Is ALL DeFi Bullsh*t? with Brad Mills

Of the bad crypto podcasts.

We had to.

other benefits. So far, there have been three drops. Exclusive Nfts. And we want to give you the Brad Mill's bonus NFT. His thoughts on NFT is it's a two minute video clip NFT exclusive for you guys. But let's find out what Brad thinks about everything. But NFT is now in this exclusive interview with him. This is a really rare moment. I think our guest today is the fastest repeat guest we've ever had on this show. Travis, it was May

15th of this year that we had. Brad Mill's on to talk about Stablecoin lunacy, which would have been episode number. Let me consult my notes here. Episode number 608. But there's been so much happening in the crypto world, and I'm going to owe Brad a personal thank you here in a moment. But first I want to welcome him back to Bat Crypto. How are you doing, man?

stablecoin that I hand Celsius. I think now my account has maybe 25, $30 left in it, and it was two weeks before they locked it down. So. Dom All right.

thanks for that. That means a lot that I helped you and I got a couple of texts from friends as well that, you know, one of my friends had a think it was he said he had put $1,000,000 into Celsius. He's an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur friend of mine that it's sold his business. And I was like, Dude, get that out. Like it's not worth the risk. And he did. He took it out, thankfully. And another friend who's a a Bitcoin kind of like he's like a

fund manager type of guy for $10 million in Celsius. And, and I mean, that's that's a significant amount of money, right? So he was initially skeptical to take it out. He was saying things like, well, the Ontario or the Quebec pension fund did due diligence on Celsius. They wouldn't have invested institutional money if this wasn't a safe platform. And I was just thinking, man, like, you know, Bernie Madoff was the chairman of Nasdaq for many years. He ran

a successful Ponzi scheme. Institutional investors are just as dumb as the rest of us when it comes to FOMO. They just that the greed and the the the relationship kind of clout you want to be able to get to associate with somebody that's on fire and on a rocket ship. It clouds judgment. And thankfully, after a little bit of cajoling me and a couple of friends and convincing him he took his money off, too. So it's we've definitely heard stories of people that we've helped the

Bitcoin Maxis have helped people get out. So I'm glad that you were able to get out. You weren't hurt by that.

I think we.

a blockchain and called it Defi. Well, it doesn't take like a lot of digging to start to realize it's unsustainable, like to be able to get that kind of yield, ten, 20% yield when we're at like historically low interest rates in traditional markets, something risky, extremely risky is going on there.

And every time that there was a huge hack like the Wormhole Bridge got hacked or there was a problem with the Luna, the Luna, you know, exit door, the protocol only had a certain amount of liquidity for you to get out to to burn the USD tokens and turn it back into Luna and then sell the Luna like there's only so much liquidity. And as these things

grow so big, they just become unsustainable. And FTI actually Alameda through your capital jump, which is another one that still hasn't gone down yet, that's at risk of it. And a bunch of other big huge VC firms like Paradigm and A16z and all these like bellwether VC brands. I mean, they're all kind of doing all this to Jenner and stuff and bailing out all these hacks that always happen in Defi and trying to provide liquidity into

the system like a central bank does. And we saw this at the turn of the century in the 1920s when the stock market sort of when the big panic happened, the stock market crash, there was a lot of risky overleverage nonsense happening and JPMorgan would go around and like actually give cash to pensions and insurance funds and banks to try to keep the wheels greased so that, you know, you don't see liquidity lock ups because when you see

the liquidity lock up. That's when you run into big problems because people start to panic and they have fear and then they start to pull their money out and that's when you get a run on the bank. So you have this like huge growth of people just thinking they're so smart and they're investing all their money, they're making tons of money, and then a bunch of retail gets sucked in because they see their they see the FOMO of all these returns that everybody else are making.

So the retail players come in, they're not as sophisticated. And then there's all this like reputation sort of osmosis that happens where somebody wants to invest in this superstar because they want to be associated with them and they don't necessarily do any due diligence. So they don't they don't they say like, oh, well, so-and-so is in, so I don't need to do my due diligence. You know, A16z is and I don't need to do my due diligence. They already did it. We're just going to we're just

going to jump into this rocket ship. So then you get into this situation where it just grows too big

and it's all unsustainable. So back in January, you started to see like these these guys that were really trying to act like the central bankers of all this defi and crypto lending and yield farming and all that stuff, bailing out to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars of well, like every month Jump Capital had to bail out the wormhole bridge for 300 million FDX Alameda 3 hours capital like all these guys were each kind of doing these bailouts and it was hundreds of millions

of dollars every time it was happening. And even in the case of Luna, it was to the tune of, I think, two or 3 billion, wasn't it, that they announced they were going to put up to. Yes. For

the LFG.

