Decentral Lens: Year End & Year Ahead | BTC's 2024| NodeMonkes Auction | NYT Sues Open AI

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to Decentralized On, where lifelong friends Chicago and Disco navigate the ever-evolving crypto landscape With genuine curiosity and a commitment to nuance. As our North Star, we offer clear-eyed exploration. Our goal To empower listeners with the tools and insights needed to flourish in this decentralized age.

Speaker 2: 0:20

All right, welcome everybody. Last show of the year. It is the end of 2023. What a wild and crazy year it has been. I am Chicago and on my right is Disco. How are you doing Disco?

Speaker 1: 0:36

I'm doing great, everybody. I couldn't be more excited to turn the page, jump into 24, and see what happens. The one thing I've learned over the last handful of years is I really don't know what's going to happen. I know it'll be interesting. That's all I got.

Speaker 2: 0:52

Yeah, this is the only industry where the more you dig, the less you know. You just keep going to different tiers of underground rabbit holes. I'm thinking of the Matrix not the first movie, but those second and third, where they had all those tunnels and all the weird electronic firefly cars, the nebican-ezzer. You just keep going in these different levels up and down and all around. The smarter I think I get in this space, the less I know, which is beautiful and it's insane.

Speaker 1: 1:27

Yeah, it's not boring, that's one way to say it. Kind of a similar thought. The first time I went to Seoul, south Korea, it was like I had no idea that there was eight levels underneath the surface of the roads that are going on. It was just like once you get to those places and there's like whoa, you're at the lobby of the hotel, but underneath it's a shopping mall and underneath it's this. It just is so incredible.

Speaker 2: 1:55

Does it really go down? I doubt it. Does it really go down a bunch?

Speaker 1: 2:01

Yeah, at least when I went there they were always on the forefront, or adopted, of technology. One of the bigger demands for the leadership of the city was to really have a stewed Wi-Fi that could handle underneath subterranean stuff. It was incredible. I completely agree with the complexity and the layers, and anyone I know that thinks that they're smart. I don't necessarily put them in that category, because the smarter people are, the more they admit that they really don't know that much, because there's so many levels to everything and surface level stuff is certainly not the jam anymore.

Speaker 2: 2:41

Yeah, that's a really good point. It's basically, I think, the people you want to follow are the people who are like look, everything's changing. It's a changing landscape all the time. This is my opinion. Here's the data behind it. I think we can both agree with X, Twitter. What have you where most of the conversation for crypto happens? Obviously, instagram's getting bigger, but that's just even a bigger, hotter mess. It's just gotten this become spam central, and the loudest voices have resulted, in my opinion, the best returns on coins almost one-to-one directly.

Speaker 1: 3:29

Yeah, yeah, it's like a marketplace for shilling. Then you go and you wonder okay, but who's encouraging or funding the messaging that's getting it? Then you're like, well, there has to be an ROI on this programming, because you do see the corresponding or correlated rise in price. We talked about it in another show and it's like I just don't really know who's in these inner circle realms that have a heck of a lot more of a at least of a strategy than retail folks. There's more to it. I think that with a lot of the things that, once you get that, you get the crypto bug and you get the bug on this or that, but once you get the bug on digging a little bit, it's almost infinite how many levels and places you can go.

Speaker 2: 4:23

Yeah, absolutely Well said. I think it's worth pointing out, too, that a lot of people are fed up with crypto Twitter. I know I just saw DC Investor. He's like forget it.

Speaker 2: 4:34

I'm going over to Farkaster and I think the more this happens, the more people are like you can't have a. I think everyone wants a nuanced conversations and I think a lot of these influential people who I like and follow are willing to have interesting conversation, to nuanced conversations, and maybe even some of them are confident enough in themselves to know that they may be wrong. I know that's how we approach it, like hey, I'm open to a different take, but I know he's going. People talk like, but then they always come back to crypto Twitter. But a big one was Zach. As EBT, he has been probably the number one voice in our space to point out grift. I can't speak for him, but he just deactivated his account entirely. I think he or she basically, the more they dug, the more at its core and even the distribution of something seemingly very decentralized like ETH was just rife with alleged ties to the Chinese government and all these different entities all over the world that are certainly less than savory.

Speaker 2: 5:52

He deactivated and who knows, maybe he could be got threatened or maybe he got too close to someone. It scares you because those voices of reason, like I said, I just keep. Every day I get on crypto Twitter, I prune at least five or six folks or at least unfollow their reposts. I turn off the reposts just so I can have a cleaner timeline. And it's getting way, way less as ooky, as you can imagine, and more and more big macro trends, which is the stuff I'm interested in anyway. But seeing him go, dc investor, obviously Pollyania I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right.

Speaker 1: 6:28

I think I should do that too. Yeah, I don't need to either. That's a tough one for me to. How it's written texturally doesn't give me a straight idea of how to translate it.

Speaker 2: 6:37

Yeah, a lot of these folks left and if you go on Farkast or even the bankless guys were like, hey, we're planting our flag, or whatever. That one feels a little less authentic to me because they're still, honestly, I feel like they're getting more and more hype-trained.

Speaker 1: 6:53

Farkast or bankless.

Speaker 2: 6:55

I think bankless I actually did something. My main source of podcasts is I do a lot of YouTube, but my main ones that I follow are on just the cruddy Apple podcast app. I think it was Friday or Saturday. I was looking at something to watch, I was going on a bunch of errands and I was all excited and I unfollowed bankless. I was like you know, I'm done Now that they just had the Solana guy on again not that there's anything wrong with that, but I just don't. Something feels off and I feel like they're pivoting to more just cash count. Now you know what. I can get my news from plenty of places. Now that you and I are giving our honest, fair takes, I don't need them anymore.

Speaker 1: 7:42

Yeah, I'm not saying oh, we're coming for them or what's happening or anything, but bottom line is, you look at careers and you look at things and God bless things for having their really great moment in time. When I got turned on to it, it was a really kind of a special onboarding feeling like I'm part of something and an educated Kind ofa resource and everything like that. But it's tough, especially when there isn't a roadmap for the industry, let alone anything else. You wonder if some people reach a level of success or audience or whatever it may be. It's some of the things that are just in our heads for themes this week. Do they hit a certain level of exposure? Where then people get in their heads on hey, this is what you should be doing now, or hey, look, let's get you doing this, this or that?

Speaker 1: 8:38

I know we even talked about a little with the real vision side of things too. It's like you kind of feel almost like are there people behind it now who are really trying to go growth and take these things to different levels? I think that one thing that's great about what we're trying to do here is we don't have aspirations of anything really. We're not looking for any exposure. We're not looking for anything. We're just trying to have conversations and looking for some knowledge and some interesting things to talk about. Frankly, we're looking for an outlet to talk about things that not many people in our day-to-day really want to go down with. I was dying to talk to folks about some of this stuff over the holidays. I realized I'm like, yeah, we should do a show, just so we can put space on what happened.

Speaker 2: 9:25

Yeah, no one out there cares If we get excited to talk to Normies about it. You're going to have to explain to them very slowly anyway. Yeah, there are last couple of shows that have been all this Eigen layer. Their last show is about the risks of it now, because people probably called them out. They're like dude double staking something.

