[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 in Crypto Talk radio
[email protected] Cryptocurrency is so boring right now. I watch some of these shows and they're just so excited, you know, they're excited about like, Da Vinci, Jeremy. I watch his. And him and the other guy, Mr. M, I think it is, and everything you keep talking about, you know, bitcoin to a million and you know, it's nothing unrealistic about the price target. The timing's a bit aggress, but, you know, there's nothing unrealistic about expecting bitcoin to go to a million simply by nature of true scarcity. By scarcity, I refer to scarcity of availability as more of the institutionals. Hold it. You know, it's going to become less available, readily available and pulled out of circulation. So certainly I can expect that there would be something there. So I'm not suggesting that it's not, but just overall I'm. I'm intrigued seeing all these different YouTubers that are so excited talking about cryptocurrency when I find it absolutely boring.
[00:01:15] I don't see anything that tickles my fancy. I don't see anything exciting, I don't see anything thrilling. I don't see anything spectacular. There's not even anything funny. I mean, there's a little bit of chuckle here and there, but nothing like to the degree that we saw the past couple years.
[00:01:30] And I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. The lack of true energizing news. I'm not sure what that means. I simply say I am bored to. It's like I've been recording now for years. You know, I started the show in 2021.
[00:01:45] I've been recording for years and I believe I've only taken one break, like one episode. I'm pretty sure that's the case. We did adjust the schedule because it used to be twice a week because at the time there was so much to talk about. There wasn't enough. I had to kind of double up the episodes. Even before then I was doing like daily and I backed down because daily was unsustainable versus just combined episodes. And I know I had some feedback from folks that at the time that were not happy about it, but it was for the good. I think we're A better show, much better spot.
[00:02:18] So we'll talk about some numbers, we'll talk about a couple news updates. But I am going to. It'll probably be a short episode. There's not really a lot that's shaking that's causing me to shaking my boots and be energized about cryptocurrency at the moment.
[00:02:36] CoinDesk.com and we're going to zoom out to the month chart starting with bitcoin this time. Bitcoin over the past 24 hours. A high of 110 grand, a low of 108 grand. Currently roughly about 110 grand as I record this. And over the month we have a very strong upward trend which is what's causing a lot of the YouTubers to speculate around higher numbers on the bitcoin run. Meanwhile, Ethereum had a low of 2,700 ish, a high of 2,800 ish, still hovering around the 2,800 mark. And its month chart is just as much on the run. But the level of volatility is lower on the Ethereum side compared to the bitcoin side, which caused a lot of people, smarter people to speculate the same thing that Leister's been telling you from his lens, which is that if Ethereum is not running like we expect, the bitcoin run is likely going to be a fake out that it's not real and it's not legitimate and it's just temporary and it's not going to sustain, meaning it's prone to going back down to a level. That doesn't mean that it's, you know, dead. It means that it's being short term manipulated.
[00:03:46] Ethereum should buy now be way higher than it is. And I want to stress why this makes sense. Ethereum's all time high was $4800 previously. When Ethereum hit $4800. Bitcoin was a $65000. So you got to reconcile why it is that Bitcoin was able to double. It doubled, not quite the 130 grand, but got pretty damn close in its all time high recently.
[00:04:14] Why is it that Bitcoin was able to double and get to that point. That's telling you that Ethereum should be at minimum 7,000 bucks and it can't even get back to $4,800.
[00:04:25] So it tells you something's manipulating situation.
[00:04:28] Something with bitcoin is not real or true. I have some theories. They're only theories that have no evidence. I think what's happening is you got Some people who are sitting on Bitcoin who are just pricing it higher because they know Michael Saylor and other institutionals are willing to pay whatever market price.
[00:04:47] So it's being inflated is the point. And we don't have realistic numbers as to demand.
[00:04:53] Obviously there's demand. I'm saying there's not realistic numbers as to demand. Realistic numbers as to demand would warrant having retail numbers included in the sales. If we did that, we would not be seeing prices in the hundred thousand dollar range at this point. We'd see somewhere around 80 to 90 by now.
[00:05:13] So to me, I always felt that the number for Bitcoin is, I don't want to say fake, but it's certainly inflated.
