[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 Cryptotalk radio
[email protected]. we're getting started a little bit early today. We wanted to get ahead of the rush, ahead of what's happening. We figured we'd check in. There's a, there's a lull. Things are running, but there's a lull. I'm going to be talking about the lull and go be talking about some of the bits and bobs that I saw a little bit earlier. And then I'm going to give my thoughts on an issue that happened. I had a good chuckle about share that. Be it the personal, I want to give a personal side. So I had another interaction. I don't for those new welcome by the way, but I don't follow cryptocurrency. This price run, I followed it slightly but not heavily. You might think that I'm crazy, but the truth is some of it is just. It's like expectant pushes. It's. We're expecting run and we're triggering FOMO to run up, but we haven't hit the true run up. We've had significant run up, but I guess what I'm saying is that the best is yet to come. We haven't hit the best of it and I'm looking for the best of it. I say that because Ethereum still has not gotten to its all time high and Ethereum still has not received the benefits that Bitcoin has received. And until I see Ethereum run the same way Bitcoin's running, I remain skeptical about the sustainability of the runs. That's not to say it's going to crap. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that I use Ethereum as my measuring stick for why I remain a little bit tentative.
[00:01:48] Some people speculated that the proof of stake shift away from proof of work for Ethereum is a contributing factor to the fact that it's not able to run.
[00:01:59] Do I think that's the case? I think there's something to be said, although I think that's one factor of many. I think it's that I think it's the idiot Vitalik dumping on your head. I think it's cheaper alternate chains. I think there's been a lot of competition that's shown up. Since that is kind of gutted what Ethereum could do.
[00:02:18] And I think that the broader acceptance of cryptocurrency is going to harm Ethereum because Ethereum for the most part has been the one that was accepted openly and the other one started to gain some traction while Ethereum stayed in the lull.
[00:02:32] I'm tin foiling when I say that it's possible the idiot Vic did that on purpose. I can't say that he did, but it's possible that he was colluding with the Gary Genslers of the world to suppress cryptocurrency himself. Perhaps he was just sitting on bags over off the side and then sharing kickbacks to people in high levels of government. I can't say that's what happened. I'm saying that I found it very suspicious the chef to proof of stake.
[00:02:57] I think if they had been, if they had remained proof of work it would have left them competitive. Because keep in mind that bitcoin cannot effectively, cannot be mined anywhere near like it could have before. And having the ability to mine it I think would have increased its, not its scarcity but its viability as an asset for people to make money without having to invest money. Right. That's where Bitcoin has now lost. It doesn't have that same impetus for miners to just stack it, win the big and then sell it. It's a different ballgame. And proof of work is still out there. There are certain tokens that are still proof of work, but they're not as mainstream and certainly not easily accessible as Ethereum was at a time.
[00:03:41] So we have to wait and see. I'm still hoping that Ethereum goes on a run. I just feel that that's the measuring stick for where we should be. And until I see it, I'm going to remain skeptical that a lot of this is sustainable. That's not to doom and gloom you. I'm just a realist that way. I'm not straight. You're in a world of sensitivity. So I feel. So we're going to talk about the cryptocurrency, we're going to talk about some of these run ups, we're going to share some opinions about some crazy nonsense that happened and then take it from there.
[00:04:14] CoinDesk.com we are going to zoom out to the month chart and we're going to start with bitcoin. Today. I think I feel in a bitcoin mood, in a mellow mood. Bitcoin side.