Speaker 1: 9:42

Are they serious? Yeah, really, really.

Speaker 2: 9:46

And then the show. Actually, the last one, I think, was Solana, and then Eigen was before it. So it's like they are pumping these things hard and it just doesn't feel. I'm sure in this bull market they will be among the biggest or they still may remain the biggest, and I think a lot of the OGs already have moved on from them and it may take time, but I think other ones we'd certainly love it to be us, and if you're out there and you've got to take different than ours, or you just want to talk about stuff or you have a good idea for the show or a segment to talk about and decentralization, ai or crypto, hit us up, because I think, with all the crypto Twitter hype getting worse and worse and worse with the algorithms, I think a group of us needs to stick together and be like all right, at least I can trust these folks.

Speaker 2: 10:36

For us, we want it to be decentralized, but we want it to be with our audience too, because this space is hard enough as it is. As Disco said many times, the FOMO filter it's so easy to have your brain hijacked. So if we're in it together, we follow the signaling from other people who have a more metered approach. Like us, we're only all going to benefit and I'm guessing we'll see good gains, probably mitigating some of the risk. And also the risk of just like how many NFTs did I buy last month? The month as you balance your books? You're like Mike did I need all these things?

Speaker 1: 11:16

Allow us to be part of your accountability partnerships.

Speaker 2: 11:20

Well said, it's like decentralized on accounting firm.

Speaker 1: 11:27

We will help. Anyhow, it's such an interesting end of year time. There's different ways to do it. We always usually like to talk through some of the happenings over the week and, that being said, crypto Twitter was a little slower. People are bigger, folks are taking bigger breaks and stuff like that right now but there still was quite a bit of year end stuff that was relatively interesting to check in on and then just to think of some of the things that are coming down the pipe as we turn the page to another year. So I don't know where we want to start today. Do we want to get into some of the stuff, that some of the stories from last year?

Speaker 2: 12:10

Yeah, sure, let's talk about 23 and just let's just look at the big picture. So obviously a lot of the big runs happen at the end of the year.

Speaker 2: 12:22

Right, I mean namely what it was at. I think it was late September. It might have even started in early October. But the big ones are obviously injective coin. I know injective went up thousands of percent and obviously the big main chain one was in the top 10 was Solana, which has just gone meteoric. Since October it was 20, maybe even 19. And now I know we peaked. We think we peaked at 120, 130.

Speaker 1: 12:51

So I saw a 123. At least you know it's going over the week.

Speaker 2: 12:57

So six acts in two or three months. I mean just insane. And again, I think a lot of that was commensurate with the hype of crypto, twitter, but also all the experimentation and degeneration that Ethereum's had in the last couple of years with NFTs and specifically DeFi and airdrop tokens. Remember Solana, hasn't? They certainly obviously already had NFTs. That was in full steam ahead mode in the past year or two, but DeFi was not. And now with all the airdrops, like this bonk token which has come down to earth again, but I mean Solana is just going nuts. And I think that with the narrative really in both timelines and people's comments like you couldn't escape it and you know it's thawed quite a bit. I think it's back down in the 108s, 109s or something, but it just went on a tear. It's still a five plus X.

Speaker 1: 13:51

You couldn't, you almost could. It was almost impossible to not have FOMO on that, especially because, especially if you've been in the space for a little bit, like you've been aware of it forever and then seeing it go, it was like okay, wow, I don't want to be the one that sleeps on something that I've been aware of for a long time. And I think a lot of people kind of you know, who are at least waiting in the space for kind of this next bull run to really kick in, probably picked up a little bit, just to kind of hedge their bet and not be the one that picked the wrong horse.

Speaker 2: 14:23

Right, yeah, I mean it's. I FOMO'd into Solana two weeks ago at 70. And you know I'm happy with the run. I want to set up another ETH validator and you know, if I bail now this gets me closer. But I suspect it's got a little more running it. But who knows, I could be wrong and it could go the opposite way. But I hedged a little and spread it out from mostly Bitcoin in Ethereum to just hit Solana, purely for the fact that I saw the three X on the Google search queries for like October through. Yeah. So I was like you know what it's, the new people are coming in, the fees are low, but you know, in no way or shape or form would I buy at this point a Solana NFT, but I just that network. I don't know if it's here for the long term, but you know there's room for a lot of networks. I just pick ordinals for me and odd chain NFTs are the way I'm going.

Speaker 1: 15:20

So, looking for those who are listening, we have just a chart up and this is from CoinDesk and it's a CoinDesk market index which is essentially their version of an S&P 500 for more digital assets and stuff. And you do see that Bitcoin this was really a big year, you know, in terms of the performance and kind of a resurgence of Bitcoin. So I think that you know when you kind of look zoom out like, yeah, solana got a lot of buzz and, you know, made some huge gains and everything but Bitcoin really had a strong showing overall and looking at just, you know how that over preformed, over performed, you know significantly. And then you know Ethereum again, it didn't. It's not tanking, you know it's not, it's not underperforming massive, but it's not keeping up with what's going on. And you know I don't know we're not making predictions or anything from that perspective, but you know I remain bullish on seeing Ethereum have a big time in the spotlight in the coming days. So we'll see if that's right or not.

Speaker 2: 16:28

Yeah. So basically you know, and one thing people have to think about too is it's at some point when you make a chart, you always have to put a beginning and an end and obviously the comparisons are always January 1st through December 31st or whatever. It's a yearly charts and you know Ethereum was down at the beginning of this year and because of the Bitcoin ETF, everything is up. So the point here is that obviously you know they got Bitcoin up at about 150, 160% on the year, the calendar year. Eth is up probably 60 to 70%, but the CMI, the basket of like all cryptocurrencies, is up like 110%. So the only big point is here that Bitcoin outperformed the full CMI basket market, obviously because of the ETF and because it's the, you know, most decentralized and the most hardened at this point. But Ethereum lagged way behind. So I guess that is a good springboard to say like do you think in 2024, do you think ETH's fate will change or do you think there's so many builders there like, it'll come, it doesn't matter when it'll come.

Speaker 1: 17:38

I think it's gonna come. I couldn't be more happy about the opportunity to continue to be able to acquire at a lower rate and you know, I just I have the FOMO of the oh, the ETH train left the gate and I didn't, you know, get to the points that I wanted to get to be able to execute some of the strategies I want to. So I think that that's there and we also haven't. I think it probably is very dependent or somewhat dependent on if Bitcoin does get the ETF in January, because they're next in line in May for that run of it. So if we see that it actually happens and it comes through, then what's gonna happen?

Speaker 1: 18:22

people are gonna be like oh well, don't forget about Ethereum, you know, and that's coming next. So I think that you know I'm happy and I think people need to be more happy for, you know, any success in the space and any sort of exposure and look at it as not as much like oh, this is a team in my division I root for. It's like guys, the whole space. There's gonna be plenty of opportunities for all the different chains that are, you know, doing well and built right. And I think that if you really look under the hood and I'm not a technologist or anything like that, but everything I've understood about it is that you know Ethereum's really got. It's really got some good stuff under the, in the engine, in the engine under the hood, and that hasn't stopped.

