
Two things, one, the the idea that they fair shake and these
other like super PACs and stuff that you that you've done a
great job of covering. They already were loaded with
cash when FTX collapsed like they had money in the bank ready
to go and they still needed to spend it.
So they, you know, that's why they, there was no one donating
after, I assume after the FTX collapse, but they, they had a
full powder keg. So they were ready to go.
I guess in this, this run up that we're seeing and this, I
don't know, all this political force behind it kind of feels
like there's actually not, I don't want to use the word
organic, but it doesn't feel like there's that retail drive
that we did previously, previously see.
Like there, there was something different about the FTXSBF
finance bull run than the one we're seeing now.
Or at least that's how I feel. And I and I just, I'm wondering
what you think that means for cryptocurrency, Like what you
think that means in terms of maybe not this cycle, but just
like it's popular. Like is the popularity waning?
You know, like it might be up, but do people care as much or I
like, yeah, I'd just love to hear your thoughts on.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's really two things there.
I think 1 is that you're right that there is really just not as
much lay interest in crypto as we saw in 2020-2021.
You know, when people were like, should I buy this?
You know, like I'm seeing these ads, maybe I should buy this.
Or, you know, people were really buying into the idea that like
maybe they, you know, as someone who did not day trade or you
know, usually do that type of thing, could still make a quick
buck off of a crypto purchase that's not there.
I think you're quite right about that.
And I think that we are seeing the crypto industry sort of
lying about that. There is this very coordinated
effort, I think from major players in the American crypto
industry to inflate the figures around the sort of lay interest
in crypto, you know, selling this idea that one in five
Americans holds crypto and that that many people are out there,
you know, waiting for the pro crypto candidate to emerge so
that they could, you know, overlook any other political
differences and vote for them. That story was, you know, loud
and clear from the crypto industry during the most recent
election cycle, and it was pretty plainly fabricated.
And then I mean even the. So loud and clear they were
afraid to put it in any of their ads they were finding.
Yeah, exactly. You know, they were funding
these, you know, $1,000,000 ads with no mention of crypto.
You know, there was a great New Yorker piece where one of the
political operatives who was working with Fair Shake was
saying that they really needed to sell the story that, you
know, there was this big block of crypto voters out there.
And someone working at Coinbase said, well, I don't know if
there is this big block of crypto voters.
And so their analysts said we'll just invent 1.
I mean, it was like totally plain and out in the open.
So I think that's a part of it. I think another part of it is
that we, I think the, the retail interest in crypto is sometimes
a little bit lagging. So you know, if you look at past
booms in the crypto world, they often follow major price run
UPS. They don't cause major price run
UPS. And so that's part of what it
is. Yeah.
But I will say that, you know, adding to that, that's something
I've been saying for a while now, like crypto has sort of
been recovering for a while. Crypto prices were up in
November. You know, we're six months later
and I'm still not seeing a whole lot of everyday people suddenly
being like, maybe I should check out this crypto thing.
I'm wondering if that sort of happened already in the
2020-2021 era and there just hasn't been enough time for
people to sort of get back into it.
I'm you, I like you discussing it right now just kind of made
my brain flip a switch, which is I think there was it was there
was such a force behind Bitcoin before, like up until I don't
know, 2021 maybe when people just I know Etherium has been
around for longer than that and I understand shit coins have
been around for longer than that.
But but I think really most of the liquidity and most of the
public attention was on Bitcoin and every time it would hit
some, you know, price that everyone was excited about every
there was a bunch of news stories about it.
Retail would come flooding in. You'd like it would go.
If it went to 20,000, Oh my God, this is a big deal.
If it went to 60,000, Oh my God, this is a big deal.
We hit 100,000 this time and no one cared.
Like no one care. When we hit 100,000 because it
was the same moment that the hawk to a meme coin launched and
all the headlines were about the hawk to a meme coin and nothing
like it. Totally swallowed, no pun
intended. Any news of the Bitcoin price
hitting, you know, this, this, this monumental point that, you
know, Bitcoiners had been excited about for a decade and
there was like no interest in it because Hayley Welch was over
here running some sort of crypto scam.