[00:04:24] Bitcoin has been on a run. Of course, if everybody knows this by now, if you've been paying attention and not been stuck in a a rut. But bitcoin's been going on a run. It hit the ceiling of about 92,000. Then it started to go back down as there was some consolidation and some profit taking. Currently, as I record this sitting at the 92,000 mark, it hit a high of 94,000 earlier, went back down to 90,000, then started hovering in the middle. It's still on an upward trend. The expectation is that the 100,000 mark is now the next attainable mark and it's not long. The expectation is if we don't get it by Christmas, certainly we would see it in the beginning of 2025. There's a number of different factors all playing into a lot of the price run that we saw. One of those is ETFs, especially options on ETFs. There's a lot of traffic on the ETF side that's contributing to some of the pumps that we see. Speaking on my personal because again, to refresh, I do have the fidelity bitcoin. These are the spot ETFs I start with. Mine are about 3x from what I bought in and I'm very happy with the performance. Obviously I would want more, but I'm happy with the performance I do see and I see on the horizon these are going to be worth a crap ton. I don't have a crazy amount of shares. I just bought enough to kind of watch it and see what would happen and create a little bit of nest egg. Like the amount of money that's in there would be enough to pay the mortgage for a couple of months. Like it's not a crazy amount of money, but it's enough that it has a little nest egg to it. And at some point I might invest more as I see there's opportunity. But on the option side, which more people were interested in, the options launch and then that starts another run on bitcoin. Because obviously after the bitcoin available in order to trade options, the downside of options is it is going to increase volatility simply because of the nature of options trades. On the ETF side, because it's more accessible, there's more people that can trade it and it may cause stronger volatility on bitcoin. This doesn't seem to suppress it in any way. Rather you should just be cautious that price volatility is going to be a thing. So people that expect it to go up and up and up, which will contribute to my story later, I want to level set you and give you a reality check. It is normal for cryptos to go up and cryptos to go down. You have to train yourself that this is a normal behavior of any cryptocurrency because it's what they're supposed to do. People are going to take for profits. What you have to watch out for only is if it's a grab Vol coin, they may just crap out completely and not come back up. So your key is just to stay away from garbage. It sounds simple, but that's what it is. Now, mind you, if you stay away from garbage, you can't make a lot of money. But you stay safer. It's up to you. I can't tell what to do with your cash. I'm just telling you that these options for the ETFs, it adds more mainstream exposure to it, which is going to increase volatility for it, which is going to affect the price in a very bizarre way that may cause you to freak out. I want to assure you, assuming nothing goes wrong with Trump's inauguration and assuming nothing goes wrong with Congress trying to fight him, you should see a wider adoption of cryptocurrency. That rhymes. And assuming Trump can do something about the whole war situation, Biden authorizing rockets on his way out and basically trashing the apartment on the way out, and Trump has to clean all that up. And assuming he can, Dr. Did the deal, assuming he can, you are going to see some positive trending. If he can fix the economy, you're going to see some positive trending. I actually looked in the main houses, you know, rates, because I was curious, what's the impact?
[00:08:05] My house that I bought has already appreciated by $50,000. Now, I'm not in an. I'm not in the most appealing area, but I learned something. I actually had a house way back in Washington state and I bought it for 265. I think it's 265, 270, somewhere around there. Grant and I had let it go for about the same price. I checked it the other day. So now this is years after the fact. That was 2014 years after the fact. I check it now and it's over $800,000. So what I learned, that was a, that was an out in the middle of nowhere area that nobody really wanted to live in. But it happened to be one of the largest houses on the street. It was 2630 square foot. It was 9600 square feet of a plot. It was pretty darn large, too large for what I needed. I didn't regret it. Except that I didn't like the street. I didn't like the hoa, you know, little old lady or whatever. But I let it go because I got other opportunities and moved on. But when I saw how much depreciated, it taught me, okay, this is just like with crypto. It's a patient game. You have to wait it out and at some point demand is going to get to that level. Now, obviously that's Washington State. Washington state has a bunch of people brought in there by the Amazons and the Microsofts, et cetera, of the world. These highly paid technical people making 2, $300,000 a year. So the prices, they're going to spike simply because of the industries where I'm at. We don't have anywhere near those same industries, not even close. However, that doesn't seem to affect price appreciation. I went and checked the history of assessments and it basically goes up $50,000 every two years. Okay. Now that I understand the game, it's all waiting. I just have to make sure I pay more towards it so that it improves the amount of equity that's there and then make a game shot with some of the equity, which I plan to do. In terms of things that are going to improve the value of the home further, the goal is to effectively double the value of the home versus what I bought for it. Can I make that happen? I think I can. How long will that take? I have no fricking clue. But I'm. I'm, in a way, I'm gambling, roll the dice, that Donald Trump is going to help contribute to positive appreciation of the economy in a way that my improvements will go further than they would have under Joe Biden. That's a theory that I. It may not work, but the thought is if I can get to that point and improve it enough and get. See, that's the game of everything with the real estate. And if you didn't know, because I used to work for a credit agency, the best way to improve your credit is to have a mortgage that you pay down on that you overpay to pay down. That's the greatest way to improve your credit. I guarantee you month over month over month, I guarantee you your credit score is just going to keep going up and up and up and up and up. That's just the game. It's all a game. So I figured between that, between the equity, which is basically money that's available that you can use for different things, you use this and parlay it into other properties, investments, you take Some of your income. Now let's say you rent one of them out, right? Take some of your income, you toss in cryptocurrency and let that make some money for you and start turning it into turnkey sources of income. See, none of what I'm describing was possible under the Biden administration. So just to be clear, the reason I'm talking it out now in my mind is, well, with Donald Trump, he might open the door for me to be able to do that where I couldn't do that before. And if you were asking because you might be curious, and some have asked, but you might be curious, so what do you get into? It's up to. You can't tell what to do with your cash. I'm telling you that bitcoin, you really can't go wrong with it. But it is going to dip at points and you got to have the constitution to not get freaked out about it. Because bitcoin is a long bet. It is one of those that I don't think it has a downside. Especially if you get more governments getting into it. It's only going to go up from there. It could be at the point that one Satoshi is $1. That's how legit this could be. Remember, there's not that much bitcoin. It's a constrained inventory. So the idea of $1, 1 Satoshi is not too far fetched. How long will it take to get there?