insider game. Whale whale game that most of crypto is actually where they they see the reason why jump and a16z and all these folks will bail out defi and crypto companies and stuff because they own massive bags of tokens and they are also providing liquidity and making the markets and they can, they can use this meteoric success of the irrational idea that you can just print a token and then market make it on your exchange or put in a hundred or $200 million of liquidity in

a defi protocol and say that that's valuable. I mean, SBF himself described this back in April, May as basically a black box Ponzi scam when he was talking to Joe Weisenthal on an odd lot. And I mean, they were very surprised that he acknowledged that like what they had built was basically Ponzi scams. And SBF at the

time said something critical. He said, If the world decides that what we did was okay, then you guys are wrong, you know, by saying by judging that this is not ethical and it's not right and it's illegal and it's a Ponzi scheme, but if the world decides in a coordinated way that what we did was wrong, then we're

going to be in trouble. So so they were all of these guys were clearly aware that what they were doing, this whole foundation of defi yield farming daos nft, like all this stuff that they use to pump coins and just call it web3, it's no different than the last cycle that we all saw happen, which is ICOs and master node coins giving you yield and all this stuff.

It got disproven. The SEC came out and said that this is not in compliance, but the idea that you could just do it with smart contracts, you know, instead of people and companies issuing tokens, it's like, oh, a smart contract is issuing the tokens, but we're just going to preeminent with our huge billion dollars of liquidity that

we just plop into the defi protocol. So the form of defi that got built on crypto is extremely risky, mostly unethical grift that just gets VCs and insiders rich because they're the ones that preeminent and they're the ones

that have the massive pools of liquidity to put in to get all the tokens out. And then what does.

it obvious that FDX was going to come down? And I described the the foundation that this whole thing was built on and how that enabled extreme risk taking and suspension of logic to be able to value something like an FTT token and in the multimillions tens of billions of of range. And there's lots of examples of that. It's not just FTT token, there's lots of tokens that are just. Michael Saylor's been calling them air tokens. You know,

they're just, they're just full of hot air. And it really is kind of insidious because the VCs hold bags of it. The VCs are the liquidity pool providers, and the traders work with the VCs to do market making and mark the price up and keep the price as high. So they do that and then they borrow against the tokens. That's the worst part. They borrow against them and use them as collateral, borrow against them, and then go pump more stuff in Defi and crypto. They just go.

that there's you know, there's others. You know, let's go ahead issue the warning, in your opinion, as we look at Defi here in Coingecko, you know which of these coins have the biggest red flag for you.

now that's going to go down. I think if anybody lived through the bear market of 2018 and 2019 and maybe even participated in the soft market where people in 2017, the soft market was like super hot, like Telegram ICO, for example, was this really exclusive ICO that, you know, they had raised a couple billion dollars from private investors and a lot of the crypto funds and crypto traders were just really wanted to get a piece of the telegram ICO.

ICO or to use, you know, CryptoKitties. And that was really what drove the demand for Etherium along with just general crypto FOMO, because when Bitcoin goes up, you have this, this like rising tides thing because the regulators hadn't given clear guidance as to what these things all are. So in 2017, there was no clear guidance that like maybe a theory and was a security and there was risk there. Maybe Ripple's a security, maybe 90% of the stuff is

securities and they shouldn't be traded on regulated exchanges. There was no clear guidance yet. So the thing went crazy. And then what happened through 2018 and 2019. People started to reel while the SEC started coming out with clear guidance that you couldn't do unregistered securities offerings. They announced that the Dow was a security, the original Dow was a security, and the original Ethereum ICO was the securities offering.

They didn't make any specific concrete statements as to whether or not it was a security currently, but they clearly said that if you're doing an unregistered ICO thing, you're not in compliance with securities laws and that the original sale of Ethereum was a security and then Bitcoin was not because it wasn't sold to anybody. So bitcoin's the only sort of real decentralized property that exists in the

crypto space. And so that's where you were in 2017 and 2018 and 19 after the SEC came out with their statements. It took a good year for people to realize, wait a second, this market's done like Ethereum's going down for a long time. Crypto is just going to go cratered. It's either going to go -95% or to zero in most cases, because people that had all this FOMO to try to get SAFT that they had missed in the

bull run. They were buying things still at about this time, say October, November 2018, which is about exactly where we are in the timeline of this bear market, where at October we're in November 2022, which is very much the same as November 2018. People started realizing, Wait a second, maybe I shouldn't be buying softs for these hot ICOs that I couldn't afford or couldn't get access to in 2017 at a at a 50% 60% discount. Maybe I'm

actually burning my money. And what I should be doing is selling everything and going into Bitcoin or just taking my money back. If you're not convicted enough on Bitcoin to hold it like just, just go back into dollars and leave because everybody had the hope them and the fuel of all that excitement and all the money that