Exactly. I mean, I think that I it's it's
so funny, I think that all of the liquidity and attention has
been driven out of Bitcoin and Ethereum.
So no one, not all of it. Bennett OK, fine.
But but a lot of it, I do think a lot of it has gone to a bunch
of these other coins. And I think this is like,
honestly, I feel like this is an issue that people have talked
about for years where they're like, as you continue to divide
the liquidity and the attention, it causes problems.
Like, you're going to have some serious issues, but sorry, go
ahead, Bennett. Well, I would contend what
you're actually just pointing to, there is somewhat of a
bifurcation in cryptocurrency where search and assets have
been accepted as commodities and have moved more into the
traditional finance sector in terms of where a lot of their
where at least a decent portion of their volume is traded, where
a lot of the liquidity is and how certain types of like
finance people think of them. And I think this is also kind of
interrelated with the retail thing is you can get the kind of
safe crypto by buying some Bitcoin ETF or you can go to the
like type of crypto where a lot of people have been burned over
the last few years. Like meme coins and NFTS were
both two cycles that in terms of like the relationship to retail
were like highly extractive. There were very few people who
were like making it big in the NFT scene or making it big on
meme coins who weren't like crypto insiders, crypto traders
who were connected and already kind of in this stuff.
And so I do sometimes wonder like if a lot of the fresh fools
got burned doing dumb stuff. And so like you see kind of that
bifurcation, there's the kind of safe one or the dumb stuff.
Yeah, I think that's maybe a part of it.
That was that's sort of my theory is that like the same
people who might have been interested in this a couple
years ago are not like coming back to it because of some new
thing. Which really leads into my my
second thing, which is that the story isn't very good this time
around. You know, there, there was a
story a couple of years ago, it was all Web 3.
It was all this is going to be the, you know, international
computer that you can build anything on and it's going to
democratize the world and, you know, all this stuff.
And look at all these apps that we're building that do things
that are useful to people and everyone in their grandma is
going to want to sign up for it. You know, that was the story and
people were buying that. This time around, it's like,
yay, Bitcoin ETF's and people are like, what's an ETF, you
know, Or it's like, look, Donald Trump loves Bitcoin and people
are like him. The guy's selling gold plated
Bibles. You know, it's just not, it's
not appealing to people. And it's also not really
anything new. You know, it's a lot of like,
hey, look, we did this thing that, you know, in traditional
finance, but we did it with crypto and people are like,
great, I guess, you know that. Yeah, it doesn't appeal to, you
know, everyday people. Well, and like, what's kind of
interesting to me is one of the projects that has been kind of
successful right now is Polymarket, which is one of the
most gambling crypto apps that doesn't advertise itself as a
casino. You know, like that's where
crypto has kind of found people. And like the other types of
pseudo gambling like meme coins keep dying off because what's
your pitch to tell someone to use Sun Pump and to go on sun
Pump and pick your tokens you want to trade on Sun pump,
right? Like, what's the narrative you
construct around what you're doing besides guessing what sun
pump is going to go up, right? None of them, by the way.
None of them are going to go up. Well, like, that's interesting
to me because I feel like, and, and I feel like Bitcoin, it has
found its purpose, right? Like we don't have to like it,
but it has found its purpose. It's used for mainly, you know,
speculative like speculation, but also clearly corporations
are buying it and dissidents and people could hypothetically use
it. They're probably not, but they
could. So I mean it is essentially it
has found its use case and now that we have these more
traditional, you know brokers and.
Somewhere Satoshi is alive and has just heard.
You hear corporations are buying bitcoins and you had an
aneurysm. No.
Yeah, corporations are buying bitcoins and dissidents could
maybe use it, I guess. I don't think they are, but
they. I know, I know I but.
The US government has launched A strategic Bitcoin reserve,
Satoshi. Let me tell you about BlackRock
and Fidelity. The president, The president's
son is now in charge of a Bitcoin mining corporation.
Satoshi. The president himself said he
wants every single Bitcoin to be mined in the United States.
