[00:00:01] Welcome to Crypto Talk Radio, the podcast for everyday investors like you. Visit us on the
[email protected] and now, here's your host, Leister.
[00:00:13] Thank you for that, Bailey. And welcome, everybody out there on Crypto Talk radio,
[email protected] it's tax day. Are you still ducking taxes? Have you not filed yet? Have you not filed an extension yet? Did you know the irs, they want to make sure you're doing two things, and if you don't do either one of them, they're going to come out the oas. Number one, you have to file your tax forms timely. That's what got Wesley Snipes in trouble. It wasn't even not paying. It was that he wasn't filing. They want to make sure you're filing taxes timely for the forms timely. Number two, if you owe money, they want to make sure that you at least do a payment arrangement the moment you know that you're going to owe something.
[00:00:58] And I've learned that for the most part, this is not all the way around, but for the most part, they'll leave you alone if those two things are true, if you file timely, and the moment you know you owe money, you set up a payment arrangement that is reasonable. You got to be reasonable about it. But if you do those two things, they mostly leave you alone. I got two pieces of mail sent to my business from the irs, and each time I'm like, ah, crap. You know, both of them were just simply confirmations of the change of address. That's it. Even though I know there's some stuff I got to do. And that's on deck next, after I record today's episode here. But they mostly leave you alone because I've got a payment arrangement. I pay a pretty penny. I pay a lot every single month to them for a balance that was owed from before. And this one, I guarantee you I'm gonna have another one I'm gonna have to do. I don't know exactly how much money it's gonna be, but it's gonna be a lot, a hell of a lot more than I have before because I made way more money.
[00:01:58] So the. The weird thing is the shift in money started in. I don't know if that started in 2023 or 2024. I can't remember off top. I wanna say it started in 2024, if I recall. And if that's true, yeah, I'm pretty much screwed. So I moved where I am now in June 2024. So I was in Nevada prior to that and it was horrible, but I was in Nevada prior to that. I moved up here Labor Day, actually. No, that's not true. Labor Day of 2023. And then. Yeah, and then I moved in this current house that I just bought in June 2024. So 2023, January would have been when I got the major bump up of money. So I suspect the worst is behind me. But I'm gonna have another round of payments like a bulk charge I'm gonna have to do and I've got some deductions, but I'm still concerned about the amount that, you know, there's a lot. So anyway, make sure you pay your, file your tax forms. Don't duck it or file an extension. Don't duck it. Like I want to file an extension to probably May, mid May, because I got a lot of stuff going on and I want to just make sure. But make sure you file your taxes. Don't duck it. Don't duck the smoke. Let's get into some cryptocurrency. I'm not going to have a long episode today. There's a lot of news bits, but quick and fast.
[00:03:22] CoinDesk.com and we are going to zoom out to the month chart on bitcoin, starting with Bitcoin simply because bitcoin took a little bit of a crap and I thought it was worth talking about. Over the past 24 hours, a high of 86,000, just shy of 86. 5, a low of 83. 7. Currently that's where it's hovering. And so we're a downward trend. We're heading in the downward direction. And some people thought that we were on the recovery and on the rebound, going back up and we were past the worst of it. Such is not the case as Bitcoin simply swears that we are not in recovery. We're going to head back down. Then I took a look at Ethereum because as I mentioned before, Ethereum gives me the best measure of whether or not we're on recovery and on the way up or crapping on the way down. And Ethereum had a high of just shy of 1700, a low of just shy of 1600, currently hovering around that same 1600 mark. And it's trending down so. And it's trending down worse than bitcoin. So this tells me that we're on the way down, going down to some pain points. Ethereum recently went down as I think it was like $1300 not long ago, which is good. I love That I load that major crap out. I think it was like 13, 8 major crap of price because I'm waiting for lower, lower prices. Some people speculated that some of the activities on Ethereum, you know, Petra and all these other things were going to cause a run. I didn't see that that was going to be the case. I still don't see that's going to be the case. And I think we have a little bit more pain before we get to some recovery. There's a couple of news bits that may or may not help with that recovery. I doubt it, but it's always possible. Everything's possible. Because at the end of the day, no matter what it is, cryptocurrency is one of those where, you know, they talk about regulating as, as gambling.