they were making in the in the bubble. And they never reconciled it until probably mid, you know, like early 2019, people started realizing like the SEC is not backing down from all these non-compliant ICOs and all this stuff is way, way overvalued. So all these all these people that that used to buy ICOs and like, you know, there was Dexs back then. Ether Delta was a popular dex. Bancor was a popular dex. People were using ether. There was lots of pairs you could trade against. There was a

kyber network and zero protocol. Like there was a whole bunch of defi stuff that was built back then and people were using these for it, but it still didn't prevent the absolute carnage in the markets. In 2019, as people started to realize that all this stuff was not in compliance and, you know, it was like a liquidity squeeze and everybody just wanted liquidity. That's what the story of 2009 was. Everybody just wanted liquidity. So the bid

for SAFT just completely disappeared. There was a bunch of funds that went bankrupt and then a bunch of saft got dumped onto the market and people were just realizing, Wait, everybody's trying to get their money back. A bunch of these ICO projects were just selling their ease to get back the dollars because the price of ether's cratering. It was down like 60% or 70%. So it was a game of chicken where the ICOs that had raised hundreds of millions of dollars realized we were going to have

to fund our projects. And if it keeps going down, we need to sell. At the beginning, in the in the rah raw bull market, everybody was thinking like, I won't sell if you won't sell, because if we all hold our ETH, it's going to go up in price

and then we'll all be on the moon, right? But as the bear market grinded on slowly, it was just nothing but like negative negative pressures and contagion from people realizing they have to sell all that ETH treasury and there's really nothing you can do with ETHE in the ICO markets. And the SEC shut down ether Delta. They find the founder and they made them shut it down.

So it was clear like they came out and stated like these decentralized exchanges are not in compliance because all they do is enable a run on registered securities trading. So we like we had a.

They are not just going to sit by and allow token creators and VCs in Silicon Valley and, you know, quant devs over in the Bahamas to be able to just like take over the business and decentralize them and disintermediate Wall Street and Capitol Hill, they're not going to allow that. So obviously they're going to use the SEC, they're going to use the the DOJ and the FATF regulations and FinCEN and all these regulators that they already have put in place to to sort of keep their

control of everything. They're going to use it and. So the way that, like, you know, all this was a nonsense bubble. In 2017, we realized it. We saw the flush out in 2018, 19. Everybody learned lessons. Well, what happens in 2020? You know, the Federal Reserve starts pumping trillions of dollars into the markets, keeps interest rates lower

than they've ever been in history. And then and like the regulators just stand back and think that because they made all these statements before, they're not going to have to deal with crypto anymore because it's all dead. Andreessen Horowitz and all these big VC firm start just basically was trading and pumping money into into this new thing that they called liquidity mining or yield farming. They created this yield farming concept in 2020. And so they piled

hundreds of millions of dollars. And this is where the Alameda team, like the FDX team, started to really shine because they were like first in that Ponzi. And they created their own like they created the Solana blockchain with serum Dex and FTT Token and a whole bunch of other ICO things that they launched, which were all defi sort of like related projects to compete with Ethereum and

the Andreessen Horowitz paradigm, Coinbase, Ethereum, maximalist crowd. And then there was Binance at the same time doing they launch Binance Smart Chain. They decided, Well, we want to compete with Ethereum's broken any way. The fees are $1,000 to unwrap your bitcoin. If you wanted to put bitcoin on, wrap it on Ethereum and use it for Defi and then take it off, you'd be paying $1,000 in fees

just to get it off. So Solana and Binance and all these other layer ones started to compete and they all started to doing the same like infrastructure funds where they would basically put up $1,000,000,000 of capital of, of like honeypot capital to get devs to come fork things over from Ethereum and build on Solana and build on Avalanche. And all you saw was really the rise of like legitimate nonsense Ponzi schemes like Ohm and Wonderland and stuff

like that. Which, if anybody had got caught, knows I'm sorry, but they grew to multimillions as well. I know that's

called rebasing.

thing to try to build the idea of uniswap. Actually, it was funny, the founder of Uniswap Hayden Adams, I think his name is, he was like pissed off that bank or raised so much money and did an ICO and launched a bank or token B and he was like this kind of Cypherpunk esque Ethereum dev. I don't think he had any perverse incentives or was a bad guy or anything like that. I kind of respected him. He was like pissed off that they had raised $100

million in launched token. He's like, You don't need a token to do in a decentralized exchange. So he forked the code and he just ripped out the token and he just made uniswap And people started to use Uniswap because there was no need for a token. So that actually got people using it. Some people, I mean, and then.