[00:05:21] If we don't see a run on Ethereum, there's no way that this can be a legitimate something. It just doesn't make any sense. I maintain that this has to be the case, that there's got to be something that's holding this back, whatever the something is.
[00:05:36] And I'm going to maintain my stance and I would challenge you listening to me here, CryptoTalk FM. If you listen to other shows who are telling you that Bitcoin's going on a run and we're at the Bull and we're going to go up, by all means listen to them if you choose. My only ask of you, I want you to compare what I just told you against what they're telling you. When I say I think this is all manipulation short term, I don't think it's going to sustain, I don't think that we are hit, we've hit any sort of real run because Ethereum's not moving. And Ethereum to me is the model for what really is a run. If we don't see Ethereum run, we're not really in that run is all I'm suggesting. So I want you, I'm asking you to hold me, hold me, compare me against what they're saying and then you make your own case and say, is Lyster telling the truth and these other guys are just hypsters and that's really all they're doing?
[00:06:36] Or does Lyster get it wrong? If it does, you can come at me. I want the smoke. I'm just going off what I feel and how can I, you know, where is that coming from? Because look at the price. For years now it does. It just doesn't make any sense.
[00:06:50] Especially when you think other tokens like BNB or Solana and you think of what their prices went to. That they can't sustain. How can that be if we were in this true bull run? Speaking of Solana, apparently, allegedly, reportedly SEC is fast tracking Solana ETFs to be approved and delivered sometime in the next month or two. This is coming out from secret undetected verbiage that was written somewhere that was given to someone that then said, hey, this is coming.
[00:07:22] Nobody has any evidence, nobody has any proof. That's just what was stated, what was rumored, what was claimed as this is what was going to occur in about the roughly the next two months. Now what does that do?
[00:07:35] We saw that the Bitcoin ETF helped with some of the purchases that happen now because, and I have some for all disclosure, Bitcoin ETFs, they started low, they've gone up. I think it went 3x recent.
[00:07:49] And you know, Ethereum ETFs, Solana ETFs, any sort of these ETFs, they open the door for institutionals as well as retail to benefit from the price movement without the inherent risk of the underlying asset. Now of course, if they don't hold the underlying asset and part of the problem here that I'll get at, if they don't hold the underlying asset and they don't experience the risk of it, that's obviously a good thing. But it also means that when that if that org, whoever's the custodian has issues or they become financially insolvent or they shut down, nothing protects you. There is no FDIC around any of this business. So you are still taking somewhat of a risk. It just happens to be lower risk and it is borne by those organizations.
[00:08:37] You have to make your own decision of whether it makes sense to get into those things, given what I just said, that you have no real insurance protection because you really have nothing to lose. The crypto directly has no insurance either. Nothing you do around cryptocurrency gives you any sort of protection or insurance. That's just the way it's been.
[00:08:56] I'm saying simply that the as more ETFs come aboard, there needs to be dialogue around protections for those custodians to make sure if they have some issues that you and I, we're protected on what's going on there.
[00:09:11] Anytime there's a custody, as in custodian that owns. Anytime there's a custody in place though, you accept that you are relinquishing some of the command in exchange for lesser risk.
[00:09:25] Speaking of custodians, Alby. Alby is an exchange or it's a wallet. But it's an exchange slash wallet. It's got both functionalities. Allegedly was ripping people off on some of their bitcoin. The story coming out is this was a wallet size exchange. I say wallet slash exchange because it has exchange features and functionality and it was not a self custody wallet. So anytime a wallet is not a self custody wallet. I said before with Coinbase, but there's others, they all do it.
[00:09:58] You're always agreeing to some terms and conditions that none of you read. And what you don't understand is that if it's not self custody, it's not your keys, not your coins and they are entitled to do whatever the F they choose to do.
[00:10:11] Well, that's what Alvy did because allegedly, and this was out of, I think it's out of China.
[00:10:16] But allegedly this person claimed that roughly 200 bucks worth of bitcoin was taken out of his account. Now the word account is already a red flag. A self custody wallet does not require you to create an account. This is the reason I have not signed up with a lot of these different wallets. And I had one of the listeners ask me about different wallets and I could not recommend certain ones because they force you to create an account.
