[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]. before I get into today's episode, I want to say thank you. We've got a couple new listeners. I appreciate you.
[00:00:25] We.
[00:00:26] I need desperately need help.
[00:00:31] Help in the sense that I want to hear from people on a regular basis as to anything you want to chat about, but also specifically, you know, how did you find us? What do you like? What do you not like? Is there anything that you would like to hear? And we are open to that feedback. It is a collaborative situation.
[00:00:52] So CryptoTalk FM, hit the contact form.
[00:00:55] We'd love to hear from you. So welcome. If you are new to the show and if you're not new, nothing's really changed. I'll give a personal update. And this may sound doom and gloom. I do it on purpose because I want to be clear.
[00:01:09] I am. I do the show because I enjoy doing it. I don't do it to make money. I do it because I enjoy doing it. Today's topics are going to talk about some very controversial things. And I do it because I'm sharing my opinion about some things I saw and read about over this past week.
[00:01:28] And I'm sharing my thoughts. That's all I'm doing. You have to make up your own mind. You'll know for sure. Some of these names, especially if you've been in it for a while.
[00:01:37] And I'm not attacking anybody. I think we're at the point now where the vast majority of these people, they don't care about what me and what I got to say because I'm not a YouTuber pretty per se.
[00:01:48] I'm just a regular podcaster and my podcasts replicate to YouTube. But that's. I'm not a YouTuber.
[00:01:56] I am planning to get back on live. The reason I haven't because I'm trying to get this room situated perfectly. There's still more work to be done. It's more than I expected.
[00:02:06] Still doesn't make a YouTuber. I'm a podcaster at the end of the day and I enjoy what I do and hopefully you enjoy it, too. That rhymes Again. Today's topic is going to be a bit controversial, but I do not do it to attack people. I do it shared opinion. And you'll have to make up your own mind. About whether you agree or disagree. But I think you'll, by the time we're done, agree that some of these people are just absolutely balls out nuts. That's just the bottom line because the Leister said so.
[00:02:40] CoinDesk.com we'll zoom out to the month chart and it doesn't matter if you pick Bitcoin or Ethereum because I'll be saying the same things about both, which is that both are in kind of a middle holding pattern. Bitcoin lost a lot of the momentum that it had very recently because there was an expectation that the whole tariffs and everything else were kind of settling down or again, some stability. That was not to be the case because the Trump administration announced a little bit more instability specifically around China as they're trying to work towards what they believe is the best way to enrich the United States.
[00:03:15] So bitcoin as an example, with the past 24 hours a low of just shy of 105 grand, a high of just shy of 107 grand, currently around the 106 grand mark. So middling right in the middle. Ethereum had a rough time of it. It actually dipped as low as a just shy of 1800 bucks not that long ago, spiked back up to $2700 currently at the $2600 mark as I record it now. Again, the the this whole $1800 was a complete blip. It did not last more than a blink of an eye. But I said that if Ethereum does not run up, it means we're not out of this bearish period. And the bull run is largely predicated on the run up of Ethereum because Ethereum has enough in its ecosystem to justify the price run. And the price run of Ethereum is going to spike largely everything else not named Bitcoin. We saw that the last time in 2020 and 2021 when Ethereum went to its all time high, getting roughly around 4800 bucks. And we saw everything else was jumping like crazy. Bitcoin was jumping, but nowhere near like it jumped from, you know, 60 grand up to 100 something grand.
[00:04:30] But within this area like Solana went crazy, Tron went crazy, Avax went crazy, Ethereum Classic went crazy. We saw some of these other alts go crazy, backed off of Ethereum going crazy. And a lot of that is because when Ethereum's price starts to spike, gas fees skyrocket on Ethereum, which was holding a lot of people back from buying a lot of tokens. As a result, they were jumping to alternate chains to Do a lot of transaction, namely the Binance Smart chain, because the Binance Smart chain was a fraction and continues to be a fraction of what you saw on Ethereum back then. I can remember very clearly Ethereum having prices of like a hundred bucks to do trades and all sorts of crazy nonsense and I wasn't gonna support.
[00:05:18] The point is that Ethereum's price dictates the market. It's not Bitcoin's price anymore. Bitcoin's price is dictated by the institutionals only, not the larger market scale. The larger market scale is run by Ethereum by and large. And that is me, Leister CryptoTalk FM telling you that statement with confidence. I challenge anybody listening to hold me accountable to that statement. It's now an audio. Hold it. You might hear various YouTubers telling you that I'm nuts. That's great, right? We will see who's right and who's wrong because everybody else is telling you it's all about Bitcoin or xrp, right? No, it's. It's always been about Ethereum because Ethereum has been influenced. Ethereum has been influenced by the idiot Vinlick, the rug puller and the government colluding to launch an unregistered security for which they artificially inflated the price. That's what we're dealing with with it, right?
[00:06:15] The reason I say it has no choice but to go back up, and that's going to be the point of positivity for all the other alts that are out there, is because no matter what, Ethereum is the quote, safest or at least the most confident that's out there for many of these investors. It's the one that has the least risk of crapping like Solana, right? It's. It's the one that's cheapest Develop. Develop on most well known, most accessible. When I say develop, I'm not talking things like Pump Fund where they're launching garbage meme tokens. I'm talking actual development using the chain for a thing that goes to something I'm going to update a little bit later about Internet computer.
[00:06:56] But Ethereum has always run the roost and continues to do so. I don't like it. I accept it for what it is.
[00:07:02] Second, let's go down some updates because I wanted to turn talk through. I did. There's a couple of news bits I'm going to talk about that. I have a little bit of 101, but it's not a dedicated 101. It's around these garbage things that I saw. But I want to go down the news bits because there's quite a few of them. I want to make sure I get through them in today's episode. It'll be a little bit longer than the usual, but not crazy long. I don't want to keep you.