call them, decentralized finance primitives. Yes, the technology in some cases is interesting, but that doesn't mean that it validates the idea that you can just launch a token based on that and a token has any value. And we've seen that because a year and a half ago I went on Kobe's podcast up only with Kobe Ledger, Peter McCormick and Udi Worth. WERTHEIMER And I pretty much was predicting the collapse of the defi tokens. They were all calling me like a boom or maxi saying, you know,

you just don't understand it. You don't think anything but Bitcoin is valuable. And I'm saying like, no, like fundamentally, you guys are in a bubble logic. You're drinking Kool-Aid. Look at the valuation of these defi tokens. Even even if we suspend the the Bitcoin or logic and, you know, I'm just going to come at this neutral, right? And I'm going to say, okay, let's say that curve has its token and we treat curve like a decentralized stock and not in a bad way, not like it's a

securities thing. The SEC has to shut it down, nothing like that. Just say that you value it like a stock. Well, like a company you value with something called the price to earnings ratio, the p e ratio. And you look at a lot of stocks in the in the in the public markets and they're way overvalued. A lot of tech stocks, a lot of tech stocks are like 20, 30,

40 x p e ratios, which is just crazy. But then you look at Defi and they were like 100 x, 200 x, 400 x p e ratios because these tokens, they kind of earn a like a an earn mechanic where if the protocol generates, say, $1,000,000 a day in swapping fees, then a portion of that is shared back to the curve token holders. So I mean, literally it's like a security, but it's decentralized, right? So you can't,

you know, whatever. But let's just forget about that argument and say, okay, well, if you value this thing based on fundamental logic, then that chart you just showed me of all the coingecko defi index, everything is way overvalued. Even still, even though we've gone through this bear market so far a year in or whatever, things are still extremely overvalued because if you look at their p e ratios or how much, how many fees they generate and

pay back to the token holders, it's insanely overvalued. So I don't want to say that like Curv token is a Ponzi scheme because I want to be correct in my criticism curve. Token is not a Ponzi scheme, okay?

But what they did do was build a Ponzi scheme on top of curve token, they built this thing called convex and convex is like a bribery mechanism that only the only goal of the convex protocol is to buy up as many curve tokens as possible and then allow protocol owners to bribe the convex token holders to allow them to get on to curve. I mean, it's insane. It's like. Literally. It's just a protocol for for unethical behavior. Convex is just the most insane. It's a Ponzi nomics.

It's a Ponzi Anomic mechanic on top.

some people are saying, okay, you have the crypto market, $1,000,000,000,000 already. Like, what is it worth that much? I mean, I got up to 11. Remember the top top two something trillion. Here we are, way less than that.

You don't even know. And I was like, well, I know that they don't do two and a half billion dollars worth of business right now.

He's not he's not us. We're that's not defi or crypto like don't blame us but really it's they are all in this incestuous like circlejerk of like token trading and liquidity mining like wash trading basically and pre mining and dumping on people and elevating this logic that like a JPEG monkey picture can be worth $1,000,000 or a curve token can have a 400 x p e ratio. And it makes any kind of sense sense or an.

here's the price, here's the earnings. Seriously, when you're talking about the stock market, maybe it's a ten x, maybe it's a there's a 1010 X price to earnings in crypto. It seems like something that doesn't even apply.

moral and pugnacious. You know, I have this moral and pugnacious when I look at all this stuff because it's just like I know that there's some person, some VC taking advantage of retail people just printing all this money by selling people on the narrative that defies the future. And this is web3 and you're in control and blah blah,

blah when it's them. The same people that ruined Web two are actually just coming in here pre mining everything and launching it out and then selling it to you saying, Oh, this is a read, write own, this is web3 you own it. And now it's the VCs that ruined the first, like the last version of the internet are pre mining and selling you dog shit and making you believe it's, you know, you know, drinking the Kool-Aid, believing it's the future. When I loved.

You know, I don't know where you are at politically, but on its face, does it appear like there's some really shady stuff going on with with crypto, the Democratic Party, Ukraine, all of this, is it all mixed together?

He's trying to build the biggest exchange as he possibly can, and he's trying to get regulations passed for crypto so that he doesn't get regulated out of existence so that the world doesn't come together in a coordinated way to figure out this was all Ponzi scams and send them into jail. So let's say that's the path. Well, it would make sense because, you know, his his family, like he has political connections and he's you know, the thing is,

his mom was at MIT or something like that, like his dad's a lawyer that worked, I think with SEC or something. There's there's there's definitely connections there. Government and and you know, the elite of the top universities of the United States. So he has pedigree so he's seasoned and he he can he can have doors open for him easier than somebody like Sisi who's, you know, like

kind of playing fast and loose and shirking regulations. So so Sam starts to, like, want to engage with U.S. regulators. He sets up FDX U X U.S. I mean, he starts demonstrating to the Democratic Party. He starts to lobby lawmakers his. Carolyn, who is, you know, one of the people at Alameda, which is the sister company there who wasn't in charge until the the CEO, Sam Trabuco, stepped down back in August, which was a huge red flag to me. And I was tweeting about it that he

stepped down. So she she kind of came in to lead Alameda and she has this connection in with Gary Gensler in this sort of like two degrees of separation and that there's a relationship between her father who worked with Gary at MIT and then some other like his boss.