[00:12:31] Maybe not in our lifestyle lifetimes. But I'm saying it's not unrealistic to think that you could do something like that at some point. That's what people are chatting about. That's the conversation. Bitcoin hitting that all time high of 94,000, scheduled to go even higher. Gold started to go back up as well. Gold, that's one of those assets that historically has been the place that you put money when you want to insulate it from inflation. Bitcoin currently has the chatter. Bitcoin currently has the attention. People are looking at it not instead of gold, but in addition to gold. We think that bitcoin has an opportunity to insulate from inflation better than gold can right now, simply because there's demand, there's strong demand where the demand for gold only largely exists outside the United States. I don't know if you read about it, but there was countries where they're still mining for gold in other countries illegally where the, the actual governments have banned mining for gold because they don't want them to have it. But some people are actually doing it so what they did is they starved them out, they cut off the supply lines to starve them out of these because they were just illegally doing it. Wouldn't stop. Gold still in high demand on the international shore. So don't think because people are telling you that Bitcoin is the number one that gold's going away anytime soon. It's not. Gold still has strong demand in some of these lesser countries that aren't able to get access to something like a cryptocurrency, the precious metal that is. And so if you hold multiple of these types of assets, you can't lose. You really cannot. I will tell you that certain ones didn't have such a good time, Polygon being one of them. Polygon didn't run anywhere near like we thought it was. Like I said, Ethereum ran a little bit and it didn't sustain. Hbar ran a bit. I was surprised there. BNB ran quite a bit. Doge ran quite a bit. Cardano ran quite a good. But I didn't see the kind of run that I want on anything other than bitcoin. Like, when I look at Ethereum, I think it ran up like 400 bucks. Bit frickin. Ethereum's peak was $4,800, and we're steering here at $3,000. I would have expected by now Ethereum to be somewhere high side of $9,000 at this point, just because of the ratio compared to Bitcoin. Historically, that has been. If you think about when Bitcoin first hit the 60,000 mark, Ethereum was at that 4,800 mark. So how is it possible that Ethereum can't seem to get up to the 8,9000 mark when Bitcoin is running almost now twice of what it was? Something's going on and I'm. I know it sounds like I'm fixated on Ethereum, and that's because there's no reason why this should not be working. There's no reason why Ethereum should not be running from my lens. Perhaps I'm missing something. If somebody knows, hit us up Cryptotalk FM and let me know what the deal is.
[00:15:16] El Salvador is talking about tokenized treasury offerings, access to the T bill for regular investments, and organizations who could not invest prior to this. This is a positive sign. El Salvador has been doing big things since they created their own bitcoin. They were one of the few to start investing in bitcoin long before everybody else and made out like a bandit. They were not dumping like some of the other countries, like Germany. So they made out like a bandit. Now they're doing big things to try to shore up their financial stacks. This is smart governance. This is what we should be doing. Not like Oakland out there who's talking about a budget shortfall and talking about cutting cyber security like some freaking idiots. By the way, anybody listening to the show CryptoTalk FM who lives in Oakland, I'm going to advocate that you get the hell out of there right now. Because they're allegedly, they're close to bankruptcy. Allegedly, they're at a budget shortfall, they're mismanaging your money like crazy and then cutting the cyber security funds. Says you're going to get breached at some point, the moment you give your information to pay your property tax bill. And I'm going to encourage you to get out of there. I can't tell you what to do. I'm encouraging that you get the hell out of Oakland. I would like you to get the hell out of California. But in the short term, at least get the hell out of Oakland because there's some shady stuff going on there. I'm trying not to swear, but you got El Salvador over there making us look bad because they're doing everything right and we can't seem to do everything correct. And I don't know what the heck going on there. Salana jumps over the $240 mark. Finally after a long term. Remember Salana was low. Salana went as low as what? What was its price? It was like 15 bucks or 20 bucks. And so if you bought way back when it crashed all the way at the bottom and you held a bunch of it, kudos to you because you made out like a bandit. And I assure you Salana is going to go a little bit higher. Salana still got some technical problems but price wise it's going to go higher. I don't see a reason Solana can't get to 300. Solana's peak was over 400. I expect 300 is easy work for a chain where a lot of garbage, pump fun garbage has spun up on that network and I expect that that's the reality. I could be wrong. I know that Bong started going on a run because they their Dow. There's a Dow. And they did an announcement of doing major burns. So they're burning down some of the remaining supply and that's caused positive price movement. There's also some rewards being given for staking of other tokens on Solana and they're offering to give Bonk. So Bonk's got a lot of upward pressure, as crap as it is. But the point is that Solana itself has a lot of visibility, a lot of awareness, a lot of traffic. It started surpass bnb, it started surpass Avax. It started surpassing theorem. It started surpass the rest of them. The