[00:07:25] I also have to be mindful because I've got a allergic reaction right now. The trees are blooming and it's setting me off. So I want to make sure I'm not coughing or sniffling or sneezing in your ear.
[00:07:36] Let's talk gift cards.
[00:07:39] You may or may not know gift cards are now easier than ever to purchase.
[00:07:44] I'm not just talking about the gift cards that you can buy from the gas station. I'm talking all sorts of gift cards, cards that you can replenish your prepaid phone cards for food, cards for Amazon, cards for games. There's all sorts of various gift cards that are now available to you. As a crypto trader, I was not compensated by any of these services. I share it because you might not be aware that these things are there. And then I want to talk about why you may or may not consider doing this. The way it works is if you have cryptocurrency in your wallet for which you've made some money and let's say you're. You don't know what to spend it on and you're not like right now we're in this middling phase and there's not. There's too much risk in investing in some garbage tokens, something. So. But you want to make use of it. So let's say you wanted to get a gift card maybe for a friend or for yourself.
[00:08:32] There are services out there that will let you do this, and there's many of them. I'm going to talk about two, and these two have my personal seal of approval. That's why I want to share both of these. One of them is called bit refill. Bit refill.com bit refill is an amazing freaking service. The way it works is you go and say, okay, this is the gift card that I want.
[00:08:55] You do have to create an account because it maintains a balance for you, but you do create an account.
[00:09:01] Then you select what gift card that you want. And they have all sorts of gift card types. I tend to use it for things like Steam. If I'm refilling the Steam account, I use it for T Mobile top Ups, I use it for Nintendo Eshop top Ups. But you can use it for all sorts of. There's all sorts of different things that you can use. And then they have an account concept. So you create an account and there's a balance that it maintains and they have a cash back feature on the account. So there's all sorts of value to this. But it doesn't just stop there. You can do Uber Eats, you could do Apple. So let's say you're looking for. Let's say you're doing gift cards for people and Apple gift cards for people that need to get, you know, like iTunes, credits or something. You can do Apple, you can do travel stuff, you can do phones, other like VoIP phones, you name it. They probably have something for you.
[00:09:54] You say which card that you want, they require that you fill it up so you add a balance to it. You then can transfer your cryptocurrency and they use, I'm pretty sure they use coins Gate but you transfer the cryptocurrency. You can choose like Ethereum, Bitcoin, bnb. I think they take Solana, I know they take Litecoin, Tron. There's all sorts of different tokens you can choose. You can connect the wallet and do it or you can do wallet connect. Scan the barcode after they acknowledge and this may take some time depending on which network you chose, but it may take some time after they acknowledge it. Then the depending on what the card was, it'll either credit to your account and then notify you. Here's the code and you can redeem it. And it's just a email. So for those of you that duck email, you can just learn to love it. Or if it's like a top up, like a T mobile, it just credits your account, it just credits your balance. Prepaid balance, coolest thing possible. So bit refill. I personally endorse them. I've used them on multiple occasions. Again mostly for gaming. I did use it for top up one time just to see how it would work and it worked really well. You could do the top up at Walmart, but they obviously don't take crypto, right? Whole point is to use your crypto to be able to do these things.
[00:11:05] So I've used bit refill on a number of occasions for these things and I thought it really worked. Specifically Steam cards. It works really, really well. Never had a problem at all. I've not used it for Amazon yet because Amazon pisses me off at times. But it is available. So bitrefill.com personal endorsement on that one. The other one that was brought to attention and I used it for a Couple of different things but I haven't used it heavily was coins be coinsbee.com Coinsbee is the same concept buying gift cards. The nice the up part of coinsbee is when you go in it has more options for gift cards. It doesn't require an account, it doesn't require kyc, it doesn't require anything. You just say this is what I want. You say here's the crypto I got. You say here's my email address. So for those the duck email. Here's my email address. And then it either emails you the card or does the top up to the phone. So there's more hoops on Bit refill.
[00:12:05] This is fair but the balance and the cash back to me it makes it worth it if you're okay doing those things. Coins BE does not require an account, doesn't require KYC and you can get the gift cards and it's an amazing service. Both of them are amazing services. I use Coins BE mostly for the top up. I haven't used it for the other types of cards. But I strongly recommend if you're one of those that wants to be in this kind, definitely check out Coins be. The one down thing I don't didn't like about Coins BE at least when I looked at it.
[00:12:34] Their advertisement says that they accept all sorts of cryptocurrencies but when I went in there they only had a limited list of options. And I don't know if that's just because of the country that I'm in. I don't, I don't know why that would matter. But you know it only had the big ones. It only had like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin. It didn't have Solana which pissed me off.
[00:12:54] But again I don't know if that was just a fluke or what was going on. So they're compared to bit refills. My point, bit refill seemed to take pretty much everything I wanted to throw at it other than garbage tokens. Whereas Coins B seemed like it was a little bit limited. But Coins B seems to have more cards and it doesn't have the same hoops to jump through in order to acquire those cards. So bitrefill.com coinsbee.com there are many others I simply spotlighting to that get my personal endorsement in case you are curious.
[00:13:24] Steak and Shake, which is arguably one of the best fast food restaurants here in the United States, recently launched bitcoin payments at all of its stores using Lightning Network.
[00:13:35] If you don't know what Lightning Network Is don't feel bad because it hasn't been advertised too broadly. But when you transfer a bitcoin, it's dog slow.
[00:13:44] It's dog slow and it depends on what's going on in the network, but the vast majority of the time it's dog slow. I just did a trend, the one I just did with coins be I use Bitcoin because I was trying to do a top up and I use Bitcoin and it took, you know, about a good three minutes. I mean, that's a long time. When you think about your payment card, your debit card, credit card, you swipe it, it's a few seconds later you're done.