[00:10:42] A self custody wallet should not need you to create an account. If they ask you to create an account, there's a risk it's a custodial wallet. If it's a custodial wallet, that means they're baking in certain terms and conditions that may put your assets at risk. That's what happened with this Albi is apparently you had to create an account and Alvi issued some terms and conditions. Now this person claimed that Alby's initial terms did not allow them to do what they did and that apparently Alvy had changed the terms.
[00:11:10] The problem is if they change the terms and you do not agree, you have to stop using the product.
[00:11:16] So let's take it on face and I don't think it's the truth, but let's take it on face that initially the terms did not have that. And then later Alby introduced terms that allow them to do it.
[00:11:27] There's no way this person read that segment because they would have told you that, yeah, they have the right to take the assets because they are the custodian, they control the assets, not you when you agree to this stuff.
[00:11:40] If they had read it, they would not have kept using this service, this wallet, this exchange. But the fact that they kept using it tells me either they didn't read the terms or they did and they figured, well, I want to keep the wallet, so I'm just going to. I have to agree it's kind of under duress.
[00:11:56] It doesn't matter if you agree under duress, you are still agreeing to terms.
[00:12:00] That's the way this works. If you have a service or product and you choose to continue using it and it is not self custodial in nature, you are agreeing to whatever terms they put upon you and you really can't complain after the fact. Some people claimed they were losing thousands of dollars on this business and allegedly, albeit sent out emails warning about this change of terms to them. And of course people duck email. You run from email, you avoid email. And this is why I keep warning everybody listening to me, email is your friend and you need to embrace it and you need to welcome it and need to support it because that's how you get business communications of this nature. So it's possible these people just don't follow email. And they were told this was happening and they were told you're by continuing to use the product you are agreeing to these terms. They all say that if you don't read your email, there could be something out there that you're doing that with. So you're awarding from Leister who's trying to look out for you.
[00:13:02] If you are creating an account, chances are there's terms and conditions.
[00:13:06] If you're not reading terms and conditions, that's a problem. You should be reading the terms and conditions to understand what it is that you're agreeing to.
[00:13:15] And if you don't agree with it, you need to stop using that product. There's tons of wallets out there, tons of better wallets that don't require an account. Pick one of them.
[00:13:24] This is up to you.
[00:13:26] I can't tell it too much cash, but I don't want to see something like this happen to you.
[00:13:31] I had somebody ask, why would they just readily take money?
[00:13:35] So custodians, custodial accounts, this is central exchanges, this is these, you know, wallets that are custodial wallets.
[00:13:44] All services like this, where money's involved have something in their terms that refers to an inactivity.
[00:13:53] And inactivity means you haven't used it in a while, you haven't logged in in a while. And they retain the right to charge a fee, a maintenance fee. All they want you to do is to make sure you're an active user. They don't just close the account, they'll just keep charging you until it's empty. I had the Same thing happen, I believe was Coin Tiger.
[00:14:12] I had transferred, this is years ago, I had transferred from Tron into Coin Tiger. And then at the time, and I forget the specifics but at the time there was something going on where it wasn't financially worth it to try to withdraw it. So I left it there. It just wasn't enough.
[00:14:30] Well, they sent a message and they said, you know, we're going to charge it every X and that's fine. I didn't care. Who cares?
[00:14:37] Again, it comes in email. They tell you they're going to do these things and so you should be paying attention to email about when they choose to do this to the end. Inactivity is a common thing. You should always, if you're going to create a service, you need to be logging into it, using it or you need to be mindful.
[00:14:56] They can put whatever they want in the terms. There's not really much you can do about it.
[00:15:00] They might try to sue. You can try, man. But it's not, no, that's not, it's not going to do any good because that's why their terms and conditions and the terms and conditions are conditioned on you using the product or service. If you continue using the product service, it is implicit that you are agreeing to set terms even if you think they're a scam. And I understand it, just that is what it is.
[00:15:23] I'm going to wrap up today's episode. As I said it was going to be reasonably short, but I'm a wrap up today's episode.