challenge is that Solana has been unstable. With that instability comes a lot of uncertainty. With the uncertainty causes negative price movement. Do I think that this is going to last a long time? I think Solana is going to be there for a while. I think it's going to have some good, good times and bad times like every other one. And I don't think that Solana can go too much higher until Ethereum gets its freaking act together. That's how I feel about it. Speaking of act together. XRP shoots past. A dollar SEC is in all kinds of trouble. There's rumors Gary Gensler is going to either quit or be fired. The David Ruffin of the secular here soon. With Trump's impending arrival, Gensler's been talking as a as if he's going to quit. He's just been giving this messaging that gives you the sense he's on the way out. He even said, you know, ultimately I got to leave it to other people. It's time to leave it to other people and move on. But the stuff that we did was good for the industry and help keep people safe, because that was the mission, was we just want to keep people safe. He also said we've never called Bitcoin a security. We're fine with bitcoin. It's all. And he called out the 10,000 other tokens out there that don't do anything. That's basically what he said. So he's saying if it's not bitcoin, it's a security. That's essentially what he's saying. So he's calling Ethereum a security in this one messaging, even though in the past he said Ethereum's not a security. It's either security or it's not. In his mind, if it doesn't do anything by itself, it's a security. Okay, if that's true, Ethereum does something. A lot of stuff doesn't run without Ethereum. So you. He has mixed messaging. He doesn't know what he's saying, but he's trying to act like, you know, I am pro crypto, I like Bitcoin, but he doesn't get it. Bitcoin only serves a certain subset. Remember, we're getting to the point where Bitcoin's going to be heavily, heavily centralized. It's going to be very centralized. You'll still be able to get it, but the price is going to be out of whack, just like it is with gold today. That's the. That's the position you're going to. It's going to take too much to get access to the bitcoin because unfortunately, it's being heavily centralized. So how's it any different than in the fiat world now, if it turns out that the governments plural can pull off the magic mystic and they can pair it, as we used to do with gold, to fiat, I think that's a positive move. I think that's a positive. We can back it with bitcoin, our fiat. And so that improves the value of the fiat. I don't think they're going to do that, though. I would love to see that happen so we can stop printing and printing and printing and printing and printing, because everybody would benefit at that point. Because if all the fiat that you already have would go further, you wouldn't see a tangible change. It's not like the physical bills. I know some of you don't carry paper like you should. The point is, is that I know the physical bills would not change form inside your wallet. I know your bank balance probably wouldn't change, but you would see it in the. In the form of like interest that you receive on your accounts. Instead of that piddly 0.25% that you get for interest, you might get like a 25% interest. Because what's happening is you're getting more value the more that you have, and they're willing to compensate for the longer you hold it because there's more value in order to be able to trade it. And all the stuff that they do with the money, these are all positive signs. XRP was one of those that was touted to be, at least, if not replacing, supplanting or supporting money transfers. That was the whole thought behind Ripple and the technology behind Ripple and XRP and what it was able to be able to do. And then when SEC came in with all their nonsense, it suppressed the price, it crapped down. I think it went down to like 20 cents at one point. Right now it ran up and it's about 120. Settled about 100. Excuse me, $20 settled down to a $10. As I record this, SEC is getting beat up. Gary Gins was getting beat up. Trump's talking the right stuff and that's causing price surges on xrp because the main Thing suppressing XRP always had been the Gary Gensler and the SEC attacks that were happening on it. The lawsuit that they quote one and I said, trust me, the SEC is not going away. The only way that's going to happen is if you get Trump in office to do something to derail it. We haven't got commit that he's going to do that. I don't know that he will. Perhaps he does, but time will tell about what's going to happen on this 1. Russia approves a 15 tax on crypto mining and transactions. They equate digital currencies to property new financial obligations. This is complete opposite of what you want to see. You don't want to see that they're applying tax on crypto mining. Trump has said he wants to exclude cryptocurrency from capital gains tax. He didn't talk about taxes on mining. There's not as much mining happening on US shores as was before. However, part of that was because of the Biden attack on all things not green. So the Gary, the Greta Tunberg approach. Right. So right now if Trump pushes all these other forms of fuel that were perfectly fine, we might see a run back on mining. Unfortunately, because all these other numb nuts rushing towards proof of stake, perhaps it's a wasted effort. I want to see what happens. I want to see if there's more proof of work that gets spun up. I'd like to see if there's any remote way Ethereum can go back to proof of work. I don't think it can, but I want to see proof of work be embraced. I want to see that we're smarter about the use of electricity. I'd like to see us embrace hybrid technologies along the way so that we can wean ourselves off of fossil fuels without this aggressive rush to EVs and all this crap.