[00:14:08] Lightning was created to try to bridge the gap from a payment perspective and make things go a little bit faster. But it's not supported by every wallet and it's not support by every terminal.
[00:14:18] So the terminal has to support it and the wallet has to support. If you're using Trust Wallet, it does not support Lightning. Very few wallets support Lightning.
[00:14:26] I use, I use a wallet that's bitcoin specific and it does not support Lightning. It's. It's the weirdest thing.
[00:14:34] Mun Mu n is a wallet that does support Lightning, but it's an ugly freaking wallet.
[00:14:40] So if you're interested in the Lightning network, because whatever you're trying to transact support supports it, sure, you can use it. I'm suggesting though that depending on your wallet, you may not support it. It's a different address. So you can't just use whatever you want. It has to fully support it. So Steak and Shake, doing this and supporting Lightning I think is good.
[00:15:00] But defaulting and requiring Lightning, I think it's going to be a risk for them because people are going to be confused because not every wallet sports Lightning. And that's because it's not really official. It's kind of in a beta phase. It's been that for a long time.
[00:15:13] So if you go to Steak and Shake, you, you may or may not be able to do the payment because it depends on whether or not you can transact it the way they want you to. I still think it's a good thing to do because you remember, what was it, Donald Trump and he went there to buy a burger to pay Bitcoin. He was sitting there waiting. I mean, it's embarrassing, right? And it actually killed the business for a minute.
[00:15:31] So this is something to keep in mind and keep aware of because it's a good thing for cryptocurrency overall.
[00:15:38] Chain link Had a malfunction very recently with one of its oracles sparking $500,000 in liquidations. And conversations about Oracles price Oracles.
[00:15:49] Some people don't know what we mean when we say Oracle. The simplest definition I can give you consider that there's a piece of technology out there whose job it is to monitor and report the current price of a thing. That's an Oracle.
[00:16:02] It is what tells all of your different tools what the price of a stable coin is, what the price of a different token is at any given time and especially when it spans over blockchains or it spans over different networks. There has to be some way to synchronize price and keep it intact. And that's what an Oracle's job is, is to help report what the current price of something is. What happened is chain link recently had they had a. There's a stablecoin on chain link d.USD de USD and allegedly then Oracle chainlink did that was misreporting its price at A$3. Now stable coins are supposed to be pegged to the dollar.
[00:16:40] So what happens? Well if you see the price is going high, okay that's the profit, right? So people are getting liquidated on this business and it's a stable coin and this was, this was bad because the Oracle, you have to trust it, you have to trust this reporting the right price because it's going to affect activities, trading activities that happen and those that are leveraging it are the ones that get hurt by this business. I said a while ago that you know, another FTX type of situation was going to happen. It was inevitable it was going to happen. So people responded to what happened. They said you know, look this is supposed to be reporting the correct value to help keep us safe. If it's not going to do that, it's just an outlaw mud show then what's the value of your chain?
[00:17:29] Because you have to understand that the whole point when you have a blockchain and it's got tokens being traded on that chain and it's got Oracles whose job it is to make sure the price is properly accounted for and it can't even do that, the inherent value of the blockchain is lost and that's a loss of trust, it's a loss of sentiment.
[00:17:49] Now part of what I said and some others agree with me is well this is what's going to happen when you keep relying on these, this volatility and volatile type assets like you know, algorithmic stable coins, things that are inherently risky and you go YOLO into those protocols and you treat them like it's real collateral. This is what's going to happen. Right?
[00:18:15] And it's true. If you're trying to use this algorithmic business to keep it. The same thing to happen really with, with poof hair as well as do rug pull, AKA Doquan with it's you're relying on these risky type of things to strike a balance. And then you depend on an oracle to keep it all in check.
[00:18:34] Well, you're creating all these chains of risk, all these links where one of them can break and just kill the business.
[00:18:41] That's what happens because the inherent treatment of the asset itself is risky. As a result, you've extended the risk to all the people who choose to trade on the chain. There is nothing that, you know, there's nothing that could be done because you created the risk in the first place. It was inevitable to happen. Question is whether chain will chain link will recover. Nobody really knows for sure.
[00:19:06] The United States government has reportedly lost roughly $21 billion selling Bitcoin that they had seized over time.
[00:19:16] You might remember some time ago that there was a bunch of reports that the United States government was just dumping bitcoin that they had seized over time from various aspects. There was chatter that they wanted people to have those, they wanted those frozen. They didn't want them sold because they knew the government would sell them on the open market. They didn't want to kill the business because it's what they were going to do. And then you think about some of this U.S. i mean, geez, the UK has a bunch of tokens. China has a bunch of tokens. El Salvador has been stacking. All of these governments because they don't see the same value inherent to it.
[00:19:51] Sell it on the open market instead of like an OTC where they can actually sell it for some profit and make some value from it. So they're dumping it. Dumping and done. Then the price keeps crapping down because that's what it's supposed to do.
[00:20:05] People don't understand because there are buy orders out there from people who are trying to buy it on the cheap. The buy orders have to be filled. There's still orders. Somebody wants it for a certain price that is lower than its current price.
[00:20:20] That's, that's what it is. It's a short, right? They're buying short. They're buying at a shorter price because they, that's the price point that they want to buy it. Some people might have said, you know, when it dipped down to 70 grand. They might have said, okay, I put a buy order 70 grand because I expected to go back down there again. Right, that's a short. And there's a lot of those.