[00:15:29] I would laugh but I'm in a little bit of pain so I'm going to just shake my head. I know you can't see it, but I'm going to shake my head. But Coinbase, who is a terrible freaking exchange, they're turning into the worst.
[00:15:44] They sent out an ad very recently that, you know, this is the kind of stuff that should be against the law in advertisement.
[00:15:53] What they said was that the price of homes, so home buying, the price of homes is cheaper with bitcoin than it is with regular fiat because. And they're tying it to inflation. But they're strategy is just jacked up what they said. And this is what I want. You're going to shake your head and you should. Okay, in 2012, and this is from their ad, in 2012, the median price of a home in the United states would be 30,000 bitcoin.
[00:16:31] Is that wrong? No, that's absolutely correct because at that time the price of bitcoin was roughly in the. You know is less than three figures is two figures. So that's about right.
[00:16:44] Right now, a decade later you only need 20 bitcoin.
[00:16:51] Today only 5 bitcoin.
[00:16:54] Listen this. So they know that what they're saying is bullshit, right? Because the price of 30 price of Bitcoin, right? The value of bitcoin when you only needed 30,000 was between 10, 20, 30 bucks.
[00:17:17] A decade later the price of bitcoin skyrocketed.
[00:17:21] Today it skyrocketed. That's why you only need five.
[00:17:25] In other words, Coinbase is ignoring the fiat value of said bitcoin in presenting it as a number to you.
[00:17:36] Despite the fact that the price of the home is still fiat based because it's tied to what I described in an older episode around asset backed securities, debt instruments.
[00:17:49] All of that is tied to the fiat system, which means you cannot transact a house without fiat. So in order to do so, even if you were to use cryptocurrency of any kind, you must correlate it to its fiat equivalent value. You cannot say, well it's only 5 bitcoin and it used to be only, it used to be 30,000, now it's only 5.
[00:18:16] This doesn't make sense because at the time that it took 30,000 bitcoin, bitcoin was dirt cheap.
[00:18:26] At the time it takes five bitcoin, Bitcoin is egregiously expensive.
[00:18:33] What you have to do is you have to separate the definition of expense versus value to you.
[00:18:44] If you don't own five bitcoin, that means it's going to be expensive for you to get the five bitcoin needed to buy a house.
[00:18:56] If you own five or more bitcoin, that means you have five bitcoins worth of value towards which you can buy a house. However, it would be stupid for you to sell that bitcoin to buy a house, at least all of it.
[00:19:15] I wouldn't have a problem taking let's say three Bitcoin, right? So you're going to buy a house that's 500 grand. So you do three Bitcoin to pay off 300,000 of the house. I probably wouldn't have a problem with that.
[00:19:30] And then you need to get job to deal with the rest of it. Why?
[00:19:35] A we still have the scam notice the credit reporting system. So if you pay everything in cash, your credit's going to be shot.
[00:19:43] Credit shot, it affects other stuff.
[00:19:46] Believe it or not be there could be hard times that hit you and you might need to tap into equity.
[00:19:56] So putting yourself in a positive equity position ahead of the game would behoove you. It's my point. So I wouldn't have a problem selling some of it for a house and then paying the rest as loan. And I would never tell anybody unless you had a surplus. If you're rocking 50 Bitcoin, sure, use it to. But then don't go, don't squander it on a house that's too much or house that's too expensive or whatever. You know, get something reasonable and then invest the rest of it smartly.
[00:20:28] But what Coinbase is doing makes them sound like idiots and all they're doing is triggering the FOMO crowd.
[00:20:36] Triggering the, what do you call it? The bullish sentiment crowd.
[00:20:42] Maxis, I guess is the term. You should not state the number of Bitcoin when equating it to a transaction that is backed by fiat. It doesn't make any sense. The number of bitcoin means nothing. It never did. If you go back to the intent of Bitcoin, the number of bitcoin should have been an equivalency, but we ruined it when we tied it to fiat and made it less valuable. The satoshi amount is of no relevance to people. It's a no relevance to transactions, it's no relevance to conversions.
[00:21:21] It's all about the fiat equivalency.