[00:23:16] And at the same time, as we embrace mining again, it creates profitability for regular persons like you and me. And if the asics, the acs are coming down in price, that's a good thing. I'd like to see that graphics cards are better able to mine crypto because think about it, for some people, two, three bucks a day is actually not chump change for them because it helps them on the side. If they're only making 15 bucks an hour, that's not a lot of money. And if you make this extra $3 doing nothing but leaving your gaming PC on that your kid was already using, to me that's, that's a great win for everybody. In my opinion, it's not a lot of money, but it's something. It's something they wouldn't have otherwise. So seeing Russia take this approach was a bit of a negative. It didn't hurt the price, but it was a bit of a shocker to see them do that because I expected them to go the complete opposite direction than what they did. This is fresh off the heels before, where they completely blocked crypto mining in certain of their territories. This is progress away from that, at least. I just felt like pricing what they're doing. Pricing it out wasn't really the right answer. The last bit of news I'll cover daos and my criticism of daos and the fact that I consider them pointless. Well, the United States court has ruled that daos can face legal liability under partnership law. Partnership law. That was an intriguing stance this judge took. Quote, the Lido Dow General partnership might be narrower or broader.
[00:24:44] Think of this.
[00:24:46] If you take all the people of a dao, the dao, the whole intent behind it is to give votes to the people who hold whatever asset, their participants in the dao, by way of holding the asset. And they have votes according to the volume of tokens that they have.
[00:25:02] What they're trying to do is they're saying, in California law, if we look at the definition of a partnership, the simple definition of a partnership is two or more parties work together for profit.
[00:25:15] It doesn't matter if there's like a contract or there's some formal agreement. It is simply saying two or more parties work together for profit. You have now created a partnership. Well, if you're part of a dao, you by definition are a partner with everybody else. That's part of the dao. That's what it's saying. So a lawsuit was filed as part of this, saying, look, Lido has crapped this dude, Andrew Samuels. Lido's crapped. And I'm suing because. Ls craft. And I'm sorry. This is a partnership, and I'm entitled to not have these losses. And these are unregistered securities. And they didn't tell me about that. They were violating federal securities laws. They didn't tell me about that. And everybody should bear responsibility for this. Now, do I think that this is a valid lawsuit? No, but the judge did said, you know what? Although it's descend, that'll protect you from getting sued here, bro. We can go after you because you have created this partnership. So this creates a precedent. It creates a dangerous precedent because of what it is. Now, of course, it's State specific. But this goes to what I was saying before in a past episode, that each state can legal legalize or not legalize cryptocurrency activities as they see fit. That's part of the challenge with some of these, like Robinhood, for example. For the longest time, Robinhood refused to let Nevada people trade because Nevada's whole legal structure was so wonky. They eventually opened it up after I freaking left New York, they refused to let people trade. Shiv, for the longest freaking time. This is a very similar something.
[00:26:50] I know that there's people that just want the feds to come in and say, yep, it's legal, it's across the board and they should and they can. It's not going to stop the fact that states have their own laws that they can impose regardless what the feds do. It just happens to be that it'd be more aggressive than what the feds do in every situation. So you can legalize. It's just like weed, right? The states can say, yep, we legal. But. But the feds can say, no, it's illegal, it's controlled substance. And if you go to certain, if you pulled over in certain situations, you will go to jail even if you live in a state where it's legal. Same thing here.
[00:27:24] People talked about now formal legal structures. So LLCs, right? LLPs some legal structure that you would create to help insulate the Dow. Piercing the veil is what's referred to if you're trying to go after people that are behind the Dow and people are expecting that with this type of a ruling you might see the rise of more LLCs to insulate the Dow. Do I think that happens? No, I think they're just going to ignore it and say if you're in California, screw you. Or if you're in the U.S. screw you. That's what I think. My personal opinion, but I was surprised to see how simple that result was. It's logical, it makes sense to me. But it just surprised me how simple it was. Oh yeah, that's right. It is a partnership effectively under that state law because of the generic definition of what it is. And that's the flaw of the DAO is it doesn't matter what they say. In their terms, you are creating a partnership because you're working together for profit reasons. It's the profit that makes it a partnership because you wouldn't do it if you didn't make any money. Here it is. And that's what it is. So I thought this was a good. I thought this was a Good thing to cover because if you're in a dao or you've been participating a Dow and there's daos all over the place, you might not even know. But if you're in a dao participating in a doubt, it's possible there's some legal protections you might gain at some point in the future. So it's definitely something to keep an eye on at least.