Speaker 2: 19:03

So yeah, and a lot of people are using it. Like you said, the big date for Ethereum is May. It will be interesting to see. I mean, obviously the SEC has, you know, with Bitcoin, I mean, it's taken 10 years to allegedly get there, hypothetically get this ETF approved by January 10th Looks like the date we may be getting if this goes through. But you know, with Ethereum, you know they have to look at it all over again.

Speaker 2: 19:28

Whereas Bitcoin was fairly distributed from the beginning, it started out with mining you know blocks of coins and those blocks. You know, at the happenings, each block it became smaller and smaller, but it was a fair distribution theoretically, anyone who knew about it could have gotten involved. Ethereum, I think, was far better than Solana as far as its distribution, you know. But the foundation and Vitalik and Joe was it Lubos or whatever his name is with? Was it Dapper Labs? Like those guys are sitting on a lot, but I don't think it is nearly as much and as lopsided as some of these other Ler2s and you know these other tokens where the teams are holding a lot of them with the VCs, and that's another big reason I just don't love Solana. It just feels like the distribution was very, it would be very easy to have.

Speaker 2: 20:25

You know what does Ethereum? 120 million tokens roughly. I think Solana is in the 500 or 400 or 500 million range, like not that the amount of tokens in itself matters, but like how many are being held back by. Then, I know, staking I think it's in the 60% high, 60% range of Solana staking, whereas ETH is only, you know, at 23%. So to me there's a lot of red flags, but you know I'll jump on the bandwagon short term, but longer term, you know, I'm probably Bitcoin first and ETH second, heading into 24.

Speaker 1: 21:00

Well, there's one gentleman who's certainly Bitcoin first and so much so. The firm is called MicroStrategy, meaning there's one strategy involved, and they, mr Saylor, scooped up an additional bag of Bitcoin to add to his stash, so they put another 615 million in, so that's making their, which is the equivalent to like 14,600 something you know coins, and now they're sitting at close to 5.9 billion in a US dollar, equivalent to what they have. So that is, that is, you know, we've done a few something goods and you've done a few something goods and you've talked about, you know, consistency and showing up and doing it. And there's a guy who's turned off the FOMO and focused, and you know it leads to, you know, the question of like, how much is going to be available and how much does he kind of represent, or the company represent, of the addressable market? And when you have these potential new demand with potential approving of these ETFs, how's that all going to shake out? Do all roads have to go through him? He's got a lot.

Speaker 2: 22:22

What does he have? I think he has 189,150 Bitcoin at an average cost you told me before the show at 31,168 coins. So he is in the black. He is in happy, happy land. He's up at least 25, 30%, up at 43 now. So hats off to him. What a convicted person.

Speaker 2: 22:49

You run this company, you're in tech, you have a lot of clients and he convinced the board. He was a majority shareholder, so he really convinced himself and COVID went down the rabbit hole and was like every time he probably looks at his numbers, every time they have a board meeting he's probably like well, guys, we could do some more marketing and really expand our clientele and hire a sales force and really have more account managers all over the world, or we could buy more Bitcoin. Bitcoin, I'll say I and I think from our standpoint as insiders, people who've been around in a while I'm sure people from the outside think it's crazy. To me it's like it makes sense. How are you going to beat, with actually doing labor, the squeeze that's going to happen? A Bitcoin. It might not happen January 11th, but it's going to happen.

Speaker 1: 23:41

Yeah, I traveled for the holidays back to my hometown and there are at least three times where someone was like, oh, we're saving a couple hundred dollars by doing it this way. I'm like, well, just put it into bit. They're like what are you talking about? It was so second nature. I'm like, oh, if you're saving that, then just go stack more bit. And that's what he did. And I think what's cool about this is that this recent purchase that we're talking about was at $42,000. So it's not like he was waiting for a big dip. It's not like he lacked conviction after the run-up that we saw for $23,000. At the end he went back in and bought at pretty much the peak that we've seen, at least since two years, right, so he's not shy about buying at this price. I don't know. It pats off, because that's conviction personified in my mind.

Speaker 2: 24:35

Oh, it's crazy, yeah.

Speaker 2: 24:36

So just to put numbers to that Disco just mentioned, the more he grabs and the more you know. Some of these ETFs must be pre-nibbling a little although I suspect some of them aren't, because you would think it would just already be a squeeze but the amount of Bitcoin that left the exchanges so your finances, obviously, your coin bases and all the other little ones that a lot of you haven't heard of in the last seven days, 20,147 more Bitcoin left the exchanges. That's $875 million off the exchanges. So the total on the exchanges right now is 9.2%. So every week, right now at least until the ETF comes, we're looking at that number because we want to see, like, at some point, is there going to be a squeeze? Or, when the price goes up, are more people going to be like you know, let's sell the news, I'm going to put it on the exchange and get that percentage, either even at 9.2% or even go up, and I'm going to make my hefty profit. I waited and now I made the profit. I not financial advice, but I'm not, you know.

Speaker 2: 25:44

And I might see a dip, but I'm not going to time this thing. Like I think you know, you've got to remember the other thing that happened that that accounting rule where Bitcoin now is allowed to be actually like a monetary denomination asset on a balance sheet. Before it wasn't, so they had to change the stipulation there and I kick myself for not getting the words right. But basically now you can put Bitcoin on there and it's the fair market value of that on your balance sheet, and before it was just like well, and you have the Bitcoin. It was almost like it. It showed it.

Speaker 1: 26:23

It's almost like it was like off the menu Right.

Speaker 2: 26:26

So, yeah, you all of a sudden, you have 13 billion on your books and then you buy a bunch of Bitcoin. You buy a billion of Bitcoin just to kind of head against the dollar, and then you're showing 12 billion, like obviously that doesn't work. Now you will actually show that value of 13 billion and maybe, as this squeeze happened, maybe they didn't even go up. So it's not just the ETFs here, it's a whole litany of folks, including companies, that could be putting a pressure on this in the next couple of years, and that's what I'm looking at.

Speaker 1: 27:01

It could be companies, it could be states, it could be. You know like there's just so many different potential participants.

Speaker 1: 27:09

I guess is the way to go with it and you know, not to take a turn, but just to take a turn. Related to that is, you know, I know that we were kind of texting and talking a little bit about. You know, not necessarily you know what we were saying earlier on the show, like thinking a couple levels deeper on this stuff and you almost wonder, like what's going to happen to what was so attractive about Bitcoin for the past. You know 14 years or whatever it is this whole. You know notion of the white paper and the complete decentralized nature of this and the immutability of it, and you know all these things.

Speaker 1: 27:49

It's almost like did it become legitimate in the eyes of investors and power structures and people that are way more influential than we would ever understand or imagine to be, and is potentially making it a commodity or I don't know what the right financial term, but making it an ETF and having it be that available widespread, will that inevitably take away some of the beauty of the ethos that attracted, you know, the original people and the early people into it?

