Best of 'The Hash'

We're pouring one out for a great 2.5 plus year run here on Coin STV. Also Coin De Podcast Network. It's all good stuff and all good things must come to a close and today it is that close. So we're just gonna look back, have fun, keep it loose and maybe even talk to some other fun. But first, I think we have a highlight reel which none of us have seen, which is a little scary. Scary. I'm very, I am very nervous. I am gonna take the leap of faith. I'm gonna throw it to the highlight reel. We're going to react, but let's watch this montage. Take it away. Gary Gensler was confirmed as the next sec chairman, Gary Gensler said that federal financial regulators should be ready to bring cases against bad actors in crypto. Gary Gensler went on cnbc's squawk box this morning and said crypto investors need better protection in a space that is significant, non compliant. Gary Gez was getting it from all sides. They're alleging that it's the fault of Gary Gess Ec for failing to provide those rules of the road. We haven't had any progress. We haven't had anybody step up to check. Gary Gez and the other public servants that are getting paid with our taxpayer dollars. And that's where I draw the line. Hi, everyone and welcome to the hash your daily beat on crypto news and culture. This comes, you know, I forget how many days after uh Elon seemingly trolled the world by putting Bitcoin in his Twitter bio. And now I guess we see why he may have been so keen on doing that. I mean, for the last few days, we've been talking about Bitcoin and, and other crypto assets just becoming really mainstream this year. And I think this just kind of pushes us more in that direction. Who do you think the next Tesla is going to be, who is buying the next billion dollars worth of Bitcoin? Who do you think that, oh my goodness, I got to get all the tarot cards for this one. Now Coinbase is the largest US Exchange, but I just thought this was really, really interesting and is reporting that, you know, shares on the secondary market are currently going for around $300 which would at its current valuation make the company more valuable than the New York Stock Exchange parent company. People are super excited about this public listing of Coinbase. Obviously, it comes at a time when Bitcoin is above 50,000, I think on last check. Um So the timing is right for this, you know, blue chip uh crypto exchange as it may 1 day be seen as to go public. The market value of Bitcoin has surpassed $1 trillion. A big moment for the space. Uh still about 1/10 of the way to the market value of gold. People is making bank and waves in the digital art world. Every day. The 1st 5000 days has sold for, I cannot believe it. $69 million that's including fees through Christie's auction house. Now, this was the first purely digital artwork to be auctioned by a major auction house. And now people is among the top three valuable living artists. They're accusing Google of using privacy to kind of keep up a fence around its market share, which is huge in this because they say we can't do our jobs as effectively if you remove third party cookies. But there are loopholes in other ways that Google will continue to kind of track data on customers. Meanwhile, Google on the other hand is saying, you know, we're pushing privacy because we do value, you know, the ability for people not to be tracked. And you know, there have been privacy concerns over Google for a while. So it's sort of like privacy has become this interesting tug of war between these two parties. And the fact that it's getting roped into this antitrust suit or action is just kind of fascinating. I think it's something we might see more of deutsch supporters are calling for this to be the inaugural Doge day. The aim for those people is to push the price as high as possible. There's the idea Jen with you when you say that people are just trying to push the price as high as possible. I'm just like, oh my gosh, like who's gonna be left holding those bags? Right? Cos it's gonna correct. It's gonna come crashing down. So, you know, it's all fun and games to get involved with uh this mean coin and go and have fun. Let's not take it too seriously. But do realize that there is real money at stake here. This is a big round, one of the bigger ones that we've seen in recent memory and it suggests that investors are still seeing opportunity in these markets. I'm gonna throw this to you will. There's someone who seems to be crawling behind you, which is a fun look. So, uh I'm gonna toss this to you for your take. That's right. No, my, I had a pipe burst in my house last night and now I have people all over trying to fix it, uh which is kind of fun to do in the middle of the show. But you know, that's how it is D I represents the ability to use your crypto without spending your crypto, which I think is really attractive to a lot of people who have committed value to these platforms and then sort of on the whale side or on the professional trading side, you know, you over collateralize for some of these loans, but you're able to sort of cover the cost of that loan by way of making bets that are likely to pay off across the rest of the ecosystem. There are just epic privacy concerns. There are epic uh you know, financial