[00:28:47] My last bit is really just a public service announcement, something it was brought to my attention. I don't have any details behind it because I'm not following this crap, but I did an out of cycle about Ben Coin from Bit Bit boy Crypto Ben Armstrong and that was one of our more popular episodes. A lot of people were very surprised. You know, I put the audio because I don't want people to call me a fudder. But the truth is the truth that that's what happened. Well, apparently this New Genesis, which allegedly was the group that stole the money, allegedly they're going to try to recover the funds. That's what we were told. Meanwhile, there's this Nick Demondi person who I think came from hit network or something. But Nick Demondi, he's all over Twitter and he's a, he's a hardcore Trump person. It's clear he's a hardcore right person. It's clear he's a hardcore. I don't wouldn't call him maga, but he's pretty hardcore on the, on the right side. And he's been messaging on occasion talking about Ben Armstrong and this and I think he's blocked but he exposed that Cassie's name isn't really Cassie, it's Ashley and said that Ben Armstrong, there's apparently a class action lawsuit against him. I couldn't find evidence of such a thing, but allegedly there's some formation of something where they're sending quote evidence to the CFTC and some class action lawsuit to go against Ben Armstrong because of. Largely because of what happened with the, the Ben Coin. Well, I was as I was looking for this alleged class action lawsuit document, did not find it. I instead stumbled across a very old. This is an old, old document that referenced his name. And this was around the whole FTX business. And I thought I would share what I saw in case somebody knew a little bit more data around it didn't surprise me. But I was curious if anybody knows any more information. Hit us Up@CryptoTalk FM if you know any data around this. But this was around Binance, so they were going directly against Binance itself. But they called out Ben Armstrong in it as a defendant. Quote A YouTuber with more than 1.5 million subscribers to his YouTube page, received kickbacks for promoting and endorsing Binance, a citizen, a resident of Atlanta, Georgia.
[00:30:51] Allegedly Quote Binance apparently enlisted the help of its affiliates, such as Defendant Ben Armstrong, to not only hype the Binance platform and its unregistered security offerings, but also separately to hype affiliate links for VPN providers in order to guide his followers to circumvent U.S. regulations and to backdoor them into the international Binance exchange. Quote Defendant Stefan, which is a different YouTuber that has like 4 million followers on YouTube, and Armstrong, where Binance affiliates earn kickbacks and commissions through the affiliate program by promoting Binance and soliciting individuals to click through their link to register for Binance services. Quote Armstrong, who goes by bitboy Crypto Online, promoted Binance across his media platforms and directed his followers to Binance through his affiliate link. These promotions emphasize the perks of the platform as well as the discounts available through the link. However, Defendant Armstrong has hidden the substantial kickbacks he stood to gain from successful solicitations, referral incentives that could last through the lifetime of a customer's use of Binance.
[00:31:55] Quote and yeah, Defendant Armstrong, as he has been exposed for doing numerous times, has also taken to hiding his extensive participation in affiliate marketing with Binance. His bitboy crypto.com webpage used to contain dozens of links to crypto exchanges and products, but within the last year, he has wiped the referral page of his website, as shown below in the screenshot from the Wayback Machine contained affiliate links to Binance and Binance Us. And it has a screenshot of what looks like a very old version of bitboy Crypto's website because it looks like it was built in the AOL days and it's got a banner across the bottom with Exchanges. And one says by bit, one says Binance us, one says Binance, one says Coinbase. And it's a referral link. It's about your referral link. And apparently Ben Armstrong had deleted all this stuff because you get a 404 if you try to hit it now.
[00:32:47] Quote on top of Armstrong's previous shameless promotion of his affiliate links, he also problematically advertised VPNs like his affiliate link to VPN Unlimited, shown below right next to crypto exchanges like Binance and Binance Us. In order to help Binance further its goal of enabling US Investors to trade on the international Binance Exchange, aiding Binance in its effort to circumvent U.S. regulations. These crypto exchanges are subject to strict know your customer rules and geofencing customer limitations, which as explained above, can be bypassed by such VPNs. Quote, Defendant Graham Stephan is the other guy participated in the same affiliate programs as defendant Armstrong. He received substantial kickbacks from directing his followers to sign up for Binance as part of his not investment advice affiliate marketing. His endorsement drove traffic to the platform and helped perpetuate the illegal sale of unregistered securities to customers who are bypassing the KYC laws in place to protect the American market and consumer. And then it's got an image. It's called Worlds Collide Bit Boy Crypto interviewing Graham Stephan and apparently it's some sort of a sit down between the two of these people that was hosted at some point on Ben Armstrong's channel.