I'm like, in the middle. I kind of lean towards more of a conspiracy one on this one, because it sounds it's a little bit too, too crazy what happened with FDX.

we know New York Times is an extremely, you know, leftist Democrat leaning publication. It's not even up for debate. And they're getting called out on on this piece, of course, by their competition at The New York Post. But then you've got Brian Armstrong saying that Twitter is broke in just about every piece of New York Times is writing puff pieces on a criminal. For a criminal feels like a turning point for citizen journalism and loss of trust

and MSM. Hello, Mr. Armstrong. Welcome to 2016 that this this is not new. This is more than six years old. But we saw it really begin to surface when Trump came down that escalator and all of a sudden journalism went out the window.

minimize the impact, of course. And it's super biased because, you know, they put this hit episode on Jesse Powell from crack and because he he was like kind of debating the the idea of cancel culture and things like that. And they were just like, offended morally that he would question the idea of like the the cancel culture thing. So they put out this scathing sort of hit piece

on him. And then, yeah, once SBF comes out as a as an A massive fraud, they, they they don't want to like make it look like, oh that's the guy that was our guy. Right? That was, that was the guy that was the number one or number two donor to the Democratic Party. So, you know, 10 million or 11 million to Biden's campaign and was planning $1,000,000,000, you know, you saying is going to give $1,000,000,000 to Democratic politicians. But it's even it's even like less than

the political thing. I think like on the capitalist sort of crypto side, the way that I look at it more is that, look, Sam was printing tens of billions of dollars just like Andreessen Horowitz, just like Coinbase Ventures, just like Binance, just like Three Arrows Capital was like all of these firms were doing the same degenerate like nonsense.

In some ways it was fraud that they were just printing their own tokens and they were propping it up with this concept of web3 and defi and pumping it with billions of dollars of money and liquidity and like getting people like Katie Horne from A16 Crypto and like Balaji Srinivasan, who's a huge VC in the space to go on huge, influential podcast like the Tim Ferriss show and show this logic to people that you should, you should pay attention to Defi and put your money into it.

And then obviously all the nonsense they did. But what the NFT is tying all that in to where they're literally paying celebrities to shill stuff, putting free stuff in their wallets and then putting them on the Jimmy Fallon show. I mean, there is a lot of nonsense going on. And when you think about it like Bitcoin. Is competing with every single other token on the planet. Every other

cryptocurrency token is competing with Bitcoin. They're all trying to like suck away investor mindshare and dollars and store of value. People are people were treating JPEGs like store value. People were looking at other world or whatever the hell that thing was that the that the the ape people launched. As you know, if bitcoin's other side. Other side. Yeah. Bitcoin's too expensive for you, you know, by some, by

some other side, by some ape coin. And it was being pushed by Coinbase and Robinhood and all these big

retail exchanges. So from the top down, you had all these, all these people trying to push confusing bad logic out to investors and high net worth individuals like Mike Novogratz, who was literally shilling Ponzi scams like Luna to high net worth individuals, and Raul Paul from Real Vision, who was co-founder of Real Vision, was one of the biggest lunar shills there was and had all of his net worth and Luna there.

there's the beautiful tattoo right there. I'm sure I like calling them. Mike No regrets instead of Mike.

Like he. He's just an a moron. If he's a money manager with that much money in Luna, like tens of millions or more in Luna or he's a liar, and he knew what he was doing, and he knowingly sucked in millions of people to put their money in the Ponzi scheme. Because what he did was two or three nights before the whole thing blew up, he pulled hundreds of millions of dollars out of it. Yeah, that's right. That's criminal. I don't know. I don't know exactly if

it was hundreds of millions. It was significant money, though, like it was either 30 million or 300 million, whatever. What? Doesn't matter, really. All the point is that he got people into the Ponzi scam. He got his money out, everybody else got wrecked, And then he says, Oh, yeah, I guess it's a reminder that you got to have humility, you know, like he's he's no different than the Wolf of Wall Street guy, like, sucker ing people into penny stocks and then dumping garbage on them.