[00:20:40] If the government or somebody else puts tokens out and they're willing to sell to those people at those prices and sometimes it's not in their control, then you're going to tank the price of bitcoin because there's monitors that look at the trading, active current trading price and that affects the price that you've seen. So a lot of the concerns people have is all of these different governments potentially dumping the bitcoin on the open market, killing the business because they hold a lot of it. And people wanted bitcoin frozen to avoid that happening. But that contradicts the very spirit of decentralization that people were talking about.
[00:21:16] It's an interesting quandary. The suffice is at the end of the day you, bitcoin is going to be the riskiest asset.
[00:21:24] So diversification of portfolio is always the best answer. Don't just rely on bitcoin because you can't know what's going to happen to it at any given time is the point.
[00:21:36] Now I'm going to wrap up with two different updates. Two different updates, two different influencers, one singular opinion because I do think everybody's got the best of intentions.
[00:21:50] In this case, I do think everybody's the best of intentions. It's just that the way that they're saying what they're saying made me laugh out loud and I felt I wanted to share it with you guys and I will close, I will wrap up once I get past this business because there's not too much to it.
[00:22:06] And I debated which one to start with and I thought let's start with the, the good dude, you know, because I know he's good hearted. I, I know he's good hearted.
[00:22:16] He goes by the name of city xscape.x cape c a p e on YouTube.
[00:22:23] He's a younger guy. I would guess he's probably in his 20s, maybe, maybe early 20 calls. His name's James.
[00:22:31] City Xscape is an app. It's a app for Android that apparently he's writing himself. He took, he said he set up some classes and he was teaching himself how to write Android applications and got really good at it and decided to write this City Xscape application which allegedly how it reads is that as you use navigation apps that you get compensation, you get paid for just using the applications or touring similar to like the Pokemon Go concept where you know, but without the mixed reality, you just go places and you benefit.
[00:23:05] That's the concept behind it. So no problem. I don't want to talk about the City Escape app. I want to talk about what he said to kind of lay the playing field. Now he fancied himself, and I say past tense, as somebody who was really strong on icp, which is Internet Computer. The story behind Internet Computer, when that thing launched, it jumped thousands of dollars. It went up crazy amounts of money and then I think due to a mix of inflation and loss of sentiment, crapped all the way back down. It currently trades at like four bucks.
[00:23:42] The initial story of Internet Computer as I understood it and if somebody is from the ECO that wants to correct me, Please do CryptoTalk FM hit the comment form and let us know. Contact.
[00:23:55] There are service providers like aws, Amazon, Google, Microsoft Azure where it provides a virtual machine, a virtual computer in the cloud that can, you can use for work and in some cases you can use for virtual servers. A lot of the different services that you use out there now on the web are hosted on some sort of virtual server somewhere. You don't need to host any sort of hardware.
[00:24:23] The cloud provider is taking care of the hardware for you.
[00:24:26] All you do is pay for essentially the resources, the electricity etc and storage.
[00:24:32] What Internet Computer was initially talking about was to try to be a competitor to that. But it also talked about things like self created Internet and being able to spin up your own little subnets and things using blockchain technologies.
[00:24:47] I never really was sold on what they were talking about because they didn't do a really good job of explaining the true mechanism. I mean I got docs out there, I'm talking for the layman investor. I don't think they did a good job breaking it down in a way that investors could consume for value.
[00:25:06] As a result I think people sold out because they didn't see the value and that's what caused the crap out that we would see. All of that's what I saw from a distance because I, I had it at a point and then I had sold it because it's like eh. And I know I got some free when I was on Coinbase and you know I sold it so I, I never saw any value and I didn't think it was going to go back up especially when it had the inflation situation.
[00:25:31] So this James person apparently was very big on Internet computer for a long time, known in the community, has quite a few followers and recently he was critical of some of the messaging that was coming out of the team where they were doing all these slide decks about AI.
[00:25:49] And one thing I'll credit James, if he ever hears this is, yes, I'm with you on the failure of all of these projects leaping to AI because all they're doing is playing follow the leader and saturating the market. Because that's the same thing that killed NFTs.
[00:26:09] When you, when everybody's just doing it, it loses all value. You no longer stand out in a crowd. If all you're doing is following the leader, you are no longer the leader.
[00:26:20] And jumping on AI is. That's what's happening now. Everybody's jumping on AI because it's the current shiny. Nobody has perfected it and nobody will.
[00:26:30] And many of those AI based projects end up being scams in the long run. I'll say that myself. He didn't say that. I do, but I agree with them in the sense that their focus on AI is doomed to fail because there was no reason to do it and they should have stayed with their mission.
[00:26:47] Where I disagree with James, and this is the first mention I want to make, he talked about how in some cases these companies are not focused on the right things to appeal to millennials. I'm going to play a little bit of audio for what he said so you can hear it directly from his mouth. But bottom line is he was saying that, you know, your, your strategy for advertising and things is not going to appeal to millennials. He's right.
[00:27:14] What I don't agree with him on is that, that it's a wrong strategy. I think it's a great strategy because appealing to what he was saying, which is emotions, is not how you make money. It's not those. Yeah, you'll get people watching your stuff, but they're not going to buy.
[00:27:31] You get them to buy by telling the story, regardless of emotional connect. It is. How is this going to benefit me? What's in it for me? That's. That's all it is. And that has nothing to do with age. That's the truth.
[00:27:44] I understand the younger people don't care about that. But the younger people, their priorities are flawed because you should be caring about what's in it for you. You should be a greedy mother father. If you're not a greedy mother father, you had no business being in it because that's what crypto is.
[00:27:58] So here's the part of the audio what he was talking about, so you can kind of hear it from the horse's mouth and hear from you. So he's a well spoken person. So I'm not criticizing that. I think just I don't agree with his stance. I understand where it comes from. I just simply disagree. Emphatically disagree.