Satoshi. Anyway, I know, I know that
Bitcoin hypothetically has use cases and has real use cases
like speculation and we see that money is continuing to pour into
it and stuff, right? I, I don't suspect it's going to
go away. I don't think it's going to go
to 0 anytime soon. Etherium had found its use case.
I don't know if it's kind of has, I don't know if Etherium
has been going up as much as is it not going?
It's not going. Up so it's been underperforming
relative to Bitcoin. Bitcoin has caused a ton of
infighting in the Etherium community.
They all keep wanting to backstab anyone associated with
the foundation. There's like a whole bunch of
splinter groups arguing over what specific specific trick
they can do that'll make number go up and like another group
that says. Ethereums woke?
They went woke or something. There's also that narrative
Solana went anti woke with some of their recent ads whereas
Ethereum still woke. I see.
So OK. Only Auntie woke enough to
briefly release the ad before taking it down, so it was maybe?
Not that's true, that's true, but so OK, so Solana has
replaced Ethereum now as basically the place to write
pumped up fun or whatever where you can, you can create your
shit coins, which is that's the use case, right?
But then the shit coins don't do anything.
So what are we doing here? And I think that that's what you
guys are like that. I'm just relaying this message
in my head and I'm just like, oh, this is really interesting.
Out of the, I don't know, hundreds of thousands, millions
of coins that exist now, there's one that has actually found any
kind of use case, maybe 2 if we include Ethereum and Solana, but
it seems like that could just be taken I.
Would say stablecoins, yeah. Each other.
It's funny because I'm obviously a critic of stablecoins, but I'm
a critic of stablecoins partially because to this day, I
don't see what useful purpose they serve outside of
legitimately just like criminals and sanctioned countries.
Like, I don't, it doesn't to me, it's like, oh, we're doing so
much for the, you know, for people who can't access dollars.
And I'm like, like North Korea, like what?
Service did the euro dollar feel in the late 20th century?
Exactly. Exactly.
Yeah. I mean, I, I think that's kind
of the common thread is like where there are use cases.
The question is, are they useful use cases?
You know, I mean, speculation is a use case, but like, I don't
think it's going to change the world.
You know, there's, there's sort of and there's like criminal
activity is a use case. Like you really can't argue with
that in crypto. It's the one where it's found.
It's it's most utility, like every money laundering
indictment you read over the last like 18 months coming out
of the Department of Justice mentions Tether.
That's an exaggeration, people. It's probably like 90% or
something. But like, it is like one of the
most common tools of money launderers and stuff.
And the crazy part of that is, is they gave the Secret Service
and everyone full access, right? Like Tethers integrated the
United States government into their operations, and still
criminals think it's the best tool.
Yeah. I mean, but I think that I think
that's actually maybe kind of an interesting loop back to what we
were just talking about, about sort of the lack of appealing
use cases. Is that like the appealing use
case for a while was that you could do things with crypto that
you weren't allowed to do otherwise.
And the one example that you came up with Bennett as of like
something that is interesting to people is polymarket.
And I think that's because it's one of the few things that like
you can do it because there's a crypto app that lets you do it,
but you can't do it with dollars.
And like that is rapidly eroding.
We're seeing people starting to do the types of things that you
could once only do in crypto, you know, much more easily.
We're seeing it as the, you know, call sheet, for example,
is doing election betting. And, you know, there's there's
sort of easier ways for people to do these things without
figuring out how to set up a crypto wallet.
And so, you know, to some extent, I think that the use
cases are kind of going away with the push to A, legitimize
cryptocurrency and, B, deregulate everything else.
You know, it's like that arbitrage isn't really there
anymore. Vlad Tenev of Robin Hood would
personally stab 3 regulators if he was allowed to list election
binary options. Like, yeah, like there's a lot
of these traditional people that want to be doing exactly what
Polymarket is doing. And assuming, assuming that
eventually they get the chance, yeah, they'll edge out
Polymarket again. And Polymarket will be left with
the world's dumbest markets with the world's dumbest resolution.