Speaker 1: 28:25

Like, is it almost like? You know, nirvana was doing great, bleach came out, subpop was there and then, you know, you know, geffen found their way into distributing, you know, nevermind and Kurt Cobain never recovered from dealing with that success globally that they weren't really digging Like. It was like. It was like this battle, internal battle for him, of being like dude. I wanted to make you know music that meant something to me and now it's being, you know, sold at Toys R Us and you know, everywhere in the world. And, you know, could I go back to being an indie band in Seattle and, you know, making music I like with my friends and touring in a van and doing it that way, or do we now have to, you know, headline Rock and Rio to 400,000 people? And is there a potential that this, you know the beginning of next year, could represent a completely different beginning of an era for Bitcoin overall?

Speaker 2: 29:25

Yeah, that's a really good question. I think it's going to change a lot because you know, as big as the you know. Let's take an NFT whale like a big spender in NFT spending a couple million, 10 million bucks or whatever, like someone who's probably a trader, hedge fund guy, who's like pure degeneracy but is just buying all the big stuff like that, you know, to us in the NFT world is a whale. Then you've got the big, you got the sailors is just although he still will be a whale, you know. But you've got these bigger folks in these companies who are early whore whales with Wall Street and with BlackRock, you know, holding a trillion, trillion five and assets like this is whale, exponential whales, right, and so they're going to. They're going to put Bitcoin, they're going to turn everything into paper trades. The beauty is you can put it in your retirement accounts. But it is absolutely going to change.

Speaker 2: 30:17

I think the biggest thing we have to look up, look out for and and keep our hackles up for and fight for is the freedom to transact and the freedom to hold our own wallets and run our own nodes, both on Bitcoin and the freedom to mine. Like we, you can't unlearn what you've already learned. We already the constitution has set up. We have freedom of speech. We have, you know, freedom to just transact. I believe in court cases was a part of that, and I think that's the thing. You know. Elizabeth Warren's trying to get rid of that right now. You know, I don't think with the current Congress, because right now the the the Congress side of the equation is more Republican, but but you know it's. It's sad that it's a partisan issue, but I don't think she's going to get it through this time. But that's something we have to look out for, because if everything turns to paper, then obviously we run the risk of.

Speaker 2: 31:18

You know, wall Street is really good at having the same 21 million Bitcoin, just like gold. Like, do you think every gold ETF out there holds one to one bars for the amount of gold they have? Like I'm going to guess. No, right. And with Bitcoin it's the same way. Now, now, hopefully, the way the SEC set it up, you have to actually show it and obviously the beauty of Bitcoin is it would be very easy to be like these are my wallet addresses. Here's a transaction I made like to show you, these are my addresses and here is what I'm holding. So you know, and it checks in every three months or a year, whatever it is. So hopefully that stays true. But I think that's where we, as the early folks you know, we need to make sure that the decentralization and holding our own keys stays intact forever.

Speaker 1: 32:13

Yeah, and it's just, it's a just if you zoom out and it's like everyone who's been on board is kind of, you know, excited to see you know it. Have you know a run and become you know kind of what? The potential has always been there and the believers have always kind of understood and someone's been like, yeah, get on the boat, dude. This is obvious, like get in here. But then I just wonder, you know what are some of the ramifications you know of having a crowded boat with you know people who own the boat, you know, and it's like I don't know who you're going to be on the boat with and it's a little, it's a little concerning for some of this stuff overall, when you just look at you know, is someone just going to snipe in and jump in and just change you know kind of the narrative and the story and the elements of what were fundamentally so you know ingenious and you know transformative. You know the whole notion of it was it's the most cool, like origin story for something that you could imagine.

Speaker 2: 33:19

Oh, it's still don't know who Satoshi is.

Speaker 2: 33:22

Like it's the greatest we, and we needed that in our culture at this time, because you know, in 2008, when the banks collapsed and that whole tronches and mortgage scams I mean what an absolute joke. And you know Main Streets the ones who got screwed the most and that's when Bitcoin came out. You know it's interesting. You're talking about, like going deep and talking about these theories. I wonder, you know, obviously you know Fidelity, blackrock and Van Eck and some of these big guys are are among the biggest ETFs here. I wonder if the amount sailor had, if they were in addition to, even if they knew, maybe you know the SEC Treasury would ever knew they're probably not going to win this one. I wonder if they tried to, like shake sailor out of his Bitcoin because he holds so much, because the more that squeezes, the more you know he's going to.

Speaker 2: 34:19

He may look like a genius and I just feel like Wall Street and the insiders I assume he is not a Wall Street insider. He's, you know he's. He's an American cowboy, right, and I just wonder if that irks them to no end, like he got in at, you know, obviously way before 31,. But his average right now is 31,000. And these guys aren't going to get that and the more that gets bought. You know they're going to make their little. You know trading percentages on the ETF they're 0.5 percent or whatever they get out of many basis points they get. But sailor is just literally can buy more or just put his feet up and just watch like it's. It's, it's brilliant.

Speaker 1: 35:00

That's the to me, that's the, that's the screenplay, you know, just to kind of develop that over the next, you know, six to 12 months. Like that would be if you could. You know if you could do an embedded, you know, watch and just kind of document and see, you know how that, how that's going to develop. I think that that's, you know, one of the key, most fascinating and of course, there's a zillion fascinating things because that's what this space provides.

Speaker 1: 35:27

But you're kind of talking about the headline act, right? You're talking about Bitcoin, you know, and and it's about to really really take center stage, and you know the different elements of. You know anything that could get nefarious, or you know blah, blah, blah. Or, as you're saying, you know kind of, you know the outsiders versus the insiders and how that all goes Like, because that, because Bitcoin and its part of the beauty was always that it was very, you know, kind of could be democratized in terms of letting you know people get involved and get in there, and I just hope that it doesn't. I hope it maintains that as much as possible. Like. This is my, that's my little soapbox on that one.

Speaker 2: 36:06

Yeah, good point. And I think the other thing too is there's always a fork right. So you would hate to fork Bitcoin, but you know that's saying in a month, if we just completely don't agree with, with the mainstream and that, like you could get a rebellion where the people enough people fork and even if some of the big miners, even if it's more of a minority people, can you know that they can choose with their feet and you know they could hold both. They could hold. You know, once you fork, you hold on both chains, so you could hold, you know on on Bitcoin Treadfy and you could hold on Bitcoin pure, or we'll just call it Bitcoin. But so there's always the fork.

Speaker 2: 36:49

But I think that's why you have to fight for being able to hold your wallet keys and and not allowing them to be like. Well, these are the true coins. You know, even when you think you've won, they go dormant for a while and then it gets insidious again and they find little ways and find bills to try and pass that have names, like you know, protect all our children again, bill and it's filled with everything. That's the exact opposite. So I think that's where we have to look out. You know I'm cautiously optimistic. Obviously everybody loves number go up paydays. But you know, I think the longer you're in the space the more you just want to make sure you have a decentralized currency for humanity, you know.

Speaker 1: 37:37

Yeah, like what I want, I understand, you know.

Speaker 1: 37:40

Yeah, we want to see, you know, arrows of green arrow, you know, things going up and everything like that.