[00:28:14] So I was going over coindesk and I noticed an article about a Solana watch that's being released from the Swiss watchmaker. And I thought this was a beautiful example of what I was talking about recently on my ICP episodes. That is unlike Cardano and Internet computers, Solana understands culture.
[00:28:36] So two things on that culture.
[00:28:40] A watch does not create or improve an understanding of culture. It has nothing to do with it.
[00:28:50] Rolex has been doing this for ages. Multiple watch manufacturers have been doing it for ages. Floyd Mayweather and Devin Haney have made a career out of wasting money on watches.
[00:29:00] Watches, they went out of style and then they came back in style somewhat as a fashion symbol. But the, the vast majority of people are buying smartwatches. So Solana's doing a watch, it's overpriced. That has nothing to do with culture. All they're doing is a gimmick. Just like the Solana phone. The Solana phone was a gimmick. And if you don't know the story of the Solana phone, they had a limited run manufacturing of a Solana phone that had. There was some gimmick where, you know, there was some amount of some garbage token on. I think it was bonk. It was something where there was some garbage token on the phone. And so getting the phone entitled you to the cryptocurrency. And so there was this mad dash for the phone. Nobody cared about the phone. They just wanted the cryptocurrency. And if you notice that went by the wayside. It's not popular, it didn't thrive. The watch is going to be the same thing, except that the watch is overpriced. I think it was like 20,000 bucks.
[00:29:55] Okay, well how is that attributed to culture? It's not. You're talking someone who sees something shiny and cool and for them, it appeals to them. But that is not how you sell. That is not how you market. That is not how you appeal to the people who are going to buy your product is not to focus on the shiny, it is to focus on the function. The Solana watch at the end of the day doesn't really do anything that any other smartwatch can't do.
[00:30:23] So you cannot distinguish why somebody should buy that damn thing except as a show off symbol. If you wanted to show off, you're going to buy a different type of watch anyway. So right there I understand why he feels it. He sees something shiny and cool and for him it makes him jump for joy. The regular layman investor is looking at this guy like he's an idiot. And again, he's a very well spoken young man and I can tell he's an intelligent young man.
[00:30:50] I disagree that this has anything to do with culture. He, he's coming from his, let's say, age perspective around what people of his age would find appealing. I got it. I'm suggesting that those are the kind of people that are not going to improve any sort of these markets. This guy's not broke, okay? So he spent five figures on various tokens, including icp.
[00:31:16] So he's not broke. And I'm not suggesting he's a broke bum, but I am saying that he might be very inefficient with his money. He might be very ineffective with his trading. We don't know.
[00:31:28] And so he's looking for these shinies that are going to appeal to him to find a place to spend his money. If you have to find a place to spend your money, you're doing it wrong. So this narrative of culture. No, there's no such a thing in cryptocurrency. You look for function. You should. Unless you're one of those degen type traders who just looks for mean garbage. Other than that, you look for function. He said Cardano. Cardano is run by a guy who I was told is a blatant idiot. But I love Cardano. I'm bullish on it. I just think that they, their strategy is flawed. But that has nothing to do with the product, has not do with the token is not the contract simply that's strategy not appealing to millennials. Rather, it's like for Cardano, what do you do? And they've not done a good job of emphasizing what do you do. That's how I feel about Internet computer. They told the story, but they've not sold that. Yes, we do this and here's real world situations that's using it. Here's how we're making, you know, boots on the ground, here's our making to change the industry. None of that has come to fruition. Why? I have no idea.
[00:32:34] My statement and I think most people listening to the show fit in this demographic like myself.
[00:32:41] It's not about emotionally appealing or culture or any of this garbage. None of that matters in the big picture. How you feel about a certain project is how you feel. But there's more to it than that. You have to look at the big picture of what do you do and you have to learn how to appeal. There's always going to be the garbage out there, like Bachelor, like World Coin.
[00:33:02] But beyond that, when you're trying to sell yourself as the technical marvel, you have to show that that succeed and if you don't, it's going to fail. It's that simple. It's not about flashy shiny watches and all that. I'm trying not to swear. All that garbage. In my personal opinion.
[00:33:18] The other one I wanted to speak about gave a topic and I think it was a little bit self serving about his motivations.
[00:33:26] But you know, the topic of his update was around whether YouTubers are scammers because I'm pretty sure it came from a place of him being called a scammer and has done for years.
[00:33:38] So what's my opinion? Let's start with that. What's my opinion? Are YouTubers scammers?
[00:33:45] We need to define scam and once we define scam, I think it self answers the question, but I'll still share my thoughts on it.
[00:33:54] Well, what really is a scam? Okay.
[00:33:57] A scam is when something is presented as X and turns out not to be X. That's a scam. At the basic level, that's a scam.
[00:34:06] So if somebody told you some used car dude, you know, like not like say whose car salesman, I'm talking real used car dude tells you, hey, come here, got a hot deal for you and tells you that this car is amazing, it's going to run forever and you're never going to any problems, you know, and you. And he's only selling it for 3,000 bucks. I know that that's. We're past that, but you just follow me. Okay? So you pay $3,000, you get this car gives you a three month warranty, right.
[00:34:38] Four months down the road you start having transmission issues.
[00:34:42] Did that person scam you?
[00:34:44] Technically, yes. Because they presented it as this car is amazing and this kind of stuff. And they knew the warranty wasn't going to be sufficient for anything. I'll give you another real world example. I bought. So this is 2023, okay. Beginning 2023, I had in, in December I had paid full price. It was 15 grand for a, it was a Cadillac something or other from Carvana.
[00:35:12] And they said, okay, yep, you're good. It's going to be shipped from I think it was California.