[00:05:06] And I've said that many of these cryptos are gambling. Many of the main ones are not gambling. I would argue though, all cryptocurrency to some degree. To some degree. It's kind of like a game, kind of like a board game. Speaking of board game, President Donald Trump allegedly is talking about making a Monopoly inspired game, actual game.
[00:05:27] Now, for those that didn't know, Trump at one point had a game called Trump the Game and of course it failed. That was in the 80s, of course it failed. It was essentially a ripoff of Monopoly. Didn't go anywhere. This chatter is him working with a guy that he used to know to build a crypto based video game allegedly modeled around Monopoly using some of the similar mechanics. This came from some inside leaks from the Trump administration. Nobody knows for sure if this is going to happen, but Monopoly people came out and said, we don't have any allegiance to Trump. We don't have any sort of mention. They don't hold our marks, they can't sell anything. Monopoly, he didn't say he was gonna sell Monopoly. He said he was gonna sell a game that was modeled after Monopoly, which is all fair game, no pun intended. But the interesting thing, Trump's doing a lot of crypto stuff. World Liberty Financial, a crypto game, a bitcoin mining facility, a stablecoin. Something to the point Maxine Waters started attacking him, saying he's getting enriched a little bit too much on cryptocurrency. Of course we need to keep things in check because obviously many of those people, like Ted Cruz and others, are making major bank on cryptocurrency. They're only saying something because their crypto bags are crapped recently off the tariff. You know, fear and the panic. That's the only reason they're saying something. So when everything started going down, all of a sudden all these Congress people started to get a little bit upset, yet they weren't upset when everything was crapping under the Biden administration. I'm just saying we have to be equitable. When things go down, they go down and everybody's harmed, even if you're not in the project. Speaking of going down mantra, which is a blockchain, it's om token, of course, crapped by 90%. The CEO recently came out and said this was a situation where they did a whole bunch of liquidations that were, quote, irresponsible. Allegedly this is, I'm not in this, but allegedly there was a whale that decided that was a major whale that dumped out of the project and took a whole bunch of liquidity with that person. And then as a result of what was happening, the liquidity being as low as it was after that, after that dump out, they started liquidating a whole bunch of assets and. And then everything just went tank. It's not that it was completely down like to its base, but it was such a steep drop. People on social media claimed that there was, you know, devs dumping out of the project and killing the business. No evidence that that was the case, but the CEO seems to say that no, that was not it. It just was all this liquidation. It's. I'm, I'll do what I can to try to recover it and recover your sentiment and see what we can do on this one. Talking about burning tokens and everything all the same, I don't know if it was or was not a scam. I don't suspect it was. I think it was just the cexs because most of them are just scummy, you know, organization. I can't say I don't know. I figured I would just share the word in case you were in that. Speaking of scummy central exchanges, South Korea is cracking down on 14 unregistered quote, crypto exchanges on the Apple App Store. So for you iPhone users, this is for you.
[00:08:26] Obviously if you United States, this does not affect you directly, but it might affect you indirectly because the exchanges might just take a brute force approach to the situation.
[00:08:35] The list includes major ones like Kucoin, Mexc, Femex, Bitmart, CoinX, Poloniex, Bitru, Biofin, Coin W, BTCC, ZoomX and Coincatch.
[00:08:47] Asking Apple to restrict access to them at linked to unregistered digital asset platforms, allegedly because they're offshore and so they basically don't trust them. And that they're operating, quote, without regulatory approval. Once again, if you're not in South Korea, it doesn't directly affect you, but those exchanges might just overreact and start locking down everybody and their mother simply because one started cracking down on them. They figure it's not worth the smoke to stay on the Apple's App Store or some garbage. And they'll say, okay, we'll just go Android. Of course, Android's crap, but it's certainly better than Apple. I don't know that. All I know is what's happening there.