Criteria. They can still do assassination
markets. Yeah, yeah, it'll be the it'll
be just for assassinations. The Santa Monica fire, that was
the moment I decided I fucking hated everything about Polly
Market and everything they stood for when they For anyone who
doesn't know, the Polly Market folks put up a when the Southern
California fires were happening, they allowed a a market to be
like, is Santa Monica going to burn down in the next two days
or something? And people might be like, oh,
well, that's just a betting market.
But I just want to inform you that when you start
incentivizing that, right, you'd start saying, will this fire
happen in this neighborhood? Like you're kind of being like
nudging people, like go on, set the fire in the neighborhood.
So yeah, the fact that that remained up and had a resolution
is just really disgusting. And they obviously don't have
morals. But anyway, sorry, yeah.
Well, and if I remember right, that was one that was tied into
their like to Uma, their centralized Oracle, their their
attempts at the polymarkets, attempts at decentralization are
frankly pathetic. But that's not that's not the
point. Yeah, not to mention the fact
that the people who are, you know, controlling the oracles
are betting in the markets. It's like, yeah, this is a mess.
Which which was the problem with Auger years ago back in like
2018. That was the first
cryptoanalysis article I ever wrote back when I was getting
into this back in like 2018 and had the same problem.
Is like eventually the resolution if you work through
the different levels that came down to who could like put up
enough coins and hold out like against the penalties for long
enough to resolve the market because you can't financially
engineer everything. Sorry, I'm just feeling
despaired. Do you ever feel despair being a
crypto skeptic at this time? It's only because I've
completely lost my mind. I sometimes feel like I'm
shouting into the wind, like like I could document with like
a pretty high degree of certainty the insolvency of like
an exchange tied to one of the most important cryptocurrency
entrepreneurs. And everything just keeps
ticking along. You know, like there's the
market still feels so disconnected from like what
markets are supposed to be or how how any of this is supposed
to function. Do you ever have that feeling?
Yeah, I mean, I, I sometimes feel like the way that markets
are is what's shifted. You know, the fact that we're
seeing, you know, the meme, meme stocks and legitimization of
sports gambling and the deregulation of crypto.
You know, it all sort of is, is a part of this larger whole of,
you know, money. The, the, the markets are just
gambling now. Like we're just, it's all
betting now. There's no fun mentals.
You look at Tesla, you look at GameStop, you look at whatever,
and it's just kind of nonsense. But yeah, I mean, I definitely
feel a little crazy sometimes, especially when I think the big
thing really is it sort of depends who you're talking to,
right? Because you can talk to people
in crypto and you can do, you know, sort of what you just
said. You can explain how something's
a scam and they'll just look at you and they'll be like, so
yeah, who cares? I can make money off of a scam.
Yeah. You know, And I had to, I had to
come to terms with that a long time ago.
You and I had that same like I had that exact same moment.
I the way I put it to PJ vote was I said I'm going into a
casino and shouting at people at the slot machine and telling
them, don't you realize you're losing money?
Yeah. Don't you know the odds?
Yeah, go away. Right.
Exactly. Yeah.
So like I, I kind of a long time ago had to sort of realize that,
you know, there's really no convincing somebody who is like
totally bought into the scam, but that doesn't mean that
there's no good that can be done.
You know, there's a lot of people who don't understand
what's happening and who want to understand or at least
understand sort of pragmatically what's going on, you know, when
they're looking at it. And those people are often very
interested and can be moved. You know, they have, they just
want to know what's happening. They want to have, you know,
some understanding of it and and they are easy to reach I think.
Is that kind of so you feel like that's the purpose of of the
work that you you are doing? Absolutely, Yeah.
Okay. I mean, I am not writing to a
crypto audience. I certainly have people in
crypto who read my work and who appreciate my work, I think.
But I am not out there trying to deconvert the true believers.