sovereignty concerns when you start to move into um uh central bank digital currencies. So this idea that we still have cash as this backbone of society, we can still use it. We can still retain control over our finances is rubbish as soon as you try it. So I am, I am terrified of these new central bank digital currencies. I'm terrified that we're moving into more of this program, a more controllable monetary world. I'm not excited about this world and that is why I'm so excited about decentralization. And uh the world of Cryptocurrency, El Salvador is gonna be like a really interesting case study when we're looking at Bitcoin adoption because it's like legally enforced as opposed to a voluntary uh way that it's been kind of pushed beforehand like everyone's coming like, hey, go and add uh open hour or go and add something that allows you to take Bitcoin payments. But in El Salvador, you have to do it. So it will be interesting to see President Joe Biden has just signed into law the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill. Of course, it contains a very controversial clause. It's a crypto provision that potentially will expand the idea of what a broker is. If this goes through, a lot of people are saying that it's gonna make it very difficult for crypto to really flourish in the United States. It's gonna push innovation offshore, it's gonna make it difficult to comply. This whole space is a brand new frontier, you know, just like anything, uh anything that's new, anything that's fast paced, there's going to be a lot of fails on the regulatory front. What do you think needs to happen next to progress, the industry in the United States? I think that there's a few more uh sort of steps forward in market structure um uh regulation that would be really important. I think talking about, you know, oversight of stable coin holdings is one piece of this. I think looking at a clear and consistent markets, regulatory framework for spot and futures, markets it in crypto and then token registration formats. I think those are probably the three biggest things, the native asset of the terra Blockchain Luna down bad, real bad. Over the last couple of days, we're talking about a 90 plus percent fall over the last 24 hours, which is really, really remarkable this after a crisis of confidence in us t the algorithmic stable coin that is wedded closely to the fate of Luna slipped off peg in dramatic fashion, dropping below. I think it was 30 cents earlier today. Now, hovering around half a buck. We took a little road trip down the I 95 and we went to Nationals Park in our nation's capital where you may have noticed Tara has sponsored the stuff right behind the home plate. We asked maybe two dozen, three dozen folks, including people who work there and also people who were regular patrons. And for the most part, there was just a bunch of quizzical looks. Now, we don't know what it is. So even when there was this catastrophic failure of the terra us t stable coin, stable coin, few people at the Nationals ballpark seem to know or care. It's kind of a, we're so early takeaway despite my best efforts to not do that. But it was interesting to look at how far yesterday's crisis in the crypt. I'm sorry, last week's crisis in the crypto markets penetrated into the mainstream Bitcoin. I just, I just understand that it's the digital gold and it's the most valuable the og of the Cryptocurrency. You know, I, I put it as like it's the world's money. You know, when you look at it, it, it's all of all worlds money put into one place. So we're in control of that and that's what I love about it. And, you know, I see the long term and affected that. So I thought this was really interesting because we have the dow and we have the legal entity and the legal entity, the corporation signed the contract and it's unclear if the Dow saw that contract before it was signed. So the Dow was under the impression that they were going to get social, social media, they were going to get support, they were going to get introduced to other investors. But it is very possible that the people who signed the contract saw the contract, it didn't have anything to do with social media and intros to new investors and they entered into that agreement without letting the dow know. And I think this is just where the disconnect happened. You joined do. Um I think there's not a lot of information on how much power you actually have when you're part of that community. And I, and I think right now it is just that community, there are still people in place who are making decisions on behalf of the Dow who are signing contracts on behalf of the dow. This community didn't all get together and sign this contract. And so I don't really think they have a say here. You get to a certain point where Bitcoin drops the cycle ends and you've been holding on to these Bitcoins which were at one point worth almost $70,000. Now, they're worth about $20,000. So you have to take a loss on your books and your operations are still just as expensive as they were beforehand. So we saw a lot of miners decide to get rid of Bitcoin last month dump into the open market at this point. It's hard to say like how much of an impact this had on price because miners typically don't have that much