Speaker 1: 37:45

But what I like so much right now is that I like looking and knowing that I have a, you know, hardware wallet and that I can essentially utilize that, you know, at any given time, should I need to, you know, and I have that direct access and I have that.

Speaker 1: 38:03

That, you know, I could hold on to for as long as I want. I could hopefully give it to whoever I would want and, you know, pass it on and do all that, and you know that nature of it is what was so, you know, intriguing to me and then seeing it kind of build up a little bit and be like dude, this is so awesome that you can do it this way, and I think that's what. It's just kind of scary that the banks are having to potentially embrace something that could represent their future failure and somewhere in that that dichotomy, there's a slightly unsettling feeling in my gut when I think about that. It's like I don't know man, like that's the weird part when you think of the big established banks getting involved and all that sort of thing, whereas I'm just a little guy who likes having a little something on a hardware wallet and loves the whole notion of the space and the whole concept of everything that's going on.

Speaker 2: 39:00

Yeah, absolutely so, you know we'll. We'll follow this story as an unravel, but 2024 is going to be a very interesting year, you know. I would suspect that ETH is just going to be slow and steady up. Hopefully that's the next ETF. Bitcoin is going to go up. I suspect it'll go down for a little, unless everybody's just throwing money at it. You know, I remember in Canada it was like the number one and I think two or three of them came out at the same time and it was immediately like the number one ever overgold. So you know we'll see, We'll see.

Speaker 2: 39:36

I mean, this is a big market and there's a lot of buyers here and there's a lot, you know, for my retirement account. I would love to have some of that denominated Bitcoin. To me that feels like a nice hedge against a lot.

Speaker 1: 39:52

Yeah. So it's like traditionally in doing a show like this, you know, like this day of the year it'd be like, well, what do you think's going to happen, you know, and blah, blah, blah. And then, if you kind of just look back on the last year, on some of the things there was no way that we would have known, or at least I didn't know that, like Ordinals was getting cooked up. You know that that's going to come in and I think that you know that's one of the biggest stories to really you know reflect on was to see how Ordinals launched. And now, at the end of the year, I'm at least questioning, like, is that the way moving forward? Like you know, you have that kind of back and forth in your mind like, yes, I like Ethereum and the Ethereum NFTs, but as we've done shows and have talked about you know multiple times, what sort of collector do I want to be? And I didn't even know that there was going to be an opportunity to have some of the elements that the Ordinals ecosystem is provided and the innovations on that side of it. So I don't have I'm not going to make any little, you know, parlor guesses on developments with the NFTs, but I will say what we talked about last time is I am concerned.

Speaker 1: 41:07

The biggest concern is about some of these established, older, more kind of web two-way things coming in and trying to take over the innovation and what's cool in NFTs. And I'm talking about like the VV and you know like how that was. You know, like hey, you get your digital collectible. Like that didn't sit well with me. I thought about that a couple of times over, you know, since we talked about it on a show and I was just like man, if it goes, digital collectibles and come to the marketplace and all that, like oh, that's how we do it and don't worry, you have to keep it there, like come on, you know, I really hope that we see a significant innovation that really takes this whole beautiful part of the token into the art and the non-fungibility and kind of just take it to another level. And I'm pretty bullish that it's going to happen, because I had no idea starting the year off that we would even see anything on Bitcoin with the Ordinal.

Speaker 2: 42:05

So that's just yeah that one just came out of nowhere, Pretty interestingly there was a mint on. It was last week and it was like last Thursday, it was Node Monkeys.

Speaker 1: 42:19

And Node.

Speaker 2: 42:19

Monkeys has gotten a ton of both positive and negative press. It's almost like the camps in the Ordinal space are divided right down the middle. You've got kind of the more of the mainstream folks, the people with bigger Twitter handles who are kind of pumping, and everyone's always pumping their own bags. But you've got these Bitcoin shrooms, which I don't know. I'm not a huge fan of them and there's just a lot of folks out there who are really against Node Monkeys because they kind of changed a lot how they were going to do the distribution. But a lot of it was based on they were going to donate a lot of the money and then the core Bitcoin team was like we don't want your money. Even the Ordinals team was like that's too much money. So they were like, okay, you know what to make this. And when they had people submit their wallets and their charities, they realized like how are we going to sift through all these charities? So they were like you know what? We're going to make this a Dutch auction. This is there's no utility, which are my favorite ones. Like no future roadmap. I don't want a roadmap on a need one, because to me, then, right away built-in is not hype and what could possibly happen and what parties I could possibly go to and what other free drops I might get. It's just like you're just paying for this.

Speaker 2: 43:38

So the reason I'm bringing up Nodemonkeys is they did probably the best job I've ever seen in a Dutch auction. But they did the Dutch auction a really interesting way. So they started at 0.21 Bitcoin and I believe that's like what 86, 87, 100 bucks, so not cheap, so it's every six blocks it went down 0.005. So from 0.21 to 0.205 to 0.20 to 0.195, every six blocks. So basically every hour it went down 0.005.

Speaker 2: 44:12

And it was fascinating because a lot of the big OGs and some of the chats I'm in were like oh yeah, not only did they put in the 0.21, the second the thing opened. Some of them put in 1, 2, 3, 4 Bitcoin, like literally, they were like I will take as many as I can. So those were the whales and so you could see there was a ton of buzz there. So what basically happened was, as it went down, once they got the of the 10,000, they got rid of 8,000 of them through this Dutch auction. The further the price went down, the more that obviously people would chime in at their price. But another interesting thing happened. So if all the big whales put in a 0.21 at 0.105, guess what happens?

Speaker 1: 45:08

There's no one there.

Speaker 2: 45:09

No, all the 0.21s now have two monkeys. So see this chart here on distribution. So basically you get exponential. So at 0.105, let's say at that time there was 2,000 of the 8,000 done, immediately all of the 0.21s would go from one monkey to two monkeys because now with their bid they can afford two of them, and the amount went from, call it, 2,000 to 3,000 or 3,500. So all of a sudden, these havenings in this auction became this important point.

Speaker 2: 45:51

Well, as you can see this chart that, if you're listening, basically we have a chart and it goes up exponentially and the guess was 0.04, but it actually was 0.03, which you know Ordinals isn't huge yet, but it's a 10,000 PFP collection. That's a lot. So these early collections were 100, 200, you know Lil Peppos was 420, 10,000's a lot, but you know they had an argument that they are truly the first 10,000 PFP set on Bitcoin and you know Bitcoin punks did come first, but again that's copied. So I don't, you know, having a crypto punk, I don't recognize that one. But so I kind of liked it. It's a funky art, it's very simple, it's very cool, but I just wanted to give them a shout out.

Speaker 2: 46:44

I you know a lot of people are like, ah, how much money did you make. It's like dude. They also in February they took a gamble and they minted 10,000 Ordinals. Like now, you couldn't even do that. Now because of Ordinals and BRC20 tokens. Now there's this people are coming up with all these charts on you know the cost to inscribe. So basically they're saying early collections are more valuable now because the cost to replace that A you're never going to have those low inscription numbers again but B the cost to inscribe something, the transaction fees on Ordinals and on the Bitcoin blockchain, because it's so much busier now with with Ordinals, which is JPEGs, videos, like literally doom. The game is on there. It just it's getting more and more expensive for that block space. So really fascinating. But you know, I had some after these guys. They made I don't even know what it was, but it was 30, 40, 50 million I'll get. I should have the number right in front of me, but they, they crushed it.