[00:34:01] US customers, including in this district, saw those promotions, clicked on affiliate links and registered with Binance as a result. Stop. So the allegation of this one, this is a while ago, this is 2023, but the allegation on this one was that apparently Ben Armstrong had affiliate links where you could go to these other exchanges. But what he was allegedly doing was telling you to use a sketchy VPN so you could hide your traffic. That's saying it's not coming from the US so you could trade on Binance and that Binance encouraged him to do so and openly, willingly allow these people to trade. Now, if you go to binance.com from a US IP address, it'll tell you we don't serve you. What they're saying is that Binance didn't take any extra steps to identify the people are using sketchy VPNs by putting them to KYC. So if it was allowing people to trade without any KYC whatsoever, that's the same thing Kucoin was doing. Kucoin never forced me to go through a stringent kyc. Kucoin has since shut it down. But at the time you could trade like crazy. Didn't care. Gate IO at one point didn't care. There was no KYC put upon people to do these. But I assume that Binance was doing more, you know, because Binance us. I know from my own personal experience I tried to go on there and it I upload the ID and I was waiting for a result, never got a result back. So I said screw you bro, I'm not doing this. I assume they were doing more rigor around this. I didn't realize that they were not but now when we look at this, the whole key of this is the affiliate links and steering people to VPNs. I don't know if you've noticed, maybe I'm the only one that's noticed. But a lot of these YouTubers do steer you to sketchy VPNs for different reasons. Maybe they're steering into sketchy VPNs not because you have the best of intentions, but because they want to help you duck the smoke. I'll say this from my own channel because it's my show. You'll never hear me advocate a sketchy vpn. I will tell you, I thought about creating my own VPN service. I actually did build it. I built the app, I built the whole nine. And then I backed off offering it. And the reason I backed off offering it is for something like this. I did not want to be accused of steering people to sketchy anything to bypass whatever regulations. I know that sucks because you can't get into some of these other tokens on some of these exchanges that you otherwise could. What I would say to this is you always have the decent exchanges that are not idiots. You know, like one inch is an idiot where they block you and it's decent. It doesn't make any sense. But like Uniswap's available, Radium's available, Jupiter's available, Trader Joe's available. All the other ones on the different chains are available to you to trade these tokens. Once you understand what chain it's on, just go to those Descend swaps if you want to trade those tokens. Certainly it's not the most intuitive experience because you can't use your fiat straight away. But what you can do then is you can get on something like Change Now Change Now IO Change now has a fiat on ram. So you can go in and turn your fiat into crypto. It will make you go through kyc. But what I'm advocating is that you just simply deal with the suckage. That's KYC to do it right. Do it over the table at some point later. If we see smarter regulation around cryptocurrency, we won't have to worry about this nonsense. But as long as people are getting ripped off, it's the best that they can do under the circumstances until we get smarter regulations in place. That's my stance on it. But I'm calling out that. I do see quite a few of the YouTubers out there that steer you to sketchy VPNs, and this may be a reason why they do it that I hadn't thought of. I thought maybe they just wanted to partner with a VP because a lot of the VPN providers offer affiliate marketing and some of the wallet ones I actually had some wallet affiliate stuff and then I stopped one of them because he was doing sketchy business and I don't offer that anymore. I just don't. That was a safe, safe pal wallet. I refused. But the point is, is that, you know, you can have that you. It's easy to get affiliate affiliate marketing deals with any of these different services. I stopped because I didn't want to have any sort of impression that I was steering somebody something sketchy. The suck of this is that, okay, I didn't make a lot of money doing it at all, so it didn't bother me. But I would like to offer things that I think are worth your time. Some people don't know about safe different wallets that are safe or ways to protect their crypto or ways to trade safely or different things that they would legit like some sort of recommendation. And I can't confidently make those recommendations. I actually Bit get Bit Get Wallet. I had talked about Bitget Wallet because I had a person in discord asked me to cover different wallets and Bit Get Wallet. I was absolutely happy to recommend them. And then all of a sudden I didn't upgrade it for the longest time because I don't. Because I know that they'll introduce stupid, you know, requirements and stuff. So I don't upgrade the apps on a frequent basis. I upgraded the big app just randomly saying, okay, let's stop nagging me. And all of a sudden it's like no more us. They what are you talking about? You're a freaking. You're supposed to be a non custody wallet. What does it matter if I'm in the US the problem with Bitget is that it integrates with their exchange and their swaps and they're worried about U.S. regulations. So they just took the aggressive approach instead of being smart about it and simply saying code the tool to just not allow me to trade on your exchange and then you're done. But I should be able to use a regular dumb wallet no matter where I am. But that's the downside of a lot of these different ones. That's the reason why I was for the longest time on like Alpha