[00:09:25] Separate news, then the fdic, allegedly, I don't know this for sure, but allegedly is looking into enabling public blockchain use by banks. I once said in an older episode, could you imagine a world where simply interacting with your local bank enabled you access to cryptocurrency without jumping through the hoops like you normally would do? This would help enable some of that. We don't know if it would truly work or not, but stablecoins allegedly are in focus to be able to enable this transaction activity between you and banks leveraging public blockchain use, which is positive momentum. It's a step in the right direction and hopefully it goes somewhere. I don't think it will, but hopefully it goes somewhere. Unfortunately, we have a lot of technological issues that get in the way. For example, AWS had a recent outage that broke down, made those same major exchanges. I want to talk about this one as my tail end of the episode because maybe people don't understand when we say decentralized, what do we mean? We allegedly mean that it's your keys, your crypto, you own it and you are your own bank. You might have heard some of these, you know, crypto bros use that term. You are your own bank. Nobody powers it. Such is somewhat true of only Bitcoin. The vast majority of cryptocurrencies out there not named Bitcoin still have a centralized infrastructure by their very nature, by the way that they behave. And the centralized exchanges certainly rely on those to host their servers and host their infrastructure. Even Bitcoin is susceptible because Bitcoin still needs the concept of nodes. Nodes are nothing more than computers. Computers still rely on Internet.
[00:11:11] So the point is that the idea of decentralized Bitcoin has it to some degree simply because no one person can control it. But you're still dependent on essentially infrastructure costs. So you could argue a case, a case could be made that what's called the the tier three, the trunks, the highest level of Internet provider that Makes access to Internet to your lower level provider so they can sell it to you. The trunks ultimately are in control of the whole business. But for these purposes of this and the exchanges, all of these different central exchanges, and to some degree, some of the decentralized exchanges, the swaps and everything are hosted on these cloud infrastructures. Whether that's Google, aws, Microsoft, it doesn't really matter. Oracle, it doesn't really matter. They're still susceptible to those rules and they're, they're at risk because those same players could simply shut the whole business down, either inadvertently or accidentally.
[00:12:16] Many people swear we, we need to get away from this and we need to create so something like an Internet computer concept would get us and wean us off of that infrastructure. The reason those haven't taken off and gained more traction is because it's not exposed to the mainstream. The other cloud providers are easy, they're quick. You can spin them up in 10 minutes. Ones like an Internet computer take a little bit more work. It's not a lot, but a little bit more work, a little bit more thought, a little bit more skill. And as a result, things have not gone the way that they had anticipated that they should have gone by now. That's not a down point of the industry overall, but it is to say so you understand, this is the reason why we don't have a stronger base with this whole business. It's going to take much more than what we've done. And very few cryptocurrencies are truly decentralized. There's always the risk of one bad actor or even just accident or even just happenstance bringing down all cryptocurrency. Thus, the only advice I can share for you is to make sure you're not leaving all your eggs in one basket. Diversify your assets. Make sure it's all spread around. To keep yourself safe. It's up to you what you do with your cash, but I'm recommending that you spread it around and at minimum, always have some bitcoin outside. Because no matter what, at least until Sakamoto shows back up or Nakamoto shows back up, make sure you have a little bit of bitcoin. It's gonna crap at some point, but for the moment, it's one of the safer assets outside of basic commodities. That's gone.
[00:13:46] In closing, there will not be a 101 today. There will be a 101 next week. I assure you there will be. This will be a short episode because it's tax day. We all need to be doing our taxes. But in closing, I want to talk about the tariffs real quick and impact on cryptocurrency, because some people speculate that the tariffs are still killing the business on crypto. And I'm going to say from my own impression that that's not what's happening. I think what's happening in cryptocurrency might be partially related to tariffs. But I think more to the point, you have a lot of these institutionals, the big companies and everything else that are accumulating on the cheap.
[00:14:25] Nobody's really selling for profit. When I say sell for profit, I'm saying that selling for a higher price, nobody's really trying to sell for a higher price. A lot of people are hoarding. And when people hoard or institutions hoard, it actually does depress the price. People may not realize, but that's actually what's happening. As a result, it's important. So, you know, this is, this is fine. There's nothing really wrong, but it's something that you may not be used to. And you have to make sure that you're aware, no matter what. You have to be thoughtful about your investments and make sure you're not putting all your eggs in one basket. Because if you don't diversify, then, yes, you are going to be freaked out when your one crap token goes in the trash. Nobody can save you from yourself other than you. Be thoughtful about it, be smart about it. We have to stop blaming Trump for everything. You know, we can talk about impacts in the short term, but long term, it's really up to you and your tolerance of what you've chosen to do. Nobody can make the decisions for you. I can only recommend to diversify. Pick multiple things, not even just in cryptocurrency. Bonds, stocks, everything. Multiple different things to help insulate from the damage that we suspect is yet to come, at least in the first part of the year.