Speaker 1: 47:49

I'd like to see their number of verse, like the azuki or something like that, just for curiosity.

Speaker 2: 47:54

Azuki was way, way higher. So azuki was in. They, what wasn't the I think there were like the 180 million. I mean just mind boggling because remember those royalties they got, before royalties kind of went away, was in 20,. What was that? 2021 was just aggringly big. So the launch might have been 60, 70 million, but the, the royalties they got was insane, Whereas the royalties in Bitcoin right now you don't get those.

Speaker 2: 48:20

So you get all your money kind of upfront and it's a lot of money, but you know you, you've got to kind of get it upfront. So they did a great job. These guys got the early. Actually, here's someone who bid one Bitcoin, so they got 33. One bid for Bitcoin. So they would have gotten about a hundred, 125 of these things. I mean just crazy.

Speaker 2: 48:41

But the guys who bid 0.21, the highest technically where it started, they all got seven. So they were all thrilled and that was a pretty good happy number. So node monkeys and they had, they gave. Basically, if it was 0.3, you know there's going to be a little change in there so 0.3, you get your seven and then that's actually that would be exact for 0.21. And obviously some of these bids you might get one, two, four, five. They had those refunds doled out the next day and I checked mine because I bid for a couple and I actually was just below the mark where I would have gotten a couple more, and so I got the refund and I looked at the numbers and like that's exactly what I should have got. So I mean the with 10,000 PIPs.

Speaker 2: 49:22

The way they handled this was just clean and spot on. It's definitely the best Dutch auction that I've witnessed and remember. On Bitcoin, this is all like fertile ground. This hasn't really been done much on this side. A lot of it was still like backdoor trades and, like you know, with the shrooms, they're all going around behind the scenes like hey, you want to buy a shroom and I'm like no, no, thank you, I don't want one. Yeah, because they want a couple of Bitcoin for it.

Speaker 1: 49:48

And.

Speaker 2: 49:48

I'm like eh, not interested.

Speaker 1: 49:50

When did when did you shift? It was a 23 shift, I think. Um, when you shifted your priority towards the or non, or utility right, like that was kind of an evolution in your collection or collecting right, like cause. You just said like, oh you know, now I just want this and I think that's been an evolution.

Speaker 2: 50:15

No, yeah, for sure I. I cause I didn't fully understand it before and you know I'd been in the NFT space for a couple of years and in crypto for like eight years, but I didn't, um, I didn't realize the different layers of where things were stored and how immutable they were. The more I learned, you know, when you get into crypto punks. Obviously, those um didn't start on chain, but they quickly uh went to on chain. Uh, I think in 2019 they went fully on chain. So that's why I got chaos roads this year. That's why I sold all but one of my azuki Cause. Yeah, for me utility, you're buying future hype. I mean, look at a zuki they. You know the art is still amazing, but you know, I feel like from the leaders there you just get the same stuff. Like 23 was a interesting year and it was a tough year.

Speaker 2: 51:05

You know, as they make what. What did they make on elementals? I mean, I don't have it in front of me, but it was 150 million. It was insane amount of money. And they're they're saying, like you know, now they're going for the whole animation play, like you know, for all the people in that.

Speaker 2: 51:19

I still love all the holders and I even like a lot of the team members. I think they're honestly trying, but that utility to me is just a bag they're going to have to carry. So if node monkeys had said all this utility, it might have gone for point two instead of point oh three. I'm just making that number up and that's that's like future potential for me. It's like give me no hype, give me just the art and the concept behind it. You know they did a good job with branding, send nodes and you know they. They were successful and I expect no utility from it and maybe I'll, when I see what I get, maybe I'll upgrade and buy a different one, or maybe I'll just hold what I have, or maybe I'll see if the price goes up, maybe I'll sell them and not be a node monkeys, I don't know.

Speaker 1: 52:03

I think I'll probably. When do you? When do you see what you got?

Speaker 2: 52:06

I think it's today. Actually it's it's tonight, so I might look, but I mean no rush, it's. I think it starts cleaning, starts tonight on magic Eden, but I think they're going to keep it open for months and months, and months. So there's no rush to do it. No, no, and there might be an advantage to holding. Like you know, this is on the Bitcoin side. Like an un, it'd be the equivalent of an unrevealed. I don't know if that's true or not, but then I don't know if you can pass that unrevealed token. But you know, I've seen in some markets like the unrevealeds often are more expensive than the reveal. It's cause people want to open that pack of baseball cards. So, yeah, we'll see one.

Speaker 2: 52:46

One little note on this like, literally, when they were done with this auction, handled it beautifully, their discord got hacked and because of Christmas, they got hacked last Thursday or Friday you know, christmas is obviously this Monday they were excuse me out of their discord and got taken over by hackers for a good five days Maybe it was four days and the hackers turned off all the comments, they booted all the mods and they were like hey, you asked and we delivered. Solana monkeys, go to this site. Hey, don't worry, sometimes it's slow, just keep clicking and I'm sure you know, I'm sure a couple hundred grand or a couple million got drained and you know these guys just had a mint. Think of these hackers like pretty genius, like these guys are, like I'm just like, cause they made everybody who got hacked good. So you know, hats off to them.

Speaker 2: 53:41

But you know yeah yeah, they paid the people back who got hacked, you know. So they definitely took the high road and you know that's off to them and they just got it back the day after Christmas. So discord employees came back to work and finally somebody got a hold of the right person and they got their discord back. But that that shows you that discord and web three and collections that have a significant value. They're not a great fit, but there's no other game in town. So you just do your best. And I learned that because there was a lot of chatter and some of my discord DMs.

Speaker 2: 54:16

A lot of these hacks were like these people had two FA and they had everything set up and dialed and still got hacked. So it makes you realize like maybe discord allegedly is not as secure as an infrastructure itself. I mean, who knows where these hacks are coming from? So it's like the only thing I saw that that could keep you safe. I guess you keep your key top administrator literally like in cold storage so it can't even be accessed, and only one machine that, and that's the only person who can see the old air gap and then that's the only person. You hook it up. You send your message to the, to the discord, and then you basically remove it again. I mean it's just crazy that you have to go to those lengths. But you know, you would think public, private key signatures in cryptocurrency and Bitcoin and Ethereum would solve this problem, but nobody's. Nobody's there yet. So this is what we have.

Speaker 1: 55:19

And it's just I mean moving forward and looking at what's what to be aware of and resolutions and things like that. It's like you know, we really have to be as vigilant as we can and not just give talking points to protecting what you're doing. And last show we were talking about somebody who has been in the space and did well and got exposed to a hack. So we just have to be so vigilant because there's so much effort and sophistication going into these things. So you're having people that are certainly a tenured and know what they're doing and get impacted by it, and that's a jarring realization as we move forward into 24 and beyond that.