Bitcoin while the Bitcoin has been mined already, about 19 million coins have already been mined at the 21 million total. So they're really only fighting over uh like 900 Bitcoin per day in terms of volume trading for Bitcoin. That's not a ton. This does tell you about like the ecosystem for miners though like are these miners healthy? And where are we going from there? The gist here and the takeaway is not only was three arrows in more debt than we thought, but there were perhaps some relationships with entities that we thought were separate that were taking on their own debt, that we're not perhaps as separate as we thought. Dan Moorehead of Pantera Capital recently posted a pretty revealing chart covering this dynamic from the 19 seventies through today that I think does a good job of illustrating this. OK. So here we're looking at the white line is the real fed funds rate. The gold line is the inflation rate and the gray shaded area represents just how out of whack these two numbers are. You'll notice that this chart which goes back to the 19 seventies shows that these numbers have never been further apart. So this is actually a pretty big deal. They're saying that Kim should have revealed that she was paid $250,000. So that original Post did use, use the hashtag ad and she did use that kind of statement we see across the industry, this isn't financial advice and that wasn't good enough for the sec. In this case, I don't think I've seen influencers and celebrities disclose how much they're getting paid in the past. And so if that's a precedent that we're setting now moving forward, for anyone who's talking about something that is a security or that is maybe a security or is not a security. I think it's going to be interesting to see how the SEC looks at this and how the advertising standards boards look at this because this is something we haven't seen before. I think that, that he just got pissed at, you know, at kind of how, how twit especially the Ceo of Twitter kind of was responding to him and was like, all right, well, fine, I'm just going to buy you and I'm going to fire you. So I think that he just paid $44 billion for the privilege of firing a lot of people and I for one am very supportive of that. So FX, Ceo Sam Bakeman free took to Twitter this morning to clear something up. He said that a competitor is trying to attack the company with rumors. He then says in the same tweet, FX is fine, assets are fine. There is a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel here that we will, that we can expect a lot of self regulation to come out of this with these crypto exchanges and say, hey, we're going to go ahead and show the proof of reserves and if you can go through that and analyze that and it makes sense to you and you want to use that exchange great. But if exchange does not have proof of reserves, especially after this entire debacle, it's probably one that you may not want to use this rapid unraveling of what had been emerging as one of the key pillars of the crypto economy. And after much back and forth involving a potential takeover bid by B A potential, a potential rescue by the likes of Justin son and others. Ceo Sam Baman Fried is filing for bankruptcy protection chapter 11 and resigning as CEO and now Will's history corner with Will Foxley. That's right. That's right. History is important and actually Bitcoin has some history. OK. We're 10 years in this industry. So you better know it a lot of times people just like talk about NFTS and layer twos on Ethereum. But Bitcoin also has layer two ambitions or at least it has had that in the past. When we look at Dow, there are so many issues. But the first thing that a Dow needs is a community and you need that community to be engaged. I think that a lot of the dow out there have figured that out. And so now we're moving on to governance. I am proud of meta for kind of sticking to their guns. They used to have this big cash cow with Facebook and they moved over to this meta idea and they're really leaning into it, even though it's clearly not working, the market cap is completely fallen off a cliff and they're gonna keep trying to do it. I, I just don't buy the whole, we need a token for this. We need a token for that because I don't know why I would want to be involved with the meta version of the metaverse. We are suckers for a good gimmick and this sir is a good gimmick. Why do you have an a with you today? Yeah, this is our business development intern left was at our booth for the last three hours. So everyone that came by, thanks for checking it out. Yeah, did a great job. I think the Bahamas took a major black eye with the ftx implosion. You're saying that you have the regulatory framework that could prevent something such as that, but I want to get your personal take on your reaction to that implosion in November. Well, I think it was unfortunate, it was unfortunate for the persons who lost money. It's unfortunate for all of those persons who were lured in. But the fact is that it just speaks to the importance of making sure that you not only have a strong legal environment but you actually are doing the regulation, which is necessary. This isn't a crypto failure. This is a banking failure. And on top of it, I really feel like the banking