[00:35:18] Okay, we get close to the date now we're in. I think it Was like late January or something. Actually, it was beginning of January. Second week gets close. Okay, delivery day's here. I'm expecting my car. I see the updates on the site. I get a call from the delivery driver. It's a lady, and she says, it's got a check engine light, so I'm not comfortable delivering it. So I'm thinking, okay, well, call Joe the technician, tell him take a look at it, fix the car and deliver my car.
[00:35:43] Well, I don't know that. So now she's playing this, you know, and I'm like, I need my car. This is 15,000 bucks gone. I paid cash. Okay, so 15,000 bucks or my car. One of the two better show up. Are we gonna have some problems?
[00:35:57] She doesn't know. And I said, just call the freaking whoever you got to call and get it done. She says, whatever, never hear from her again.
[00:36:06] So I escalated through BBB because it's like, I need my car, I need my money back.
[00:36:11] Finally get a contact back through bbb and they're like, yeah, apparently there was something with the car and they didn't. They were just. They didn't know what to do, and it got screwed up. I'll refund your money. Okay, so they didn't deliver the car. Now, it could have been a small thing. It could have been simply that the battery was drained. I mean, that happens. But chances are there was a major problem with the car. Because what usually happens with check engine is that there's something mechanical that's not right, like a sensor or something else that needs to be fixed. It usually doesn't happen just off straight 12 volt.
[00:36:42] So, fine, give me my money back. Okay. This is right around the time I hear about my brother and he's having some problems. I want to go see him. The trip that I have to take, which is where I ended up, is going to be going right through where he's at. So I'm planning, I need a car, and I'll just drive up and I'll stop by, see him and check and make sure he's okay and do what I can because I had some time, but I can't get a car. Why didn't I have a car? Because I had given the other car back during the pandemic because there was no value in paying near 500 bucks a month when I don't have it. You know, I wasn't working. My clients started having issues.
[00:37:19] So this car, it's a wash. Now I gotta find another car, find a different dealer. He says, it's as is. So he told me up front, it's as is. 10,000 bucks. This is for the green card that I still have.
[00:37:31] But he told me when I talked to him it is as is. But we've had it checked out. We ran it through this. We verified everything was fine. We didn't see any issues.
[00:37:41] So it is as is. But we ran through it. We did all this. Okay, 10,000 bucks.
[00:37:47] He gets the car, it's delivered over to me. I do some drive, gets check engine light. Okay. And again, check engine light is usually indicative of a problem.
[00:37:57] Certainly something mechanical that needs to be checked out.
[00:38:00] Now, I know it's got to be something emissions related just because of the way the cars act. Okay. So I get it checked out by a regular. I do yourmechanic.com who's a scam. But I did that just, you know, to do the routine maintenance and get it checked out. Take a look and all this stuff. First guy says, no, there's nothing wrong with it. I see everything's fine. I can't trigger the check engine light does the maintenance.
[00:38:23] Again, it's a scam, but whatever.
[00:38:26] I called him again because I want a second opinion.
[00:38:30] So second guy, he's much smarter about it. Does the run, says, yeah, I got the check engine light. It took a while.
[00:38:37] I'm almost confident it's your catalytic converter.
[00:38:41] I think I told this story before. Catalytic converter is the most expensive part of a car no matter what it is at that time. It's the most expensive part of a car not named the transmission.
[00:38:54] Fine. Take it down to mining key. Have the verified. I said chances are it's a cat converter. But check, you know, check throughout the car. Checks car. Yep, cat converter. It's going to be $4,800 if I recall, to replace cat converter.
[00:39:09] Okay, So I paid $4,800. Cars run like a dream ever since.
[00:39:14] Was I scammed?
[00:39:16] Technically, you could say yes because it was presented as we checked and everything was fine.
[00:39:21] Turns out they did not change the oil. He said he did. There's no way he did because the first guy who swapped it the oil was straight up dirty.
[00:39:29] None of the filters were changed. There was body damage unreported. So was it a scam? Officially, yes.
[00:39:36] Then there was issues with registration. I won't get into point is, was it a scam? Yeah, because again, if something is presented as such, this is what this is and it turns out not to be the case. That's essentially a scam okay, so I was essentially scammed on that green car. I was essentially scammed on the white car because the white car that was from Carmax and they presented it's clean. We checked it out, all good, no issues.
[00:40:03] Turns out I drove it, test drove it and they do the, you know, go ahead and test drive it and whatever.
[00:40:09] You just drop off your whatever and do the test drive. It had a check engine light tone. Check it out. They said there's nothing wrong with it.
[00:40:16] Check engine light goes out, it comes on and goes out and comes on and goes out. I took it back. Same thing. They can't isolate why it's happening. They think it's a 12 volt battery because it's intermittent. I took it to four different Ford dealerships. None of them saw a problem and they all claimed they couldn't replicate the issue.
[00:40:33] Recently I wasn't able to re register the car because they require the check engine light not be on because they have to have their scanners will not get past the check engine. So I had to fix the underlying issue. Turns out, as I suspected, it was the actual battery. It's a plug in electric hybrid.
[00:40:51] Turns out the battery itself, the actual hybrid battery was toast. So I had to get that replaced. Six thousand bucks.
[00:40:58] But the point is, when I bought it, it was presented as everything's fine. Did I get scammed? Essentially, yes.
[00:41:07] Where am I going with all Those stories?
[00:41:09] The YouTubers that tell you something is X right? And you'll hear and this all came from beliefs, by the way.
[00:41:17] You'll hear him have said over time from terrarium to now. Devi is one he's talked about. Cryptonomy is one he's talked about.
[00:41:27] Saitama he talked about at a point strange in you. He talked about the point. Roboingu he talked about the point.
[00:41:35] Elon Muskrat was another one.
[00:41:38] Btfa, you can go down the list of all these multiple projects that he presented Bitcoin as. Like Bitcoin is a great example.