Speaker 1: 56:07

I think we're going to hear a lot about that in the next couple of years and obviously we have the elephant in the room with AI and how all that's going and how those are going to be. Some of those strategies will be deployed and I like to think that the people that we're talking to and the people that we get to know some of our information from and our correspondence with would be a little bit more at the forefront of that sort of thing. So I really feel for some of the folks that are just not even don't even understand anything about security and digital stuff and where they're going to end up this year. So somebody.

Speaker 2: 56:44

Well, yeah, I just remember too, though, like you asked the question before, smartly like how are you going to onboard the mainstream? And you know, hopefully it's not this candy or VV, or are these, these login, literally web to logins. But if it was that moral web to log in, I think I would be okay with that, as long as you then you know, even paying with a credit card I don't care, like, if there's someone I want to buy, I'll buy it, but as long as you then can easily transfer it out to your own wallet. And that's where they're such a big fail.

Speaker 2: 57:18

And, you know, I think education needs to happen for some of these artists to do it right. So real collectors can you know and hold their own art. When you have a digital asset, the only thing you really own is the public private key info. You're the only one who can move it around. But the beauty of all of this stuff is it lives out there on the inner webs for everybody to see, and you are just the one who owns the public private key pair to move that you own the sat.

Speaker 1: 57:55

Yeah, that's very true. And yep, it's just even you were talking about. You know we were looking at your wallet compromise. You know the compromise, compromise or whatever it may be of you know one of the active hot wallets that you had, and it's just like you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make a pledge to myself that I'm gonna start cleaning those up as we get into the next stuff and actually actually act on some of the things that I'm learning, instead of like yeah, but it probably won't happen to me and keep just rolling around you.

Speaker 2: 58:23

Just don't mind me to do something, because I'm not saying I haven't done it yet, but I also will say it's not fun.

Speaker 1: 58:31

You know it's not fun, no one wants to, but I think that you'd be prudent to do so and to take a look at just what you haven't. Refreshed it a little bit, because you know there's no cost or big issue with you know, starting fresh with some different wallets and making sure that you're set up. So that was one of the themes. You know, we heard about the ledger, we heard about this, we just heard about this. You know so so many hacks so many hacks.

Speaker 2: 58:54

I think the number we just saw the number across our desks this morning it was like it was a couple billion, at least in hacks it was single digit billions. It was either two, three, four or five billion, whatever it was. That's a lot of money just in hack. I mean look how many, like you said, just look how many have happened in the last three months. Last week we talked about three that happened the week prior in early December. I mean it's just absolutely bonkers. So you know as it goes more mainstream.

Speaker 2: 59:23

Yeah, it will be interesting to see if people get smarter, you know, with crypto, twitter, though, and Instagram. I just I also feel, like you know, we're obviously doing a show here about nuance and really trying to dig deep and really trying to have an honest take, and sometimes I'm not going to lie to you I feel like people just don't give a crap, they care about number go up. So it gets disheartening at times, but maybe it shouldn't, maybe it's just like dude, just you know, just keep driving hands on the wheel and keep moving forward.

Speaker 1: 59:54

Yeah, I was watching something on like CNN today and this is like radar's up on this recently and it was about they called it pig butchering or something, and it was this scam that's coming out of like a neighboring country, thailand, and what really annoyed me about it you know, obviously I don't want anyone to get scammed was that the positioning of the piece was like it's a cryptocurrency scam. So I'm just, of course, you know. So you know people are loving to lump cryptocurrency with that and you know it's just. It's it's just kind of annoying when you start hearing a lot of mainstreamy talking about you know, oh, you know, elizabeth Warren, every day, you know misappropriating things to help that narrative. So I think we need to we need to be pretty smart about that as well.

Speaker 2: 1:00:48

Yeah, and educate people and hopefully more and more people will be willing to listen and care for the. You know you come for the number, go up and the pretty JPEGs and you stay for the decentralization and the self sovereignty of holding your own wallet and your own cash. You know you had talked earlier about. You know the ultimate is holding your hardware wallet, but the ultimate, you know, like if you ever had to like pull the escape hatch, the ultimate is just memorizing a 24, 25 or whatever you have seed phrase and having nothing on you. You know so it's. It's crazy how it's. You know when you try.

Speaker 2: 1:01:28

That's why I'm trying to explain it to people. You're like, well, you own it, but you don't because it's out there, it's out of the blockchain, but you're the only one that can move it. I mean, it's such a cool concept at its core that we forget just how magical that part is and how, even understanding that public blockchain side of it that it's, it's yeah, the private key is held, or known by you to match the private public key pair with the. You know the encryption, the 256 Shaw or whatever it was, and that is enough. You know, and that's again where we, the people. You know what was his name Zimmerman.

Speaker 2: 1:02:11

Like we need to fight, or Phil Zimmerman, we need to fight for encryption. I think we need to. We need to feature him in the next show, like you know, whether we just talk about him. I'd love to actually get him on the show, but we need to maybe revisit that, because that was huge and it feels to me like the powers that be are just keep fighting the encryption, because with encryption comes some privacy, some privacy which, you know, everybody deserves.

Speaker 1: 1:02:36

So one thing that popped in my mind that I was going to, I was going to bring up, that happened over the over the holidays, I was in conversation with the gentleman that put the bug in my ear and, you know, put the hooked me on the whole notion of crypto in the you know frothy, bully, you know times of of when I got into the space and I was like, hey man, how are you feeling? You know, I'm like, and he is just so, you know, he is so tradfied Like, he's so in his very successful and everything, and I'm like, dude, the ETFs. He's like what are you talking about?

Speaker 2: 1:03:15

So not even on his radar.

Speaker 1: 1:03:17

Not one bit. And I'm like dude, this is a, you know, this is huge. Potentially he's like what? I haven't been reading up on that, what are you talking about?

Speaker 2: 1:03:25

And I was like, oh God, okay, well, when you buy at 68 and you're just like it goes to 16. I mean, think about it is like, wow, I am in over my skis, so it'll be interesting. You know, the sad thing again is, if this does go, the people will FOMO in when it's all time highs again, because we know in our space how manipulative these influencers are in creating FOMO. Think about the mainstream media where all of a sudden they're like oh, maybe it's not so bad and maybe maybe you should put one or two percent, and I don't know what angle they're going to take, but at some point they may. Once, once the big traditional companies have these ETFs, they might be pushing it a little more and then people will get in at new all-time highs and maybe that's not too late, maybe it's no big deal. That's just what you get for being in the mainstream. But you know it's.

Speaker 2: 1:04:11

It's when people, when you get burned really bad. Obviously you're not going to stay near the stove for too long, yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:04:21

But you know we're talking about people getting in at all-time highs or whatever. As we said earlier, earlier today Saylor just bought, you know, a grip at 41 something. So you know that's a. That's still a pretty nice number to you know a grip.

Speaker 2: 1:04:35

Yeah, I like that grip.

Speaker 1: 1:04:38

Oh yeah, All right. What else we want to hit on today?

Speaker 2: 1:04:42

Well, I think we're. Let's see, we've talked about predictions. I don't know what else. What else you want to talk about? I know you want to talk about that.