Wallet because Alpha Wallet doesn't do anything fancy crazy. I started with Coinbase Wallet didn't do anything fancy crazy. I was on trust. I didn't do anything fancy crazy because I don't want, you know, you shouldn't have. Where these wallets are making these arbitrary decisions, and the ones that do have affiliate agreements, I then can't recommend them when they're going to do sketchy stuff just because you upgraded it, Just because you do a security upgrade, all of a sudden they're locking you out of features. So I, and I'm disclosing all this so you know where I stand on this business. I knew there's too much sketchiness in the crypto space where the affiliate side was not worth the risk that I was seeing all of them do. Every last one of them was doing something sketchy. And so I said, I'm not going to recommend any of you guys because it's not worth it. If it's a dumb something, sure, no problem. I don't mind. If it's just a generic dumb wallet or a generic dumb tool of some kind where there's no interplay with any other service provider and they basically say it's, it's your keys, your coins, then, yeah, I would do that. But there aren't very many of those left out there. Even trust wallet to some limited degree has a bit of sketchiness to it now. It's better than the rest of them. But I'm saying that there's always that chance that they could lock you out of something because you're in the U.S. do, do, do. And so that's my message to you as to why I don't do these affiliate things. And reading what happened with this, you know, finance and Ben Armstrong and stuff, tells me I made the right decision. I don't want you to feel like I don't have these ideas. I do. But I also don't want to put you, I don't want to trap you into something that I know is just going to set you up for failure. So there's a lot of tiptoeing and it sucks. And I'm optimistic that Donald Trump can hopefully get to a point where we can open this up to where a lot of these providers stop just blocking the fricking us because they don't know, because they have inept developers who don't understand how to simply code their tool to let us access things that are perfectly fine and have always been perfectly fine. It doesn't matter that in the US if it's decent, but that's the way they treat it like, okay, okay, we'll just lock it all. No, stop. Lock what really should be. Don't lock everything. You don't need to we're not there yet. Hopefully we get there under Donald Trump. I don't know if we will, but hopefully we do. And in closing, as I said, this is a good time. It's a good time. It's, it's never too late to invest. So if you're kind of want should I invest now? It's never too late to invest. You just have to keep the edicts of don't invest more than you can afford to lose because you will have losses. I would recommend you don't get into sketchy garbage right now. If you're going to get into something bitcoin, you can't lose the core coins, you can't really lose. I would stay away from sketchy crap unless you're a gambling you want to roll the dice. I'm not, but maybe you are. But other than that, this is a time now where you could and don't expect to be a millionaire. That's the other thing, right? Don't expect to be a millionaire. Just expect to make some money and it's going to take some time. That's why it should be money you could throw away because you're going to still need to live your life because we're not talking. So it's going to make you a millionaire overnight. It's just not going to happen. But this is a positive time for everybody who can get into cryptocurrency. And if it's true that China is going to open up the coffers, we expect close to $2 trillion to flow into cryptocurrency. Well geez, that puts US to a 5 trillion dollar market cap overall in crypto. Guess what? The vast majority of that's going to come into the alts. It's not going to go to bitcoin. Some will go to bitcoin, but the vast majority will come to the alt simply because that's the way they play. So we have to see what that looks like. And that's why I say you're not too late. It might feel like it because of the price of bitcoin, but remember the rest of them are not at their all time highs. Bnb kind of sort of. The rest of them are not their all time highs. You're not too late, you still have an opportunity to invest. Just you have to train yourself to understand it's going to be volatile for a while, it's going to take time for any significant growth and most importantly, it's all about how much you put in. So if you're only able to put in 10 bucks. Put in 10 bucks, understand? It might only go 10x, right? And you get 90 bucks profit. Well, that's 90 bucks you didn't have before. But if you can put a thousand in there and it 10 X's, well geez, that's 9,000 bucks profit. But that thousand dollars shouldn't be the last thousand dollars you have either. So be smart. But you're not too late is the point. You're not too late to invest if you really want to invest. And my recommendation always is the core coins can't steer you wrong. If you want to invest in something, pick any of the cores. Any of them that have their own blockchain, bitcoin itself. Any of them that serve as gas for a blockchain. I'm not talking bone, which I'll talk about on out of Cycle today after this, but I'm talking anyone that you know, Avalanche and Polygon and H Bar and you know the Phantom that was and Metis, you know, the ones that they run a blockchain. They're the gas of the blood, those. You can't go wrong. Bitcoin, you can't go wrong. If you're going to get into stuff, get into those. I would recommend getting into the ETFs because you can't go wrong with those. You, you can't go wrong with ETFs at all. But they're long term. It'll take some time to realize profit and then train yourself to take profit so you don't get wrecked like some of the people I'm going to be chewing out on my out of Cycle here shortly. San.