[00:41:48] No, this is the one. This is going to go. You're an idiot if you don't do this. You're this that, it's that, right? Terrarium. These are doctors. They're not going to scam you. They're not going to rip you off. They have no reason to do that.
[00:42:01] Lillian Finance. Brad, he quoted somebody else who said Brad, the Beatles cashed out and he's like this is not true. And he was overly defensive. When you state things as X and you're overly defensive towards X and it turns out Being Y did. Did you scam people? Technically, yes. Because you're presenting it in absolutes that you could not have known, right? If you don't know, don't present it as absolutes and cover your ass. If you say like I did on Libero all the way from the very beginning, all of my episodes are still up. I said, for now it's doing what they told me, but I have no idea if it's going to last. And it's certainly not sustainable with these unrealistic APIs. I said that countless times.
[00:42:51] Just because it's a scam don't mean you can't make money. And just because you make money doesn't make it not a scam. This is not a. This is a separation between whether you made money or not versus whether it's a scam or not. They are mutually exclusive.
[00:43:04] The answer to the question from my Lens, are the YouTubers scammers? The answer is yes. For the ones that present something as absolutes and it turns out not to be the case, going by that criteria, that simple statement, every last one of them to a T is a scammer because they presented something with confidence, as X, they would say, and I know he would say, it's what we knew at the time. It's what we thought at the time. It looked like, I thought, it felt like. All of those are excuses. They're Chewbaccus.
[00:43:43] If you present it as an absolute, that's why we have qualifiers. If you present it as an absolute and it turns out not to be the case, you have just now set yourself up. You have just now put yourself in that vein. You told people Ben Coin was going to be successful. You told people Ben was going to make it run. You told people there's no way Ben could fail. You said people are idiots if they don't get in you spoken absolutes, that puts you in a trap situation.
[00:44:10] You didn't do that necessarily for Strange Emu. You didn't do that necessarily for Robot, but you certainly did do it for Monkey shit. You certainly did do it for btfa. You damn sure did it for Terrarium.
[00:44:24] Then he went down the list of others that he was pointing out, like Austin Hilton, you know, Rodney Jake. He didn't call it like Adam Captain. There's so many other ones that you know, you might know all of them are in some ways culpable for those same things. I talked about it with Strange Emu and the reason I thought whoever did that was trying to get back at those YouTubers for that same thing. Because that's what they do. They put things in a light that makes it absolute and it traps people.
[00:44:58] They would say. He would say, you got to make up your own mind. He's not wrong.
[00:45:03] That doesn't change the fact that if you present something as absolute, immutable, this is what it is. And I'm speaking with utmost confidence. It must be the case. If you do that and it turns out not to be the case, you just set yourself up and that makes you a scammer when you do that. That's why I say don't do that. It's not about. This is not financial advice. You simply have to qualify what you're saying. Don't speak in absolutes of what you know is going to happen.
[00:45:33] Don't speak in confidence about what's going to be.
[00:45:37] He does that with Devi. He does that where he's saying, yeah, it's going to be nasdaq. It's going to be nasdaq. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. We went through the same cycle with Terrarium and them launched an exchange where he said, no, they lost an exchange. This is big business going to be a thing. And it turns out to be some API to Huobi. I think it was. It was a complete popcorn fart.
[00:45:57] And then there's all these dumps happening from the doctors where Blease has to. He now has to embarrass himself calling it out, saying there's legit questions. Well, yeah, because you have people who are speaking absolutes and you shouldn't be Brad saying Brad never sold when he did sell you spoken absolutes because you're only defensive about your friend.
[00:46:18] I. Rodney.
[00:46:20] Rodney's a great example of what I'm talking about.
[00:46:24] Rodney speaks negatively about those projects that he sees are turned into sketchy business.
[00:46:30] Prior to that, though, there are times when he is all in hinox, same thing. Jake, same thing. Austin Hilton, same thing. Adam Captain, same thing. Crypto Queen, same thing. There are times when they get betrayed for something, then they'll speak negative. Outside of that, they're all on it and they're telling you 10x this, it's going to do this and it's going to be an amazing thing and they're going to turn this around and all that. That's based on what. What are you basing that on? Just them telling you that.
[00:47:01] And no, it's not as simple as saying people should make up their own minds.
[00:47:06] The question is about, are the youtubers scammers if you state something as an absolute fact and it turns out not to be the case, that is by definition a scam.
[00:47:18] That's what it is.
[00:47:20] It's all about representation.
[00:47:22] Now he gave an example, I think it was BTFA he was talking about because that was a neighbor of his or something. And he called the FBI and FBI said what he did was legal.
[00:47:32] Well, it was legal because there's no law against it.
[00:47:35] And I said the same thing and I actually had a back and forth talking about scams.
[00:47:41] I had a back and forth around the whole lockpay and safe jet scammers, you know, the car salesman 2 oh, car salesman 3 0, Michael Bul Duke and his brother in law.
[00:47:56] And I called that out. I called out, look, this is a grift, okay? And I had somebody say, you know, we need to lock these people up. And I said, technically nothing broke a law.
[00:48:08] And he says, no, how could that be? And I'm trying to get people to understand it can be a scam.
[00:48:14] But there's no law against what was done.
[00:48:18] And there's an implied consent.
[00:48:20] The implied consent is the big problem.
[00:48:24] If you buy into something that was presented a certain way, you made the choice to do it. Like the law knows nobody forced you to do it. You made the choice to do those things.
[00:48:35] Was there misrepresentation? No, because at the end of the day, like take the 100x gems is another one believes was pitching 100x gems was talking about we can make these contracts and do all that stuff. Well, it did. You could make contracts, you can make tokens. So what it said was what it was draining the money out of it. If he owned the liquidity pool or he owned the tokens, he has every right to do that. It sucks because you're losing money, but nothing technically broke a law.