[00:21:23] So you're not in any better position now than you were prior to Bitcoin's rise is what I'm getting at it. Nothing is better.
[00:21:32] Coinbase states it's better because of the amount of Bitcoin you would need to hold, but it's all faulty. Then they released an inflation and they were linking somebody else's different service, but they released this inflation index and this chart is trying to make the statement that based on inflation only. So we're just talking the value of said asset based on inflation. Only Bitcoin is still cheaper that the price of a typical home going strictly off inflation numbers, which is a fallacy because again houses are part of asset backed securities and part of debt instruments, which means they're tied to fiat, which means they're tied to inflation no matter what. But setting that aside, they're suggesting that for a house that's roughly 300 something thousand dollars in fiat it would only be just over $180,000 or so in bitcoin.
[00:22:33] What's the flaw of that logic? The flaw of that logic is once again to buy a house you're not paying bitcoin, you're paying fiat. So the fiat value inflation Included is going to hit you regardless. You would still have to have the equivalent amount of Bitcoin to. To get to the Fiat level anyway, which means you're not benefiting simply because it's bitcoin. This is a fantasy graph predicated on a world where we were in the past out of Fiat. We weren't. We are not.
[00:23:09] We're not going to be in our lifetimes, since we're not going to be.
[00:23:16] Any equivalency that you drive must include natural inflation for Fiat, because that's what we've done to the cryptocurrency.
[00:23:25] I would love.
[00:23:27] I would love to see some upstart like say, Rocket Mortgage or somebody, some upstart company say, we will accept Bitcoin. Straight Bitcoin, no Fiat for this. It won't happen, folks. It can't.
[00:23:45] Consider. And if you think I'm nuts, I want you to do your own research on what I'm about to tell you.
[00:23:51] I'm a homeowner. Okay? Consider property tax. You don't own a house. When you buy a house, you don't own it. I know you think you do. You don't, you don't.
[00:24:03] Property taxes. You never own the land that you have your house on.
[00:24:09] I don't care if you bought the land off scratch. You still have property taxes.
[00:24:14] You could buy land that is in unincorporated areas, right? You could buy land that's in spaces where it's not part of some sort of incorporated something.
[00:24:26] So you can buy land to build nowhere. You still have to be allowed to build on said land. You still have to be allowed to do utilities to said land. You could be like Thomas Massie and go completely off the grid. He did all that himself though, right? You could do that if you wanted to. That. But think of the overhead, think of the expense. And I'm not even talking money. I'm talking time. Do you have the time to do that? See, he works Congress, so he has that benefit. He has a nest egg that works. Do you. Do you make six figures like he does? Probably not.
[00:25:03] Things are working against you. So what I'm telling you, in the real world of normal humans like you and I, you don't own the land that the house is on. So that's number one when you own the house, right? So let's say you pay it completely off.
[00:25:19] You're still paying property taxes on the damn thing. It doesn't matter. They're never going to go away.
[00:25:24] So that's the thing. During the time that you're paying off the home.
[00:25:29] What you've done is you create a mortgage.
[00:25:32] The mortgage is a loan. The loan is extended by a financier, usually a bank of some kind, that might get sold as a debt, debt instrument, an asset backed security to somebody else a servicer is maintaining. There might be escrow involved.
[00:25:51] But you also have inside of this, right, when you're doing the mortgage and you're paying that, the interest that accrues on that loan, all of that's not raw profit per se for the bank or for the financier.
[00:26:07] You have to consider that the governments plural, they take a slice of things they want you to have, mortgages they want you to have. They don't want you to rent.
[00:26:20] Okay? The people who own the property from which you rent, they get nailed and then they nail you and then they have to profit. That's why renting is a scam. But they want people to own property.
[00:26:32] So you might ask, well then why is it so dang expensive? They want people to do it? It's expensive because what's happened is they've added a bunch of regulations.