collapse is not done yet. Luckily, we have this thing that was created a little bit over 10 years ago that allows people to actually have access to their hard money 24 73, 65. Does anybody know what that is? Anybody Mueller? I think it starts with a beat. I think it might be Bitcoin and I think this is a nice little bit of tailwind for the Bitcoin narrative. You know, like Bitcoin has been having a good run of late. Things are kind of looking good in the Bitcoin markets. I think a lot of it is, again, people are looking for that flight to safety. Maybe gold isn't your thing. Maybe you have a little bit more risk tolerance. Maybe Bitcoin can be that thing that outlast the banks in the long run, the full pitch for we're on. So you're saying there's a chance that we can be on a flag that's on my face. It's gotta be a team, a team, we can have a conversation. Iii I think banning B CBC Central Bank, uh uh digital currencies is easy. You, nobody wants the federal government or any government knowing where you have your money, how much money you have, etcetera. Um, it's a violation of our, our rights of privacy. Uh, and I don't think anybody wants that. So I think that's a very easy position to take. I, I don't think that there's anything particularly innovative about that. Um, but, but certainly I have never been a fan of Central Bank digital currencies. It's Taco Tuesdays on the hash. It looks like it is a very happy taco my daughter made this. So I always like to show off her artwork and what she did. She brought this home for mommy because she knows mommy loves tacos, numb, numb, numb, numb. I will say we don't have any clips of my daughter trying to come into my office or while I'm filming and her saying mama can I have some candy at 8 30 in the morning um in Los Angeles, California. But that, that does happen quite often. Sometimes she does like just slip notes and I'm hungry. I want a hot dog. Um Can you hug me? So she sounds like me. Yeah. Good hug and a hot dog. It's true. It's good stuff, good stuff all around. Holy Smoke. What a journey. Bull run bear run insanity. We had an SPF cameo. I was wearing some terrible outfits, facial hair, all sorts of strange things going on. How did you guys let me wear those fits? I really do not know. But man, wow. Thank you for uh putting that together control, we appreciate you as always. And that was quite the look back, Jen, what stood out to you. Well, the way I think it was interesting watching all of our takes get more and more, I guess, not confident, but our analysis got deeper and deeper, right? We talked about similar stories day in day out, we were able to reference things that had happened in the past and make some interesting predictions. And I would just want to point out in the past 630 episodes, I believe this is our six 130th episode. We made some pretty good predictions that ended up happening. And so taking that walk down memory lane was bittersweet. It was just kind of great to take a look back. I feel sad. I feel happy. I feel all of the emotions. Will. How do you feel? Hm. I, I don't know if my takes got better. I feel like they actually got more lukewarm as time went on. So I don't know how you guys feel. I feel like I had better glasses and maybe slightly better haircuts. So shout out to Bruce Barbers in Denver for, for helping me out if you guys are expensive, but you get the job done when I'm on the TV, every day, especially in the three box. It's very up close here. Uh I think the best thing is the way we all kind of groove together over time. I remember the first days of the hash was very awkward and we like stepped on each other all the time and didn't know how to hand it off correctly and we just kind of made it work. So I like that. I think teamwork, teamwork made the dream work. Zach. It really did. Yeah. Crypto is crazy. Like how fast things move and how big things happen. I don't know if that even makes any sense. But the idea that, you know, we watched the rise of this industry sort of uh grab on to mainstream credibility and then we watched it all implode uh the back half of 2022 starting with the unraveling of terra subsequent collapses by three ac genesis other lenders and then the big Kahuna ftx uh filing for bankruptcy and some significant alleged fraud over by Sam Macri who we ended up talking to. I guess that was the day after the famous Super Bowl commercial starring David. So uh very amazing to see it all condensed again. It was 630 episodes. That's remarkable in, in like in and of itself, but to have a condensed to see sort of like just the roller coaster of crypto, right? It's not just the price chart that is a roller coaster. The ins and outs of covering this story every day are certainly, it's certainly a lot to deal with and it's a big credit to the people in the coin desk newsroom who have capably covered this thing for years and are the best in the business at giving us the raw material for us to pop off takes, right? They do the hard stuff. We do the, we do the easy work of offering our analysis and our way of connecting the dots. So big. Big. Thank you to all the folks in the newsroom and across the entire coin nest organization who make it all possible. So big. Shout out to y'all. I just wanted to get them in here for sure.