[00:49:04] That's why there's been a push for regulatory scrutiny on the crypto business. We just don't want it to go overboard. We don't want it to act like the stock market.
[00:49:14] But you're now I said on a much older episode, you're never going to get to a world where everything's completely locked down because it doesn't make any sense.
[00:49:23] So when we ask the question, are YouTubers scammers? The answer is yes. If you present something as absolutely the case and it turns out not to be the case, that makes you a scam. That's a scam because you spoke in absolutes.
[00:49:39] So the easy way to avoid that is to not speak in absolutes. When you don't know.
[00:49:45] You're guessing you're going off what you're told or you're going off something you see and you can say, it certainly looks like there's something here, then you need to cover your ass. I have no idea if this is legit, folks. Okay, it sounds legit on surface, but for all I know, it could be a scam, which is what I did on Libero.
[00:50:04] You always have to do that, cover your ass. If you cover your ass, if it rips you off, you covered your ass. You didn't tell people?
[00:50:13] Nope. You're like with Ben, you're. You're an idiot if you don't get in this and it's going to go to amazing amount of money. You're going to be. He's going to take care of you, he's going to do all this other stuff and he's speaking absolutes and set yourself up for failure.
[00:50:25] So this is my opinion and I share it because I want people to understand.
[00:50:30] This isn't to tell you not to watch YouTube channels. There are some out there I think are good. I said Adam coins I think is really good. His is too short, but I like the content.
[00:50:41] I like da Vinci. Jeremy. I don't like the guy he hosts with. I wish he did his own stuff, but I understand, you know, And I like some of the guests.
[00:50:50] Mr. M, I think it is. I like some of the guests. I just don't like him.
[00:50:54] There's very few other ones I watch. I actually watch Happy Caddy Crypto and there's some beef going on with leaves and Happy Caddy Crypto. And I understand it's silliness because at the end of the day, it's what I said. Everybody's greedy, so that's. That's that. But when we talk about scams again, is Happy Catty Crypto scamming people?
[00:51:13] Has he done something that you can argue is a scam? No, so far, not that I've seen. He talks about stuff, he pitches his own stuff, and he criticizes other people's stuff. He's done nothing I see that I would describe as a scam or even close to a scam from my lens.
[00:51:30] Certain people, including bleeds, don't like the way he votes. But that's what validators for, right? You choose who you'll validate with based on whether you agree with what they're doing or not. That's how the system's working.
[00:51:42] But on the flip, can we say the same thing? If we look at these two, at a macro level.
[00:51:48] And we ask the question, is Happy Caddy crypto a scammer? Name one thing I that I want to hear if you know, is there something Happy Caddy crypto has done under the definition I gave you? There's something he shilled and pitched as an absolute and it turned out not to be the case. I'm talking a dead on absolute.
[00:52:07] This is what it is. And you're, you're missing out. Is there something he did of that right. And it turned out to crap out? I don't recall anything. It was. If there is, let me know. I want the smoke.
[00:52:21] But if we ask the same question, Bob leaves, he absolutely had multiple projects where he's done that and that makes him scams.
[00:52:29] Is he doing it because he intentionally wants to rip you off? No, they're doing it because they're greedy. They're doing it because they're trying to make money. They're doing it and they might position that they're trying to make money off of the people that are going to them.
[00:52:44] And sure, that is the source, inevitable source.
[00:52:48] But if you bought in, it's your money at the end of the day.
[00:52:52] So we can sugarcoat it however we want to.
[00:52:58] If somebody is talking about tokens, like, I'll give you a great example, binance stuff on YouTube.
[00:53:04] He's another one I really enjoy because he has a great accent.
[00:53:07] Binance stuff does not shill stuff. He criticizes to the end. Sometimes I think he goes overboard, but he criticizes to the end. Sometimes he's wrong, sometimes he's right, but he's enjoyable to watch because he's not trying to pitch you on nothing. He just calls it like he sees it. And again, I really enjoy listening to his stuff as what it is. Can I say that Binance stuff has scammed? No.
[00:53:33] So when we say the universal statement, obviously there are always exceptions, right?
[00:53:39] But we have to look at the. We have to look at the deep innards of the way people talk, the way people present and what they tell you and how they tell you and why they tell you and understand that they are doing it because they're greedy mother fathers. That's why they're doing it. They're not doing it because they don't like you. They're not doing it because they're against you. They're not. Some of them think little of you, that's true. But by and large they, they have no feelings about you in the situation. They're just greedy mother fathers and they are Happy to take whatever money, yours or somebody else's, as they see fit. Because why not? And that's the reality. That's the answer. The answer is they have any that have done something stated as an absolute that turned out not to be the case.
[00:54:28] It's a scam.
[00:54:31] I don't want you to be disenfranchised about any of what I said or turned off of any of the channels. I want you to engage what I want, though, when you do engage, you have to turn your mind off the trap. The trap is when they try to convince you, persuade you to get into something stated as an absolute.
[00:54:59] That's the trick. If they state it with the condition that they don't know if it's legit or not, they're not sure. You know, I'm not. I haven't done deep on it. It could be an absolute crap out. And they tell you this, it's fine to take a look at it because they warned you. And then it's a gamble, right? You roll the dice if you want.
[00:55:18] Just don't allow them to influence you every time.
[00:55:24] Because some of them, not all, but some of them simply don't care if you lose it all.
[00:55:31] Those are the ones you got to watch out for. But the only way that you can be aware that that's happening to you is to go in with a closed mind, go in skeptical, look for them to warn you away from stuff, because that's how they tell you that they're looking out for you.
[00:56:02] Sam.