[00:26:42] Regulations cost money. There's a lot of things that are just overhead. It's not the straight. Build a log cabin and you're good. Build a brick house and you're good. Build a Sears home and you're good. There's all sorts of chaos. I was just dealing with an electrician who's doing a lot of critical work for me and I'm glad that he's doing it and we've got some good progress. But he had to move a light fixture and everything else and he found that, yeah, this wiring, I told him, you know the person that came to the inspection before you, the same company, he said, yeah, it's all tied to the 20 and it shouldn't be. And I'm like, yeah, I know the house doesn't work. I guarantee you this wiring is wrong.
[00:27:26] And he's like, okay, I'll take a look. And he turns out, yeah, this wiring, the wires, they're not rated for. It's on a 20amp breaker. These wires are not rated. That's a problem.
[00:27:37] But that's the slap together nature of older homes that were. There were no such rules. And you could join stuff together and you could jury rig stuff together. But what they found is, you know what, that might actually be a fire risk.
[00:27:54] So now they have all these regs around the wiring and what can be inside the walls and what can be in the baseboards and what could be in the Attic and what can be in the basement, what has to be in junctions and what has to be in conduit. And the gauging of the wire from plumbing, I'm looking at it like, okay, this, this is crazy. All these regs and things that have to happen in order to get this going, but they have. Where you can't sump to the driveway, you can't sump straight to somebody else's property. You can't do this, you can't do that, you can't do this bad.
[00:28:32] But I understand it's because, okay, if you do that, this might affect your foundation. If you do this, this might affect that. That we learned over time. What am I getting at? I'm telling you that everything has changed.
[00:28:47] And as a result of all these things that have changed and that we've learned and that the government has added as overhead to what used to be a very simple process, the concept of ownership has decreased.
[00:29:01] The expense has increased. So it's not just inflation that's part of it, but it's also the cost of things has increased. It's gotten worse over time. And so now you have to. This concept that Bitcoin being only you, only five is. It's a. It's insulting, okay, if the amount that you have to own has not changed, and it doesn't matter if it's in cryptocurrency form or in fiat form, the amount you need to own has not changed. That's the bottom line of this and Coinbase's joke of a post.
[00:29:38] Nothing's changed.
[00:29:40] In some mythical future world where there is no fiat equivalency, which I will maintain will not occur in our lifespan, we could make that story. Even when you got there, you still are going to have that. You still. Because you're never going to get. When you think about all the chain of people that are involved in this, when you think about all the employees and those employees have to pay their bills and the utility companies have to make money, Everything runs on money. Everything runs on fiat. You'll never be able to unravel the ball of yarn that's fiat. All they can do is create an equivalency.
[00:30:17] And if they create an equivalency which basically restores pairing not to gold but to cryptocurrency against the fiat, that might be something sustainable.
[00:30:30] It's too late because we printed so much money and there's so much debt out there that's owed. You can't unravel that. So what are you going to do? You'd have to reprice, you'd have to revalue everything from the ground up. And that's never going to happen. Like, you know what I'm saying?
[00:30:46] No matter what you do, we're going to have equivalency to Fiat. The price of things has not changed. The narrative that bitcoin has made stuff cheaper is false. It's fake, it's not true. And I'm not trying to naysay you, I'm trying to be a realist on this one because it's the truth. We're not in any better situation simply because bitcoin is rising and we're not going to be because Fiat is always going to run the roofs and that's just the way it goes.
[00:31:12] In summary, if you're looking at if you're new, right, if you're listening and welcome, by the way, if you're new and you're trying to get in, I'm not trying to sell you off of it. By no means am I trying to do that. It's a difficult on ramp because you don't know the right price entry point.
[00:31:29] It's easy, though. Buy on the red, sell on the green.
[00:31:33] But I'm also trying to tell you to be wary of BS posts like this that tell you that bitcoin somehow mystically makes stuff cheaper.
[00:31:43] Nothing in crypto is making anything cheaper. And it's not going to because it's tied to Fiat. It's going to be tied to Fiat. If you get in, make sure it's money you can afford to lose because you're still going to need the Fiat to pay your bills and to feed yourself.
[00:32:00] And that's not going to change. And that's just the real. I'm just. I'm being real with you. I know a lot of YouTubers aren't. I will. I'll tell you the straight up because I don't want people getting this BS narrative that bitcoin is going to be all you need at some point. And it's not true, Sam.