Kudos to you, bro. I earned a little respect for you.

was so much a political cover up. Thing where it's like the the the powers that be in the traditional markets were actually just trying to prop him up. And then, you know, he's actually a CIA agent or something like that. And he's like, he's a spook. And he actually blew the whole thing up on purpose to give them an excuse to come in and heavily regulate. That's one of the conspiracy narratives going around. I mean, it's compelling because all of this shit that happened that blew up with

FDX will cause a huge backlash from regulators. But I think more so What it was, was just he had this opportunity to grab a hold of a market lead against finance. If the world started to regulate crypto and if he was able to get regulations passed that gave his shit coin printing abilities a little run for their money.

try again to try to recover people's money. And here's the part that gets me the most when we get to the fool me once, Shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Kevin O'Leary says that he is willing to give. He did invest in Sam Bankman-fried again, which causes like whatever respect I had for Mr. Wonderful to

go your Mr. Stupid Mr. Idiot. What in the world are what do you know how many how influential that is to other people that have just lost a lot of money and you're talking that you would invest in this thief again.

They were holding well.

That's that's what I believe is going to happen over the next year, maybe two years at this point, because what just what just transpired in the crypto markets is just insane. Like the fact that nobody saw this stuff. It's just going to give the regulators an excuse to come in and say, look, these people are all children and scammers. They can't be left alone in a room with each other. They're going to like, start cannibalizing each other and they're going to lose everybody's money. So we

have to come in and regulate this. They're not responsible. And, you know, they got their push and Ponzi schemes and you can't see obvious fraud in front of their faces. And look at all this insane, like unregistered broker dealer stuff happening and celebrities acting like promoters of complete garbage. So we have to come in and regulate. And this is going to be good, actually, because it'll cause more people to finally be able to wake up and see

the difference between Bitcoin and crypto. Because right now it's very confusing because they can go out there and say absolute trash, like people with millions of YouTube subscribers. They have no business telling people advice on how they should invest their money, have the respect in a bull market as if there's some kind of smart, you know, financial advisor that knows the difference between Bitcoin and a defi token or an NFT land coin or whatever, and comparing

them almost the same. So you end up with a lot of people getting into things like Celsius because they want yield or a lot of people going into Defi and thinking that they're going to be doing yield farming and getting yield. So I think it's important that. They

recognize that it's not just SBF was a fraudster. It's that like they got to have some introspection and realize that they are the ones that enabled this market to get to a place where it can be a complete fraudulent base and grow massively to a point where it's going to be literally Ponzi schemes blowing up and burning tens of billions of people's dollars because that's where it got to. And they're all trying to sidestep it right now.

You can see if you go on Twitter spaces or listen any interviews like what you just said with Kevin O'Leary or like what The New York Times is doing, they're all trying to sidestep it and say like, oh, we couldn't see this coming or Oh, he's a good guy. We did our due diligence, we'd invest again. They're really trying to sidestep it and say things like they're out there doing that or they're saying things like, He was

a fraud, It's a centralized exchange. That's the problem. You got to go into Defi or you got to hold your own keys with with the theory, Like they're trying to basically sidestep the whole entire rest of the picture. And dude, I came on this podcast back in May talking about Defi like Luno was Defi so so it started with Defi really. It was these centralized people that

were propping up defi money printing games. And then it yeah, they made markets on centralized exchanges, They, they listed the defi coins on centralized exchanges and then that caused a whole bunch of crazy nonsense to grow even bigger. But this started from Defi like Defi is the problem here the Ethereum defi I like I like the idea like I said before, a decentralized lending, decentralized exchange. Obviously money is the biggest use case that you can ever have

for decentralized finance. Like the money is the biggest use case of decentralized finance. Having a money that's sound and and fixed and trustworthy in terms of its monetary policy, something predictable for 100 years in the future. That's a ten x improvement over gold. And that's not going to just slowly be debased like the dollar. Bitcoin is perfect money and it's the building block of Defi. You got to start with a sound money and that's what Bitcoin is.

And we're building out decentralized finance on Bitcoin. So it's just not done with all these token Ponzi scams attached to it. It's going to be just done like technology, like Bitcoin.

is going to come out and say, Hey, these are all unregistered securities and we're going to see thousands of coins just go to zero? Is that is that it's likely?

like $500,000. It's like a peanut compared to EOS and and all this other stuff with FTT token in the billions and Solana and Ethereum and all these other things that raise, you know, either raised billions or became the pre mine bag of it was worth billions. So why would they go after library. Well it's actually in a game theory sort of scenario. Library gives them a precedent because it's a court ruling. To be able to have legal ground, that all of these things are securities. And

library didn't even do a traditional ICOs. They didn't actually like do this big thing with an ICO. They actually just sold pre mined coins to people after the project launched. So it's an important case. It's an important ruling because it went to the courts. And, you know, obviously we've had tons of SEC settlements where they've said like, you know, hey, Kim Kardashian, you can't just go out and promote this thing.