I'm not out there trying to get Bitcoin maximalists to sell all
their Bitcoin. But, you know, I do think that
it is important for, you know, everyday people, whether or not
they want to put money into crypto, to understand what
happens in this sector, especially as it's becoming so
closely entangled with politics and, you know, the sort of
system of the world around us. It used to be that you could
ignore Bitcoin and it was fine. You know, you didn't have to
know what was happening. You didn't have to care.
Now, you know, if you are interested in the political
machinery of this country, you do sort of have to know what's
happening or what this stuff is or what this industry is.
And it affects finance in, in every.
It's an octopus now. I mean, like, it, it, it, it it
affects every and like every. Yeah, I mean, you're right.
Every American should at least understand it.
That is that. I think that's a pretty fair
assessment. It also kind of is scary.
It is, but you know, I, I also sort of make this point fairly
often, which is that you actually really don't need to
understand the technology that much.
You don't necessarily have to understand the financial
engineering, but I do think it's important to understand the
industry and the sort of power that it is manipulating and
wielding and the way that that sector interacts with the
broader financial system. I think that's the that's where
it's really important for people to understand.
And if they don't understand exactly how bitcoins are mined,
you know, then that's probably OK.
Like they can learn, sure. But like, that's really not
going to change their understanding of of, you know,
the, the sort of material impacts of crypto on the world.
But knowing, you know, why it's so important to people like
Donald Trump, why the industry is so powerful and what it's
doing with that power and what the potential impacts are to the
broader financial system and to people who maybe don't hold
cryptocurrency at all and never plan to.
That's I think the really important thing.
And I think a lot of people don't understand that.
And so that's what I've been really working to try to help
explain as much as possible. It's funny because I like I, you
know, like even the concept of stable coins, it's like, you
know, I understand what you're saying where it's like you don't
necessarily need to explain the tech, but then if you try to dig
into it at all, you kind of do, you know what I mean?
Just because it's like, it's like if I just say it's a dollar
derivative, I mean, that just isn't giving it credit for how
fucking insane it is, right? But yeah, it isn't just a dollar
derivative. You know what I mean?
I. Should caveat what I said a
little bit, which is that like if I have 15 minutes of
somebody's time, I'm not going to spend it explaining to them
how bitcoins are mined or what stable coins really are.
You know, that is not the first, you know, that's not the 101
level material I see. You do obviously have to
understand that stuff once you're getting deeper into it.
If you're talking to legislators, you know, or their
staff who are trying to regulate this stuff, then you do really
have to understand that, you know, if you're trying to
understand how some of these crazy financial derivatives work
and like, you know, what is crypto staking and why is that
allowed? You know, that type of thing,
you do have to get into the weeds of it.
But when it comes to like, you know, everyday people who are
just trying to understand what's going around, going on around
them, starting out with like, all right, let me explain a
blockchain to you is like, it's just not the best use of either
of our team. That's a really good point.
Yeah, I. Mean got to start at the
transaction level. Actually before we get to the
transaction level, do you know what Shaw 256 is?
Okay, if you don't know what. But it does it almost.
It does kind of spiral very quick like I.
Know. Sure, sure, sure.
I, I try, sometimes I just try even with, you know, I'll be
talking to a neighbor or something about what I do and
it's like, OK. I always hit the point in
conversations where someone says something that's like subtly
wrong but directionally right and I need to decide I'm going
to just let them be subtly wrong but directionally.
Sniping or if. It's time to start going down
the rabbit. Hole I had a great conversation
a couple of days ago with someone who is, I think 7 years
old, who overheard me talking with their parents about some of
the writing that I do. And they were like, what's
cryptocurrency? See.
And I was like, oh boy. And so I said something like,
it's, it's like Internet money. And they're like, but what is
it? And I was like, nothing really.
It's, it's sort of made-up. And they're like, well, that's
dumb I. Was like, what you got it, you
get it, you're ready. You're you're better than half
the people in Congress in terms. Of you're looking for a job.
Everyone reads Citation needed, I'll say that.
Yeah, citation needed. You can find my words in
citation needed dot news and web 3 is going just great.
Thank you for joining us. It was a fun chat and I'm so
glad that we have your endorsement for Cascoin.
So thank you. The one crypto I hold proudly.