Speaker 1: 1:04:50

Yeah, yeah, there's one thing that I wanted to bring up, just because you know we do like to. You know, try to use the Charlotte Bond loom and weave back things from other times, other episodes, and you know we had a great show. I think it was. It was one of my favorite shows, when we kind of learned a little bit more about AI from you know, from one of our, from one of our listeners. Actually, it was incredibly informative and it really, you know, opened my eyes to, you know, the potential intersections and everything from AI and then, specifically, the decentralized side of it and some of the projects that are going and some of the ironies that some of the more decentralized platforms are actually from you know, metta or some of the more centralized companies.

Speaker 1: 1:05:34

But I thought it was really interesting that just today their news came out that the New York Times filed a lawsuit against open AI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, and I think that this may be one of the most interesting battles to watch and I'm wondering if AI is potentially going to go through a little bit more of the ringer kind of like crypto had to go through for the past.

Speaker 1: 1:06:04

You know X amount of years where wait.

Speaker 1: 1:06:06

Now people are going to look at it and the New York Times is essentially saying, hey, wait, you trained your bots on our material and we are funding the journalists to create these, this content that you're then feeding your, your systems, to then provide answers to essentially make us irrelevant.

Speaker 1: 1:06:31

And I think that it's going to be. I think it'll end up going to the Supreme Court. I think it's going to end up being a massive. You know which way it goes with AI and you know I do from the little research I've done and trying to learn more and more like I do think that there's this big a fight for that being more decentralized, for centralized, and I think that this could be part of a piece of that puzzle moving forward. So just something to really keep our eye on. I think, and I thought it was a really big development because you don't get much more established from a media perspective than the New York Times and you don't go and sue a company that's more established than Microsoft and you know it's going to be a pretty existential battle, I think.

Speaker 2: 1:07:16

Yeah, and there's a lot at play here too, because, think about it, you know the New York Times. Obviously, a lot of their stuff is behind a paywall, so if they're grabbing that, I would think they'd have a stronger case. If it's just out there, like you know, just grabbing stuff from Reddit or all these places where you don't need to necessarily log in to see the text and get scraped, that's public information. So how is that going to be treated? And you know, when this is, there's going to be so many political agendas here. It's mainstream media versus kind of Silicon Valley. But it's also going to be like well, who owns the rights to this? And the other thing is like so let's say, okay, you scraped all this New York Times stuff in the past. How would you? You've already used your LLMs or your learning models and stuff like. How would you undo that? It almost seems like silly, you know, and they've made so much money. Is it just a massive payout or is it something much, much deeper than that?

Speaker 1: 1:08:24

Yeah, exactly, and you know I was reading some of it today where they were saying that one of the things that was mentioned and is really irritating to the New York Times is they would be the source to like go check their site on something, but the chatbots would just omit that part of it to help to not drive the traffic even to the source site. So they're talking about losing, you know, eyeballs on their content as a result of taking their information, information and you know providing the answers where you don't then have to go check the resource that they built for it. So there's just, it's a monster of a potential story and it was just breaking today and obviously it's not going to go quickly, but to your point it's really. You know setting up this big battle and you know I wonder where Elizabeth Warren is going to fall on this. I wonder you know how that's going to go and how it's going to get positioned from that side of things.

Speaker 2: 1:09:24

I know and there was a whole thing that I listened to that just said Elizabeth Warren a lot of. She gives her marketing department a lot of leeway and a big reason that she brings up crypto a lot is because it gets a lot of clicks. So, you know, it's this new mentality, or maybe this has always been the mentality of the big power players, but all press good or bad, is good, press right. So you know, I don't know if she's up for election this year, but I hope she is. I hope she loses, she needs to go. So, indeed, all right.

Speaker 2: 1:09:55

Well.

Speaker 1: 1:09:55

I think that you know I couldn't be more. I don't want to say bearish or bullish, but I couldn't be more intrigued to see how things are going to play out. And you know we've been through the last handful of years. You couldn't have predicted really any of the biggest stories. I even remember, you know, when you know the Russia and Ukraine, like that happened I think, kind of like February was when the invasion and you weren't hearing about that at all.

Speaker 2: 1:10:24

You know, at the end of the previous year yeah, unless you were right following it and it just goes to show you, yeah, how you know, and obviously we're very far away from everything that's going on here in America. We've got a couple of oceans, you know, on either side separating us from most of the populace in this world. But yeah, it's. I've had forgot that was this year. I assume that had started last year.

Speaker 2: 1:10:48

But yeah, I guess, when you put that in perspective as we wind up, the show like 2023 was just another absolute roller coaster and you know, as we all hopefully relax for you know, heading into the new year and revamping for 2024, hopefully we can all stay centered and balanced and also know, like I think the hardest thing for me sometimes is like I just, like you, hear about all these injustices in the world and you just want to, like, you just want to fight and make a good one. Why can't people be better? And you know it's hard because you can't. A, you can't focus your energy everywhere, but B, there's certain things, many things are totally out of your control and a lot of times, just sweeping up your little corner of the universe and being kind to the folks around you and your kids and your family, even though they might drive you nuts sometimes, is the best thing you can do.

Speaker 1: 1:11:46

Yeah, you got to grab the moments and you have to. You know, it's all about the gratitude perspective, you know, I think is, as I age, you know, much like a fine cheese or wine. I realized that you know, you can, you can look at it one way or the other, and why the hell wouldn't you look at it from hey, I'm happy that we have this going on. Or, you know, it could certainly be worse and I don't know if that can tie into just, maybe we do this time a communal, something good, and I think that we're just we're bullish on communication, I'm bullish on this show, I'm bullish on being able to, you know, talk things out and think things through, and I just don't think that we're going to run out of things to discuss and to kind of noodle on, and I think that that's one of the great things about truly being alive.

Speaker 1: 1:12:36

Every moment is a person. I watched her parent, her son, and he came in and was saying something like I'm bored and she goes boarders is a choice. There's many things that'll work with me. Like he can't be bored, yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:12:51

Yeah, no, that's. That's well said, that's well said. So everybody will happy new year. It's. It's silly that we wait till the end of the show because you know to say, hey, punch that like button, leave us a review comment.

Speaker 1: 1:13:04

But probably not. We're not. We wouldn't be advised to do that, I'm sure.

Speaker 2: 1:13:08

I know we do it right at the beginning and we probably have graphics like smash that, like a button, smash it so. But we're happy you guys are here with us. You know the audience is growing and we're excited about that. But we also just love having these conversations and you know we're going to do it our way and be honest and do it as organically as possible. But if anyone has any ideas out there, you know we're easy to get ahold of. So you know, chicago X on Twitter, disco X on Twitter, or just leave comments in YouTube or anywhere, and we will, we will see them and we will definitely get back to you. So, so happy to all.

Speaker 1: 1:13:47

Sorry to interrupt but as always, this show is for entertainment purposes only. Nothing should be considered financial advice. We recommend never getting over your skis and never investing what you can't afford to lose. So with that as a sign off, I to say happy new year and let's look forward to having some fun and being interested and learning and being engaged as we move down this road.

Speaker 2: 1:14:11

Take care everybody.