Here's a fine for $500,000 or a million or whatever it is, or, hey, like, you know, can you can't just launch this illegal security. You're going to have to send all the money back to all the investors. There's all kinds of things like that that happen. But this this one actually sets a precedent that the courts have decided in the SEC's favor. So now this spells a lot of problems for all the other cryptocurrencies that are

most likely unregistered securities because. The shit that blew up in the last eight months in crypto is going to cause an extreme backlash from the regulators to come and look at these markets. And even with the OFAC sanctioning the tornado cache protocol and arresting the dev, you can see like it's clear they don't want to see decentralized

finance on Ethereum. Succeed from multiple angles. They don't want to see it be able to be used for criminal money laundering and funding Russia and all blah, blah, blah. Like all the traditional rules that they have in the financial system, whether you agree with that or not. Like, it's not even a comment on that. It's just they have the guns, they have the regulations in place. It's

clear they're enforcing the regulations on Defi. So people are just out there screaming in the wind saying, Yeah, but we want to be able to do it. Well, the SEC has rules and they have the authority. So you're either risking going to jail or getting a huge fine by just going against the SEC, going against old fact, going against fat if. And look, the only community that is decentralized enough to withstand a government regulatory clampdown is Bitcoin.

There actually is nothing that the regulators can do to the Bitcoin protocol to change the Bitcoin protocol. We saw that play out with the SegWit two X sort of No. Two X movement. The Blocksize wars in 2017, the Bitcoiners like that were running their own nodes. It got like it proved out that the Bitcoin network and the consensus of Bitcoin is not controlled by corporations. It's not controlled

by miners. It's controlled by users that run nodes. So doesn't matter what the government says to the mining companies or to the Bitcoin developers. It's the it's the it's the hundred thousand users that run their own nodes that actually enforce the rules of Bitcoin. And just like how in BitTorrent, it's illegal to download movies, but people still do it anyways because there's like too many people to enforce the rule. They can't stop bitcoin and they can't change bitcoin.

up here, you know, give a warning to people maybe around your thoughts around cbdcs, because as I'm looking at this thing and as we've told you all and I've talked about this, it seems that FDX was a Ponzi set up with the intention to eventually try to crash crypto. They're laundering money that they're given to Ukraine. It's going back to the politicians, not only on the Democrats side. Mitch McConnell got two and a half million dollars. They

were showing it. And then right after that, boom, oh, hey, we're going to we're going to we're going to test a 12 week cbdc pilot program. You guys have nothing to do with FDX or any of that. So, I mean, seriously, this seems like the worst sort of dystopian kind of thing we could possibly have. Is this.

the UBI. Here's $500 a month for everybody who uses our wallet. And if they do that, I mean, that's actually kind of good for Bitcoin, I believe, because it will it will you know, it doesn't matter if it's a dollar or a cbdc. It gets people more thinking digitally and it will show the need for Bitcoin. It'll further separate Bitcoin from everything else because Bitcoin will be then even more will be the only decentralized censorship resistant

money that we have in the world. So I think it's good for bitcoin and bitcoin holders should definitely be wary of Cbdcs, but I actually think that the crypto thing is a more insidious threat to Bitcoin success because it's propped up by influencers that are not trying to like surveil you necessarily. They're just trying to get rich and they're, you know, they were effectively using celebrity influence to brainwash tens of millions of people into buying garbage

and not paying attention to Bitcoin. And, you know, Saez was out there or Sam was SBF was out there lobbying against Bitcoin, saying things like Lightning Network is too slow. You know, you can't use that for money for the world. Salon is the solution. And his lobbying that he was doing was basically trying to put Bitcoin and Ethereum and

Solana in the same category legally. So clearly there's objectives here from the Ethereum crowd, like COIN Center is funded by consensus and they benefited greatly at least 10 million or maybe maybe $4 million or something off the jet coin scam that got ran in 2021. Consensus airdropped like tons of get coin tokens to to to coin center and then coin center goes and lobbies and tries to

convince the government that Ethereum is not a security. So you have like all of these COIN foundations and lobby groups fighting against Bitcoin, trying to lump Bitcoin in with all the pawns is a nonsense that happened in crypto. And honestly, it's like that's what I think is more at play here. I don't necessarily think it's so much like political conspiracies. It's just incentives. Like Ripple is literally funding Greenpeace to fund Bitcoin and say proof of work

is evil and it's going to boil the oceans. Ethereum and consensus are out there trying to flood Bitcoin, saying, Oh, now we're proof of stake, we're green coin. Sam was doing the same thing. So literally this is a battle for money. And while there is some political component to it, people got to realize that like if we don't have bitcoin separated from crypto, we will get into a world of cbdcs and surveillance. Because they can co-opt Solana, they

can co-opt Ethereum. Everything else is centralized. And if we really do want to have a sovereign form of money that we can use, that's censorship free, you got to choose Bitcoin and you got to start learning more about Bitcoin and think a little longer term instead of like, how do I get the next 100% API on my on my, my, my Stablecoins are like, what's the next NFT thing that's going to ten X?

really going to tumble, including Bitcoin because. Bitcoin is tied to crypto. Whether they'd like it or not.

painful capitulation. And there's so many overvalued coins like look at go through coin gecko's top 100 and just like try to rationalize the valuation of these coins for their market caps and just look at the chart at like let's say the Fed didn't print $10 trillion and reignite everything, right? Look at the trend of where most altcoins were going. They were going to zero. But because 20, 20, 2020, like the end of 2020 and, you know, beginning of

2021 bubble happened. Like, just click on, click on. Like not even Solana, because that was an ICO. Let's just let's just look at one of the.

it's not really that valuable. They're more like, if you want to be, if you want to be generous, you can say that if Bitcoin is a commodity and so are some of these altcoins, you could say that like Bitcoin is gold and Tron is like bronze or something like that. Like maybe because a lot of people use Tron for Stablecoins overseas, maybe it has some utility value like aluminum has massive utility value in the world. And I'll tell this story and then we'll well, we can

end it. But like this is the framework of thinking that I like to have, even if Ethereum is successful, because back in like I think it was the 1800s when they first discovered like aluminum, it was a lighter, stronger metal metal than gold, and it was like shinier. So they found aluminum. People had this crazy FOMO bubble over aluminum and they started buying it up and it went up, like in the value of aluminum went crazy.

It got so bad. It got so bad. This bubble that Napoleon had a set of gold silverware and aluminum silverware. And when the esteemed guests would come over for dinner, they would be served on the aluminum silverware. And then the children would get the gold silverware to eat with. And people were just like, buying stakes in aluminum mines

and all this stuff. Then what happened was the Industrial Revolution, they realized that aluminum could be manufactured in mind and like, you know, purified and stuff at a much cheaper cost. And the tons of it, they started being able to dig lower and they found more of it. So the price of aluminum cratered against gold because eventually people got back into the same reality that, like gold, has certain properties as a commodity, whatever a property, a metal that

you can't replicate with other things. And even if the aluminum which ended up in the war in World War Two became the most used metal in World War Two, like it was used for tanks and weapons and buildings and everything, aluminum became extremely important as a useful thing. It had utility value, but that didn't mean that the price of aluminum skyrocketed. It was like the most used thing in terms of like a medal in history and during World War Two. But you don't invest in aluminum.

So I like to think about Bitcoin as digital gold. And even if Etherium gets to like the promises of old Defi, you know, Defi becomes the number one way to settle on the world. And all the derivatives markets move from Wall Street and they go on and there's quadrillions of dollars of a volume happening on Ethereum Defi. That doesn't mean that the East token is a better version of Bitcoin. That means it's digital aluminum, so it can have massive use and still be like going down in price.

you know, in the other markets, like, all right. Is coming back and look and see because they got down to I think well in the in the barest of the bears where there was only like maybe six that were $1,000,000,000 company in 2018 or something. 19.

are off on the risk cliff. You know, it's not a risk curve. It's a risk Cliff, because you get off like Wiley Coyote, you're running off off the risk cliff and you're sitting on air grabbing all these tokens and thinking they're investments. You look down and there's nothing there and.

a serious look at like learning more about Bitcoin. And the best resource for that is actually Preston Pierce's podcast. He runs a podcast. He runs the Investor Network. It started off as a macro podcast talking about the the stock markets and value investing, things like that. And then he started getting into Bitcoin. He created the mayor multiple

and he's been my favorite Bitcoin commentator since. So don't, you know, don't follow me or pay attention to me, just like start learning more about bitcoin and follow Preston Fisher's podcast. Follow him on. On Twitter and. That would that would make me feel good.

that he kept all of them. And so I think what we're going to see is those people are going to be all on them. Then he's going to start hiring good people. And because really when you have really good, productive people who know what the hell they're doing, these other people really slow them down, right? And so let them be part of the hiring and of great people later on, because I don't think you don't need 8000

people around Twitter. You need 8000 people. If you're talking to every government and wheeling and dealing with every politician. But from what I've seen, I catch heard even retweeted it. He said 99, it was a Tim Poole tweeted it said 99.6% of Twitter people are gone. He's down to the 50 very best employees. And now he's going to build that from there. Can you imagine if all of them were just so shitty? I haven't noticed any decline in Twitter yet. No, it's got more funny, actually.

sued for $1,000,000,000 and they got canceled. I the thing is, they go off on him about the thing that happened in Connecticut. Right. And the shooting. And because he was I remember what he basically said was, yeah, there's it's not exactly the story they're telling is not the correct one. I don't think he ever said people didn't die, but he said the FBI was going in with them. And and and now we all.

with a professional financial advisor. Please understand that the trading of Bitcoins and alternative cryptocurrencies have potential risks involved. Anyone wishing to invest in any of the currencies or tokens mentioned on this podcast should first seek their own independent professional financial advisor.